Over the last 30 years, Silvana Patriarca, a professor of Contemporary History at Fordham University, New York, has deeply and consistently investigated the construction of the Italian national narrative: its ‘long term’ genealogy, its characteristics, its tensions. Her first book, Numbers and Nationhood (Patriarca 1996), focused on the co-production of statistical knowledge and the national image of Italy during the Restoration and the Risorgimento, rereading the interplay of science, culture, and politics in the formation of bourgeois ‘public opinion’ in the liberal period. In Italian Vices (Patriarca 2010), she dissected the rhetoric and tropes of the national character, its ostensible fragility, and the different political uses of the recurring discourse on Italian vices and virtues, from the Risorgimento to the Republic.

Although there is a wide-ranging historiography dealing with psychoneurosis, various manifestations of psychic suffering widespread among traumatised soldiers during the Great War have received less attention. This essay, based on an analysis of soldiers' clinical files in Italian psychiatric hospitals, draws out these phenomena. The main forms assumed by this kind of trauma are three: soldiers who strip off their uniform and wander around naked; a sort of regression to childhood; and a particular type of hysteria. The essay stresses how existingstereotypes about women were adapted to form a new way of describing masculinity in crisis, and the new political subject: the masses. Too many emotions, too many nerves, define the affected men: they are subjects deprived of personality, and their predicament highlights the transition from soldier-hero to mass-soldier.

The article uses archival sources to critique the currently dominant etymological approach to the history of the word ’ndrangheta as used to refer to the Calabrian mafia. Scholars such as Paolo Martino and John Trumper have latched onto the word's ancient Greek origins to argue that the mafia organisation that we today call ’Ndrangheta has origins dating back many centuries. Moreover, according to Martino in particular, the flattering connotations of the word ’ndrangheta (courage, martial prowess, manliness) indicate that the ’Ndrangheta as a social phenomenon was rooted in the same positive values, and that it only later degenerated into criminality. This article proposes that the work of Martino and Trumper represents a largely evidence-free extension of etymology into the field of history. Analysing the latest archival evidence about the word from criminal trials conducted in the 1920s and early 1930s, and setting it in the context of current historiography and criminology on the ’Ndrangheta, the article argues that two conclusions about the history of the word are likely: that the use of ’ndrangheta as a name for the Calabrian mafia began at around the time it first appeared in the documentary sources; that the first to adopt it were mafiosi themselves.

‘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 historiographical article will argue that the March on Rome (October–November 1922) was the end point of a serious and at that point unique insurrectionary project, which followed three intense years of Fascist violence (where the state had rarely if ever taken on the Fascists, and had often colluded passively or actively with them). It was accompanied by violence and constant threats of further violence, in Rome and across Italy. It was in no way a bluff – but also stood as a warning to all those who still imagined that Fascism could be opposed, on the streets, in parliament, or at the ballot box. The violence hit bystanders, but was also targeted at the private homes of communists, socialists and hated liberals, and at centres of urban resistance in Rome itself. This article will look in detail at the ways historians have understood the March on Rome, and systematically removed the violence from that event, ignored the March itself and played down the role of the squadristi. It will also look at the powerful role of a ‘what if’ counter-factual which has dominated most accounts of the March on Rome to date, with some recent exceptions.

The centenary of the March on Rome has prompted Modern Italy's Contexts and Debates section to focus on the public uses of history in reference to interwar Fascism. We are looking into the ‘Past, Present, and Future of the Italian Memory of Fascism’, to borrow the title of Guido Bartolini's interviews that were published in our issue 27 (4), 2022. While commemorations and anniversaries shouldn't inherently influence academic research agendas, a broader understanding of public memory can help us to understand the current political mood in Italy. For example, it can explain why the centennial and other comparable ‘fascist’ anniversaries now have little meaning for most of the Italian public and are scarcely addressed by politicians. Indeed, most Italians seems to suffer from political amnesia. The condition is so serious that not even a dramatic occurrence such as the victory of the proudly post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party at the election of September 2022 has proved able to cure it. Happening just a few days before the centenary of the March on Rome, the electoral results were surely expected to elicit a strong reaction by left-wing politicians and intellectuals – perhaps a mass demonstration, like the one that took place in Milan on 25 April 1994, in the aftermath of the first victory of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, when another post-fascist party, Alleanza Nazionale, took power. Yet nothing of that sort has happened in 2022. Why?

In today's Europe, commemorations can be times at which to affirm international reconciliation, based notably on the knowledge produced by historians who are becoming progressively cosmopolitan. However, commemorations are also used by national-populist political parties for electoral purposes and can lead to tensions with neighbouring states. This was the case in Trieste in September 2019, when the city council executive (controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition) decided to erect a statue of Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 years after he had occupied the nearby city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in Croatia. This commemoration led to a series of debates among historians, especially in Italy. Based on a critical discourse analysis and an interdiscursive approach to narratives produced by historians for colleagues and for the broader society, the current research investigates the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history when in parallel a commemoration is coordinated by national-populist forces in a public space.

This article analyses the development of Italian health policies in the post-Second World War period. Shortly after the setting up of the ‘Beveridge model’ and the creation of the British National Health Service, Italy also introduced a new approach to health, which became part of the Constitution. However, the implementation of the necessary reforms was delayed due to resistance from the country's institutions and government parties. The introduction of a radical health reform became possible only in 1978 through pressure generated from social conflicts, trade unions and left-wing parties. The implementation of the National Health Service encountered a number of obstacles due to the specific conditions of Italy, but also owing to changes at the international level. The neoliberal policies started in the 1980s introduced restrictions in health spending, the regionalisation and privatisation of services, and a new selective approach to health. In spite of these limitations and contradictions, the Italian healthcare system has been considerably successful, leading to strong improvements in health and to a life expectancy at birth among the longest in Europe. The recent developments – and the experience of the pandemic – confirm the important impact of a public, universal health service and, at the same time, the persistent policy efforts aimed at weakening its reach.

This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the ‘outsiders’ turned into ‘enemies’ and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time.

This article investigates how the Ethiopian war was represented by Epoca – the most prolific Italian weekly news magazine for illustrated reportage in postwar Italy – during the last phase of Italian colonialism (1950–60). The analysis focuses specifically on two photographic commemorations published on the twentieth (1955) and twenty-fifth anniversary (1960). The aim of this contribution is to examine these iconotexts in order to display how the interplay between images and words transmitted a selective and codified memory whose path mainly moved from nostalgia to pride while remaining characterised by a complete rejection of the feeling of shame. This representation was not even questioned by the references to those elements that will be considered, in the long-term, as evidence of the brutality of this colonial enterprise: those signals appear not to have been removed, but rather silenced and not truly comprehended, preventing the sense of shame from taking root in Epoca until 1995.

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.

For the last 20 years, research on European colonialism has addressed private photo collections. Prior to that, interest was focused specifically on propaganda photography. In the hope that privately kept material could offer new, more ‘authentic’ insights into colonial everyday life, researchers have so far mostly ignored the mass-produced images which are often part of such private collections, too. But especially when the question arises of how mass-produced images functioned as consensus-building tools, of what impact they had on the ground, they seem to be a promising source. Therefore, this paper on mass-produced images of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War in private photography collections probes how ‘ordinary’ soldiers used images, what meanings they created in the process, and, thereby, how they positioned themselves relative to the Fascist regime's dominant colonial discourse. This article answers these questions by drawing on the private collections of four so-called ‘allogeni’, German-speaking Italian citizens from the province of Bozen/Bolzano, who took part in the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.

This essay will consider some key aspects of the imagery of the ventennio regarding the Italian overseas territories through the analysis of the covers of the illustrated magazine Libia, launched in 1937 in the context of the so-called ‘Fourth Shore’ of Italy, ruled between 1934 and 1940 by governor Italo Balbo. Firstly, this essay will address the existing bibliography on the relations between the press and Italian colonialism. Then, it will examine the figure of Balbo over two sections – one relating to his activities for the development of Libya, the other dedicated to his relationship with the arts – unpacking the close links between the work of the governor in the colony and the periodical. The final part of the article will focus on Libia, examining the themes and subjects chosen to illustrate its covers and the several artists who collaborated with the magazine as illustrators.

This study analyses the essential question of the role of visual and material culture in the construction of a mass racial ideology during the Fascist colonial empire. The hypothesis behind this essay is that representations of the facial features of colonised populations may be understood as agents that transform what are in fact inconsistent and vague notions of identity and race into concrete and effective ontologies, both in the scientific field and in the popular imaginary. The facial casts made by the anthropologist Lidio Cipriani and exhibited in the race pavilion of the very popular Mostra triennale delle Terre italiane d'Oltremare (1940) in Naples, the anthropological photographs and illustrations of the infamous journal La Difesa della razza (1938–43), and the advertising images representing African women's bodies, both gave consistency to the notion of race and incarnated its protean nature made up of narratives, metaphors, fantasies, and prejudices constructed and accumulated over time.

In 1993, a few months before his death, the veteran film director Federico Fellini was invited to the University of Bologna to receive an honorary doctorate. Bologna, the oldest modern university in the world, wished to bestow on Fellini its institutional recognition of his half a century in the Italian film industry. Not unflattered, Fellini declined, and wrote to the rector of the university that he felt ‘like Pinocchio being decorated by the headmaster and carabinieri for cavorting in Pleasure Island’.

This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

This article assesses Italy's participation in the Expo du Sahara in Paris in 1934, placing it within the framework of European colonial culture, exhibitions, and international relations during the 1930s. Hitherto, the Expo du Sahara has been largely ignored by historiography, but it offers important insights into Italo-French relations in the years immediately preceding Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the ways in which Fascist Italy sought national and international legitimacy through the medium of exhibitions. The Paris exhibition, staged by the European powers after years of clashes, was also a physical representation of the so-called ‘colonial concord’ and ‘peaceful’ partition of North Africa, processes in which Italy's role was fundamental.