The 1860s opened with a new geopolitical prospect for Europe: Italian unification, achieved in 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, outspoken supporter of Italian independence, tracked the period of transition between the 1859 Second War of Independence and the creation of the new nation-state in her final work, collected in Last Poems[GK8] (1862). Though understudied patriotic poems like “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani,” “Garibaldi,” and “The King’s Gift” look forward to celebrate an anticipated national consensus, they also look back, working through public processes of mourning. Celebrating the unification of disparate kingdoms and imperial territories under a constitutional monarchy might have been particularly resonant for the UK as a nineteenth-century nation-state, as British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento suggests; however, attention to Barrett Browning’s transatlantic publication contexts and political-historical content , as the American Civil War began to unfold, reminds readers that civil strife and territorial dissolution remain ever-present undercurrents to nation-state creation.

Anglo-Italian ‘traditional friendship’ was a widely-assumed principle in European diplomacy during the second half of the 19th Century. But at a closer look, Anglo-Italian relations were less idyllic than it seemed.

This first ever account of the history of the Italian patent legislation throughout the nineteenth century describes the salient characteristics of patent systems in the Italian pre-unitary States (Kingdom of Sardinia, Gran Duchy of Tuscany, Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, etc.). It assesses the extent to which the legacy of these pre-unitary states’ legislation shaped the discussions and the formation of the first Italian patent law after the political Unification in 1861. It then compares the characteristics of the Italian patent law of 1864 with the English, French, and German models, noting that this 1864 law remained substantially unchanged until 1934. Finally it examines, from an Italian perspective, the implementation of the Paris Convention of 1883 in terms of both legislative changes and its effects on the activities of indigenous and foreign inventors in Italy, providing an analysis of the major trends in patenting activities by Italian and foreign inventors and their changes over time.

The history of operetta in Italy is inextricably entangled with discourses about the status of Italian opera and the formation of an Italian national identity. In the 1860s, it was Offenbach, Hervé and Lecocq that conquered the Italian stages, then, later, the ‘Viennese’ imports of Suppé, Strauss Jr and Lehár. Italian operettas based on parodies of foreign works and combining elements of dialect and couleur locale flourished at this time but struggled to undermine both the foreign monopoly and the time-honoured tradition of opera buffa. The relationship between operetta and Italian opera – not only buffa but also seria – was central also to critical discourses about the rise of the Italian bourgeois, becoming closely intertwined with questions on the position of musical theatre between entertainment and art. Inevitably, discussions of operetta also took strong nationalistic undertones in a country that was struggling to find a unifying national identity and that recognized operetta as a foreign import that could contaminate opera or illegitimately undermine its primacy on Italian stages. The extraordinary success of La vedova allegra in Milan in 1907 and the growing political tensions between Italy and Austria-Hungary in ensuing years sparked new interest in the creation of a national operetta.