Umberto Meoli

Meoli was born in Padua, one of nineteen brothers; his father was a pharmacist from a small town near Benevento, and his mother was from Padua.

In 1940, at age 20, Meoli began his service in the Italian Army fighting in World War II, and, three years later, with the Resistance after the 1943 armistice between Italy and the Allied armed forces. As a result, Meoli was imprisoned by the Benito Mussolini Fascist government, and spent several months in the Palazzo Giusti detention center in Padua.[2] The Palazzo Giusti detention center was notorious for the cruelty of some Fascists in Padua during the Italian Social Republic. For example, Giovanni Gonelli, a barely literate jail keeper at Palazzo Giusti in Padua and a member of the Banda Carità, apparently enjoyed dehumanizing his prisoners by refusing their requests for food or blankets. The sentence of the Appellate Court of 8 January 1946 states that Gonelli would tell prisoners who asked for water to "piss and drink."[3] There is no doubt that Meoli experienced such cruelty while imprisoned in Palazzo Giusti, and that this cruelty affected his thoughts.

In 1961 Meoli married Rachel Toulmin, an Englishwoman and lecturer at Padua University. Rachel Toulmin was the younger sister of Stephen Toulmin, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Southern California.[4][5]

Meoli was briefly a Communist, and after graduating, he worked for a time in the trade unions (Camera del Lavoro) in Vicenza, but he was soon at odds with the rigid militancy of organized labor. He found his vocation in the late 1950s, when he obtained a teaching post at the University of Parma.

It was during his time at Camera del Lavoro that Meoli became influenced by the Canadian Harry Gordon Johnson, one of the most active and prolific economists of all time. Gordon's main research was in the area of international trade, international finance, and monetary policy. In 1961, Meoli made a special journey to the University of Manchester in England to meet Johnson. He quickly became a close friend of both Philip Andrews, A former President of the Royal Economic Society,[6] Andrews was senior researcher at Nuffield College at the time [7][8][9] and Elizabeth Brunner[10][11] with whom Meoli shared an admiration for Alfred Marshall and a more skeptical view of John Maynard Keynes.

In 1961, Meoli published the first book in steady flow of books, in which would increasingly concentrate on the history of economic thought and ideas.

By 1970, Meoli became Professor of the History of Economic Thought at Camera del Lavoro, and shortly afterwards was invited to occupy a similar chair at the University of Venice.