At the end of February 1997, an unexpected controversy erupted when the Italian Minister for Public Instruction and the University, Luigi Berlinguer (cousin of the former General Secretary of the PCI, Enrico) sent a ministerial circular to schools, urging them to include, for students in their last years at school, "reflections on the figure of Antonio Gramsci, in this, the sixtieth anniversary of his death." This recurrence, added Berlinguer, "offers the opportunity to call attention to a page of contemporary history, of which Gramsci was undoubtedly a protagonist and to reflect on the role that he played as politician, thinker of a decided character and witness to the assertion of the values of freedom and democracy." The Minister concluded by encouraging teachers to have their students "carry out a research on Gramsci's thought, on the originality and importance of his writings, on the wide ranging commitment to the world of the workers and on the value of the testimony offered by his suffering."
There was an immediate protest from parliamentary representatives of Silvio Berlusconi's Centre- Right Forza Italia and its allies, with accusations being levelled at Berlinguer of authoritarian leanings. The secretary of the United Christian Democrats (the would-be "philosopher", Rocco Buttiglione) accused Berlinguer of wanting "to homogenize Italian citizens to a set of common values decided by the centre, which are those of the Gramscian project of hegemony. . . .Such a circular could be sent out by the Director of the Istituto Gramsci, not by the Minister of Public Instruction of the Republic of Italy." The former Marxist--and this time real philosopher--Lucio Colletti (he, too, now of Forza Italia) complained that "the State which has its own conception of the world and which orders the local educational authorities ("Provveditorati agli Studi") to see to spreading [Gramsci's] ideas is nothing more than a totalitarian State. No one wants to expel Gramsci from the Italian political and ideological tradition, which would be senseless, just as no one can think of expelling Mussolini, but if we had a circular from a Minister of the Alleanza Nazionale [the "post-fascist" heir to Italian fascism] suggesting that the educational authorities should deepen the knowledge of the work and thought of Mussolini, we would probably have barricades up in the streets." Another leading Forza Italia representative, Marcello Pera, claimed that "Gramsci is not part of the common culture of Italy of today, he does not belong to the fathers of the nation." The ex-Marxist historian Piero Melograni (with so many ex-Marxists now in Forza Italia one sees the continuing relevance of Gramsci's analysis of "transformism") brought up the hoary old chestnut that "very few teachers know that Gramsci, in the prison years, [END PAGE 3] was in reality expelled from the PCI [not even the PCd'I, as a historian would more accurately write] because he found himself in opposition to the pro-Stalinist line adopted by his comrades. In the last years of his life Gramsci came out of prison and, although there was Mussolini's regime in Italy, he died in one of the most luxurious clinics in Rome, the Quisisana. . . . Italian students do not need rhetorical celebrations: they need, instead, to know the truths of this century in all their terrible rawness."
All the left and other democratic newspapers carried stories the next day (1 March) with counter- comments from representatives of the cultural world in Italy. Colletti's appalling blunder and (one hopes unintentional) lack of good taste in bringing in Mussolini as a comparison was hardly worthy of comment by anyone. In its usual style, Il Manifesto carried the ironic headline "Don't open those Notebooks" and quoted the Ancient Greek specialist Luciano Canfora, who noted the ignorance of the right in apparently not even knowing that the preceding week a "committee had been nominated by the Minister of Cultural Affairs, for the preparation of the Works of Gramsci. The Communist intellectual is like Mazini, like Foscolo. Nothing else need be said." An article in Liberazione, the Rifondazione Comunista paper, noted the backwardness of the present day right as compared even with Croce in his most right-wing phase towards the end of his life; Croce in fact had no hesitation in claiming Gramsci--"one of ours" as he is quoted as saying--for the whole of Italian culture.
The words of Giuseppe Vacca, Director of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, were quoted everywhere, including of course L'Unità, the paper founded by Gramsci, as a more or less official response: "Gramsci's thought is a reference point for twentieth-century culture . . . In the past I often wondered why the Italian school system never arrived at studying the 20th century, but from today's reactions I can understand why; perhaps because the forces that have ruled this country for fifty years thought and still do that its citizens' education should not contain a historical knowledge and intelligence of its own time."