Born into a family of modest means, he became a historian of note whose work drew attention in Italy and abroad, particularly in the United States, after he was forced into exile by Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist regime.

His transatlantic exile experience endowed him with new insights and a fresh perspective to explain the rise of fascism and shaped the memory of the war and political life in Italy after 1945.

Salvemini was born in the town of Molfetta, Apulia, in the poor south of the Kingdom of Italy, in an extended family of farmers and fishermen of modest means.

[2] In 1897, he married Maria Minervini, the daughter of an engineer from Apulia, whom he had met while studying in Florence and with whom he would have five children: Filippo, Leonida, Corrado, Ugo and Elena.

He thought that the war did not meet the real needs of the country in need of far-reaching economic and social reforms, but was a dangerous collusion between unrealistic nationalism and corporate interests.

[3] In 1916, he married Fernande Dauriac, the divorced wife of Julien Luchaire, an Italianist and founder of the Institut français in Florence, and an animator from 1916 to 1919 of the Revue des nations latines, on which Salvemini would also collaborate.

[1] His stepson Jean Luchaire later became the head of the French collaborationist press in Paris during the German military occupation of France during World War II.

[2][5] He supported the Fourteen Points, the internationalist programme of self-determination of United States president Woodrow Wilson that envisioned a readjustment of the frontiers of Italy along clearly-recognisable lines of nationality, in contrast to the Italian irredentist policy of the foreign minister Sidney Sonnino.

[5] He joined the opposition after the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, when it became clear that Mussolini wanted to establish a one-party dictatorship.

[2] Salvemini worked to maintain a strong network of contacts among anti-fascist intellectuals throughout Italy while much of the Italian academic world bowed to the regime.

[5] With his former students and followers Ernesto Rossi and Carlo Rosselli, he founded the first clandestine anti-fascist newspaper Non mollare (it) ("Don't Give Up") in January 1925.

[21] He wrote articles in important journals like Foreign Affairs and travelled around the country to warn American public opinion against the dangers of fascism.

[2][30] Alarmed by the outbreak of the Second World War after Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939, he and other Italian exiles founded the anti-fascist Mazzini Society in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In fact, government agencies like the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation solicited his advice on fascism and Italian matters in general.

[34] The increasing prominence of Max Ascoli, Carlo Sforza, and Alberto Tarchiani in the Mazzini Society consequently led to the progressive distancing of Salvemini from active decision making.

Salvemini's fear was that Franklin D. Roosevelt would give Winston Churchill and his conservative agenda a free hand in postwar Italy that would benefit the monarchy and those who had collaborated with Mussolini.

[35] After Mussolini's fall in July 1943, Salvemini became increasingly concerned that the Allies of World War II and Italian moderates favoured a conservative restoration in Italy.

[2][4][36][37] Salvemini was also a familiar figure in the younger years of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., editor of the campaign speeches for peace strategy then known as The New Frontier for John F.

According to his biographer Charles L. Killinger, Salvemini embodied a political culture such that "the Fascists were anti-Salvemini before he became anti-Fascist, and their efforts to silence him made his name synonymous with early Italian resistance to the new regime.

Throughout his exile, he actively organized resistance to Mussolini, assisting others in escaping Italy, and he played an important role in spurring both elite and public opinion in America against the fascist regime.

[47] Giolitti's biographer Alexander De Grand describes his subject's foe as a "major historian, driven by an austere moralism" and as a "difficult man who attracted deep attachments and bitter enmity", who "constantly sought to turn his ideas into practical policy, yet he was a mediocre – no, terrible – politician", quoting Salvemini's fellow exile Max Ascoli, who described him "as the greatest enemy of politics of all the men I have known".