Aldo Moro in the Italian Modern Histories

The syntheses of the history of a country are a mirror of scholars’ work. This article is devoted to an analysis of what the histories of contemporary Italy tell about Aldo Moro, from the end of the 1960s up to today, and it follows a great deal of the debate about the history and the problems of Italian democracy in the last forty years. The research on the history of the republican Italy is now well launched; however, the common awareness of interpretative concepts which has been achieved for the period before 1945 is still missing. The exam of the assessments of Moro proves it. With only some relevant exceptions, the histories of Italy tell us more about their authors, their sympathies and antipathies, their political cultures or the phases of the history of the country in which they wrote than about Moro himself. The interpretation of his figure is still oriented more by the brilliant formulas of journalism writing on current affairs than by careful researches (however, still incomplete and at an early stage). The «Moro affair» attracted the attention and caused the growth of an immense bibliography, while the image of the political leader and of the statesman remained attached to his tragic death. George Mosse’s 1979 suggestion of widening the horizon and trying to put in relation Moro’s political experience, his culture, his analyses, his problems with the great transformations of western democracy was not followed.

Keywords: Aldo Moro, histories of modern Italy, Italian historians, Italian democracy, interpretations of Republican Italy, history of Italy 1945-1978

• A Itália em disputa: comunistas e democratas-cristãos no longo pós-guerra (1943-1978) Giuseppe Vacca, Luiz Sérgio Henriques, (ISBN:9788526815377)

Renato Moro, Aldo Moro nelle storie d’Italia in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 2/2010, pp 17-69, DOI: 10.3280/MON2010-002003