In this special issue of Modern Italy, four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology.

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 Italy's position in relation to northern Europe, the South's position within Italy, Calabria's position within the South and the position within Calabria of certain communities. A number of towns in the Locride are at the extreme end of this spectrum: Locri, San Luca, Africo and Platì. Analysis of the (mis)recognition of inhabitants of these communities, including by other Calabrians, demonstrates how the experience of shame may be layered. This paper also considers how interviewees appear to deny their social and cultural proximity with the ’ndrangheta and the role this plays in a self-perpetuating cycle involving stereotypes, ’ndrangheta growth and extreme socioeconomic conditions.

This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony's 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.

Since the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's city council. Local perceptions of national events, like Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed a significant symbolic meaning and challenged traditional understandings of local administration by introducing notions of political opposition. In Bologna, the second city of the former Papal State, the Moderates were able to form a political hegemony after the Unification of Italy and remained the predominant political force also after the parliamentary revolution of 1876 and the electoral reforms of the 1880s. Due to its limited influence on the local administration, Bologna's Left defined its ideological profile earlier and more clearly than the Left in other parts of Italy and integrated issues of national importance into local political discourse. Illustrating the relationship between central administration and the periphery, the article analyses the development of political language and changing meanings of political representation on the local level between Unification and World War One.

The prison system under Fascism was used to house both common and political prisoners. After 25 July 1943, the prisons were opened, only to be closed once again in occupied Italy as the Nazis took over the system. San Vittore prison in Milan was theatre to a series of changes over the period from 1943 to 1946, culminating in the famous riots of April 1946. This article analyses the changes in the prison system, the mix of prisoners inside the institution and the continuation of the civil war inside San Vittore after liberation. This micro-focus allows reflections on a number of key issues regarding the post-war state: legitimacy, legality, repression and amnesty. The post-liberation regime's failure to keep order both inside and outside of the prison system was a key test of its legitimacy among those who had gone along with Fascism and were worried about what was to come: The article centres on the extraordinary and contested events surrounding the ‘revolt’ of 1946 in San Vittore and argues that accounts thus far provided are neither accurate nor particularly insightful about this key post-war moment. The amnesty of 1946, so long attributed to Togliatti's personal sense of responsibility was, in reality, forced upon the justice minister by the chaos in the prisons right across the peninsula.

The idea for this special issue of Modern Italy emerged from the Association for the Study of Modern Italy's annual conference ‘The Second Italian Republic Ten Years On: Prospect and Retrospect’, which was held at the Italian Cultural Institute, London, in November 2004. The conference afforded an opportunity for scholars and observers of contemporary Italy to reflect on one of the most eventful decades in the history of the Italian Republic and to offer an appraisal of how political, economic, social and cultural life had fared since the first election based on the new majoritarian voting system which first brought Silvio Berlusconi's coalition to power in April 1994.

Following the collapse of the ‘First Republic’, political leadership has become both more technocratic and more charismatic. Constitutional reform of a presidential type, which would reinforce this dual trend, has come near to being effected. This paper argues that organizational changes in the main political parties bring them close to being able to participate in such a system. It also argues that a plebiscitary form of constitutional democracy, namely some form of presidentialism, could reinforce the consolidation of the nascent two-bloc party system. Finally, it argues that a political system based on two competitive party blocs could be of great benefit to the Italian polity.

The modern popular cult of the Pope, which originated with the ‘disinherited’ papacy of Pius IX, reached its acme with Pius XII. Phases of intensification of this cult, which was linked to other ‘devotions’, those of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary, served to mobilize the Catholic masses at critical junctures for the Catholic Church and in the face of what were perceived as political threats. Pius XII had to animate ‘movement’ in an age proclaimed to be one of a unique crisis of civilization. The projection of him as a charismatic figure was linked to that of Rome as a sacred centre and as the very fulcrum of world history. The Catholic activist ethos of ‘movement’ and also the presentation of the interchange between Pius XII and the Crowd had features in common with Fascist rhetorics, but ultimately the cult of the ‘victim-Pope’ represented an inversion of the crasser forms of power-imagery.

The article examines certain of the more recent perspectives on twentieth- century dictatorship, looking in particular at the complex relationship between the dictator and the people. Extending its range beyond that of the ‘classic’ totalitarianisms, the paper argues for a more nuanced approach to the question of popular support for or resistance to regimes and suggests that many of the old binaries concerning popular attitudes need to be revised, with a consequent readjustment of the roles often attributed to violence, to ideology and other cultural factors, and to the varied seductive attractions of mass mobilisation. While pointing to the difficulties of reaching any very definite conclusions in an area characterised by ambivalence and ambiguity, the paper attempts to suggest certain variables related to popular behaviour that may have determined the degree to which regimes were able to impose domination.

The Italian representatives in the Brussels Constitutional Convention played a greater role than expected. The Italians, who many thought would be destined to a role as pigmies in the Convention because of ideological differences and the personal mistrust they carried from their domestic arena, acted mostly as giants in the contributions they provided to the final text. The representatives of both the government and the opposition identified a series of points upon which they agreed and which were introduced in the final document. These positions, although not federalist, were much more advanced than those described as ‘intergovernmental’ or ‘confederal’. There were many reasons for this. The deliberative method adopted in the Convention probably helped this convergence. Certainly, the Italians wanted to keep open the dialogue with the main EU member-states at a moment when the war with Iraq was undermining it, and the Italian representatives in the Convention shared a pro-European attitude, while this attitude was being called into question in the domestic arena by the Berlusconi government.

I am taking the opportunity created by the recent introduction of a section entitled ‘Contexts and Debates’ to put forward some considerations regarding Bevilacqua's contribution on the southern question, which appeared in the last number of this journal. By doing so, I hope to promote a stimulating debate on the South of Italy today and on the way forward for reversing the current process of de-industrialization in the region and the widening gap between the South and the rest of the country. Ideally, the debate should encourage different points of view and interpretations without reopening old wounds or leading to entrenched positions.

This article focuses on the experience of a group of traceurs (people practising parkour) in the urban context of Genoa. It describes a public area of the town – the ‘spot' most frequently used for training – from the specific point of view of the traceurs. Genoa is made up of different and relatively autonomous public spaces with specific and cultural characters, but parkour originates from the attempt to disrupt and reconfigure the city's institutional framework. Genoese traceurs share some of their orientation with other parkour groups in Europe and North America: they are attempting to define new ways of moving and new meanings for urban spaces and to expand the standard definition of a citizen. However, in the urban environment of Genoa, traceurs have to face diverse forms of opposition to their attempts to define their own pathways through the everyday flow of people, and in the disciplinary gaze of other citizens.

Following consideration of the most common representations of migrants in Italian cinema, where they are often portrayed as victimised and minor subjects, this article analyses a film by Davide Sordella and Pablo Benedetti, Corazones de Mujer (2008) as a ‘post-migration alternative’. This film considers a different way of depicting ‘foreigners’, and addresses the complex issues of gender and sexuality as they emerge at the interface between Western and Arab cultures. Within the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's ‘gender performativity’ and Rosi Braidotti's ‘nomadic subject’, this article aims to suggest an alternative way of representing migrants in Italian cinema as agents of social and gender transgressions.

Based on Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra (2006), production of the TV series Gomorra – La serie (2014) was met with scepticism as many feared it would glamorise organised crime and, consequently, attract young people toward Camorra affiliation. The series' bleak portrayal of criminals and criminality was offered as a response to such concerns. Despite the preoccupations, Gomorra – La serie was hugely successful and, because of its quality, was sold to other countries. In Italy, the series' success can be measured by the popularity of its Twitter hashtag #GomorraLaSerie. Engaged with Henry Jenkins' theories of media convergence and based on a corpus of tweets bearing this official hashtag, this article proposes a quantitative analysis and advances conclusions regarding the Italian TV audience and second-screen viewing practices. Additionally, through a qualitative study of Saviano's tweets about the series, it examines the writer's use of the social media platform as a tool of narrative continuity. Finally, the article highlights a few examples of fan-generated media and concludes with remarks regarding Saviano's problematic position at the centre of a transmedia object.

This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

In Italy, living close to or even within a place of business is not in and of itself unusual. Forms of housing in Italy are similar to many other European countries in that people primarily live in mixed-use spaces. It is common to have an apartment above cafés, bars, and bakeries. In this article, I examine how this form of mixed-use residence shapes market practices, decision-making, and labour relations among owners and workers. I argue that the spaces in which employees participate in the market economy also mirror their commitments to family. By examining workspaces across two food certifications in Milan, Italy – a Made in Italy certification (Food Italy) and a halal certification (Halal Italia) – I argue that Italian kinship networks structure how workers in each business operate. This intervention contributes to a larger literature on the cultural dimensions of capitalism.

During the Age of Mass Migration more than four million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in US cities has been widely explored: however, the study of how migrants adjusted in relation to nature and food production is a relatively recent concern. Due to a mixture of racism and fear of political radicalism, Italians were deemed to be undesirable immigrants in East Coast cities and American authorities had long perceived Italian immigrants as unclean, unhealthy and carriers of diseases. As a flipside to this narrative, Italians were also believed to possess a ‘natural’ talent for agriculture, which encouraged Italian diplomats and politicians to propose the establishment of agricultural colonies in the southern United States. In rural areas Italians could profit from their agricultural skills and finally turn into ‘desirable immigrants’. The aim of this paper is to explore this ‘emigrant colonialism’ through the lens of environmental history, comparing the Italian and US diplomatic and public discourses on the potential and limits of Italians’ agricultural skills.

This article has two related aims. First, it examines the most up-to-date studies relative to Italian military justice during the First World War, and seeks to set them in the context of the historical debate since the late 1960s. Secondly, and more specifically, it focuses on recently uncovered evidence regarding staggeringly high numbers of previously unknown summary executions in the Italian army. It explores the significance of these findings for understanding the character of the Italian military justice system as well as that of the war conducted by Italy's ruling élites between 1915 and 1918.