Denis Mack Smith CBE FBA FRSL (March 3, 1920 – July 11, 2017)^[2] was an English historian who specialized in the history of Italy from the Risorgimento onwards. He is best known for his biographies of Garibaldi, Cavour and Mussolini, and for his single-volume Modern Italy: A Political History.^[3][4] He was named Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1996.^[5]

Early life

Denis Mack Smith was born in Hampstead (north London),^[2][6] the son of tax inspector Wilfrid Mack Smith (1891–1975) and Altiora Edith Gauntlett (1888–1969), and was educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School and Haileybury College, where Martin Wight was one of his tutors.^[4][7] He earned a degree in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and following his graduation, he was a fellow there for the next 15 years (1947–62).^[8]

Career

A Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford from 1962 to 1987, and then an Emeritus Fellow until his death, Mack Smith has been considered the world's leading scholar on Italian history for the English world.^[9] He belonged to the post-World War II generation of Cambridge historians, many based at Peterhouse, who learned to appreciate the primacy of documentary evidence.^[10] He was an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He received the Presidential Medal of Italy in 1984.^[11]

Though his work on Italian history has been criticized by Italian academics, including Rosario Romeo^[12] and Renzo De Felice, since their first translations were published in the 1950s, Mack Smith remains the second best-selling author on Italian history after Indro Montanelli. Other Italian academics were outraged over Mack Smith's refusal "to regard Italian fascism and the rise of Benito Mussolini as an aberration".^[13] Mack Smith contended that one of the causes of Italian fascism was the structural weaknesses that existed in the Italian political system, a lasting "legacy of the Risorgimento".^[13]