THE historian Giorgio Spini was shaped by a deep commitment to two forces rarely found in Italians: liberalism and Protestantism. Their influence gave his scholarship an unusually far-ranging and detached perspective when writing about his countrymen, but Spini was also a patriot, and nothing gave him more satisfaction than the part he had played during the Second World War in securing the survival of some of Italy’s most treasured works of art.
In the summer of 1944 a detachment of Mahrattas from the British Eighth Army took possession of the castle of Montegufoni in Tuscany. The property was known to belong to the Sitwell family, but though their artistic inclinations were not news to the soldiers’ officer, he was still puzzled as to what should be done with the large number of elderly paintings in some of the castle’s subterranean rooms. He remembered that in the area there was an Italian intelligence officer serving with the Allies, and Second Lieutenant Spini was duly summoned.
When Spini descended to the dimly lit cellar, and held up an oil lamp to see what was there, the first sight that met his gaze was the geometrical patterns of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Next to it was the Giotto Madonna, and a little further on Botticelli’s Primavera. Room after room was filled with the pick of the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, which had been removed to the castle for safety.
“So,” the officer asked him, “are they worth anything?” Backed up by the writer Eric Linklater and the broadcaster Vaughan Thomas, who had also come upon the find, Spini was able to convince him that a guard ought to be mounted over the paintings. Though he lacked the temerity of Linklater, who climbed a stepladder to plant a kiss on the lips on the loveliest of Botticelli’s Graces, Spini — a Florentine himself — was thrilled by his discovery.
His advice saved the paintings from the fate of the Tuscan Mannerist canvases he saw at a nearby village. A regiment of New Zealanders had unearthed them from their hiding place, and had then ingeniously used the works of Bronzino and Pontormo as bivouac material.
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Giorgio Spini was born in Florence in 1916. His father’s family belonged to the Waldensian Church, an early reformist denomination which cleaves to Puritan principles and has its largest congregations in Italy in the mountain valleys of the northeast. Spini had a frugal upbringing, wearing only hand-me-down clothes until he was 20.
His father was a railway engineer who fell out with Fascist functionaries in his profession, and eked out an existence as a mathematics teacher. He imbued his son with a desire for self-improvement and for knowledge. Spini was also influenced by his involvement with Protestant youth and cultural movements, which had close ties to the German churches oppressed by Hitler, and this in turn sparked his own involvement with anti-Fascism.
After university Spini became a schoolteacher. In 1940 he published his first work of history, a study of Antonio Brucioli (1497-1566), the translator of the Bible into Italian. He had already written a novel about life under Fascism, and in 1939 was harshly interrogated by the police on account of his sympathies, but he managed to convince them that he had no involvement with the nascent Resistance movement. In 1942 he joined the anti-Fascist Action Party.
The previous year he had been called up, and in an Alpine regiment he rose to the rank of sergeant. When the Italian Armistice came in 1943, Spini crossed the lines (though still recovering from tuberculosis), and from Bari began broadcasting into occupied Italy under the pseudonym Valdo Gigli. Later he joined the British Army as an expert in psychological warfare, and in 1944, walking ahead of South African troops in his Italian uniform, he was the first Italian officer to liberate his home city of Florence. In 2000 this was commemorated by the award to him of her highest honour, the Golden Florin.
Spini had fond memories of the phlegmatic qualities of the British soldier, although less pleasant ones of their frequent resort to blasphemous oaths. He had an intellectual’s perhaps hopeful belief that he and they were fighting to preserve exactly the same values, epitomised for him by the thought of the Florentine Renaissance and by the exacting moral authority of the German theologian Karl Barth.
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The Medici and the Protestant influence on the formation of the modern world subsequently became his two main areas of study. His first success came with Cosimo I, published in 1941 and, in a second edition, in 1970. His Autobiografia della giovane America (1968) looked at the country in its early years, while Barocco e puritani (1991) compared the cultures of Italy, Spain and New England in the 17th century.
His other works included two analyses of the Unification of Italy, Risorgimento e protestanti (1989) and Italia liberale e protestanti (2002), as well as an influential general survey of early modern history, Storia dell’età moderna (1515-1763) (1965). From 1952 until 1960 he taught at the University of Messina, and then from 1960 until 1990 he was Professor of History at Florence. Spini was also a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Wisconsin and the University of California (Berkeley), president of several historical societies and learned journals, and latterly Italy’s representative to the general assembly of Unesco. He also sat on the joint governing council of the Italian Waldensian and Methodist Church.
Spini was always aware of his responsibilities as an intellectual, and felt in recent decades that Italians had become too much prey to opportunism and populism.
He was appointed a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Order of Merit in 2001. The following year he published a memoir, La strada della liberazione.
He is survived by his wife, Annetta Petrucci, whom he married in 1945, and by their four children. His son, Valdo, is a former Minister of the Environment and a leading figure on the Italian Left.
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Giorgio Spini, historian, was born on October 23, 1916. He died on January 14, 2006, aged 89.