ABSTRACT
Piero Sraffa was the only son of a wealthy Jewish family from Pisa. This small Tuscan town is not far from Livorno (Leghorn), where the ancestors of David Ricardo, also Jewish, had lived from the early seventeenth century until about 1680; they were traders in coral.1 Sraffa’ s ancestors on his father’ s side had been merchants in Pisa for generations. His father, Angelo Sraffa, the son of Giuseppe Sraffa and Marianna Treves, was born there on 19 December 1865.2 After completing his secondary education, Angelo Sraffa went to the University of Pisa in 1884. At that time, the work of the poet Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906, reviver of the classical tradition, opponent of romanticism and Christianity, had an enormous influence on the intellectual and academic life of the city.3 Piero’s father was strongly attracted to Carducci’s writings, and put together an extensive library devoted to the latter’s work.4
At the university, he studied mainly in the Law Faculty, then one of the best-known in Italy. Among his professors were Francesco Carrara, Filippo Serafini (1831-97), editor of the Archivio Giuridico,5 and David Supino, who, with Serafini, founded the review Diritto Commerciale. However, his real teacher in law was undoubtedly Ludovico Mortara, who later abandoned university teaching to become, before the First World War, First President of the Court of Appeal in Rome, Minister of Justice and Senator.
