Our essay aims to offer a biography of Elena Sengal (1911–1962), an Italian citizen of Ethiopian origin, whose life offers important elements to better understand both Fascist and postwar Italy. Elena was born into an Italo-Ethiopian family and became an Italian citizen after the naturalisation of her father, Sengal Workneh, a former Italian colonial subject and a lecturer in Amharic and Tigrinya at

This article offers a critical rereading of the historiography on the role of women in the Italian Resistance. It starts with the postwar period, marked by a general silence and the prevailing image of women as mothers and staffette. In the 1970s, the first historical elaboration of women’s experiences began in all northern regions, leading to the now iconic concept of the ‘silent Resistance’. In the

Through the analysis of a series of different documents preserved in the Fondo Tremaglia, I reconstruct the genesis and development of the National Day of Italian Labour Sacrifices in the World (Giornata nazionale del sacrificio del lavoro italiano nel mondo). The holiday was conceived by Minister for Italians in the World Mirko Tremaglia and designated by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the end

This article provides an overview of the main interpretations in contemporary historiography of the role of Italian political actors in the management of public debt during the First Republic, also in the context of European integration. In order to fill the gaps in historical research on this crucial issue, the conclusion proposes some questions and insights for future research.

In the new millennium, amidst a crisis of antifascism as a source of political legitimacy, there has been a revival of antifascism in a more accessible and popular form, integrated into collective imagination and everyday practices. Events and themes of the Resistance have been revisited in venues and contexts beyond the traditional, utilising new approaches and languages outside conventional frameworks

This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain

Since its inception in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, a specialised unit within the ranks of the French military, has played a prominent role in the wars of both colonisation and decolonisation. This article seeks to trace the origins, development and eventual decline of an Italian and international ‘Legionary issue’ regarding the recruitment and employment of Italian volunteers in a foreign military

In the autumn of 1934, Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen/Bressanone denied two Italian-speaking priests, Carlo Torello and Giuseppe Ricci, permission to teach within his predominantly German-speaking diocese. In response, Benito Mussolini threatened to expel all Church representatives from the state education system and, by extension, to unravel the recently signed Lateran Accords. Untangling the motivations

The aim of this article is to analyse the Italian Nuova Destra. The first part examines the birth of the Nuova Destra within the current of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), referring particularly to Pino Rauti, a founder and leader. Following the experience of the magazine La Voce della Fogna and the Hobbit Camps, the first publishing initiatives of the Nuova Destra – Diorama letterario and Elementi

When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power

During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers of Italian origin were drafted into the US military and sent to fight overseas against the Axis powers. For many, this was an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the country and remove suspicions raised by Italian communities’ ties with the Fascist regime. The prospect of fighting in their homeland aroused mixed feelings

This article uses the hitherto partially unpublished diary of Virginia Minoletti Quarello and her husband Bruno Minoletti to shed a light on the Resistance and on the transformation of Italian politics after the war from an original angle. Virgina and Bruno, members of the Italian Liberal Party, played a central role in the Resistance and in consolidating the network of the Liberal partisans led by

In December 1959, several episodes of antisemitism occurred in West Germany. These events spread rapidly to other countries and were dubbed by newspapers the ‘swastika epidemic’. In Italy, the episodes sparked intense debate among the main political forces of the time, framing the interpretation of antisemitic episodes within a context that considered the comparison between the two countries, while

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in

This article examines the causes and geographical trajectories of the globalisation of vermouth, one of the most famous Made in Italy products in the world. Of all the fortified wines, vermouth stands out for its unique history. Originally a product of Piedmont consumed mainly by the aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, vermouth became the subject of a growing export trade between the nineteenth

The role that Roma communities played in the Resistance during the Second World War is a little-known part of history, especially in Italy. Through consideration of their involvement, we can highlight the complexity of the Resistance, and recognise Roma communities as an integral part of Italian society. Roma involvement in the Resistance had distinctive characteristics compared to that of the gagi

This paper analyses the period following the annexation of Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 from the standpoint of forest history. Recent historiography has demonstrated that the development of scientific forestry was a crucial factor in the state-building process. Post-unification Veneto provides an opportunity to explore these dynamics from a decentralised perspective, focusing on two critical

This article analyses the political determinants of antipoverty policy in Italy between 1948 and 2022, providing a long-term analysis of the Italian minimum income scheme. We look for an explanation of that evolution drawing on three theoretical perspectives: veto players, gradual institutional change, and party competition. Our methodology is process tracing which involves the examination of ‘diagnostic’

Through an analysis of the Italian context, this article illustrates how censoring attitudes shaped the modern meaning of pornography between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the years of the Great War. The difference between the ideas of pornography and obscenity is pointed out through a concise examination of censorship archive documents from the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, the State

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

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

The end of the civil war, the fall of the Italian Social Republic, the allied occupation and the gradual transition to the new Italian Republic not only set Italy on the path to democracy, but also gradually gave Italians access to a new public space. This article proposes to revisit the classic question of the legacy of Fascism by looking at the question of space and the difficult construction of

Street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic, installed in the twenty-first century, mark Palermo's former Jewish quarter, over half a millennium since Sicily last had a substantial Jewish population. They recall a medieval Jewish minority, but also symbolise what some consider to be Palermo's essentially pluralistic character. What motivates this inchoate revival of ‘Jewish space’, and what does it

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia

This article explores the socio-ecological impacts of Fascist hydropower extraction in the Alpine valleys of Italy, focusing on the Toce river basin during the interwar period. It investigates the conflicts between local communities and hydropower initiatives by private energy companies under Fascism, thereby revealing the regime's communication strategies rooted in its political ecology. By analysing

In 1912, the Italian parliament approved the extension of male suffrage, making it ‘almost’ universal. This process of revising representation transformed the very idea of the relationship between citizens and the state and shaped a profoundly different Italy. The aim of this article is to trace both the process leading to the approval of universal suffrage and its impact on the party system. With

Italy's prison overcrowding became world news in early March 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak sparked riots in prisons across the country, causing the death of 13 inmates. As a crisis narrative, the COVID-19 pandemic made visible the deep, ongoing crisis of Italy's prison system and disclosed new conditions for critical thought on the restorative potential of the penitentiary system. This article first

The political messaging of Leoluca Orlando, who served five terms as mayor of Sicily's capital, Palermo (most recently, until 2022), articulates a cosmopolitan vision of local identity. Orlando seeks to emphasise Palermo's ‘tolerant’ values, invoking the city's history to foster this image, as well as using a variety of rhetorical strategies. He portrays Palermo as having a true ‘essence’, which is

This article examines the first tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Italy and the so-called ‘sfida dei butteri’ (the challenge of the Italian cowboys of the Pontine marshes), which took place in Rome in March 1890. Analysing nineteenth-century Italian newspapers and photographs, I demonstrate that populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments marked the Italian media's responses to the American

The article explores media depictions of industrial labour in Italy, with a special focus on visual, film and television portrayals, spanning from the 1960s to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than delving into an analysis of labour processes, the primary objective of the article is to scrutinise the gendered representations of work and whether and how the representation of

Recently, a renewed history of foreign immigration in Italy, focusing on the very first migration flows after the Second World War, has offered a more appropriate periodisation of the phenomenon. Women have been at the forefront of these flows, which were initially determined by the new postcolonial setting of the former Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia). Subsequently, the immigrants

This introduction to the special issue ‘Gender and Work in Twentieth-Century Italy’ draws on key strands of historical scholarship on gender and work, including women workers’ experiences, labour market discrimination, domestic work, the impact of gender norms, and ideas of masculinity and femininity on work identities. It traces the development of feminist influence within this scholarship, from making

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores

From a gender historical perspective, labour precarity constitutes a long-term phenomenon. Women's work represents a privileged observatory to understand how instability and precarity also characterised the cycle of economic and industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. The article compares the conditions of female factory workers with those of home-based workers, a traditionally invisible category

It has been over 20 years since Donna R. Gabaccia's seminal work Italy's Many Diasporas was published (London & New York, 2000), an overview of the social, cultural and economic history of Italy's various migrations. Much has changed since then, but this book remains a classic. In this roundtable, historians Lucy Riall, Pamela Ballinger and Konstantina Zanou reflect on the value of Gabaccia's work

This essay deals with the criteria for the employment of POWs in Italy during the Great War. It is a contribution to the current research demonstrating the close connection between civilian and military spheres during the war, including in the area of internment. This intertwining is particularly evident when one studies the wartime economic system. Although the article shows that the contribution

The article aims to sketch out the main features of the political culture of the Radical Party (PR). This political culture is paradigmatic of a much broader phenomenon that has affected the politics of Western democracies since the 1970s: the critique of traditional parties in the name of a party model formed by spontaneous groupings of society; the extreme emphasis placed on individual choices in

This report is about the ASMI Summer School held in Pisa on 22–23 June 2023. The conference focused on twentieth-century history issues: gender studies, cultural studies, resistance studies, fascism studies and mafia studies, with the addition of a round table and two keynote lectures, which discussed the profession of the modern historian and the history of racism in Italy from the Second World War

This article links the study of transnational and imperial fascism in the context of the Italian occupation of Albania by examining how Italian authorities sought to turn Albanians abroad into assets rather than liabilities. Organising and monitoring Albanians occurred through conferences, youth institutions and consular activities. Studying such concrete contacts and negotiations allows us to explore

By exploring how the taxation of sex work is interpreted and explained, this article aims to expand theoretical and empirical understandings of tax imaginaries – the collectively formed meanings ascribed to taxes, taxpaying, and the purposes they serve – and how gender is mobilised in their construction. It argues that tax imaginaries created and circulated through online expert commentaries on the

In recent years, the architectural legacy and so-called ‘difficult heritage’ of Fascist Italy has become a flourishing field of research. These topics have also begun to make their way into the undergraduate classroom. To date, however, there has been little research carried out into the methods we use to teach the history of Fascism in particular. In this short article, we outline how we have applied

Calabrian ‘illegitimacy’ in the (inter)national imaginary today is largely the result of the region's association with the ’ndrangheta. Using analysis of oral history interviews, this research examines how this ‘illegitimacy’ influences the self-perception of Calabrians. It argues that a spectrum of prejudice and its effects can be mapped out both metaphorically and geographically. This spectrum incorporates

Since its introduction in the early 2000s, legislation relating to the voting rights of Italians abroad has enabled millions of residents of voting age outside of Italy to engage in homeland elections and elect their own MPs. The inclusion of Italian citizens abroad in the Italian polity has nevertheless translated into a patchy electoral engagement. This article does not intend to provide an analysis

Rationing and illegal food trade in Second World War Italy have received very little scholarly attention in comparison to the scale and impact they had on people's daily life. This article contributes to filling this gap, first by providing an overview of the dynamics that already in the early years of the war determined the development of an illegal system of food trade. It then considers the experience

This essay analyses Salvemini's major works on Fascism, namely The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), Mussolini Diplomate (1932) and Under the Axe of Fascism (1936). The focus of this analysis is twofold: to explore both Salvemini's methodology and the events leading to the publication of these works. In The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, Salvemini examines the origins and the rise of Mussolini's

Long neglected, Gaetano Salvemini's years of exile (1925–1949) now constitute a crucial period for reconsidering his intellectual and political profile. This article intends first to propose an overall interpretation of Salvemini's exile that considers the years 1919 to 1925 as the culmination of a profound turning point in his life. The central part of the essay is devoted to reconstructing the genesis

If the ‘colour line’ was prophetically defined as the issue of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century the concern of many scholars is with the research methodology that the attention on the colour line has generated. Migration, postcolonial, and blackness studies focusing on Italy have all asked fundamental questions on how to reframe history, memory, and culture. Charles Burdett (2018)

In this article, we introduce an innovative approach to examining campaign themes in Italy, by performing an original corpus linguistic analysis of the party manifestos related to the crucial 2022 election. Through its systematicity and flexibility, our approach allows us to gauge theory-driven propositions using a large amount of so far unexplored textual data. As anticipated, the 2022 Italian party

Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) is one of the most influential intellectuals of Italian and European twentieth-century history. As 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of Salvemini's birth, this special issue of Modern Italy aims to attract the attention of an international readership and contribute to filling the gap in scholarly publications in English, offering a tool to approach Salvemini's intellectual