Zarathustra, Anno 1, No. 1. New York, 15 Maggio [May] 1925.

Copies of this magazine are one of the "holy grails" of Italian American publishing: of Zarathustra, Francesco Durante noted it was a "review of high cultural profile, oriented to the left, of which however, there is no trace in bibliographies or archives."

Valentini was a journalist at L'Araldo Italiano, and an attorney as well. His most famous individual work is perhaps Il ricatto: Eccola, la Giustizia! Rivelazioni e documenti [Blackmail: Behold Justice: Revelations and Documents], Torino: 1924, based on a famous trial whose defendants were said to belong to the Black Hand. Durante calls the work a "curious pastiche mixing passages of narrative and trial documents, chronicles, and digressions." A fine review that summarizes the work, treating it as a more serious legal work, may be found in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 16, Issue 3 (1926) by Robert Ferrari.

Valentini's standing in the larger American scene is impressive: he is one of only two Italians who appears on a distinguished short list in the 1950's (one that also included Norman Thomas, Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Dubois, Clarence Darrow and Felix Frankfurter) as members of the International Committee for Political Prisoners, revealed during proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (See its Investigation, Vol. 2, p. 2897). 

An excerpt from Valentini's Brunori's Fortune, from Il ricatto, is in Durante. The Brunori of that work is the same medical doctor, Nicola Brunori, to whom Ezio Taddei's Alberi e casolari is dedicated, q.v., and to whom the Collection's copy of Armando Borghi's Mischia sociale (da . . . alla Cooper Union) is inscribed, q.v. In that same period, Valentini contributed frequently to Carlo Tresca's Il Martello.

Ernesto Valentini

[publisher not identified]

15 Maggio [May] 1925

Italian