Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-04-12DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.12
Beatrice Stasi
{"title":"Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 by Salvatore Pappalardo, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, 280 pp., £85.50 (hardback), ISBN 9781501369964","authors":"Beatrice Stasi","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"The main theme of Pappalardo ’ s monograph is the literary invention of a Phoenician origin of Europe, which sought to promote a multi-ethnic and multicultural alternative to the dominant nationalist characterisation of the European continent. In highlighting the contrast between a literary interpretation of the ‘ multiethnic Danube region as a Europe behind the nations ’ and a historical approach focused on the ‘ hegemonic presence of the German Austrian elite ’ , the author sheds light on the ability of literature not so much to produce a utopian world but to ‘ provide an alternative paradigm to the monolithic and monolingual nation ’ , in an autonomous and structurally different way from historiography. Rather than offering the best possible reconstruction of the past, literature thus seeks to provide a mythography capable of legitimising and proposing a future project. This well-documented study could, then, be placed in a broader diachronic perspective, when the myth of origins was a recurring theme in historio-graphical exercises that were structurally mixed with rhetoric. This perspective can also frame the political and ideological stance underlying the convincing historiograph-ical and comparative approach developed in Pappalardo ’ s book, which traces references or allusions to a Phoenician mythography in the literary and non-fictional production of modernist writers linked to and inspired by the multi-ethnic environment of Habsburg Trieste – the Adriatic outpost for a Mediterranean projection of the Mitteleuropean empire. The book ’ s main thesis is further illustrated through a systematic, though by no means unprecedented, downplaying of the irredentist vocation of the Austro-Italian subjects. The book opens with a long introduction where the author clarifies the link between modernism and Europe. The first chapter explains the spread at the turn of the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries of a perception and representation of the Adriatic as a Phoenician sea, crossed and civilised since antiquity by a Semitic people who had represented","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48272625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-04-12DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.15
Amy Muschamp
{"title":"Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism by Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, translated by James Sievert, Cambridge, MS and London, The MIT Press, 2022, viii + 251 pp., $30.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-262-54471-9","authors":"Amy Muschamp","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41668280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-04-12DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.10
{"title":"Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writing: Maraini, Sapienza, Morante by Maria Morelli, Oxford and New York, Peter Lang, 2021, x + 306 pp., £46.35 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-78874-175-0","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"This monograph demonstrates the happy marriage between queer theory and selected works of Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elsa Morante vis-á-vis the insights it affords into gender identity and its intersections with (biological) sex, the body, sexuality, and desire. Each serves the other well, with the texts illuminating the theory and the theory bringing to light new textual aspects or allowing more sophisticated and more complete interpretations of aspects examined in previous criticism. Morelli ’ s systematic application of queer theory as a literary critical tool shows how three women writers so diverse in life histories, ideas and ideologies (Morante and Sapienza were not supporters of feminism), writing styles, and chronology of output exhibit similar concerns and a similar approach to gender that depart from the pensiero della differenza sessuale , the Italian feminist philosophy that theorised an essential female difference originating in the body. This philosophy, which emerged alongside equality feminism during the 1970s and 1980s, namely when the selected works were written or published, has been used extensively to interpret post-1968 Italian women ’ s writing in the wake of Lazzaro-Weis ’ s 1993 pioneering study From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women ’ s Writings (1968 – 1990) . Morelli argues that, in creating characters who feel ill at ease in normative categories of gender and sexual identity and who are immersed in non-hegemonic multi-layered situations, dis/located spaces, and non-linear temporalities, Maraini, Sapienza, and Morante challenge the female-male binary and the imperatives of heterosexuality and reproduction that sustain patriarchal societies and subtend feminist thought of difference despite the latter ’ s aim to dismantle current concepts of femininity. In doing so, their works advocate more fluid and becoming subjectivities and ways of living that are akin","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44361217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.9
Daniele Pipitone
{"title":"‘L'espoir quotidien’. Cultures et imaginaires socialistes en France et en Italie (1944–1949) by Virgile Cirefice, Rome, École française de Rome, 2022, 580 pp., €35.00 (paperback), ISBN 9782728315314","authors":"Daniele Pipitone","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.9","url":null,"abstract":"team, has become a site onto which fans project memories and desires. Her physical absence allows for fan involvement: the section of the final chapter on the Mina fan group on Facebook argues that a collective, prosthetic memory of the star is constantly being constructed through the images and memories shared on social media, alongside the tributes by RAI in 2020 which drew on the institutional weight of the RAI televisual archives. As Haworth argues, Mina is ‘everywhere yet nowhere’. Her curated image still has the emotional power of a deeply felt memory, even for younger generations, sometimes felt as a nostalgia for former media forms like early television. In the conclusion Haworth briefly addresses another aspect of Mina: that of camp, reading her through the Sontagian lens of excess, artifice and theatricality. Mention of drag performances as Mina might allow us to open up an aspect that Haworth has not been able to analyse, which is that of Mina as gay icon. More audience research is needed here, but the camp aspects of Mina and her diva vulnerability have made her perfect for appropriation by the queer star Mahmood, or by Italian-American drag queen Aquaria, who was photographed as Mina for Vogue Italia in 2018. Ultimately Haworth’s excellent book points forward to many more meanings of Mina, yet to be explored.","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"276 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48132690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.8
Catherine O’Rawe
{"title":"The Many Meanings of Mina: Popular Music Stardom in Post-war Italy by Rachel Haworth, Bristol, Intellect Press, 2022, xix + 240 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-789-38560-1","authors":"Catherine O’Rawe","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.8","url":null,"abstract":"of condemned prisoners at the Fosse Ardeatine: two chosen at random and eight names of Jews. According to him, these eight Jews owed him their lives. Debenedetti reconstructs Alianello’s logic. Alianello wants to prove in the court of public opinion that he was one of the good guys. If the most characteristic connotation of Fascism was the persecution of Jews, he will offer the most incontrovertible connotation of antifascism: the protection of the Jews (p. 59). Debenedetti disqualifies this double game: you cannot transform black into white, massacre into magnanimity. A reflection, perhaps, also on the ineffectiveness of postwar justice and purge processes. Crimes against Jews became very difficult to prosecute after the amnesty issued by Minister of Justice Palmiro Togliatti in June 1946, and many criminals were not convicted. La nave di Teseo’s new edition of these two stories is welcome and necessary. Debenedetti’s message is important today more than ever to fight resurgent racist discourse. The publishing house perhaps missed an opportunity to add to the tributes in the book one from a present-day historian: such an engagement would have further enhanced the long-standing documentary value of Debenedetti’s book. Nevertheless, the edition is clear and easy to read, and the two tales are short and poignant, making the book a good educational tool for students.","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"274 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48130495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-03-06DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.5
J. Foot
{"title":"The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual","authors":"J. Foot","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This historiographical article will argue that the March on Rome (October–November 1922) was the end point of a serious and at that point unique insurrectionary project, which followed three intense years of Fascist violence (where the state had rarely if ever taken on the Fascists, and had often colluded passively or actively with them). It was accompanied by violence and constant threats of further violence, in Rome and across Italy. It was in no way a bluff – but also stood as a warning to all those who still imagined that Fascism could be opposed, on the streets, in parliament, or at the ballot box. The violence hit bystanders, but was also targeted at the private homes of communists, socialists and hated liberals, and at centres of urban resistance in Rome itself. This article will look in detail at the ways historians have understood the March on Rome, and systematically removed the violence from that event, ignored the March itself and played down the role of the squadristi. It will also look at the powerful role of a ‘what if’ counter-factual which has dominated most accounts of the March on Rome to date, with some recent exceptions.","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"162 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47059145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.7
Nicola Bassoni
{"title":"Searching for Japan: 20th Century Italy's Fascination with Japanese Culture by Michele Monserrati, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, xi + 246 pp., £29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-78962-107-5 – ADDENDUM","authors":"Nicola Bassoni","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"193 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43320603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.6
O. Greco
{"title":"Poor, sinful and dangerous women: illegal prostitution in the Mezzogiorno before and after Unification","authors":"O. Greco","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"144 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47819168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ItalyPub Date : 2023-02-28DOI: 10.1017/mit.2023.3
Diana Garvin
{"title":"Building pasta's empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa","authors":"Diana Garvin","doi":"10.1017/mit.2023.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2023.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the role that Italian food companies like Barilla pasta played in creating narratives of East African empire at the apex of the Fascist ventennio. It aims to use the commercial remnants of Fascist empire to provide a more thorough accounting of how colonialism shaped the modern cultural history of Italian pasta. To do so, I analyze the paper ephemera, that is, the pasta advertisements and packaging, that connected occupied East Africa to Italy, demonstrating how regime projects to promote grain evolved into corporate projects in private industry. I argue that these two stories form a single cohesive narrative, one that can unite much of the excellent work that has been done on Fascist agriculture in empire with the transnational history of Italian food companies. East African empire, as depicted by Italian pasta shapes and advertisements, was consumable. At stake in this inquiry lies the shifting question of Italian national identity, framed by food products in global contexts.","PeriodicalId":18688,"journal":{"name":"Modern Italy","volume":"28 1","pages":"97 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46530737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}