Gramsci was held in near-total isolation and surveillance in Milan for over a year

Evidence

But on 20 January 1927, Gramsci was transferred to Milan. The journey lasted nineteen days, with the prisoners being transported—most of the time in chains— from prison to prison the length of the peninsula. After over a year in Milan, where he was kept in almost permanent isolation, punctuated only by the appearance of specially planted agents provocateurs to share his cell, and with no facilities for reading or writing other than of a’ limited number of personal letters, he was brought back to Rome to stand trial. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 227

Categorization

• XREF: The prison conditions directly shaped the fragmentary, notebook form of Gramsci’s theory — connects to why the Prison Notebooks read as self-contained aphoristic units.