Bertrando Spaventa, the Italian Hegelian philosopher, was born at Bomba in Abruzzo, educated in the seminary at Chieti, and taught for a time in the seminary at Monte Cassino before moving to Naples in 1840. There he became one of a small circle of liberal students associated with Ottavio Colecchi (1773–1847), who taught privately in opposition to the "official" philosophy of Pasquale Galluppi. Colecchi was himself a devotee of Immanuel Kant, but he read all the German idealists carefully and in the original. Spaventa, like the other young men in Colecchi's circle, was convinced that the real meaning of Kant's work was to be found in the later idealists, especially in G. W. F. Hegel, and the Hegelian interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason always remained the nodal point of his own speculations.

Spaventa's younger brother, Silvio, was imprisoned at Naples for his part in...