‘One of the last secret maestros’: Nicola Chiaromonte between Europe and America

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article describes the transatlantic cultural mediation performed by Italian editor, critic and political activist Nicola Chiaromonte, focusing specifically on his relationships with figures from the mid-twentieth-century U.S. cultural formation known as the New York Intellectuals. Drawing heavily on unpublished correspondence and archival materials, it highlights how Chiaromonte – who in the 1930s belonged to influential Italian and French intellectual networks, as well as to the antifascist movement ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ – publicly and privately transmitted political ideas forged in the debates of the Italian antifascist diaspora and the intellectual matrix of interwar Paris to leftwing 1940s New York circles associated with literary and socio-political magazines such as Partisan Review (P.R.) and politics. After exploring Chiaromonte’s years as a refugee in Manhattan as a scene of formal and informal cultural mediation, it turns to his post-war role as co-editor of the Italian Congress for Cultural Freedom (C.C.F.) magazine Tempo Presente (T.P.), foregrounding this institutional role as a site of idea circulation and exchange that leveraged Chiaromonte’s transnational cultural knowledge and connections. The article emphasizes the significance of interpersonal relationships not only to Chiaromonte’s political vision but also as sites of transformational intellectual labour.