Julius Evola

Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) was an Italian philosopher, artist, exoterist, and scholar of Oriental thinking. During his life, he was critical of Fascism, from Traditional point of view. After 1946, he become the inspirational leader of the spiritual wing of Neofascism in Italy.

Life

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome on 19 May 1898. His father Vincenzo and his mother Concetta Frangipane, came from Sicilian nobility. During his adolescence, he conducted scientifical and technical studies, but at the same time got involved in the study of Arts and Philosophy, getting to know authors such as Oscar Wilde, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Otto Weininger, Carlo Michelstaedter, Friedrich Nietzsche. He attended the faculty of Engineering, but refused to graduate for despisement of academic titles. In 1917, he took part in World War I as Artillery Officer in Italian Army, fighting on Asiago Plateau, despite his sympathies for the traditional monarchies of Central Powers.

He was then influenced by Giovanni Papini, who got him in contact with Futurist artists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla and Gottfried Benn, participating to national Futurist exposition in Milan (1919). He soon become deluded with Futurism and got in epistolar correspondence with Tristan Tzara in 1920, soon becoming a prominent exponent of Dadaism in Italy, as a painter, poet and collaborator of Bleu Revue. He had personal exhibitions in Rome, Berlin and Paris. In this period, he made use of drugs to achieve altered state of conscience, and he went through a period of depression, even thinking of resorting to suicide (1921).