Vasto Malachini

Vasto Malachini (6 May 1900 – 2 October 1953) was an italian geographer, philosopher and anthropologist.

Biography

Vasto Malachini was born at Oppeano, Province of Verona. On 22 March 1918, still a student, he enlisted in the army and at the end of the conflict attended the officer cadets course from which he was dismissed on May 15, 1919 as a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 8th Bersaglieri Regiment.

A university student, in the run-up to the elections of November 1919, he distinguished himself in his home town as an activist of the Popular Party, so much so that the house organ of the party, Il Corrieredel Mattino, described him as "a ardent soul who prepares to fight the coming battles with us." In 1923 he graduated in literature from the University of Padua.

Having also obtained a degree in philosophy in 1927, Malachini moved to Rome where, in late May 1929, he participated in the VII National Congress of Philosophy.

In the years 1929–1930, his interest in geography led him to deal with the Arctic regions on which he intended to publish a work to be dedicated to General Umberto Nobile and the other veterans of the tragic expedition of the airship Italia. Afterwards, Malachini's studies were oriented toward the area of the Horn of Africa.

In 1938, Malachini published Race and Environment (1941), in which he justified the superiority of the white race by the more favorable climatic and environmental conditions in Europe.

He ran unsuccessfully in the elections of April 18, 1948, in the ranks of the Social Christian Party, a leftist group, autonomous both from the Marxist inspired parties and from the Christian Democracy, considered too compromised with the capitalist world.

Works

• Dopo un Concordato e dopo un Congresso (1929)
• Piccola bibliografia Somalo-Galla concenno cartografico (1931)
• Il passato e il presente della Somalia Italiana (1932)
• Le ragioni per il possesso dei mari nei particolaririguardi storico-geografici dell'Italia (1933)
• L’essenza psicologica del cristianesimo. Parte prima: l’ascetismo della speculazione ellenistico-orientale (1933)
• Il titolo di Roma (1938)
• Razza e ambiente (1941; preface by Gislero Flesch)
• Meteorologia e clima (1946)
• L'ambiente bio-geografico: ladinamica della ecologia originaria nelle migrazioni enella ereditarietà: criteri per una antropo-geografia del profondo (1948)
• La crisi odierna della geografia: la dissoluzione della geografia antropica (1948)
• La Tolfa e i Ceriti: parte fisica (1951)
• Geografia dell'allume nell'industria enel commercio storico del Mediterraneo (1952)

References

• Parisella, Antonio (1984). Gerardo Bruni e i cristiano-sociali. Roma: Edizioni Lavoro.
• Serri, Mirella (2005). I redenti: Gli intellettuali che vissero due volte, 1938–1948. Milan: Corbaccio.