Parole collettive [Collective Words]. New York: S.E.A. [Società Editrice Americana], 1941.

Parole collettive [Collective Words]. New York: S.E.A. [Società Editrice Americana], 1941.

Ezio Taddei (b. Livorno, 1895 - d. Rome, 1956) was involved in Italian politics at an early age: at thirteen he was arrested for involvement in a demonstration connected with a nurses’ strike in a Roman hospital. When released from prison, he found the doors of his home closed to him, and began life as a vagabond. He was sentenced in February 1922, along with 32 other anarchists, by the Court of Assizzes in Genoa for conspiracy to destroy several private and public buildings.

Overall Taddei spent 18 years in Italian jails, first for his anti-bourgeois activities and later for his anti-fascist activities; these experiences animated and fueled much of his writing. War and imprisonment fostered his desire for social justice, reinforced by his reading, especially 19th-century Russian realist novels. The Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin, who arrived in Italy in 1864 and believed in immediate armed revolution, attracted intellectuals like Taddei; he and anarchist Errico Malatesta recur as models for the fictional alter egos under which Taddei wrote.

This work, with a preface by the writer Alfredo Segre, comprises seven stories, written in the late 1930s during the last few of Taddei’s 18 years of imprisonment in the Fortezza di Civitavecchia in Italy. It goes without saying that publication of such a work in Italy would have been impossible in 1941.

The artist for these sketches spread throughout the work, and probably also the unsigned collage depicted on the cover, was Costantino Nivola (b. Orani, Italy, 1911; d. Southampton, NY, 1988), a Sardinian graphic and fine artist and sculptor. Fearing for the safety of his American Jewish wife, Ruth Guggenheim, Nivola fled Italy with her for America in 1939, where he became art director of Interiors and Progressive Architecture, the first non-American admitted (in 1972) to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an intimate of de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

The American edition of this work, Hard as Stone, was translated by Frances Keene and published in New York by New Writers in 1942. The Collection contains six of Taddei's works.

As is evident from the translations into English of several of his works, Taddei (unlike most of the other writers in the Collection) enjoyed a significant, however brief, success in American intellectual circles. A frequent critic of the racist and anti-immigrant fervor in the U.S., in New York he was welcomed by Carlo Tresca and, following Tresca’s assassination in February 1943, made an impassioned speech on the street outside the offices of Il Martello about the need to find the assassin.

Martino Marazzi has a fine, extended biographical discussion of Taddei (in Voices of Italian America, 152 et seq.) as well as excerpts there in translation from Le porte dell'inferno and, also in the Collection, Ho rinunciato alla libertà. Durante also has an extended biographical introduction and appraisal of Taddei's special place in Italian American letters.