GRAMSCI, ANTONIO. - Politician and writer, b. at Ales (Cagliari) on Jan. 23, 1891, d. in Rome on Apr. 27, 1937. From 1924 he was secretary of the Italian Communist Party; arrested by the Fascist government on Nov. 8, 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison; ill from the hardships he endured, he d. in a clinic.
GRAMATICA, ANTIVEDUTO - The Savior between ss. Stanislao and Adalberto. Below, s. Giacinto. Painting executed around 1594 - Roma, high altarpiece of the Polish church of S. Stanislao.
Besides his articles in L'Ordine nuovo, he left behind, unpublished, his prison notebooks: from both these and the Lettere dal carcere (5th ed., Torino 1948), one can reconstruct his continuous polemic aimed at moving communist theory from the mechanicism of historical materialism to the "neo-humanism" of the philosophy of praxis. He penned penetrating pages or suggestive reflections on the relations between North and South and between city and countryside during the Risorgimento, on the formation of intellectuals and their role in the class system, on the "subaltern" classes, on popular literature, on the cosmopolitanism of the Counter-Reformation, and on Machiavelli. His limitations in examining the history of the Catholic Church lie in his conflation of the "political" Church and the Church as a religious institution: according to G., "the papacy struck at modernism as a reforming tendency within the Church and the Catholic religion, but it developed popularism, that is, the socio-economic base of modernism" (Il risorgimento, Torino 1949, pp. 72-73). In reality, G. misses the unity of the Corpus Christi mysticum, whereas the cultural unity of the Catholic Church does not escape his social realism, whose strength consists in feeling "the necessity of the doctrinal union of the entire religious mass" and in striving "so that the intellectually superior strata do not detach themselves from the lower ones" (Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, ibid. 1948, p. 7); on this plane he explains the opposition of Catholics to Croce: "Catholics understand very well that Croce's intellectual significance and function are not comparable to those of traditional philosophers, but are those of a true religious reformer, who at least succeeds in maintaining the detachment between intellectuals and Catholicism and therefore in making, to a certain extent, even a strong clerical resurgence among the popular masses difficult" (op. cit., pp. 182-83). G., however, understands Catholicism as a negative social function to be overcome and not as a spiritual union of believers. For G., in the modern era, through the effect of liberalism, Catholicism on a religious plane had become largely nothing more than a superstition. With the Restoration, Catholicism, from integral positions in the fields of culture and politics, had declined into a party opposed to other parties (Note sul Machiavelli, Torino 1949, p. 233 ff.).