Guglielmo Ferrero

Born in Portici near Naples on July 21, 1871, he became one of Italy’s best-known historians, as well as a journalist and novelist. Early in his career he worked across several fields, but he won broad international attention with Grandezza e decadenza di Roma (The Greatness and Decline of Rome), a major multi-volume history that helped make his name far beyond Italy.

His writing was never only about the distant past. Ferrero devoted much of his thought to liberalism, political power, and the idea of legitimacy in government. He was strongly opposed to dictatorship, and later works continued to explore how states win obedience, how fear shapes politics, and why free acceptance of authority matters.

An outspoken critic of Fascism, he spent part of his later life in exile and went on to teach history at the University of Geneva. He died there on August 3, 1942, leaving behind a body of work that connected classical history with urgent modern political questions.