Piero Craveri, history as an exercise in freedom. The conference in Naples

He achieved, in his scientific passion for history, the intellectual freedom of those who test research on the consistent ground of reality . Piero Craveri, who passed away in December 2023, is celebrated with a two-day conference in Naples promoted by the Fondazione Biblioteca Benedetto Croce and the Suor Orsola Benincasa University. It is a memory articulated on a polyphony of voices for the multiplicity of interests that Craveri developed, driven by an elegant and insatiable curiosity: a historian of politics, secular and radical, an expert on environmental issues, he directed the economic research center of the Uil and was part of the scientific council of Confindustria; he sat on the regional council of Campania and the municipal council of Naples, was a senator and as an academic contributed to the destiny of the Suor Orsola university where he concluded a long career as a university professor.

President of the Benedetto Croce Library Foundation, he bore witness to the legacy of an impressive family tradition that he nurtured without being suffocated by. His grandfather was a distinguished philosopher, his mother Elena was a prominent intellectual, his father Raimondo was the leader of the Partito d'Azione and of risky undertakings in the Resistance with the American secret services, of which testimony can also be found in the famous memoirs of Peter Tompkins. Suspended between the Piedmont of the Craveris and the Naples of the Croces, he loved mountain walks as much as the sweetness of Vesuvius, thanks to a temperament that his sister Benedetta, if we had to condense it, sums up for us in these words: "A free and irreducible spirit, but capable of exercising an intelligent indulgence with which he filtered his own and other people's qualities and weaknesses".

It was a human propensity that bore fruit in the profession of historian, in political debate and in academic practice: “ A gentleman of substance who knew how to close discussions with the right word, a lover of confrontation but not of dialectical sterility” recalls the rector of Suor Orsola Benincasa, Lucio d'Alessandro, who shared Craveri's contribution to that university for three decades. “He corresponded to Croce's idea that the ruling class is formed on history and that a strong ethos of the institutions is always necessary”.

He diagnosed the fragilities and incompleteness of Italian political history in an ideal trilogy, which in the last book of 2022 photographs the “post-democracy” where changing leaderships prevail over increasingly emptied parliaments. It is the loss of that stabilizing center that had previously attracted him to figures distant from his own secular education such as De Gasperi: his biography of the Christian Democrat leader is considered indispensable by Catholic historians. But Craveri also successfully experimented for the Dizionario biografico degli italiani with the lives of Enrico Berlinguer, Giuseppe Di Vittorio and Aldo Moro, the latter “emblematic because his drama is a focal point of incomplete democracy”, observes Stefano De Luca, full professor of History of Political Thought, Craveri’s successor in the chair of Contemporary History at Suor Orsola: “I met him when he was dean of the faculty and I was a simple researcher and a relationship was born that ended up becoming a friendship, because his peculiar trait was curiosity towards any interlocutor who seemed interesting to him. This rare intellectual freshness kept him young until the last moment”.

Like her younger sister Benedetta, she was educated when anti-Crocianism was in force in the universities for ideological reasons and for the advent of new currents, "but Piero and all of us in the family", she recalls, "lived our tradition with absolute understatement. We never formalized the idea that Croce was an inescapable master nor did we hear talk of anti-fascism in my house, because certain things were simply taken for granted. Piero did not passively absorb the legacy that came from his grandfather or parents, but translated it independently according to his civil and scholarly passion". Like when, as a municipal or regional councilor, he was committed to the environment in the wake of the founding mother of Italia Nostra, but "updating the positions to the political and historical problems that he faced from time to time". Ideas interested him, ideologies bored him, freedom fascinated him.

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