When Herbert Spencer died (December 8, 1903), the British press proudly reported that Italian newspapers were also giving great prominence to the news, in one case even with mourning borders. On December 11, a member of the Italian Parliament, the jurist and university professor Agostino Berenini (1858˗1939), delivered a speech on the English polymath warmly appreciated by the whole assembly: an honor by the way that Spencer would not have been happy about, since Bernini was a member of the Socialist Party. A few weeks later Spencer was celebrated by one of the few institutions whose membership he had granted the honor of accepting, the Accademia dei Lincei, the world’s oldest science academy (1603). Soon afterwards, thanks to young philosopher Guglielmo Salvadori (1879-1953), the most active popularizer of Spencerism in Italy, the 1904 first issue of Rivista di Filosofia e Scienze Affini (Journal of Philosophy and Related Sciences) was entirely devoted to Spencer. The prompt reaction to Spencer’s death was consistent with his reputation South of the Alps among scholars - humanists and scientists - of very different political persuasions, who nevertheless shared an interest in utilitarism as well as an intolerance towards the power of the Catholic Church in Italian society. In this paper I shall first follow Salvadori’s activities to show the different contexts in which Spencerism circulated in Italy. Secondly, I shall focus on Tullio Martello (1841-1918), a liberal and anti-socialist economist deeply interested in evolutionism. Concerning the lay public, at the beginning of the twentieth century several translations and reprints of Spencer’s books and a survey of “The most widely read books by Italian People” (1906) confirmed the high circulation of Spencerism among “not expert readers”. The 1906 sample shows that Spencer was appreciated, first, by “workers and shop keepers”, and secondly by “white collars and professionals”. While students declared little interest in Spencer, Catholic priests read his books carefully, “in order to refute his theories from the pulpit”: this is the most reliable evidence I could find of Spencer’s success among the restricted - as the paper will show - Italian public in the period 1870s-1910s c. In the following decades, Italian scholars occasionally felt the need to state that, after that early period of success, Spencer had been forgotten. However, a long period survey of the Italian publishing market shows that an interest in Spencer has been kept alive until recently and, again, by Italian scholars with outspoken, different political agendas.