Gaspare Ambrosini. Dal fascismo all’invenzione dell’autonomia siciliana

Abstract

This work traces the work of Gaspare Ambrosini (1886-1985) along three different ones Italian political systems of the twentieth century: liberal, fascist and republican. In each of these three epochs, Ambrosini played a leading role not only from the point of view of intellectual reflection and of the academic profession, but above all in that of militant political commitment. His is the first innovative reflection on the birth of the system of mass parties after the introduction of suffrage universal (male) immediately after the great war; his is the elaboration of the one-party system fascist; his is the creation of the first systematization of imperial and racist theories after the conquest of Ethiopia; his is the reflection on a new form of state that had to be given to fascism once he became an empire; his is the invention of the formula of the state of the regions that, after the collapse of the fascist regime, was grafted on the Sicilian story even before the birth of the republic, with the writing of the autonomous Statute; his is the drafting of chapter V of the new Italian Constitution; his is the request to introduce the Sicilian Statute directly, like the Lateran Pacts, within the Constitution; his was the defense before the regional laws, through the presidency of the high court of Sicily, and then of the national ones with the presidency of the Constitutional Court; his was the attempt, thank you to the election as president of the Foreign Commission of the Chamber, on behalf of his party, that is, the Christian Democracy, before maintaining the empire and then succeeding in obtaining the mandate on the Somalia. The Sicilian autonomy here is read as a product, the invention of the fascist imperial theories, capable of resisting the end of the twenty years, and able to be converted from Ambrosini to extraordinary instrument of struggle and political hegemony of Christian Democracy.