Antonio Gramsci was born 132 years ago, his ideas in the heart of US power

In his interventions he often refers to "the centrality of culture and education which enable us to choose". Gramscian echoes: "educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence", said the Sardinian thinker born on January 22, 1891.

Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation in Joe Biden's administration. He was also mayor of the city of South Bend, Indiana from 2012 to 2020 and a Democratic candidate in the run-up to the last presidential election. It is no coincidence that he frequently recalls the themes of culture and education, central to Antonio Gramsci's thought: his father Joseph, who died in January 2019, was one of the most profound connoisseurs of the ideas and values expressed by the author of the "Quaderni from prison", of which he translated the first version into English. Mauro Pala, professor of "Literary criticism and comparative literature" at the University of Cagliari, recalls him thus on the university website: "Joseph (Jo for friends) Buttigieg loved Sardinia, partly because, as a Maltese, he he identified in their common Mediterranean roots, but also because he saw in the islander origins a strong point for his work.The islanders - he told me one day - are naturally forced to deal with external influences, which manifest themselves in history in the form of merchants, invaders , migrants of all kinds: this phenomenon sharpens their perception of the other, forcing them to constantly renegotiate their position in the world".

The study on Gramsci

Joseph Buttigieg, Maltese by origin but American by adoption, taught "English Literature and Comparative Literature" at the prestigious University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He was founder and president of the International Gramsci Society. It has maintained a close relationship with Sardinia over the years. In fact, he animated, on several occasions, the Gramsci International Summer School in Ghilarza and was among the first Visiting Professors of the University of Cagliari. «His students - adds Mauro Pala - still remember with enthusiasm the constructive climate of interdisciplinary debate of those meetings, conducted in the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which encourages discussion between teacher and students». Joseph Buttigieg played a decisive role in the research "Minors and minorities" coordinated by Giuseppe Marci, professor of Italian philology at the University of Cagliari, and edited the preface to the writings of Umberto Cardia, also an acute scholar of Gramscian thought. In 2007 he spoke, with his fluent Italian, at the conference "Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian in the great and terrible world" which took place between Cagliari, Ghilarza and Ales on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the death of the greatest Italian intellectual of the twentieth century. In 2012, his son Pete was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the youngest mayor of a US city with at least 100,000 inhabitants (he was 30 at the time). Now he dreams of becoming the president of the United States.

The portrait

Meanwhile, on the occasion of the 132th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Gramsci, the Armungian cartoonist Sandro Dessì, author of various artistic projects dedicated to Sardinian writers and intellectuals, pays homage to an intellectual capable of developing very useful ideas for the present with a portrait and for the future.