Biography

Fabio Calè graduated with a master’s degree in Contemporary History from La Sapienza University of Rome, with a dissertation on fascism, within the research line of political aesthetics, under the supervision of Bruno Tobia.  He worked for years as a political analyst and curator of cultural events, exhibitions and publications related to the memory of the Italian Communist Party.

In 2011, he published Popolo in festa (Donzelli), a book+DVD on the history of the Festa de l’Unità, intersecting historical reconstruction based on archival documents with wide-ranging interviews with militants, organisers, artists, intellectuals and party leaders. In 2012, he coordinated a multimedial exhibition documenting the 1944 Nazi raid and mass deportations in Quadraro, a Roman suburb, in collaboration with the Gramsci Foundation. Between 2013 and 2018, he was employed by the Italian Senate as personal secretary to the Chair of the CQIE (Italians Living Abroad Committee).

Since 2022, he has been working on a project on the political culture of communists in Italy, Portugal and Spain, focusing mainly on the comparative analysis of communist festivals. Since 2023, he is a PhD student with an FCT scholarship at the IHC, NOVA University Lisbon.

Research fields

• Political culture
• Comparative history
• Oral history
• Migration studies

Selected publications

• Costantini, Eleonora, Fabrizio Patriarca & Fabio Calè (Eds.). Vado. Voy a volver o me quedo? Le biografie migratorie degli Emiliano-Romagnoli nella Comunità di Madrid. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2024. [link] 🔓
• Calè, Fabio, “El submarino rojo. La URSS en el imaginario colectivo español (1982-1985),” in Imaginando la guerra fria desde los margenes. La sociedad española y la OTAN (1975-1986), editado por Giulia Quaggio e Sergio Molina, 23-41. Granada: Comares, 2023. [link]
• Calè, Fabio. Popolo in festa. Sessant’anni di feste dell’Unità. Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2011. [link]

Main projects

• “Low Tide. The Soviet Myth in Southern Europe between 1975 and 1991: the Collective Imaginary and Self-representation of Communists in Italy, Spain and Portugal” — PhD thesis to be presented to the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, supervised by Giulia Strippoli e Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez (IHC — NOVA FCSH). Individual PhD project funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (2022.14702.BD). 2023-