One hundred and fifty years ago, in October 1860, the legendary dawn meeting at Teano between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont marked a momentary confluence of competing visions of Italian unification. Although the moment represented an ideological about-face for Garibaldi, his status as the most luminous hero of Italian unification continued to rise like a serene spirit, seemingly untainted by the contested realities of the nation he had helped to create. Of course, that generalisation ignores a thousand exceptions, and already from the 1950s and 1960s, authors such as Denis Mack Smith and Christopher Hibbert had underlined that Garibaldi's life and historic role were not without conflict or enmity (Mack Smith 1957; Hibbert 1965). But it remains true that, all told, Garibaldi's legacy and personal reputation have been characterised, until very recently, by an almost uncanny pact of agreement not to disagree – at least in public.

The international role and status of Italy among international powers has been an issue of debate in both the political and the academic context. What has never been systematically investigated is the way in which other powers with which Italy interacts in institutional contexts perceive Italy and its international role. It is the aim of this special issue to provide an overview of how Italy is perceived abroad. This introduction explains why it is worth looking at international images of Italy, and sums up the findings of the research project.

The year of the Risorgimento, 1860, is associated with the ‘Garibaldi moment’, a time when the image of the radical revolutionary appeared to be ‘depoliticised’ in Britain. While recognising such a phenomenon, this article considers whether regional pockets escaped such a trend, analysing the case-study of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where strong links between Garibaldi and local radicals coloured public perceptions of the Italian hero. By scrutinising the unfolding of the ‘Garibaldi moment’ in this context a complex picture emerges, showing that, far from being a unifying ‘depoliticised’ figure, Garibaldi was a source of divisions within Newcastle society. Crucial in this division was George Crawshay's challenge to the recruitment of a British Legion to follow Garibaldi. By looking at the provincial press and examining the local reception of a variety of entertainments, it is argued that, while political engagement drove the enthusiasm of radical audiences, fashionable shows–devoid of political content–could not rely on Newcastle ‘Garibaldimania’.

Gramsci's work continues to enjoy popularity amongst academics and activists. There is nonetheless a real question about the relevance of his central political ideas for the twenty-first century. This paper defends the thesis that Gramsci's humanism is part of a long tradition of political thought which dates back to Machiavelli, and that although this national-popular humanism is now outdated for reasons which are suggested in the writings and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, there is also a sociological component to Gramsci's theorising that retains resonance today.

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.

This article analyses the reaction to Garibaldi in Ireland during the Risorgimento, a reaction which, in its negativity, generally contrasted with the Italian's heroic depiction elsewhere. Attitudes towards Garibaldi reflected existing religious divisions in Ireland, with Protestants supporting him and Catholics condemning his actions in Italy. The study examines ballads, pamphlets and newspapers to illustrate the pro-papal fervour felt in Ireland and the strength of anti-Garibaldi feelings. The decision of Irishmen to form a battalion to fight in defence of the Papal States in 1860 reveals that, ultimately, denigration of Garibaldi became a badge of Irish nationalism. The study highlights the position of Britain in understanding the relationship between Ireland and Italy in these years, pointing out Irish nationalists’ bafflement over Britain's support for Italian unification while it denied similar rights to Irish subjects. The article demonstrates how, in this context, domestic and tactical considerations coloured responses to Garibaldi in Ireland, with Irish issues projected onto the Italian situation, thus leading to entrenched and extreme attitudes towards the Italian soldier.

The American attentive foreign policy elite's perceptions of Italy as a foreign policy actor appear inconsistent with Italy's global role. The paradox of Italy's global status as a middle-power and the absence of status within the American foreign policy community raises three questions: What role should we expect Italy to play in American foreign policy calculations given its structural position in the international system? What role does Italy play in aiding or hindering American foreign policy objectives within the transatlantic community? Is there a disjunction between the American elite's subjectively low expectations for Italy as a foreign policy actor and Italy's objective importance for the successful realisation of American foreign policy objectives?

Soon after the Second World War and the signing of the 1947 Peace Treaty, Italy was faced with the traumatic loss of its African colonial Empire, an Empire whose establishment had been one of the main objectives of the Fascist regime's foreign policy. This article analyses Anglo-Italian relations in the Somalian context, highlighting the contributions made by Fascism and by the anti-Italian policies of British troops to the tensions that were to lead to the tragic events of January 1948. Attention is focused on the diplomatic mission carried out by Umberto Zanotti Bianco, President of the Italian Red Cross, an important figure in Italian Liberalism. Zanotti Bianco was conscious of the need for Italy to rejoin the ‘club’ of democratic powers and, in accordance with the diplomatic strategy of Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, he sought to reopen dialogue between Britain and Italy. The dispute between Italy and Britain brought about by the Mogadishu events and, more generally, by the Italian presence in Africa was soon brought to a close, due both to Zanotti Bianco's shrewd strategy and to the clear need for the Western Allies to strengthen De Gasperi's government on the eve of the decisive April 1948 elections.

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.

The success of Italian movements opposing the war in Iraq during the period 2003–2005 has awakened historians’ interest in the historical features of left-wing pacifism in Italy. Some particularly noteworthy contributions have focused on the campaigns orchestrated around 1950 by the Italian Committee of the Partisans of Peace (the international movement financed and supported by the USSR and international communism against Western anti-Soviet rearmaments). After describing the principal features of existing research, this article focuses on the lexical and communicative aspect characterising left-wing pacifism in Italy in the years immediately following the Atlantic Treaty. It highlights the way in which communist and socialist language gravitated towards the classist and anti-capitalist definitions of ‘war’ and ‘peace’, in line with the position developed in Lenin's reflections in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. However, in the same context, there were images and symbolic references imbued with a rebuttal of the violence of war but with fewer ideological connotations, which reflected an attempt to attract the interest and support of groups and individuals ideologically distant from Marxism. This interweaving of choices of expression contributed to the deep-rooted influence of left-wing pacifism within Italian cultural politics.

This article analyses the place and meaning of female heroism in the process of the making of modern Italy. Beginning with Garibaldi's first wife Anita in Brazil, a great number of women all over the world were attracted to Garibaldi and his movement. Theirs was a sentimental and political engagement, which in some cases turned them into real soldiers, like those who joined the ranks of Garibaldi's troops. Whereas until 1860 the Garibaldinian volunteer was not understood as an exclusively male category, this changed around that key year, both in reality and in the collective imagination of the Risorgimento. Women were denied the right to be soldiers in Garibaldi's legendary Thousand. Subsequently, stories of militant women like Anita Garibaldi were softened in the foundation fictions that narrate the birth of Italy, turning women into passive members of the Italian nation. This change is analysed in depth by focusing on the emblematic case of Esperance von Schwartz, one of Garibaldi's biographers, and for a time, one of his female companions in arms.

The word antipolitica (‘anti-politics’) is widely used in contemporary Italian political debate. The concept of ‘anti-politics’ is also frequently used by social scientists in explaining the Italian political transition that took place during the 1990s and analysing the current political situation. In spite of this wide use, sociopolitical literature does not provide a consensual definition of the term. As result, the semantic field of the concept as yet appears poorly defined. This article provides a detailed look at the use of the term ‘anti-politics’ in the sociopolitical literature. Structuring the analysis around some basic conceptual distinctions, the article proposes a taxonomy of the meanings related to the term ‘anti-politics’, highlighting four different meanings of the concept. Referring in particular to the Italian political system, the article provides examples of the meanings of the concept of ‘anti-politics’ using phenomena occurring in the peninsula during the 1990s – phenomena which were central to the increasing use of the term in Italy during that decade.

Italy's relationship with Germany has undergone substantial changes over the last 20 years. Since 1989, the two countries, traditional allies and partners in the EU and NATO, have experienced a number of tensions. A crucial problem for Germany lies in its incapacity to accept fully Italy's ambitions to be a leading European power. In domestic terms, the perception of Italy has been heavily overshadowed by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi who has allowed familiar stereotypes to survive and impeded a sober analysis of Italy's changed preferences.

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.

The Italian national elections of 18 April 1948 handed power to the Christian Democratic Party. The Italian Communist Party had, however, gained significant municipal control in the local elections of 1946. For the Communists, the local level became the testing ground where administrative practices, political initiatives, social alliances and economic projects were developed. The leaders and the intellectuals worked to outline the cultural framework of a political project which could challenge national politics from town councils. Meanwhile, with a view to making gains in the local elections of 1951–1952, propaganda was used in an attempt to diffuse and proselytise municipal political programmes among different social classes in a divided socioeconomic environment.

This article analyses, adopting the well-known approach of Katz and Mair, the issue of organizational change within Italian political parties since 1990. In addition to an account of trends in membership, local units, finances, staff, and of changes in party statutes, the article aims at testing the widespread view in the literature that organizational resources–hence power–are becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of party and/or parliamentary leaders, and correspondingly that the territorial presence of parties is declining. The analysis of the change over time of Katz and Mair's party organisational ‘faces’ leads to the confirmation, to a large extent, of the overall hypothesis of a decline of the party at ground level, and a concentration of party resources in the central office, and above all in the party in public office.

This article analyses the British perceptions of contemporary Italy and Italian politics. Through the use of a number of sources (parliamentary debates, governmental documents, newspaper articles and interviews) it argues that Italy is not perceived, within Great Britain, as a great power within the European system nor it is viewed as a peripheral actor. Rather, it suggests that Italy seems to have finally found in the post-Cold War scenario its proper role–a European middle power, with important responsibilities within a regional sub-system. A frequent request–and expectation–coming from British politics and society is that Italy should take on more international responsibilities, even in the sphere of defence–as the different readings of Italy's role and leadership in Afghanistan and Lebanon reveal. However, Italy's ability to play this role is believed to be hampered by several factors: its uncertain political situation, its unwillingness to engage in military operations, its reluctance to respect international commitments and its structural economic problems. As a result, further possibilities of cooperation with other international partners as well as its potential for autonomous action on the international stage are, in several cases, precluded. Moreover, if the relations between Italy and the UK are usually seen in a positive way, and Italy is viewed as a reliable partner, the nature of the cooperation between the two countries is often considered to be fragile and based on short-term common interests and strategies.

Facing the controversial memory of the Risorgimento, Fascism was compelled to measure itself against Garibaldi, the nation's most celebrated and popular hero. The result was an exaltation of the alleged continuity between Redshirts and Blackshirts, marked by an emphasis on patriotic voluntarism that removed Garibaldi's adherence to the principles of liberty and democracy from his legacy. In the national discourse developed in the press and school textbooks, Garibaldi was harnessed to the ideological needs of the regime and held up as the embodiment of the Italian people's heroic militarism. However, as this article shows, the eclectic nature of Fascist culture left room for more radical interpretations that did not fit the image of Garibaldi as a ‘disciplined revolutionary’. Particularly among left-wing and younger Fascists, Garibaldi became the precursor of the corporatist revolution, an icon of populism melding values of social transformation, moral intransigence and patriotic self-abnegation. This emphasis on the hero's radical legacy was to reappear glaringly between 1943 and 1945, when the civil war between Fascists and partisans also became a battle over the symbols and memories of the Risorgimento.

As a consequence of Italy's integration in the EMU in 1998, the Lega Nord shifted from a pro-European to a Eurosceptic position. The Lega's Eurosceptic vision combines a strong identification with Europe with a hostile attitude towards the institutions of the EU. Identification with Europe expresses in the first place the party's geopolitical view of Padania as a European and hence modern and entrepreneurial region. Its critique of the EU incorporates numerous, sometimes contradicting influences such as the neo-liberal vision of a free-trade based Europe with minimal rules and regulations, and a protectionist defence of northern Italian economic interests. It is in particular the party's institutional vision that attributes centrality to the right of Padania to autonomy and self-government which leads to its rejection of the centralism and dirigism of the European Union.