Alessandro Casati

Alessandro Casati (5 March 1881 – 4 June 1955) was an Italian academic, commentator and politician. He served as a senator between 1923 and 1924 and again between 1948 and 1953. He also held ministerial office, most recently as Minister of War for slightly more than twelve months during 1944/45, serving under "Presidente del Consiglio" ("Prime Minister...") Bonomi. Biography Provenance and early years Count Alessandro Casati was born in Milan, the younger son of Gian Alfonso Casati (1854–1890) by his marriage to Luisa Negroni Prati Morosini (1857–1927). The Casatis came from the Milanese nobility: they could trace their ancestry back more than eight hundred years. Family was important. In the judgment of one commentator, family ancestry influenced Count Alessandro more deeply than mere dynastic awareness. The recollections of friends along with his own letters and writings attest to a constant habit of invoking people and practices from the past to correct present disjunctures, usually without any very obvious awareness of solutions that might emerge through a process of continuity. Public service ran in the blood: Gabrio Casati and Camillo Casati were uncles. Philosophy Sources describe him variously as a "religious liberal" or as a "liberal modernist". His upbringing was privileged and heavily influenced by the nineteenth century liberalism that in Italy had grown out of eighteenth century enlightenment ideals. He was a student at the "Alessandro Manzoni College" ("Collegio Alessandro Manzoni") in Merate. An influence from his adolescence that recurs most frequently in Casati's writings is the wily pragmatic economist-politician Stefano Jacini. But Alessandro Casati also lived through the social ructions and the neo-conservatism that grew out the rapid industrialisation during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Through the prisms of these influences and experiences he emerged as a voice for social and political stabilisation and moderation, first through the Giolitti years, and later under Fascism.