Augusto Monti (29 August 1881 in Monastero Bormida – 11 July 1966 in Rome) was an Italian writer and professor.

A strenuous opposer of fascism since its beginning, Monti was imprisoned by the regime. He directed the magazine Il Baretti from 1926 when the founder and director of the magazine, Piero Gobetti, died.^[1] During post-World War 2, he became an important representative of the world of Italian literature and pedagogy.^[2] He taught at Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio in Turin.^[3] Among his students there were Cesare Pavese, Giulio Einaudi, Leone Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, and Massimo Mila.^[4]

The son of Bartolomeo and Luigia Berlingieri, he was born in Monastero Bormida, a small town in the Langhe in the Province of Asti and, at the age of three, moved to Turin,^[5] following his father (a clerk in a store)^[6] and, before that, the manager of a Mill (grinding), which, however, had been swept away by a flood of the Bormida (river).

His mother was a Genoa schoolteacher, who died when Augusto was only two years old. After studying at the Liceo classico Cavour and first earning a degree in literature in 1902 and then in philosophy in 1904, he was assigned to teach initially in Bosa,Sardinia, and then in Chieri.^[5] Here in 1910 he married elementary school teacher Camilla Dezzani, by whom the following year he had his only daughter Luisa Monti Sturani (nicknamed Luisotta by her father, who would in turn become a teacher and writer and, in 1935, marry painter Mario Sturani). Loyal to the ideals of the Unification of Italy, which had accompanied the development of national society, on the eve of World War I, Monti sided with the leftist Interventionism (politics). He then participated in the war as a volunteer in the Trench, however, spending two years as a prisoner in Austria.^[7]

After the war he continued to work as a teacher and in 1919 was transferred to Brescia^[5] in the Liceo Ginnasio Statale Arnaldo. He became interested in problems of culture and School Gentile Reform, a subject he covered in the pedagogical essay published in 1923 Liceo classico School and Modern Life.^[8] Between 1924 and 1931 he was a teacher of Italian language and Latin language at the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio in Turin and had among his students some of the best-known personalities of Turinese culture in the period between World War II and World War II, such as Cesare Pavese,Leone Ginzburg,Guido Seborga,Massimo Mila and Giancarlo Pajetta.^[5] He was also a friend of Piero Gobetti^[5] (he collaborated on his magazine La Rivoluzione liberale) and Antonio Gramsci.

A Secularity, of Artistic inspiration and an Anti-fascism from the beginning (in 1925 he abandoned his collaboration with Corriere della Sera in protest against the "fascist takeover" of the newspaper), in 1931 he left school impatient with the political climate and lived by giving lessons to Agnelli family children,^[9] and in 1935 he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison by the Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato (1926–1943).^[10] During his imprisonment he had the antifascist politician Ernesto Rossi (politician) (founder of the Radical Party) as a cellmate.^[7] When he was released from Regina Coeli (prison) in Rome in 1939, he settled first in Turin, then in Cavour, Piedmont and finally in Chieri, in an attempt to escape the constant scrutiny of OVRA agents.

In Chieri he found shelter in the house of his daughter Luisa's former maid, near the hill of San Giorgio; passing himself off as a retired general, he managed to avoid arousing suspicion among his neighbors, and from there he was also able to continue his commitment to political militancy.^[11] In 1951, a widower for almost twenty years (his first wife had died in 1932), he married in second marriage Caterina Bauchiero,^[12] whom he had met precisely during the years of the Chierese refuge.

He participated in the Italian resistance movement in the Action Party (Italy) and, upon the subsequent dissolution of that party, joined the Italian Communist Party as an independent. He was among the most active contributors to the newspaper l'Unità^[5] and the magazines Rinascita, Belfagor,Il Ponte.

He also wrote Politics essays including Reality of the Action Party, published in 1945.

He made his name in the literature field with the work of narration entitled I Sansôssí (transl. "The Carefree Ones"),^[5] a history of liberal Piedmont, which has the Langhe and Turin as its backdrop, published in 1929 that would later be part of the trilogy La storia di papà together with Quel Quarantotto of 1934 and L'iniqua mercede, of 1934, which would be reissued in 1949 by Einaudi under the title Tradimento e fedeltà and in 1963 again by the same publisher, as I Sansôssí.

His last work, entitled My Accounts with the School, dates back to 1965.

He is buried in the cemetery of Monastero Bormida, his hometown, where he used to go every summer for vacation.

• (in Italian) Deepening by "Comunità Montana Langa delle Valli" langadellevalli.it
• (in Italian) I Sansôssí on L'Ancora settimanale di informazione Comment about Augusto Monti and first page of his novel (in original language)