Luciano Canfora

Luciano Canfora (Italian pronunciation: [luˈtʃaːno ˈkaɱfora]; born 5 June 1942) is an Italian classicist and historian. Born in Bari, Canfora obtained his first degree in Roman History in 1964 at Pisa University. He has for some years been professor emeritus of Classics at the University of Bari. His specialty is ancient libraries and his book The Vanished Library,^[1] which is about the Library of Alexandria, has been translated into some 15 languages.^[2]

Canfora in June 2022

Since 1975, Canfora has edited the periodical Quaderni di storia. In 1998, he published a rebuttal of Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky's work, Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca, about criticism of Palmiro Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party.^[3] He stood in the 1999 European Parliament election in Italy for the Party of Italian Communists. In 2004, Canfora published a history of democracy under the title La democrazia. Storia di un'ideologia.^[4]

Biography

Education and academic career

Among Italy's leading philologists,^[5] a student of the historian of antiquity Ettore Lepore,^[6] Luciano Canfora is the son of the historian of philosophy Fabrizio Canfora and the Latinist and Greek scholar Rosa Cifarelli, both professors at the Quinto Orazio Flacco high school in Bari, as well as anti-fascist protagonists of the city's cultural and civic life after World War II. His mother was sister of jurist and magistrate Michele Cifarelli, a former member of the Action Party, deputy and senator of the Italian Republican Party.^[7]

He graduated in Humanities with a thesis in Roman history in 1964 and received his postgraduate degree in Classics from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He began his university career as an assistant professor of ancient history and later of Ancient Greek literature. He is professor emeritus of Greek and Classics at the University of Bari and scientific coordinator of the Higher School of Historical Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici di San Marino.^[8]

He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, both scientific and high popularization, such as the Boston Journal of Classical Tradition,^[9] the Spanish Historia y crítica, and the Italian high popularization geopolitical journal Limes. He is a member of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci^[9] and the scientific committee of the Encyclopedia Treccani. He also directs, since 1975, the journal Quaderni di Storia (ed. Dedalo, Bari), the text series La città antica at the publisher Sellerio, the Paradosis series for Dedalo editions and the Historos series for Sandro Teti Editore.

He is a prolific author on philology, history and politics from ancient to contemporary times. Many of his books have been translated in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. He is an elzevirista for Corriere della Sera and contributes to Il Calendario del Popolo, on which he has a regular column entitled Brother Babeuf.^[10]

He coordinated and directed, together with Diego Lanza and Giuseppe Cambiano, Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica for Salerno editore (1992–1996), a collective work on the different characters of Greco-antique philology, Ancient Greek literature and its persistence. Top Italian experts in Greek philology and history of literature contributed to this work. He received in 2011 for the Militant Criticism section the Feronia-City of Fiano Prize.^[11]

In 2020 Luciano Canfora won the historical scientific section of the Acqui Award of History.^[12]

Policy

Already a militant for some years in the Proletarian Unity Party (Italy) (PdUP), in 1988 he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI);^[13] after the Bolognina turning point he adhered to the third motion proposed by Armando Cossutta For a Socialist Democracy in Europe,^[13][14] being elected to the party's central committee A few months after the subsequent dissolution of the PCI he joined the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC).^[13]

He was a candidate for the 1999 European Parliament election on the list of the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI) in the Northwestern, Central and Southern Italy constituencies, without being elected.After the dissolution of Comunisti Italiani, he was called a "communist without a party." In the 2018 general election, he supported the Free and Equal list and candidate Michele Laforgia in the Bari uninominal election.^[15]

In a 2019 interview, he says he has "always been a Proletarian internationalist".