This article tackles the issue of literary censorship in Fascist Italy. The first part offers an outline of the organization and the practices with which the regime attempted to control publishers and authors. It tracks the development of Mussolini's Press Office into a fully fledged ministry, examines the introduction of a semi-preventive form of censorship, and looks at the effects of the anti-Semitic laws. The second part concentrates on the literary activities of the novelist, editor and translator, Elio Vittorini. His many encounters with Fascist censorship provide ideal subject matter for a close examination of how censorship affected literary production. It also provides an example of the need to re-address aspects of Italy's literary history during the Fascist period, particularly in relation to questions of coercive and consensual collaboration with the regime.

This article proposes an institutionalist reading of the processes of industrial and employment change taking place in the clothing industry in Brindisi, Italy, during the 1990s. In contrast to more orthodox economic interpretations that focus on the separation between the economy and institutions, this article assumes the centrality of institutions for an understanding of industrial and employment performances and their change over time. Institutions profoundly affect the pursuit of the objectives of profit and efficiency in that they influence the definition of what can be considered as rational in a given institutional configuration and compatible with the values that a given society holds as socially and economically legitimate.

This article examines Rome City Council's policies concerning the Roma during Francesco Rutelli's two terms as mayor (1993-2001). It demonstrates that the Rutelli administration's policies for these minority communities shifted from a superficial but genuine attempt to overcome aspects of marginalization to a criminalizing strategy of exclusion. It is argued here that the failure significantly to improve the social conditions of the Roma was due to (a) a refusal to tackle the inter-related causes of their social exclusion and (b) submission to the anti-Roma hostility of parts of the voting public. Following the demolition of Rome's largest shanty town in October 2000, the Council was unable to house many of the Roma it had made homeless. It would seem that a ‘cleaning-up’ campaign was intro duced to distance undocumented individuals and those with criminal records from the city through a notable rise in police raids. This change in approach was accompanied and justified by an intensification of ethnicized public order discourse.

The ‘Italian Politics Group’ of the Political Studies Association (PSA) convened for the second time at the organization's annual conference, held this year at the University of Leicester. Co-ordinated by Felia Allum (Bath) and Jim Newell (Salford), the group provides a forum for debating Italian politics and generating collaborative publications among scholars largely, but not exclusively, based in the United Kingdom. This year, apart from its own panels, the group organized joint discussions on ‘decentralization’ and ‘presidentialism’ with the PSA's specialists in French politics.