‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.     

Revising history: Elvira Giallanella’s Umanità and the editing of gender

A mix of fantasy, history, spirituality, and political engagement, Elvira Giallanella’s film, Umanità (1920), is a sort of Carrollian ‘through the looking glass’ in which reality resembles itself but upside-down. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Giallanella’s film – a revision of Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s 1916 children’s story from 1916. children’s story – both reflects and critiques gender roles that had been temporarily fissured by the war itself. A feminist position transpires in the juxtaposition of the pre-war male-authored text with the postwar female-directed film, further revised by men. An invaluable historical source, Umanità not only offers insight into a woman’s and a feminist’s perspective on the Great War and its aftermath but also sheds light on the moral, political, and philosophical atmosphere of destabilization at the time. Coming full circle, Umanità suffered from the very same revisions by the re-established postwar patriarchy, and by the end of the 1920s, cinema itself had been reclaimed as male territory, leaving the film lost amongst the debris. Umanità’s resurfacing in 2007 allows us to reflect on the process of history-making in itself: what is omitted, what is included, and more importantly whose voices will be validated enough to be heard along the way. This instance – one amongst several – can serve as an example of how history is indeed a continuous process made up of (re)visions, and never a singular, univocal one.     

From Propaganda to ‘Information’: Reforming Government Communications in Britain

Since the 1980s, several studies of post-war British propaganda have been published. While many of these have focused on developments abroad, some have explored domestic work carried out under the auspices of the Central Office of Information. Established in 1946, the Central Office of Information provided a range of services to government departments, including advertising and public opinion polling, but it was just part of a wider system of official communications that has tended to attract less attention in the historiography. Reorganised by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour governments, this system was presented to the public as a means of disseminating impartial and apparently non-controversial ‘facts’ about government policy. Few commentators today accept that justification, but little is known about why it emerged after the Second World War or what impact it had on existing communications machinery. Taking a broad view of the subject that considers the inter-war and wartime antecedents to the post-war communications system, this paper seeks to fill in some of the gaps that have emerged in the literature. Focusing on shifts in official nomenclature and departmental practice, it explores the relationship propaganda shared to government policy and its broader legacy in the twentieth century.     

The image of ‘all good Italians’. The Eichmann trial seen from Italy

ABSTRACT

The Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem in 1961 marked a turning point in the international public’s collective awareness of the extermination of Jews in Europe. In Italy, the trial contributed to the mainstream narrative of the events that concerned the deportations of the Jews. The Italian case was mentioned in the indictment of the attorney general, Hausner, and in the deposition of the only witness present at the trial, Hulda Campagnano. In this article, our analysis of the trial’s reception in Italian newspapers and media shows that the Jerusalem reports, especially through misrepresenting the words of Campagnano, created the image of Italians as ‘good people’, who would help Italian and foreign Jews, against the wishes of the Nazis. At the same time, the responsibility of Italian Fascism for the anti-Jewish laws in 1938 and the role of Italians in the arrests and deportations of Jews since 1943 have been neglected.     

Roman Millstones from Orvieto (Italy): Petrographic and Geochemical Data for A New Archaeometric Contribution

The probable site of extraction and production of Pompeian‐style leucite‐bearing millstones, singled out by Peacock (1980, 1986) in the vicinity of Orvieto, and the outcropping of the ‘Leucitophyre’ lava have been systematically studied employing standard petrographic and geochemical methods (optical microscopy and ICP–AES/MS spectrometry). The combination of petrochemical data, previously very poor, allowed us definitively to exclude the possible ‘overlap’ of phonolitic and tephri‐phonolitic lavas from other Quaternary Volcanic Districts of Latium, and provides a helpful tool for future work on leucitite millstones. Consequently, the databank obtained has been used to attribute the origin of five Roman millstones discovered in three archaeological sites in central Italy (Latium and Marche). It has also been useful to verify the geological provenance of some Sicilian and French leucitite millstones analysed by previous workers. The results point to a provenance from the Orvieto area, with the exception of the millstones from Sicily, for which a different origin was hypothesized.     

Assessing Ceramic Compositional Data: A Comparison of Total Reflection X‐ray Fluorescence and Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis On Late Iron Age Spanish Celtiberian Ceramics

A solid‐phase, non‐chemical processing protocol was recently developed as a means of chemically characterizing archaeological ceramics by total reflection X‐ray fluorescence (TXRF). Following this methodology, TXRF can provide semi‐quantitative determinations for 18 elements with comparable levels of precision and accuracy for the majority of them in comparison with a clay reference material analysed by instrumental neutron activation (INAA). In order critically to assess the analytical capabilities of TXRF, a large sample set of Late Iron Age Spanish Celtiberian ceramics and modern clays was analysed both by TXRF and INAA. Semi‐quantitative chemical data provided by TXRF and quantitative data provided by INAA were subjected to commonly used multivariate statistical methods as a way of evaluating the ability of the new technique to discriminate among different compositional groups. The comparison of the two data sets shows no significant discrepancies, thereby allowing support for the same archaeological interpretation. These results suggest that TXRF has potential applicability for compositional characterization of archaeological ceramics, providing data that are useful for provenance studies.     

Living and dying as subjects of the Inca Empire: Adult diet and health at Puruchuco-Huaquerones,Peru

Imperial strategies varied as the Inca expanded their empire from the capital in Cusco. Some communities were conquered violently while others were ruled indirectly with little evidence of Inca presence. According to ethnohistorical evidence, the central coast was peacefully annexed by the Incas ca. A.D. 1470, but little is known about how Inca imperialism may have affected the quality of life of subjects of the Inca Empire. We integrate multiple lines of evidence to assess diet, health and disease for a sample of human remains from the Late Horizon cemetery of Puruchuco-Huaquerones, Peru. Specifically, we examine and analyze osteological, dental and stable isotope data (n = 162, 90 and 46 respectively) in order to investigate whether the Inca period population at Puruchuco-Huaquerones experienced nutritionally insufficient diets and poor health under imperial policies. Diet at Puruchuco-Huaquerones incorporated a variety of foods, both plant and animal. Osteological lesions and stature indicate periods of stress, with males experiencing more illness relative to females. Stature sexual dimorphism, the presence of healed lesions and isotope data indicate a sufficiently nutritious diet and support the conclusion that, although disease was present, individuals were healthy enough to survive and recover. Geographical and temporal comparisons suggest that health changed little with the Inca annexation of this region, but future work is needed.     

Fragments from many pasts: layering the toponymic tapestry of Milan

In the recent literature on the cultural politics of naming, toponyms and street names are increasingly read within the wider social–historical context upon which naming is contingent. In this perspective, naming is often seen as an act of power and a way to inscribe an ideological discourse into the landscape. In this article, we analyze the street names currently inscribed in the historical center of the Italian city of Milan, Italy as a reflection of its long and contested social and political history. Fragments of all the different toponymic regimes and hegemonic discourses that took over one after the other over time have remained inscribed in Milan’s street network, originating a complex tapestry in which different pasts revive and conflicting ideologies co-exist. In this context, we examine the role Geographical Information Science (GIScience) methods and technologies play in quantifying, revealing, and visualizing the spatial patterns of downtown Milan’s toponymic texture at the urban scale and at the scale of the six historical neighborhoods.