Raditsa, Leo

Leo Ferrero Raditsa (1936-2001) was a teacher, scholar, editor and writer, and a distinguished historian of Ancient History. He wrote criticism, essays, plays, history, novels, poems and was an accomplished painter.

A naturalized United States citizen, Leo was born in Switzerland on March 2, 1936 to Bogdan (Radica) Raditsa and Nina Lombroso Ferrero. His maternal grandfather was the prominent Italian journalist and historian Guglielmo Ferrero, and his grandmother was Gina Lombroso, the daughter of Cesare Lombroso, the renowned Italian criminologist. She was a well-known writer on women issues. Nina's brother, Leo Lombroso Ferrero, was a gifted poet and playwright. The Ferreros were outspoken antifascists who left Italy in 1929. They settled in Switzerland, where Guglielmo Ferrero was professor of Modern European History at the University of Geneva.

Bogdan Raditsa was a delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva, and in 1940 he was assigned a diplomatic post at the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington, D.C. He assisted Tito into power and worked in his administration until 1946, when he defected. He returned to the United States and lived in New York with his wife and two children, Leo and Bosiljka (Bosa). He taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and continued his career as a journalist. Nina Raditsa taught Italian and French at Fairleigh Dickinson, and for many years she was an officer on the board of The International League for Human Rights.

Leo Raditsa graduated from Philips Exeter Academy and received his AB in History and Literature from Harvard College in 1956. During his undergraduate years, Raditsa and four friends founded the i.e. The Cambridge Review (1953-1957), a literary journal that became well known in intellectual and academic circles. The Review published writers and artists, such as James Agee, Gregory Corso, Paul Goodman, Walker Evans and Jackson Pollack.

After graduation Raditsa returned to New York and was hired by The Readers' Subscription, a book club run by W.H. Auden, J. Barzun and L. Trilling, to work on its monthly publication The Griffin . During this period he persuaded Roger Strauss, Jr., of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to republish the banned works of the psychologist Wilhelm Reich.

In 1960 he resumed his studies and entered the graduate school at Columbia University. He received his Master's degree in Medieval History in 1962. His thesis was "Reform, Revolution and Tyranny in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Florence." In 1969 he earned his doctorate in Ancient History with his dissertation, "A Historical Commentary to Sallust's Letter of Mithridates." During his years at Columbia, he received two University Scholar Fellowships and the President's Fellow at Columbia. In 1964 and 1965 he received Fullbright fellowships to the University of Munich and the Free University in Berlin.

His early teaching career included positions as an instructor and assistant professor in the Classics Department at New York University, where from 1965 to1972, he taught Greek and Latin as well as Ancient and Medieval history. In 1972 he accepted a teaching position at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was part of their Great Books program. He received tenure in 1977 and taught there until his death.

In 1978 he was appointed editor of St. John's publication The College, which he re-founded and edited as The St. John's Review in 1981. In the years 1977-78 he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. During that year he wrote "The Division of the West, Rationality and the Perception of Depth" (unpublished). His life-long interest in Wilhelm Reich led to his book, Some Sense about Wilhelm Reich, published in 1975 and later translated into German. The Denton Congressional Hearings on South Africa attracted Raditsa's interest, and he wrote and published "Prisoners of a Dream: The South African Mirage, A Historical Essay on the Denton Hearings" in 1989. He was a frequent contributor to the publications Midstream, The New York Tribune, The Washington Times and the Italian political journal Ideazione . He exhibited his own paintings and collected contemporary art.

Leo was married for over twenty-five years to Larissa Bonfante, an archaeologist of Etruscan History and Professor in the Classics department at New York University. Their son, Sebastian Raditsa, was born in 1983. His stepdaughter is Alexandra Bonfante-Warren. He divided his time between the United States and Italy, where he lived in his family home, outside of Florence.