Modern Italy最新文献

This article describes the results of the Progetto di ricerca di interesse nazionale (Research Project of National Interest [PRIN]) ‘Il brigantaggio rivisitato’ (‘“Brigantaggio” Revisited’), which investigated the practices and imagery of brigandage (and the fight against it) in modern and contemporary Italy from a Euro-Atlantic perspective. A large community of scholars, both within Italy and further afield, tackled numerous historiographical issues: forms of rural criminality in the modern age; the profile of the brigands (both male and female); their level of politicisation and relationship with the Legitimists and the Catholic Church; the reaction of the security forces and the unification movement; the evolving definition of the word ‘brigand’; the politics and military strategy of the post-unification anti-brigandry campaign; and the interaction between the local dimension and global view of banditry and irregular warfare. In-depth work was also conducted on the image of the bandits spread through visual and material culture by the media and on their performative consequences in different eras, through to their present-day reuse.

This contribution summarises the scientific discussions that developed during a one-year cycle of international and interdisciplinary seminars focusing on the relationship between migration and citizenship in Italy. We considered human mobilities in their relation to the politico-administrative institutions of the state and observed the latter's attempt to define and govern them. The relative marginality of the Italian case in the literature about state building, nation building and citizenship is an opportunity to examine these processes with fresh eyes. The first section is a critical analysis of the policies regulating access to Italian citizenship. The second examines the entanglement between external and internal migrations and how they are governed, considering various administrative borders and statuses such as Italian municipal residency. The third section addresses the role of different field actors (from street-level bureaucrats to legal practitioners and activists) in shaping or negotiating the borders of citizenship while implementing the law.

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.