Abstract
Over the last 30 years, Silvana Patriarca, a professor of Contemporary History at Fordham University, New York, has deeply and consistently investigated the construction of the Italian national narrative: its ‘long term’ genealogy, its characteristics, its tensions. Her first book, Numbers and Nationhood (Patriarca 1996), focused on the co-production of statistical knowledge and the national image of Italy during the Restoration and the Risorgimento, rereading the interplay of science, culture, and politics in the formation of bourgeois ‘public opinion’ in the liberal period. In Italian Vices (Patriarca 2010), she dissected the rhetoric and tropes of the national character, its ostensible fragility, and the different political uses of the recurring discourse on Italian vices and virtues, from the Risorgimento to the Republic.
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