Modern Italian History

From 1815 to 1831 the sabaudian court spent longer and longer periods in Genoa. Subsequently, Genoa became a sort of second State capital, and the Genoese aristocracy began to frequent the court: during the ancient Republic this representativeness did not exist. Only some families, however, were admitted to court. These few families were skilled to use the court to secure careers both in the army and in diplomacy. In mid 19th century these families were perfectly inserted in the service of the Sabaudian crown.

Negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta la società italiana attraversa un periodo decisivo, nel quale cambia in modo rapido e profondo, come forse mai nella sua storia. Il libro racconta questo momento di passaggio utilizzando una categoria di fonti storiche inconsueta e formidabile: le canzoni di Sanremo. Da Nilla Pizzi a Claudio Villa, da Modugno a Celentano, da Mina alla Cinquetti, quelle prime, seguitissime edizioni del Festival riflettono il percorso dell'Italia dal Dopoguerra al Boom, dalla povertà al benessere, da società contadina a moderna potenza industriale. Analizzando le canzoni sia da un punto di vista testuale che musicale ed inquadrandole nel generale contesto di ricostruzione storica di quegli anni, viene messo in luce come quelle musiche e parole, quei divi e quel pubblico rivelino i mutamenti (e le resistenze al cambiamento) di un Paese attratto e spaventato dalla modernità. Cambia il modo di rappresentare la realtà, di guardare all'America, nonché l'immagine dell'amore, della donna e della famiglia. Mentre partiti politici ed intellettuali come Pasolini, Eco, Fallaci e Montanelli si interrogano sul Festival, gli italiani ne decretano a gran voce il successo, canticchiandolo, criticandolo o facendo entrambe le cose.

(303 pagine - Nota introduttiva di Stefano Bollani)
http://www.mondadorieducation.it/libro/leonardo-campus/non-solo-canzonette/120900039852

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In the Fifties and the Sixties, Italian society undergoes changes as quick and deep as probably never before in its history. The book deals with this pivotal moment through an unusual, yet very powerful category of historical sources: the songs of the Sanremo Festival.
With singer-stars such as Nilla Pizzi, Claudio Villa, Domenico Modugno, Adriano Celentano, Mina and Gigliola Cinquetti, those early, very popular editions of the Sanremo Festival reflect the path Italy was covering from postwar to the "boom" years, from poverty to prosperity, from rural society to a modern industrialized power.
By analyzing the songs both from a textual and a musical point of view, and by placing them into the historical context, the book underlines how those notes and lyrics, those singer-stars and their audiences may reveal us the changes (and efforts to resist them) of a country that was both attracted and scared by modernity.
Among things that change are the way songs represent social reality, the relation with America and its culture, the image of love, woman and family.
As political parties and intellectuals such as Pasolini, Eco, Fallaci and Montanelli judge the Festival, Italian people sanction its success with a loud voice, by either whistling it, criticizing it, or doing both at the same time.

(pages 303; Foreword by Stefano Bollani)
http://www.mondadorieducation.it/libro/leonardo-campus/non-solo-canzonette/120900039852

La «politica dei sacrifici» del governo Andreotti e la proposta dell’«austerità» avanzata da Berlinguer furono il principale bersaglio del movimento del 1977. Sacrifici e austerità erano ritenuti due programmi convergenti, finalizzati – secondo i contestatori – non solo a fronteggiare la crisi economica ma a prefigurare un modello di sviluppo basato sulla riduzione dei livelli di benessere per le classi subalterne. Attacchi molto duri furono indirizzati al Partito comunista. Ebbe così luogo, quell’anno, la prima contrapposizione esplicita e frontale in Italia fra il principale partito della sinistra e un movimento sociale. Il movimento considerava infatti il Pci collocato a difesa del capitalismo e lontano da ogni progetto di trasformazione della società. Si trattò non solo di uno scontro politico e ideologico, ma anche di una contrapposizione tra diversi universi culturali, sistemi di valori, modelli esistenziali, che traducevano modi diversi di interpretare e vivere le trasformazioni della società italiana (la raggiunta maturità della società del benessere, la diffusione dei consumi, la ricerca del soddisfacimento di bisogni individuali). Il movimento fu di fatto anche un’espressione di quei cambiamenti, cui diede corpo con nuove forme di politicizzazione e un rapporto tra militanza e privato diverso dal passato. Quei fermenti, tuttavia, attraversarono anche il corpo del Pci, nonostante le rigide posizioni del gruppo dirigente.

The course is a journey through 250 years of Italian history, from the French revolution to the current pontificate of Pope Francis. The aim is to capture fundamental moments and issues in the religious life of the Italian people. While focusing mainly on Italy, the course will also take into account questions and events that relate to the broader history of Western societies. The primary type of documents that will be examined are the papal encyclicals (official letters authored by the popes). The course will study the theological and political content of the encyclicals, as well as their linguistic and stylistic strategies. While focusing primarily on pontificates and their intellectual production, the course will pay attention also to the religious life of the people and the documents that reveal their devotion and beliefs. In this regard, the class will shed light on the historic tensions and conflicts in Catholic history between the religious canon (that is the set of laws and norms produced by the Holy See across the centuries), and the actual practices and beliefs of the people.
The course will be delivered in a seminar mode and host contributions from notable external scholars. Students will be invited to give presentations, comment on the readings, and be actively engaged all the time. Attention will be paid to the original Italian documents or their translation. Students with no knowledge of the Italian language are welcome to join.

Segnalazione del saggio incluso nel numero monografico dedicato a "L'Italia e la rivoluzione d'Ottobre. Masse, classi, ideologie, miti tra guerra e dopoguerra", a cura di Giorgio Petracchi, in ANNALI DELLA FONDAZIONE UGO LA MALFA "STORIA E POLITICA", XXXI, Edizioni Unicopli, Milano 2016, pp. 144-166.

Il saggio intende dimostrare che, subito dopo la pubblicazione, da parte di Alberico Gentili, dei De iuris interpretibus Dialogi sex (1582) e delle Lectiones et Epistolae (1583-1584) i rapporti fra Jean Hotman e il giurista di San Ginesio divennero molto difficili e burrascosi. Lo dimostrano alcune epistole scritte da Hotman ad autorevoli giuristi (ad es. Bodin), e ad alcuni umanisti (Bergmann, Payne, Cuffe, Th. Savile) contenenti critiche molto dure e severe ai Dialogi gentiliani. Malgrado ciò, e malgrado le opposizioni dei puritani, Gentili riuscirà ad ottenere la cattedra di Civil Law a Oxford.Il saggio contiene anche notizie circa il tentativo compiuto, dal Gentili, di ottenere un insegnamento a Tubinga nel 1580.

uelques mois après l’élection de Benoît XIV, les architectes de la Fabrique de Saint-Pierre de Rome engagèrent une série d’enquêtes de stabilité sur la coupole de la basilique. Elle présentait, depuis longtemps déjà, de nombreuses fissures. L’inquiétude s’étendit à la curie et, à l’automne 1742, elle était à son paroxysme. La pape commanda alors une expertise à des savants réputés mais étrangers au microcosme romain de l’architecture. Les résultats de leurs travaux, présentés lors d’un spectacle de démonstration scientifique mettant en scène la maquette de Michel Ange restaurée pour l’occasion, ne firent que déclencher une onde de protestations qui s’étendit sur plusieurs années. La querelle initiale, confinée dans les cercles du palais apostolique, se constitua rapidement en une controverse scientifiquement argumentée qui traversa avec une grande violence les catégories professionnelles et les clans intellectuels. Cependant, la richesse du dossier montre qu'il ne peut être réduit à un simple débat policé sur des questions techniques. Il fait apparaître la très grande diversité de conceptions sur l'architecture en vigueur dans la Rome du milieu du XVIIIe siècle, motivées par des positions identitaires, intellectuelles, religieuses et politiques discordantes.

Davide Tabor, Il cerchio della politica. Notabili, attivisti e deputati a Torino tra ‘800 e ‘900, Silvio Zamorani editore, Torino 2013, pp. 288, Euro 32,00

Il libro parla di politica e si concentra sui decenni tra Otto e Novecento, quando le trasformazioni sociali cominciarono a modificare il sistema politico italiano. Parla dell’Italia liberale, negli anni in cui iniziò ad allargarsi il corpo elettorale e dunque si estese la gamma degli interlocutori sociali dei candidati e delle associazioni, e quando tanto le istituzioni quanto le organizzazioni cominciarono ad affrontare il problema della partecipazione delle masse alla vita politica italiana. Parla di politica «alta» e di politica «bassa», di persone importanti, deputati, senatori e ministri, di individui comuni, artigiani, operai, membri di associazioni popolari, e di notabili di quartiere. Tra tutti questi attori, infatti, c’erano nessi, contatti e scambi, e la politica di massa sembrava il frutto, più che di una nazionalizzazione o di una mobilitazione dall’alto, dell’interazione tra i vari soggetti che da più parti contribuivano a costruire le organizzazioni e a definire i messaggi politici, in «alto» come in «basso». Il libro ha vinto il premio SISSCO-ANCI Storia 2014.

The aim of this paper is to situate the Sardinian village within the flux of contemporary social transformations that stand poised to redefine it. Specifically, it examines the highland village of Orgosolo, understanding it as a site that concentrates a clear set of cultural self-definitions that stand opposed to perceptions of life beyond the locality. A key element of local discourse is a view of the collective historical experience that
underscores the social, political, and cultural marginality of rural life in central Sardinia, and associates the village with a dissident identity that is reaffirmed by a social memory of violence suffered at the hand of powerful outsiders from Antiquity onwards. Yet, this perspective on the locality is not the sole one, and as such the village presents a contested site where the normative traditionalist vision holds little traction among an ascendant generation of urban-oriented youth who, for their part, reject the past and any definition of village identity explicitly associated with it.

This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy's middle- and upper-class households during fascism's twenty years in power. Due to significant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country's popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy's typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By promoting the beverage's hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moderate consumption of the peninsula's standardised wines with the dictatorship's nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine's honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country's typical wines as Italy's wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’.

Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.

This introductory chapter outlines how Fascist Italy played a distinct role in shaping international affairs in the period between 1935 and 1945, creating a Fascist decade of war. In contrast with the tendency to marginalize Fascist Italy’s role in much of the scholarship, we suggest that Italy was one of the principal causes of the international instability leading to World War II and that Fascist ideology influenced the conduct of war across the Mediterranean theatre. The Fascist decade of war is analysed through the political, military, diplomatic and cultural dimensions, adopting a dual perspective. On the one hand, the Italian angle considers the ways in which Fascist policy, strategy and ideology made this decade of war a by-product of the consolidation of the Fascist regime. On the other, the international angle seeks to evaluate how Fascist regional challenges affected the policies, strategies and ideologies of other countries. We, therefore, seek to revisit and challenge traditional military histories by exploring violence, propaganda, perceptions, ideology, empire, race and occupation, engaging with new methodological approaches. In so doing, this volume draws upon recent developments in Italian and international scholarship, providing a necessary update on the state of the field for an English-speaking readership.

One of the most important Sephardic families, the Abrabanel played an important role in the making of the Cosimo I de' Medici's state. Allowed to establish banks in Tuscany and granted special privileges, the Abrabanels, especially Benvenida, was in very good personal terms with Cosimo's wife, Eleonora of Toledo who - according to some Hebrew sources - used to refer to her as a "mother".

"Cinema is the most powerful weapon " – Benito Mussolini's motto loomed in capital letters over the 1937 inauguration of the massive production hub being built in the outskirts of Rome, reminding the film industry what was expected of it. Notwithstanding the effort to deploy cinema as a key technology for governing the nation and the empire, in the early 1940s film became a battlefield for the Regime. This excavates from the closet of memory the story of the Cinema cell, the group of young film enthusiasts who, in fascist Italy, engaged in what today we would call " media activism " : they put their lives on the line, infiltrated the film industry, and shouldered the movie camera as their initial weapon of combat against a defiant totalitarianism. Here, I focus on how the underground formation elaborated an iteration of filmic realism that countered the implantation in the body politic of racialized fantasies of national identity. In tracing the cell's efforts to develop a gaze on the nation that would oppose the race-driven realism advocated by Mussolini's son Vittorio, among others, I establish a genealogy for Visconti's 1943 Ossessione and its display of queerness as the authentic alternative to fascist life. By way of conclusion, I disentangle the system of intimacy and affectivity harnessed by this film from the one that postwar neorealism contributed to securing.

This book deals with the fate of one of the oldest and largest tangible remains of ancient Rome: the fourth century BCE city wall, incorporated in the city's symbol of modernity, the central train station of Termini. Through a "heritageography" of the renowned station, the book tells a history of modern Italy and the classical tradition, exploring the dynamic of the interplay of ancient and modern in the Eternal City in the period 1860–1950.