The paper explores the tale of two 'epicentres’ – metropolitan New York and Lombardy – and seeks to depict the socio-demographic patterns that characterise the worst cases of infection, hospitalisation, and death during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. By drawing upon secondary data concerning sub-territorial units within the two regions – ZIP-code level and counties in New York and municipalities in Italy – the paper compares the characteristics of the two areas in an effort to understand both how they became the original major epicentres and how their experiences of the pandemic differed. We suspected initially that the pandemic in Lombardy was a function of a complex constellation of variables, such as the age of the population, the unexpected emergence of the virus, and features of the local health system. In New York, the pattern seemed to fit a more familiar dynamic, the kind one would expect from the course that most pandemics take: the poor suffer the worst. The paper tries to extend the understanding of the complex and not univocal mix of social variables that can facilitate the spread of a pandemic and make its effects extreme.

This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon.

Between 1938 and 1943, Fascist intellectuals debated the problem of how to create a racial policy that would encompass the Japanese within the Aryan doctrine. This article demonstrates how internal divisions in the Fascist party over racial issues generated alternative versions of pro-Japanese propaganda, which influenced the racial thinking of the Italian far-right even long after the Second World War. I show how Italian racial theories developed to underpin the alliance with Japan were transnational in scope, as they involved both German and Italian scholars in a common effort to lobby state racial policies. Specifically, I consider George Montandon and Julius Evola as two transnational actors engaged in building a case for the inclusion of the Japanese in the family of Aryan races, speaking either from a ‘biological’ or ‘spiritual’ perspective. While by the end of the Second World War the ‘biological’ thesis for the inclusion of the Japanese race had evaporated, the ‘spiritual’ thesis would continue to influence a generation of Italian far-right militants, especially during the ‘Years of Lead’. To make sense of this legacy, I suggest that the foundational myth of Italian Fascism, based on the spiritual heritage of the multiethnic Roman empire, responded to the neofascist quest for transnational affiliations against Western materialism.

This article analyses Canadian perceptions of Italy at the governmental and societal levels. It argues that Canadians pay relatively little attention to things Italian and that their images of Italy are somewhat stereotypical. Italian politics do not receive much attention and when they do, domestic political aspects prevail over foreign policy ones. The Canadian press represents Italy as a country with a cultural and artistic past, an economic system that finds it difficult to adjust to globalisation and hence destined to decline, a corrupt political system and last, but not least, a society exhibiting many curious, and even bizarre, streaks.

In 1925 the Fascist dictatorship forced Gaetano Salvemini to leave Italy and begin a new life in exile. Salvemini understood he could find political and financial support in London to achieve two main aims: to live a decent life as an antifascist exile and fight the Fascist dictatorship from abroad. Thanks to a network encompassing intellectuals, academics, journalists, and politicians, London provided Salvemini with a platform for sharing antifascist stances outside Italy. This essay will develop research on this topic by taking into account Salvemini's conference speeches, articles, books, and essays written while in Britain, from 1925 to 1934. The corpus of the selected texts will show that Salvemini carefully singled out topics that were able to attract the attention of a foreign audience, particularly British public opinion. Therefore, the analysis of Salvemini's intellectual production during this period and the reaction of the press will contribute to cast a new light on his antifascist strategies; in other words, it will lead to a consideration of the extent to which being part of a British intellectual network transformed his approach to the antifascist struggle.

Celebrity scandals are a useful tool to reveal the pervasiveness of expected ways of behaving within a particular culture or society. Italy of the early 1960s was particularly marked by these kinds of scandals, including that of singer Mina’s pregnancy by Corrado Pani in 1963. This article takes this scandal as a case study to explore how star image in this period in Italy was influenced by the established ideologies that governed social convention, morality, and traditional gender roles. It examines in detail the ways in which the popular press reported on this scandal, using the reports that covered the announcement of the pregnancy and then the birth to cast light on the extent to which the mainstream social values and ideas regarding the status quo and expected ways of behaving for women in Italy during the early 1960s were destabilised and/or reasserted through the star persona of Mina.

At the dawn of the Second World War, the successes of the Axis seemed to herald the realisation of a new anti-Bolshevik and anti-democratic European order dominated by Nazi-fascist powers. Italian Fascists and Spanish Falangists enthusiastically welcomed plans for the ‘new civilisation’ in which they were determined to participate as protagonists. This article sheds light on the roles projected for the respective countries in the New European Order in the postwar period, according to the black and the blue shirts. It also investigates the ideological and cultural foundations of the Fascist and Falangist projects related to the new continental configuration, identifying similarities and differences between them. Considering the scarcity of comparative writings about fascist movements in the Mediterranean area, the present research fills a historiographic gap.

This article focuses on Italian Fascist propaganda in Finland. Federico Finchelstein (2010) characterised fascism as a global-transnational doctrine with diverse reformulations, ramifications and permutations. Therefore, the Finnish case-study is useful in the analysis of Mussolini's twin struggle against Soviet Communism and the increasing Nazi threat in the Baltic in the 1930s and 1940s. This article will examine how Mussolini tried to keep in touch with Finnish fascists after Hitler's rise to power. Organisations and groups like the Lapua Movement and the Finnish Patriotic People's Movement were inspired by Italian Fascism and the success of the March on Rome encouraged their hope that they could take power in Finland. The ultimate failure of Finnish fascism has ensured the continued marginalisation of fascism as a research subject in the Finnish academic tradition. Yet, as Roger Griffin suggests, studies of peripheral and failed fascisms can also contribute important insights for understanding both the ‘centre’ of fascism, as well as modern nationalist extremist movements. Fascism as an international political phenomenon cannot be understood from rigidly national interpretative frameworks.

Among his varied publications, Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) produced three collections of oral testimonies gathered from the contadini (peasants) of Piedmont: La strada del davai, Il mondo dei vinti and L’anello forte. This article argues that these collections were the product of the same specific impegno del dopo (‘obligation of afterwards’) as his initial autobiographical writings, which had arisen from his experiences as an officer on the Russian Front during the Second World War. From this premise, the article then examines the interaction of Revelli's sense of impegno del dopo with the methodology he developed. The article concludes with an assessment of Revelli's stated aims and his actual achievements.

Report on the Convegno internazionale di studi nel centenario della battaglia di Adua, Piacenza, 10–12 April 1996, now published as, Angeld Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Rome - Bari, 1997, 468 pp., ISBN 88–420–5196–9, 45,000 Lire.

In April 1987, I turned up at Trento's Centro Santa Chiara expecting to see a screening of Mustapha Akkad's The Lion of the Desert and discovered instead, due to a forced entry into the auditorium and confiscation of the reels by the Digos, that Italy faced its colonial past with real anxiety. This film recounts the life of Omar al-Mukhtar, the man who made Italy's conquest of Libya a vicious and bloody war of attrition complete with the whole set up that empirebuilding required for its cheerful accomplishment: concentration camps, mass deportations, massacres of civilians, carpet bombing of villages, etc. Omar al-Mukhtar was hanged, of course, and for Gheddafi Libyan patriotism was born, hence his pleasure in pouring enough oil money into the film to attract big names like Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. But in Italy the film was banned because considered ‘damaging to the army's honour’. It is strange, but perhaps not altogether without logic, that the Italian army should feel threatened by people being able to see soldiers of Fascist Italy behaving as the soldiers of Fascist Italy behaved, when taking into consideration that the Italian Republic was born, like Libya, out of the Resistance. As in Germany (or so goes the story), the army remained impervious to the excesses of fascist ideology and, of course, played an important part in countering it. But if there was a project that the Italian army (before and during Fascism) made very much its own it was the colonization of Africa.

The article analyses how Spanish perceptions of Italian domestic politics and its international role have changed over the last decade. The first part of the article presents an overview of the most significant fields of cooperation between the two countries and of the images of Italy in Spanish politics. There follows the reconstruction of non-institutional perceptions through an analysis of articles concerning Italy published by two major Spanish newspapers. The article concludes that the traditional image of Italy as a positive model to imitate has faded away and a more competitive attitude has emerged.

At the end of 2009, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that 2010 would be the year of reforms in Italy (Il Sole 24 Ore, 26 December 2009). Indeed Mr Berlusconi and the question of institutional reforms have been the crucial elements of Italian political discourse and debate in recent years. However, while much has been said and written about the former, a number of key questions still beg to be answered about the latter. First of all, what reforms are we talking about? Are these a specific package of institutional engineering or are they, rather, an eye-catching and consensus-building yet still diffused set of aspirations? In either case, what vision of twenty-first-century Italy do they reflect or propose? Is there consensus enough – within and across parliamentary coalitions – on what the priorities ought to be and how they should be tackled?

This article analyses the competition strategies adopted by the Christian Democratic (DC) and post-Christian Democratic (post-DC) parties after the electoral reforms of 1993 and 2005. Four main aspects are considered: the significance of cultural (ideological and cognitive) factors in the DC's exit from the political stage; the need to adapt post-DC strategy to bipolarism and the nostalgia for an autonomous centre; the nature and geography of the post-DC vote; and the attitudes of the middle-level elites of the three principal post-DC parties (the DL, the UDEUR and the UDC) vis-à-vis the competitive and strategic decisions they had to make. The article reaches the following conclusions: the post-DC parties share the same cultural orientations and have similar politico-electoral characteristics (a confessional background, the relevance of patronage networks and personalistic vote mobilisation); all three parties adapted, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to the new structure of coalitional bipolarism in the decade 1996–2006; and both research data on the main post-DC parties’ national congress delegates and the evolution of their electoral strategies on the eve of the 2008 elections show that the post-Christian Democrats felt more at home in the centre-left alignment, together with the post-communist PDS-DS, than in the centre-right alignment led by Berlusconi.