The Press: Old Wine, New Bottle

For 22 Fascist years, the only Italian in all Italy who dared openly badger Mussolini was famed Philosopher Benedetto Croce. Through his brilliant, semimonthly philosophical magazine La Critica, Croce continued saying what he felt to be eternally true, even though these truths often contained political implications insupportable to Fascism. La Critica had a select, world-wide circulation, was read avidly by Italian university students. It was one of Mussolini’s great mistakes that he did not stop the mouth of this one voice of liberalism.

In Sorrento last week, 78-year-old Philosopher Croce announced that at year’s end he will abandon La Critica (established in 1903), but will go right on speaking his mind in a brand new review to be called I Quaderni della Critica (Notebooks of Critical Thought).