In 1991 the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci’s party, ceased to exist. Over the 1990s, liberal democratic culture gained a position of hegemonic importance, including on the Italian left: liberal figures such as Ignazio Silone and Carlo Rosselli won the day and were even compared to Antonio Gramsci, not to mention people whose ideas were even less similar. For several years it seemed that the Sardinian communist risked disappearing from public view altogether, so much so that it has often been noted that Gramsci was being studied far more outside of Italy than in his home country. In truth this was only partly the case.

Fallen from grace in the eyes of both the political class and the majority of intellectuals, Gramsci’s position in Italian culture could not have descended much further. But in the fifteen years following the sixtieth anniversary of his death in 1997, around 180 volumes (both books and monographs) came out that were either about him or published his works, around one per month – including many large publications, especially in the first few years of the twenty-first century.

There are a range of explanations for this phenomenon. In the first place, it had been widely accepted that Gramsci represented a giant of twentieth-century thought, and he had become the most studied modern Italian author in the world. Gramsci’s fortunes outside of Italy from the 1980s and 1990s increased considerably not only in places where the left is more present (e.g. South America), but also throughout the English-speaking world, in British and American universities, as well as being drawn upon by African-American and Bengali intellectuals. This diffusion of Gramsci and the globalisation of his fame, naturally had a positive effect on his fortunes in Italy itself.

A second reason that prevented Gramsci from being entirely drowned out in Italy was the development of historical-philological studies in the 1990s that came out of the Gramsci Foundation’s national edition of his writings (the Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Antonio Gramsci), which utilised newly released archival material in Moscow as well as new research relating to various figures in Gramsci’s life. It also drew on research on the diachronic organisation of the Notebooks and the impact of that ‘great and terrible world’ on their contents, research that has gradually provided a new context for the prison works.

Last but not least, a resistance was mounted to this dangerous removal of Gramsci, conducted by groups, organisations, activists and individual teachers – both in and outside of the academy – who opposed this forgetting of the Sardinian Marxist. In this context, the establishment of the Italian Sessions by the Italian section of the International Gramsci Society (IGS) in 1996 was of great importance, contributing to the organisation of seminars and conferences, the collation of new editions and, beginning in 2001, seminars on the language of the Notebooks, encouraging a new collective process of studying the prison writings free from the burdens of prior interpretations, forming a new generation of Gramsci scholars.

This book – now in its second edition (expanded to include studies from 1997 to 2012) – includes an account of those interpretations and discussions of Gramsci which have taken place in Italy over these past fifteen years.

The first nine chapters that formed the first edition in 1996 have been altered as little as possible, with the exception of the ninth section of Chapter 9, which has been largely reworked, while the tenth section of the same chapter has been removed. For the rest, some notes have been added or completed, and corrections have been made to errors of printing and formatting. There are also additions relating to some essays that have been unjustly ignored, and a few opinions have been revised. I think the only significant modification is my re-evaluation of the previously under-estimated existence of a long distance exchange between Gramsci in Turi and Togliatti in exile; in the previous edition, I had favoured the hypothesis that Togliatti had wanted to break off relations with Gramsci in 1926.

Three chapters have been added on the development of Gramsci studies in the years following 1996. My reconstruction of the years 1996–2005 is the result of work undertaken in collaboration with Chiara Meta in our jointly-authored Gramsci: Guida alla lettura (Milan, Unicopoli 2005). Some of the opinions expressed there been partly revised in the new chapters. This is also the case for the many reviews and essays that I have written over the years for various journals, as well as for the website of the International Gramsci Society. The new chapters follow the design of the first edition, in which we decided to prioritise critical discussions whose impact is central to current interpretations.

Many friends have read whole chapters or parts of them, providing precious advice even if I have not always followed it. Aside from Chiara Meta, I extend my deepest gratitude to Lea Durante, Eleanora Forenza, Fabio Frosini, Raul Mordenti, Giuseppe Prestipino and Peter Thomas for their indispensable dialogical role. It is not merely a formality to say that the responsibility for the final product is mine alone.

My thanks also goes to the participants of the seminars on the interpretation of the Notebooks organised by the IGS Italia, whose collective work I have drawn upon for many years.

This book is dedicated to Carlos Nelson Coutinho, a friend who is with us no more. The intensification of his illness and his eventual passing away in September 2012 interrupted a conversation which we had maintained at a distance for many years, ‘along the internetted road’, as he put it. Throughout the work of drafting the new chapters of this book I missed his advice and criticism but I believe that his significant contribution is present nevertheless, through the way he enriched my reading of both Gramsci and his interpreters over the years. Thank you, Carlos.