Italian History Research Articles

Narrating the Crusades in Two Contemporary Novels: Ideology and Dialogue Between Eastern and Western Perspective

The Crusades, particularly the First Crusade, have long captivated the imagination of writers and poets in both the Christian West and the Muslim East. This study explores how the First Crusade is narrated and invoked in contemporary literature through a comparative analysis of two novels: The Awakening of the Knight by Egyptian author Mohamed Tarek (2022) and Jerusalem by Italian historian and novelist Andrea Frediani (2013). The research examines the relationship between these works and historical and literary sources on the Crusades, while also addressing their contemporary political and cultural resonances. The findings suggest that contemporary narratives, as exemplified by these two novels, oscillate between ideological uses of classic concepts of heroism and dichotomies such as good versus evil applied to modern contexts, and a more imaginative, entertaining approach that frames the Crusades as an epic, event-driven story in an attempt to bridge connections between East and West, suggesting the potential for intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding. The analysis underscores the enduring impact of the Crusades on contemporary thought and calls for further exploration of this historical period in modern cultural and civilizational discourse.

‘Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond’: Introduction: Notes on methods and historiography

This editorial positions the study of fashion and costume against the field of film studies and the history of Italian cinema and media. Although scholarly approaches to this field of study first appeared in Anglo American literature at the beginning of the 1990s, the pioneering work of Italian historian and film critic Mario Verdone has yet to be acknowledged. The anthology Verdone edited in 1950, a pivotal year of Italy’s post-war reconstruction, was the first of its kind: prior to its publication, the relationship between costume, fashion and film had never been the subject of scholarly enquiry. The title of Verdone’s book, La moda e il costume nel film (‘Fashion and costume in film’) calls attention to how these arts, techniques and industries work in the actual process of making films. Verdone’s book offers a context for the articles contained in this volume.

The influence of Hessen and Dewey in italian pedagogy of work (1945-1970)

In Italian history, the years from 1945 to 1970 are crucial because they lead the country towards democracy, through the consolidation of the republican government, industrialisation and cultural openness towards ideas, theories and practices from beyond the borders. In the pedagogical field, the thought of foreign scholars who were also involved in labour pedagogy was accepted and reworked. Dewey and Hessen belong to different pedagogical currents and have influenced different Italian pedagogical fields, their theories are sometimes similar, sometimes divergent. The comparison shows how anthropological conceptions with different assumptions give rise to ideas on work pedagogy that reflect Dewey's instrumentalism on the one hand and Hessen's spiritualist humanism on the other. For both scholars, work is considered a pedagogical tool for educational and scholastic renewal that presupposes play as an activity characteristic of the early ages of life.

Images and Religious History in Italy

Abstract The aim of this article is to present historical research conducted by Italian historians and art historians who have treated images as historical sources whose testimonial value is the same as that of written (literary and archival) sources. After a brief introduction into the origins of these methods and the development of the Warburgian approach in Italy, some pioneering works will be examined, followed by a selection of more recent studies by historians and art historians. The latter converge in the shared field of iconographic studies, which function as a dual historiographical periphery, shared by both historians and art historians. Although images have been used to explore different aspects of religious life, this essay will focus on the subtle dynamics of religious conflicts, both among Christians and between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

(Un)stable Ghettos

Abstract This article reviews Italian and international historiography on the history of Jews in Italy during the early modern period, aiming to critically engage with the notion of the “ghetto” and the interpretive frameworks through which it has been studied. It situates this concept within broader historiographical trends in Italian history of the period. The study gives particular attention to the growing influence of the Roman Inquisition and its pervasive—though not total—control over Jewish communities, noting the varied ways this influence was enacted across Italy’s diverse urban and rural regions. The analysis begins with an exploration of Jewish responses to the temporary readmission into the Papal States under Pope Sixtus V from 1587 to 1590, using this episode to re-evaluate the category of the ghetto. The conclusion argues for a future research direction that moves beyond the assumed stability of the ghetto, reconstructing the history of Jews in Italy by identifying people, places, actors, distinctions, and movements—while remaining mindful of the profound impact of the long history of persecutions.

An Interface for Linking Ancient Languages

Abstract This paper focuses on the linking potentials offered by the EpiLexO web-based front-end for creating and editing an ecosystem of digital resources for ancient languages, developed in the context of a project on the languages of fragmentary attestation of ancient Italy. The focus is particularly on mechanisms introduced for linking lexical information to other information bits either internally or externally, e.g., for creating attestations by linking lexical forms to their variants in relevant inscriptions, as well as for linking lexical data to external independent LOD datasets available on a remote endpoint. Finally, in the conclusions, we briefly introduce some future planned or desired enhancements as well as the final platform component, a parallel interface that constitutes the fruition application, which will be open to anyone on the web and will allow for browsing, searching, cross-querying and visualizing the created set of interlinked resources.

Coalition politics under exceptional exogenous constraints: the Meloni government during the EU-financed economic recovery plan

ABSTRACT Since its inauguration, the coalition dynamics characterizing the Meloni government have been interrelated with managing one of the largest investment plans in Italian history: the Next Generation EU-funded recovery plan. This windfall represents both a historic opportunity for economic revitalization and an unprecedented external constraint for Italy. By linking two established research agendas, the coalition life cycle and the Europeanisation of domestic politics, this study examines the extent to which external constraints arising from EU membership may have affected coalition governance. Using a longitudinal design spanning almost three decades (1996-2023), the study finds that the implementation of the recovery plan is associated both with new trends and the accentuation of existing ones, including the strengthening of the prime minister’s role.

Memory, Forgetfulness, and Multidimensional Acts of Resistance

In this dialogic intervention, we discuss the multiple dimensions of forgetting in Italian history and historiography through both temporal and geographical lenses. To do so, we begin by exploring issues of memory and "strategic” forgetfulness (Del Boca 2002; Favero 2010), arguing that forgetting is not merely a neutral and passive act, but rather a generative process embedded within dynamics of race, gender, class, and space. Starting with the temporal dimension, we discuss Charles Mills’s concept of “white ignorance” (2007), which underlines the ways “collective memory” has been used and manipulated to forge racialized national identities and to selectively forget the colonial past and (by extension) the war crimes committed by Europeans during the colonial invasion of Africa. Within this framework, ignorance, rather than representing absence, serves an ideological function and is used to create oblivion through selective forms of cultural remembrance. In the case of Italy, certain stories of Italian colonial and racial violence (as well as anticolonial and antiracist resistance) have been excluded from the domain of mainstream knowledge production, resulting in the perpetuation and transmission of dominant master narratives based on white, Eurocentric, and colonial ideas of “knowledge.” We also analyze memory and forgetting from a geographical perspective, considering the ways memory and forgetting become embedded in physical places such as monuments, street names, and spatial arrangements. Additionally, the production of historical amnesia functions through the active forgetting of the deep and layered connections that link Italy to the broader global circuits of colonial racial capitalism, as well as transnational resistance. This conversation encourages the exploration of alternative ways of knowing within an epistemological framework of resistance and will promote the use of memories and “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault, 1980) as powerful multidimensional counternarratives for challenging crystallized and selective notions of hegemonic historical memory.

Memory, post-fascism and the far-right

Abstract After 78 years of democracy, Italy continues to grapple with its recent past in the political, social, and cultural spheres. Its experience of fascism under Mussolini, its dual participation in the Second World War, and the continuous and still existent connections between the ideological factions of the 1930s–1940s and now render the country a rich case for the study of public history and memory. The specificity of these characteristics has often made Italian history and memory look like an outlier, shaped by circumstances difficult to compare with those of other countries'. This paper argues that contemporary Italian memory politics are in reality a valuable source of information about the kind of mnemonic discourses that may arise in other (Western) European countries, given the increasingly polarised and populist European landscape. Our study of discourses put forwarded by the post-fascist party Fratelli d'Italia reveals a set of mnemonic tools with which they successfully banalise fascism and chip at Italian public discourse slowly but surely. The comparison between this discourse and that of VOX and AfD in Spain and Germany, respectively, shows that these tools, ranging from nativism to policy (de)legitimation linked to fascist imagery, has started to transfer to other countries' political strategies.

Roman History

We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.

Troubles and satisfactions of a valiant librarian: new documentation about Guerriera Guerrieri from her personal archival file preserved at the Central State Archive

Guerriera Guerrieri is a protagonist of the Italian cultural history of the last century, remembered for the intensity of her work and for the multiplicity of initiatives and actions that characterized her professional activity as a librarian and which still allow us today to remember her as a figure of absolute importance in Italy; among these, the development of cataloging rules, the cataloging of periodicals and the diffusion of books and reading, activities which he carried out with an awareness not only about librarianship, but also about cultural and bibliographical aspects. Guerrieri's professional and personal life, however, was not simply dotted with satisfactions and successes, but the war, some family deaths, the instability of a residence, and envy and slander exacerbated by the fact that she was a capable and esteemed woman in her own environment, forced her to resist tenaciously until she was discharged from service. To the analysis and contextualization of the information already known, this essay adds the critical presentation of others documents from the numerous documents contained in his personal file preserved in Rome at the Central State Archive.

The concept of “popular royalism” in the latest historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era: pro and contra

In recent years, the concept of “popular royalism” has gained popularity in the historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The author of the article analyses the main tenets and criticisms of this concept based on the writings of the three main theorists, Paul Choplin, Álvaro Paris, and Andoni Artola. The term “popular royalism” appeared as a result of an incomplete discussion about the essence of counter-revolution in European countries in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. According to the authors of the concept, royalist and counter-revolutionary movements were not retrograde in nature and met the actual demands of different layers of society in the situation of civil war. The counter-revolution gave rise to an alternative way of politicization of the masses and contributed to the emergence of new models of their political participation. The royalists monopolised old sources of political legitimacy and adapted familiar discourses and images to new challenges. Drawing on the idea of legitimacy, they put forward a wide range of demands that were not only conservative but also innovative. Nevertheless, specific regional casess, especially from Italian history, show that the cross-class alliances led by the royalists were temporary and unsustainable. These alliances contributed to the Restoration, but only with foreign military intervention. Yet, since the national historiographical traditions are still very stable, the proposed new concept of popular royalist movements requires substantial clarifications, taking into account the specifics of the historical development of different countries and regions.

From a “Glorious Reparation” to a “Wretched Adventure”: The Second Italo-Ethiopian War in Italian History Textbooks (1936-2020)

ABSTRACT Conducted against the backdrop of international debates on colonial and racist crimes, this study examines representations of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in Italian secondary school history textbooks from the fascist period to the present. In a systematic analysis, the article explores how textbooks, as key “memory-makers,” depict the motivations, context, course, and consequences of a colonial war frequently subject to amnesia in Italy. We explore the distortions, omissions, and demystification textbooks have promoted over time, measuring them against historiographical advancements. Overall, we observe growing recognition of arbitrary Italian aggression and the illegal use of chemical weapons, but fluctuations in the assessment of European responsibilities and Mussolini’s involvement in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Silencing, minimization of responsibility, and a strong Italo- and Eurocentric tendency persist in the textbooks, whose lacunae and inaccuracies appear to feed into the enduring myth of the “good Italian.”

Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia, and Berlusconism: a political and cultural enterprise

ABSTRACT Silvio Berlusconi instigated a significant and lasting transformation in Italian politics. He revolutionized political communication, established a personal party, personalized the political process, and influenced the alteration of the party system. His approach was marked by a mix of diverse and sometimes contradictory elements. For example, this new political figure, who claimed to be the most important statesman in Italian history, strived to maintain his image as an outsider and non-politician. He framed himself, his party and his coalition as expressions of the centre-right, yet he was undeniably a new kind of populist, leveraging his vast media empire for the purposes of political mobilization. Berlusconi also succeeded in creating ‘Berlusconism’, a unique political culture that I will discuss, along with an anthropological transformation of politics and society. Thus, even after Berlusconi’s death, the legacy of Berlusconism endures in Italy. Moreover, in the mainstream literature, Berlusconi has often been seen as evidence of the ‘abnormality’ of Italian democracy. Contrary to this view, I argue that despite Italy’s distinct national characteristics, Berlusconi exemplified the first instance of a profound metamorphosis affecting many European democracies, which are no longer strictly classical liberal and representative models.

Aldo Mieli, Italian Historian of Sciences and Gay Rights Activist

Aldo Mieli, Italian Historian of Sciences and Gay Rights Activist

Incarceration Trends in Italy Between Rising ‘Punitiveness’ and ‘Penal Moderation’

AbstractThe article analyses Italian incarceration trends and the impact of prison population increases on the criminal punishment system as a whole. “Correlating prison and community justice trends: an outline of net-widening” presents the interpretative framework and illustrates four events in recent Italian history that can be considered ‘breaking points’ if compared to the ordinary prison expansionism observed since the 1990s. Moreover, in comparing prison population and alternatives to imprisonment trends, it describes how the considerable expansion of community justice measures in the last ten years can contribute to shaping a net-widening scenario. “Imprisonment trends in Italy: restraint after the boom?” analyses the specificities of the Italian prison system compared to those of other European countries: overcrowding, pre-trial detention rates, migrants’ penal control, and short-term sentences. In the conclusions, we consider the extent to which the recent evolution of prison trends and some Italian specificities can be read in terms of increasing ‘punitiveness’ or, conversely, ‘penal moderation’.

From comparative to causal relations: the case of siccome ‘because’ in the history of Italian

Abstract This article investigates how adverbial causal clauses come into being by tracking the diachronic development of the lexical item siccome ‘because’ from Old to Contemporary Italian. We show that adverbial causal clauses introduced by siccome in Contemporary Italian originate from comparative-similative clauses. By describing the steps of this diachronic change, we demonstrate that in specific contexts the comparative-similative marker has paved the way for a comparison between two events entailing a causal relation. The change is formalized by adopting a free relative clause analysis (Cinque 2020a. On the double-headed analysis of “headless” relative clauses. In Ludovico Franco & Paolo Lorusso (eds.), Linguistic variation: Structure and interpretation, 169–196. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) to comparative and causal clauses.

The Text beyond Itself: Romani Social Construction in Romanian Secret Police Files

Romanian State Secret Police (Securitate) files produced before 1989 can be accessed today through a lengthy process that requires official research authorization through a government office, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității - CNSAS). The CNSAS General Document Fund includes large issue-related files under the umbrella of “The Gypsy Problem,” with thousands of pages of both national and county-level reports and recommendations. This paper teases out the granular documentary clues (spie, as Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg describes them) in some of the Securitate files to explore the way in which a pattern of documentary communication is built to frame Romani identity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, and parasitic. A particularly interesting aspect of the knowledge production imposed through these files is reflected by anecdotes that purportedly illustrate the character of the Roma. This study analyzes the relations of power built through hermeneutic devices and language choices which build “truth formulae” (Weir) that reify a particular view of Romani ethnicity, class, and gender. This archival (de)construction has implications for a long view of policy, political memory, and exclusionary societal attitudes today and in the future.

Women and Italian history at the crossroads of new perspectives

This article discusses the recent volume edited by Silvia Salvatici, "Storia delle donne nell'Italia contemporanea" (Rome, Carocci, 2022). It highlights the originality of studies published on the subject in recent decades and focuses on the methodological challenge of the book, which interweaves national and global history and uses a gender perspective to rewrite the history of Italy from the Unification to the present day.

Italian history, Mediterranean history: New perspectives on an imperial and colonial past

In recent years, historiographical research has increasingly focused on the link between Italy and the Mediterranean, taking into account the debate on new spatial categories in national, regional and global history, and showing a growing interest in imperial history. This article discusses the status quo and future research perspectives. Focusing on four recent Englishlanguage publications, it approaches the Mediterranean as a space that challenges mainstream Italian history by highlighting its imperial nature, including decolonisation processes and their legacies in the present. Based on these premises, the article engages in a dialogue with other geohistorical "areas" of the Mediterranean, examining sources written in different languages and paying particular attention to local experiences prior to the Italian occupation.