This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly ‘common-sense’ understandings of ‘Italian-ness’ (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to ‘Italianise’ their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials’ moral authority, political support and ‘totalitarian’ façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an ‘Italian identity’ among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state.

This review article focuses on two key developments in urban history. The first is that the new transnational approach to urban history is significantly advancing the field and the second is that within the European context an important new emphasis is being placed on Eastern and Southern Europe. As claimed by Claus Møller Jørgensen in his review of nineteenth-century transnational urban history:

In an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay was a rejoinder to those who would see harbingers of the Soviet collapse in the heterogeneous social tendencies of the postwar period. Instead, Bittner draws attention to the sources of cohesion that held the Soviet Union together through the challenges of wartime and beyond. However, Bittner intended his essay not as a general theory of post-war Soviet society, but as an observation about the integrative tendencies that kept the Soviet Union together during the Second World War and in the decades that immediately followed. So when did this alchemical potential for ‘self-organization, resilience, regeneration, redefinition, and creation of new social forms and structures’ come to an end?2