This is an excellent introduction into the political ideas of Antonio Gramsci, born on Sardinia in 1891 who spent the last eleven years of his life in prison, courtesy of Mussolini. He's most famous for his Prison Notebooks. What this book does so well is to make this prison writing understandable for the ordinary reader, as the notebooks have a fragmentary form that makes them difficult to comprehend.
The book also introduces the reader to the terms Gramsci used to make Marxism more understandable to those in Italy for example as he sought to explain the success of The Risorgimento where Italy became united into the country we'd recognise today. Gramsci knew what had to be put in place and when in order for a Socialist society to come into being and certain elements of this process were missing during the Risorgimento, leading to a weakness later exploited by The Fascists.
My favourite term of Gramsci's is 'Common Sense' which he used to denote the uncritical and partly unconscious way in which people perceive the world, even though he indicated that everyone was a philosopher. He also recognised that when political parties and their leaders are no longer recognised by their class as its expression, this crisis of representation means the field then becomes open for the activities of unknown forces represented by charismatic "men of destiny".