Tempo Presente

Tempo Presente (1956-68) was a magazine of political, cultural, and social commentary co-edited by Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte and affiliated with the Associazione italiana per la libertà della cultura, the Italian national committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Despite never exceeding a circulation of three thousand copies, it published major mid-twentieth-century intellectuals, including Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Albert Camus, Leonardo Sciascia, Enzo Forcella, Nelo Risi, Elsa Morante, Altiero Spinelli, Gustaw Herling, Elémire Zolla, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, and Guido Piovene. 

Though Silone and Chiaromonte, both belonging to antifascist circles, had known each other since at least 1934 and begun envisioning an international magazine as early as 1936, Tempo Presente was likely conceived at the 1955 CCF “The Future of Freedom” conference in Milan. It was thus conceptualized in the context of the transatlantic non-communist left for a cosmopolitan, intellectual Italian audience. 

Silone and Chiaromonte presented Tempo Presente as “an international magazine”—“a cultural enterprise based on the recognition that the world today has no borders…not because political and ethnic borders are abolished, but because the borders of our moral world are uncertain and problematic”—and explicitly distinguished its outlook from “national, ideological, cultural or religious” provincialism. This was reflected in the magazine’s attention to international events and debates and the lens it used to analyze postwar Italian society. Typical issues included short editorials, letters from foreign correspondents on issues in those locales, reviews of articles from Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, Latin American, and American periodicals, commentary on recent events, domestic and international book reviews, and essays about national or international politics, philosophy, literature, or the arts.

Though Silone was a member of the CCF Executive Committee and Chiaromonte served as his alternate, the co-editors put significant effort into keeping the magazine independent from the CCF headquarters in Paris: they ensured the magazine was not formally published by the CCF (only affiliated with it), were autonomous in choosing material, and minimized their CCF-derived funding. Though Tempo Presente nonetheless benefitted from access to other CCF magazines, which enabled the content exchange and engagement with international events and ideas, its editors were known for their stubborn independence and inclination to take stances at odds with the CCF leadership and other CCF magazines. The magazine was assisted in this regard by Silone’s international stature and authority within the CCF and from the transnational networks Chiaromonte had developed as an antifascist exile and refugee: if Silone’s status helped secure the autonomy of the magazine, Chiaromonte’s relationships with French and US intellectuals and ties to American magazines like Partisan Review and Dissent helped Tempo Presente become a conduit for content circulation and idea transfer that promoted heterodox thinking. For instance, Tempo Presente published “America, America,” an essay by Chiaromonte’s friend Dwight Macdonald, though the piece had been rejected as too critical of US society by the peer CCF magazine Encounter. 

Tempo Presente’s editorial line was staunchly anti-fascist, anti-clerical, anti-Gaullist, and anti-Crocean, though it expressed a strong anti-totalitarianism and commitment to intellectual freedom that aligned with the CCF’s general outlook. The magazine was moreover critical of the Franco and Christian Democrat governments in Spain and Italy, the Greek junta, US foreign policy, and the failures of Western decolonization—in addition to condemning Soviet aggression and oppression and giving voice to Soviet-bloc dissidents. This combination of attitudes, alongside the magazine’s anti-religious tone and avoidance of zealous anticommunism, resulted in frequent friction with the CCF leadership as well as an uneasy positioning vis-à-vis Italian political and intellectual alignments.

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