Italian football is renowned as much for the passion of its spectators as it is for the quality of its players, yet these spectators are understudied. Those studies that have been conducted have generally focused on the problems of violence and racism associated with some of the more extreme supporters, the so-called ultras. This paper aims to complement that research by analysing a different aspect of the passions of Italian spectators, namely the emotional ties they create with particular players upon whom they confer a special, hero-like status. Our interest lies not in questioning the legitimacy of this status, but rather in looking at what the history of these emotional attachments reveals of the football supporters themselves, and of their relationship to the football club they support. This paper focuses on the intense relationship supporters of Associazione Sportiva Roma have had with two key players: Agostino Di Bartolomei and Francesco Totti. Drawing on a large body of texts including graffiti, newspapers, talkback radio, popular accounts and internet fan forums, along with psychoanalysis and classical mythology, the authors trace the way each of these players was granted a specific heroic status that evolved and changed over time, and how the passions they provoked became part of the ever transforming culture and identity of Rome. In particular we explore how the tales and cultural texts devoted to football players can reveal something of the emotional worlds and experiences of a city's inhabitants, and the way local memories and identities are remembered, retold and forgotten through passionate engagement with the football players who represent them on the broader national and international stage.

Fascism saw education as a key way to ‘make Italians’ both at home and in its colonies. Schools for Italians and for the indigenous population in Africa were a key part of this project. These educational institutions were set up, partly, to convince young Italians of their role as colonisers and bearers of an idea of ‘Italian civilisation’. A small minority of Africans, who were permitted to attend schools created for a section of the local population, were given an education that was designed to reinforce their role as inferior and as targets for an idea of a superior ‘Italian civilisation’. This article will analyse the role of the schools set up in the colonies both for Italians and for the local population, as well as their use of politics, propaganda and their educational techniques. The article looks at continuities and breaks with the pre-Fascist period, as well as the radicalisation of racist educational policies after the proclamation of the empire.

World cultural heritage is under systemic attack on several crisis fronts, most notably in Mesopotamia, where ISIS is practising a deliberate and highly sophisticated strategy of ‘cultural cleansing’. Through its newly established Task Force, Italy is leading the international community’s efforts to strengthen the protection regime by including a cultural component in the mandates of peacekeeping interventions. The Italian contribution distinguishes itself, thanks to its capacities and capabilities, in fulfilling the military, police and cultural tasks of ‘cultural peacekeeping’ and in meeting the needs of the international intervention in the crucial entry and exit phases. Moreover, Italy’s commitment to protecting cultural heritage fits perfectly with the distinctive features of Italy’s international identity and role while at the same time serving the country’s national interests by increasing its standing and visibility in world affairs.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the Italian public funding regime, in the light of the assumptions of the cartel party thesis. In the mid-1990s, the debate on party and party system change was revitalised by R. Katz and P. Mair (1995), who introduced the concept of the ‘cartel party’ as a means to study the increasing influence of the state on party politics. Among the main analytical dimensions of the cartel party argument, the system-level variables have received little attention with respect to the Italian case. In what follows I try to find out empirical evidence for the hypothesised changes in the relationship between parties and the state and in the patterns of inter-party competition. I will analyse the trends of the law-making process in the domain of party funding (1948–2014), by combining these observations with data on parties’ reliance on state funds and party collusive behaviour.

‘Addiopizzo’ (Goodbye protection money) is a grassroots anti-mafia movement based in Palermo that stresses the individual consumer's responsibility for maintaining the Sicilian mafia's pizzo system. If you purchase products from a business that pays the pizzo you are indirectly supporting the mafia. By encouraging Palermitans to buy from ‘pizzo-free’ businesses, Addiopizzo uses the purchasing power of the consumer to fight organised crime. The community of ‘pizzo-free’ businesses is small but steadily growing whilst the number of critical consumers pledging to buy their products appears to have peaked. This article aims to investigate the reasons why consumers may be reluctant to support ‘pizzo-free’ businesses by asking those who have already made public their decision to do so. Whilst critical consumers cannot fully explain why the majority of Palermo's citizens continue to tolerate the pizzo system their attitudes towards them do highlight differences that may help to account for wider non-participation in Addiopizzo's campaign.

The term ‘transnational history’ has made rapid ground in recent scholarly debate. In some ways the latest manifestation of an approach that has been variously described as international, comparative, world or global history, transnational history seeks to overcome a historiography focused on the nation and to displace the focus on the nation-state by studying non-governmental institutions, civil associations, informal groups and/or individual actors. Its primary claim to innovation lies in an emphasis on movement, interaction and interpenetration between and across different groups, societies and political units. Thus, the main concern of transnational history is with linkages and networks, perhaps especially in the so-called ‘Global South’; with respect to the latter, an implicit aim of the approach is to challenge the ‘Eurocentrism’ characteristic of historical writing at least since the Enlightenment.

Recent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men's sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender.

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

Italian capitalism has long been distinguished by the large size of the public enterprise sector and the power of large family firms, underpinned by powerful networks of inter-firm alliance orchestrated by the merchant bank, Mediobanca. This article seeks to analyse the extent to which the current programme of privatization is serving not only to shrink the size of, but to transform the structure of, power in the private sector. While some reformers have seen in privatization an instrument to encourage the adoption of Anglo-Saxon forms of corporate governance in Italy, it is argued here that the evidence of recent changes indicates the emergence of a more differentiated pattern of corporate governance rather than the triumph of any single model.

In the last decade, in spite of a large number of parties taking part in elections, the Italian party system has shown an increasing simplification in the programmatic supply, with two large coalitions showing a process of convergence of their policy platforms. This article shows that on the crucial themes characterising the confrontation between neo-liberalism versus regulated capitalism, the distance between the two coalitions has progressively reduced. The theory of the cartel party has predicted convergence in the policy positions of parties. Thus, the article will attempt to test the validity of this theory and of the predicted consequences on the Italian case. For this purpose, a longitudinal analysis will be presented grounded on party manifestos for the Italian general elections.

Mussolini was the prototype of twentieth-century charismatic dictators. His personal charisma antedated the founding of Fascism and the formal construction of collective charisma through the movement and the personality cult. First forged in the socialist movement, Mussolini's charisma assumed a new guise when he became a supporter of Italy's intervention in the First World War. He acquired an aura for the third time as Fascist leader. There were always tensions between the Duce and Fascism as the latter embodied the collective charisma of a movement. Nevertheless, Fascist ideology and culture incorporated the idea of the charismatic leader as a focus and source of authority on the model of the Catholic Church. Although it was difficult by the 1930s to distinguish between the believer's exaltation and courtly adulation, Mussolini exercised a personal charisma for many Fascists even after his death.

This article examines the surrogacy debate that has developed within contemporary feminist and LGBT movements in Italy, following the approval of the law on civil unions at the beginning of 2016. This debate has been marked by a deep fracture between those who see in surrogate motherhood a chance to imagine new forms of social bonds and those who consider that women’s wombs and newborn children can never be the object of an economic ‘exchange’. I will first analyse the most controversial positions held by some feminists who have participated in the debate, which revolve around the centrality of the maternal figure. Then I will outline a brief history of the social construction of pregnancy, linking it to changes in the marketplace and the birth of biopolitics. Finally, with the help of Angela Putino’s philosophical thought I will advance a potentially different feminist approach to the issue of surrogate motherhood.

This article examines the social and political responses to the new flow of immigrants to Italy from outside the European Union. First, the Italian experience is compared with the rest of Europe with respect to such questions as the characteristics of the immigrants themselves, and the response to them on the part of political parties, the church, the unions, and the state at local, regional and national levels. Next, broader comparisons are drawn between the Italian case and that of classic ‘societies of immigration’, particularly with regard to the structure of economic opportunity available to the extracomunitari in Italy.

This article examines a number of the major works on Italy conducted by political scientists from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the research of Banfield, Almond and Verba, Tarrow and Putnam, it discusses the interpretations of Italy offered by these scholars and examines the contribution they have made to the political and intellectual debate surrounding the so-called ‘Italian case’. It concludes that the image presented of Italy by American researchers is generally critical and often simplified and stereotypical. Moreover, rather than highlighting the clichés frequently present in such accounts, Italian intellectuals have tended instead to use them in order to construct a wholly negative perspective of Italy and, in many instances, have distorted the original intentions of those American political scientists whose work is cited as evidence.

This article suggests some new interpretations of the significance of the general elections of 18 April 1948 by examining the prosecution of Italian ex-partisans in the Republican era. A reappraisal of those trials – which took place from the summer of 1945 to the early 1950s – is offered through examination of the documents of the National Committee of Democratic Solidarity, set up after the assassination attempt on Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti on 14 July 1948, and the sentences of the Corti d'Assise (High Courts) and Military Tribunals. The papers of both Umberto Terracini and Lelio Basso, promoters of the Pro-partisans Defence Committee, show how judicial repression had its roots not only in the failed purge of former Fascists from the judicial system, which was unsuccessful because of a desire for continuity within the bureaucratic apparatus of the State, but most of all thanks to the ideological position and anti-communist policies of the political elites of that period.

This article seeks to explain the Iraq policy of Silvio Berlusconi's second government. Why did Berlusconi's Government declare ‘non-belligerency’ when the American-led war with Iraq began in March 2003? Why did the Government send a mission of 3,000 Italian troops to Iraq in April 2003? Why did Berlusconi announce the progressive withdrawal of that contingent in March 2005? This article recognises the Berlusconi Government's ideologically-rooted pro-American tendencies, but draws on liberal international relations theory to stress the importance of the electoral motive to explain the timing and nature of the Government's decisions. As the Italian public was highly critical of the Iraq war, the Berlusconi Government could not actively participate in the war; it had to frame the deployment as a peace mission and had to begin withdrawing Italian troops before Iraq was stable and secure.

During the Fascist ventennio, prominent Italian writers and journalists, such as Mario Appelius, Raffaele Calzini, Arnaldo Cipolla, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, Roberto Suster and Cesco Tommaselli, reported from China, Japan and Korea for Il Popolo d'Italia, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. Their travel narratives were crucial for the creation and diffusion in Italy of the dominant representation of China and Korea as remote, decadent and exotic societies; and of Japan as a progressive society resonant with Fascist Italy. The narrativisation of these countries in Italian travelogues from the Fascist ventennio was part of a widespread discursive practice by Italian intellectuals willing to subscribe to, and actively disseminate, the guiding principles of Fascism. When emphasising China's and Korea's irreconcilable difference from, and Japan's affinity with, Fascist Italy, these intellectuals extolled the Italian race and culture, justified Italy's position in geopolitical dynamics, and propagandised the exceptionality of the Fascist ideology.

Now that the fifteenth legislature has come to an end, it is appropriate to assess the performance of the government whose fall was responsible for this event, as well as the coalition's significance for the trajectory of Italian politics generally. The four articles that follow this one together initiate the task, exploring performance from an institutional and policy-making point of view. This article suggests four criteria for evaluating the performance of any government and offers a brief initial ‘summary report’ in terms of them – paying special attention to implementation of the programme and to communications. Bearing in mind the structural conditions in which it had to work, the government had some notable achievements to its credit, but these same conditions undermined it by opening up an unbridgeable gap between performance and popular perceptions of performance.

This article aims to provide a systematic, comparative analysis of two of the main women's mass publications in order to trace continuities and changes in the development of women's role in the public sphere in Italy. The analysis begins with an elaboration of the social and political context, which is crucial for the understanding of media texts in general. It shows how the existence of only limited political spaces in post-war Italian society due to the polarisation of Catholicism and communism delayed both an open political discourse on women's conditions and the gradual development of an autonomous and lay feminist movement. Noi Donne of Union Donne Italiene (UDI) was closely aligned with and financed by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and lacked any substantial autonomy until the early 1970s, while Cronache of the Catholic women's organisation Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF) was a faithful instrument for the propagation of those Catholic concepts of femininity that were redefined and reinforced by the Vatican in the Catholic publication Civiltà Cattolica.

This contribution to the special issue focuses on newsreels and documentaries that were produced concerning the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936), commonly known as the Abyssinian War. It aims to contextualise LUCE's filmic production on the war, so as to create a framework in which the institute can be understood not only as being part of a wider politics of propaganda in Fascist Italy, but as an example of a modern socio-technical organisation that enabled the discursive construction of East African nature as ‘Other’ and therefore helped to justify colonial war as a process of sanitised creative destruction aimed at replacing a previous, negative ‘first nature’ with a positive, Fascist and Italian ‘second nature’. The article draws on archival documents from Mussolini's government cabinet, and on LUCE documentaries and newsreels; these sources are used to create a background against which LUCE's concern with the Second Italo–Ethiopian War can be understood.