OUR HISTORY
«I have reasons that I can't say here, Why, because…they touch on things that perhaps cannot yet be said, but very precise". This hinted at the assassination of Giovanni Gentile by the philosopher and former PCI senator Cesare Luporini during a Radio Tre radio broadcast in April 1989, but within four years he took the secret with him to the grave.
On the threshold of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Gentile murder it would therefore not be inappropriate to return to the possible meaning of this cryptic phrase, also making use of some results of the investigation conducted by Luciano Mecacci in his book "The Florentine Ghirlanda and the death of Giovanni Gentile" (Adelphi, 2014).

As is known, the philosopher's death sentence appeared for the first time in February of 1944 on the Lugano socialist paper «Libera Stampa», to then be re-proposed on the clandestine organ of the PCI «La Nostra Lotta» in a slightly modified form: in both cases the articles bore the signature of the Latinist Concetto Marchesi and were born as a radical rejection of the national conciliation proposals advanced by Gentile during the 1943. Actually the second article, the one in which the infamous verdict appears («Senator Gentile, the people's justice has issued its sentence: DEATH!») it was modified by Girolamo Li Causi, responsible for the clandestine press of the PCI, and endorsed by Togliatti. The execution took place at the entrance to the villa of Montalto al Salviatino il 15 April 1944 by a commando of Florentine Gappists composed of Bruno Fanciullacci and Giuseppe Martini, although there are still uncertainties as to which of the two shot.
For a long time the official version of the PCI insisted on the thesis of an autonomous initiative to avenge the Gappists led by Fanciullacci, around whom a popular myth of the vigilante of the proletariat was consolidated.
But this reconstruction was immediately doubted in some Florentine circles: not so much and not only regarding physical perpetrators, but rather on the question of intermediate principals, that is, those who made the distant threat of the sentence effective. Formerly Bernard Berenson - famous American art critic, fixed star in the Florentine cultural and aristocratic firmament- he wrote in his diary, with the body still warm, the rumors of a possible role of citizen intellectuals, or rather of that world of which Luporini was also part, and in which the lines between communists and shareholders were somewhat blurred, only to then exclude - with real or simulated naivety- the hypothesis, given the help that Gentile had always given, good or bad, to all those who had found themselves in difficulty with the regime or simply in need of a recommendation. Berenson rather leaned towards fascist responsibility, seeing in Major Mario Carità, ras of the gang of torturers of the same name, the probable person responsible for the murder due to Gentile's known opposition to his brutal methods of action, which, moreover, the philosopher was preparing to report to Mussolini on a trip to Salò scheduled for 17 April.
Licio Gelli will return to making insinuations on the black trail in recent years, supporting the version of a laissez-faire to the gaps by the fascist services, o del security service nazista, for reasons substantially mirroring those of Marchesi and Li Causi: or the need, felt in particular by Alessandro Pavolini's extremist republican faction, to exclude any possible form of pacification between the warring parties. For these hypotheses, to tell the truth, no convincing evidence has emerged, but it is useful to remember them as evidence of how broad the spectrum of Gentile's enemies was.
Mecacci does not even exclude a possible involvement of the shareholder world in the broadest sense, and it is precisely this element that perhaps constitutes the crux of Luporini's words and of the Gentile affair in general. Not neglecting the responsibility of the intellectuals organic to the local communist leadership, already limited in the 1980s by Giampiero Mughini and Luciano Canfora to the names of the “Red Count” Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, of the writer Romano Bilenchi and the industrialist Bruno Sanguinetti, However, it seems possible to broaden the field to include some liberal-socialist exponents, perhaps ideologically distant from the former but belonging to that same social milieu of the para-aristocratic Florentine intellectuals gathered around the living room of Berenson and similar. A bottom-up confirmation of this "court conspiracy" thesis arrives, for example, from the apparently reliable testimony of Lieutenant Bindo Fiorentini, military veteran from the Yugoslav campaign who, precisely by virtue of his skill with weapons, was asked to eliminate Gentile by an unspecified high-level figure in the shareholder share of the citizen's liberation movement. Fiorentini refused, but the fact remains that the shareholders, and therefore that world, they were involved somehow.
A top-down confirmation, Instead, emerges from the strange story of Mario Manlio Rossi, sui generis philosopher with extensive contacts in the Anglo-Saxon world. Reviewing in 1950 «Genesis and structure of society», Gentile's final work, Rossi reported the words that the latter said to him while handing him the manuscript: «Now I have completed my work. Your friends, no, they can kill me if they want". Rossi didn't have many friends in Florence, Indeed, in the intellectual arena he was full of enemies due to his bizarre character. But he certainly had friends among the Anglo-Saxons, proof of this is that immediately after the liberation he began working as a trusted man of the allied military government, and then arriving in 1947 in Edinburgh where he, philosopher by training, he succeeded John Purves in the chair of Italian studies without any academic qualification to justify the position. Ora, this Purves wasn't just a bookworm, but also a collaborator of the British secret services since the years of the First World War: in May 1938, during Hitler's "special days" in Italy, the Scottish agent received orders to test the waters to discover whether there were any foci of opposition to the regime among the non-academic Florentine intelligentsia. The outcome of this work was a notebook entitled «Florentine garland», in which Purves took note of those who, in the event of a probable conflict, they could have acted as contacts for British intelligence actions. It was almost all of the local intellectuals, united more by the aura of aristocratic and cosmopolitan intolerance towards the regime than by an anti-fascism of a specific political color: it was essentially the usual world gravitating around the "secular pope" Berenson (and in Montale).
Talking to Rossi, Therefore, Gentile rather than the alleged British machinations of his assassination to gain cultural control of the future liberated Italy - as Renzo De Felice will also argue with a certain amount of conspiracy theory- he was probably referring in a generic way to the well-known galaxy of "friends" of the Garland. This was a world totally at odds with Gentile's, not only on a political level, but you could say classy, as well as for style and conception of life: noble and highly cultured, but the former is frivolous and a courtier; familiar, good-natured, the second is petty bourgeois and traditionalist.
Furthermore, a world that was eager to free itself from that sort of pater familias of Italian culture that the philosopher had been and who, if he had survived the war, it would most likely have remained given its speculative weight, the well-known mediation skills and the various credits of gratitude that he counted almost everywhere. In this sense, in the figure of Gentile a surprising convergence between political instances could manifest itself, intellectual and personal (not free from meanness) which made him the perfect target: by killing Gentile on the pretext of political reason, he would have eliminated a willing father-master with almost all his beggars, but precisely for this reason it is too bulky and otherwise immovable. It is therefore not surprising to find the Milanese philosopher Antonio Banfi among the main inspirers of the death sentence of Marchesi and Li Causi, which had been greatly benefited by Gentile in the 1930s despite the different theoretical orientation, and in which the oppressive debt of gratitude was transformed into a future burden to be erased with blood, taking advantage of the red-hot political climate of the civil war.
Seventy-five years after the events, Like this, even the words from which we started, pronounced by that trait-d'union between aristocratic circles, philosophical, liberalsocialists and communists who was Luporini, perhaps they lose their oracular aura to reveal themselves only as the stubborn and miserable cover of something halfway between a Renaissance conspiracy and a Freudian collective killing of the father.
Luca Platti
 
source – http://lanostrastoria.corriere.it/2019/04/07/lesecuzione-di-giovanni-gentile-settantacinque-anni-di-ambiguita/