The problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.

In the essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Michel Foucault contends that every society constructs sites which can be defined as effectively enacted utopias (heterotopias), sites where social policies are articulated and where ideals of social ordering are physically performed. The article examines how a number of places in Fascist Italy, which conformed entirely to the principles of the heterotopia that Foucault sets out, were perceived by a selection of prominent writers and journalists. It examines the recorded journeys to the cemeteries of the First World War, to various renovated prisons within Italy and finally to the new towns south of Rome. It explores the kind of mental and physical sensations which the different writers evoked as well as examining the ways in which their written accounts of their imaginative experiences interacted with the myths of identity and social control which were central to Fascist ideology.

The focus of this article is the revisionist course which the Italian Socialist Party embarked upon after 1956 and which led up to the first Centre-Left government. The article challenges two quite well established views. One view is that the transformation experienced by the PSI during the 1956-64 period was simply tactically expedient and devoid of any substance and consistency. This article argues, by contrast, that these years represented, in Alessandro Pizzorno's words, a veritable ‘Copernican revolution’. This period of revisionism was as important as the better-known revisionisms elaborated during the same period by other European Socialist parties such as the German SPD or British Labour. The second main argument is that ‘structural reformism’, the new strategy adopted by the PSI after 1956, was not, as it has often been described, an expression of ‘duplicity’ owing to the party's incapacity to behave like a genuinely reformist party - a phenomenon that has allegedly long characterized parties of the Left. Instead, the strategy was reflected in the changes to European socialism during the early 1960s. In particular, this period marked a contrast to the previous years which were characterized by the dominance of ideas of ‘redistributive’ socialism, à la Anthony Crosland. This period marked also a shift among Socialist parties towards the acceptance of greater state controls over the economy by way of public planning and ownership.

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.

The incidence of partisans killing Fascists after the Liberation of Italy is a difficult and contested subject in the historiography of that period. This article addresses one particular case—the Schio killings which took place on the night of 6 July 1945—and examines different narratives of the event in the light of the ways in which the struggle for power played out between the Communists, the Allies and the centre-right has dictated the significance and commemoration of this incident and, by extension, of the Resistance itself. This discussion of narratives and the rhetorical struggle that has taken place to assert different forms of legality underlines the need to problematize categories such as ‘Fascist’, ‘Communist’, ‘victim’, ‘criminal’ and ‘justice’ in understanding the incident.

Italian capitalism has long been distinguished by the large size of the public enterprise sector and the power of large family firms, underpinned by powerful networks of inter-firm alliance orchestrated by the merchant bank, Mediobanca. This article seeks to analyse the extent to which the current programme of privatization is serving not only to shrink the size of, but to transform the structure of, power in the private sector. While some reformers have seen in privatization an instrument to encourage the adoption of Anglo-Saxon forms of corporate governance in Italy, it is argued here that the evidence of recent changes indicates the emergence of a more differentiated pattern of corporate governance rather than the triumph of any single model.

This article shows how the discovery of electrical energy that could be transmitted and used in industry triggered a huge effort to take advantage of Southern Italy's water resources and improve its natural environment. In the early years of the twentieth century, primarily through the initiative of Francesco Saverio Nitti, the great statesman and environmental expert, the rivers and forests of the South became an object of particular attention in that they were to be the central element in conservation measures whose aim was to produce cheap electricity, but which also necessarily involved reforestation, state control of forestry, the embankment of rivers and other changes. For southern reformers such plans were envisaged as the way to launch industrialization in the South.

In the 1970s a group of ex-partisans founded the Resistenza Continua social movement. This article traces the origins and history of the movement and explores its contacts with other similar neo-Resistance groups. Though Resistenza Continua was clearly not a movement of great consequence, an analysis of it sheds a useful light on the strengths and weaknesses of the Resistance tradition.