Fascist prison conditions nearly killed Gramsci before transfer to Formia

Evidence

As news of Gramsci’s condition filtered through to the outside world, an international campaign was mounted in anti-fascist circles to demand his release. The campaign, organised notably by Piero Sraffa, a long-standing friend of Gramsci’s now living in England, was at least partially successful. At the end of 1933, Gramsci was transferred from Turi to a clinic at Formia, a small town midway between Rome and Naples. The transfer was an urgent medical necessity. In the last year at Turi illnesses had taken grip of his entire organism, and he was slowly but inexorably being killed by lack of medical attention. At Formia he began gradually to recover somewhat, and was able to resume work on the notebooks. Despite his perilous condition, however, and in contravention of the fascist penal code itself, he was still held as a prisoner; his room had been specially converted as a prison cell, and he was harassed by brutal supervision . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete biographical grounding for why the notebooks are fragmentary, coded prison writings — useful when explaining Gramsci’s cryptic notebook style in the Islamophobia toolkit. — connects to: Fascist imprisonment ended Gramsci’s active intellectual life at forty-six — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1673