The nation as seen from below: Rome in 1870

When Rome joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, its symbolic importance played a large part in its role as the new capital of the nation-state. That very symbolic weight, though, left but a small space for the Romans themselves, particularly the lower classes. While recent scholarship on Italian nation-building has explored the cultural project underlying its political developments, it still remains to be understood how the lower classes first experienced and responded to their incorporation into the nation. Courted by the new nation-state, its clerical opposition and its radical opposition alike, their Risorgimento was different from that of the Romantic tropes informing the new national politics.     

Public works and municipal government in two Italian capital cities: Comparing technical bureaucracies in Turin and Rome, 1848-88

The article draws a comparison between nineteenth-century Turin and Rome, linking the growth of technical bureaucracies in the municipal institutions of both cities to the local struggles for control over urban space. In both post-1848 Turin and post-1870 Rome, the implementation of new institutional reforms offered local city councils an opportunity to gain more power and autonomy than they had enjoyed in the recent past. The organization and the role of municipal technical services were therefore affected, with quite opposite results, by the conflicts opened with the state about the redefinition of the province of local government     

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity,film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.     

高卢人的罗马化——罗马征服与统治时代凯尔特文明的嬗变历程

公元前58年,恺撒出任山南高卢总督兼理纳尔榜南西斯高卢,标志着高卢战争的开始.经历8年的血战,高卢终于臣服于罗马的军威之下,凯尔特高卢社会从此步入了罗马化时代,拉丁文化逐渐成为高卢地区居民的主流文化.本文对高卢地区罗马化过程进行概要性梳理,在此基础上尽力阐释凯尔特文明的嬗变及其与罗马文明的融合历程.     

Destructive creation: fascist urban planning,architecture and New Towns in the Pontine Marshes

This paper examines the construction, architecture, planning and design of New Towns in the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, in the 1930s, analysing the discourses which contributed to their shaping and settlement. It focuses specifically on the plans and architectural characteristics of the city of Sabaudia as the best example of fascist urban utopias in the area. The paper also moves beyond an analysis of architecture and planning to consider the human beings who were slated for occupying what were viewed as ideal, utopian fascist spaces. This is done through an investigation of Italy's ruralization and internal colonization policies, which aimed to tackle a ‘demographic problem’ defined through recourse to statistics and sociological analysis. These policies were animated by colonists, and their families, chosen by the regime's institutions to take part in the Pontine Marshes project. Italian fascism's structuring of a new urban environment, which stretched from grand systemic designs to the measurement of mosquito net dimensions in colonial houses' bedrooms, justified the attempted social and political control of fascism's experimental urban subjects.