‘Soprattutto un attore di quella drammatica fase della vita italiana è stato tuttavia privilegiato in modo schiacciante come oggetto di studio: il “soggetto terrorista”, ovvero i terroristi e le organizzazioni terroristiche.’

(‘One kind of actor in that dramatic period of Italian life has been privileged above all others, in an overwhelming way by researchers and others: the terrorists themselves and their organisations.’ (Brizzi 2021, 11).

This essay aims to analyse the presence of neofascist organisations and far-right terrorism in Italy in the early 1970s from a new perspective. Firstly, it will focus on the activities to combat the subversive structures of the ‘black galaxy’ carried out by regional institutions through the creation of special ‘regional commissions of inquiry on the problems of neofascism’. Between 1974 and 1975, these commissions carried out an extensive inventory of the movements, associations and organisations of the Italian far right. Their aim was to show the spread of the phenomenon and its local roots. Building upon the information gathered by the regional commissions, the essay will analyse the relationships between the various far-right groups in Italy and their European counterparts. The final part of the article will focus on the influence of local specificities in defining the relations between extremist movements beyond national borders.

This article employs a transnational perspective to examine the relationship between food and drink consumption by Italians in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Italy's process of nation-building. The phenomena of emigration and colonisation were often interlinked, especially after Italy's defeat at Adua, Ethiopia, in 1896. This threw prime minister Francesco Crispi's form of colonialism into crisis and launched a different approach, based on the creation of a ‘Greater Italy’: a sort of Commonwealth based on cultural and economic ties between the Kingdom of Italy and Italian communities abroad. They were asked to be the bridgehead for Italy's economic and cultural expansion by consuming its exports, especially food and drink products. This required the development of shared feelings of national belonging among the emigrants, by breaking down the local identities that still prevailed and were particularly evident in the sphere of diet, as well as in religion, social life and language. The article analyses the promotional material that reflected the drive to foster Italian national sentiment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which helped to create an Italy both within and outside national borders.