Since 2001 DPI Italia, the Italian section of Disabled People's International, has played an important role in a series of research projects in the European Commission's Daphne Programme on violence against women with disabilities. Several different types of violence have been identified, from sexual abuse to removal of women's control over their environment to invasion of their privacy in healthcare contexts to control of their reproductive capacity, particularly of women with intellectual disabilities. In the light of these projects, and of the CRPD's recognition of the multiple discriminations experienced by many women with disabilities, the article argues for a shift away from an ethics of care and dependency towards one of equal reciprocal relations between disabled women and others and to a bioethics grounded not in exceptional need but in everyday life. Peer counselling among disabled women is particularly important in effecting this shift.

Mussolini had declared that Fascism, through the anti-mafia campaign entrusted to Cesare Mori, prefect of Palermo, in the second half of the 1920s, had conclusively liberated Sicily from the mafia. However, from the early 1930s a new deterioration of public order on the island was evident, and the regime was forced to launch a second, and much less publicised, repression of this phenomenon. In the course of its careful investigations the body given responsibility for pursuing this repression, the Ispettorato Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza per la Sicilia, compiled a series of reports, including the Processo verbale di denunzia relating to the area around Palermo. With a level of detail never seen before, these reports described the structure, organisation and dynamics of mafia groups. This was possible because police officers had available members of the mafia groups themselves – genuine pentiti – who had decided to make disclosures to the authorities.

The image of England was very important to the political culture of Italian liberals during the Risorgimento and the post-unification period. Even if it was viewed as unreachable, it still constituted an example of progress that Italy could strive towards. This article reconstructs the stages of the process that saw a section of Italian political culture become alienated from this image, just at a time when a more complete form of industrial democracy was becoming eswtablished in Britain. This alienation is interpreted here as having its roots in attitudes to the issues raised by the workers’ movement: Italian liberals were reluctant to give it full legitimacy and engage it on the open terrain of social and political competition. The first two sections of the article go over the traits of Italian Anglophilia up to the end of the nineteenth century and single out the earliest reasons for alienation. The third section identifies the Boer War, the figure of Chamberlain and the cluster of issues linking democracy, imperialism and protectionism as key factors in the change of direction. The fourth section shows that the constitutional conflict in Britain and the Parliament Act were a further, decisive, step in Italian liberals’ disaffection with the ‘English model'.

In the 1970s a group of ex-partisans founded the Resistenza Continua social movement. This article traces the origins and history of the movement and explores its contacts with other similar neo-Resistance groups. Though Resistenza Continua was clearly not a movement of great consequence, an analysis of it sheds a useful light on the strengths and weaknesses of the Resistance tradition.

The city of Milan has been host to two separate mass migrations over the last fifty years. The first involved Italians in the 1950s and 1960s, the second, non-Italians from the 1980s onwards. Until now little comparison—historical, sociological or otherwise—has been made of these two processes. The first part of this article draws up a theoretical and definitional framework for this comparison, and sets out the possible bases for such a task. The second part looks in detail at three stories concerning non-Italians in Milan in the 1980s and 1990s: the vicissitudes of one important temporary centre for immigrants in Via Corelli in the city; the story of Driss Moussafir, a Moroccan victim of terrorism; and the violence which erupted in Via Meda in the summer of 1998. Through these micro-stories, the article examines a number of historical questions concerning migration and integration and looks to draw comparisons concerning the role of politics, the state and racialization between these two historical periods.

This article reviews Italy's role in the various phases of the European Union's policy towards the Mediterranean: the ad hoc policy of the 1950s and 1960s, the Global Mediterranean Policy developed in the 1970s, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership agreed in Barcelona in 1995, the European Neighbourhood Policy signed in 2003, the proposal launched by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2006 for a Mediterranean Union. The overall argument is that the various Italian governments have carried out an ambivalent and often reactive policy: on the one hand, they have consistently tried to promote a Mediterranean dimension in the European Union, though without upsetting the United States; on the other hand, they have limited the extension of trade privileges to exports from North Africa. While the end of the Cold War provided a new opportunity for Italy to play a more assertive role in the international arena, the two coalitions that have alternated in power have substantially failed to move the Mediterranean to the centre of Italy's and the European Union's external policy. A partial change of attitude – yet a reactive policy – emerged under the second Prodi Government, when Italy and Spain became close allies in an attempt to counter-balance the new activist policy of Sarkozy.

Historiography has mainly focused on the pragmatic and realist character of Alcide De Gasperi's politics, whilst substantially overlooking the purely intellectual dimension of his lengthy political experience. The publication of a critical edition of his writings allows us to enrich the traditional image that has been developed of this Italian politician, whose interventions in public life were also expressed by way of significant cultural reflections. In this respect his writings from the 1930s, written during his so-called ‘internal exile’ inside the Vatican, are particularly significant. These pages bear witness to De Gasperi's close attachment to the political culture of European Catholicism. His passionate defence of Catholic constitutionalism and Catholic-Liberal goals, the revival of the political traditions of the Zentrum and the development of the Church's social doctrine in a corporativist direction testify to De Gasperi's often underestimated analytical capacity and intellectual breadth.

This essay reconstructs the emergence of a growing sensitivity towards animal welfare in Italy during the so-called ‘liberal’ years. An examination of the origins and activities of animal protection societies, the debate on use of animals for scientific experimentation, and the earliest provisions for animal protection, reveals a growing concern for animal welfare in Italy too during the course of the twentieth century. This was channelled by the liberal-bourgeois values of the time: public decency, moderation, and goodwill towards animals as well as humans were all seen as signs of ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’. It was claimed that foreign influence, particularly British, was of vital importance in such developments in Italy, including both the thoughts of the anti-vivisectionists and the work and propaganda of the societies for animal protection. This essay also examines the 1913 Law, which was the first important Italian legislation governing animal welfare and protection.

In this essay, I argue that despite the Vatican’s condemnation of Nazi racism as an anti-Christian ideology, some Catholic sectors in Fascist Italy were not impervious to anti-semitic and racial prejudices. Looking at the discussion on race and anti-semitism in the propaganda of clerical Fascism and its simultaneous echo in Church discourses, this research delves deeper into the formation of a specific Catholic trend of racial anti-semitism that excluded Jews from a religiously and ethnically homogeneous definition of the Italian nation. A significant part of the propagandists of clerical Fascism attempted to define a racial and anti-semitic narrative that could be suitable for both Fascist racism and Italian Catholic culture. I examine the Catholic appropriation of racial anti-semitism on a broad spectrum of positions, ranging from Catholics who only flirted with racialist rhetoric to those who dismissed the transformative value of conversion because of alleged racial barriers. Challenging the traditional distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-semitism, the examples under examination demonstrate the entanglement of religious and racial arguments in the shaping of a ‘Jewish race’ that was considered foreign to the italianità celebrated by the regime.

The incidence of partisans killing Fascists after the Liberation of Italy is a difficult and contested subject in the historiography of that period. This article addresses one particular case—the Schio killings which took place on the night of 6 July 1945—and examines different narratives of the event in the light of the ways in which the struggle for power played out between the Communists, the Allies and the centre-right has dictated the significance and commemoration of this incident and, by extension, of the Resistance itself. This discussion of narratives and the rhetorical struggle that has taken place to assert different forms of legality underlines the need to problematize categories such as ‘Fascist’, ‘Communist’, ‘victim’, ‘criminal’ and ‘justice’ in understanding the incident.

As Italian society struggles to come to terms with the presence of Chinese immigrants and with changing global patterns of industrialisation and shifts in the dynamics of industrial power, the question of Sino-Italian relations is increasingly present in Italian cultural representations across media and genre. Among the themes which recur within Italian discourse on Chinese industry are Made in Italy vs Made in China, tradition vs modernity, and environmental responsibility. In this paper, I offer a reading of the complex and, at times, ambivalent treatment of these themes in Gianni Amelio's 2006 film, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star), and Alessandro Perissinotto's 2014 novel, Coordinate d'Oriente (Oriental Coordinates). Central to my analysis of the two works is an examination of the trope of contacts between the economies and societies of the two countries being sublimated in the fictional narratives into relationships between Western men and Chinese women. Against this backdrop, I propose an interpretation of the power dynamics which underpin the narratives.

Using Italian and Albanian archive sources, this essay analyses the effectiveness of Italian policy in Albania, during the years of its union with Italy (1939–1943), in the creation of a model Fascist state and in the generation of support for Italy among the Albanian population. Through the creation of party and state structures similar to those in Italy, Fascism intended to give voice to Albanian Nationalist demands, but Italian policy was undermined by a basic defect which helped to cool any initial enthusiasm: the loss of all semblance of Albanian independence and the exploitation of local resources to the benefit of the Italians alone. The Italy-Greece conflict cast a shadow on the Fascist fighting ability which not even the creation of ‘Great Albania’ (thanks to the help of the Germans) removed. As Italy's military fortunes changed for the worse, they were forced to address a growing resistance until the tragic conclusion of 8th September 1943 and the end of the occupation.

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.

This article focuses on Italian foreign and security policy (IFSP). It looks at three examples of the country's policy-making which reveal its poor results as a security provider, namely: Italy's tardy reaction to the violence in Libya in 2011, its prompt reaction to the Lebanon crisis in 2006, and its efforts to be included in the diplomatic directorate, the P5 + 1, approaching relations with Iran in 2009. The article considers whether government action has bolstered the reliability of IFSP and also discusses the country's FSP in terms of its basic differences from that of its partners in the European Union, France, Britain and Germany, envisaging how Italy could react to build more credibility. Italy's policy is observed through a three-pronged analytical framework enriched by concepts of the logic of expected consequences. The article concludes that IFSP is predictable, but it must still reveal that it is reliable, and explains why this is the case.

This article investigates the history of coffee culture across three continents during the Fascist ventennio (1922–45.) By using the novel framework of coffee, from the bean in the field to the machine in the caffè, it connects interwar histories that previously have been explored independently. Specifically, it examines the transnational economics of coffee bean trade routes and the colonial imagery of coffee advertising to argue that caffès emerged as key sites for promoting the Fascist imperial projects in East Africa – an architectural and artistic legacy that remains in place today. Ultimately, this trajectory broadens the way that we understand how food and farming became politicised during the Fascist period. By untangling the interwar trade of beans and bodies between Italy, Brazil, and Ethiopia, this article brings to light an untold story of caffeinated imperial aggression and resistance.

The linguistic and cultural identity of transnational writers who choose to write in an adopted language or to self-translate, has gained increasing interest among researchers over the last decade. Approaches to the topic have ranged from textual analyses of translingual narratives and language memoirs to more ontological investigations of the processes of identity-formation in transcultural frameworks. Acknowledging that there is no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic units and ethnic, social or cultural formations, this paper considers the relationship between the literary practices of contemporary translingual writers and the role of language both in the formation of personal identities and in the reconfiguration of constructions of national identity and literary belonging. Specifically, I examine how two contemporary women writers, Francesca Marciano and Jhumpa Lahiri, who each represent a remarkable case of self-conscious linguistic transformation, interrogate the traditional construct of a monolingual, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural national identity. I argue that their autofictions reflect the multilingual and transcultural reality of contemporary transnational literature and instantiate broader issues connected with the definition, categorisation and consequent evaluation of literary canons and literary citizenship.

This article consists of three sections. The first one concentrates on the conceptualisation of the Italian concession in Tianjin (1901–1947). The second connects the past imagery of the Italian ‘aristocratic concession’ to its contemporary reinvention as the ‘New Italian-style Town’. The third section explores the rationale for the diffusion of what I define as Italianerie: a fascination for Italy, for a ‘real-unreal’ Italian-flavoured atmosphere, through the creation of multi-million-dollar luxury designer outlets known as ‘Florentia Villages’. The first Florentia Village, ‘inspired by classic Italian architecture’, opened in Wuqing, halfway between Beijing and Tianjin, in June 2011, followed by the replica of this template in eight Chinese cities. Is this the outcome of a specific patrimonialisation strategy? What is the significance of this showcase of Italian design in China? What lies behind the apparent paradox of reproducing ‘in/authentic’ Italy in miniature, and using it to sell the ‘real’ luxury products, in a country like China, which is stereotyped as the paradise of the fake? Is innovation by design reconfiguring the relationship between production and consumption of cultural images and commodities? This article intends to explore these questions with particular attention to transcultural strategies in Chinese urbanism – past and present.

This article looks at the contribution that the recording of personal memories makes to the history and to the collective and public remembrance of the Second World War in Italy. It concentrates on a product of the 1980s boom in oral and written testimonies about the war, Giulio Bedeschi's edited anthology of the personal stories of civilian victims, Fronte italiano: c'ero anch'io. La popolazione in guerra. The article assesses the anthology's theme of victimhood and its implications for how Italians have chosen to remember the war. It considers the standing of these personal memories as historical sources, and the extent to which they can contribute to a historical understanding of the Italians’ war experiences.

In the course of the 1950s, Italian industrial design underwent a period of professionalisation and rose to international fame under the banners of ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘la linea italiana’. Seen in retrospect, Italian design retained this position during the 1960s, with the onset of avant-garde ‘pop-design’ and ‘anti-design’. Yet this future development was by no means a given in the Italian design community at the turn of the decade. At this crucial moment, between the rationality of the first postwar period and the playfulness of the second, allegations of a ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design raised a storm in the professional community for a brief period around 1960. This article analyses this heated debate, focusing on its most pronounced manifestation: the discussions in the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) and the design magazine Stile Industria following the jury's decision to withhold the Gran Premio Nazionale Compasso d'Oro for 1959.