Eugenio Colorni

The Final Year: 1943-44 Genesis of a Perspective Eugenio Colorni

Literary Nonfiction. Edited by Luca Meldolesi. Translated by Michael Gilmartin. He was ready to let himself be pervaded by an idea and to experience it by compassionately living it, so as to possess it. Then sometimes he would turn it around and transform it into something rich and strong, in Shakespeare's words. If I think of a baffling and miraculous intelligence, able even to absorb superstition, even astrology or magic, and transform them into an original treasure, I think of Eugenio Colorni. --Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue

[Eugenio] detests a federation organized through state diplomacy for purposes of economics and power. He sees a federation in terms of a socialist movement --that is, born of the people. And therefore revolutionary (just as he detests arranged marriages or unions without love, in which one tends to exploit and reduce the other to oneself). --Luisa Villani Usellini

In short, Colorni's thinking was an incandescent magma of colossal genius that would have assailed any sphere his intellectual interests had turned to. --Leo Solari

I remember Angelo, this great scientist, this great scholar, this great freedom fighter also as a man who was exquisitely political, exceptionally able in political activity and propaganda and in the lessons he was able to teach us even though he was only slightly older than we were. --Giuliano Vassalli