Early life Gramsci was born in
Ales, in the
province of Oristano, on the island of
Sardinia, the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci (1860–1937) and Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). Francesco Gramsci was born in the small town of
Gaeta, in the
province of Latina,
Lazio (today in the
central Italian region of Lazio but at the time Gaeta was still part of
Terra di Lavoro of
Southern Italy), to a well-off family from the southern Italian regions of
Campania and
Calabria and of
Arbëreshë (Italo-Albanian) descent. Gramsci himself believed that his father's family had left
Albania as recently as 1821. The Albanian origin of his father's family is attested in the surname Gramsci, an Italianised form of
Gramshi, which stems from the definite noun of the placename
Gramsh, a small town in south-central Albania. Gramsci's mother belonged to a
Sardinian landowning family from
Sorgono, in the
province of Nuoro. Francesco Gramsci worked as a low-level official, In 1898, Gramsci's father was convicted of
embezzlement and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution. The young Gramsci had to abandon schooling and work at various casual jobs until his father's release in 1904. As a boy, Gramsci suffered from health problems, particularly a malformation of the spine that stunted his growth, as his adult height was less than 5 feet, and left him seriously hunchbacked. For decades, it was reported that his condition had been due to a childhood accident—specifically, having been dropped by a nanny—though in 2011 it was suggested that it was due to
Pott disease, a form of
tuberculosis that can cause deformity of the spine. Gramsci was also plagued by various internal disorders throughout his life. Gramsci started secondary school in
Santu Lussurgiu and completed it in
Cagliari, where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro, a former soldier whose time on the mainland had made him a militant
socialist. At the time, Gramsci's sympathies did not yet lie with socialism but rather with Sardinian autonomism, as well as the grievances of impoverished
Sardinian peasants and miners, whose mistreatment by the mainlanders would later deeply contribute to his intellectual growth. They perceived their neglect as a result of privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrialising
Northern Italy, and they tended to turn to a growing
Sardinian nationalism, brutally repressed by troops from the Italian mainland, as a response.
Turin In 1911, Gramsci won a scholarship to study at the
University of Turin, sitting the exam at the same time as
Palmiro Togliatti. At
Turin, he read literature and took a keen interest in
linguistics, which he studied under
Matteo Bartoli. Gramsci was in Turin while it was going through industrialization, with the
Fiat and
Lancia factories recruiting workers from poorer regions. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge. Gramsci frequented socialist circles as well as associating with Sardinian emigrants on the Italian mainland. Both his earlier experiences in Sardinia and his environment on the mainland shaped his worldview. Gramsci joined the
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in late 1913, where he would later occupy a key position and observe from Turin the
Russian Revolution. , where Gramsci studied Although showing a talent for his studies, Gramsci had financial problems and poor health. Together with his growing political commitment, these led to him abandoning his education in early 1915, at age 24. By this time he had acquired an extensive knowledge of history and philosophy. At university, he had come into contact with the thought of
Antonio Labriola,
Rodolfo Mondolfo,
Giovanni Gentile, and most importantly,
Benedetto Croce, possibly the most widely respected Italian intellectual of his day. Labriola especially propounded a brand of
Hegelian Marxism that he labelled "philosophy of
praxis". Although Gramsci later used this phrase to escape the prison censors, his relationship with this current of thought was ambiguous throughout his life. From 1914 onward, Gramsci's writings for socialist newspapers such as
Il Grido del Popolo () earned him a reputation as a notable journalist. In 1916 he became co-editor of the
Piedmont edition of
Avanti!, the Socialist Party official organ. An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci proved a formidable commentator, writing on all aspects of Turin's social and political events. Gramsci was at this time also involved in the education and organisation of Turin workers; he spoke in public for the first time in 1916 and gave talks on topics such as
Romain Rolland, the
French Revolution, the
Paris Commune, and
the emancipation of women. In the wake of the arrest of Socialist Party leaders that followed the revolutionary riots in August 1917, Gramsci became one of Turin's leading socialists; he was elected to the party's provisional committee and also made editor of
Il Grido del Popolo. In April 1919, with Togliatti,
Angelo Tasca and
Umberto Terracini, Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper ''
L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order). In October of the same year, despite being divided into various hostile factions, the PSI moved by a large majority to join the Third International. Vladimir Lenin saw the L'Ordine Nuovo'' group as closest in orientation to the
Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary programme of a
left communist,
Amadeo Bordiga. In the course of tactical debates within the party, Gramsci's group mainly stood out due to its advocacy of
workers' councils, which had come into existence in Turin spontaneously during the large strikes of 1919 and 1920. For Gramsci, these councils were the proper means of enabling workers to take control of the task of organising production, and saw them as preparing "the whole class for the aims of conquest and government". Although he believed his position at this time to be in keeping with Lenin's policy of "All Power to the Soviets", his stance that these Italian councils were
communist rather than just one organ of political struggle against the
bourgeoisie, was attacked by Bordiga for betraying a
syndicalist tendency influenced by the thought of
Georges Sorel and
Daniel De Leon. By the time of the defeat of the Turin workers in spring 1920, Gramsci was almost alone in his defence of the councils.
Communist Party of Italy The failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement convinced Gramsci that a
Communist party in the
Leninist sense was needed. The group around ''L'Ordine Nuovo'' declaimed incessantly against the PSI's centrist leadership and ultimately allied with Bordiga's far larger abstentionist faction. On 21 January 1921, in the town of
Livorno (Leghorn), the
Communist Party of Italy (, PCd'I) was founded. In opposition to Bordiga, Gramsci supported the
Arditi del Popolo, a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the
Blackshirts. Gramsci would be a leader of the party from its inception but was subordinate to Bordiga, whose emphasis on discipline, centralism and purity of principles dominated the party's programme until the latter lost the leadership in 1924. In 1922, Gramsci travelled to Russia as a representative of the new party. Here, he met Julia Schucht (Yulia Apollonovna Schucht, 1896–1980), a young
Jewish violinist whom he married in 1923 and with whom he had two sons, Delio (1924–1982) and Giuliano (1926–2007). Gramsci never saw his second son. 16, Moscow. Translated, the inscription reads: "In this building in 1922–1923 worked the eminent figure of international communism and the labour movement and founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci." The Russian mission coincided with the advent of fascism in Italy, and Gramsci returned with instructions to foster, against the wishes of the PCd'I leadership, a
united front of leftist parties against fascism. Such a front would ideally have had the PCd'I at its centre, through which Moscow would have controlled all the leftist forces, but others disputed this potential supremacy. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too remotely from political debate, and thus would have run the risk of isolation. In late 1922 and early 1923,
Benito Mussolini's government embarked on a campaign of repression against the opposition parties, arresting most of the PCd'I leadership, including Bordiga. At the end of 1923, Gramsci travelled from Moscow to
Vienna, where he tried to revive a party torn by factional strife. In 1924, Gramsci, now recognised as head of the PCd'I, gained election as a deputy for the
Veneto. He started organizing the launch of the official newspaper of the party, called (Unity), living in Rome while his family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyon Congress in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling for a united front to restore democracy to Italy were adopted by the party. In 1926,
Joseph Stalin's manoeuvres inside the Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the
Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by
Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of the leader. Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti which they never completely resolved.
Imprisonment and death in Rome On 9 November 1926, the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life that had occurred several days earlier. The Fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his
parliamentary immunity, and brought him to the Roman prison
Regina Coeli. At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." He received an immediate sentence of five years in confinement on the island of
Ustica, and the following year he received a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment in
Turi, Apulia, near
Bari. Over 11 years in prison, his health deteriorated. Over this period, "his teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food... he had convulsions when he vomited blood and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell." An international campaign, organised by
Piero Sraffa at
Cambridge University and Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana, was mounted to demand Gramsci's release. In 1933, he was moved from the prison at Turi to a clinic at
Formia; he was still being denied adequate medical attention. Two years later, he was moved to the Quisisana clinic in Rome. He was due for release on 21 April 1937 and planned to retire to Sardinia for
convalescence, but a combination of
arteriosclerosis,
pulmonary tuberculosis,
high blood pressure,
angina,
gout, and acute
gastric disorders meant that he was too ill to move. Gramsci died on 27 April 1937, at the age of 46. His ashes are buried in the
Cimitero Acattolico in Rome. By moving Gramsci from prison to hospital when he became very ill, the Mussolini regime was attempting to avoid the accusation that it was his incarceration that caused his death. Nevertheless, his death was linked directly to prison conditions. Gramsci's grandson, Antonio Jr., speculated that Gramsci had been working with the Soviet government to facilitate a move to Moscow, but changed course as the political climate in Russia
intensified in 1936. ==Philosophical work==