Flashback, Eclipse. The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s. By ROMY GOLAN. Pp. 311. New York: Zone Books, 2021

guage as a synthesis of the dialect that expressed the everyday life of the local people and the Italian (Tuscan) through which a common culture could be formed. Such a synthesis would achieve a language open to regional variations yet responsive to the concrete practices of the people. In this way, the divorce between the high culture of the elites and the popular culture of the masses could be transcended. Francese’s discussion of Padula’s views of the masseria and of its massaro is especially noteworthy and enlightening. Padula’s description of socio-cultural traits such as work ethic, commonsense and probity, that he attributes to the independent farm worker, provides an insight into the problems of the Southern peasantry in Italy. For the social type Padula describes is everything that the peasant is not, and everything that the author wants the peasant to become. This type, what the English and American 17th and 18th century thinkers call the “yeomanry”—independent and autonomous producers— embodies the social, cultural, political and economic requisites necessary to a free civil society and to a free state. Machiavelli in the Discourses denounced the gentiluomini who lived off the labor of others (as did the elites, both lay and clerical), performed no useful work, and did not live a productive life. In their countries and regions (such as the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples), no free society and no republic could be established. This is precisely the problem that Padula tried to remedy when he addressed issues of language and dialects, the condition of the peasantry, the role of elites (both rural and town), and the profound socio-economic backwardness of the Italian South in general— problems which could not be confronted without first resolving the conflicts caused by the absence of the state’s authority and legitimacy—that is, by reducing and ultimately eliminating the wide gulf separating elites from the popular masses. Francese brilliantly and thoughtfully addresses these questions in his new book. It is a work that is well written, lucid in its exposition, sensitive in its close and intimate readings of Padula’s Italian and Calabrian writings. Francese exhibits a profound and remarkable knowledge of the linguistic (dialectal) and social (the patrimonialism and patriarchalism) underpinnings of the Italian South (especially in its Calabrian incarnation). In sum, Francese’s work is an important contribution to Italian studies, specifically to the study of the cultural and social structures of the Mezzogiorno as represented in its Calabrian historical context. It is especially significant in the way it concretely details, through the study of Vincenzo Padula’s work, the intricate and complex problems attendant upon Italian unification. Padula’s work underlines the inherent contradictions of a state that asserts liberalism—equal rights and due process of law—while simultaneously buttressing the parasitic preeminence of Southern elites.