World cultural heritage is under systemic attack on several crisis fronts, most notably in Mesopotamia, where ISIS is practising a deliberate and highly sophisticated strategy of ‘cultural cleansing’. Through its newly established Task Force, Italy is leading the international community’s efforts to strengthen the protection regime by including a cultural component in the mandates of peacekeeping interventions. The Italian contribution distinguishes itself, thanks to its capacities and capabilities, in fulfilling the military, police and cultural tasks of ‘cultural peacekeeping’ and in meeting the needs of the international intervention in the crucial entry and exit phases. Moreover, Italy’s commitment to protecting cultural heritage fits perfectly with the distinctive features of Italy’s international identity and role while at the same time serving the country’s national interests by increasing its standing and visibility in world affairs.

Antonio Bresciani’s notorious trilogy of novels about the revolutions of 1848, starting with L’Ebreo di Verona, first appeared in the earliest issues of the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica from 1850. They constitute an intransigentist attack on the Risorgimento, and portray the events of 1848–1849 as the result of a satanically inspired conspiracy by secret societies. This article re-analyses those novels by placing Bresciani in the context of the ‘culture war’ between lay and religious world views across Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century. The article argues that Bresciani represents a significant case study in the intransigent Catholic response to the kind of patriotic motifs identified by the recent cultural historiography on the Risorgimento. The ‘paranoid style’ of Bresciani’s conspiracy myth is analysed, as is Bresciani’s portrayal of Garibaldi, female fighters, and Jews – in particular the tale of Christian conversion presented in L’Ebreo di Verona. The article argues that, despite its polarising, reactionary intentions, Bresciani’s fiction betrayed many influences from the Romantic culture of the Risorgimento that he claimed to despise.

This article examines how the American conception of female beauty introduced new and distinct understandings of beauty and femininity to postwar Italy. In analysing beauty product advertisements from one of the most popular women’s magazines of the period, Annabella, the article articulates the components of the American beauty ideal and illustrates how these notions broke with previous Italian ideas of beauty. Moreover, the article also examines how this new ideal promoted democratic consumer capitalist values – freedom of choice, individualism, and affluence – which had an important political and cultural significance in Italy’s Cold War struggle. In light of this struggle and the country’s postwar redevelopment, the American beauty ideal sought to influence the women who read Annabella and the way in which they fashioned and identified themselves – as the Italian ‘Mrs Consumer.’

From 2008 Sicily’s president was Raffaele Lombardo, leader of the Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA), a party founded by politicians who were already well established in the city of Catania and its province. In the summer of 2012 Lombardo’s government was forced to resign following an investigation that exposed the connections between the president and Mafia families in eastern Sicily. This article draws on two ethnographic studies carried out in Catania between 2009 and 2013: in describing the political behaviour and power relations between voters, local councillors and MpA executive officers, the research examined the tendency to internalise the widely understood narrative about politics and patronage in Sicily that Lombardo and his colleagues embodied. By relating ethnographic data to the legal documents showing the links between MpA leaders and Cosa Nostra bosses, I argue that social and cultural support for the party will have included support from local Mafia members.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the Italian public funding regime, in the light of the assumptions of the cartel party thesis. In the mid-1990s, the debate on party and party system change was revitalised by R. Katz and P. Mair (1995), who introduced the concept of the ‘cartel party’ as a means to study the increasing influence of the state on party politics. Among the main analytical dimensions of the cartel party argument, the system-level variables have received little attention with respect to the Italian case. In what follows I try to find out empirical evidence for the hypothesised changes in the relationship between parties and the state and in the patterns of inter-party competition. I will analyse the trends of the law-making process in the domain of party funding (1948–2014), by combining these observations with data on parties’ reliance on state funds and party collusive behaviour.