Operetta, with its well-structured production systems, constituted a dynamic sphere of activity that stretched across Unified Italy. This activity was rarely acknowledged by the representatives of so-called ‘high culture’, even as it stimulated the growth of the social structures that would later give rise to cinema and other forms of mass entertainment. Though in recent years scholars have focused on the foreign influences on light music theatre in Italy in the years following Italian unification, little attention has been bestowed on Italian operetta. This article concentrates on the origins of this genre, offering a detailed analysis of the dialect theatre tradition from which the first French-style operetta productions in Italy emerged. Specifically, I examine the urban contexts of Milan and above all Rome, a city of crucial importance in the diffusion of operetta in dialect, whose highly local (even parochial) connotations would exert a significant influence on the formal, social and cultural evolution of operetta right up to the turn of the century.

This article examines the dissemination of agricultural education in primary schools in the Romagna, an important rural area in post-unification Italy. The topic is explored within a wider perspective, analysing the impact of institutional changes – at both the national and local levels – on the transmission of agricultural knowledge in primary education during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Two particular elements of the process are examined: students, as the intended beneficiaries of the educational process; and teachers, who as well as having a key role in reducing the extent of illiteracy were sometimes also involved in disseminating agricultural knowledge. The transfer of that knowledge appears to have been a very challenging task, not least because of the scant interest that Italy's ruling class showed towards this issue. However, increasing importance seems to have been given to agricultural education in primary schools during the economic crisis of the 1880s, when the expansion of this provision was thought to be among the factors that might help to prepare the ground for the hoped-for ‘agricultural revolution’.