Letters from Prison

". Immediately below, the registration number is written by hand: 7047. In the letters from Civitavecchia, the following stamps appear: "Penitentiary Establishment of Civitavecchia," "Avoid enclosing valuables in ordinary letters directed to detainees," "It is forbidden for convicts to receive food items from the outside," and the registration number. Furthermore, the round stamp with the Savoy coat of arms surrounded by the words "Penitentiary of Civitavecchia. Censorship." The letters from Formia are stamped, but the writing is not legible.

Not all the letters written by Gramsci from internal exile and prison have reached us: some were lost during the years of fascism and the war; others, withheld by the police, never reached their destination. We possess the original for a portion of the letters; for others, only the copy that his sister-in-law Tatiana sent to the family and to party comrades in Moscow, and to his friend Sraffa in Cambridge. The originals and copies are kept at the Gramsci Institute, Via del Conservatorio 55, Rome.

Gramsci’s letters from prison were partially published in a volume released in 1947, which included 218 of them. Since then, some others saw the light in Società, in l’Unità, and in Mondo operaio. In 1962, a handful of letters to family members were published in Rinascita. In 1964, the second volume of the anthology 2000 pages of Gramsci, in addition to reprinting part of the letters from the 1947 edition, published 77 unpublished ones (cf. Comparison table with previous editions).

The present edition comprises a total of 428 letters, of which 119 are previously unpublished. Many are published here in their entirety for the first time. The edition is based on the autographs. The letters published from handwritten or typewritten copies, or from other editions, are indicated in the cited table with the sign *.

In the transcription, the spelling and punctuation of the originals have been preserved. Slight interventions in the punctuation