The Italian Second Republic was meant to have led to a bipolar polity with alternation in national government between conservative and progressive blocs. Such a system it has been claimed would undermine the geographical structure of electoral politics that contributed to party system immobilism in the past. However, in this article I argue that dynamic place configurations are central to how the ‘new’ Italian politics is being constructed. The dominant emphasis on either television or the emergence of ‘politics without territory’ has obscured the importance of this geographical restructuring. New dynamic place configurations are apparent particularly in the South which has emerged as a zone of competition between the main party coalitions and a nationally more fragmented geographical pattern of electoral outcomes. These patterns in turn reflect differential trends in support for party positions on governmental centralization and devolution, geographical patterns of local economic development, and the re-emergence of the North–South divide as a focus for ideological and policy differences between parties and social groups across Italy.

This paper examines the politics of urban space through a consideration of three ways Italians in Toronto, Canada, create, make claims to and express their belonging in particular neighbourhoods in the city. The article considers forms of claiming and colonizing space that are not overtly violent or confrontational with respect to other groups living within the plural city but, in effect, are assertions of power over particular places with which others must contend. The three forms encompass a range of scales, temporal duration and purposeful collective expression by Italians in Toronto, and they include the quotidian shaping of neighbourhoods, the calendrical colonizing of public spaces during religious and secular celebrations and the monument building that attests to the permanence of Italians in the city. Ultimately, these forms of place-making must contend with the larger forces of commodification and popular imagery that influence the spatial representations of Italians in Toronto.

The recent argument that the notion of ‘transition’ should be set aside in attempting to explain the trajectory of Italian politics in the past two decades is to be welcomed, but does not go far enough in explaining why we, as Italianists, got our case wrong and how exactly we might get our case right today. The transitional ‘myth’ was born and maintained despite growing evidence of its inherently problematic nature, in both conceptual and empirical terms. The concept of ‘transition’ needs more serious conceptual treatment and empirical application, but even with this work it is unlikely to be concluded that Italy is in transition. Freeing Italy and Italianists from this conventional wisdom, while, at the same time, not abandoning the idea that something exceptional happened to Italian politics in the early 1990s will help enrich the debate on the nature of the political change that Italy has experienced in the past 17 years.

This article challenges commonly held preconceptions about the absence of a cohesive cultural policy by arguing that, while many rival aesthetic creeds were accommodated under Mussolini's regime, they can all be seen as permutations of a common vision of the central role to be played by a culture in the regeneration of the national community and the creation of a new Italy. It points to a profound relationship between Fascism's cultural policy and its core mobilizing myth of palingenetic ultra-nationalism, which similarly spawned a wide variety of surface ideologies similarly doomed to failure by the irreducibly pluralistic nature of modern society.

The problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.

Focusing on Italy's Middle East policies under the second Berlusconi (2001–2006) and the second Prodi (2006–2008) governments, this article assesses the manner and extent to which the observed foreign policy shifts between the two governments can be explained in terms of the rebalancing between a ‘Europeanist’ and a transatlantic orientation. Arguing that Rome's policy towards the Middle East hinges less on Italy's specific interests and objectives in the region and more on whether the preference of the government in power is to foster closer ties to the United States or concentrate on the European Union, the analysis highlights how these swings of the pendulum along the EU–US axis are inextricably linked to a number of underlying structural weaknesses of Rome's foreign policy. In particular, the oscillations can be explained by the prevalence of short-term political (and domestic) considerations and the absence of long-term, substantive political strategies, or, in short, by the phenomenon of ‘politics without policy’ that often characterises Italy's foreign policy.

Recent anti-discrimination campaigns by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activists in Italy have increased the visibility of these communities and individuals, but have not resulted in the desired improvements to legislation. In light of this situation, this article analyses modalities of ‘visibility’ as defined and desired by the active LGBT community in Turin, host city for National Pride 2006. The Pride committee scheduled an unprecedentedly ‘visible’ year-long programme of consciousness-raising and cultural events that went far beyond the more usual one-day march. Drawing on a series of interviews with members of the committee and of the lesbian community conducted in Turin in March and June 2006, the discussion explores social, cultural and political visibility in this LGBT community as it hosted National Pride.

Changing from a country of emigration into one of immigration has been one of the major phenomena of Italian society in recent years. One of the realms where this has been most evident is in Italian households employing migrants for domestic service and care work. This article looks at domestic and care practices in the everyday life of a Neapolitan household. Based on participant observation conducted in Giuseppe's apartment, it shows how the traditional Neapolitan way of life can be maintained by employing a live-in worker. It discusses some of the contradictions and tensions involved in this kind of work, and, by looking at everyday life, it also questions depictions of vulnerable migrant workers at the mercy of their employers.

This article examines the coverage of Naples since 2000 in the Guardian and the Independent, paying particular attention to their portrayal of the Camorra and the refuse crisis. It argues that this coverage was not simply riddled with stereotypes but was also characterised by significant inaccuracies and omissions. Analysts in Italy have detailed how the trash emergency in 2008 was the outcome of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity and that organised crime, although intent on exploiting the situation, was not a determining factor. The British press, instead, tended to conflate the breakdown of the urban waste cycle with the dumping of toxic waste and, by inverting cause and effect, to point the blame at the Camorra. These accounts, it is argued, are partially explained by the very nature of foreign news that seeks out dramatic and clearcut stories for an otherwise disinterested audience. They also reflect the heightened interest in the Camorra following the Secondigliano War and the English translation of Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. However, the article suggests that it is the press's assumption that Naples is already an ‘out of the ordinary’ urban setting that ultimately precludes the possibility of an informed coverage of the city and its predicaments.

Although Italian mafia scholars have recently been turning their attention to the Calabrian mafia (known as the ’Ndrangheta) diaspora in Australia, their efforts have been limited by conducting research remotely from Italy without the benefit of local knowledge. Australian journalists and crime writers have long played an important role in documenting ’Ndrangheta activities, but have in turn been limited by a lack of expertise in Italian language and culture, and knowledge of the Italian scholarly literature. As previously in the US, Australian scholarly discussion of the phenomenon has been inhibited, especially since the 1970s, by a ‘liberal progressive’ ‘negationist’ discourse, which has led to a virtual silence within the local scholarly literature. This paper seeks to break this silence by bringing the Italian scholarly and Australian journalistic and archival sources into dialogue, and summarising the clear evidence for the presence in Australia since the early 1920s of criminal actors associated with a well-organised criminal secret society structured along lines familiar from the literature on the ’Ndrangheta.

Many authors use the metaphor of an accordion to describe the enlargement of the constitutional functions of the Italian head of state: because of the weakness of the political parties the president is able to ‘open and play the accordion’ according to his own interpretation of his institutional powers. While useful, this metaphor does not take into account the structural changes that have occurred over the last 30 years, as well as the informal powers that recent presidents have resorted to, which were the most important factors in the metamorphosis of the presidential figure. Structural changes include the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the First Republic and the mediatisation and personalisation of politics and party structure. Informal powers include those of ‘esternazione’ (a term that roughly means ‘to render public personal statements without previous consultation with the cabinet’) and of moral suasion. By analysing the development of these two powers, this article aims to describe the changing role of the head of state during the Second Republic. It also defines a typology of presidential moral suasion, which is proposed as a useful tool to analyse presidential style and strategy in influencing law-making. The analysis of the innovative use of communicative powers by the last two presidents, Ciampi and Napolitano, shows how the transformation of the Italian presidency can probably be considered permanent.

This article shows how the latest research into Sicily's social and economic history calls into question certain well-established interpretations of the history of the family and its structures, the paradigm of Mediterranean honour, and the theory of familism. This new appraisal also highlights the major significance of the history of women and gender identity.

Emotion plays a vital role in any rounded history of warfare, both as an element in morale and as component in understanding the soldier's experience. Theories on the functioning of emotions vary, but an exploration of Italian soldiers' emotions during the First World War highlights both cognitive and cultural elements in the ways emotions were experienced and expressed. Although Italian stereotypes of passivity and resignation dominated contemporary discourse concerning the feelings and reactions of peasant conscripts, letters reveal that Italian soldiers vividly expressed a wide range of intense emotions. Focusing on fear, horror and grief as recurrent themes, this article finds that these emotions were processed and expressed in ways which show similarities to the combatants of other nations but which also display distinctly Italian features. The language and imagery commonly deployed offer insights into the ways in which Italian socio-cultural norms shaped expressions of personal war experience. In letters that drew on both religious imagery and the traditional peasant concerns of land, terrain and basic survival, soldiers expressed their fears of death, isolation, suffering and killing in surprisingly vigorous terms.

Italy's national calendar has undergone a marked transformation in the last 10 years, with the inclusion of new holidays and the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones. This article analyses these changes by focusing on the recent debates about a shared past, involving state leaders as well as intellectuals. After an analysis of the forms of symbolic conflict concerning memory and the relevance of cultural constraints in shaping this conflict, and a brief assessment of the new form of the Republic's calendar, the article examines three major days that deal with the State's treatment of the past: 25 April (Liberation Day); 2 June, seen as the birthday of the Republic; and the recently introduced national Remembrance Day (10 February), which remembers the foibe or killings and emigration of Italian people on Italy's eastern frontier with former Yugoslavia. The article concludes by identifying the major trends in the public management of memory in the context of Italy's Second Republic.

The Italian political crisis of 1993–1994 and the new political dynamics to which it gave rise, and which persist today, have strongly shaped both public debate and historiographical reflection on the Italian Republic. This article assesses the impact of the political changes of the post-1994 period (and notably Berlusconi's entry into politics) on the debate over the so-called First Republic, with regard to: Italian national identity in the post-Fascist period; the functioning of the political system, especially in relation to the role of the political parties; anti-Fascism and its internal divisions; communism and anti-communism.

The article analyses cross-class encounters within 1970s feminist campaigning from the perspective of the history of emotions. It is based on a case study of a feminist women's sexual health clinic (consultorio autogestito) in a working-class district near Turin, the Falchera, in the mid-1970s. The article investigates the role played by emotions in the creation of a sense of community among women from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. The encounters between feminist activists from Turin and working-class women living at the Falchera are understood as framed by these emotional exchanges, which led the women involved to question in new ways their own life-stories, aspirations and understanding of libertà. It is argued that these exchanges led to a reshaping of feminist politics at the grass-roots, specifically in the articulation of strongly situated notions of liberation. The analysis is based on original interviews and interviews published at the time.

This article examines whether Italian foreign policy has undergone significant and substantial changes under the second Prodi government. The first part identifies the variables affecting continuity and change in a country's foreign policy and addresses the question of the conditions under which one can expect changes as a result of a change in government, and the conditions under which continuity is instead more likely. The second part looks at the second Prodi government's foreign policy on a number of topical issues, most of which were also faced by the Berlusconi government, to see to what extent the Prodi government's approach to foreign policy indeed changed from that of its predecessor. The article concludes that the Prodi government did not change Italian foreign policy in any substantial manner; differences existed only in the way the new government occasionally chose to present and justify its policies publicly.

This article explores the communication strategy of Silvio Berlusconi through the analytical framework of the ‘permanent campaign’ model. Beginning with the distinction between ‘personal popularity’ and ‘political consensus’, the article looks at the different aspects of Berlusconi's political communication strategy since his election victory in May 2001 and assesses the rationale and effectiveness of his permanent campaign. The author concludes that, despite Berlusconi's strong commitment to the communication process, his leadership appears more similar to the rhetorical Presidency model than to the experiences of leaders who have shown that campaigning can also be used to govern. The article identifies two key limits: (1) the link between the drive for personal popularity and the building of support for the government's main policies appears weak; (2) all communication strategies are undermined by deep divisions within the ruling coalition.

What role has culture played in shaping Italians’ experiences of Italian colonialism before and after the Second World War? How can the tools of cultural analysis be employed to understand the place and space Italian colonialism has had within Italian and European history? This article draws on and discusses the growing body of scholarly work about colonial narratives and representations (exhibitions, travel writings, etc.) but is centred on the Italian colonial cinema. It focuses, in particular, on the issue of the double-edged power of the visual in colonial films with respect to both Italian and African audiences. The article explores spectatorship under colonial conditions but also how the visual elements of colonial films contributed to or complicated the production of ‘colonial experiences’ among the many Italians who never set foot in Africa.