“Masons in Italy: The Borderland Between Fanaticism and Liberty” Aldo Alessandro Mola REHMLAC ISSN 1659-4223 216 Special Issue UCLA - Grand Lodge of California Aldo Alessandro Mola. Italian. He has been professor at the University of Milan and is co-holder of the Theodore Verhaegen at the Free University of Brussels. Since 1967 has been publishing books and biographies. Some of his works are Storia della Massoneria italiana dalle origini a oggi (Bompiani, 1977–2012), Storia della Monarchia in Italia (Bompiani, 2001), Declino e crollo della monarchia in Italia (Mondadori, 2006), and the biographies of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1982), Giuseppe Mazzini (1986), and Silvio Pellico (2005), as well as Giovanni Giolitti, lo statista della Nuova Italia (Mondadori, 2003, included since 2012 in the collection Los Clasicos de la Historia). He was co-director of the work Il Parlamento Italiano from 1861 to 1992 (24 volumes). As a journalist, he had published articles in “Corriere della Sera”, and “Panorama”. He is also director of the “Storia in Rete” journal. He is the chair of the European Center on the Study of the State “Giovanni Giolitti” and of the Center on the Study of Freemasonry. He has received several prizes for his contribution to History in Italy. In 1990 he was awarded with the Gold Medal from the Scuola della Cultura e dell’Arte. E-mail:
[email protected] Date received: April 25, 2013 - Day accepted: June 18, 2013 Keywords History, Freemasonry, Italy, Fanaticism, Liberty Palabras clave Historia, Masonería, Italia, Fanatismo, Libertad Abstract This article presents a survey through the history of Freemasonry in the current Italian territory, from its eighteenth-century origins to present, and analyzes the influence that the fraternity had on the country’s historical events.