Delio Cantimori

Italian historian. Student of the Scuola Normale in Pisa. In 1934 Giovanni Gentile offered him the position as assistant at the Italian Institute of German Studies in Rome. In 1939 he obtained the chair of modern history at the Faculty of Education in Messina; the following year he returned to the Scuola Normale at Gentile’s invitation. Towards the end of the 1930s he became a sympathiser of the Italian Communist Party. He had to interrupt his teaching position at the Scuola Normale during the period of the Salò Republic; he took it up again in 1944. In 1948 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party, from which he withdrew in 1956 after the events in Hungary. From 1951 he taught modern history at the University of Florence, while continuing to teach courses about the history of the Church and methodology of historical studies at the Scuola Normale. Editorial consultant for Einaudi publishers, he wrote for the Politecnico and Società journals, and translated the first book of Marx’s Das Kapital into Italian. He was deeply interested in the documents and experiences of the 16th century heretics, of whom he identified the veiled language and secret codes, using historical method and humanistic insight to reconstruct unknown historical occurrences.