Tommaso Fiore

Life

Tommaso Fiore was born in a working-class family on 7 March 1884. After completing higher education in a seminary school located in Conversano (as it was normal at that time for gifted students who couldn't afford public high schools), he studied classical literature at university and then he taught inside Italian classical lyceum schools. His interests were mostly focused on the poverty of Southern Italy's peasants, and he struggled with his thoughts to find a solution to Southern Italy's economic failure (in Italian, such scholars are called ). He was also a strenuous socialist, and he always fought for the Independence and federalism of Southern Italy. He also studied poverty and other issues related to Southern Italy's peasants. In the 1920s, he became mayor of Altamura, his hometown, and he was a courageous opponent of fascism. He was sent into internal exile in 1942 and then jailed in 1943 because of his intense propaganda against fascism.

On 19 August 1909, he also joined the Italian Freemasonry, and he was appointed to the Masonic lodge number 1799 located in Altamura. On 7 February 1915, he was appointed as Master Mason.

He collaborated with the Italian newspaper La Rivoluzione liberale whose chief editor was Piero Gobetti, and with the newspaper Quarto Stato founded by Pietro Nenni and Carlo Rosselli, where he explained his ideas about socialist reformation of Southern Italy.

On 28 July 1943, he lost his son Graziano in the massacre of via Niccolò dell'Arca, in Bari, carried out by fascists. In the aftermath of World War II, he was appointed as Latin grammar and literature teacher at the University of Bari, where he also became Provveditore degli Studi ("Superintendent of Studies"). In 1952, his book Un popolo di formiche (which means "a people of ants") won the prestigious Viareggio Prize.

Works

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