Changing from a country of emigration into one of immigration has been one of the major phenomena of Italian society in recent years. One of the realms where this has been most evident is in Italian households employing migrants for domestic service and care work. This article looks at domestic and care practices in the everyday life of a Neapolitan household. Based on participant observation conducted in Giuseppe's apartment, it shows how the traditional Neapolitan way of life can be maintained by employing a live-in worker. It discusses some of the contradictions and tensions involved in this kind of work, and, by looking at everyday life, it also questions depictions of vulnerable migrant workers at the mercy of their employers.

While Piero Gobetti has often been the subject of historical attention in Italy since his death in 1926, the existing literature on this anti-fascist intellectual and editor has almost always considered him in the context of political tradition and focused on his theories and historical studies rather than on his editorial activities. This article aims to redress this balance, by situating Gobetti within the context of the socio-economic environment of post First World War and early fascist Turin, and by examining his role as an editor and cultural organiser with respect to his most well known periodical: La Rivoluzione Liberale. Drawing on the personal correspondences of Gobetti and the administrative archives of the periodical, an account of its circulation and readership will be constructed in order to determine the nature (in geography, education, profession and political affiliation) of the community of the ‘Liberal Revolution’.

The Italian linguistic situation is characterised by a remarkable number of language varieties, although the development of Italian in the past 150 years has been the cause of a language shift from local languages to Italian. The degree of endangerment suffered by so-called ‘Italian dialects’ is shown using the Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality drawn up by a UNESCO ad hoc expert group in 2003, and the data offered by the 2006 ISTAT survey on language use. The debate in Italy on the vitality of ‘dialects’ and their future has done little to activate mechanisms and strategies to reverse the worrying language shift that both minority languages and ‘dialects’ are undergoing.

Images and stories of migration within contemporary culture in Italy are shaped by several interconnections between the past (memories of Italian emigration, Italian poverty and rural society) and the present (Italy's postindustrial and multicultural realities). Analysing different texts, this article explores how the construction of the ‘official memory’ of the Italian emigration is used both to recall an anti-racist and sympathetic reception of today migrants and to conceal the specificity of today's mobility. In this context, the temporal categories of Eurocentric modernity are functional to the maintenance of hierarchical differences between ‘self’ (Italian and European) and different ‘others’ (the migrants). Although the system of representations is articulated around traditional dichotomies between North and South, East and West, and self and other, the article shows the crucial role of ‘migrancy’ cinema. It offers new trajectories, alliances and exchanges, which are significantly represented through the multiple crossings that challenge the walls of Fortress Europe in the Mediterranean.

‘But he has nothing on!’ Throughout his career, the Italian sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno's sophisticated and penetrating sociological analysis has laid bare the shortcomings of the theoretical ‘new clothes’ woven by methodological individualism out of concepts of ‘individual’, ‘interest’, ‘decision’. As well as articulating Pizzorno's critique, this article aims to draw attention to the substantial and skilfully designed suit of theoretical clothes in which he has dressed the naked emperor. Pizzorno calls on sociologists to pay particular attention to processes of mutual recognition and attribution of identity: these processes, Pizzorno argues, give standards of value to the individuals involved, who are seen as ‘jealous of their reputation’ rather than as utility maximisers.