The Augustan Exhibition of Romanità, held in Rome's Palazzo delle Esposizioni between 1937 and 1938, exemplifies the aestheticisation, ritualisation and sacralisation of politics during the Fascist era in Italy. This article conducts a multi-layered spatial analysis of the exhibition that considers space as passively experienced, as an agent to re-map memory, as a mediator between intention and reception and as having both physical and mental characteristics. The relative sizes of the spaces, their sequence and their axial placement within the Palazzo's plan were the most powerful forces that conveyed the exhibition's overall political and social aims. The Mostra Augustea della Romanità (MAR) is here analysed as a form of historical representation with a specific narrative which is played out within an orchestrated space in order to create and reinforce a (Fascist) political identity. The idea of Rome took on material aspects through a kind of ‘recognition effect’ for the visitor by presenting Romanità as a collective mirror in which to view an image of their own social visage. Thus an active connection would, according to the organisers, be forged between a Roman past and a Fascist present, and its two leaders and creators, Augustus and Mussolini, as well as between the individual and society. The MAR also demonstrates the prevalence of the cult of Il Duce in Fascist society and its importance for maintaining high levels of consent. With its focus on a particular view of the ancient world, the MAR was an ephemeral event that acted as teleological justification for the advent and supposed permanence of Fascism, which at the same time presented itself as a unique archaeological, scientific and educational document of the Roman world.

In the first months of 1948, Italy witnessed one of the fiercest electoral campaigns in its history, which saw the mobilisation of all sectors of society and the involvement of numerous international actors. In the end, the Christian Democrats and their political allies gained the majority of the votes at the first post-war general elections of 18 April 1948, thus officially inaugurating the history of the new Italian Republic.

Italian colonialism in Africa has for some time been a largely neglected subject of study. The signing of the Paris Treaty of 1947, which deprived the country of its colonies, did not lead to critical debates, in Italy, around the issue. On the contrary, the post-war political elites continued to demand the restitution of those colonies, in continuity with previous regimes. The hagiographic and mythic image of colonialism that had been created by liberal and Fascist propaganda remained alive in Italian culture and society. This article analyses the continuities and ruptures in the treatment of colonial history offered by post-war high school history textbooks. Traditional discourses and imagery marked the way in which textbooks examined the nation's colonial past, distorting the reality of the past and contributing to the creation of a sense of innocence with regard to the Italian presence in Africa.

This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

Dunkirk–Alamein–Bologna: Letters and diaries of an artilleryman 1939–1945 (1994) is based on the letters written by Christopher Seton Watson while on active duty as an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery in the Second World War. In this essay, the correspondence provides a platform for exploring first how CSW's wartime experiences coloured his views on Italy and Italian politics, and then the ways in which those views had developed and changed by the time he published his major study of the crisis of Italian liberalism (Italy from liberalism to fascism 1870–1925 (1967).

This article explores the issue of elite representation through photography during the 1930s in Italy. It examines how modern technology affected representation and refers specifically to the work of Ghitta Carell, a photographer who became very successful by portraying prominent Fascist men and women in Italy, including the Duce. Images of the dictator had been continually developed since the late 1920s and frequent and various representations of his person, including the face, were pervasive. Carell's idealised style was much appreciated by high society and Fascist officials alike, while her work also has a darker emotional content that borrows from a painterly tradition. Although not engaged directly by the regime, Carell's work has to be considered as both separate from and complementary whilst also adding to the Fascist aesthetic. She was complicit with the cult of the Duce while revealing aspects of Mussolini's personality that other photographers avoided or missed.

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 examines the changing attitude of the Sicilian statesman Francesco Crispi towards Britain between the 1850s and the end of the century. While Crispi had enormous admiration for Britain, and recognised that Italy had much to learn from its political system, he also acknowledged that the British constitution was the product of a long process of historical evolution and could never be imitated slavishly in Italy. From the end of the 1870s in particular, Crispi felt that Italy could not concede the degree of freedom permitted in Britain until the state had completed its work of what he called ‘political education’. As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s Crispi looked to an aggressive foreign policy to strengthen Italy's beleaguered institutions, and he counted on British support to achieve this. The refusal of Britain to back him in the way he hoped left him perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries.

In this paper it is argued that the concept of pluralism – the most important value in the Italian media debate – is conceptually confused. The author identifies three mutually incompatible conceptions of pluralism used when discussing the public broadcaster Rai: (1) structural pluralism, satisfied when the public broadcaster is divided into autonomous channels or programme groups; (2) summative pluralism, satisfied when output is divided between political actors according to some ideal distribution; and (3) pluralism ‘lottizzato’, satisfied when a number of different political positions are ‘represented’ by journalists within the broadcaster.

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.

While caution, tactics and compromise characterised the political practice of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement in post-war Italy, a section of the Italian press took a less guarded approach to the 20-year regime (Fascism) and to fascism as a political idea (fascism). A lively debate began immediately after the death of Mussolini; Italians sympathetic to fascism opposed the new Italian republican settlement and their opinions were freely expressed in newspapers and magazines. Neo-fascism in Italy was represented by three main ideological currents (left-wing, moderate and right-wing), and this article gives an account of the different views of the issues of democracy and corporatism that were held by fascist loyalists. An extensive number of articles published in the period 1945–1953 are used as primary sources.

Italian party coalitions (from both the centre-left and the centre-right) have enacted an average of 57% of the pledges included in their common manifestos. In relative terms, Italian political parties keep their electoral promises much less than parties governing in single-party government, but slightly outperform those that form post-electoral coalitions. Although this finding contradicts the widespread pessimism about Italy's performance, it also illustrates that there is no significant advantage to bipolarism and the existence of a common programme as opposed to situations where coalitions are formed after the elections. This might explain Italians’ dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their country.

This article addresses a rather neglected aspect of Salvemini's prolific political output. Based on records collected in the Salvemini Archive at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Florence, this article examines Salvemini's perspective on the 1948 elections in Italy, through an analysis of his public writings and private correspondence. It considers the decisive impact that exile to the US and the academic environment of Harvard had on Salvemini's conception of democracy and politics, by making him an outsider in post-war Italy, a country polarised into the two competing ideological factions of the Communists and the Christian Democrats. Salvemini's fiercely independent spirit led him to criticise the Allies’ plans for post-war Italy and the American intervention in the 1948 elections under the auspices of the Cold War. Through an understanding of Salvemini's thought, this essay tries to offer a deeper analysis of the meaning of the 1948 elections as a watershed in the history of Italy.

This paper addresses the question of whether the Italian Lega Nord pursues functional policies in spite of its postfunctional rhetoric (politics of simulation) or pre-material policies that are in line with its dominant postfunctional discourse (politics of identity). The analysis focuses on fiscal federalism because this is an area that links together both economic issues – fiscal autonomy is seen as highly functional to the economy of those regions of Italy which form the Lega Nord's strongholds – and identity matters – federalism is claimed and justified on the basis of the existence of a distinct territorial community with its own cultural values and social cohesion. The paper concludes that the Lega combines postfunctional rhetoric and ‘formal’ policies on the one hand, with functional ‘actual’ outcomes on the other. This combination, which hitherto appeared to be a winning electoral formula, has recently run into difficulties.

Other Spaces is a collaborative creative arts exhibition project that explores visual and material expressions of cultural identity with a particular focus on museum collections. This project aims to provide a rich examination – visual, emotional and intellectual – of the multiple cultural narratives that contribute to the social fabric of Australia through a unique marriage of contemporary photomedia and creative writing practice. This project explores the ways that migrants and refugees have found to express their cultural identity through the material objects they have brought with them to Australia. Many of these objects are not only of great personal value but often of cultural, historical and religious significance. Some are very ordinary everyday objects but they can be highly evocative and symbolic of the relationship between culture and identity, and between the places of origin and an individual's present home in Australia. This article, through a combination of photography, creative text and scholarly discussion, will focus specifically on Italo-Australian migrants and on some of the material objects that they have donated to museum collections, and use these objects to explore notions of cultural belonging and identity.

With the elections of 18 April 1948, for Italian Communists the prospect of coming to power in the short term vanished. In the aftermath of the elections, the sustained confrontation of the Cold War at the international level and the unfavourable political context in Italy deeply shaped the tone and content of the Communist press, including the educational magazines for young militants. This article deals with the representations of the political enemies in the press for young Communists between 18 April 1948 and the electoral campaign against the legge truffa in 1953. Attention is paid to how the Communist press portrayed, in particular by visual means, the different subjects that made up the ruling anti-Communist bloc: the US government; Christian Democrats; the Catholic Church; and, finally, the Italian business world. In particular, the analysis underlines the relevance that a ‘nation-’ and ‘gender-’ related discourse had in the construction of political enemies.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse the eugenic pacifism of Giuseppe Sergi, one of Italy's most important anthropologists working at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sergi's eugenic proposal, while accepting the long-contested idea of Weismann's germ plasm theory, preserves Lamarck's theory of the conditioning effect of the environment through the cautious use of Gregor Mendel's theory of recessiveness. Sergi, co-founder of the eugenic movement in Italy, thus affirmed the ‘salvific’ power of an upbringing that would assume the task of carrying forward to future generations the recessiveness of traits of violence, which would thereby assure humankind a prosperous future guaranteed by ‘competition between the races’, a competition that would no longer be on the battlefield but in the fields of industry, art and science.

This article analyses the parallels between the role played by the Church, first during the Crisis of the Liberal State in the early twentieth century and then during the transition from the Christian Democratic regime to the ‘bi-polar’ Second Republic more than 70 years later. It explores both the particular, contingent forces at work in each, and the underlying explanations as to why the Church was able to successfully exploit these two processes of transition in the political history of Italy to its advantage. It concludes by arguing that the experience of these two crises demonstrates that the Church is not only a powerful force in Italian civil society but also effectively ‘a state within a state’ in relation to the functioning of Italy's political structures.