This article presents the results of a piece of research into extortion in the city of Palermo between 2004 and 2015. Highlighting the importance of the territorial context among the factors that explain the mafia phenomenon, the study draws on two different georeferencing databases: the first relating to the distribution of extortion across the Sicilian capital's various districts, and the second relating to the distribution of Palermo businesses that had joined the Addiopizzo anti-extortion movement. Although the empirical material is problematic, marked territorial variations emerge from a comparative analysis of the two databases, prompting a number of potential interpretations.

As Italian society struggles to come to terms with the presence of Chinese immigrants and with changing global patterns of industrialisation and shifts in the dynamics of industrial power, the question of Sino-Italian relations is increasingly present in Italian cultural representations across media and genre. Among the themes which recur within Italian discourse on Chinese industry are Made in Italy vs Made in China, tradition vs modernity, and environmental responsibility. In this paper, I offer a reading of the complex and, at times, ambivalent treatment of these themes in Gianni Amelio's 2006 film, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star), and Alessandro Perissinotto's 2014 novel, Coordinate d'Oriente (Oriental Coordinates). Central to my analysis of the two works is an examination of the trope of contacts between the economies and societies of the two countries being sublimated in the fictional narratives into relationships between Western men and Chinese women. Against this backdrop, I propose an interpretation of the power dynamics which underpin the narratives.

The body partially disrobed as a visual strategy for self-branding is the theme of this article. During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon. Mussolini’s partial nudity is considered here as a powerful political tool. The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic (Sperling 2014, 21). Deconstructing the visual language of Fascist propaganda that made the man into a myth, this article illustrates the most iconic aspects of Mussolini’s visual strategy, demonstrating his innovative capacity to take advantage of a modern attitude towards self-representation, similar to that adopted by today’s heads of state.

This article looks at the contribution that the recording of personal memories makes to the history and to the collective and public remembrance of the Second World War in Italy. It concentrates on a product of the 1980s boom in oral and written testimonies about the war, Giulio Bedeschi's edited anthology of the personal stories of civilian victims, Fronte italiano: c'ero anch'io. La popolazione in guerra. The article assesses the anthology's theme of victimhood and its implications for how Italians have chosen to remember the war. It considers the standing of these personal memories as historical sources, and the extent to which they can contribute to a historical understanding of the Italians’ war experiences.

This article consists of three sections. The first one concentrates on the conceptualisation of the Italian concession in Tianjin (1901–1947). The second connects the past imagery of the Italian ‘aristocratic concession’ to its contemporary reinvention as the ‘New Italian-style Town’. The third section explores the rationale for the diffusion of what I define as Italianerie: a fascination for Italy, for a ‘real-unreal’ Italian-flavoured atmosphere, through the creation of multi-million-dollar luxury designer outlets known as ‘Florentia Villages’. The first Florentia Village, ‘inspired by classic Italian architecture’, opened in Wuqing, halfway between Beijing and Tianjin, in June 2011, followed by the replica of this template in eight Chinese cities. Is this the outcome of a specific patrimonialisation strategy? What is the significance of this showcase of Italian design in China? What lies behind the apparent paradox of reproducing ‘in/authentic’ Italy in miniature, and using it to sell the ‘real’ luxury products, in a country like China, which is stereotyped as the paradise of the fake? Is innovation by design reconfiguring the relationship between production and consumption of cultural images and commodities? This article intends to explore these questions with particular attention to transcultural strategies in Chinese urbanism – past and present.

This article presents the results of some empirical research on extortion in Palermo. The project is based on the administration of a structured questionnaire with traders in various districts within Palermo and villages in the provincial interior, in two phases, the first in 2007 and second in 2012. The objective was to explore traders’ opinions on the various aspects of the phenomenon of extortion: its characteristics, causes, possible solutions, and the responsibilities of every actor in the battle against this illegal enterprise. In the period in which the research was undertaken, there was a wave of strong anti-mafia and anti-racketeering activism, particularly stimulated by the emergence in 2004 of the Comitato Addiopizzo and culminating in the establishment of the first ‘antiracket’ association in Palermo.

In 2011, Edoardo Nesi – a former industrialist in the Prato textile district – won the most prestigious Italian literary prize for his autobiographical novel Storia della mia gente, a book centered on the contrast between Prato’s past industrial success and present decline. Nesi has since become a regular contributor to Corriere della Sera, among other newspapers, and with his following book, Le nostre vite senza ieri, he has further emphasised his role as a public intellectual. In Nesi’s view, Italy’s participation in the global economy has exposed Italian manufacturers to a level of competition that they were not ready to meet. This disadvantage, Nesi contends, was exacerbated by the adoption of the euro, which put an end to the former practice of using monetary policy to offset trade deficits. As a result, many firms lost market shares, and the Prato textile district ended up being largely taken over by Chinese businesses. This paper criticises Nesi’s account of the Italian industrial decline. In particular, it argues that his sympathetic view of the former political-industrial system is mostly an expression of self-complacency and does not positively contribute to the current debates on the Italian economic crisis.

Since its defeat in the 2001 general election, the Italian centre-left has been unable to come to any agreement on the question of its political leadership, either inside or outside parliament. For various reasons, neither of the defeated candidates—Francesco Rutelli of the Margherita and Piero Fassino, the new secretary of the Democrats of the Left—was able to take on this role. Nor could the centre-left agree on appointing Massimo D'Alema as the alliance's spokesperson in parliament. As a result, the choice regarding the alliance leadership was continually postponed with the excuse: ‘The centre-left has lots of prominent figures. When the time comes we will choose one of them’. For a time, there was popular support in favour of a leadership role for Sergio Cofferati, the former Secretary of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL). However, the likelihood of this scenario receded with his decision to run as candidate-mayor for Bologna. Subsequently, the return from Brussels of the only centre-left leader to have won a general election, Romano Prodi, seemed to resolve the leadership question. However, Prodi quickly became aware that, while the party oligarchs of the centre-left were prepared to make him leader, they were not willing to yield much power. Prodi therefore suggested the use of electoral primaries to decide the leadership issue. In this way, he hoped to build up sufficient consensus from the Olive Tree/centre-left electorate to allow him to become not only head of the government, but also the real leader of the alliance. To date, however, the problems surrounding the centre-left leadership and the undefined nature of the Olive Tree remain unresolved.

This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni's La Vita é Bella (1997) and Ettore Scola's Concorrenza Sleale (2001). The analysis places the films and their choice of narrator in the context of the child in European Holocaust film and argues that the child's perspective, often used to qualify the actions of adult characters and cast a questioning or even accusatory gaze on them, is used in these Italian films to perform the opposite function. Focusing on cinema as a site of memory and as a site of emotions, the article suggests that Italian filmmakers use children to infantilise the audience, induce pity rather than reflection, and discuss Italy's role in the Holocaust while reassuring audiences of the life-affirming, democratic and humanitarian values of post-war Italians. This political and historiographical use of the child's emotions not only reinforces the need to insist on the revision of the brava gente myth, but also invites a thorough reconsideration of the complexity of the relationship between the historical film and the emotions.

Between the end of the Great War and the start of the Second World War, various Italians living in London, who for the most part had migrated there around the start of the twentieth century, started their own particular determined opposition to Fascism. Their initial aim was to counter Fascist monopolisation of London's Italian community, contesting control of the community's main associations, institutes and cultural bodies by the Fascio, which had been established in London in 1921. Subsequently, these anti-Fascists also sought contacts outside London's Little Italy, on the one hand with British political bodies and the British press, and on the other with anti-Fascists in other countries. While strong links were formed with the latter, British society showed only a muted interest. This is in part explained by the positive response to the Fascist experience by the Conservative press and various eminent British politicians, at least until the mid-1930s.

In the course of the 1950s, Italian industrial design underwent a period of professionalisation and rose to international fame under the banners of ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘la linea italiana’. Seen in retrospect, Italian design retained this position during the 1960s, with the onset of avant-garde ‘pop-design’ and ‘anti-design’. Yet this future development was by no means a given in the Italian design community at the turn of the decade. At this crucial moment, between the rationality of the first postwar period and the playfulness of the second, allegations of a ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design raised a storm in the professional community for a brief period around 1960. This article analyses this heated debate, focusing on its most pronounced manifestation: the discussions in the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) and the design magazine Stile Industria following the jury's decision to withhold the Gran Premio Nazionale Compasso d'Oro for 1959.

This article investigates the role, reception, and socio-cultural, political relevance of mondo movies in the context of late 1950s–early 1980s film and documentary. The mondo genre debuted with reportage films about sexuality in Europe and reached its pinnacle with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s assemblage films. The historical context in which this genre evolved, and white masculinity was rearticulated and positioned at the centre of the national imagined community, is mapped focusing both on gender and race constructions and on the gaze identifying, encoding and decoding the sensationalist presentation of postcolonial/ decolonising Otherness. A brief review of some of the author’s published work on 1962–1971 mondo movies introduces Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and director Ruggero Deodato’s controversial reflection on the white, capitalist, sexist, Western and neo-colonial anthropological gaze.

Political corruption can be considered as a means by which money influences politics. In the classic studies the causes of corruption have usually been identified in the characteristics of the principal actor in the political system: the party. Samuel Huntington, in particular, has linked the development of corruption to party weakness during phases of growing political participation. Corruption spreads in those specific paths to modernization in which popular participation in political decision-making is not immediately accompanied by a strengthening of those institutions, such as political parties, which should filter and direct collective demands: ‘the weaker and less accepted the political parties, the greater the likelihood of corruption’.

This article reviews the considerable progress that has been made in modern Italian women's and gender history over the last decade. It puts forward the argument that such history, whose roots lie primarily in the feminist movement of the 1970s, was until recently consigned to the margins of the historical establishment but is now beginning to make a much greater impact. The article looks at the richness of the current wave of new publications and the wide range of topics they cover but argues that in a number of areas the historiography is still somewhat uneven. It also suggests that there is a pressing need for works of synthesis to draw together the research that has been done to date.

This article examines the monumental cemeteries of nineteenth-century Italy with regard to their role as platforms for the tensions between Church and state. In that burial grounds were publically owned yet administered by the clergy, they represented a space where conflicts between secular and clerical powers might be played out – conflicts that reached a peak in the final decades of the Ottocento following the annexation of the Papal State to unified Italy. Particular attention is given to the adoption of cremation as a practice that was advocated by anticlerical, liberal and radical factions in opposition to the Catholic Church. That opposition was manifested in the design and layout of Italian burial grounds and in construction of new crematoria.

This essay empirically evaluates three aspects of Berlusconi's legacy for Italian political communication: his pioneering of political marketing and modern electioneering; his ability to appropriate and popularise his particular rhetorical formulae; and his approach to increasingly relevant digital media. Berlusconi skilfully imported professional televised-centric campaigning in Italy, opening a wide competitive gap that his centre-left opponents took two decades to close. He also managed deeply to influence political discourse by spreading his signature catchphrases among most journalists and politicians, including his opponents. He was, however, less innovative, and generally outperformed by his main competitors, in the use of digital media to inform and engage voters. These findings suggest that Berlusconi's impact on Italian political communication has been massive, but his legacy may be less lasting to the extent that media and electioneering are evolving towards models that differ from those dominated by Berlusconi.

The success of Italian movements opposing the war in Iraq during the period 2003–2005 has awakened historians’ interest in the historical features of left-wing pacifism in Italy. Some particularly noteworthy contributions have focused on the campaigns orchestrated around 1950 by the Italian Committee of the Partisans of Peace (the international movement financed and supported by the USSR and international communism against Western anti-Soviet rearmaments). After describing the principal features of existing research, this article focuses on the lexical and communicative aspect characterising left-wing pacifism in Italy in the years immediately following the Atlantic Treaty. It highlights the way in which communist and socialist language gravitated towards the classist and anti-capitalist definitions of ‘war’ and ‘peace’, in line with the position developed in Lenin's reflections in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. However, in the same context, there were images and symbolic references imbued with a rebuttal of the violence of war but with fewer ideological connotations, which reflected an attempt to attract the interest and support of groups and individuals ideologically distant from Marxism. This interweaving of choices of expression contributed to the deep-rooted influence of left-wing pacifism within Italian cultural politics.

Considering the increasing quantitative usage and expanding qualitative scope of instruments of delegated legislations as the predominant means of enacting welfare reforms, this article investigates the consolidation throughout the Second Italian Republic of a new interpretation of executive prerogatives in the exercise of legislative functions. This is not only a problem in relation to the constitutional balance defining the relationship between the executive and legislature, but also an issue for executive policy leadership and capacity to steer the legislative process. It is argued that since the 1990s the usage of legislative decrees has become a sui generis and the predominant means of decision-making, adopted in particular for welfare reforms. In particular, delegated legislation to the executive has changed the impact that interest groups, such as trade unions, have on the policy process. Two case studies are presented by way of illustration, namely the health care reforms of the early 1990s and the education reform in 2003.