While in school, he developed an early interest for poets including Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, and even more fervently for Giacomo Leopardi and Ugo Foscolo.
On 27 November 1939, he wrote and secretly distributed a manifesto urging his high school companions to unite and organize against the fascist dictatorship.
After World War II broke out, Braibanti began to seek contact with dissenting intellectuals and the anti-fascists of Giustizia e Libertà, many of them being exiled in France.
In 1943, he joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party (PCI), together with Gianfranco Sarfatti, Teresa (Chicchi) Mattei, Renzo Bussotti, and others.
The second arrest took place in 1944, together with Sandro Susini, Mario Spinella, and Zemiro Melas (Emilio), by the Banda Carità, a notoriously violent fascists militia.
In the post-war period, Braibanti obtained his degree in theoretical philosophy with a thesis on the concept of the grotesque, "understood as a crisis of the ideal, and therefore as a middle ground between the tragic and the comic".
He also continued his study of the life of ants, built artificial anthills, and established a deep contact with the ecological reality of the time.
Years later, it will find a continuation in the films Orizzonte degli eventi, Morphing and in the screenplays Il pianeta difronte and Conversazioni con un chicco di riso.
[5] In 1960, Eugenio Cassin, whom Braibanti had met during the period of the Florentine Resistance, distributed through Schwarz Editore the four volumes Il Circo (poems, essays, plays) and Guida per un'esposizione.
In 1974, Braibanti wrote the lyrics of The Sheep Who Wanted to be a Horse for Maria Monti's LP Il Bestiario, a ground-breaking electro-acoustic project arranged by Alvin Curran.
[8] The album was rereleased in 2018 by UnseeWorlds and was praised as "a near perfect emblem of the fascinating territory gained through collaboration... [with] the radical poet Aldo Braibanti as its lyricist, arrangements and synthesizer from Alvin Curran (Musica Elettronica Viva), the baritone saxophone of Roberto Laneri (Prima Materia), as well as the soprano saxophone of jazz legend Steve Lacy.
Giovanni was discharged after 15 months of internment, with a series of clauses that ranged from the obligatory domicile in his parents' home to the prohibition of reading books that were less than a hundred years old.
[12][13][14] In fact, l'Unità, the official organ of the PCI, openly took a position in favour of Braibanti and against the sentence, so much so that the day after the ruling it published an editorial by its director, the former partisan Maurizio Ferrara [it], in which the obscurantist climate in which the trial had taken place was denounced in no uncertain terms.
His sentence had a great echo in the international press, highlighting the profound anomaly of the contested crime and the way it was handled by the Italian procedural system.
[19] The trial quickly revealed its political nature, proposing itself as the last attempt of the old social order to impose its own values against the rising tide of 1968.
The sentence aroused wide echo throughout Italy: Alberto Moravia, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Adolfo Gatti, Giuseppe Chiari, and numerous other intellectuals in favor of Braibanti.
[20] In prison, Braibanti continued his activity as a poet, he wrote a play L'altra ferita a psychological retelling of Sophocles' Philoctetes, staged by Franco Enriquez in 1970, with electronic music by Pietro Grossi and sets by Emanuele Luzzati.
Released from prison, Braibanti resumed his work on Virulentia, but soon abandoned it for a new theatrical cycle, called Le ballate dell'Anticrate.
While laboring through his theatrical activities, he began writing and directing multi-installment radio drama: Lo scandalo dell'imaginazione (1979) and Le stanze di Azoth both broadcast by RAI 3.
In the Impresa dei prolegomeni acratici (Editrice 28, 1988), Braibanti explored various themes including historical criticism and a re-foundation of pedagogy.
The main thrust of the book emerges from his own presentation: “I describe the development crisis that brought me out of classical psychoanalysis, and directed me towards a more strictly biological interpretation of behavior" [21].
"[21] In 1985, Braibanti wrote the screenplay for the film Blu cobalto directed by Gianfranco Fiore Donati and the interpretation of Anna Bonaiuto and Enrico Ghezzi.
With the help of his family, he spent the last few years in Castell'Arquato, trying to complete new works, Catalogo degli amuleti, the Nuovo dizionario delle idee correnti, and the feature-length video Quasi niente.
[26] The Italian film director Gianni Amelio is about to release a full-length fiction on Aldo Braibanti entitled Lord of the Ants and produced by RAI Cinema.