Nicola Chiaromonte

Nicola Chiaromonte (1905-72) was an editor, critic, political activist, and intellectual. Born in Rapallo, Italy to an upper-middle-class family, he earned a law degree from the University of Rome in 1927. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he frequented figures such as Adriano Tilgher, Giorgio Diaz de Santillana, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, Mario Soldati, Dino Terra, Paolo Milano, and Francesco Grandjacquet. After being introduced to Carlo Rosselli and Andrea Caffi, who became his friend and mentor, Chiaromonte joined openly antifascist circles: by 1932 he was actively contributing to the antifascist movement Giustizia e Libertà (GL) and by early 1934 had become coordinator of its clandestine Rome cell. Informed upon to the fascist police later in 1934, Chiaromonte went into political exile in Paris, where he befriended Mario Levi (brother of Natalia Ginzburg), Andrè Malraux, Raymond Aron, and Lionello and Franco Venturi, among others. Such political and intellectual ties facilitated his participation in Paul Desjardins’s décades de Pontigny and attendance at the first International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture. 

Chiaromonte’s contributions to GL’s underground publications, especially his analyses of fascist power and its socio-cultural origins, were influential—but he broke with the organization (alongside Caffi, Levi, and Renzo Guia) in early 1936 over its aims and growing proximity to the consolidating Popular Fronts. This rupture reflected Chiaromonte’s commitment to a transnational antifascism focused not on direct action against the Mussolini regime (the main GL line) but on building an antifascist resistance culture able to address the social and moral issues at the root of fascism which would disseminate via the horizontal mobilization of likeminded networks and friend groups. Shortly after leaving GL, Chiaromonte enrolled in the early months of the Spanish Civil War, joining Malraux’s Republican air squadron—though, uneasy with the Stalinization of the Spanish Republican forces, he left the conflict after just 6 months. In the late 1930s, Chiaromonte collaborated with Caffi and Levi in the antifascist initiatives of other independent socialists (i.e., Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, Giuseppe Faravelli, and Angelo Tasca), including a clandestine radio transmission; he also became closer to Ignazio Silone.

Chiaromonte fled occupied France in 1940 as the Nazis approached Paris—escaping first to Algeria, where he was hosted and befriended by Albert Camus, then to New York. He arrived in Manhattan in August 1941 thanks to an emergency visa secured via Max Ascoli. In New York, Chiaromonte first worked at the Italian desk of the Office of War Information and helped edit Gaetano Salvemini’s American antifascist newspaper L’Italia Libera, frequenting an Italian refugee network that included Ugo ‘Mike” Stille, Lamberto Borghi, Aldo Bruzzichelli, and Niccolò Tucci. After meeting Meyer Schapiro and Dwight Macdonald—likely thanks to his Italian connections—by 1943 Chiaromonte was frequenting New York Intellectual circles, becoming a noted interlocutor of Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Abel, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, William Philips, William Barrett, Philip Rhav, James T. Farrell, and Sidney Hook, among others. In addition to contributing essays to US periodicals such as The New Republic and Partisan Review, Chiaromonte became an important influence on the editorial direction of politics magazine and a close friend and mentor to Macdonald and McCarthy. In this New York context, his familiarity with French intellectuals and their debates, knowledge of philosophy, and first-hand experience of recent European political events made him a notable reference point: Chiaromonte introduced his new circles to Continental thinkers (such as Caffi, Simone Weil, P.J. Proudhon, and Georges Gurvitch), participated in reading groups on Plato and Kierkegaard, and served as a bridge to the European independent left—including by presenting American friends to Camus.

Chiaromonte returned to Paris in 1948 and began work at UNESCO. A contact point between the Left Bank intelligentsia and the New York Intellectuals, Chiaromonte connected American acquaintances in Paris (including Abel, H.J. Kaplan, and Saul Bellow) to Italian and French circles—frequenting circles exploring political alternatives for postwar Europe that intersected both the rising existentialist movement and the birth of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). 

In 1953 Chiaromonte repatriated to Rome as a theater critic for Il Mondo. In 1956 he became co-editor with Silone of the Italian CCF magazine Tempo Presente, as well as Silone’s stand-in on the CCF Executive Committee. These roles positioned Chiaromonte in a transatlantic publishing circuit and forum for intellectual exchange that facilitated his promotion of the work of friends such as Camus, Macdonald, and McCarthy in Italy, participation in high-profile international conferences and debates, and dialogue with international periodicals, including Dissent—an American magazine considered an heir to politics, the 1940s magazine Chiaromonte had helped shape. Tempo Presente’s international outlook and heterodox stances—opposing both communist and fascist totalitarianism, religious dogma, and French and American imperialism—reflected Chiaromonte’s and Silone’s stubborn independence vis-à-vis the politics of both the Italian publishing scene and the CCF leadership. Chiaromonte died in Rome 1972. 

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