The majority of Italian communists had been somewhat independent from strict adherence to the Soviet Communist Party's dictates for several decades by the 1970s. This biographical drama explores the career of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), one of the communists who, in the '20s and '30s began to break with Moscow over issues of strategy. Born in Sardinia, Gramschi, together with Palmiro Togliatti created the newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo in 1919. He became the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party in 1924. Arrested in 1926, he died days after his release from prison in 1937. His writings, The Prison Notebooks, cover the period between 1929-35. In these, he substituted the conception of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" for the "hegemony of the proletariat." His emphasis was on intellectual guidance rather than domination by the state. The movie mostly explores his career while he was in prison, from which he was allowed to circulate his notions concerning a gradual revolution.