Antonello Gerbi’s Discovery of the New World : Life Experience and the Practice of History (1938-1948)

The Spanish translation of Antonello Gerbi’s La disputa del Nuovo Mondo (1955) prepared for the Fondo de Cultura Económica, made this seminal Italian study of the transatlantic debates about the indigenous peoples and nature of the Americas accessible to an international audience. Henceforth, Gerbi’s work came to serve as a fundamental reference book on American studies. Despite its success, the reasons that inspired Gerbi’s interest in the Americas have never been examined with an eye for his biography, the historiography of American studies, and global history. This essay reconstructs the historical context in which Gerbi developed his magnum opus while combining an analysis of Gerbi’s papers and scholarly methods with a reconstruction of his professional and intellectual relationships. It also draws on information gleaned from extensive interviews with Gerbi's son as well as the relatives of his friends. With the help of these various research methods and sources, it introduces the reader to the circumstances and reasons that led Antonello Gerbi (1904-1976) to redirect his interests towards the history of the Americas and their cultural relations with Europe during his decade-long exile in Peru as a victim of Mussolini’s racial laws.