Punctual, lucid, brilliant the historian Lucio Villari, As the President of the Republic said today Sergio Mattarellahe was “Insigne and intellectual ending, a reference of generations of historians, a man of great culture, capable of combining scientific rigor and passion for democracy and justice”. Of his death, which took place at 91 on Sunday 16 March, Mattarella says he is “grieved” and is precisely to the speech of the Head of State of 5 February in Marseille that Villari had dedicated his speech on La Repubblica on February 20. The combination of the third Reich and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, explained Villari, “is a fitting and spot on parallel that has the merit of giving us the opportunity for a historical reading of the present”. Here and it is precisely the analysis of the relationship between past and present that animated the work of this scholar, professor for years of contemporary history at the University of Rome Tre, loved by generations of students for availability and lucid intelligence.
Born in Bagnara Calabra (Reggio Calabria) on August 28, 1933he was a university professor and author of numerous and lucky essays, collaborator of newspapers and television and radio programs. With his brother Rosario Villari (who passed away in 2017), professor of modern history, the company in history was the author of the manual. History course for the lower middle school (Sansoni), a textbook on which many generations have formed. And moreover that of Lucio Villari was a decidedly active way of interpreting the story, as a living comparison of ideas. For this reason he also had an active part in many television programs, including the most recent past and present with Paolo Mieli on Raitre and symbolically had the part of the landlord in 1980 when he participated in the film The terrace, by Ettore Scola. In the European elections of 1999 he was a candidate as the European parliamentarian of the “Central Italy” district in the list I Democrats promoted by Romano Prodi. Also registered in the National Association of the partisans of Italy (Anpi), he never hid his political ideas while analyzing the present with a lucid gaze and capable of significant distinctions. “As a historian and as a man interested in the politics of the left I am very satisfied with this speech. It was the speech of a high -level political woman, who caught the essential problems of the country, without recourse to ideological formulas, indeed taking the distances from fascism”.
So for example Lucio Villari promoted, speaking with the Ansa the programmatic discourse of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of 25 October 2022. However, the historian, who still remains the inheritance of fascism in the Italian right, is convinced. “It remains a lot of fascism, of the positive things of fascism, which remained alive also in the First Republic – he explained on the same occasion -. The intervention of the state in the economy is also the work of fascism, the reclamation, the house of the mother and the child … there are positive things that should be recognized. The left does not do so because it ignores or underestimates them ». He studied and analyzed them in his many volumes and essays on the history of ideas, political institutions and economics, from the 700 to the 1900s, with particular attention to the social life of the western world of that period: seven hundred Adieu. From Enlightenment to Revolution (1989); Italian capitalism of the twentieth century (1993); The roulette of capitalism (1995), the insomnia of the twentieth century. The meteors of a century (2005), The adventures of an industry captain (2008), beautiful and lost. The Italy of the Risorgimento (2011), Italian night. The restless debut of the twentieth century (2011), Machiavelli. An Italian of the Renaissance (2013), Amara America. Stories and myths with stars and stripes (2013), the French revolution told by Lucio Villari (2019), just to name a few.
He collaborated with several newspapers, including the Republic to whom his daughter Anna today gave the news of her death.