In a vast, 16th Century palazzo in the heart of Naples lives a stubby, stooped old man whom Neapolitans call "Don Benedetto." Though he is in his 80s, the old man ordinarily rises at 6, and an hour later trudges into his book-lined study to write at his big desk or to sit in his big armchair, thinking. Occasionally Neapolitans see him out strolling, passing dilapidated palaces and ancient churches, to his favorite bookshop on the Via Foria for a bout of friendly dickering. But last week Neapolitans were troubled: out of the palazzo had come the news that Philosopher Benedetto Croce was gravely ill.
Up & down Italy, newspapers carried the alarm: the old philosopher had collapsed. His daughter had rushed to his bedside, and so had such friends as Alessandro Casati, a leader of the Liberal Party, and Enrico de Nicola, ex-President of the republic. For two days Italians waited, then breathed with relief. Philosopher Croce had called for his manuscripts, said he wanted to get back to work. Though his doctors insisted that he keep on resting, they thought that for the present the danger was over.
A Single Glance. Thus, this week, Benedetto Croce approached his 84th birthday —an age, as he put it, "when a man's life seems a past that he can survey at a single glance." As scholars all over the world well knew, that glance included much.
Long before Italians ever heard the name of Benito Mussolini, they had begun to know Benedetto Croce. He was the wealthy aristocrat with the bristly hair who was to become not only Italy's most noted 20th Century philosopher, but a senator and a cabinet minister as well.
In the first months of Fascism, he was slow to realize what Mussolini stood for. But when dictatorship established itself, he turned his back on Rome. In Naples, he edited a scholarly anti-Fascist magazine called La Critica, defied the government with his book History as the Story of Liberty. Once a band of young Black Shirts threatened to storm his home, fled when confronted by Signora Croce. Beyond that, the Fascists never dared to molest the Croces. "There is one man in all Italy whom I fear," Mussolini once remarked—"Croce. And I fear him because I do not understand him."
A Sigh of Relief. Other Italians understood him better. After the fall of Mussolini, they called Croce back into public life once more in Marshal Badoglio's cabinet. But his appearance was a brief one. With a sigh of relief he left public office for good, and went back home to a library that reached ladder-high ("How can a man live without books?"), and to a special Italian Institute of Historical Studies which he had long wanted to found.
Since then his palazzo has been filled with students. They browse through his library at will, sometimes approach Il Maestro with a question. Such interruptions are welcome. "For so many years under Fascism," Croce says, "not a single student came to me with his problems."