Roses for Gramsci

Roses for Gramsci is a remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

In summer of 2023, author Andy Merrifield and his family move from the UK to Rome to begin a new life. Soon after his arrival, the author visits Gramsci’s grave and decides to take a volunteer position helping to maintain the cemetery. At the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home also to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, he keeps a watchful eye on Gramsci’s tombstone, talking to some of his visitors, admiring the roses and notes that Gramsci’s guests leave, and communing with the sentinel cat that keeps watch near the gravesite. Thus begins Merrifield’s deep dive into Gramsci’s life almost a century after his death.

The result is a stunning portrait that offers fresh insights into nearly every aspect of Gramsci’s often tortured existence: a childhood scarred by severe health problems; his grasp of the culture of workers and peasants; his growing understanding of political economy; his friendship with the economist Piero Sraffa; his frustration trying to communicate with and be father to the son he never saw; his generosity and kindness. Above all, Merrifield illuminates how Gramsci kept his humanity, suffering horribly in prison while writing a revolutionary classic, The Prison Notebooks. Personal, compassionate, moving—and illustrated with the author’s photographs —Merrifield revives both the legacy and meaning of Gramsci’s work and the dying art of belles lettres. Roses for Gramsci is an evocative and indelible book.

READ AN EXCERPT

Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar and author of a dozen books including, most recently, Beyond Plague Urbanism and Marx, Dead and Alive: Reading “Capital” in Precarious Times. He has written numerous articles, essays and reviews appearing in Monthly Review, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Jacobin, and Dissent. He is a prolific writer about urbanism, political theory and literature, with titles credited to him including Dialectical Urbanism, The New Urban Question, and Magical Marxism. In addition to intellectual biographies of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and John Berger, he has also published a popular existential travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, a manifesto for liberated living, The Amateur, and a memoir about cities and love inspired by Raymond Carver’s short stories, called What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (and Love).