Sraffa

He was born in Turin, Italy, to a wealthy Jewish family, to Angelo and Irma Sraffa. His father was a Professor in commercial law. He studied in his town and graduated at the local university with a work on inflation in Italy during and after World War I. Notably, his tutor was Luigi Einaudi, one of the most important Italian economists and later a president of the Italian Republic.
From 1921 to 1922 he studied in London at the London School of Economics. In 1922 he was appointed as Director of the provincial labour department in Milan, then as Professor in Political economy first in Perugia, and later in Cagliari, Sardinia. In Turin he had met Antonio Gramsci (the most important leader of Italian Communist Party). They became close friends, partly due to their shared ideological views—Sraffa was at this time a radical Marxist. He also was already in contact with Filippo Turati, perhaps the most important leader of Italian Socialist Party, whom he allegedly met and frequently visited in Rapallo, where his family had a holiday villa.
In 1925 he wrote about returns to scale and perfect competition, underlining some doubtful points of Alfred Marshall's theory of the firm. This work was completed in an article he published the following year.