Giovanni Cassandro

Giovanni Cassandro (21 April 1913 - 10 October 1989) was an Italian Jurist by training, with a particular focus on Legal history. During the 1930s he worked as a government archivist, first in Venice and then in Naples, which gave him the opportunity to develop an abiding specialism in the wider history of Italy, especially with regard to the south. He also took a growing interest in politics, becoming a liberal activist during the closing years of the dictatorship and a member of the team around Benedetto Croce that re-established the Liberal Party after the arrest of Mussolini in July 1943. He served as party secretary in 1944 and again during 1946/47. Cassandro remained active in national politics till 1947, when he accepted a professorship in Legal history at the University of Bari. He later moved north, taking a series of professorships straddling the interface between Law and History at the Sapienza University of Rome. Between 1955 and 1967 he combined his university work with a position as one of the fifteen judge at the newly established Constitutional Court in Rome.

Biography Giovanni Italo Cassandro was born in Barletta, an ancient coastal town a short distance to the north-west of Bari . Michele Cassandro (1876-1962), his father, was a school languages teacher, schools inspector and the author of various published historical studies on local topics. He was still exceptionally young when he graduated from the University of Bari in 1933 with a degree in Jurisprudence. In 1936 he moved to Naples, taking an equivalent management position with the Archives department there to the one he had been fulfilling in Venice. Naples was the home city of his newly acquired father-in law, Fausto Nicolini, and he continued to be hugely influenced by Nicolini both on a personal level and with regard to his on-going academic research. He had already published a number of historical studies even before 1933, but on his arrival in Naples, surrounded by the vast repository of material held at the archive, Cassandro embarked on a life-long study of the region identified, before 1860, as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He was one of those who successfully called for the Party Congress for the liberated territories which was held in Naples during 2–4 June 1944, during the course of which he was confirmed in his office as Party Secretary. A new government was formed in December 1945 of which, after much wrangling, Leone Cattani became a member, which meant resigning the Party Secretarial position. He was not immediately replaced. Instead the administrative tasks were attended to by the three vice-secretaries already in position, Anton Dante Coda, Franco Libonati and Cassandro. That remained the position till the third party congress, held in Rome between 29 April and 2 May 1946, when Giovanni Cassandro was re-elected to his former position as Party General Secretary. Within the party hierarchy he tended to favour moderate centrist positions, frequently finding himself in alliance with his friend Benedetto Croce. As regards the public face of the party he was more than content to leave the limelight to others. However, during the second half of 1946 he played an important role behind the scenes in the integration of most of the key members of the Italian Democratic Party, hitherto seen as a right of centre monarchist party, into a broadened version of the Liberal Party. After this there is no indication that Cassandro exercised further significant influence over the decisions of the Liberal Party. Although he had been a member of the (nominated) National Council during 1945/46, In 1955 he was elected to membership of the new Constitutional Court, sworn in on 15 December 1955 as one of the court's fifteen judges. The mandate lasted for twelve years, and he served out his full term, retiring from the judiciary on 15 December 1967. He had retained close links with the University of Bari throughout his twelve year judicial mandate,