Italian Nation Research Articles

The Religious ‘Persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and British Sympathy for Italian Nationalism, 1851–1853

AbstractThe history of British relations with the states of pre‐unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the impact that negative perceptions of those countries had upon the development of British sympathy for Italian nationalism, are little understood. This article on British reactions to what the Victorians perceived as religious ‘persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany begins to redress this imbalance. Tuscany was in many respects one of the more progressive states in the Italian peninsula. Its government was moderate compared with those at Naples and Rome, it was affluent and it invested in a modern communications infrastructure. However, during the years following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–9, the Tuscan state's policy of religious retrenchment led to a sequence of events – some of which involved British subjects – which were perceived as examples of religious ‘persecution’ in Victorian Britain. British reactions to these events illustrate the extent to which religion could affect British foreign policy during the mid‐nineteenth century, and they help to explain the emergence of British sympathy for the Italian nationalist cause during the 1850s.

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano: desacralisation of a fascist relic

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano, raised to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War and to celebrate the victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, was contested from the moment of its installation in 1928. The German-speaking inhabitants of Bolzano were offended by its expression of Italian patriotism and the monument continued to symbolise the antagonism between the Italian- and the German-speaking population in the period following the end of Second World War. The monument’s explicit fascist propaganda attracted strong polemical reactions and some political groups even asked for it to be demolished. A recently-opened permanent exhibition in the crypt of the monument explores the twentieth-century dictatorships of Italy and their impact on Bolzano. Its historicisation offers a new interpretation of the monument – not one based on a schism between the populations of Bolzano, but rather one proposing reconciliation. This historicisation happens through the contextualisation of the monument, an efficient tool for the ‘desacrilisation’ of politically charged buildings; by exposing the detested ideology that they represent, they are stripped of their original ‘sacred’ character. This process also shows that it is possible for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a country’s modern heritage.

Italian citizenship and the transcending of territory

Mass migration means that links between a persons country of residence and country of citizenship are now often broken. In such circumstances which political rights should an expatriate citizen have? Italy has created overseas electorates for Italian citizens living abroad. This spreads the Italian nation well beyond the territorial boundaries of Italy and allows people who are not subject to Italy's laws to participate in making those laws. This is incompatible with the democratic principle that the ruled should be the rulers Includes an introduction by Katharine Betts written for the three articles: Hugo, G.; Defining Australia's national population in the era of globalisation. People and Place. 2006; 14(4): 26-33Carli, C.; Italian citizenship and the transcending of territory. People and Place. 2006; 14(4): 34-36Fedi, M.; Transnational citizenship: multiplicity of rights, responsibilities and opportunities. People and Place. 2006; 14(4): 37-39 Copyright. Monash University and the author/s

Island societies and mainland nation-building in the Mediterranean: Sardinia and Corsica in Italian, French, and Catalan nationalism

Island societies and mainland nation-building in the Mediterranean: Sardinia and Corsica in Italian, French, and Catalan nationalism

Alla ricerca di una religione per l'uomo collettivo. Enrico Corradini tra neopaganesimo, anticristianesimo e filo-cattolicesimo

What was the position of Italian imperialist nationalism towards religion and the religious dimension of politics, as it manifested itself in the first decades of the 20th century facing the rise of the masses? How was it possible to conciliate the cult of the Nation, a cult which became a religious one, with the defense of the tra-ditional religion of the Italians and with the nationalists’ will to seal a durable agreement with the Catholics? Is it possible to establish a link between these two dimensions? This is what this essay aims to investigate through an analysis of the positions of the acknowledged founder of the movement, Enrico Corradini. His evolution between literature and politics was characterized by a long anti-Christian and pagan season, where paganism represented the model of the attained fusion between national conscience and religious faith, and Christianity was the disrup-tive element that had broken the ancient balance and the continuing obstacle to the development of a strong national faith in the present. Separating and confront-ing Christianity to Catholicism, he resumed the latter as heir to the universal great-ness of Rome and tried to absorb it within the religion of the Nation. Corradini’s thought, at once authoritarian, mythic, pseudo-religious and modernist, appears therefore paradigmatic of a current of thought that was discovering the im-portance of the religious dimension of politics even before the Great War, repre-senting at the beginning of the century the first breeding ground of Fascism.

From Hindustan to Brabant: Meyerbeer’s L’africana and Municipal Cosmopolitanism in Post-Unification Italy

AbstractThis article examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.

Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille: Collection, Archive, and National Identity during the Risorgimento

Histories of the carte de visite and the photographic album rarely consider adequately the intersections between modes of viewership associated with collecting and archiving, and assertions of national identity in the nineteenth century. Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille, completed in 1867 to commemorate the Expedition of the Thousand, a defining episode in the Italian Risorgimento, presents the portrait card of 824 of the 1,092 men known to have participated. The photographs are ordered alphabetically and erratically sourced – although Pavia took many in his own studio – and bound into a massive album. The Album mobilises practices of viewing and organisation that come from both the archive and the collection, constituting a case in which contradictory modes of constructing narrative, engaging historical time, and understanding the materiality of photography produce a complex mode of viewership significant to the histories of photography and identity construction in the newly formed Italian nation. Seen from the purviews of the collection and the archive, this episode in the history of photography has implications for understanding how the album and the portrait card shaped the way photographs were viewed and used in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more specifically in nation-building movements such as the Italian Risorgimento.

Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century ed. by Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou

Reviewed by: Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century ed. by Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou Evdoxios Doxiadis (bio) Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, editors, Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2016. Pp. xiii + 217. Paper $29.95. Mediterranean Diasporas is a great example of the value of collaborative efforts in presenting and analyzing themes that span across national historiographies, languages, and disciplinary categories. Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, the editors of this volume, elected to focus their investigation on what they call diasporic intellectuals and, by so doing, succeeded in revealing a new perspective on Mediterranean history in the nineteenth century. The contributors in the volume problematize notions of nationality, imperial allegiances, and the nation state, often rejecting common understandings of the reception of Western ideas in the region. This volume breaks down the compartmentalization of national historiographies that has proven remarkably durable and challenging to the efforts of many historians of the region over recent decades. [End Page 264] As Thomas Gallant states in a thoughtful afterword, the chapters of this volume contribute to a significant revision of our understanding of diaspora, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, as well as to the history and transmission of ideas around the Mediterranean world and Europe (207). The first three chapters ("Letters from Spain: The 1820 Revolution and the Liberal International" by Juan Luis Simal, "An Itinerant Liberal: Almeida Garrett's Exilic Itineraries and Political Ideas in the Age of Southern European Revolutions (1820–34)" by Gabriel Paquette, and "Learning Lessons from the Iberian Peninsula: Italian Exiles and the Making of a Risorgimento Without People, 1820–48" by Grégoire Bron) discuss the impact of the Iberian revolutions of the 1820s and the subsequent civil strife that lasted into the 1830s in both Spain and Portugal. Placing their discussion within a larger context of questions about national sovereignty and political liberty in a post-Napoleonic world, they draw attention to the role of political exiles in crafting a discourse throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. All three chapters show the impact of the promulgation of the Cadiz Constitution in Southern Europe, the effect of the failures of the Spanish and Portuguese constitutional regimes of the 1820s, and the eventual successes of liberalism in the 1830s and 1840s—all of which has not been sufficiently considered by Greek historians within the context of Greek political developments. Bron's chapter in particular acts as a wonderful bridge from Iberia to Italy by considering these effects on the Italian exiles who took part in the events of the Iberian Peninsula. In chapter 4, "Mediterranean Liberals? Italian Revolutionaries and the Making of a Colonial Sea, ca. 1800–1830," Maurizio Isabella turns to the examination of several Italian (or Italo-Greek) intellectuals whose ideas were influenced by travel and exile, as well as by the presence of the new French and British imperial projects in the Mediterranean. Through the careers of intellectuals like Vittorio Barzoni, Ugo Foscolo, Alfio Grassi, or Gianbattista Marochetti, Isabella is able to explore the nature of early nineteenth-century liberalism, and imperial liberalism in particular, going beyond the traditional approach that examines such figures within Italian (or Greek) nationalism and situating them instead within a broader framework of Mediterranean liberalism, where contradictions—such as combining strong philhellenic ideas with praise for the Ottoman Empire, as in Grassi's case—can easily exist (86). Chapter 5, "Ottomans on the Move: Hassuna D'Ghies and the 'New Ottomanism' of the 1830s" by Ian Coller, is a welcome extension to North Africa of some of the themes presented by the earlier authors. The concept of mobility is once more crucial in Coller's discussion of "New Ottomanism" through the experiences of D'Ghies, a man of North African origins, who was educated [End Page 265] in Europe and advocated independence from the Ottoman Empire. Later, he would enter Ottoman service and, as the editor of Le Moniteur Ottoman, would embrace the cause of Ottoman revival and reform. Unfortunately, Coller's chapter is the only one dealing directly with North Africa and would have benefited by the inclusion of another chapter, possibly on Egypt, which...

Dante’s Purgatorio Canto VI in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Translating the Nazione/Nação

In the 1888 Brazilian –not Portuguese– translation (as the cover proudly reads) in terza rima of Purgatorio Canto VI by Brazilian José Xavier Pinheiro the choice of the translator of the word pàtria instead of the word paese (or in Portuguese país) caught my attention. In this paper I argue that the use of the word pàtria was done in an attempt to translate, both inside and outside the text, the national consciousness present in Dante, a national consciousness that was much needed in nineteenth century Brazilian society. Purgatorio Canto VI is where we witness the moving embrace between Virgilio and Sordello, an embrace prompted by their discovery that Mantua is their common hometown. Such a tender moment unleashes Dante’s rage toward Italy and its citizens, condemning the many wars and the frivolous political games of their municipalities, particularly of Florence. While in the Italian text Sordello inquires about Dante and Virgilio’s “paese” (v.70), in the Portuguese text Pinheiro deliberately uses the word “pàtria” (v.70). First, I discuss the creation of Dante as a political icon by nineteenth century Italian patriots and activists, Mazzini among others, and the ways in which these ideas traveled to Brazil through Garibaldi (among others). Second, I look at how Pinheiro uses this potentiality in his translation of the Purgatorio VI, to reflect on the impact that the translation might have had on the construction of the literary canon of a new nation and whether such ideas can be actually translated. Third, I show how both the Risorgimento’s reinterpretation of Dante and Pinheiro’s translation challenge the arguments advanced by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on translation as a tool for political change.

Is Immunity a Historical Concept?: Medical and Juridical Immunity in the European Enlightenment

The inoculation of smallpox was the major topic that connected the late eighteenth-century Italian proponents of the Enlightenment and the new Romantic movement. From Parini to Manzoni, from Giovanni Bicetti to Carlo Porta, both the Illuministi and the Romantics were active proponents of vaccination and wrote poems to celebrate it. Despite their intellectual and medical engagement with immunization, however, neither group attempted to transform vaccination into a political trope. In the context of the rise of Italian nationalism, despite the abundance of biopolitical metaphors, there is a surprising, notable lack of an immunity paradigm. My paper looks at the history of the rise of the Italian Intellectuals' interest in vaccination and analyzes the creation of Italian nationalist tropes in Manzoni and in the Romantic movement, and it tries to discuss the reasons behind their lack of interest of immunization as a political trope.

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic Americaby William B. Kurtz Mary C. Kelly Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. The North’s Civil War. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 236. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6886-3; cloth, $120.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6753-8.) Nativism, reinforced by the massive influx of immigrants during the Irish famine of the 1840s, revitalized perceptions of American incompatibility with Catholic loyalty to Rome. Debates over manifest destiny, the [End Page 186]U.S.-Mexican War, abolitionism, and sectionalism exacerbated the Catholic Church’s embattled condition in the Civil War era. William B. Kurtz’s study of Catholicism at a pivotal juncture in American history effectively documents a tumultuous progression. Kurtz initially unscrambles bitter sectional tensions disrupting northern Catholic fidelities to church, region, and party before and during the Civil War. Most Catholics opposed prowar Republicans, he notes, but wartime service allowed War Democrats to enhance their prospects as “true Americans” (p. 43). Catholic colleges supported the Union army, while the reputations of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania regiments soared. Commanders Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran, alongside other soldiers, supported emancipation, temporarily affirming the compatibility between faith and patriotism. The more than six hundred nuns who bolstered the national Catholic profile more than “the actions of Catholic chaplains or soldiers” contributed much, Kurtz continues, but ethnic prerogatives continued to challenge assimilation prospects (p. 68). Bishops’ indecisiveness on emancipation neutralized the value of Catholic military service for many northerners, while debates over abolition sidelined the repeal movement for Irish Americans committed to their home-land’s independence. Catholic advocator Orestes A. Brownson’s prowar, pro-emancipation stance confronted the conservative stance of New York’s Archbishop John Hughes, who based his opposition in economic and faith concerns and not in mere “unprincipled obstructionism,” Kurtz argues (p. 109). The brutality of incensed Irish New Yorkers who lashed out against conscription in the 1863 draft riots is adroitly counterpoised against bishops’ efforts to renounce the violence and contextualize factors of “patriotism, disaffection, ethnicity, class, and racism” underpinning the clash (p. 110). The virtual erasure of Irish Catholic sacrifice in the Union army from contemporary culture is recognized, while Kurtz positions the failure to exempt clergy from the draft against Protestant hostility to Pope Pius IX’s “mostly humanitarian” appeal for an end to the war (p. 121). But Protestant antipathy to a cohort associated with such violence, and therefore seen as incompatible with America’s founding principles, eclipsed the pope’s call. Proposals for Catholic veterans to defend the Papal States against Italian nationalist forces seemed to confirm Catholic disloyalty as Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept draft riot memories alive. Kurtz concludes that while Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of the Hibernians commemorations of Irish Civil War heroism asserted local and regional Catholic cultural empowerment, negative perspectives remained until their abatement during World War II. Several focuses merit additional scrutiny, including Father Edward Purcell and the Cincinnati-based Catholic Telegraph’s “fierce advocacy of the war and emancipation,” Horace Greeley’s anti-Catholic attitudes, curtailment of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations in 1867, and Catholic cohorts other than Irish or German (p. 123). Kurtz is unduly cavalier in citing Irish priority of church over radical nationalism, but deft in summarizing that “[s]upport for Ireland, the working class, and the church were not necessarily incompatible, and were in many cases simply three different but related parts of Irish Catholic Americans’ daily lives” (p. 132). His contention of Catholic aspirations to [End Page 187]“uphold law, order, and stability” also warrants further exploration, while the “separate Catholic America” of the title is somewhat disingenuous—Catholics arguably forged a distinct, rather than “separate,” religious culture in the modernizing United States (p. 91). Any book tackling such thorny topics should inevitably prompt such questions, however. Kurtz is to be commended for his masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War...

“The Italian Color”: Race, Crime Iconography and Dubbing Conventions in the Italian-Language Versions of Scarface (1932)

In the early 1930s the crime film Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932, USA, dir. Howard Hawks) stirred censorship controversies in the United States because of its gritty portrayal of criminality and violence. Debates over crime, race and immigration proliferated in the North-American press and finally led to Italian-American pressure groups to call out for the film’s boycott because it ‘offended the Italian nation and people’ and vilified immigrant communities. Archival historical research in AVT has revealed how film versions have frequently been cut and dialogues ideologically manipulated to suit political agendas, commercial interests and dominant sexual and religious moralities. Indeed the translation of films has often served too many masters, suffering direct or indirect censorship intervention whenever a film defied existing societal taboos. My contribution aims to offer a diachronic perspective on the reception of Scarface lo sfregiato in Italy. It will look at the film’s Italian-language translation and re-translations for cinema, television and DVD, prepared by different hands and re-voiced by different actors during a span of fifty years (1940-90s). From the textual and contextual analysis of the film’s different Italian editions, it will be possible to trace significant ideological shifts in the reception of Italian-American crime iconography and in the language used to communicate it.

Byron, Barrett Browning and the Organization of Light

Feminist readings of Casa Guidi Windows frequently invoke Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as a significant intertext for Barrett Browning, identifying in Barrett's Italy a direct retort to Byron's representation of the Italian nation as a languishing female body, which returns to it the potential agency inherent in the republican body politic. But Barrett's Italy not only challenges Byron's account of Italy as the feminine victim of masculine history, it also negotiates the obliterating glare of Byronic light. Responding to recent interpretations of the poem's windows as apertures that compromise the division between public masculine and private feminine space, this article explores the ways Casa Guidi, both the poem and the home that it describes, represent a liberal architectonics that is as concerned with resisting as it is with celebrating the subliming forces of indifferent nature and international politics. One of the ways in which that resistance is performed is via the poet's negotiation of Italian light, natural, divine and artistic, a negotiation through which Barrett describes a post-Romantic feminine poetics that realigns poetic form and the domestic, and suggests both as spaces through which light may break.

Oppressed nationalities: Italian responses to the Polish Uprising of January 1863

AbstractThis article analyses the activities organised in Italy to support the Polish Uprising of 1863 and the speeches and narratives used to present this foreign question to the Italian public. This international event brought to the forefront the same issues that had been raised by Italian nationalism, and also when discussing foreign national movements, Italy reflected both on her own identity and past history. In particular, the democratic ideals of the Risorgimento found their fulfilment in supporting the Polish rebels. The article, using archival sources, tries to build a transnational approach to Italian nationalism with a particular focus on how both Italian patriots and public opinion perceived and acted towards other ‘oppressed nationalities’ while also struggling to complete its own unification. Supporting a foreign cause was not only an expression of solidarity, but it also strengthened national sentiment and provoked a reflection on Italian national pride and identity.

A path towards Fascism: nationalism and large-scale industry in Italy (1910–1923)

In the decade before World War I, close connections developed in Italy between the nationalists and major elements of large-scale industry. As the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, became the main political reference for industrialists, the ties between nationalism and the business community helped to undermine the liberal state and end the political system established by Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, the Nationalist Association developed close links with the Ansaldo company and supported it in the ‘parallel wars’ of Italian capitalism. Ansaldo went bankrupt in 1921, but the nationalists were able to establish relations with other entrepreneurs. Their connection with large-scale industry lay behind Mussolini’s decision in 1923 to accept the Nationalist Association into the National Fascist Party. Nationalism not only ensured that important economic forces would support the Fascist regime but its ideology significantly contributed to the building of Mussolini’s dictatorship.

Paolo Mantegazza as Didatic Gastronome: Food, Art, Science and the New Italian Nation

It is in Risorgimento Italy that there is an incessant quest for a definition of what it means to be Italian amongst a reality of economic paucity and clear social divisiveness. During this tenuous yet crucial epoch, there is a cohesive attempt to define Italian taste with an ideological terminology previously absent from sensorial and aesthetic discourse. A fundamental purveyor of this novel approach is the self-defined “poligamo delle scienze,” Paolo Mantegazza. To the plurality of roles attributed to the medic (anthropologist, pathologist, senator, writer, etc.), there is one yet to be explored—Mantegazza as didactic gastronome. In the attempt to combat what he considers the anti-hygienic conditions plaguing the nation, the medic inaugurates a pedagogic process that would ideally lead to the formation of the Italian citizen. With the goal of creating a stronger and more capable Italian populace, the author goes to great lengths to provide guidelines for maximizing nourishment through the humblest of foods. Ultimately, Mantegazza’s pedagogic gourmandism is integral in the propagation of a social model of comportment that defines the Positivist framework of biological and nationalistic renewal and to a new vision of taste.

A historical review of the critical judgement of Il Gattopardo (1958) on the Risorgimento

SUMMARYThe Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo) is a novel by Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the end of the Bourbons' kingdom and the beginning of the Savoy dynasty, the first sovereigns of the new Kingdom of Italy (1861). Published posthumously in 1958, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and it is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 2012 The Observer named it as one of the ‘10 best historical novels’. The purpose of this article is to refute the negative image of the Risorgimento as presented in this novel. The Leopard, with its broad resonance, has strongly contributed towards distorting the historical judgement on the foundations of the Italian nation, above all by failing to do justice to Prime Minister Cavour's courageous and judicious political strategy in the choice of the leadership class – also Sicilian – in the newly created Kingdom of Italy (1860–61).

The last poem of Pietro Giannone—finally decrypted

ABSTRACTPietro Giannone (1791–1872) was an Italian poet and patriot, a friend and associate of Giuseppe Mazzini. In his last years, he wrote a secret poem using unusual symbols. For nearly 150 years, the poem resisted decryption attempts, but the code has recently been broken and recovered: a mix of monoalphabetic, digraphic, trigraphic signs, polyphones, and a little repertory. Some serious (but useful) flaws made decryption possible.

A History of Italian Citizenship Laws during the Era of the Monarchy (1861-1946)

This article aims to present the evolution of Italian citizenship from political unification to the end of the Second World War, which in Italy corresponds with the end of the monarchy and the advent of the Republic. In this long period, the central definition of Italian citizenship was given by the Civil Code (1865), the basis of which was Ius sanguinis and the patrilineal system. The 1912 Law on Citizenship changed some aspects of the previous legislation, but did not alter the general legal scenario, despite great pressure from some organised movements such as those formed by Italian expatriates in the Americas. With the advent of fascism (1922), the discourse on the Italian nation became radicalised, but Mussolini’s regime did not pass any organic laws on citizenship. The innovations introduced under fascism were relatively modest; many were directed towards limiting the rights of particular categories of citizens, such as political opponents and Jewish people. Italy reached the beginning of the republican period with a legal apparatus on citizenship that was very similar to the one established for the first time in the Civil Code of 1865. This shows how Italian political classes have given more attention to the orthodoxy of the law than to the need to adapt it to the numerous transformations in Italian society.