PERSON
Antonio Gramsci (Life)
Italian Marxist philosopher, political theorist, and co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy (1891-1937), whose Prison Notebooks — composed during his imprisonment by Mussolini's regime — became one of the twentieth century's most influential bodies of critical thought.
Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia, on January 22, 1891, to a modest family of mixed Albanian and Italian heritage. A childhood injury left him with a severe spinal deformity and chronic health problems that would shape his life. He studied at the University of Turin on a scholarship, becoming involved in socialist politics and labor organizing during the Turin factory council movement of 1919-1920. Co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, he was elected to parliament in 1924 and imprisoned by Mussolini's regime in 1926. During his imprisonment, despite severe illness and restricted access to sources, he composed the Prison Notebooks. He died in 1937, shortly after release, at the age of forty-six.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gramsci's intellectual formation combined rigorous classical education with immersion in the specific conditions of early twentieth-century Italian politics. Turin was the center of Italian industrial development and of the Italian