Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007)

Luigi Meneghello was born in Malo, a small town near Vicenza, Italy. His father was a craftsman and his mother was a teacher. In 1939, he enrolled in the University of Padua to study philosophy. From 1940 to 1942, he worked for the newspaper Il Veneto. After a short stint in the Italian Army in World War II, in 1943 he entered the Partito d'azione (Party of Action) and became active in the resistance movement. At the end of the war, he graduated cum laude with a thesis on the philosophy of Benedetto Croce. In 1947, he received a one-year British Council scholarship to the University of Reading. It led to an appointment teaching there in the English Department on the Italian Renaissance. In 1948, he married Katia Bleier, a survivor of Auschwitz, and the couple settled permanently in the UK. He helped found the Department of Italian Studies in 1961, which he headed until his retirement, and received a chair as Professor in Italian Literature. After years of academic activity and work as a translator (often using the pseudonym Ugo Varnai), in 1963 he published his first book, Libera nos a Malo (English title, Deliver Us), a semi-autobiographical work about his hometown. A year later, he published I piccoli maestri ("The Little Teachers," published in English The Outlaws, 1967). This book was considered one of the most effective memoirs of the Italian resistance. It was adapted into a film in 1998 by Daniele Luchetti. In 1980, Prof. Meneghello retired from the University of Reading to devote himself full-time to writing. He lived in London and later in Thiene, near Vicenza, where he moved after his wife's death.