Croce's family, and early education--His religion--Life in Rome in the eighties--Labriola's influence--Meditations on ethics--Return to Naples; life as a scholar--Travels; and the problem of history --Philosophus fit--The intellectual conditions of Italy after the Risorgimento--Contemporary European culture--American analogies --Two leaders of Italian thought--Francesco de Sanctis--Giosuè Carducci--Croce's approach to philosophy, and his method of work--His relations to the philosophical practition--Vico and the philosophy of the Renaissance--Bruno and Campanella--The humanism of Vico--Naturalism and spiritualism--A philosophy of the human spirit. I. The Beginnings Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italian province of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and conservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a high magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion to the old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His father followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" of Naples: that an honest man must take care of his family and of his business, and keep away from the intrigues of political life. His mother was a woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of education for women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had never existed, used to produce. Bertrando Spaventa, the philosopher, and Silvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, were her brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's family because of their political ideas. The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the only touches of colour were added by his own passion for books of history and romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to which he accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croce attributes the relative delay in the development of his political feelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests in literature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itself some compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towards partisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of liberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of any kind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what is useful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.