Modern Italy最新文献

This article uses an original dataset to sketch a portrait of women mayoral candidates and women elected as mayors in Italy in the period 1993–2021. The analysis highlights several significant findings. Women must compensate for their political marginality by deploying other resources, such as higher levels of education. Nevertheless, women are penalised not only by the reluctance of parties to put them forward as candidates, but also by the elections themselves. More specifically, the electoral presence and strength of women decreases when the population size of the municipality grows, except for municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Moreover, women candidates are most disadvantaged in geographical areas where the socioeconomic condition of women is more marginal. However, women mayors running for a second mandate have the same chance of winning as men. Finally, it is the protest parties, rather than the left-wing parties, that are revealed as doing the most to promote women.

You can never really get tired of Italian politics. Over the last 30 years, we have seen many turning points, the most memorable of which was undoubtedly Silvio Berlusconi's unexpected ‘descent into the field’ in 1994. Nor have we been deprived of colourful characters, such as Matteo Renzi or Matteo Salvini, who, as their careers took off, ended up burning their wings. And after many unsuccessful attempts, imagination has finally come to power (as they used to say in the 1960s), although the 1968 generation has nothing to do with it. Indeed, all the credit goes to the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), whose activists were seen carrying their leader Beppe Grillo – sitting in a dinghy – through the streets of Bologna during a procession of sorts. The general elections of 25 September 2022 added an important chapter to recent Italian political history, which has sometimes taken on a dramatic tone but more often that of a comedy or even a farce. All in all, nothing out of the ordinary; in the society of the spectacle, this is how the Darwinian struggle for political survival can also be played out.

This article is about the seminar held at Luiss University in Rome on 17 June 2024. The seminar focused on ‘The End of Christian Democracy: A New Direction for Research’ and was the first milestone and official launch of the PRIN research project ‘The End of Christian Democracy: The Collapse of a Political Dream – Voices from the Margins’, led by a consortium of four universities: Luiss, Roma Tre, Bologna and Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples.

Knowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.

This paper critically reviews and examines the available data concerning Italians embarked on the SS Arandora Star on 30 June 1940. It encompasses their fate on 2 July when the ship was sunk, their subsequent journeys and the sources used to verify the conclusions. The principal aim is to establish, as far as is possible, the precise number, correct names and other details of those who were embarked on the ship. A fully validated ‘Embarkation Listing’ is published here for the first time.

On 2 July 1940, the ocean liner SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-47, with the loss of around 805 lives; over half of these were British-Italian civilian internees. This article approaches the event from the arena of Second World War military history, contextualising the sinking within the early Battle of the Atlantic. In so doing, it shifts the customary focus away from government internment policy and discussions of cultural legacy towards examining British and German naval strategies and realities. Tactical and logistical considerations of the conflict are investigated, the explication of which allows more detailed discussion of the sinking controversies and enables delivery of ‘answers’ to the persistent ‘questions’ of why Arandora Star was sailing unescorted and without Red Cross insignia. The broad perspective offered engages with transgression and culpability, and overall the article seeks to advance Arandora Star scholarship with its distinctive maritime focus.

Within British-Italian history of the Second World War, there are several questions surrounding the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, on 2 July 1940, which still remain problematic. Nevertheless, this tragedy continues to play a prominent role in the heritage and memories of the Anglo-Italian communities in the UK. This article focuses on the experiences and memories of the Arandora Star from the perspective of members of the Italian community in the North-East of England. Oral histories of Italian civilian internees who were embarked onto the ocean liner were collected via qualitative interviews with descendants of victims and survivors. This article contributes to raising awareness of Arandora scholarship by articulating how memories were interpreted retrospectively and transmitted down generations. Informing the debate on the purpose of misremembering in oral history, this article sheds light on the events and their imaginary reconstruction.

During the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

This article progresses Second World War historiography of ‘enemy alien’ internment, especially of the SS Arandora Star, sunk in 1940 with a high loss of Italian civilian lives. Employing a new paradigm, that of the deathscape, defined as a topography of death and the practices that surround it, this investigation recontextualises Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland. Ambiguous loss, complicated grieving, disenfranchisements in mourning and absences in multiple layers of the deathscape form overarching themes that are explored in parallel to emotional-affective memory. The previously neglected study of individual memorialisation, both private and ‘official’, provides an important primary source in the fragmented materiality of the deathscape, allowing fresh insight on both cultural manifestations and political context. As the material and cultural apex of the deathscape, the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow, created by Archbishop Mario Conti in 2011, are evaluated through the lenses of leadership, identity and heritage activism.

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.