Antonio Gramsci (c.1920) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Marxist, journalist, political leader and social theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a small, disabled, chronically ill man from a poverty-stricken Sardinian background. He was also someone about whom the Italian fascist state famously declared: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.” Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned in 1926 at the age of 35, ten years before Benito Mussolini declared his empire in Afr