Antonio Moscato

Antonio Maria Moscato was born in Rome on 26 September 1938. He studied at university under the historian of religion Ambrogio Donini, and then worked with the anthropologist Vittorio Lanternari, becoming his assistant at the University of Bari.

In 1957, still a young man, he began working with Livio Maitan, the most important figure of Italian Trotskyism. According to Maitan's memoir La strada percorsa, Moscato was one of a group of young people drawn to the Fourth International by the Sicilian intellectual Giuseppe Paolo Samona, whose publishing house Samona e Savelli later issued Moscato's first books.

Moscato taught the history of the labour movement, contemporary history and the history of Afro Asian countries at the University of Lecce, where more than 250 students graduated under his supervision. His colleagues in the movement said the chair in labour history was abolished around the time of his retirement.

He wrote a long list of books. Early works dealt with religion and popular movements, including a study of the nineteenth century prophet Davide Lazzaretti. Later books analysed the Soviet bloc and its crisis, among them Intellettuali e potere in URSS, Gorbaciov. L'ambiguita della perestrojka and Chiesa, partito e masse nella crisi polacca. He researched Che Guevara's papers in Cuba and wrote Che Guevara, storia e leggenda, Breve storia di Cuba and Il risveglio dell'America Latina (2008), and also wrote on Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.

He directed the newspaper Bandiera Rossa, founded the journal Critica Comunista, wrote for Erre and l'Anticapitalista, and contributed to Liberazione and Limes. He sat on the editorial committee of the Quaderni of the Fondazione Ernesto Che Guevara and ran the website Movimento operaio, La pagina di Antonio Moscato.

Politically he moved from the Revolutionary Communist Groups to Proletarian Democracy and, in 1991, to Communist Refoundation, standing for the Apulian regional council in 1995 and for the Senate in Lecce in 2001. In December 2007 he joined Sinistra Critica, and from 2013 he was a member of Sinistra Anticapitalista.

For many decades Moscato's partner was Maria Novella Pierini, known as Titti, an activist in the same political current and co author of his first book. In 1966, in the days after the death of the student Paolo Rossi in Rome, he and two other young activists, among them Celeste Ingrao, were attacked and beaten by a group of neo fascists. In his later years he lived in Recanati.

Moscato died in Recanati during the night of 24 October 2026, at the age of 88. The news reached Sinistra Anticapitalista as its national political committee was about to begin, and the meeting began planning how to preserve his memory. The Swiss group MPS and the Lecce newspaper Quotidiano di Puglia also marked his death.

Moscato is remembered as a historian who combined research, teaching and political activity, and as a mentor to several generations of activists in the Italian radical left and to hundreds of students in Lecce. His writing on the Soviet system, on Cuba and on Che Guevara reached a wide readership, and one of his Guevara books was translated into Czech.