The Foundation

Fondazione Circolo Rosselli's mission is to study, deepen, promote and debate the main cultural, political, economical and sociological issues that interest our modern society.

The Foundation promotes meetings, conferences, lectures and talks about today’s fundamental issues. To achieve these goals the Foundation works in collaboration with the Circolo di Cultura Politica Fratelli Rosselli and other clubs and foundations worldwide.

The President of Fondazione Circolo Rosselli is Prof. Valdo Spini MP

In 1920, a group of young men, headed by Gaetano Salvemini , founded the Circolo di Cultura ( Cultural Circle ) in Florence . Among their number were the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli , Piero Calamandrei , Ernesto Rossi , and Alfredo and Nello Niccoli. The Cultural Circle was not associated with a particular political party, but rather an open forum in which its members might express their opinions as freely as they wished. It was frequented above all by the younger generation, and in its early days the Circle's small nucleus of regular members met once a week at the house of Alfredo Niccoli, a lawyer by profession.

In April 1923 the Circle became more organized and had its own premises at no. 27, Borgo Santi Apostoli. Thanks to the efforts of the Rosselli brothers, a well-stocked library was set up with a good selection of Italian and foreign periodicals. Among those responsible for the running of the Circle were Salvemini, the Rosselli brothers, Ernesto Rossi , Piero Jahier, Piero Calamandrei and Enrico Finzi.

The first phase of the Cultural Circle 's activities came to an abrupt end in 1924 in the wave of Fascist violence which followed the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. The Circle had assumed a decidedly anti-fascist position, and on the 31st December 1924 its premises were broken into and the archives destroyed. The Circle was officially closed on the 5th January 1925 by order of the Prefecture. At this point a long battle against fascism began, with the young men of the Cultural Circle fighting in the front lines. Some of the more important events of this period were: the publication of the first clandestine antifascist newspaper, Non Mollare ; the founding of the Movimento di Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty movement) by Carlo Rosselli , an early theorizer of liberal socialism; the murder of the Rosselli brothers on the 9th June 1937 at Bagnoles de l'Orne in France; and the founding of the Partito d'Azione (Action Party).

It was the Florentine Partito d'Azione , led by Tristano Codignola, that refounded the Cultural Circle after the Liberation of Italy in October 1944. The Circle became known as the Circolo di Cultura Politica Fratelli Rosselli (CFR - The Rosselli Brothers Cultural and Political Society). This marked the beginning of the second phase of the Circle's history, with Piero Calamandrei as its President. In more recent times, Giorgio Spini and Enzo Cheli have been Presidents of the CFR. The Circle has continued to be active ever since it was reformed, partly thanks to the periodical intakes of talented young men and women. Its wide-ranging activities have been of importance not only within the city of Florence and Tuscany , but also on a national and international level. Recently the Circolo Fratelli Rosselli Foundation was set up. Both it and the CFR itself are non-profit-making associations.

ESSENTIAL BILIOGRAPHY OF WORKS RELATED TO CARLO AND NELLO ROSSELLI IN ENGLISH:

• Mitchell Cohen e Michael Walzer,  “The Liberal Socialism of Carlo Rosselli,” Dissent (Winter 1994).
• Urbinati, Nadia. "The Liberal Socialism of Carlo Rosselli," Dissent, Winter 1994: 113-16
• Massimo Mangilli-Climpson, Men of Heart of Red, White, and Green: Italian Anti-Fascist Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Vantage Press, 1985)
• H. Stuart Hughes, Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1922-1974 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)
• Joel Blatt, “Carlo Rosselli’s Socialism,” Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History, edited by Spencer Di Scala (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)
• Blatt, Joel. "The Battle of Turin, 1933-1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libert*, OVRA and             the origins of Mussolini's anti-Semitic Campaign," Journal of Modern Italian Studies,     vol. 1, n. 1, Fall 1995.
• Nadia Urbinati, Introduction to Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism. Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro. "Nello Rosselli: A Historian Under Fascism," Journal of Italian History I, n. 2, Autumn 1978: 287-314.
• Delzell, Charles F. "The Assassination of Carlo and Nello Rosselli: Closing a Chapter of   Italian Anti-Fascism," Italian Quarterly XXVIII, n. 107 Winter 1987: 47-64.
• Delzell, C. Mussolini's Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance. Princeton: Princeton                       University Press, 1961. Reprint, New York: Howard Fertig, 1974.
• Gage, Mary Lynn. "The Campaign of Giustizia e Libert*: The History of an Anti-Fascist     Movement," unpublished M.A. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1974.
• Pugliese, Stanislao. “Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli,” Journal of Contemporary History, July 1997, vol. 32, issue 3.
• Pugliese, S. G. Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Salvemini, Gaetano. Carlo and Nello Rosselli: A Memoir. London: For Intellectual Liberty, 1937.

Today in Spain, Tomorrow in Italy Carlo Rosselli

(From “Fascism, Anti-fascism and The Resistance in Italy,” edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)

Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937) was born into a wealthy Jewish family with strong ties to the Risorgimento. Abandoning a promising career as a professor of political economy, he joined the antifascist cause and was instrumental in publishing the first underground antifascist newspaper. Arrested for his activities, he was sentenced to confino on the island of Lipari, off the coast of Sicily. After a daring escape, he made his way to Paris where, in 1929, he founded Justice and Liberty, the largest and most influential non-Marxist leftist movement. From Paris, Rosselli wrote essays, organized the movement, and even plotted Mussolini’s assassination.  When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Rosselli was one of the first to arrive in Barcelona in defense of the Spanish Republic. Rosselli believed that the Spanish Civil War had to be transformed into a European-wide offensive against fascism and Nazism. That idea, and this speech, given over Radio Barcelona on 13 November 1936, may have sealed his fate. An anonymous police spy wrote to Rome that Rosselli was “the most dangerous of the antifascists in exile” and that it was necessary that he be “suppressed.”  While recuperating in the French countryside, Rosselli was assassinated, together with his brother, the noted historian Nello, on 9 June 1937.

Comrades, brothers, Italians,  listen.  

            An Italian volunteer speaks to you from Radio Barcelona to bring you the greetings of the thousands of exiled Italian antifascists that are fighting in the ranks of the revolutionary army.  

            An Italian column has fought for three months on the front in Aragon. Eleven dead, twenty wounded, the esteem of our Spanish comrades: here is the testimony of its sacrifice. 

            A second Italian column, formed just in these days, heroically defends Madrid. In all sectors of the front, Italian volunteers are found, men who having lost liberty in their own land, begin to regaining it in Spain, rifle in hand. 

            Daily the Italian volunteers arrive: from France, from Belgium, from Switzerland, from the distant Americas. Wherever there are Italian communities, committees are being formed for proletarian Spain. Even from oppressed Italy volunteers depart and arrive in Spain. In our ranks we count dozens of  companions who have crossed the frontier covertly, risking a thousand dangers. The young ones who have abandoned the university, the factory, even the barracks, fight alongside anti-fascist veterans. They have deserted the bourgeois war to participate in the revolutionary war. 

            Italians, listen. This is an Italian volunteer who speaks to you from the radio from Barcelona. A century ago enslaved Italy kept silent and quivered under the heel of Austria, of the Bourbons, of the Savoy, of the priests. Every effort of liberation was brutally repressed. Those people who were not in jail were forced to the exile. But in exile they did  not renounce the struggle. Santarosa in Greece, Garibaldi in America, Mazzini in England, Pisacane in France, together with so many others, no longer able to fight in their country, struggled for the freedom of other peoples,  showing to the world that Italians were worthy of living freely. From those sacrifices, from those examples, the Italian cause was consecrated. The Italian reacquired faith in their strengths. 

            Today a new tyranny oppresses us – a great deal more ferocious and humiliating than the ancient one. It is not longer the foreigner that dominates. It is we who have allowed a factious minority to subdue us; using the strengths of privilege, it holds in fetters the working class and the thought of all Italians. 

            Every effort seems vain against the massive, dictatorial army. But we don't lose faith. We know that dictatorships pass away and that the people remain. Spain furnishes  us with the pulsating proof. Nobody speaks anymore of De Rivera. Nobody will speak tomorrow about Mussolini. And as in the Risorgimento, in the darkest time, when almost nobody dared to hope, from abroad the example and the incitement came, so today we are convinced that modest effort of the Italian volunteers, will find tomorrow a powerful will for redemption.  

            It is with this secret hope that we have hastened to Spain: today here, tomorrow in Italy. 

            Brothers, Italian comrades, listen. This is an Italian volunteer who speaks to you from the radio in Barcelona.  

            You believe the false news of the fascist press, which depicts the revolutionary Spanish people like hordes of bloodthirsty crazy persons on the eve of defeat. The revolution in Spain is triumphant. Every day it penetrates more and more  into the depth of the life of people, renewing institutes, correcting secular injustices. Madrid has not fallen and it won’t fall. When it already seemed inevitable that it would succumb, a marvelous uprising of people halted the invasion and  began the counteroffensive. The motto of the revolutionary militia, which until then was “No pasar*n,” [they shall not pass] has become “Pasaremos,” [we will pass]; that is, not the fascists but us, the revolutionary ones, will overcome. 

            Catalonia, Valencia, the whole Mediterranean littoral, Bilbao and one hundred other cities, the richest zone, the most evolved and industrious of Spain, is solidly in the hands of revolutionary forces. 

            A new order has been born, based on liberty and social justice. In the workshops, the boss no longer commands, but the collective, through suggestions of factory and labor unions. In the fields, one no longer finds wage earners forced to do a weary job in the interests of others. The farmer is master of land that he works under the control of the local town hall. In the offices, the employees, the technicians no longer  obey a hierarchy of “daddy’s boys,” but  a new hierarchy founded on ability and free choice. They obey, or better they collaborate, because in revolutionary Spain and above all in libertarian Catalonia, the most audacious social conquests are made respecting the personality of the man and the autonomy of human groups. Communism, yes, but libertarian communism. Socialization of the large industries and large-scale commerce but no idolatry of the state: the socialization of the means of production and exchange. This is conceived as a means to freeing man from all slavery. 

            The experience in progress in Spain is of extraordinary interest for everybody. Here, there is no dictatorship, no military economy, no denial of the values of the west but conciliation of the most ardent social reforms with liberty. There is no one party that, pretending to be infallible,  seizes the revolution: anarchists, communists, socialists, republicans all collaborate for the public, at the front, in social life. What a lesson  for us Italians! 

            Brothers, Italians, comrades, listen. An Italian  volunteer speaks to you from the radio in Barcelona to bring you the greetings of the Italian volunteers. On the other bank of the Mediterranean a new world is being born. It is the antifascist uprising that begins in the West. From Spain it will conquer Europe. Above all, it will arrive in Italy, so near to Spain in language, traditions, climate, customs and tyrants. It will arrive because history cannot not arrested,  progress continues, dictatorships are parentheses in the life of the people, almost a whip to spur them, after a period of inactivity and abandonment, to take back in hand their destiny and fate. 

            Italian brothers who live in the fascist jail, I would like that you were able, just for an instant at least, to plunge yourselves in the intoxicating atmosphere in which this marvelous people have been living for months, despite all the difficulties. I wish that you could go in the workshops to the enthusiasm that the people have for the fighting comrades; I wish that you could cross the countryside and  read on the face of the farmers the boldness of this new dignity and above all  to cross the front and to talk to the volunteer militiamen. Fascism, which cannot trust any of the soldiers who pass en masse to our lines, must resort to mercenaries of all types. Instead, the proletarian barracks swarm with a crowd of young people pleading for weapons. A month of this life, spent for of human ideals, is worth more than  ten years of vegetation or false imperial mirages in Mussolini’s Italy. 

            And don’t even believe the fascist press when it paints Catalonia, largely anarchist/syndicalist, prey to terror and disorder. Catalan anarchism is a constructive socialism, sensitive to the problems of liberty and culture. Every day furnishes proofs of its realistic qualities. The reforms are completed with order, without following preconceived schemes and always holding in account experience. Barcelona has given us the best proof, where, despite the difficulties of the war, life continues to unwind regularly and the public services work better than they did before. 

            Italians who listen the radio of Barcelona, attention. Volunteer Italians fighting in Spain, in the interest and for the ideal of a whole people that struggle for its liberty, ask you to prevent that fascism continues its criminal work in favor of Franco and of the factious generals. Every day airplanes furnished by Italian fascism and driven by mercenary aviators who dishonor our country, launch bombs against unarmed cities, tearing to pieces women and children. Every day, Italian bullets, built with Italian hands, transported by Italian ships, launched by Italian guns,  fall in the trenches of the workers. Franco would already have lost some time ago, if it had not been for the powerful  help of fascism. What shame it is for Italians to know that their own government--the government of a people who was once in the vanguard of the struggle for liberty-- tries to murder the liberty of Spanish people! 

            Proletarian Italy, awake. Stop this shame. Italian factories and Italian harbors should not send any more murderous weapons. Where open boycotting is not possible, resort to secret sabotage. The Italian people must not become the police officer of Europe. 

            Brothers, Italian comrades, an Italian volunteer speaks from the radio of Barcelona in the name of thousands of Italian fighters. 

            Here one fights, one dies, but one also wins for liberty and the emancipation of all the people. Italians, help the Spanish revolution. Prevent fascism from  supporting the factious and fascist generals. Collect money, and if, for repeated persecutions or for insurmountable difficulty you are not able in your center to fight the dictatorship effectively, hasten to strengthen the columns of volunteer Italians in Spain. 

            The faster proletarian Spain  wins, the sooner will come the time for the uprising of the  Italian people.         

            Italy is a great country, yes, but in the workshop the despotic master commands. Italy is great, yes, but if someone dares to say what he has in his heart, he is quickly caught by the Special Court. Italy is great, yes, but there is a racket in the schools, in the professions, in the offices: the reign of fascist officials, secretaries, under-secretaries,  relatives of the secretaries and under-secretaries, while the noblest spirits of our country are forced into the most disheartening silence. We are in short great, imperial, strong. . . but we don’t enjoy a simple, elementary law: to live as men, humanly, to the service of those two ideal principles for which life is only worthy, by which societies progress: justice, liberty. To you Italians I speak. Free Italians, courage! On the other shore of the Mediterranean a new world is born. The revolution arrives, triumphant, against fascism, anti-fascism . . For centuries our Spanish brothers were enslaved, as in Italy and other countries . . . You know the history . . . But the people this time are ready. People, not the government. . . 

            Those people who believe by now that the revolution will fail are dreaming.  The revolution wins. . . It is a natural and inevitable phenomenon. The men who have slacked their thirst at the eternal source of liberty - of a positive liberty, not only political, but economic and social - those men are determined that they will no longer  return to servitude. Rather than surrender, they will defeat everyone.   

Carlo Rosselli, “Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia” in Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp. 70-75; translated by Stanislao G. Pugliese; see also Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).