Augusto Conti was born at San Pietro alle Fonti, near San Miniato di Pisa in 1822. He completed in the village his early studies, which soon made him aware of the existence across Italy of unifying elements, that is, language and culture. He went to Siena and Pisa to attend a course of law before graduating in Lucca. In spite of some youthful instances of outrageous behaviour, he maintained from the very beginning a balance in his work between religion and patriotism. By profession he was a lawyer, but was also a standard-bearer in the Volunteer army of Florence that left for the First War of Independence.
After fighting at Curtatone and witnessing other skirmishes and uprisings, once he returned home, he taught elementary philosophy at San Miniato and then from 1856 rational and moral philosophy at the Lucca high school. The fruits of his collaboration with the major figures of his time, from Celestino Bianchi to Felice Le Monnier and Raffaello Lambruschini, were collected together in the volume Evidenza, amore, fede o i criteri della filosofia that was published in Florence in 1858. This book adopted a completely uncritical approach to the history of philosophy, aiming at a defence of Catholicism that avoided the debate of the time between positivism and Hegelianism.
After a short period as inspector general of studies for Tuscany, in 1860 he was given the chair of theoretical philosophy at the Istituto di studi superiori di Firenze. He was invited to become a member of the Accademia della Crusca, of which he later became “archconsul”, and worked energetically on the promotion of the Italian language and the dialects of Tuscany.
As a member of the Consiglio superiore della Pubblica Istruzione, he also enjoyed a short political career at local level. Later on, he also sat in the Chamber of Deputies with the parties of the Right, although his Catholicism, which was moderate (but not liberal) – he was, for example, opposed to the abolition of the temporal powers of the Pope – made him less influential than those holding more radical views.
He joined the Associazione conservatrice nazionale that was founded in Rome, after the death of Pius IX, in the private home of Count Paolo Campello della Spina. Its aim was to hold back the dreaded dechristianisation of Italy, but the idea of creating a conservative Catholic party was short-lived after its condemnation by the Church hierarchy. He supported some sort of accommodation between the papacy and the Kingdom of Italy, and advocated an expansionist policy towards the continent of Africa that could spread the Italian language and the Catholic religion.
In the last years of his life he devoted all of his energy in a vain attempt to uphold the values of a world, by then superseded, in the face of a mentality that inevitably was changing values and ways of life. Although Raffaello Caverni had adopted a more advanced and open stand, Augusto Conti admired his work greatly and had no problems welcoming him to his own private house in Via dell’Erta Canina. In italiano è chiaro. Conti. (who was described by Eugenio Garin as “rugiadoso”, meaning “unctuous”) died in Florence in 1905 and was buried in the cemetery at San Miniato with a Franciscan habit and the Italian flag.
