This article analyses the development of Italian health policies in the post-Second World War period. Shortly after the setting up of the ‘Beveridge model’ and the creation of the British National Health Service, Italy also introduced a new approach to health, which became part of the Constitution. However, the implementation of the necessary reforms was delayed due to resistance from the country's institutions and government parties. The introduction of a radical health reform became possible only in 1978 through pressure generated from social conflicts, trade unions and left-wing parties. The implementation of the National Health Service encountered a number of obstacles due to the specific conditions of Italy, but also owing to changes at the international level. The neoliberal policies started in the 1980s introduced restrictions in health spending, the regionalisation and privatisation of services, and a new selective approach to health. In spite of these limitations and contradictions, the Italian healthcare system has been considerably successful, leading to strong improvements in health and to a life expectancy at birth among the longest in Europe. The recent developments – and the experience of the pandemic – confirm the important impact of a public, universal health service and, at the same time, the persistent policy efforts aimed at weakening its reach.

On 3 February 2018, in the town of Macerata, an Italian citizen with far-right sympathies deliberately fired several shots from his car at nine African immigrants, injuring six. The article argues that this shooting can be considered an act of lone-actor terrorism, an anomaly in the Italian context. Based on the social science literature on this subject, the paper analyses the profile of the shooter and the dynamics of the attack. Moreover, adopting a relational perspective to radicalisation, it examines the attacker's interactions: on the one hand, he was in contact with different political organisations that could represent ‘echo chambers’ for the tacit validation or even the justification and amplification of radical beliefs, including on the relation between immigration and security; on the other hand, he was not subject to their discipline and social control. This peripheral social position helps explain this case of lone-actor terrorism, in a national context where far-right mobilisation and violence have historically assumed collective forms.

In today's Europe, commemorations can be times at which to affirm international reconciliation, based notably on the knowledge produced by historians who are becoming progressively cosmopolitan. However, commemorations are also used by national-populist political parties for electoral purposes and can lead to tensions with neighbouring states. This was the case in Trieste in September 2019, when the city council executive (controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition) decided to erect a statue of Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 years after he had occupied the nearby city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in Croatia. This commemoration led to a series of debates among historians, especially in Italy. Based on a critical discourse analysis and an interdiscursive approach to narratives produced by historians for colleagues and for the broader society, the current research investigates the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history when in parallel a commemoration is coordinated by national-populist forces in a public space.

This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the ‘outsiders’ turned into ‘enemies’ and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time.

The centenary of the March on Rome has prompted Modern Italy's Contexts and Debates section to focus on the public uses of history in reference to interwar Fascism. We are looking into the ‘Past, Present, and Future of the Italian Memory of Fascism’, to borrow the title of Guido Bartolini's interviews that were published in our issue 27 (4), 2022. While commemorations and anniversaries shouldn't inherently influence academic research agendas, a broader understanding of public memory can help us to understand the current political mood in Italy. For example, it can explain why the centennial and other comparable ‘fascist’ anniversaries now have little meaning for most of the Italian public and are scarcely addressed by politicians. Indeed, most Italians seems to suffer from political amnesia. The condition is so serious that not even a dramatic occurrence such as the victory of the proudly post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party at the election of September 2022 has proved able to cure it. Happening just a few days before the centenary of the March on Rome, the electoral results were surely expected to elicit a strong reaction by left-wing politicians and intellectuals – perhaps a mass demonstration, like the one that took place in Milan on 25 April 1994, in the aftermath of the first victory of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, when another post-fascist party, Alleanza Nazionale, took power. Yet nothing of that sort has happened in 2022. Why?

In 1993, a few months before his death, the veteran film director Federico Fellini was invited to the University of Bologna to receive an honorary doctorate. Bologna, the oldest modern university in the world, wished to bestow on Fellini its institutional recognition of his half a century in the Italian film industry. Not unflattered, Fellini declined, and wrote to the rector of the university that he felt ‘like Pinocchio being decorated by the headmaster and carabinieri for cavorting in Pleasure Island’.