On the local history site «La Storia di Castel Bolognese»
(https://www.castelbolognese.org/), which he edits, Andrea Sogliarecently posted an article that brings to attention the figure of Emilio
Raffaele Papa, who died in Turin more than two years ago, on May 2,
2022, at just over 90 years of age. The article is entitled "The
Castellana childhood of the historian and lawyer Emilio Papa", and is
based to a considerable extent on information and testimonies provided
by Papa's friends and family. Information that was partly unknown until
now even to me, who was born and lives in Castel Bolognese and
personally knew Emilio Papa. However, it is not so much the biographical
and private aspects that I intend to talk about here (even if I briefly
mention them), but rather the public activity of Papa and his
historiographical production. Historian, lawyer, university professor,
he was originally from Romagna but had moved to the Piedmont capital
many years ago. He was born in Imola on 25 December 1931, but spent his
childhood in Castel Bolognese, the hometown of his mother Giovanna
Zaccherini, who belonged to a well-known Castel Bolognese family of wine
brokers (known in the village by the nickname Macapac), relatively
well-off for the time. His grandfather Emilio Zaccherini (1882-1950),
Giovanna's father, had been an anarchist of some importance at a local
level, active between 1901 and 1927, as documented by police sources
kept in the Central Political Records Office at the Central State
Archives in Rome. His father, Luigi Papa, originally from Carinola
(Caserta), was instead a Carabinieri marshal stationed in Imola. In the
Wikipedia file dedicated to him, it is recalled that Emilio Raffaele
Papa "taught at the Universities of Bologna, Bergamo and Turin, where he
began as an assistant to Alessandro Galante Garrone and then held, for
over twenty years, a course in the History of political parties and
movements. As a teacher of contemporary history, he focused his
interests mainly on the history of institutions, but was also interested
in fascism, the history of the workers' and socialist movements, and the
history of the Italian judiciary. Author of about twenty volumes (many
reprinted several times) and hundreds of essays published in magazines,
he also dedicated himself to "general history" with a History of
Switzerland[Bompiani, 1993]and a History of European
unification[Bompiani, 2006]. Also noteworthy is his activity as a
journalist (among other things, he was a national councilor of the Order
of Journalists and president, for thirteen years, of the Appeals and
Disciplinary Commission of the National Register of Journalists) and
lawyer (he was a public defender, although rejected by the Red Brigades,
in the trial of the Red Brigades held in Turin from 1976 to 1978 and
civic defender of the City of Turin from 2004 to 2010). Here we limit
ourselves to adding that, having accepted to be a public defender in the
trial of the Red Brigades, he knowingly and courageously ran
considerable personal risks, entering the sights of the Red Brigades.
Among his main works, in addition to the two already mentioned, we
recall: Storia di due manifestoi: il fascismo e la cultura italiana
(Feltrinelli, 1958), a now classic and unsurpassed text, written at a
young age; Origini delle società operaie (Lerici, 1967); Judiciary and
Politics: Origins of Democratic Associationism in the Italian Judiciary:
1861-1913 (Marsilio, 1973); Fascism and Culture (Marsilio, 1975); The
Trial of the Red Brigades (Giappichelli, 1979); Return to Politics:
Problems of Socialism and Democracy (F. Angeli-Gaetano Salvemini
Institute of Historical Studies, 1988); Bottai and Art: A Different
Fascism? (Electa, 1994); Discourse on Federalism (Giuffrè, 1997);
Rereading Carlo Rosselli: From Liberal Socialism to European Federalism
(Guerini, 1999); The Other Side of Democracy: For a Democracy of
Surveillance, (Lacaita, 2012); What is Democracy? (Rubbettino, 2014).
We mention separately the book Per una biografia intellectuale di
Francesco Saverio Merlino (F. Angeli, 1982), the most relevant testimony
of Papa's interest in the thought of the well-known anarchist and
libertarian socialist theorist and militant. Emilio Papa has also
dedicated other works to the figure of Merlino, dedicated in particular
to the famous defense of Gaetano Bresci on the occasion of the trial for
regicide. Among these essays we cannot fail to mention the report
presented by Papa at the conference on "The end of Socialism? Francesco
Saverio Merlino and possible anarchy" (Imola, 1 July 2000), the
proceedings of which were then published by the publishing house Centro
Studi Libertari Camillo Di Sciullo (edited by G. Landi, Chieti, 2010).
Papa's report, entitled F.S. Merlino, a "lawyer of evildoers", in
defense of the regicide Gaetano Bresci, is a timely and very detailed
reconstruction of the trial, inserted in its historical, political and
emotional context. A historian and intellectual of value, of sure
democratic and anti-fascist faith, Emilio Papa leaves us a highly
respectable historiographical production, with which we will be able to
measure ourselves for a long time to come. His biographical events and
his intellectual activity have intertwined several times with
libertarian thought and the history of anarchism. This makes him closer
to us and we are proud to have had him, even if only occasionally, as a
traveling companion.
Gianpiero Landi
https://umanitanova.org/emilio-raffaele-papa-1931-2022/
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