Modern and epic Icarus of liberal antifascism, Lauro de Bosis passes away before even reaching his thirties, following the flight on Rome during the night of October the 3rd, 1931. Formerly executive secretary of Italy America Society and Lecturer in American universities since the end of the Twenties, young de Bosis cultivated a very strong ideal relationship with Benedetto Croce and his philosophy, to the extent that he self-proclaimed to be the divulger of Croceanism in the USA. The Crocean thought is to him the ripest, noblest fruit of the Italian civilization, vilified by fascism: this value is what inspires the Lauro de Bosis Lectureship, instituted in Harvard after his death, and to this day it still inspires the Lauro de Bosis Fellowship on Italian Civilization. During the months preceding the air strike, Lauro writes speeches for several conferences, one of which is titled La religione della libertà, like the first chapter of Storia d’Europa by Croce. The genesis and the spiritual dimension in which the conference develops are hereby pieced together, with appropriate references to the unpublished letters to Croce, to be shortly released by the essay’s writer. In the years in which the Italian dictator talks about the “rotten corpse” of freedom, its rebirth as authentic, laic, philosophical “religion”, concrete opponent of any kind of totalitarianism, symbolically soars with a man.
Keywords: Lauro de Bosis, Benedetto Croce, Gaetano Salvemini, Freedom, Liberalism, Anti-Fascism, Europe, USA, Thirties
