Adriano Romualdi

Adriano Romualdi (9 December 1940 – 12 August 1973), was an Italian historian, Germanist, essayist and journalist.

Biography

Adriano Romualdi was born at the city of Forlì in Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy, the son of Pino Romualdi (1913–1988). He studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he attended the courses of Augusto Del Noce and the historian Renzo De Felice. Under the direction of the latter and Rosario Romeo, he submitted his doctoral thesis in contemporary history, dedicated to the German Conservative Revolution.

On February 13, 1964, Romualdi drove his Fiat 600 against a group of people accompanying film director Pier Paolo Pasolini and who were defending him from a previous ambush. However, Pasolini decided not to file a lawsuit.

In 1971, he became an assistant professor in contemporary history at the University of Palermo under Giuseppe Tricoli. His academic work focuses on the history and origin of Indo-Europeans, on Plato, Nietzsche, the German Conservative Revolution, on the "essence of fascism" and on "fascism as a European phenomenon".

As soon as he began his studies, Romualdi joined the FUAN (Fronte universitario di azione nazionale), where he was quickly put in charge of the cultural orientation of the organization1. He was to become one of the main intellectual leaders of the radical, national-revolutionary, but resolutely legalist tendency of the Radical Right, including, in particular, the former militants of the Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo who returned to the MSI in 1969. He was to become one of the main intellectual leaders of the radical, national-revolutionary, but resolutely legalist tendency of the Radical Right. This is why he remained a member of the MSI until his death. The basis of his political line was Julius Evola's 1953 book Men Among the Ruins.

He married a German woman, Else Romualdi, who worked in the library of the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies in Rome, and they had two children. In 1973, Adriano Romualdi died in a car accident at the age of 32. His death raised suspicions of faul play because of his hypothetical involvement with the Piazza Fontana bombing and the secret services.

Thought

Just before his death, he published Idee per una cultura di destra, an essay highly critical of the new cultural leader of the MSI, the ex-Marxist Armando Plebe. Romualdi criticized the philosopher for being a bourgeois anti-communist, who had not disavowed his materialist and atheist roots, who would remain a liberal and could not be called a man of the Right.

For Romualdi, it was important to think of the future in European terms and not just Italian ones. Even if he was very marked by radical anti-communism, he proposed a separation of Europe from the two blocs that had emerged from the Cold War, in an autonomous policy directed against both the USA and the USSR. He defended a concept of Europe-Nation in gestation: "only a united Europe and a nationalism of the Nation-Europe can represent a valid revolutionary alternative".

For Romualdi, an indispensable element in the construction of an organic society is the creation of a new elite. It was in this spirit that he created and animated small groups of reflection and training of cadres, such as the group "Conservative Revolution", which was renamed "The Solstice".

Adriano Romualdi was close to Evola and knew him personally. He published an authorized biography of the philosopher in 1966. After his death, Evola, despite some criticism of him (such as on the notion of transcendence, which Romualdi considered too neglected) paid him tribute, writing that the intellectual Right had lost one of its most brilliant young minds.

Works

• Platone (1965; 1992)
• Perché non esiste una cultura di destra (1965)
• Drieu La Rochelle: il mito dell'Europa (1965; with Guido Giannettini & Mario Prisco)
• Julius Evola: l'uomo e l'opera (1966; 1979)
• Nietzsche e la mitologia egualitaria (1971; 1981)
• Oltre il nichilismo. Raccolta di aforismi di Friedrich Nietzsche (1971)
• Sul problema d'una Tradizione Europea (1973)
• Idee per una cultura di destra (1973)
• La destra e la crisi del nazionalismo (1973, posthumous; 1987)
• Le ultime ore dell'Europa (1976; 2004)
• Gli Indoeuropei. Origini e migrazioni (1978)
• Correnti politiche e ideologiche della destra tedesca dal 1918 al 1932. La Rivoluzione conservatrice (1981; 2013)
• Il fascismo come fenomeno europeo (1984; 2013)
• Una cultura per l'Europa (1986)
• Su Evola (1998)
• Primo schema costituzionale per uno stato dell'Ordine Nuovo (1998)
• Lettere ad un amico (2013)

External links

• Works by Adriano Romualdi at Open Library