From territorial to ethnographic colonies and back again: The politics of Italian expansion, 1890-1912

For Italy, unprecedented mass migration in the late nineteenth century overshadowed the European Scramble for Africa. To secure Italy's place in the new imperial order, Francesco Crispi proposed to harness emigration for colonial expansion, by settling Italy's East African colonies with the surplus Italian population. Defeat at Adwa in 1896 shattered Crispi's project, and turned attention to colonial possibilities elsewhere. Luigi Einaudi and other Liberals trumpeted the value of Italian collectivities or colonie across the Atlantic, where Italy exerted only indirect influence. In theory, these 'spontaneous colonies' would boost the Italian economy at little expense. Italian colonialist societies turned from Africa to the Americas, working to make Italian migration more prestigious, successful and profitable. After 1908, however, Enrico Corradini and the Italian Nationalists mocked these initiatives, and called upon the Italian state to return to traditional imperialism in Africa.     

In the footsteps of George Orwell: Patrick McCarthy as Italian correspondent for Tribune, 1978–1980

Abstract

This paper examines Italy's contribution to the United Nations (UN) and how effective this has been in protecting Italian interests. The first part outlines the areas where Italy's input to the UN has been most relevant in terms of ideas, policies and participation, such as for example the campaign to ban the death penalty and its participation in collective security through participation in UN peacekeeping missions. This paper also highlights the critical role that Italy's long-standing positions on UN reform and the enlargement of the Security Council have played in defining Italy's status in the international community, and asks whether there have been significant changes in the traditional Italian position and its loyalty to the UN and, more generally, to the multilateral system. The second part analyzes the origin and rationale of Italy's policies toward the UN and their effectiveness in defining and defending the national interest. It explores the idea that these policies have been determined by the ‘institutional multilateralism’ of the Italian Constitution, the ‘genetic multilateralism’ of the Italian society and the ‘forced multilateralism’ of Italy as a middle-range power. Italy's positions on the UN and its reform are examined in the light of claims that Italy's foreign policy reflects its ‘complex of exclusion’ and presumed lack of influence in the ‘major stakes’ in world diplomacy.     

Colonising Italians: Italian Imperialism and Agricultural ‘Colonies’ in Australia, 1881–1914

The historiography of Australian imperialism before the First World War has often neglected a context wider than the relationship with Great Britain. Yet this era also implicated non-British governments and their emigrants. Despite their small numbers, Italian settlers are significant for highlighting Italy's empire-building and Australia's struggles for national and imperial unity. Italy's foreign policies after 1901 opened commercial opportunities across its diasporic networks, which included subsidising agricultural ‘colonies’ in Australia. The contemporary discourses of sectarianism and racism voiced before Federation articulated political and popular resistance against Italian immigrants. The rhetoric shifted after Federation as state governments examined the issue of land tenure for closer settlements (small agricultural farms), appealing to an argument about serving unemployed Australians before approving foreign settler schemes. The history leading up to two Italian projects in Western Australia and Queensland in 1907 allows reflections on Italy's diaspora colonisation and Australian responses to foreign imperialism.     

Hegel's critique of the enlightenment

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.     

Italians and music. Financescape,ideoscape and mediascape

Abstract

This article explores the reasons why Italian contemporary musical life is generally considered to be below the standards set by other European and overseas countries, a situation that is all the more striking when the contrast with Italy's glorious musical tradition in past centuries is born in mind. The failings of public institutions and the inadequacies of policies have often been blamed for this, but in fact the causes are more complex. Arjun Appadurai's terminology that is cited in the title and the subsections of the article that are organized around the themes of ‘financescape’, ‘ideoscape’ and ‘mediascape’ provide the opportunity to develop a better understanding of the complex factors playing a role in the Italian music scene. In terms of structure and organization that greatest problems lay in the production system of the Opera theatres, in the progressive fall in public funds for the performing arts and in a visibly shrinking music market. These factors have created a crisis, but they have deep roots in Italian culture, one symptom being the relatively small demand for music in Italy. These different factors have combined to create a situation of immobility and conservatism that in turn weighs heavily on both serious and pop music.     

Masculinity and Secessionism in Italy: An Assessment

Abstract. The masculinist rhetoric of the northern Italian separatist party, the Lega Nord, is an example of nationalist status affirmation. The stereotyped contrast between effeminate southerners and masculine northerners developed at the end of last century is used to affirm the superiority of the masculine North. The Lega's rhetoric parallels mainstream concerns on Italy's international status, and proposals for reforms to make Italy more ‘masculine’ and European. The use of a gendered language for the affirmation of national status reveals a belief in a normative hierarchy of nations, but also introduces a tension between a ‘masculinist’ status affirmation and a model of modernity which includes the emancipation of women as one of its principles.     

The role of the sartoria in post-war Italy

This article aims to build on established scholarship by highlighting a little-studied area of fashion production, that of the regional Italian dressmaker. Using one woman's wardrobe as a lens through which to consider established patterns of consumption, this article examines the role of the sartoria or dressmaker in post-war Italy. After a brief discussion of the reputation and dynamics of the related but more exclusive Italian couture, the author defines the characteristics of clothing produced by Italy's regional, small-scale dressmakers and their importance within Italy's fashion system. The author draws conclusions based upon close examination of one woman's wardrobe, created by the Turin workshop Sartoria Grimaldi and now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum's permanent collection. A selection of this wardrobe was researched and exhibited for the first time in 2014 within the Museum's major exhibition ‘The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945–2014’.     

Silvio Berlusconi and the traditions of Italian foreign policy: a comment on Ambassador Romano's presentation

Abstract

While open to criticism on many levels, the foreign policy of Italy under Silvio Berlusconi does not deviate in many significant ways from traditional approaches, especially on its management of Italy's relations with the United States and the European Union. Italy's ‘exceptionalism’ is also similar to that of many other European states.     

Italian universities,Fascism and the promotion of corporative studies

This article deals with a specific aspect of the development of corporativism as ‘unofficial’ doctrine of Fascist Italy: its presence in Italian universities. It argues that corporatist schools followed the fortune of the ideals they were called to represent, which were definitely eclipsed by the mid-1930s, when the economic crisis called for more direct and effective forms of state intervention in economic life. In the universities, the rise of corporativism as a specific field of study, and the broader project of creating an ideologically educated future ruling class, challenged the domination exercised by the powerful faculties of law in particular, which traditionally were the key paths for access to the legal profession and the civil service. The resistance of the conservative university establishment meant that the plans to promote corporatist curricula had failed well before the fall of the regime, but many of those appointed to teach Corporative Studies under Fascism maintained their academic positions in Italy's ‘de-Fascistized’ post-war law faculties, and made innovative contributions to Italian social and economic thought.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

Adriano Celentano and the origins of rock and roll in Italy

Abstract

This article examines the way in which American rock and roll was translated into Italian culture. It argues that Italian versions of rock and roll were not just ‘watered down’ or ‘domesticated’ versions of the original. Rather, Italian rock emerged from a context that was different in musical, ethnic, political, linguistic and religious terms. By focussing on Adriano Celentano (the most prominent ‘Italian Elvis’ of the 1950s), it is shown that Italian rock singers evolved from mere imitation to cultural forms that were more related to the Italian environment. Musically, this meant a relationship with the domestic melodic tradition, jazz and American rock and roll rather than the blues. The rebellious attitude of early singers was a function of the hostility demonstrated towards them by political and religious authorities. Once this attitude was replaced by one of co-optation, opposition was replaced by modernizing integration. A figure like Celentano managed to be simultaneously defiant and conservative, pagan and religious, conformist and non-conformist. The resulting contradictions were concealed beneath a personal magnetism partly based on an established ‘cool’ style that appealed to the new categories thrown up by social and economic changes. Celentano's fame was confined to Italy not because he merely imitated American rock but because he developed an original synthesis that was specifically adapted to Italian tastes.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,Part II

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously confronted the emigration of 27 million Italians as an interpretative theme. Part II of this two‐part article studies Italian migrants’ experiences in France, South America, Switzerland and Germany, comparing ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ receiving areas to the English‐speaking world discussed in Part I. A focus on these other sections of the Italian diaspora challenges some fundamental interpretations of historians of Italy about emigration: Italian migrations to these areas were neither limited to the late nineteenth century, sparked by the economic crises of those yean, nor a product of the ‘problem of the Mezzogiomo’. Italian historians have special opportunities to study return migration to Italy, and to interpret Italy's own evolution into a multicultural receiving country, by comparing it to the models of multi‐ethnic nations where Italian migrants once settled around the world.     

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies' man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.     

Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.     

The crisis of the Italian state: then and now

Abstract

The article argues that Patrick McCarthy's Crisis of the Italian State was a book of great value by an author who was a partisan in the struggle to reform the Italian political system. The book's argument that lasting reform of Italian politics is only possible if middle class Italians begin to act as citizens, rather than as clients who regard the state as a source of potential largesse, has proved to be a far-sighted one, although at the time it seemed simplistic. Many of Italy's current troubles stem from the failure of Italy to go beyond the ‘overworked state’.     

Difference Between the Self and the Heathen. European Imperial Culture in Dutch Missionary Exhibitions, 1909–1957

‘Imperial culture’ is a concept coined by British historiography to describe the influence of imperialism on metropolitan British culture. Although it is now used in other national historiographies as well, it would appear that we have not yet realised the concept's full potential. This article, drawing on recent scholarship emphasising the transnational connections in European imperial cultures, investigates the implications of seeing imperial culture as a European phenomenon and as a European mentality. For this purpose, this article uses the narrative that was propagated at a specific national practice where empire met a metropolitan European society as a case study: missionary exhibitions in the Netherlands in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, Catholic and Protestant missionaries displayed objects from the indigenous, colonised populations who they were trying to convert and hereby legitimised and underpinned imperialism in Dutch culture. However, their significance went deeper than that. This article argues that the missionaries’ narrative transcended the national level and promoted ideas of Christianity as a European religion and civilisation as a European trait. A European community based on religious, cultural, and racial traits was set against a generic non-European heathen world. However, national and denominational frames of reference also remained in place. With this case study, the article explores the possibilities and difficulties that arise from studying imperial culture as a European mentality.     

Conspiracy theories in Republican Italy: the Pellegrino Report to the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism

This article analyses the draft of the final report prepared by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, who from 1994 to 2001 chaired the ‘Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres’. The document was completed in 1995 and attempted a general interpretation of the causes of the political violence that had been a major feature of the history of the Italian Republic up to that point. The report was closely connected with what is often described as the moment of the transition between Italy's ‘first’ and ‘second’ Republic and, in keeping with revisionist theories current at the time, attributed responsibility for misdeeds and occult plots (real or imagined) that occurred in Italy over a period of forty years primarily to ideological division caused by the Cold War. This paper argues that this resulted in a highly distorted narrative of Italian history in which events appear to be determined almost exclusively by external factors to the exclusion of important internal dynamics.     

The Gubbio Papers: historic centers in the age of the economic miracle

World War II is over. Italy is radically transformed with new modes of production and consumption, of thinking and dreaming, of living the present, remembering the past, and projecting the future. Here is the end of an 'old' archaic Italy, and the beginning of a 'modern' one, which rethinks its own national identity on the basis of its 'Atlantic' collocation and Marshallized economy - but also as resistance to an 'Americanization' of its culture. An emblematic episode in this reconstruction of Italy is the discussion, opened by the Gubbio Papers in the early 1960s, on the ­'management' of Italy's artistic 'patrimony'. The restoration of Italy's historic centers, aimed at avoiding American urban sprawl and the culture of US neo-capitalism, engenders, however, new and more peculiar problems - last but not the least the 'museumification' of both Italy's culture and its past. This article frames the Gubbio 'solution' within the larger contemporary debate concerning the models of economic and cultural development that should be deployed in Italy's 'reconstruction'.     

A queen without a sceptre: public opinion and the political-constitutional debate in Italy in the first fifty years of national unification

Italy's intellectual debate over the concept of ‘public opinion’ in the first fifty years after unification can be better understood if one starts from an analysis of the constitutional framework. The definition of the rights and duties of rulers and ruled was the most pressing concern for the liberal ruling class. It should be noted that a strong paternalistic element was always present in the Italian intellectual debate. This paternalistic approach emerges clearly in the official Catholic culture. The main difference between Catholic intellectuals and liberals was over the ‘public sphere’. Liberalism mistrusted the masses because they were prone to insubordination and easily manipulated by demagogy, but it also believed the masses could elevate themselves. The ruling class's culture was essentially a synthesis between ‘moderatismo’ and that section of Catholicism that was less closed to modernity. Public opinion was considered by many as ‘queen of the world’, but according to the Albertine constitutional statute, the king was more politically influent.     

Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women

The second part of 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning author David I. Kertzer's interview with the Italian political leader Romano Prodi covers the period from the fall of Prodi's first government in 1998. Starting with the causes of the 1998 crisis, the discussion follows Prodi's subsequent career as President of the European Commission (1999–2004), the introduction of the Euro, the expansion of the EU, and the attempts to introduce a new European constitution, before moving to the second Prodi government (2006–08). Describing his subsequent role as UN Special Envoy for the Sahel and his candidacy in the 2013 Italian presidential elections, Italy's former Prime Minister reflects more widely on the current state of European and Italian politics.