Gramsci’s family poverty was political, driven by his father’s imprisonment for local opposition.

Evidence

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891, in the small town of Ales in Sardinia. His father came originally from Naples and had been intended to be a lawyer. But the death of his own father, a colonel in the Carabinieri , meant that he had to abandon his studies; he found a job as registrar in the small Sardinian town of Ghilarza. There he met Gramsci’s mother, who was the daughter of a local inspector of taxes and had the rare attainment, in an area of go per cent illiteracy, of being able to read and write. Any ambitions the couple might have had for their children were rudely dashed, however, in 1897 when the father was suspended from his job, without pay, on suspicion of peculation. The following year he was put under arrest and in 1900 he was sentenced to nearly six years imprisonment. To what extent he was guilty of the charges, which were undoubtedly motivated by his opposition to the political party in power locally, is not very important; corruption is anyway endemic in that type of society. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Early life details will matter for understanding how Gramsci’s Sardinian experience of subalternity and regional inequality shaped his later concepts of hegemony and common sense.