Working at the intersection between literary history and periodical studies, this article investigates the role played by the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (Rome, 1948–1960) in processes of Anglo-Italian literary transfer. The article charts the journal’s British network, analysing quantitatively the presence of both established and new writers. Further, it focuses on Botteghe Oscure’s publishing and distribution policy in the United Kingdom, drawing on its founder Marguerite Caetani’s correspondence in order to interrogate the location of the journal within the Italian and the English literary systems, and thus illuminate the journal’s role as a site of literary production as it was shaped in both Italy and Britain.

This article engages with the postfeminist debate on girls’ sexuality in contemporary Italy. The huge popularity among adolescents of social network sites (SNSs), which involve a vast mobilisation of personal images, has given rise to new concerns and a moralising gender panic about girls’ sexuality. Drawing on critical girls’ studies, and based on the outputs of a qualitative research project, the article discusses the gender discourses that emerge from Italian girls’ digital practices on SNSs, with specific reference to girls’ online self-representation through posting and sharing photos on Facebook and other SNSs. The article explores how sexual regulation works among girls in the digital context by analysing the postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture. In doing so, the article hopes to contribute to the transnational academic debate in media and cultural studies by showing the discursive and visual conditions of possibility which shape girls’ digital sexual subjectivity on social network sites.

In this article, I explore the conditions of the media in Italy by taking into consideration a variety of elements: the context of media legislation and media concentration that have favoured the interests of Silvio Berlusconi, and the role of progressive agency (media professionals, citizens' groups) as they worked within those constraints to keep alive the flames of democracy during the ‘Berlusconi era’. This perspective is intended to provide an alternative interpretation to what has become the prevailing view of contemporary Italy: an ‘abnormal’ country; the ‘Sick Man of Europe’; worse yet: a country of ‘servants’. The framework of analysis includes the influence of the media-magnate-turned-politician on media legislation and the television sector, but also evaluates the important roles that media professionals and citizens have played to improve pluralism. The article argues that despite extreme levels of media concentration and an unprecedented conflict of interests, a commitment to engage in political discourse has continued to characterise Italy's political culture. This commitment has been expressed by a multiplicity of actors, from journalists and media professionals to citizens' organisations and media activists.

This article explores the reasons for the failure of the Fascist attempts to raise the Italian birth rate through an examination of the pro-natalist campaign in the great industrial and commercial city of Milan and its surrounding province. It then considers one of the specific ways in which the birth rate was kept down - illegal abortion - focusing in particular on the dramatic events surrounding the arrest of an illegal abortionist in the small textile town of Rho in 1928.

Considered by many scholars to be principally a catch-all or a useless concept, populism has rarely gone hand-in-hand with historical reflection. Building upon ‘the need to return populism to history’, this article offers an overview of the reasons why populism as a concept and as a potential sequence of historical events seems to fit well in post-Second World War Italy, and aims to suggest areas for further research. At the intersection between conceptual history, democratic theory and discourse-historical analysis, the article explores the continuities and discontinuities of Italian populisms, focusing on the resemioticisation of the concept of civil society and its legacy within historical Italian Fascism, especially during the transition to the so-called Second Republic.

This article examines how the American conception of female beauty introduced new and distinct understandings of beauty and femininity to postwar Italy. In analysing beauty product advertisements from one of the most popular women’s magazines of the period, Annabella, the article articulates the components of the American beauty ideal and illustrates how these notions broke with previous Italian ideas of beauty. Moreover, the article also examines how this new ideal promoted democratic consumer capitalist values – freedom of choice, individualism, and affluence – which had an important political and cultural significance in Italy’s Cold War struggle. In light of this struggle and the country’s postwar redevelopment, the American beauty ideal sought to influence the women who read Annabella and the way in which they fashioned and identified themselves – as the Italian ‘Mrs Consumer.’

This article charts the establishment and expansion of the ready-to-wear Max Mara label before the birth of the Max Mara group in 1967. Until recently, little consideration has been given to the evolution of Italian fashion, and few histories of dress or Italian culture even mention its presence before the 1970s. Still fewer acknowledge the crucial emergence of fashionable ready-to-wear in Italy in the 1960s, in which Max Mara played a key role, and which anticipated the international success of ‘Italian style’ in the 1970s and 1980s.

This article explores the Italian government’s attitude towards Trieste and its territory in public discourse and the unique role of the disputed area as a means of reinforcing, challenging or disrupting nationalist rhetoric of Italian nationhood after 1945. It argues that the central government’s projected image of the disputed border vacillated between that of a wall and a bridge at the southern tip of the Iron Curtain and was utilised to either strengthen or weaken past nationalist conceptualisations of Italian identity or ‘italianità’ within and outside the Adriatic city. While producing significant resistance within the Triestine community and its émigrés, this political process also succeeded in transforming this disputed territory from a stronghold of Western democracy into a bridge toward the socialist world within public discourse. This close reading of both political and public views of Italy’s eastern border ultimately reveals the inherent fluidity and constructed meaning of ideas of nationhood in Cold War Italy.

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 manifestos are characterised by a somewhat balanced configuration of emphasis across a variety of themes, of which some are more controversial and others more widely shared among voters and parties. Further, we also corroborate that parties primarily focus on those themes that historically fit them best, ideologically and in terms of perceived competence. Lastly, salient ‘issues of the day’ are differently emphasised by Italian parties, which particularly avoid devoting considerable attention to the highly sensitive Russian-Ukrainian war.

The spread of mobile telephones in Italy is examined as a typical technological phenomenon and is contextualized in the theoretical literature on technological change. A brief introduction is followed by a historical account of the growth of mobile telephony and then by an examination of its current spread and likely future development. After this, two interpretative models are put forward which, it is suggested, may be used both in this particular case and for any form of technologically mediated communication (TMC): the butterfly paradigm (applied to the spread of a technology), and the circuit synergy paradigm (applied to the relative importance of individual factors in the process of diffusion).

In recent decades, architectural historians, preservationists, and the general public have shown a growing interest in Fascist-era buildings. Many of the most high-profile examples are those associated with the monumental excesses of the regime. However, new attention has also been focused on more modest buildings that are significant examples of interwar Italian modernism or Rationalism, including former party headquarters (case del fascio). Taking as primary examples works by Giuseppe Terragni, the architect most often associated with Rationalism, as well by Luigi Carlo Danieri and Luigi Vietti, whose interwar contributions to Italian modernism have been less often the focus of scholarly attention, this article traces the postwar histories of case del fascio with the aim of better understanding the ways in which architecture and politics intersect and some of the consequences of this for the contemporary Italian architectural landscape.

Based both on the author's personal testimony of living, working and studying in Italy for ten years, and on his more recent sociological fieldwork, this article explores various dimensions of racism in the north Italian city of Modena, paying special attention to the experiences of Tunisian immigrants. The methodology comprises interviews with Tunisian immigrants and their employers, observations in bars and other public places, analysis of racism in the workplace, monitoring of the local media and reference to the national political debate. The findings reveal that being on the receiving end of racism, hostility and violence are regular facets of the everyday lives of Tunisian immigrants in Modena, as well as being part of a wider local and national anti-immigrant discourse.

This article sets out to outline the way in which existing narratives dealing with the development of modern design in post-1945 Italy have ignored those aspects of the story which do not concur with a characterization of that phenomenon that relies on the concepts of rationality, mass production and the impact of new materials. By focusing on and elaborating a number of ‘other’ themes—namely those of nature, craft, domesticity and the culture of consumption—this study sets out to redress this imbalance and to introduce the possibility of a new reading of modern design in Italy which can be seen to be rooted in a set of cultural values which are more obviously feminine’ in nature.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the left generally, the 1989-1994 period can be viewed as a political failure in as far as there was a right-wing outcome (albeit ephemeral) to Italy's transition. Yet, it is a failure which has to be viewed in the context of the deep undercurrents of change at work in Italy in this period and the constraints within which the PDS and its leader, Achille Occhetto, were operating

This article examines the documentary series Combat film made by Leonardo Valente and Roberto Olla for Rai-Uno. Shown in April 1994, the series was based on film taken by the American army (1943-5) and provoked a national scandal when it was first shown. The article argues that in order to fully understand Combat film it is necessary to look at the overall design of the programme as well as its content. By concentrating on the ‘special’ shown on 5 April 1994 the author demonstrates how the revisionist message of ‘national reconciliation’ which underlies the programme is reinforced by a series of formal and technical strategies.

The article looks at the role of Italy in the decision-making arena of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), analysing the initiatives it put in place to address and influence the construction of a common defence. The article aims to explain the ability or inability of Italy to build up a consensus around its proposals. By studying two initiatives in the field of European defence and security, it seeks to determine the factors which resulted in the differing outcomes of Italian actions at the European level.

American intervention in the 1948 Italian national election campaign has long been a source of contention. Most scholarship has assessed the Truman administration's activities in binary terms that revolve on simplistic notions of ‘success’; the idea that American efforts did or did not affect the outcome. The subsequent tendency has been to celebrate or critique US intervention. This article traces the difficulties experienced by the American government in post-war Italy, which laid the platform for an improvised effort in support of non-communist forces. The mobilisation was neither unified nor coherent and, moreover, was influenced by Italians. The final result nevertheless masked problems with the campaign. Rather than a normative critique of American efforts, this article argues that the outcome fostered a ‘perception of success’ that reframed US conceptualisation of the post-war Italian case and considers the wider ramifications of this mind-frame for future US–Italian relations and broader American approaches in the Cold War.

The Second National Conference on Disability, held in Bari in 2003, took the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), adopted by all WHO member states in 2001, as its frame of reference for future action and policies on disability. The ICF broke decisively with the medical model by seeing disability as an interaction between a biological and psychological condition and environmental and attitudinal barriers. Although existing Italian legislation on access to work for persons with disabilities, particularly Law 68/1999 on ‘collocamento mirato’ (targeted placement), anticipated some of the principles and definitions of the ICF, its implementation in practice was often snared in complex bureaucratic procedures and compromised by narrowly medical assessments of impairment and by considerable variations in standard from region to region. In 2009–2011 a pilot project, Progetto ICF4, was launched in 11 regions of Italy. It applied ICF principles, using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to assess the suitability of a work environment in terms of the networks of relations between the different actors involved in it. The way this has functioned in practice is illustrated by a case study of Teramo, one of the provinces in the pilot.