User:Luciano Mecacci

Luciano Mecacci (Livorno, Italy, 27 November 1946) is an Italian psychologist and historian.

He has been researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the National Research Council (Rome, Italy), then full professor at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome and finally full professor of General Psychology at the University of Florence (1995-2009). He has worked at the Institute of General and Pedagogical of Pedagogical Sciences and at the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow (Russia) in the early '70s of past century, at the Institute of Neurophysiology of the National Research Council in Pisa (Italy), and at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology in Paris (France).

His main research field is psychophysiology and cognitive psychology. He has also written extensively on the history of Russian psychology, especially on Lev Vygotsky's work (in 1990 he published the first integral translation in the world of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech). His first book was ''Brain and History. The Relationship between Neurophsyiology and Soviet Research'', with the preface by Alexander Luria (Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1979). Recently he has published the book ''Besprizornye. Bambini randagi nella Russia sovietica, 1917-1935'' (Adelphi, Milano, 2019; German translation in progress) about homeless and orphan children in the postrevolutionary Russia.

Other interests are in the field of Italian history in the past century. His book on the philosopher Giovanni Gentile's death executed by Communist partisans in 1944 (La Ghirlanda fiorentina e la morte di Giovanni Gentile, Adelphi, Milano, 2014) has won the Viareggio Prize and the Acqui Storia Prize.

Some other of his books have translated into Dutch, English, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.