Influential historian Claudio Pavone dies

Claudio Pavone has died aged 95

 ROME – Claudio Pavone, one of the most renowned and influential Italian historians of our time, has died Tuesday aged 95.

 The famous figure would have reached his 96th birthday on Wednesday. In his most famous work, ‘The Civil War’ (1991, Bollati Boringhieri), Pavone argued that the Resistance, other than being a war of liberation from the fascists, was also a civil war between Italians, provoking much discussion and debate among the partisan movement. According to the historian, as conveyed in his ‘Historical Essay on Morality in the Resistance,’ the Resistance was a triple war of Italy against Germany, Italian fascists against Italian anti-fascists and between the revolutionary and the bourgeois classes.

  Partisan, director of ‘Parolechiave’ magazine, professor at the University of Pisa and president from 1995 to 1999 of the Italian Society of Contemporary History, Pavone played a key role in the arrangement of the Central State Archives following the war and became somewhat of an activist.

 Later, as a founder of a ‘leftist revisionism,’ Pavone participated and led a political and cultural battle against ‘neorevisionism’ which, in his eyes, aimed to distort the history of Italy, making it more suitable to the new political sphere under Silvio Berlusconi.

 Pavone had three children with his first wife and then went on to spend many years of love and companionship with his second wife Anna Rossi-Doria.

  Winner of the Ignazio Silone International Prize for Non-Fiction in 2007, his ‘Air of Russia’ was recently published by the Laterza publishing company. Again with the same publishing house, Pavone’s ‘First Lesson in Contemporary History’ has also been released.

 sw