Italian History Research Articles

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

A deep variational convolutional Autoencoder for unsupervised features extraction of ceramic profiles. A case study from central Italy

The need for a quantitative approach to the morphologic study of ceramics is becoming increasingly evident. Ceramics are the most common material in many archaeological sites and a huge amount of data has accumulated over time. This data can be handled by Machine Learning algorithms which are rapidly gaining popularity in archaeology. Although most approaches can be referred to classification tasks, in this contribution a particular type of Neural Network is proposed for feature extraction from archaeological ceramics. Through this proposed method it is possible to gain a numerical weighted representation of the pottery profile that can be used for multivariate analyses. The case study will focus on regionalisation processes in pottery production between the end of the 2nd millennium BC and the first half of the 1st millennium BC in central Tyrrhenian Italy, a period that saw major transformations in the cultural and socio-political structure of Ancient Italy. The results seem to confirm the regionalisation hypothesis and offer interesting insights into the quantitative study of archaeological ceramics.

Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda

Reviewed by: Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda Elena Lolli Germano Maifreda, Italya. Storie di ebrei, storia italiana [Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History]. Laterza: Bari-Roma, 2021. 341 pp. €24.00. ISBN: 9788858143896 A melting pot of cultures in the heart of Western Christendom, Italy, or the "island of divine dew," as described by the creative Hebrew etymology I-tal-ya, has seen a diversified presence of native, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jews for over two millennia. The Italian-Jewish coexistence and interaction has had a great historical impact on society that contributed to the identity-making and evolution of the country. However, despite an exceptionally long Jewish existence in the peninsula that dates back to Roman times, most Italians still think about Jews' vicissitudes as something apart from the nation's mainstream history. Jews have always been seen as an isolated, passive, and persecuted minority, and thus, their history is usually considered separate from the general one. As the title underlines, Germano Maifreda aims to dismantle such historiographical misconceptions, which are principally due to the fact that for many years the events relating to Italian Jews have been mainly reconstructed by scholars through the documentation produced by the majority society, thus leading to the emergence of fallacious metanarratives. The author argues that without taking into account the sources produced within the Jewish communities, the historical process of assimilation between Jews and Christians may appear distorted, like the one described through the medium of "pink spectacles" by eminent historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and Cecil Roth, or merely reduced to a histoire larmoyante, whose partiality was denounced by Salo Baron's famous thesis. In order to understand Italian history as inclusive of the Jewish experience, Maifreda suggests going beyond the antisemitism parameters and reflect on how the Jews have systematically negotiated their own position within the Italian authorities over the centuries. With the art of diplomacy, Jewish mediators operated discreetly through trying to use their influence and various expedients to moderate rulers' decrees. Yet, the history of Jewish diplomatic efforts contradicts the myth of Jewish passivity, because in reality, their efforts involved a much broader web of interactions than just the "vertical relationship" between sovereigns, communities, and Court-Jews. According to the author, it is necessary to develop an overall approach devoted to articulating the meaning of "identity" in the history of Italian [End Page 263] Jewry, taking into account the reciprocal influence between Jewish communities and their Christian counterparts. Also, thanks to newly discovered documents, Maifreda proposes some case studies that cover multiple relationship issues and environments that occurred over the course of several centuries. In 1516, the governor of Venice declared that Jews had to live in a ghetto, which was the first of many Jewish enclosures ordered by political powers in the Italian peninsula. The Jewish community became an important cosmopolitan center of the Republic, bringing significant economic growth for the city, including nuanced networks with Christian neighbors. In the first chapter, the author sheds fresh light on this complex interfaith encounter by showing us different types of integration, or even prohibited unions, such as the forbidden love between the Christian sailor, Moretto, and the Jewish woman, Rachel, a story that reminds us of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but in an early-modern Venetian ghetto. In the court of Ferrara, Jewish refugees from the Iberian peninsula, invited by the Duke of Este, played a fundamental role, thanks to their financial skills. Most of the conversos in Ferrara were wealthy bankers and traders, with international relations with partners based in Middle Eastern markets or in various ports located in the Mediterranean. An emblematic figure of the complex social stratification experienced by Ferrarese Judaism after the arrival of Portuguese Marranos is that of the influential Gracia Nasi, alias Beatriz de Luna. She openly professed the Jewish religion, financing, among other things, a translation of the Bible in Judeo-Spanish printed in Ferrara between 1551 and 1553. In Chapter 2, the story of Gracia Nasi demonstrates that there was not one single Italian-Judaism model, nor a single way of living as Jews. At the start of the sixteenth century, we witness the birth of...

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

Transnational Italian Studies

Transnational Italian Studies

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Looking Sideways to Italy in Contemporary World Literature

This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, “Italy” has also become increasingly detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of “looking sideways” at literary representations of Italy from “outside” the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić’s Trieste, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere.

Against the current: an interview with Elena Aga Rossi

ABSTRACT Elena Aga Rossi is one of the most important historians of contemporary Italy and a noted scholar of the international relations of the early cold war. In this interview with Mark Gilbert, Aga Rossi gives an overview of her career, and of her most famous books, notably Una nazione allo sbando and Togliatti e Stalin. The interview also discusses some of the most important historiographical controversies in recent Italian history.

Exclusion in the City Space: the Italian Experience

This article draws attention to the problems of exclusion and building frontiers in urban space. At the same time, the focus of the study is concentrated on the systematic nature of the formation of cultural exclusion zones at different time intervals in the history and culture of the Apennine Peninsula, that is, on the territory of the modern Italy. The reflection of exclusion in the city, which occurs throughout the urban history of Italy, is reflected and fixed in the history of Italian culture and art and in the phenomena of building physical and symbolic boundaries, marginalization and appropriation of space associated with this phenomenon.
 This work is intended to prove the need to transform the erroneous position that exclusion is characteristic only of a modern city, a megapolis as a product of globalization, while the exclusion of an individual in an urban environment and the development of urban civilization are two interrelated and simultaneous processes that are developing over the centuries.
 Taking into account the affects and experience of fixing exclusion in the urban cultural spaces of the Apennine Peninsula, the author comes to the conclusion that the history of urban culture fixes the presence of exclusion, which is characteristic of the individual living in the urban space from the very moment the city appeared and the corresponding subject-centric urban culture, the existence in which unfolds in the space of subordination, overcoming borders or resistance to the social order it gives rise to. All of these factors also affect the identity of the subject of urban everyday life. Italy, traditionally understood as the cradle of civilization and world culture, provides one of the most representative experiences of building, fixing, reflecting and experiencing exclusion in the urban environment due to the evolutionary process of changing and crossing different cultures.

A Chronological Database about Natural and Anthropogenic Sinkholes in Italy

Sinkholes are a widespread geological hazard, typical of karst lands, where they generally originate as collapse features related to presence of underground voids. Nevertheless, other types of sinkholes can be formed through solution, suffusion and sagging processes. Sinkholes can also be originated in relation to artificial cavities, excavated by man in past times. In Italy, sinkholes interest large sectors of the country, given the very long history of Italy with an intense utilization of the underground. They cause serious damage to infrastructures, economic activities, and human health every year. We present a catalogue on natural and anthropogenic sinkholes in Italy, as the first step toward evaluation of the sinkhole hazard. After introducing sinkholes, which is definitely a highly underrated type of disaster in Italy, we point out their occurrence in the country. We illustrate the methodology used to build the database, with particular focus on accuracy and reliability of the data. Collecting information from different types of sources, a catalogue of some 1190 sinkhole events is built. Database structure and data analysis are then illustrated. Eventually, we draw some conclusions on the likely uses of our work by providing recommendations for environmental management on this very delicate issue.

Looking for Something New: Antonioni's La notte and Specters of Femininity

Abstract This article is a political interpretation of La notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1961) and proposes that the central theme of the film is the identity of the discourse of capital and the discourse of patriarchy, both as solipsistic, self-perpetuating enjoyment. On the narrative level, the capitalist-patriarchal discourse is incarnated in double complementary figures, both male and female. The male couple consists of a traditional fatherly moralizing figure and a modern mute solipsist, who is also a sexual predator. The female one is constructed out of mute enjoyment of a nymphomaniac and a phantasmagoric figure of Valentina whose power of fascination is utterly mediated by the commodities among which she moves and the fashionable intellectual commonplaces she utters. This configuration is set up to map a labyrinth of existential im/possibilities that a non-spectral new woman, Lidia, faces at a particular juncture in Italian history. Her initial flânerie, in which she attempts to dissolve her bourgeois identity-property, fails as she becomes conscious that what seems to be the space of indeterminacy and becoming is in fact a thoroughly organized urbanist hyperspace that aims at absolute management of people and commodities. Unable to find something really new in new Italy, Lidia returns to the constricting discourse of melodrama she has been inscribed into as a long-suffering wife in order to undermine its conventions and use its utopian potential to put her relationship with her husband on a new footing. Although her attempt fails, an attentive viewer is given two glimpses that catch something beyond the commodity-oriented melodramatic universe: a timeless moment of transcendence created in writing and a reconciliation of subject and object in a female dance act.

Isolated but not alone: the response to the pandemic in the story of pags: from the italian case history to the global health summit “rome declaration”

Struggling with practical problems such as the sudden cancellation of scheduled visits and exams and a sense of abandonment and uncertainty. This is how the “ordinary” patients lived the period of the health emergency in Italy. At the same time, civic and rights protection associations, since the beginning, have been active with a sense of responsibility, creativity, and energy, often revealing themselves to be the only point of reference and the only service available to citizens. This is the double side of the coin, in the implications of the pandemic on chronic and rare patients, which emerged from the XVIII National Report on Chronic Policies of Cittadinanzattiva, presented on October 13th, 2020, and entitled: “Isolated but not alone: the response to the pandemic in the story of Patients Advocacy Groups (PAGs)” [1]. The Report arised from the story of 34 Italian associations of patients with chronic and rare diseases who adhered to the National Coalition of Associations for Patients suffering Chronic Diseases (CnAMC) [2] of Cittadinanzattiva [3]. This experience - thanks to Active Citizenship Network [4] - was first socialized on the occasion of the 15th European Patients' Rights Day held on May 5th & 6th, 2021 [5], and then brought to the attention of the leaders of the G20 and other states, gathered together with the heads of international and regional organizations on the occasion of the Global Health Summit held in Rome on May 21, 2021 [6].

Threatened and extinct amphibians and reptiles in Italian natural history collections are useful conservation tools

Natural history museums are irreplaceable tools to study and preserve the biological diversity around the globe and among the primary actors in the recognition of species and the logical repositories for their type specimens. In this paper we surveyed the consistency of the preserved specimens of amphibians and reptiles housed in the major Italian scientific collections, and verified the presence of threatened species according to the IUCN Red List, including the Extinct (EX), Extinct in the Wild (EW), Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), and Vulnerable (VU) categories. Altogether, we analyzed 39 Italian zoological collections. We confirmed the presence of one extinct reptile (Chioninia coctei) and five extinct or extinct in the wild amphibian species (Atelopus longirostris, Nectophrynoides asperginis, Pseudophilautus leucorhinus, P. nasutus, and P. variabilis). Seven CR amphibians, fourteen CR reptile species and the extinct skink C. coctei are shared by more than one institution. Museums which host the highest number of threatened and extinct amphibian species are respectively Turin (17 CR and 1 EX), Florence (13 CR and 1 EX), and Trento (15 CR and 1 EW), while for reptiles the richest museums are those from Genoa (15 CR and 1 EX), Florence (11 CR and 1 EX), and Pisa (7 CR). Finally, we discussed the utility of natural history museums and the strategies to follow for the implementation of their functionality.

Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence

Abstract This article unpacks the 1610 case of a multiple perpetrator rape of enslaved female Jews from Tétouan by Catholic convicts and Muslim slaves in Livorno, early modern Italy’s leading slaving center. Adding to the ongoing attempts to expose the violence inherent to the historical records of slavery, it charts the efforts to silence the slaves and offers a counternarrative to the one their slavers wished to create by erasing their suffering. The article argues that the assault was justified as part of a business strategy. The rape of female slaves by enslaved men as a means of increasing the slavers’ profits, it suggests, was thus a more global phenomenon than has hitherto been assumed and was not limited to women’s systematic raping in Atlantic slavery. Problematizing the scholarly focus on Muslim-Christian reciprocity in early modern Mediterranean slavery, it then proposes that the affluence of Livorno’s Jewish community increased the vulnerability of enslaved Jews in the city to excessive abuse. Complicating historiographic notions regarding religious pluralism and interethnic relations in Livorno, the assault’s analysis underscores the importance of writing Jewish slave women back into not only the history of slavery but also the narratives of Jewish history and Italian history.

Autobiography through Anecdotes in Joe Pieri’s Isle Of The Displaced

Associated with such life writing genres as (auto)biographies and memoirs, anecdotes are described as stories which “illustrate particular ideas, concepts, and views of the way a life is lived, making considerable editorial commentary on the nature of a particular ideological moment and the effect of that moment on individual lives.”(Encyclopedia of Life Writing) Anecdotes thus focus on, and highlight, episodes of a person’s life by transforming them into tales and stories using fictional narrative techniques and suspenseful plot twists.
 Having emigrated from Italy to Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century and established his fish and chip shop in Glasgow, Joe Pieri was then interned and turned into an “enemy alien” on the day Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. In Isle of the Displaced, his book about this traumatic event, Pieri turns the most marking aspects of his journey to, and life in “Camp S” in Canada into a series of witty and comic anecdotes. This paper focuses on the definitions and history of anecdotal theory in order to analyse Pieri’s fictionalisation strategies and the way these stories function as a psychological dam in times of crisis, in addition to re-inscribing these important events in British and Italian histories. The main contention of this article is that the appeal of fiction increases during life’s most difficult times mainly thanks to the imaginative and tragic-comic powers of literariness.

Особенности употребления сложного герундия в итальянском языке XVI в. (на примере трактата Ф. Гвиччардини «История Италии»)

The aim of the study is to determine the structural and functional features of complex gerundial constructions in the Old Italian language of the XVI century, using Francesco Guicciardini’s treatise “The History of Italy” as an example. The paper is novel in that it is the first to analyse the specificity of using the complex gerund as one of non-finite verb forms on the basis of a work written in the Cinquecento era in the genre of a historical treatise. As a result of the study, it has been found that the complex gerund in F. Guicciardini’s work is characterised by variation at the syntactic level and has more functionality compared to the modern literary language.

The Problem of the Unification of Italy in Dante Alighieri’s Works

The year 2021 is a remarkable date for the Italian history: 160 years ago the unified Italian state was created. As a matter of fact, before then, the necessity to unify the country had been discussed for more than five centuries. One of the first who expressed these ideas was the great poet and politician Dante Alighieri, whose anniversary is also celebrated this year. In Russian Dante studies, the poet’s ideas on the Italian unification have been usually considered within the context of his own political views. It is the case of A.K. Dzhivelegov’s and I.N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s studies, which considered the biography and political activity of the famous Italian poet, whereas E.P. Naumov paid special attention to Dante’s view on the contemporary political situation in Europe. Our article is entirely dedicated to the development of the issue concerning the Italian unification in Dante Alighieri’s work. Basing on a systematic analysis of the entire body of Dante’s work, this article highlights the fact that the idea of unification is not only found in Dante’s political writings but is, in fact, a keynote of all his literary work. Although Dante considered the unification of Italy in the context of the utopian universal monarchy, he also saw the roots of this unification much deeper than that, i.e. in the organic unity of the Italian people. Our work emphasizes a given evolution of Dante’s philosophical and political views, in connection with the unfolding events of his time. In conclusion, this article provides a comprehensive description of Dante’s views on the unification of Italy, highlighting the necessity of this unification, the unwillingness of the country to it, as well as the reasons of this unwillingness coming from the contemporary municipalism.

Religija u evropskim javnim prostorima / Religion in the European Public Spaces

This chapter discusses the distinguish between media cases from court cases, concerning Muslims and Sikhs which deal with religious dress codes in the common, political and institutional public spaces. It proves the real issue is not the religious symbol in itself but what it reminds the public of: from the Islamic threat' to the peaceful Sikh community that rescues the Italian parmesan', the media give their own interpretation of the events and news related to religious issues, influencing people's attitudes and common knowledge. Indeed Italian history, characterized by divisions and local arrangements which did not contribute towards creating a strong sense of belonging to the Nation and where the Catholic faith has always been a predominant element of the citizens' identity has often been an example of pragmatic local solutions and arrangements as regards the effects of religious pluralization, such as the greater visibility of religious dress codes in the public spaces.

L’architetto integrale and Gustavo Giovannoni’s role in education and cultural dissemination

ABSTRACT The engineer Gustavo Giovannoni made a decisive contribution to the development of a new professional figure: l’architetto integrale, best described as the all encompassing architect. Under this broad indicative title he envisioned a variety of operational skills that combine the roles of architect, urban planner, historian and restorer. In the context of these multifaceted interests, the essay investigates the centrality of scientific dissemination for Giovannoni. For the sake of accuracy, the term cultural dissemination should be used, as it better conveys the idea of a 360-degree educational project designed for both learned audiences (with a solid scientific background) and non-specialists generally interested in Italian architectural culture, planning history and landscape. Giovannoni’s careful targeting of different audiences is discernable in periodicals and other media chosen to transmit his ideas, from scientific journals to newspapers and national radio programmes. The present essay seeks to investigate the relationship Giovannoni had with the media and his participation in the amateur activities of various cultural and sporting associations, directed towards increasing awareness of Italy’s historical cities and the territory’s natural beauty.

La donna mostro. L’"aging" nella commedia all’italiana fra generi e genere

Sacred monsters: this is how most of the Italian media and public call actors Gassman, Mastroianni, Tognazzi, Manfredi, Sordi, to mark their legendary status in the Italian history of cinema. Comedy in particular is strongly associated with, and often defined by, the presence of these immensely popular male stars. However, this same period of time, this unique genre, has often relegated female figures to fixed stereotypes (the young maiden, the older woman, the mature one). How can we investigate such a complex phenomenon as the Commedia all’Italiana from a gender point of view? For example, by observing the different representations of time and of the aging process in the bodies of actors, actresses and characters (with particular attention to the works of Antonio Pietrangeli). In this way perhaps we will find another kind of “monstrosity”: female otherness, constantly looking for its (uncomfortable) position within movies that are unapologetic representations of the male gaze.