Luciano Canfora

Luciano Canfora (born 5 June 1942) is an Italian classicist and historian. Born in Bari, Canfora obtained his first degree in Roman History in 1964 at Pisa University. He has for some years been Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Bari. His specialty is ancient libraries and his book The Vanished Library, which is about the Library of Alexandria, has been translated into some 15 languages.

Since 1975, Canfora has edited the periodical Quaderni di storia. In 1998, he published a rebuttal of Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky's work, ''Togliatti e Stalin. Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca'', about criticism of Palmiro Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party. He stood in the 1999 European Parliament election in Italy for the Party of Italian Communists. In 2004, Canfora published a history of democracy under the title ''La democrazia. Storia di un'ideologia''.