Massimo Teodori
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Massimo Teodori, probably one of the the most famous expert on US affairs actually living in Europe, author of several best-sellers, was born in Force, near the city of Ascoli Piceno, Italy, to an upper middle class family. His grandfather, a landowning farmer, was a liberal deputy in Ascoli Piceno from 1903 to 1919 who shared the ideas of Giovanni Giolitti. His father, a lawyer, was a liberal antifascist who held public responsibilities during the Italian Liberation and in the immediate post First World War period. From the age of 15 to 18 years, he hitchhiked throughout Europe, sleeping in youth hostels and getting in touch with new, various and unexpected ideas. As of 1958 he lives in Rome, where he got a university degree in architecture with Bruno Zevi and Ludovico Quaroni, whom he began to collaborate with. During the university period he was actively involved in local and national university politics making this an intellectually stimulating and effervescent career initiation period. In the mid-60s he lived in the United States (New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Berkeley) for three years and got to experience first hand the tumultuous and creative years the country was going through. His academic career took off as of 1971, when he began to teach American History at Italian universities without passing through bureaucratic apprenticeships. In 1979 he became a Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Perugia. In Italy he has had the opportunity to teach at the Libera Universita Italiana Scienze Sociali (LUISS) of Rome and at the John Hopkins University of Bologna. In the United States, he has taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University of New York, and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Massimo Teodori, president of Italy-USA Foundation, has written numerous books, among them “Maledetti Americani” (“Cursed Americans”), “Benedetti Americani” (“Blessed Americans”), “L’Europa non è l’America” (“Europe is not America”), and “Raccontare l’America” (“To tell America”), the most famous ones published by Mondadori, the publishing house leader in the Italian book market.
