Italian Nation Research Articles

Thought and action? Perspectives on Mazzini and Garibaldi on the bicentenaries of their births

The introduction provides a context for the six papers that were presented at two different symposia marking the birth bicentenaries of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. The papers, revised for publication, address specific contributions made by these two founding figures of the modern Italian nation to the history of the Risorgimento, the ideologies of republicanism, democracy and nationality. The papers also make room for a discussion of their contrasting political modes, and look at their politics before and after Italy's political unification in 1860–61. The comparative approach highlights differences and similarities between Mazzini's and Garibaldi's political strategies and illuminates the choices available to those who wanted to unify the peninsula. The broad themes around which these papers are organized restore to these two figures the broad cosmopolitan dimensions that made the Risorgimento a movement of global impact.

The ‘Northern Dominator’ and the Mare Nostrum: Fascist Italy's ‘Cultural War’ in Malta

Within the wider attempt to transform Italian communities abroad into Fascist colonies, the Italian Fasci Abroad sought to build nationalist propaganda in the Mediterranean. The irredentist activities and the propaganda of the Fasci in Malta alarmed the British governors on the island, the British government and MI5. This article analyses the cultural conflict organised in Maltese schools, bookshops and universities by the Italian nationalists against the British protectorate–a conflict the British suspected could be followed by military activity, in particular when Italy began building its empire in Ethiopia. The nationalist offensive was supported in the 1920s and, more vigorously, in the 1930s by the Fasci, the Italian consulate on the island and, ultimately, the Italian government. Not even the Second World War and the bombing of Malta by the Italian air force concluded the conflict between Italian and British imperialism on the island.

“The Policy of Geography”: Cavour’s Considerations, European Geopolitics, and Ireland in the 1840s

This essay considers an 1845 English translation by “A Friend to Ireland” of a French essay on Irish politics by the Italian nationalist Count Cavour, Considerations on the Present State and Future Prospects of Ireland. Irish aspirations to national sovereignty are, in Considerations, insistently distinguished from, and represented as insignificant in relation to, a universal history in which the British Empire leads the globe towards modernity and liberalism on terms that register the ways in which universal history and geopolitics sanction opposing views of global relations and the foundations of sovereignty.

Pompeii and the Last Days of the Italian Risorgimento Giuseppe Garibaldi, Alexandre Dumas and Giuseppe Fiorelli in Naples

The article suggests that both the end of the romantic phase of the Risorgimento and the consolidation of the new Italian nation are closely associated with a profound change in the meanings attributed to Mount Vesuvius and the remains of Pompeii. Until 1860 the suggestive power of the ruins of Pompeii evoked a desire to follow the seductive example of the good life in an antique culture. After 1863 the ruins and dead bodies came to be viewed as objects that acquired meaning only by the analyses of professional archaeologists. The author discusses this turning point by comparing the Pompeii of Alexandre Dumas, appointed by Garibaldi as Honorary Director of the Scavi and the Archeological Museum in the fall of 1860, with the Pompeii of Giuseppe Fiorelli, appointed as Director of the Scavi and the Museum by the Italian government in 1863.

Psychiatric institutions, their architecture, and the politics of regional autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy

This paper examines the planning process and architecture of two public psychiatric institutions built around 1900 in Trieste and Lower Austria. From 1864, the building of new asylums was the responsibility of Crown land governments, which by the end of the nineteenth century had emerged as sites of power and self-presentation by minority groups and new political parties. At the same time, the area of asylum planning was establishing itself as a branch of asylum psychiatry and promoting the idea of the asylum as model settlement, contributing to social reform. I analyse the interaction of psychiatrists, architects and government officials involved in planning the two institutions in the context of Crown land governments’ self-positioning within the empire and internationally (especially in relation to Italy and Germany). The Trieste asylum planners were working for a government controlled by Italian nationalists, but their desire for a ‘modern’ asylum turned them towards German models. The Christian Social government in Lower Austria sought to supplant Germany as the leader in this branch of science. The spatial arrangement and visual articulation of the two asylums is interpreted in the context of the interaction of psychiatry and the politics of regional autonomy.

The Madre Patria: The Rebirth of Modern Italy in the Patriotic Spaces of Lake Fucino (1876) and the Torre Monumentale Di San Martino Della Battaglia (1893)

The role of a maternal figure in the construction of the nation as an 'imagined community' has been largely constrained to studies on the anthropomorphic myth that the nation is born or reborn in the Italian case. This article examines the crucial importance of maternal imagery in the construction of Italian patriotism, a discourse founded upon the myth of the nation's Risorgimento or rebirth from an ancient past. These ideas are examined through close analysis of two monumental spaces — Lake Fucino in Southern Italy and the Torre Monumentale di San Martino della Battaglia in Northern Italy — in which the development of patriotic experience is explored through sacred and secular representations of the notion of Conception.

Jews in Italy between Integration and Assimilation, 1861–1938

The history of Italian Jews from 1861 to 1938 is often viewed as the period in which they totally assimilated into the Italian nation. This article, however, argues that rather than their assimilation it was a period of their integration into Italian society. Various approaches to this question are presented, including a review of the literature, with a view to reconsidering the relationship between Jewish culture and Italian culture, or rather non-Jewish culture. Italian Jewish history is shown not to be separated from, but to be “internal” to Italian social, cultural, and political history—part of the dynamic process of change that occurred during this period not only in Italy but throughout Europe.

Cuando la patria llama: Italia en guerra y los inmigrantes italianos en Argentina

Italy's partecipation in colonial wars at the beginning of the 20th century and in the First World War fueled the Italian immigrant's patriotism in Argentina. The war joined together the immigrants and strenghtened their ethnic identity. Same condition was not possible during the Thirties and during the Second World War. Patriotism couldn't provide the unity of fascist and antifascist immigrants and was feared by the Argentinian society as a divisive phenomenon.

Migration and Integration in Giulio Angioni

Giulio Angioni's third novel, Una ignota compagnia, published in 1992, breaks the mould of fiction containing characters from the extracomunitario community. Before this, migrants to Italy from outside the European community, when they appeared in fiction, were never cast as central characters. Now one of the central figures of a novel is a Kenyan, Warùi, whose experiences in modern urban Italy are seen as running parallel and being strikingly similar to those of a Sardinian 'migrant' to the mainland, Tore. Angioni's democratic and progressive aspirations for the equitable integration of extracomunitari and other outsiders into the Italian nation are expressed, among other ways, through optimism of a linguistic kind. The style in which he tells the stories of Warùi and Tore is an experiment with a sort of plurilingualism that is seen to be in tune with, and is in fact the vehicle of, the vision of integration which is at the very core of the work.

Introduction: "Confirm my voice": "My sisters," Poetic Audiences, and the Published Voices of EBB

Introduction "Confirm my voice": "My sisters," Poetic Audiences, and the Published Voices of EBB Marjorie Stone Beverly Taylor In a pocket notebook including works dating from the 1842-44 period, the poet who used the name Elizabeth Barrett Barrett before her marriage and Elizabeth Barrett Browning afterwards, or "EBB" for short throughout her life,1 drafted an untitled, unfinished poem beginning "My sisters! Daughters of this Fatherland / Which we call England!"2 In this fragment, published here for the first time (see below), she calls upon the women of England: "Give me your ear & heart—Grant me yr voice / Do confirm my voice—lest it speak in vain." Fifty years after her birth in 1806, there seemed little reason to believe that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had spoken "in vain." By 1856, hosts of readers—male as well as female, in England and well beyond its borders—"confirmed" her voice with widespread reviews, frequent tributes, strong disagreements (an indirect form of confirmation), and solid sales. Her 1844 Poems (published in the United States as A Drama of Exile: And Other Poems), combined with works such as "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," published in the 1848 issue of the Boston anti-slavery annual The Liberty Bell, had established her trans-Atlantic reputation. By mid century, she stood with Tennyson among the first rank of English poets, celebrated not only by the public, but also by other writers and artists. She was the only woman writer included in the list of "Immortals" drawn up by the zealous young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.3 She was also named by the Athenaeum as a suitable contender for the position of Poet Laureate on Wordsworth's death in 1850, the year in which an expanded new edition of her Poems appeared.4 Casa Guidi Windows (1851), on the movement for Italian unification and nationhood, generated mixed reviews in England, given its controversial call for British intervention in continental politics. In Italy, however, in an 1852 address to the Piedmont Chamber of Deputies, it was cited by the Italian writer and politician, Massimo D'Azeglio, then Prime Minister of the Italian state, and praised even by some of the Italian patriots whom the poem [End Page 391] critiqued.5 Aurora Leigh (1856), the first extended portrait of the woman poet in English literature, further enhanced EBB's international reputation even as it generated animated debates, going into more than twenty editions by century's end. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the backlash in England against Poems before Congress (1860), the poet's second book calling for British intervention in Italian liberation, her collected poems were repeatedly reprinted, or issued in new editions, along with multiple selected editions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, her work was discussed in France, especially popular in North America, and translated into French and Italian—even, in the case of "The Cry of the Children," into Russian.6 While hosts of nineteenth readers in different nations and languages may have "confirmed" EBB's voice with ear, heart, writing, and speech acts of their own, their divergent responses to a body of work that is extraordinarily wide-ranging in its representation of speakers, deployment of poetic forms, and variable subject matter suggests how complex and multi-faceted an issue "voice" can be in her poetry. To accommodate the amplitude of her poetry and multiplicity of its effects—its intertextual engagements with precursors, its refraction through varying generic registers, and the "Uproar in the echo"7 that it excited through its utterance—we might do better to speak of the published "voices" of EBB's poetry. Our attachment to the concept of a holistic voice in reading poetry—a voice that connects us to the poet herself or himself through a subtle medium as intimate as breathing—-speaks to our nostalgia for the integrated unitary self as an ultimate origin of utterance. Yet as Margaret Linley, Eric Griffiths, and Yopie Prins, among...

‘Neither Fish nor Fowl’? The Correspondence of Lorenzo Valerio, 1825–1849

Lorenzo Valerio (1810–1865), though a key figure in Piedmontese and Italian politics, a newspaper editor of note and a leading light of both the Associazione Agraria and the Associazione Italo-Slava, has not been accorded in recent years the attention he merits. With the publication, however, of the first four volumes of his correspondence, it is now possible to map more precisely Valerio's activities and influence, in Risorgimento Italy and far beyond it. These letters provide their principal editor, Adriano Viarengo, with the opportunity to review a number of crucial historiographical questions in Risorgimento scholarship, among them, the nature of moderate hegemony, the political vision of the Sinistra subalpina, and the complex relations between Italian patriots and Slav Romantic nationalists active within the Austrian Empire. This article is designed both to portray Valerio and his world, and to reflect upon the contribution Viarengo has made, whether in his introductions to the correspondence or in his ancillary essays, to the study of the Risorgimento.‘… a good enough sort, but neither fish nor fowl …’ Giuseppe Mazzini [Letter, 6 March 1851, to his mother]

CANNONS AND RUBBER BOATS

Written in October 2001 as a ‘gut reaction’ to the attack on the Twin Towers, and published first as a long article in the daily Corriere della Sera and then in book form (in its original shape, twice as long as the article) in December 2001, Oriana Fallaci's pamphlet La rabbia e l'orgoglio (‘Anger and pride’) was in its twenty-sixth edition when I bought it in September 2004. Its follow-up, La forza della ragione (‘The force of reason’), has already sold 800,000 copies since its publication in 2004. Oriana Fallaci has emerged after 9/11 as the strongest and most vocal Italian representative of the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. This essay analyses the constitutive elements of her discourse (Italian nationalism, values instead of history and politics, and violent speech conflating Islam, terrorism and immigrants) and tries to understand its appeal and the sources of its authority in Fallaci's career, in order to outline the specific Italian version of the clash of civilizations theory.

The Alternative Economies of Emigration and Immigration, the Real and the Constitution of Italian Nation Spaces

In this paper I consider how we might interpret the implications of the coincidence of emigration and immigration in Italy. Some scholars have situated Italy's population changes in the past 30 years within the framework of the ‘Mediterranean model of Migration’. Although this model offers a general picture of the structural features in common among ‘Mediterranean’ countries, it assumes the existence of the nation rather than questioning its very becoming or possibility and how emigration and immigration as forms of mobility might suggest the limits to the symbolisation of nationalism. Employing concepts derived from Slavoj Žižek, I explore the potential to explain the constitution of Italian nation spaces through the concept of the ‘Real’ to analyse the threats that mobilities make to the fantasmic category of the Italian nation.

Exile and Nationalism: The Case of the Risorgimento

Italian nationalism was essentially the product of exile, as most Risorgimento patriots lived and published their work abroad after successive failed revolutions. Exile was turned by political refugees into one of the foundational myths of the Risorgimento as the narrative of the Italian nation fighting for independence. The article examines the different aspects of the representation of exile in political and literary texts, which justified exile as the only choice available when faced with despotism at home. It surveys the research on exile published after independence, and highlights how the mythical interpretation of exile developed in the Risorgimento-influenced historiography until the post-war period. Finally, it suggests that in order to understand the effects of exile on Italian identity formation, we need to study Italian nationalism as part of trans-national intellectual exchanges.

Written in Blood: The Art of Mothering Epic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

At age thirteen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed her first poem, Battle of Marathon, inspired by her hope to become Homer. (1) Later in her life, however, she rejected limitations of an inspired by past. In Barrett Browning's 1856 verse novel, Leigh, protagonist--a woman poet, author herself--defines true of creators of epic: they must represent .../ Their age ... this live, throbbing age. (2) Leigh, an innovative kunstlerroman significantly longer than Milton's Paradise Lost, was indeed hailed as a present-day by Barrett Browning's contemporary, Coventry Patmore. (3) The continues to receive considerable critical attention, much of which now focuses on its use of images which allow female experiences that usually silenced to speak loudly. (4) In fact, Dorothy Mermin argues that women in text are conceived primarily as mothers, with exception of Aurora (p. 190). However, Barrett Browning maintains that heavens and earth grant same vocation to both mother and poet: namely, to carry out most necessary work of developing human soul (AL, 2.455,460). Thus, does, in fact, become a mother by means of her literary creations. Yet in 1861, Barrett Browning seemingly questioned this link between maternal and poetic in her 100-line lyric, Mother and Poet, which depicts tragic fate of a woman who successfully blended her maternity and her artistry. Based on historical figure of Laura Savio, an Italian patriot, Barrett Browning's speaker raises two heroic sons only to sacrifice them both to nationalistic ideals she nourished within them. This lyric poem--briefly glossed by critics as a moving tribute, (5) an indictment of patriarchy, (6) or a re-thinking by Barrett Browning of her own political involvement (Mermin, p. 238)--actually completes metaphor of poet as mother introduced in Leigh. Indeed, it provides support Leigh's argument that writing a poem is an epic action which may lead, like an hero's, to creation of a new social order (Mermin, p. 183). A comparison of conception, formation, and promulgation of a poem/child in both works and an exploration of ways in which both poems concretize critical theories later formulated by French feminist Julia Kristeva will show that Mother and Poet offers significant insights into struggles of all poets whose book, which is a man too, must be written in man's blood (AL, 5.398, 356): mothering of a physical child, creation of a poetic Other releases a form of life and energy which can be shaped but not controlled--and which must ultimately be sacrificed. Thus, child/text becomes a type of Christ, a messianic force which both subordinates and elevates maternal poet as agent of a loving apocalypse. While earlier epics Aeneid and Paradise Lost have twelve books, Leigh was conceived as a nine-book epic; thus, very structure of reveals its gestational nature. According to Sandra Donaldson, Barrett Browning's own experience at age forty-three of giving birth and nurturing a child greatly influenced her poetry for better, deepening her sensitivity. (7) Similarly, when Aurora's book comes to term, she envisions herself as a complete poet/mother, integrating her own femininity with masculinity of her betrothed, Romney. Barbara Gelpi asserts that when confesses her love Romney, her alter ego, she finally possesses the united spirit of a creative woman ... trustful of her power. (8) The symbolic number nine recurs within this context of artistic growth in book 3, when receives nine letters with red seals, ninth of which contains not only news of Romney, but a description of two sketches of Danae being violated by Jove in a glittering haze of prodigious golden rain; in one, Danae runs a-flame to meet her visitor, and in second, she lies . …

Margherita Sarfatti & Italian Cultural Nationalism

From the early 1920s when Benito Mussolini first came to power through the end of the first decade of the fascist rule, Margherita Sarfatti played a dominant role in the formulation of a new variety of Italian cultural nationalism. A cultural advisor, art critic, socialist turned fascist, and Mussolini's lover, she both directly and indirectly shaped the cultural policies of the Italian regime. As Victoria de Grazia suggests, Sarfatti "wielded immense personal power through her capacity to bring together intellectuals, artists, and the political personnel of the regime." Over time, she "manipulated the regime's burgeoning patronage networks to promote the Novecento as a 'national school,'" helped to found the review Gerarchia, largely created the public image of the Mussolini in her authorized biography Dux (1925), and "reigned, doyenne of official intellectual life."1 In their biography of Sarfatti, Philip V. Cannistraro, and Brian R. Sullivan have argued that "Margherita had brought a degree of cultural respectability to a movement that otherwise appeared to be nothing more than a gang of violent, anti-intellectual thugs."2 Nancy Harrowitz has addressed Sarfatti's complicated identity as a Jewish woman (she later converted to Catholicism) involved in a largely masculinist and later anti-Jewish regime. Sarfatti, she writes, "was to a great degree the author of fascism itself and thus also the author of those conditions which produced such profound identity shifts within herself."3 Despite her importance to this period of cultural history, however, Sarfatti's writings remain unavailable in English translation: a situation that the present dossier sets out to remedy in the form of a brief but representative sampling of her early writings on art for Mussolini's newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. [End Page 889] Margherita Grassini Sarfatti was born in Venice in April 1880 to wealthy, unassimilated Jewish parents. Thanks to her private teachers Pietro Orsi, Pompeo Molmenti, and Antonio Fradeletto, whose careers combined investment in art with political engagement, her education included significant exposure to art and art criticism. Despite her parents' social position, she became a committed socialist early on, in 1898 marrying the socialist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, the member of another prosperous Venetian family. The Sarfattis moved to Milan in 1902, and about this time Margherita began her career as an art critic. In 1903, she was awarded a prize for her articles on the Fifth Venice Biennale, published in Gazzetta degli Artisti (Venice) and La Patria (Rome). From 1903 to 1908, Margherita contributed art criticism to such periodicals as Avanti! (Milan), Avanti della Domenica (Florence then Rome), L'Adriatico (Ancona), Varietas (Milan), and the Gazzetta di Venezia, securing a regular post at the socialist daily Avanti! in 1908.4 These early years demonstrate the extent to which her thinking about art was from the beginning intertwined with her ideas about politics and social change. Sarfatti's influence in the art world was greatly aided by her political and amorous involvement with Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a rising star in the socialist party, and in December 1912, he took over the editorship of Avanti! This was the period in which Sarfatti first cemented her ties to the avant-gardes, and such figures as Achille Funi, Leonardo Dudreville, Carlo Erba, and Antonio Sant'Elia became frequent guests of her salon.5 Although they still identified themselves with futurism, Sarfatti saw in them the beginnings of a calmer classicizing trend in the modern movement. In 1914, she reviewed their "New Tendencies" exhibition for Avanti!, celebrating the work of Funi and Dudreville in a review that marks a transition in her career from being a mere observer of the art world to that of advocate and promoter.6 As the political situation shifted—in Italy in general, and in the socialist party in particular—Sarfatti gained additional clout. In October 1914, Mussolini broke with the socialist party over the question of Italian neutrality in World War I: although the socialists opposed the war, he believed Italy should intervene. Sarfatti...

Nationalism and family ideology: The case of Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century

At the turn of the 20th century, many European countries paid increasing attention to the family as a social institution. The interest itself was closely related to the rise of nationalism in Europe, and consequently, the family was supposed to serve its goals. Similar to German, Italian or French nationalists, Lithuanian-speaking intelligentsia were aware of the importance of the family in developing a strong nation. Nevertheless, unlike Westerners, the Lithuanian nationalists did not connect the family ideology with pronatalistic discourse. Lithuanian family ideology was not focused on procreation as its main goal. Only a nationally conscious wife and children raised in the Lithuanian spirit were considered to be the most solid base for a strong nation.

Raphael: From Urbino to Rome ed. by Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry, Carol Plazzotta (review)

REVIEWS 288 ers and nobility and the process of nation building. Foreigners and nobles were in similar positions during the Revolution. As the Germinal laws affected both nobles and foreigners, they provide an understanding into how new forms of nationality and citizenship were created. It is interesting to note that nobles and foreigners were alleging that they were transformed by the state into members of a nation or in the alternative that they had always been members of such a nation. Woolf discusses the constituent elements of the Italian nation. Italy’s historiography, as that of other European nations at this time, exalted the state and scientific progress. Unlike other European nations however, Italy lacked a strong central administration. Abigail Green discusses what it meant to be German in two different time periods. She also looks at how different political institutions shaped an emerging nationhood. Zimmer discusses the transformation of the different meanings of nation while analyzing the relationship between the nation as a focus of collective identity and nationalism as an ideological and political movement. He distinguishes between three phases of nationhood, each giving light to a different kind of nationalism and related discourse of national identity. Mandler supports the traditional historiographical argument that the British state was different from European norms while still incorporating the view that power in Britain was based on the idea of cultural hegemony more than institutional government. MIHAELA L. FLORESCU, Cerritos College, Norwalk Raphael: From Urbino to Rome, ed. Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry, and Carol Plazzotta (London: National Gallery Company 2004) 320 pp., 240 ill. This exquisitely illustrated catalogue to London’s National Gallery’s ambitious exhibition, Raphael: From Urbino to Rome, is an essential addition to the library of any Renaissance scholar. Covering roughly a dozen years of Raphael’s artistic production, this magnificent catalogue traces the artist’s brilliant early career and “meteoric rise to fame” from his humble beginnings in Urbino through the death of his first papal patron, Julius II (59). The book includes color illustrations of over ninety of Raphael’s paintings and drawings; each accompanied by detailed catalogue entries. The introductory essay by Tom Henry and Carol Plozzotta is exceptional in its synthesis of the most recent Raphael scholarship. Distinguished scholars Arnold Nesselrath and Nicholas Penny both contribute outstanding critical essays which attest to the continued resonance of Raphael’s career with contemporary scholars. Henry and Plazzotta provide tantalizing evidence for Raphael’s early artistic education in the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi, who died when Raphael was just eleven years old. While earlier generations of scholars have rejected the possibility that the young Raphael could have learnt anything from his father before the latter’s untimely death, the authors cite textual and visual evidence that suggests it was Santi, and not Pietro Perugino, from whom Raphael received his first artistic training. The young Raphael’s artistic debt to his father is demonstrated in his first documented commission, the St. Nicholas of Tolentino Altarpiece for the church of S. Agostino in Città di Castello, ca. 1500–1501 (cat. 15–17), where Raphael’s use of color and technique clearly reflects Santi’s influence. The authors consider fascinating evidence for Santi’s career and contribution to the artistic sphere; he emerges as a significant—if REVIEWS 289 relatively minor—player in central Italian art of the late Quattrocento. This hypothesis is in marked contrast to traditions that maintain Raphael’s artistic training began under the tutelage of Perugino. The authors maintain that the lack of any documentation for Raphael’s apprenticeship to Perugino confirms that the established master was not so much the young artist’s mentor as he was his artistic contemporary. Raphael’s ability to skillfully maneuver with in the social circles of the rich and powerful is also attributed to the influence of his artist/courtier father. It is clear that Raphael was extremely well connected throughout his career and was able, through his charm and social savvy, to adapt quickly and successfully to the different environments in which he worked (21). Henry and Plazzotta present Raphael as a great draftsman and synthesizer, able to assimilate and develop upon the work of contemporary artists...

Multiculturalism in New Italian Cinema

Many factors contributed in the last 30 years to bring to the fore the need for a new representation of the Italian nation in the media. They span from the local economic boom to the combination of global political events—the widespread process of de/counter-colonization, the demise of communist/socialist/dictatorial regimes in Eastern Europe, the poverty and the climate of terror in North Africa, the dissolution of the Yugoslavian federation, Italy joining the European Union and so forth—and they all contributed to the formation of a wave of mass immigration in the peninsula. On a daily basis, since the early nineties, mass immigration prompts the country to re-think its identity in terms of culture, religion, heritage, and to resituate itself in a European and global context, and while in literature the hyphenated identities of the contemporary diasporic writers begin to emerge, the televisual and cinematic representation of their correlatives is still missing or incomplete. As a rule, the patriarchal eye of the Italian director is still the privileged lens through which the Italian audiences see immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities. However, some filmmakers, displaying a more perceptive sensibility than their peers on the changes that occur around them, manage to incorporate instances of multicultural openings within the ongoing narrative of a national cinema.

Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (review)

Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia). Edited by Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro. (Brescia, Italy: Editrice Morcelliana. 2004. Pp. 411. euro28.00.) Daniele Menozzi, of the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, and Renato Moro, of the Universita degli studi Roma Tre, edited this worthy volume based on research and conferences at the University of Florence and at the University of Urbino's Romolo Murri Foundation. Given the book's concentration on the Spanish, French, and Italian experience, here mainly concerns its right-wing dimensions rather than its communist one. Nor does German Nazism figure much except in discussions of Mussolini's alliance -with Hitler. Nevertheless, given the enormous volume of recent work on how the Holy see or the German Catholic Church faced Nazi racism, Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo provides needed context and reminds us that Rome's response to interwar Latin totalitarianism was ambivalent. One question provoked by the book's title might be the choice of the word totalitarianism, a concept that touches every essay in one way or another. Among the central questions for historians of fascism are ones of definition; is fascism, for instance, or is totalitarianism? Such queries apply to this book. How totalitarian was Mussolini's state? Menozzi and Moro acknowledge difficulties with this term that, they note, the Church did not use until about 1938 (p. 374). Other concepts at work include secularization and, more important for the purposes of the book, what the Italians call statolatria or state worship .The essays in Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo mix Catholic elements into this stew. Many of the figures dealt with here ponder the idea of a universal state, often in efforts to reconcile the Church and Mussolini's regime, recalling both pagan and the Christian Roman Empire, medieval Christendom, modern Italian nationalism, and the Duce's resurrected empire in Africa. Menozzi and Moro group the collection into three sections. The first, titled Authority, deals with the Church and the new twentieth-century false religion of statolotria. Menozzi begins with a discussion of Pius XI's 1925 encyclical, Quas primas on the social kingdom of Christ and its interpretation as either a political call to arms or as a spiritual document. Quas primas occurs in many of the following studies. The next chapter, by Giovanni Vian, samples Italian bishops for their ideas on power and authority, concepts that they preferred over anarchy and mob rule. For them, Fascism offered solace and the Lateran Accords. Alfonso Botti concludes with a study of the Spanish Church and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and recalls the question here of whether or not he was, indeed, a totalitarian? Like the split over Quas primas, Botti finds diverse judgments on the regime, from (at times) suspicious Jesuits to more sympathetic Augustinians. …