This article addresses the problem of the Catholics' diffusion of anti-Jewish propaganda in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the question of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the formation of Italian national identity in the same period. The paper uncovers two layers in the discourse of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica regarding Italian unification. On one level, typical of the journal's editorials, nationalism is rejected, while on a less conspicuous level the journal forcefully defines the Italian nation in Catholic terms, partly through the alienation of Jews. The investigation indicates that the approach towards Italian nation-building should be taken into account when studying the Catholics' rhetoric concerning Jews, and it supports the thesis that the contribution of the Church towards shaping Italian national identity should be taken seriously in studies of the Risorgimento.

Addressing Italian workers in his Doveri dell'uomo of 1860, Mazzini unequivocally laid out his thoughts on women's rights. The thinker from Genoa, all the more after his encounters with other political philosophers from different national environments such as Britain and France, saw the principle of equality between men and women as fundamental to his project of constructing first the nation, and second a democratic republic. In his ideas regarding emancipation Mazzini, who spent a good 40 years of his life in exile, was one of a small group of European thinkers who in challenging the established customs and prevailing laws not only hoped for the end of women's social and judicial subordination, but also held that changes to the position of women were essential to the realisation of their political projects. Thanks to this respected group of intellectuals, the issue of female emancipation found a place in the nineteenth-century European debate regarding democracy and the formation of national states. The closeness of the positions of these thinkers, and their commitment in practice as well as theory, mean that it can legitimately be argued that in the course of the nineteenth century a current of feminist thinking took shape. This was born of the encounters between and reflections of various intellectuals who met first in France and then in England, and who came to see women's rights not just as a discrete issue for resolution but as fundamental to their projects for the regeneration of nations, or, as in the Italian case, for the construction and rebirth of a nation.

The well-known dispute between Benedetto Croce and John Dewey had several elements at its origin. This article provides a systematic overview of the issues that impinged on this affair, and of the many studies which have dwelt on the exchange between these two philosophers. The underlying American anti-Hegelianism, the language problem and the actual differences in thinking on aesthetics are all fundamental to this mutual misunderstanding. The reasons why Croce had made a limited impact in the United States are discussed. The analysis concludes by highlighting the socio-ethical aspects of Deweyan aesthetics.

In this paper, the concepts of city as context, locality and incorporation are applied to the case of Albanian immigrants in Florence. To date, most research on the incorporation of immigrants and its relationship to space is based on the city or the inter-relations between the nation-state and city as contexts where incorporation takes place. The findings of this study show that the relationship between locality and the incorporation of immigrants is multi-dimensional. First, although findings support the role of the urban ethos in immigrants' incorporation, the city is not a homogeneous entity and should not be equated with locality where immigrants' incorporation is concerned. The importance of locality within the city is highlighted by the role played by the qualities of space and aesthetics in immigrants' incorporation and identification. Also, more attention should be paid to intergenerational perceptions of space, as the data show that different generations have different ‘cognitive geographies’ and varying perceptions of space and appreciations of cosmopolitanism, seen here in relation to locality. These aspects should be seen in relation to the historical, structural and cultural particularities of the city as a key context of incorporation, without ignoring the national-level politics of immigration and integration.

Ada Gobetti's Storia del gallo Sebastiano represents one of her many anti-fascist activities. By the time of the story's creation, Ada Gobetti had lived under fascism for 16 years. While Sebastiano descended from a long line of non-conformists in children's literature, it imparted a very specific ideological and political agenda, since Sebastiano was born at the height of fascism. Read by thousands of Italian children during the war, the story provided a clever critique of Mussolini's attempt to make children conform to the fascist ideal. Through Sebastiano, Ada Gobetti enlisted parents and their children in her efforts to urge Italians to resist fascism. After the war, as vice-mayor of Turin, the first woman to hold such a position in Italy, Ada Gobetti worked diligently to effect positive reforms in the schools, and fought openly for the rights of Italian women and children. She also wrote extensively on child rearing and devoted much of the remainder of her life to pedagogic activities to promote a ‘democratic education’ for both children and their parents.

Giovannino Guareschi, author of the immensely popular Don Camillo stories and editor of the weekly newspaper Candido, spent 14 months in a Parma prison from 1954 to 1955 for having libelled the former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. To this day, he is the only Italian journalist since the founding of the Republic ever to have served actual, behind-bars jail time for libel. This study examines several aspects of Guareschi's life in prison – the ways he coped with boredom and loneliness, the attempts he made to understand his fellow inmates and how he defiantly tried to buoy his spirits. In particular, it focuses on both his correspondence with his wife Ennia, a collection of 44 letters, and his personal musings kept in two prison diaries – all documents that have never been published. The analysis rectifies common misinterpretations as to why Guareschi purposely refused to appeal his guilty verdict and chose to go to jail, considers how Guareschi presented himself in his writings and contemplates Guareschi's place in the history of Italian prison writing.

The recent argument that the notion of ‘transition’ should be set aside in attempting to explain the trajectory of Italian politics in the past two decades is to be welcomed, but does not go far enough in explaining why we, as Italianists, got our case wrong and how exactly we might get our case right today. The transitional ‘myth’ was born and maintained despite growing evidence of its inherently problematic nature, in both conceptual and empirical terms. The concept of ‘transition’ needs more serious conceptual treatment and empirical application, but even with this work it is unlikely to be concluded that Italy is in transition. Freeing Italy and Italianists from this conventional wisdom, while, at the same time, not abandoning the idea that something exceptional happened to Italian politics in the early 1990s will help enrich the debate on the nature of the political change that Italy has experienced in the past 17 years.

One month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Corriere della Sera published an article on the possible future consequences for literature of this horrific event. Some novelists boldly declared their work would not be affected at all, while others observed that their literary visions and perspectives were already responses to life's tragic aspects. Several writers confessed to wondering, at least initially, whether literature henceforth could continue to have any real sense. A decade later, this essay examines the nature of the Italian response. It looks first at the views of those writers who expressed opinions directly to the press or in essay form, and then at a small number of novels (by Tullio Avoledo, Marisa Bulgheroni and Tiziana Rinaldi Castro) and short stories (by Andrea Piva, Andrej Longo and Andrea Canobbio) which have embraced the theme, and which have done so in ways that reinforce the sense of an underlying political and/or cultural aesthetic. Connections between twenty-first-century reactions to 9/11 and the Italian experience or memory of political terrorism and war will be explored, as well as the question of inspiration for novelists, in the particular context of catastrophe or trauma.