Case del fascio and the Making of Modern Italy

Abstract

In recent decades, scholars of modern Italy have identified Fascism’s effort to establish a new society as a hallmark of the regime’s engagement with modernism. Fascist party headquarters (case del fascio), the primary institution through which the party aimed to alter the character, habits, and attitudes of its citizens in the making of Fascist Italy, are largely absent from this discourse, despite their extraordinary importance to the regime. Through an analysis and discussion of the regime’s building activity in the rapidly developing working-class neighborhoods on the edge of nineteenth-century Milan, the city most closely associated with modern ways of life in the interwar period (and still today), this paper provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which the amenities, design, and location of party-controlled outposts were intended to advance the party’s objectives and communicate Fascism’s central place in the making of a modern urban landscape in the regime’s final decades.     

‘Looked-after’ young people's voices an actor-network theory analysis

This article offers an empirical case study of ways in which ‘looked-after’ young people responded in focus groups about taking part in a survey task. These research participants are deemed by the state as in need of protection. We demonstrate that despite their vulnerable status, they are immensely resilient and capable of contributing to debates about research participation. Through the application of actor-network theory, we outline conglomerations of actor-networks involved with the materiality of their agency.     

Man of faith and political commitment: Alcide De Gasperi in the history of Europe

Since the early 1980s historians and others have been radically revising established understandings of the Italian south. New research has undermined the notion of a dichotomy between north and south and has begun to challenge the parameters of the Southern Question itself. The books reviewed here reflect, comment upon and drive forward this process of revision. One suggestion is that representations of the south as 'backward', 'picturesque' or fundamentally 'different' are the product of ideological and political elaboration rather than the reflection of any fundamental reality, and should be seen as part of a neo-Orientalist discourse which justified southern subordination. While acknowledging the strengths of this new history of the Mezzogiorno, this article argues that the neo-Orientalist explanation risks simply restating southern difference and subordination in another form. What is needed instead is a new, and less dichotomized, approach to southern Italian cultures and a recognition of the complexities - and hence the importance - of southern identities.