In this ground-breaking study, leading Gramsci scholar Guido Liguori unearths the philological pathways through which the Sardinian Communist's thinking developed. Liguori 'excavates' the Prison Notebooks by examining Gramsci's relation to other thinkers, and concludes his study with a discussion of the metaphors used by Gramsci. What emerges is the image of a thinker more widely known than he is understood.