This year marks the centenary of the birth of the Italian Marxist Livio Maitan. Maitan, a remarkable figure of the radical left who died in 2004, is almost unknown among the latest generation of political activists. His intellectual and political trajectory belong to the history of an age of fire and blood that finished in the 1990s, between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks.

For fifty years, between the 1940s and the 1990s, Maitan was one of the leading figures of the Trotskyist Fourth International, alongside Pierre Frank and Ernest Mandel. As a tireless strategist and organizer, he was very influential in many of the Fourth International’s crucial decisions — although he was less colorful and flamboyant than some of its other leaders, and only featured briefly as a character in Redemption (1990), Tariq Ali’s satirical novel on the Fourth International.

In his native Italy, Maitan was a public figure of the radical left. A conference at the National Library in Rome recently discussed his legacy, with many prominent representatives of the Italian left taking part, from Fausto Bertinotti to Luciana Castellina.