Farewell to the historian Giuseppe Parlato, a student of De Felice, who loved Puglia

We want to offer our contribution so that the historiographical interpretation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is increasingly plural": this was the mission of Giuseppe Parlato, former rector of the International University of Rome, historian and student of the master Renzo De Felice, lover of Puglia to which he reserved a week every year to combine commitments as a lecturer with seeing old friends (starting with the professor from Martina Franca Vito Fumarola and the lawyer Roberto Russano). He passed away on Monday evening, after having fought against an incurable disease that had not weakened his dedication to research in the depths of the twentieth century. He had dedicated the last part of his life to the Ugo Spirito-Renzo De Felice Foundation, which had become a training ground for talent in an area that - although in the majority at this time - has always been unaccustomed to creating networks capable of influencing the imagination.

In a season in which the rereading of the last century, after the praiseworthy studies of De Felice (but also of Francesco Perfetti, Claudio Pavone, Emilio Gentile and Pasquale Serra), is now often held hostage by propagandists or journalists of modest erudition, Parlato represented the realist soul of Italian historiography, for his gentleness of spirit combined with a rigor in the interpretation of documents, a scientific rule that made him unassailable even when his revisions touched on identity totems.

Four of his books will remain as cornerstones in contemporary historiography: The Fascist Left: History of a Failed Project , Fascists Without Mussolini , The Halved Flame. Almirante and the Split of National Democracy , all published by Il Mulino, and Half a Century of Fiume , published by Cantagalli.

The study of the fascist left erased the reductionist readings of the Mussolinian period to mere reactionarism: Parlato combined in his studies magazines, student publications, programs and testimonies, demonstrating that it was not an "impossible fascism", but an ideal anti-capitalist and socialist tension also expressed in laws and regulations. In Fascisti senza Mussolini he discovered unpublished documents on the transition from the regime to the Republic, highlighting the crucial role of Pino Romualdi, former vice secretary of the Republican Fascist Party, but above all interlocutor of the USA in the path that led many former Balilla to participate in the political life of the nascent democracy. He dedicated an essay to the split of Democrazia nazionale, confirming the role played by the DC.

He used to stay in Puglia around the tenth of February, a period in which he illustrated to many student communities the shame of the persecution carried out by Tito's communist partisans against the Italians on the eastern border. He was so passionate about the Itria Valley that he described in an imaginative way his stay in a cummersa , and he granted one of his most precious writings, The Nation of the nationalists , a successful attempt to rehabilitate a category long equated, erroneously, with fascism, to the publishing house of the Taranto native Enrica Fallone.