This article reviews De Gasperi's foreign policy in the light of his recently published writings and speeches. Research has been carried out into the stages of his youth and his internal exile, seeking elements of continuity that would re-emerge later on in De Gasperi's policies as Foreign Minister, and his Atlantic and European policies. The key moments of De Gasperi's international political action, in particular the talks he took part in concerning the Italian Peace Treaty, membership of the Atlantic Pact and promotion of European integration, help to cast light on the characteristics of De Gasperi's political style. Above all, three elements are emphasised: responsibility, loyalty, and a capacity for renewal.

Gramsci's work continues to enjoy popularity amongst academics and activists. There is nonetheless a real question about the relevance of his central political ideas for the twenty-first century. This paper defends the thesis that Gramsci's humanism is part of a long tradition of political thought which dates back to Machiavelli, and that although this national-popular humanism is now outdated for reasons which are suggested in the writings and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, there is also a sociological component to Gramsci's theorising that retains resonance today.

This article explores the Italian government’s attitude towards Trieste and its territory in public discourse and the unique role of the disputed area as a means of reinforcing, challenging or disrupting nationalist rhetoric of Italian nationhood after 1945. It argues that the central government’s projected image of the disputed border vacillated between that of a wall and a bridge at the southern tip of the Iron Curtain and was utilised to either strengthen or weaken past nationalist conceptualisations of Italian identity or ‘italianità’ within and outside the Adriatic city. While producing significant resistance within the Triestine community and its émigrés, this political process also succeeded in transforming this disputed territory from a stronghold of Western democracy into a bridge toward the socialist world within public discourse. This close reading of both political and public views of Italy’s eastern border ultimately reveals the inherent fluidity and constructed meaning of ideas of nationhood in Cold War Italy.

Working at the intersection between literary history and periodical studies, this article investigates the role played by the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (Rome, 1948–1960) in processes of Anglo-Italian literary transfer. The article charts the journal’s British network, analysing quantitatively the presence of both established and new writers. Further, it focuses on Botteghe Oscure’s publishing and distribution policy in the United Kingdom, drawing on its founder Marguerite Caetani’s correspondence in order to interrogate the location of the journal within the Italian and the English literary systems, and thus illuminate the journal’s role as a site of literary production as it was shaped in both Italy and Britain.

In this article, I explore the conditions of the media in Italy by taking into consideration a variety of elements: the context of media legislation and media concentration that have favoured the interests of Silvio Berlusconi, and the role of progressive agency (media professionals, citizens' groups) as they worked within those constraints to keep alive the flames of democracy during the ‘Berlusconi era’. This perspective is intended to provide an alternative interpretation to what has become the prevailing view of contemporary Italy: an ‘abnormal’ country; the ‘Sick Man of Europe’; worse yet: a country of ‘servants’. The framework of analysis includes the influence of the media-magnate-turned-politician on media legislation and the television sector, but also evaluates the important roles that media professionals and citizens have played to improve pluralism. The article argues that despite extreme levels of media concentration and an unprecedented conflict of interests, a commitment to engage in political discourse has continued to characterise Italy's political culture. This commitment has been expressed by a multiplicity of actors, from journalists and media professionals to citizens' organisations and media activists.

Based both on the author's personal testimony of living, working and studying in Italy for ten years, and on his more recent sociological fieldwork, this article explores various dimensions of racism in the north Italian city of Modena, paying special attention to the experiences of Tunisian immigrants. The methodology comprises interviews with Tunisian immigrants and their employers, observations in bars and other public places, analysis of racism in the workplace, monitoring of the local media and reference to the national political debate. The findings reveal that being on the receiving end of racism, hostility and violence are regular facets of the everyday lives of Tunisian immigrants in Modena, as well as being part of a wider local and national anti-immigrant discourse.

The spread of mobile telephones in Italy is examined as a typical technological phenomenon and is contextualized in the theoretical literature on technological change. A brief introduction is followed by a historical account of the growth of mobile telephony and then by an examination of its current spread and likely future development. After this, two interpretative models are put forward which, it is suggested, may be used both in this particular case and for any form of technologically mediated communication (TMC): the butterfly paradigm (applied to the spread of a technology), and the circuit synergy paradigm (applied to the relative importance of individual factors in the process of diffusion).

American intervention in the 1948 Italian national election campaign has long been a source of contention. Most scholarship has assessed the Truman administration's activities in binary terms that revolve on simplistic notions of ‘success’; the idea that American efforts did or did not affect the outcome. The subsequent tendency has been to celebrate or critique US intervention. This article traces the difficulties experienced by the American government in post-war Italy, which laid the platform for an improvised effort in support of non-communist forces. The mobilisation was neither unified nor coherent and, moreover, was influenced by Italians. The final result nevertheless masked problems with the campaign. Rather than a normative critique of American efforts, this article argues that the outcome fostered a ‘perception of success’ that reframed US conceptualisation of the post-war Italian case and considers the wider ramifications of this mind-frame for future US–Italian relations and broader American approaches in the Cold War.

The article looks at the role of Italy in the decision-making arena of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), analysing the initiatives it put in place to address and influence the construction of a common defence. The article aims to explain the ability or inability of Italy to build up a consensus around its proposals. By studying two initiatives in the field of European defence and security, it seeks to determine the factors which resulted in the differing outcomes of Italian actions at the European level.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the left generally, the 1989-1994 period can be viewed as a political failure in as far as there was a right-wing outcome (albeit ephemeral) to Italy's transition. Yet, it is a failure which has to be viewed in the context of the deep undercurrents of change at work in Italy in this period and the constraints within which the PDS and its leader, Achille Occhetto, were operating

This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony's 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.

Calabrian ‘illegitimacy’ in the (inter)national imaginary today is largely the result of the region's association with the ’ndrangheta. Using analysis of oral history interviews, this research examines how this ‘illegitimacy’ influences the self-perception of Calabrians. It argues that a spectrum of prejudice and its effects can be mapped out both metaphorically and geographically. This spectrum incorporates Italy's position in relation to northern Europe, the South's position within Italy, Calabria's position within the South and the position within Calabria of certain communities. A number of towns in the Locride are at the extreme end of this spectrum: Locri, San Luca, Africo and Platì. Analysis of the (mis)recognition of inhabitants of these communities, including by other Calabrians, demonstrates how the experience of shame may be layered. This paper also considers how interviewees appear to deny their social and cultural proximity with the ’ndrangheta and the role this plays in a self-perpetuating cycle involving stereotypes, ’ndrangheta growth and extreme socioeconomic conditions.

This article examines the documentary series Combat film made by Leonardo Valente and Roberto Olla for Rai-Uno. Shown in April 1994, the series was based on film taken by the American army (1943-5) and provoked a national scandal when it was first shown. The article argues that in order to fully understand Combat film it is necessary to look at the overall design of the programme as well as its content. By concentrating on the ‘special’ shown on 5 April 1994 the author demonstrates how the revisionist message of ‘national reconciliation’ which underlies the programme is reinforced by a series of formal and technical strategies.

Since the early 1990s Italy has been engaged in promoting peace and stability in the Balkans with a growing amount of political, economic and military resources. At the beginning of the process of Yugoslav dissolution, the Italian polity was torn apart by a set of political and financial scandals that prevented the development of an assertive foreign policy. Over time, however, Italy was able to play a more relevant and constructive role. This article traces Italy's policy towards the Balkans from its modest beginnings to the present day, focusing on four key political/economic events: the war in Bosnia, the Telekom Serbia affair, the war in Kosovo and the support given to the nascent Albanian democracy. Generally speaking, Italy has provided a positive, although modest, contribution to bringing peace and stability to the region.

In this special issue of Modern Italy, four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology.

Since the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's city council. Local perceptions of national events, like Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed a significant symbolic meaning and challenged traditional understandings of local administration by introducing notions of political opposition. In Bologna, the second city of the former Papal State, the Moderates were able to form a political hegemony after the Unification of Italy and remained the predominant political force also after the parliamentary revolution of 1876 and the electoral reforms of the 1880s. Due to its limited influence on the local administration, Bologna's Left defined its ideological profile earlier and more clearly than the Left in other parts of Italy and integrated issues of national importance into local political discourse. Illustrating the relationship between central administration and the periphery, the article analyses the development of political language and changing meanings of political representation on the local level between Unification and World War One.

The Second National Conference on Disability, held in Bari in 2003, took the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), adopted by all WHO member states in 2001, as its frame of reference for future action and policies on disability. The ICF broke decisively with the medical model by seeing disability as an interaction between a biological and psychological condition and environmental and attitudinal barriers. Although existing Italian legislation on access to work for persons with disabilities, particularly Law 68/1999 on ‘collocamento mirato’ (targeted placement), anticipated some of the principles and definitions of the ICF, its implementation in practice was often snared in complex bureaucratic procedures and compromised by narrowly medical assessments of impairment and by considerable variations in standard from region to region. In 2009–2011 a pilot project, Progetto ICF4, was launched in 11 regions of Italy. It applied ICF principles, using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to assess the suitability of a work environment in terms of the networks of relations between the different actors involved in it. The way this has functioned in practice is illustrated by a case study of Teramo, one of the provinces in the pilot.

In recent decades, architectural historians, preservationists, and the general public have shown a growing interest in Fascist-era buildings. Many of the most high-profile examples are those associated with the monumental excesses of the regime. However, new attention has also been focused on more modest buildings that are significant examples of interwar Italian modernism or Rationalism, including former party headquarters (case del fascio). Taking as primary examples works by Giuseppe Terragni, the architect most often associated with Rationalism, as well by Luigi Carlo Danieri and Luigi Vietti, whose interwar contributions to Italian modernism have been less often the focus of scholarly attention, this article traces the postwar histories of case del fascio with the aim of better understanding the ways in which architecture and politics intersect and some of the consequences of this for the contemporary Italian architectural landscape.

This article sets out to outline the way in which existing narratives dealing with the development of modern design in post-1945 Italy have ignored those aspects of the story which do not concur with a characterization of that phenomenon that relies on the concepts of rationality, mass production and the impact of new materials. By focusing on and elaborating a number of ‘other’ themes—namely those of nature, craft, domesticity and the culture of consumption—this study sets out to redress this imbalance and to introduce the possibility of a new reading of modern design in Italy which can be seen to be rooted in a set of cultural values which are more obviously feminine’ in nature.