This paper explores how im/migrant women coming to Italy from all corners of the world and from very different backgrounds in terms of class, education and work experience are transformed into home eldercare assistants. The paper explores how these workers are created through discourses and every day practices enforced at different levels: from the state to the employers, from the mediators to the workers themselves. The creation of these workers has a double function: one is to fill the needs of a welfare state that otherwise would have to radically transform itself in order to provide effective services to the elders and, the other, is to alleviate the pressures of those of the family caregivers, mostly women, who otherwise would collapse under the burden of extended care.

This essay focuses on the racialising devices that characterise some Italian colonial novels. Specifically, it looks at two novels of the late 1920s – Enrico Cappellina's Un canto nella notte. Romanzo coloniale and Guido Milanesi's La sperduta di Allah – with the aim of highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the racist models they endorse. A critical close reading of the texts reveals the degree of interconnection between segregationist and inclusivist interpretations of the cross-racial colonial encounter in the first half of the ventennio. With this perspective, the 1936 imperial turning point, even though critical on the institutional level, appears less so in the cultural field of racist production.

In Western countries children's identities have been constructed through their bodies and the different meanings attached to them. Children's bodies are central to defining their social and spatial position in the city. They are in fact, more than any other group, subjected to a set of spatial bans and prohibitions that confine them within places specifically targeted at them during their free time (i.e. recreational, ludic and sports organisations). One of the recreational activities most commonly engaged in by Italian children is sport. However, little is known about children's approach to sporting activities. What is proposed here is that the site of children's involvement in sport is a valuable key for the observation of the ambiguous construction of children's citizenship through spatial borders and body training. Based on a long-term ethnographic study of the Cagliari football club academy for children, and informed by the new sociology of childhood approach, this article investigates the role of organised sport contexts in the urban generational order. The conclusions stress the contradiction detectable in a structured football club academy as a site that, on the one hand, promotes children's rights to play and, on the other, restricts their substantive citizenship within the public space.

This article discusses recent academic and theoretical approaches to disability in Italy, situating them in relation to Anglo-American disability studies as well as within the Italian academic context, and sketches out the contours of an emergent Italian disability studies. The discussion centres on three terms that have emerged recently in Italy: superabilità (implying both ‘ability to overcome’ and ‘exceptional ability’); diversabilità (being ‘differently abled’); and transabilità (the desire for, or identification with, a disabled body by a non-disabled subject). The article considers the role of narrative in each of these categories, as well as the way that each deals with the question of limits. While discourses in each category construct or confirm a strong disabled identity, the article argues that transabilità might also be understood as the transcendence of identity on the basis of ability. This alternative understanding puts pressure on the question of identity itself and challenges the very need for narrative (re)construction.

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy's experience of the Second World War and the Resistance, through canonical films such as Rossellini's Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945). It is important, however, to restore a full picture of the array of genres which narrated and refracted the Resistance experience in the post-war period. To this end, this article looks at a key genre that has been overlooked by scholarship, the opera film or melodramma. In examining Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, Gallone, 1946), the article considers Mary Wood's contention (in Italian cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005, 109) that in this period ‘realist cinematic conventions were insufficient for the maximum perception of the historical context’, and that the ‘affective charge’ of melodrama was essential for restoring this complexity. It assesses the appeal to the emotions produced by the film, and the ways in which this is constructed through the bodily and vocal performance of the opera divo, and questions the critical division between emotion (always viewed as excessive) and authenticity (seen in neorealism, the mode of seriousness) which has seen the opera film relegated to the margins of post-war Italian film history.

This article reports the main findings of a paper first presented in May 1996 at a study conference organized by the Reform Commission of the Higher Council for the Judiciary (Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura, CSM). That presentation was published in full in Quaderni del Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura, 1, 99, 1998, pp. 1–84. For reasons of space, most of the evidential materials are omitted here.

Love him or loathe him, Silvio Berlusconi is widely assumed to be Europe's most remarkable politician of recent decades, one who has not only affected the nature of electoral competition or the shape of the party system in Italy, but one who has influenced the country's political agenda to the extent that he himself and his role in politics have for long periods been the most important issues around which party competition has taken place.

The attempt to halt the remorseless spread of organised crime in the Italian South should not just be an issue for the judges, investigating magistrates and forces of order; every citizen should feel that they are an integral part of a wind of change, coming from below, that can have a decisive impact on local society. Starting from this premise, art and culture, adopting an approach of participation and involvement, can play a primary role in processes of renewal. In various areas within the provinces of Naples and Caserta, carefully researched works of street art, with the direct involvement of the local population, have provided the means for intervention in decaying and marginal environments where organised crime seemed to be so well entrenched as to be ineradicable. This article presents four case studies, analysing their assumptions, methodology and objectives.

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.

By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier or reduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by the reduce to familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

For the last 20 years, research on European colonialism has addressed private photo collections. Prior to that, interest was focused specifically on propaganda photography. In the hope that privately kept material could offer new, more ‘authentic’ insights into colonial everyday life, researchers have so far mostly ignored the mass-produced images which are often part of such private collections, too. But especially when the question arises of how mass-produced images functioned as consensus-building tools, of what impact they had on the ground, they seem to be a promising source. Therefore, this paper on mass-produced images of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War in private photography collections probes how ‘ordinary’ soldiers used images, what meanings they created in the process, and, thereby, how they positioned themselves relative to the Fascist regime's dominant colonial discourse. This article answers these questions by drawing on the private collections of four so-called ‘allogeni’, German-speaking Italian citizens from the province of Bozen/Bolzano, who took part in the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.

The Fascist model of exhibiting power and placing it in museum settings had its origins in the Liberal exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, and in the first exhibitions devoted to the Risorgimento. However, the regime's museum initiatives were numerous, innovative and varied, and many of them have not yet been adequately investigated; those launched in Italy's colonies, in particular, remain largely unexplored. This article highlights the surprisingly extensive network of museums and temporary exhibitions that Fascism initiated in Italian possessions abroad, involving prominent figures from the regime and contemporary culture, and shows how science, culture and nation-building (in both the colonies and the mother country, and between them) were interwoven in the Fascist museological project for the colonies.

The essay investigates the occupation of the city of Rijeka (1919–20) by an irregular army led by Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, focusing on the concepts of sovereignism and populism. While people with different mentalities and ideological horizons took part in the endeavour, it was d'Annunzio that gave the occupation its profound meaning. The poet attempted to put into practice his political vision centered around a ‘noble people’, composed of warriors and producers, opposed to the liberal elites and in competition with revolutionary socialist movements. In this sense, the Free State of Rijeka grew into the prototype of a new society based on the integration of racial, plebiscitary, corporate, aesthetic, and political themes. At the same time, the city became a beacon of opposition to the new international order proposed by US president Woodrow Wilson, since it advocated and worked towards the birth of sovereignty for small countries resisting new supranational bodies such as the League of Nations.

This article analyses the development of Italian health policies in the post-Second World War period. Shortly after the setting up of the ‘Beveridge model’ and the creation of the British National Health Service, Italy also introduced a new approach to health, which became part of the Constitution. However, the implementation of the necessary reforms was delayed due to resistance from the country's institutions and government parties. The introduction of a radical health reform became possible only in 1978 through pressure generated from social conflicts, trade unions and left-wing parties. The implementation of the National Health Service encountered a number of obstacles due to the specific conditions of Italy, but also owing to changes at the international level. The neoliberal policies started in the 1980s introduced restrictions in health spending, the regionalisation and privatisation of services, and a new selective approach to health. In spite of these limitations and contradictions, the Italian healthcare system has been considerably successful, leading to strong improvements in health and to a life expectancy at birth among the longest in Europe. The recent developments – and the experience of the pandemic – confirm the important impact of a public, universal health service and, at the same time, the persistent policy efforts aimed at weakening its reach.

This article consists of interviews with five world experts on the memory of Fascism. Taking the centenary of the March on Rome as an opportunity to rethink the development of Italian collective memory, the five interviewees were asked to reflect on different aspects of the Italian memory of Fascism, addressing the dominant conceptualisations, limits, and transformations of the discourses used to narrate Fascism in Italian culture. The result of these conversations, which touch upon issues related to the memory of the Resistance, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and colonialism, is a rich overview of the main trends and current trajectories of Italian memory culture, which can help us imagine the future directions of the Italian memory of Fascism and enhance interventions in this field by memory scholars and memory activists.

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 of the black market through two wartime diaries, one published and the other unpublished, written by women of opposite political views, both living in Rome and its outskirts. The analysis of the diaries considers women's attitudes towards the black market. The article argues that the Fascist propaganda of duty to the homeland, so intensively practised through domestic literature during the 1920s and 1930s, was again exploited in wartime in the discourse around the black market and hid the political responsibilities of the government.

This article explores the relationship between Italian heroism and literary history in relation to G.M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy. It firstly summarises some important features of the Victorian culture of public moralism that shaped Trevelyan's early work. It then discusses the influence of the poet, novelist and man-of-letters, George Meredith, on Trevelyan's Garibaldi books and historical practice. The comparison of Meredith and Trevelyan suggests that Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy should be understood as part of a project self-consciously undertaken by Victorian literary and political elites to consolidate, celebrate and, less frequently, to critique British liberal culture and politics. The article concludes that while a Mazzinian notion of dolcezza may have influenced Trevelyan's notion of the hero, his interest in the Risorgimento was ultimately motivated by the usefulness of Italy and Garibaldi in promoting what he considered to be a distinctly ‘English’1 form of ethical patriotism, whose intellectual antecedents – Whig gradualism, constitutional compromise in the form of parliamentary monarchy and a hierarchy-inflected anti-Republicanism – stood in ambivalent relation to the concept of democratic nationality.

Alcide De Gasperi's political life spanned the first half of the twentieth century. It went from his education in a small local environment, but within the multinational setting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to his period of enforced, yet intellectually very productive, public silence during the period of Fascist Italy, and then to his period in the limelight during the years of postwar reconstruction, the re-establishment of democracy and the construction of European unity. A group of scholars has documented the evolution of an outstanding leader by publishing a critical edition of De Gasperi's Scritti e discorsi politici, a collection of writings and speeches from the outset of his career until the end of his life. This article illustrates the research that has been carried out so far; the criteria behind the collection and editing of sources on De Gasperi; and the chronological periods and thematic issues around which the whole body of De Gasperi's political writings have been collated.