Italian literary historian, critic,
politician and left-wing public intellectual Alberto Asor Rosa
has died at the age of 89, his family said Wednesday.
Asor Rosa, whose name was the most famous palindrome in Italian
literature, studied under great Italian literature scholar
Natalino Sapegno at Rome's La Sapienza University before
becoming one of the country's leading Marxist thinkers and
literary critics.
He broke with the Italian Communist Party, the biggest in the
West, over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and only
returned in 1972, working to reform it and turn it into a
mainstream social democratic force, especially after the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989.
A specialist in modern and Baroque Italian literature, Asor Rosa
conceived and directed the compilation of the monumental history
of Italian literature published by progressive publishing house
Einaudi.
His favourite work was Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.
He once said "the right age to read the Orlando Furioso
intensely and never leave it again is between your 30s and 40s,
when you are still young enough to remember that day-to-day
reality is not everything and already mature enough to
understand that beyond what is visible, worlds exist that one
should really not miss".
Asor Rosa contributed to several leading leftwing journals and
wrote many books including Intellectuals and the Working Class,
Writers and the People, The Two Societies, The Last Paradox,
Writers and the Masses, and Outside the West, Or Reasoning on
the Apocalypse, as well as an autobiography, Dawn of a New
World, and a novel, Suspended Loves.
He also penned seminal essays on literary giants including
Macchiavelli and Joseph Conrad.
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