 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2020) |
Alessandro Gerbi, known as Sandro (born October 3, 1943 in Lima, Peru) is an Italian journalist, author of several biographies and books on Italian contemporary history.
Sandro Gerbi was born in Peru because his father Antonello (1904-1976), who at the time was senior economist of Banca Commerciale Italiana, had been transferred there in 1938 by his boss, Raffaele Mattioli. As a matter of fact, Antonello was in the verge of being dismissed from his job as a consequence of Italian racial laws (against people of Jewish origins). Antonello, in 1940, married his Viennese girlfriend, Herma Schimmerling (1912-2012), who had joined him in Lima. They had two children: Daniele (b. 1941) and Sandro (b. 1943). In the spring of 1948, the Gerbi family returned to Milan, where Sandro completed his secondary education (at the Liceo Classico "A. Manzoni”), and later (1967) obtained a law degree from the local Università degli Studi (University of Milan). Sandro Gerbi was first employed (in 1968) at Banca Italo-Israeliana in Milan, and subsequently spent 6 months in the United States at Underwood Typewriter Company (as an intern) and Southern Methodist University (attending a summer course in International Law). By the end of 1969 he was hired by Scandellari-Ventura-Lanella, a Milan stockbrokers firm, as an assistant to prominent journalist and financial expert Renato Cantoni (1916-1987). It was Cantoni, at the time a regular contributor to the Italian daily papers, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan) and La Stampa (Turin), who introduced him to the world of journalism.
In 1971, Gerbi began collaborating with the weekly Il Mondo writing articles about financial affairs until 1975. Between 1976 and 1978 he was a financial commentator on the radio news program GR2 , directed by Sergio Zavoli. In 1977, he became a full-time reporter for the daily newspaper Il Giorno (Milan) for a year and a half. After leaving his position there, Gerbi started working as a freelance financial journalist. He ran Il Giorno weekly column about the Milan Stock Exchange for over 15 years, and founded and ran from 1978 to 1987 the lettera SIGE, a monthly publication covering the financial markets.
Then, in 1990, came his professional turning point. Gerbi went from covering financial matters to contemporary history, a special area of interest of his which he had not pursued previously. This change happened when Gaetano Scardocchia, then editor of La Stampa, read an essay by Gerbi about the Italian historian Robert S. Lopez at the Voice of America [1] during the war (subsequently Lopez was a Professor of Medieval History at Yale) and invited Gerbi to write for La Stampa's cultural pages. In 1993, Gerbi moved to another national newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera , until 2000. Then came a nine-year collaboration with Il Sole 24 Ore Sunday cultural supplement, followed by another three years working for Il Corriere again.
In 2012 Gerbi officially retired as a journalist to pursue a career only as a book author. In fact, he had already started working in the field of non-fiction when, thirty years earlier, he had edited his father's most famous work, La disputa del Nuovo Mondo (Ricciardi , 1983; reprint Adelphi, 2000), [2] with the support of Franco Venturi and Mario Einaudi, and under the guidance of Gianni Antonini, editorial director at the publishing house Ricciardi. He later worked on more of his father’s works, including monographs and essay collections (see below).
Gerbi’s work as an author — which began quite late, at the age of 55 — is characterized by a special passion for extensive archival research: he likes to write biographical essays, and parallel biographies (with two characters examined together). He has a particular interest in fascism and the problems that arise within the relationship between intellectuals and politics, especially in times of dictatorship. He still enjoys writing occasionally about economic and financial history.
His books with the publishing house Einaudi include: in 1999, Tempi di malafede (winner of the Comisso Award in 2000), [3] a story about the thwarted friendship between the writer Guido Piovene and the antifascist philosopher Eugenio Colorni; in 2002, Raffaele Mattioli e il filosofo domato (the “tamed philosopher” being Antonello Gerbi); in 2006 and 2009, together with Raffaele Liucci, a two-volume biography about famous Italian journalist Indro Montanelli; in 2011, an essay called Mattioli e Cuccia. Due banchieri del Novecento.
His publications with the publishing house Hoepli include: in 2013, Giovanni Enriques, dalla Olivetti alla Zanichelli (winner of the Biella Award in 2014); in 2016, I Cosattini. Una famiglia antifascista di Udine (winner of the Matteotti Award in 2017). With Hoepli, Gerbi also published a couple of second editions of books previously written, such as Tempi di malafede in 2012 and the Indro Montanelli biography, Raffaele Mattioli e il filosofo domato, in one sole volume in 2017. In 2009 he wrote the banker Antonio Foglia’s (1891-1957) biography, in a private edition.
Over this period of time, Gerbi has edited, sometimes in collaboration with other professionals, various collections of essays or of newspaper articles for the publisher Nino Aragno (including works by Enzo Forcella, Alessandro Galante Garrone, Orio Vergani, Bruno Visentini, Antonello Gerbi, Enrico Cuccia, Paolo Baffi, Guido Piovene, Giovanni Malagodi, and Giorgio Ambrosoli).
Between 1991 and 2006, Gerbi published several essays in the literary magazine Belfagor, as well as penning various entries for the Dictionary of Fascism (Einaudi, 2005), edited by Sergio Luzzatto and Victoria De Grazia.
His autobiographical research on the secularization of the Gerbi family has led to the 2019 publication of his book Ebrei riluttanti (Hoepli), which in 2020 has been translated into English by Jeremy Moyle as Reluctant Jews, published by Centro Primo Levi Editions in New York City.
In 1983 Sandro Gerbi married Margherita Dezi, a former teacher from Abruzzi. They have two children: Martina (b. 1984) who is a classical dancer and photographic model, and Antonello (b. 1988), who is a mathematical engineer and holds a PhD in mathematics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian existential philosopher.
Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli was an Italian journalist, historian and writer. He was one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes according to the International Press Institute.
Ludovico Geymonat was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and historian of science. As a philosopher, he mainly dealt with philosophy of science, epistemology and Marxist philosophy, in which he gave an original turn to dialectical materialism.
The Bagutta Prize is an Italian literary prize that is awarded annually to Italian writers. The prize originated among patrons of Milan's Bagutta Ristorante. The writer Riccardo Bacchelli discovered the restaurant and soon he regularly gathered numerous friends who would dine there together and discuss books. They began charging fines to the person who arrived last to an appointed meal, or who failed to appear.
Federico De Roberto was an Italian writer, who became well known for his historical novel I Viceré (1894), translated as The Viceroys.
Giovanni Raboni was an Italian poet, translator and literary critic.
Cesare Segre was an Italian philologist, semiotician and literary critic of Jewish descent, and the Director of the Texts and Textual Traditions Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Pavia (IUSS).
The Acqui Award of History is an Italian prize. The prize was founded in 1968 for remembering the victims of the Acqui Military Division who died in Cefalonia fighting against the Nazis. The jury is composed of seven members: six full professors of history and a group of sixty (60) ordinary readers who have just one representative in the jury. The Acqui Award Prize is divided into three sections: history, popular history, and historical novels. A special prize entitled “Witness to the Times,” given to individual personalities known for their cultural contributions and who have distinguished themselves in describing historical events and contemporary society, may also be conferred. Beginning in 2003 special recognition for work in multimedia and iconography--”History through Images”—was instituted.
The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, also referred to in Italy as Moro Case, was a seminal event in Italian political history.
Giordano Dell'Amore was an Italian economist and banker.
Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, formerly known as Giardini Pubblici and Giardini di Porta Venezia are a major and historic city park in Milan, Italy, located in the Porta Venezia district, north-east of the city center, in the Zone 1 administrative division. Established in 1784, they are the oldest city park in Milan. After their establishment, the Gardens have been repeatedly enlarged and enriched with notable buildings, most notably the Natural History Museum (1888–1893) and the Planetarium (1930).
The Right group, later called Historical Right by historians to distinguish it from the right-wing groups of the 20th century, was an Italian conservative parliamentary group during the second half of the 19th century. After 1876, the Historical Right constituted the Constitutional opposition toward the left governments. It originated in the convergence of the most liberal faction of the moderate right and the moderate wing of the democratic left. The party included men from heterogeneous cultural, class, and ideological backgrounds, ranging from Anglo-Saxon individualist liberalism to Neo-Hegelian liberalism as well as liberal-conservatives, from strict secularists to more religiously-oriented reformists. Few prime ministers after 1852 were party men; instead they accepted support where they could find it, and even the governments of the Historical Right during the 1860s included leftists in some capacity.
The La Voce was an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan from March 1994 to April 1995. It was founded by journalist Indro Montanelli after a disagreement with Silvio Berlusconi, at that time owner of the Il Giornale newspaper of which Montanelli had been the founder and editor in chief. Montanelli would later rejoin Corriere della Sera as a columnist.
Eugenio Colorni was an Italian philosopher and anti-fascist activist.
Guido Piovene was an Italian writer and journalist.
Storia d'Italia is a monumental work of the journalist and historian Indro Montanelli, written in collaboration with Roberto Gervaso and Mario Cervi from 1965 to 1997. The idea of a series of books about the history of Italy came to Montanelli after a conversation with Dino Buzzati. Montanelli initially proposed the idea to Mondadori, who wasn't interested. Montanelli then spoke to Longanesi, who agreed to publish the prologue, Storia di Roma in 1957. Following the success of the book, Rizzoli purchased the rights of the work and republished it in 1959. In 1965 Rizzoli, satisfied with the cultural impact of the book and its commercial success, agreed to publish the ambitious Storia d'Italia.
Leopoldo Longanesi was an Italian journalist, publicist, screenplayer, playwright, writer, and publisher. Longanesi is mostly known in his country for his satirical works on Italian society and people. He also founded the eponymous publishing house in Milan in 1946 and was a mentor-like figure for Indro Montanelli: journalist, historian, and founder of Il Giornale, one of Italy's biggest newspapers.
Maurizio de Giovanni is an Italian author of mystery novels.
Giorgio Ficara is an Italian essayist and literary critic. He is Full Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Turin.
Roberto Gervaso was an Italian writer and journalist. He won the Premio Bancarella twice: for L'Italia dei Comuni in 1967, and for Cagliostro in 1973.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
