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.

This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni's La Vita é Bella (1997) and Ettore Scola's Concorrenza Sleale (2001). The analysis places the films and their choice of narrator in the context of the child in European Holocaust film and argues that the child's perspective, often used to qualify the actions of adult characters and cast a questioning or even accusatory gaze on them, is used in these Italian films to perform the opposite function. Focusing on cinema as a site of memory and as a site of emotions, the article suggests that Italian filmmakers use children to infantilise the audience, induce pity rather than reflection, and discuss Italy's role in the Holocaust while reassuring audiences of the life-affirming, democratic and humanitarian values of post-war Italians. This political and historiographical use of the child's emotions not only reinforces the need to insist on the revision of the brava gente myth, but also invites a thorough reconsideration of the complexity of the relationship between the historical film and the emotions.

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 investigates the role, reception, and socio-cultural, political relevance of mondo movies in the context of late 1950s–early 1980s film and documentary. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s assemblage films. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, is mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/ decolonising Otherness. A brief review of some of the author’s published work on 1962–1971 mondo movies introduces Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and director Ruggero Deodato’s controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze.

The body partially disrobed as a visual strategy for self-branding is the theme of this article. During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon. Mussolini’s partial nudity is considered here as a powerful political tool. The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic (Sperling 2014, 21). Deconstructing the visual language of Fascist propaganda that made the man into a myth, this article illustrates the most iconic aspects of Mussolini’s visual strategy, demonstrating his innovative capacity to take advantage of a modern attitude towards self-representation, similar to that adopted by today’s heads of state.

Political corruption can be considered as a means by which money influences politics. In the classic studies the causes of corruption have usually been identified in the characteristics of the principal actor in the political system: the party. Samuel Huntington, in particular, has linked the development of corruption to party weakness during phases of growing political participation. Corruption spreads in those specific paths to modernization in which popular participation in political decision-making is not immediately accompanied by a strengthening of those institutions, such as political parties, which should filter and direct collective demands: ‘the weaker and less accepted the political parties, the greater the likelihood of corruption’.

This article reviews the considerable progress that has been made in modern Italian women's and gender history over the last decade. It puts forward the argument that such history, whose roots lie primarily in the feminist movement of the 1970s, was until recently consigned to the margins of the historical establishment but is now beginning to make a much greater impact. The article looks at the richness of the current wave of new publications and the wide range of topics they cover but argues that in a number of areas the historiography is still somewhat uneven. It also suggests that there is a pressing need for works of synthesis to draw together the research that has been done to date.

This article examines the monumental cemeteries of nineteenth-century Italy with regard to their role as platforms for the tensions between Church and state. In that burial grounds were publically owned yet administered by the clergy, they represented a space where conflicts between secular and clerical powers might be played out – conflicts that reached a peak in the final decades of the Ottocento following the annexation of the Papal State to unified Italy. Particular attention is given to the adoption of cremation as a practice that was advocated by anticlerical, liberal and radical factions in opposition to the Catholic Church. That opposition was manifested in the design and layout of Italian burial grounds and in construction of new crematoria.

The success of Italian movements opposing the war in Iraq during the period 2003–2005 has awakened historians’ interest in the historical features of left-wing pacifism in Italy. Some particularly noteworthy contributions have focused on the campaigns orchestrated around 1950 by the Italian Committee of the Partisans of Peace (the international movement financed and supported by the USSR and international communism against Western anti-Soviet rearmaments). After describing the principal features of existing research, this article focuses on the lexical and communicative aspect characterising left-wing pacifism in Italy in the years immediately following the Atlantic Treaty. It highlights the way in which communist and socialist language gravitated towards the classist and anti-capitalist definitions of ‘war’ and ‘peace’, in line with the position developed in Lenin's reflections in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. However, in the same context, there were images and symbolic references imbued with a rebuttal of the violence of war but with fewer ideological connotations, which reflected an attempt to attract the interest and support of groups and individuals ideologically distant from Marxism. This interweaving of choices of expression contributed to the deep-rooted influence of left-wing pacifism within Italian cultural politics.

The year of the Risorgimento, 1860, is associated with the ‘Garibaldi moment’, a time when the image of the radical revolutionary appeared to be ‘depoliticised’ in Britain. While recognising such a phenomenon, this article considers whether regional pockets escaped such a trend, analysing the case-study of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where strong links between Garibaldi and local radicals coloured public perceptions of the Italian hero. By scrutinising the unfolding of the ‘Garibaldi moment’ in this context a complex picture emerges, showing that, far from being a unifying ‘depoliticised’ figure, Garibaldi was a source of divisions within Newcastle society. Crucial in this division was George Crawshay's challenge to the recruitment of a British Legion to follow Garibaldi. By looking at the provincial press and examining the local reception of a variety of entertainments, it is argued that, while political engagement drove the enthusiasm of radical audiences, fashionable shows–devoid of political content–could not rely on Newcastle ‘Garibaldimania’.

The article discusses new studies of foreign soldiers in the Italian armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorgimento against the background of recent scholarship on ‘transnational soldiers’, which acknowledges the complexities of foreigners' initial motives for enlistment and of the transnational processes inside the single armies. The article suggests that from the mundane structures of military life to the perceptions of the rank-and-file, many aspects of the soldiering experience in the multinational armed groups on all sides of the Risorgimento actually advanced rather than obviated national boundaries. This paper further demonstrates that the military cultures of the nationalists and the anti-unity forces were much more porous and mutually constitutive than is often recognised. The histories of the ‘transnational soldiers’ in the armed groups of the Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento are crucial for a possibly new, comparative history of the armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorigmento. This paper explores approaches of the culturally revived ‘new military history’ and suggests that it provides much still unrealised potential for Risorgimento historiography.

Considering the increasing quantitative usage and expanding qualitative scope of instruments of delegated legislations as the predominant means of enacting welfare reforms, this article investigates the consolidation throughout the Second Italian Republic of a new interpretation of executive prerogatives in the exercise of legislative functions. This is not only a problem in relation to the constitutional balance defining the relationship between the executive and legislature, but also an issue for executive policy leadership and capacity to steer the legislative process. It is argued that since the 1990s the usage of legislative decrees has become a sui generis and the predominant means of decision-making, adopted in particular for welfare reforms. In particular, delegated legislation to the executive has changed the impact that interest groups, such as trade unions, have on the policy process. Two case studies are presented by way of illustration, namely the health care reforms of the early 1990s and the education reform in 2003.

Interest in the spread of human capital has grown in recent decades, as it is acknowledged to play an increasingly important role in supporting social and economic development. This paper, starting from the distinction between education – assessed by educational attainment – and literacy proficiency – that is, what people are actually able to do with the written word – examines the distribution of these properties in Italy. Results of analysis show that while the longstanding gap between the North and the South is gradually closing with regard to the distribution of educational credentials, there is still a significant difference in the acquired level of competence. There is also an unexpected result: the regions of the North-West, once the main driver of Italy's economic development, today deploy a smaller stock of human capital than the North-East and Central macro-regions. In light of these findings, improving the education system's effectiveness and creating adequate political, institutional and legal arrangements that favour the development of human capital appear to be an absolute priority for Italy.

This paper investigates the actions executed by Italian artists – male and female – centred on interpersonal relationships, at times with an insight into the dynamics of couples or directly involving the public. In Italy, during the 1960s and 1970s, various artists dedicated themselves to what were initially called happenings or actions, and only later became known as ‘performances’, but unlike in the better-known Body Art, the phenomenological exploration of the self and of reality frequently observed in the Arte Povera circle of artists, many welcomed the new sensibility embodied by feminism, which, by redefining gender positioning, emphasised the centrality of the ‘private’ sphere and revived interest in ‘affection’. This is particularly significant in light of the Italian cultural context, where women artists have often looked with suspicion at any initiatives dedicated explicitly to women's issues or at women-only exhibitions.

Over the last two years, the metaphor of war has often been used in Italy when discussing the fight against the pandemic, to describe the restrictions that have been introduced as a result, from lockdown to the Green Pass. Paradoxically, once the state of emergency ended, just as we were on the cusp of the long-awaited return to normality (to ‘peace’ in a sense), Russia's sudden invasion of Ukraine meant that war truly became part of Italians’ lives through the media. In this context, I have analysed the positions taken by the major Italian periodicals (Avvenire, Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Foglio, La Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Mattino di Napoli, Il Messaggero and Il Tempo di Roma) between 20 February and 5 March. What becomes clear through examination of the main articles is that the themes that would characterise the subsequent Italian debate – from a strategic, humanitarian, political, and economic point of view – were already present in the two weeks from the end of February to the beginning of March 2022.

This essay empirically evaluates three aspects of Berlusconi's legacy for Italian political communication: his pioneering of political marketing and modern electioneering; his ability to appropriate and popularise his particular rhetorical formulae; and his approach to increasingly relevant digital media. Berlusconi skilfully imported professional televised-centric campaigning in Italy, opening a wide competitive gap that his centre-left opponents took two decades to close. He also managed deeply to influence political discourse by spreading his signature catchphrases among most journalists and politicians, including his opponents. He was, however, less innovative, and generally outperformed by his main competitors, in the use of digital media to inform and engage voters. These findings suggest that Berlusconi's impact on Italian political communication has been massive, but his legacy may be less lasting to the extent that media and electioneering are evolving towards models that differ from those dominated by Berlusconi.

On September 18, 1938, Benito Mussolini disembarked in the port city of Trieste to begin a seven-day visit of the Tre Venezie. The tour was in keeping with Mussolini's policy of andare verso il popolo which involved periodic visits to Italy's regions. It was also an opportunity to impose the cult of the Duce on a frontier region which had, since the 1920s, been the site of harsh anti-Slav policies designed to Italianize the Venezia-Giulia region. This article examines the workings of the cult in Trieste where the regime was anxious to demonstrate that it was present in a city that had felt neglected by Rome. Often viewed as a top-down enterprise, this article will explore how the cult of the Duce relied significantly on local dynamics and spaces.

Most books by or about Antonio Gramsci reproduce on their covers the same studio photograph dating from the early 1920s. It is a head and shoulders portrait showing Gramsci with longish hair, dark coat buttoned at the neck, unsmiling and looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. This was also the image of him most commonly displayed in Communist Party branches all over Italy from the late 1940s to 1991. Yet if we compare it with other extant photographs of Gramsci, as well as with those of other revolutionary leaders adopted as iconic in the communist movement, we can see it differs from the former and resembles the latter in several ways. The most striking difference is the erasure of any sign of Gramsci’s bodily impairment: the curvature of the spine and short stature resulting from the spinal tuberculosis he had as a child. The article examines the history of this photograph and the way it became adopted as the approved image of Gramsci and considers what was at stake in removing from official memory a condition of disability that was central to his own personal and political identity.