In spite of the great tradition in social movement studies, Italy completely lacks any contribution regarding animal advocacy from the point of view of political sociology. This is despite the fact that, as in the rest of Western societies, interest in the wellbeing, rights and status of non-human animals is growing. This can be seen both among the general population and in the very varied organised forms of welfare and activism. In this article, we will investigate this internal differentiation, starting from an initial stratification in welfare, protectionism and anti-speciesism, and focusing in particular on the following two aspects: ethical values; and political ‘careers’ and multi-membership affiliations. The investigation was accomplished by means of 20 semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire answered by 704 volunteers and activists. The tripartition hypothesised was confirmed, although with a few exceptions: more progressive values emerged among anti-speciesists, and conservative positions among protectionists and welfarists, but the overall spectrum is characterised by utilitarian perspectives. Similarly, previous experience in the specific field of animal advocacy is typical of the protectionist area, while anti-speciesists also come from other opposition movements.

Branding promotes and sells products and services through the creation of an identity – the brand. What happens when the promoter of a brand is a government? What transformations does a national identity experience when it becomes a brand to export? Is national branding a contemporary form of promoting national identities? To explore these questions, the article focuses on two artefacts that show the propaganda/branding strategies of Italians in Peru and Peruvians in Italy during the twentieth century: the magazine Romana- Gens ne la Terra de ‘Los Incas’ (1934–1941) and the ad-documentary Marca Perú in Loreto, Italy (2012). The analysis of these artefacts shows three dimensions of Italo-Peruvian mobilities. First, the complex negotiations of foreign populations that seek to integrate into their adoptive countries (and/or desired market). Second, the reversal of the direction of migration: Latin America was a point of arrival for the Italian immigrants from the nineteenth century until the 1970s, but during the last decades of the twentieth century, it became a point of departure to Italy, which was seen as a place of economic progress. Finally, the specific politics of affects in the relationship of Italian and Peruvian immigrants with national identities built during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Irish drama underwent an extraordinary rediscovery in Italy during the Second World War, primarily because of its political convenience (Ireland was a neutral nation) but also because of its aesthetic significance. Through an analysis of the role of key mediators I employ Irish literature as a lens to investigate a crucial moment of renewal within both Italian politics and theatre, emphasising strands of continuity between Fascist and post-Fascist practices. First, I show how a wartime ban on English and American plays prompted an interest in Irish drama and the fluid status of the Irish canon enabled authors of Irish origin (e.g. Eugene O’Neill), to be affiliated with Irish literature. I then move on to considering how this very fluidity facilitated the daring rebranding of Irish theatre as anti-fascist in Paolo Grassi’s ‘Collezione Teatro’, a key step in his position-taking at the centre of Italy’s theatrical field. Ireland was a substitute for England and appeared on Italian (political and literary) maps mainly thanks to its anti-English function. However, despite the politically inflected motivation of the various, often contrasting uses of the category ‘Irish drama’ in wartime Italy, this was the first time Irish literature had been widely acknowledged as a specific tradition within the Anglosphere in Italy.

When the Italian army breached the Aurelian walls at Porta Pia in 1870 and Rome was seized from the pope, the city could not have been more unlike a contemporary European capital city. In the years after it became Italy’s capital, Rome underwent a process of radical urban renewal. This article, focusing on the creation of a new neighbourhood in Prati di Castello – the area north-east of the Vatican – frames Rome’s transformation as part of the ‘culture wars’ between the Church and the new Italian state. The decision to postpone the creation of the new district in Prati until the 1880s and the way it was then carried out reflect the wider shift of Italian politics from Cavour’s notion of ‘a free Church in a free State’ to the more combative anticlericalism of the Left after 1876. Against this background, Prati emerged as a political landscape in which competing powers articulated their aspirations and values, negotiated their respective authorities, and transmitted political ideas.

In this article, we analyse the ideological content of the discursive strategies used by a group of migrant workers subjected to ‘caporalato’, a form of illegal hiring and exploitation of farm day workers through an intermediary. Starting from a series of collective open interviews with farm workers, we examine the way in which the dynamics of both exploitation and resistance are reproduced through linguistic and discursive practices. What emerges from the analysis is a complex set of ambivalent experiences and representations. Despite its inherent exploitative and controlling nature, the workers tend to justify, legitimise and deny the negative aspects of caporalato. Nonetheless, they also use linguistic devices of resistance to reconfigure the meanings of, and their role in, caporalato. Interestingly, the analyses show that caporalato is also perceived as a mechanism of social mobility. Only limited attempts at explicitly challenging its criminal nature are strategically expressed.

This paper offers an original interpretation of Garibaldi’s political style and imaginary. The aim is to account for Garibaldi’s sustained engagement with the possibility of displacement as an alternative to revolution. It begins in an afternoon on a remote small island between two oceans. Garibaldi was considering his options. When he returned to Italy, he had seriously reflected on the possibility of colonising other places. Colonising had entered the picture. It was a postcolonial Garibaldi.