Carlo Muscetta

Carlo Muscetta (22 August 1912 – 22 March 2004) was a poet who became better known as a literary critic and, later, as an editor of literary magazines.

He also had a parallel career in teaching, employed as a university professor of Literature successively at Catania, Paris (as a "visiting professor") and Rome.

Between 1925 and 1928 he attended the Liceo Pietro Colletta (technical secondary academy) in Avellino, which according to one evidently unimpressed commentator might have led him to a career as a cost accountant.

He then switched to the "Liceo classico Pietro Colletta" (secondary school) which held out the likelihood of a more academically oriented set of qualifications.

While still living in Avellino he came to know Guido Dorso, who exercised a lasting influence on his thinking, both politically and more broadly.

Sources imply, in addition, a certain ambiguity or fluidity about Muscetta's political attitudes during the later 1930s.

In 1931 he enrolled as a student at the University of Naples Literature faculty.

He had already, as a teenager, established a "respectful" relationship with Benedetto Croce, to whom he frequently submitted written questions and from whom he received written answers.

Croce is widely seen to have been instrumental in steering Muscetta towards literary criticism as a career path and historicism as an important philosophical prism.

In 1932 he transferred to the University of Florence, where he was taught by Luigi Russo.

He association with Benedetto Croce and others of a liberal mindset may have been one of the factors behind his transfer to Florence in 1932.

(Party membership had been a precondition of application for a public sector position since, formally, 1933. )

He graduated in 1934, successfully concluding his student career with a dissertation, supervised by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, concerning the nineteenth century literature scholar Francesco de Sanctis, a subject to which he returned in his subsequent writings.

Muscetta returned to the south in 1935, settling in Molfetta, where he taught at the "istituto pubblico" (secondary school". It was during his time in Molfetta that he became friendly with the left-wing intellectual Tommaso Fiore. He was dismissed from his teaching post after he was overheard criticising the colonial war in Abyssinia, but found a new position at the "Istituto Di Cagno Abbrescia", a secondary school in nearby Bari through the intervention of Fiore.

There are indications that even when he was a literature student in Naples, during a period in which Italy was increasingly governed as a one-party dictatorship, there were members of the university who regarded Muscetta as politically suspect.

In April 1935 Carlo Muscetta married Lucia Galeota.

The two had met at the University of Naples a few years earlier.

The births of their sons Mara and Sergio followed in Bari (1936) and Pescara (1937).

Nevertheless, in 1937 he became a party member.

In 1937 the couple relocated to Pescara (Abruzzo) where Muscetta had been offered a more secure (and better paid) job at a "scuola magistrale" (secondary school with a strong academic focus).

He had "very publicly" abandoned his open hostility to the government in 1937, but would nevertheless, according to his own subsequent attestations, remained active as an "underground antifascist".

In Rome Muscetta quickly became part of a network of young literati.

He teamed up with one of these, Mario Alicata, to compile and publish "Avventure e scoperte: nuove letture per i ragazzi italiani della scuola media", an anthology of "adventure and discovery stories", aimed at younger teenagers.

In 1939 Muscetta succeeded in obtaining a transfer to Rome, on the far side of the mountains.

Here he began teaching Italian literature at the "Conservatorio di S.Cecilia".

The job offer resulted from his participation, on 10 November 1939, in the government's "Littoriali" festival.

He secured first place in the "Education Policy" competition category.

The theme that year was "Independence of Italian literature".

He also secured fourth place in the "culture and arts" category.

He had decided to participate in "the games" because he was "tired of provincial life, and wanted to live in Florence or Rome".

Meeting with the National Education Minister, Giuseppe Bottai led to the teaching job at the "Conservatorio di S.Cecilia".

The politicised context of his arrival in Rome involved a sudden celebrity and/or notoriety within Rome's intellectual class.

In 1940, together with the antifascist journalist Giaime Pintor, Muscetta became a member of the judging commission for the "Prelittoriali", a sub-section of the annual "Littoriali" in which he had competed with such success in 1939.

However, Muscetta took the idea of going along with fascism one step further, contributing during the early 1940s to the fortnightly literary magazine "Primato" which was launched in March 1940, and thereafter directed by Giuseppe Bottai, the Fascist Education Minister in Mussolini's government between 1936 and 1943.

There are, indeed, references to Muscetta having found and shared words indicating "great intellectual admiration" for leading fascist hierarchs.

Nevertheless, "Primato" was a literary journal for intellectual readers: not every article appearing in it was an unqualified paeon of praise for the Fascist government.

After 1943, Muscetta was able to insist forcefully that he had never fully conformed, even in his contributions to "Primato", to the characterisation which he imputed to Velio Spano, that he had been seen as a "young redeemed anti-fascist" ("un Giovane antifascista redento").

During the 1960s and 70s he came to wider prominence as a free-thinking Marxist commentator.

Carlo Muscetta was born and grew up at Avellino, a midsized town with a rich history, located approximately 50 kilometres (30 miles) inland to the east of Naples.

Angelo Muscetta, his father, was an energetic businessman with a wide range of commercial interests.