Count Alessandro Casati was born in Milan,[5] the younger son of Gian Alfonso Casati (1854–1890) by his marriage to Luisa Negroni Prati Morosini (1857–1927).[2] The Casatis came from the Milanese nobility: they could trace their ancestry back more than eight hundred years. Family was important. In the judgment of one commentator, family ancestry influenced Count Alessandro more deeply than mere dynastic awareness. The recollections of friends along with his own letters and writings attest to a constant habit of invoking people and practices from the past to correct present disjunctures, usually without any very obvious awareness of solutions that might emerge through a process of continuity.[1] Public service ran in the blood: Gabrio Casati and Camillo Casati were uncles.[3]
Philosophy
Sources describe him variously as a "religious liberal" or as a "liberal modernist". His upbringing was privileged and heavily influenced by the nineteenth century liberalism that in Italy had grown out of eighteenth century enlightenment ideals.[1] He was a student at the "Alessandro Manzoni College" ("Collegio Alessandro Manzoni") in Merate.[6] An influence from his adolescence that recurs most frequently in Casati's writings is the wily pragmatic economist-politician Stefano Jacini. But Alessandro Casati also lived through the social ructions and the neo-conservatism that grew out the rapid industrialisation during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Through the prisms of these influences and experiences he emerged as a voice for social and political stabilisation and moderation, first through the Giolitti years, and later under Fascism.[1]
Commentator and networker
He was also, as a young man, an enthusiastic child of Modernism, both in terms of his religion and more broadly. This was apparent from his contributions to Il Rinnovamento (loosely "Renewal"), a short-lived Milan-based literary and cultural bi-monthly magazine which he co-founded with Tommaso Gallarati Scotti and Antonio Aiace Alfieri, and which was launched in January 1907.[3] It was a magazine produced by and for angry youth: Scotti described Rinnovamento as "not simply a reaction against religious conservatism ... [but] also a reaction against the neo-paganism, the neo-aestheticism, the positivism and the scepticism that were corrupting the Italian soul".[1] During these early years of the twentieth century Casati was also a significant contributor to Leonardo, a literary magazine (which was described as a monthly publication and appeared slightly irregularly between 1903 and 1907) and La Voce, a more influential magazine produced (also rather irregularly) in Florence between 1908 and 1916.[3] Casati's contributions to these publications brought him to the wider attention of Italy's intellectual class, including several literary celebrities of the day. A particular case in point was the philosopher-politician Benedetto Croce. Context for Casati's view of the world was provided by his religious belief. Croce, in contrast, had robustly and permanently rejected religion during his teenage years. Despite such fundamental difference, Casati and Croce became life-long friends:[7] abundant evidence for their mutual respect and affection survives in their sometimes combative correspondence that runs for more than forty years.[2] After Il Rinnovamento folded in 1909 Alessandro Casati was involved in discussions about launching a new literary-political publication, but he was never by nature a polemicist, increasingly demonstrating a certain constrained detachment with regard the surging intellectual currents of the times: such discussions – at least as far as Casati was concerned – came to nothing. One source refers to his evident wish, at this time, to retreat into an inscrutable process of ethical and intellectual "self-discipline".[1][a]
War
Alessandro Casati was not among those who professed themselves surprised by the outbreak of war at the end of July 1914, and he regarded Italy's military intervention in April 1915 as an inevitable if deplorable development.[1] He participated in the fighting, ending the war with the rank of "Tenente colonnello" ("Lieutenant colonel"), having received the Bronze and Silver Medals of Military Valor ("...medagliere di bronzo e d'argento al valor militare"). He fought at the Battle of Asiago, led the successful attack by the 127th infantry regiment of the Florence Brigade at Monte Kobilek and was badly wounded at Bainsizza, following which he needed an operation. He also fought with his "Alpini" forces against the Austrians in the so-called "White War" in and around the Tonale Pass in the mountains north of Bergamo and Brescia.[2] There are also a number of reports, albeit not formally confirmed, that during 1917 Alessandro Casati became a close associate of his fellow Lombard, General Capello, commander of the Second Army, providing critical advice and practical support, notably in respect of using innovative propaganda techniques to sustain troop morale, both before and after the important Battle of Caporetto.[1] Capello was considered unusual in senior military circles because of the way he liked to surround himself with "intellectuals", and the "catholic liberal" Alessandro Casati was prominent among these.[8]
Public service
Casati's record during the war had in any event raised his profile with the Italian political establishment and in the immediate aftermath of it he was entrusted with several important political-diplomatic assignments.[1] In September 1923 he accepted an invitation from the Education Minister, Giovanni Gentile, to take on the vice presidency of the country's "Higher Education Council" ("Consiglio superiore della Pubblica Istruzione"), a body charged with ensuring the efficacy and consistency of Gentile's schools reforms.[2][1] Already in March 1923 he had accepted nomination as a member of the senate.[5][9] The senate was (and is) the upper house of Italy's bicameral parliament. One of twenty-two nominees accepted on that occasion, he was proposed for senate membership by his old friend, the senator Benedetto Croce.[2]
Casati joined the government as part of the cabinet re-shuffle of 1 July 1924, taking over from Giovanni Gentile at the Education Ministry. Politically he was, at this stage, a still slightly semi-detached member the group around the former "Presidente del Consiglio" ("Prime Minister..."), Antonio Salandra.[1] The murder, in a Lancia Lambda on 10 June 1924, of the anti-fascist politician Giacomo Matteotti was widely blamed on Fascistthugs: it triggered a widespread political and public backlash against the increasingly autocratic Mussolini government.[10] As the political temperature rose, on 3 January 1925 Benito Mussolini delivered a speech to the lower house of parliament "Camera dei deputati" accepting "moral" but "not material" responsibility for the Matteotti murder.[11] He assured the parliament that within the next 48 hours the situation would be clarified. That indeed proved to be the case: Interior Minister Luigi Federzoni sent out a precise instruction to the Prefects (regional administrators) which had the effect of drastically restricting press freedom and closing down political opposition parties across the country. If it had not been clear before, it was now impossible to avoid the reality that Italy was well advanced along the path to one-partydictatorship.[12] 3 January 1925, the date of that Mussolini speech to a recalcitrant parliament, was also the day on which Alessandro Casati resigned from the Mussolini government.[2][4] In the immediate term this appeared to mean joining Francesco Ruffini and Luigi Albertini in political opposition to the government from within the senate,[2] but in reality it was Albertini whose example he now followed, withdrawing from both the political stage and from public life more broadly.[1][3]
Scholarship
Correspondence with his friend Benedetto Croce indicates that Casati had difficulty adjusting to the reduction in the size of his social circle that followed his withdrawal from public life.[1][13] The years that followed were to be his most productive in terms of his writing, however.[1] His 1931 essay and subsequent work on the memoires of Giuseppe Gorani and the Seven Years' War date from this period.[3][14] He also devoted himself to preparing a three volume historical work on contemporary Italian history.[3] This was never published, however. The papers he had gathered and the drafts he had prepared for it were destroyed in February 1943 when most of his "palazzo" in Milan, including the rich and extensive Casati family library which he had inherited and then greatly extended,[2] were destroyed by British bombing.[1][15] (Casati nevertheless continued to receive friends in the two rooms that survived in the rubble.) Later he relocated to a new home at Arcore, a short distance to the northeast ofthe city centre.[2]
Alfonso Casati (1918–1944) was the much loved only son of Alessandro and Leopolda Casati. Alfonso volunteered for service in the Liberation Corps in May 1944. He was assigned to the Special Battalion of the First Grenadiers. In command of the "Bafile" battalion he took part in the fighting for control over Belvedere Ostrense and Corinaldo (near Ancona) which were being held by the Germans as strongholds along the "Heinrich line". While protecting the retreat of Polish and Italian units serving with his platoon, Alfonso Casati was shot dead by a German mortar at Corinaldo on 6 August 1944.[1][16] He became a posthumous recipient of the Medaglia di bronzo al valor militare.[16]
After he was succeeded at the ministry by his friend Stefano Jacini in June 1945, Alessandro Casati became president of the "Consiglio supremo di difesa" ("Supreme Defence Council").[1][18] There were a number of other public service and government appointments during Casati's final decade.[19] of which one of the more significant was his appointment as a member of the Italian delegation to UNESCO. In May/June 1950 he presided over the UNESCO General Conference, held on that occasion in Florence.[2][20]
A new constitution, signed off at the end of 1947, meant a new senate, instituted on 1 January 1948 (although the new republican senate continued to meet in the Palazzo Madama, just as the old senate had under the monarchy). Alessandro Casati was nominated to membership of the (greatly enlarged) republican senate on 1 April 1948, formally on the basis that he had been a member of the old senate.[19] He was elected president of the Liberal Party group of senators on 8 May 1948, retaining this position till 24 June 1953.[19]
During his final months, which were marred by serious illness, Alessandro Casati retreated to his villa at Arcore, ordering his affairs and entrusting some surviving inherited ancestral papers from his Teresa Casati and Federico Confalonieri to the Risorgimento Museum in Milan.[1]
He died on 4 June 1955. Senior senators paid tribute to his scholarship, his generosity and modesty complemented by powerful persuasiveness in argument, his shrewd judgment, his courage as a soldier and politician, and his over-riding patriotism.[2]
His physical remains are buried, alongside those of his wife and of the son who predeceased them both, in the family masoleum at the Muggiò municipal cemetery, near to the family home of his later years at Arcore.[23]
^Giovanni D’Alessandro (15 July 2012). "Quando il filosofo Benedetto Croce era di casa ad Arcore". Foto dei primi anni ’20 svela l’amicizia col marchese Casati Uno studio personale nell’attuale dimora di Berlusconi. Il Centro SpA, Pescara. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
