Tempo Presente (Italian:Present Time) was a monthly political magazine which existed between 1956 and 1967 inRome, Italy. It was supported by theCongress for Cultural Freedom which published other magazines, includingCuadernos,Encounter,Survey andDer Monat.^[1][2]

Tempo Presente was established in 1956 and published monthly in Rome by the Italian Association for Cultural Freedom.^[3][4] The Association was the Italian division of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.^[5] The first issue ofTempo Presente appeared in April 1956^[6] and declared thatTempo Presente was an international magazine.^[7]

Its editors wereIgnazio Silone andNicola Chiaromonte.^[6][8] The magazine featured articles published in other Congress magazines, includingCuadernos,Encounter,Der Monat andPreuves.^[3] They all covered significant cultural and political events which were used to show the superiority of Western-style democracy over other alternatives of government.^[9] However, each of these magazines had their own specific political stance mostly depending on the editors, andTempo Presente adopted a left-wing approach.^[9] Another distinctive feature of the magazine in contrast to other Congress magazines was its attempt to modify the transnational dimension of the cultural Cold War to local conditions of Italy.^[7]

The major contributors of the monthly were leftist writers who did not support Communism:Italo Calvino,Vasco Pratolini, Libero de Libero,Albert Camus,Alberto Moravia,Leonardo Sciascia,Enzo Forcella,Nelo Risi,Elsa Morante,Altiero Spinelli, Giulio Guderzo, Giuliano Piccoli and Luciano Codignola.^[5] Some well-known international writers also contributed toTempo Presente, includingDwight Macdonald,Hannah Arendt,Melvin J. Lasky,Richard Löwenthal,Mary McCarty,Daniel Bell,Lewis A. Coser,Joseph Buttinger,Michael Harrington,Irving Howe andTheodore Draper.^[5] In 1961Tempo Presente featured a short story of theYugoslav dissident writerMilovan Djilas entitledThe War which led to its ban in Yugoslavia.^[10]

Tempo Presente could not develop close relations with other Italian publications which led to its isolation in the Italian political and cultural arena.^[7] The magazine experienced frequent conflicts with the leading periodicals of the period such asIl Ponte,Il Mulino andIl Mondo.^[7]Tempo Presente folded in 1967 due to the low levels of circulation.^[3][5]

• 1956 establishments in Italy
• 1967 disestablishments in Italy
• CIA activities in Italy
• Congress for Cultural Freedom
• Defunct political magazines published in Italy
• Defunct Italian-language magazines
• Magazines established in 1956
• Magazines disestablished in 1967
• Magazines published in Rome
• Monthly magazines published in Italy
• Propaganda newspapers and magazines
• Cold War propaganda

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from November 2021