Overview

Ernesto de Martino was born in Naples on 1 December 1908 and died in Rome on 6 May 1965, aged only fifty-seven. Throughout a career that lasted some twenty-five years and spanned World War II, the following Italian civil war and the birth of the Italian republic and the economic miracle, de Martino pioneered different fields in both the humanities and social sciences. Although he obtained little, if any, international recognition – especially if compared with other continental European scholars (Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others) – he became a major figure in the Italian intellectual landscape and, more recently, a widely appreciated anthropologist.

The son of a railway engineer, Ernesto Sr, and Gina Jaquinangelo, the young Ernesto follows his family first to Florence, where he attends the local liceo (lyceum), and then to Turin, where he begins a university course in engineering (1928). After a few months, however, he decides to leave the programme to pursue his academic interests in the study of philosophy and religion. In 1930 he moves again with his family and settles in Naples. There he is enrolled in the faculty of humanities at the University of Naples, where he studies history of religion. His work at the university is supervised by Adolfo Omodeo (1889–1946), one of the foremost Italian intellectuals. Omodeo – who acknowledged the intellectual qualities and potentialities of his young student – introduces de Martino to some of the most important Italian scholars of the time.