This research is based upon three interrelated elements: the European crisis, Italian Fascism and the analysis of the two carried out by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, that is, the notes he wrote during his detention in Fascist prisons from 1929 to 1935. However, the aim of this contribution is to shed light not on Gramsci’s analysis of the European crisis and the regime in Italy as such, but on the way in which this analysis interacts with the constellations of political power and of hegemonic social forces existing in Italy and in Europe at the time. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are in fact not reflections on a defeat, made far away— both physically and mentally—from the on-going struggle (as they have often been interpreted in the past), but a strategic analysis of opportunities for communist political initiative presented by the new European and Italian situation of the late 1920s and early 1930s.