This article uses an original dataset to sketch a portrait of women mayoral candidates and women elected as mayors in Italy in the period 1993–2021. The analysis highlights several significant findings. Women must compensate for their political marginality by deploying other resources, such as higher levels of education. Nevertheless, women are penalised not only by the reluctance of parties to put them forward as candidates, but also by the elections themselves. More specifically, the electoral presence and strength of women decreases when the population size of the municipality grows, except for municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Moreover, women candidates are most disadvantaged in geographical areas where the socioeconomic condition of women is more marginal. However, women mayors running for a second mandate have the same chance of winning as men. Finally, it is the protest parties, rather than the left-wing parties, that are revealed as doing the most to promote women.

This article delves into the historical trajectory of Lotta Femminista, a pioneering separatist feminist network in Italy during the early 1970s, and its significant influence on feminist discourse, particularly concerning the advocacy for wages for housework. Through an examination of the group's development within the broader context of the Italian women's movement, this study illuminates the theoretical foundations and practical activism associated with the perspective on wages for housework. Drawing on archival documents and personal accounts, the essay investigates how Lotta Femminista depicted domestic labour as a form of women's exploitation within a Marxist framework. Despite facing criticism and opposition, Lotta Femminista's ideas resonated globally, leaving a legacy in feminist theory and activism. Through its engagement with issues such as the refusal to work and the recognition of unpaid care as a site of capitalist exploitation, Lotta Femminista contributed to the broader history of feminism in Italy and beyond.

You can never really get tired of Italian politics. Over the last 30 years, we have seen many turning points, the most memorable of which was undoubtedly Silvio Berlusconi's unexpected ‘descent into the field’ in 1994. Nor have we been deprived of colourful characters, such as Matteo Renzi or Matteo Salvini, who, as their careers took off, ended up burning their wings. And after many unsuccessful attempts, imagination has finally come to power (as they used to say in the 1960s), although the 1968 generation has nothing to do with it. Indeed, all the credit goes to the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), whose activists were seen carrying their leader Beppe Grillo – sitting in a dinghy – through the streets of Bologna during a procession of sorts. The general elections of 25 September 2022 added an important chapter to recent Italian political history, which has sometimes taken on a dramatic tone but more often that of a comedy or even a farce. All in all, nothing out of the ordinary; in the society of the spectacle, this is how the Darwinian struggle for political survival can also be played out.

This article is about the seminar held at Luiss University in Rome on 17 June 2024. The seminar focused on ‘The End of Christian Democracy: A New Direction for Research’ and was the first milestone and official launch of the PRIN research project ‘The End of Christian Democracy: The Collapse of a Political Dream – Voices from the Margins’, led by a consortium of four universities: Luiss, Roma Tre, Bologna and Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples.

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

Italy's prison overcrowding became world news in early March 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak sparked riots in prisons across the country, causing the death of 13 inmates. As a crisis narrative, the COVID-19 pandemic made visible the deep, ongoing crisis of Italy's prison system and disclosed new conditions for critical thought on the restorative potential of the penitentiary system. This article first describes the impact of COVID-19 on Adriano Sofri's ‘no prison’ writings, starting from his column in Il Foglio on the prison uprisings in March that followed the announcement of the anti-COVID measures; it subsequently analyses the Italian response to the pandemic from an internal, practitioner-led perspective. By offering both a dialectic and an immanent perspective, it aims to develop new ways of understanding the detention system and enhance the social credibility of the penitentiary system in Italy beyond the constraints of COVID and the emergency logic.

This article explores the socio-ecological impacts of Fascist hydropower extraction in the Alpine valleys of Italy, focusing on the Toce river basin during the interwar period. It investigates the conflicts between local communities and hydropower initiatives by private energy companies under Fascism, thereby revealing the regime's communication strategies rooted in its political ecology. By analysing newspaper articles, propaganda outlets and communal archival documents, the study uncovers statal and local perspectives on infrastructure development and its enduring consequences. How the political ecology of Fascism in a high-altitude hydropower construction site became an expression of Fascist modernity will thereby be shown. Despite objections from valley inhabitants, Fascist hydropower projects persisted, perpetuating socio-ecological inequalities after 1945. Even postwar efforts for compensation failed to address the long-lasting impacts on mountain communities. This research reveals the intersection of political ecology and modernist infrastructure development in Mussolini's Italy, and thus also highlights the legacies of Fascist resource extraction policies on the country's peripheral Alpine regions.

In 1912, the Italian parliament approved the extension of male suffrage, making it ‘almost’ universal. This process of revising representation transformed the very idea of the relationship between citizens and the state and shaped a profoundly different Italy. The aim of this article is to trace both the process leading to the approval of universal suffrage and its impact on the party system. With a compilation and analysis of data developed from scratch for the elections of 1909 and 1913, it was possible to analyse the main dimensions of the two rounds in a disaggregated manner. Three aspects make 1913 a year of transition. First, the degree of competition in the electoral process, especially in the South, increased considerably. Second, the decline of liberal formations was not transformed into defeat, thanks only to the Catholic vote. Third, the birth of the Popular Party and the failure to create a mass party of conservatives were causes of the imbalance in the party structure.

During the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

Knowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.

Within British-Italian history of the Second World War, there are several questions surrounding the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, on 2 July 1940, which still remain problematic. Nevertheless, this tragedy continues to play a prominent role in the heritage and memories of the Anglo-Italian communities in the UK. This article focuses on the experiences and memories of the Arandora Star from the perspective of members of the Italian community in the North-East of England. Oral histories of Italian civilian internees who were embarked onto the ocean liner were collected via qualitative interviews with descendants of victims and survivors. This article contributes to raising awareness of Arandora scholarship by articulating how memories were interpreted retrospectively and transmitted down generations. Informing the debate on the purpose of misremembering in oral history, this article sheds light on the events and their imaginary reconstruction.

This article progresses Second World War historiography of ‘enemy alien’ internment, especially of the SS Arandora Star, sunk in 1940 with a high loss of Italian civilian lives. Employing a new paradigm, that of the deathscape, defined as a topography of death and the practices that surround it, this investigation recontextualises Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland. Ambiguous loss, complicated grieving, disenfranchisements in mourning and absences in multiple layers of the deathscape form overarching themes that are explored in parallel to emotional-affective memory. The previously neglected study of individual memorialisation, both private and ‘official’, provides an important primary source in the fragmented materiality of the deathscape, allowing fresh insight on both cultural manifestations and political context. As the material and cultural apex of the deathscape, the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow, created by Archbishop Mario Conti in 2011, are evaluated through the lenses of leadership, identity and heritage activism.

On 2 July 1940, the ocean liner SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-47, with the loss of around 805 lives; over half of these were British-Italian civilian internees. This article approaches the event from the arena of Second World War military history, contextualising the sinking within the early Battle of the Atlantic. In so doing, it shifts the customary focus away from government internment policy and discussions of cultural legacy towards examining British and German naval strategies and realities. Tactical and logistical considerations of the conflict are investigated, the explication of which allows more detailed discussion of the sinking controversies and enables delivery of ‘answers’ to the persistent ‘questions’ of why Arandora Star was sailing unescorted and without Red Cross insignia. The broad perspective offered engages with transgression and culpability, and overall the article seeks to advance Arandora Star scholarship with its distinctive maritime focus.

This paper critically reviews and examines the available data concerning Italians embarked on the SS Arandora Star on 30 June 1940. It encompasses their fate on 2 July when the ship was sunk, their subsequent journeys and the sources used to verify the conclusions. The principal aim is to establish, as far as is possible, the precise number, correct names and other details of those who were embarked on the ship. A fully validated ‘Embarkation Listing’ is published here for the first time.

The political messaging of Leoluca Orlando, who served five terms as mayor of Sicily's capital, Palermo (most recently, until 2022), articulates a cosmopolitan vision of local identity. Orlando seeks to emphasise Palermo's ‘tolerant’ values, invoking the city's history to foster this image, as well as using a variety of rhetorical strategies. He portrays Palermo as having a true ‘essence’, which is necessarily multicultural. I analyse Orlando's pronouncements on his official Facebook page, as well as observing his audience's reactions to his messaging, both supportive and critical. I examine how Orlando articulates the narrative that Palermo has historically been a ‘mosaic’ of various cultural influences, proposing that the contemporary city is the ‘true’, welcoming face of the Mediterranean. As well as exploring the political utility Orlando sees in such arguments, I analyse the risks inherent in this essentialising project.

This article examines the first tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Italy and the so-called ‘sfida dei butteri’ (the challenge of the Italian cowboys of the Pontine marshes), which took place in Rome in March 1890. Analysing nineteenth-century Italian newspapers and photographs, I demonstrate that populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments marked the Italian media's responses to the American show. In the historical context of Italy's socioeconomic crisis and of the first phase of colonial expansion in Africa (1870–1922), the mixed reception of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, amplified by the media event of the sfida, shaped the fate of the western genre in Italy.

The article explores media depictions of industrial labour in Italy, with a special focus on visual, film and television portrayals, spanning from the 1960s to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than delving into an analysis of labour processes, the primary objective of the article is to scrutinise the gendered representations of work and whether and how the representation of work, including all professions, has played a pivotal role in shaping narratives about Italian society and its inherent contradictions. In this context, the article also emphasises the significance of what remains unrepresented, highlighting the absence of work as equally consequential as its presence. Of particular importance within this exploration is the examination of women's work, a realm less frequently depicted than that of men. The article dedicates specific attention to unravelling the nuances of women's role in the workforce, recognising their portrayal as a key element in understanding broader narratives about Italian society and its complexities.

Recently, a renewed history of foreign immigration in Italy, focusing on the very first migration flows after the Second World War, has offered a more appropriate periodisation of the phenomenon. Women have been at the forefront of these flows, which were initially determined by the new postcolonial setting of the former Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia). Subsequently, the immigrants came from various other countries (Spain, Cape Verde, Portugal, El Salvador, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ceylon, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan). At the same time, the majority of them were employed in a specific sector of the labour market: domestic work. This article focuses on female immigrants who were employed as domestic workers, their presence in public discourse in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, and government policies in this area. Drawing on statistical data and surveys, press and audiovisual materials, and feminist theory and practices, it aims to analyse the construction of paradigms – visibility, invisibility, subalternity, rights and racialisation – associated with female immigration and domestic work as a specific sector of employment.