How many books and notebooks could Gramsci keep in his cell in Turi prison?

Abstract

This article presents evidence on how many books and notebooks Antonio Gramsci was allowed to keep in his cell – two issues of obvious importance to any research on Gramsci’s biography and writings. The number of books will be considered first. Information collected in this area will then lead the analysis of the number of notebooks he could keep in the cell. Important information will emerge from documents produced during the 1930s by detainees, prison officers or other authorities, but also from a testimony by Gustavo Trombetti which remained virtually unknown for seventy years and by a fresh reading of testimonies by other detainees. In the case of the notebooks, information gathered by the editors of the Quaderni del carcere will also play an important role. What we present is an abridged version of Nuove fonti sul numero di libri e quaderni che Gramsci poteva tenere in cella, but we also put forward new arguments regarding the number of notebooks on which Gramsci seems to have worked during each single month of his detention in Turi, the occasions when his work may have been interrupted by prison authorities and a decision possibly taken by Mussolini in autumn 1932 that could have allowed Gramsci to continue writing his notebooks while the same concession was withdrawn to other political detainees.