Late Nineteenth-century Italy Research Articles

Policing the Sicilian Mafia: Repression and Control of the Mafia Phenomenon in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy

The article analyzes the repression of the Mafia phenomenon in Sicily between 1896 and 1901. The close attention paid to the Mafia by the authorities during this period produced a strong evidence base which this article examines through the lens of policing practices. These practices remain neglected as to date the historiography has focused on tracing legal developments rather than examining the application of laws by the forces of law and order. Accordingly, the article puts forward a series of historiographically important questions: what was the attitude of police forces in controlling dangerous individuals? How much do the practices adopted by police forces tell us about the possibilities for state intervention and the limits of its influence? What was the relationship between the perception of a criminal threat, police operations and the construction of judicial truth? The article reveals a very clear image of the Italian state in the liberal era. In fact, state officials and high-ranking institutional figures seemed interested in strengthening the social and political order by establishing control networks which could operate in any circumstances. They aimed to make it impossible not to interact with state officials. In this sense, rather than seeking a complete monopoly of violence, they aimed to oblige local power holders, social groups and semi-public figures to bargain with state officials. The effect was that social groups with means of violence at their disposal did not necessarily become a threat to the maintenance of order and nor did they necessarily forestall the possibility of state mediation and hegemony.

Aleramo’s Una donna via Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

This article provides a detailed comparison of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and Sibilla Aleramo's novel Una donna (1906), focussing specifically on the similar endings of both works where the respective protagonist walks out on her family. It begins by examining the various contexts and collaborative networks that enabled the theatre of Ibsen to travel into late nineteenth-century Italy, namely Luigi Capuana's translation of the play, Casa di bambola, and early interpretations of the lead role by Italy's star actress, Eleonora Duse. The article proceeds to offer a close reading of Casa di bambola and Una donna, elucidating how Aleramo's first-person novel is able to expand on key issues which are only dealt with briefly in Ibsen's play. In so doing, the analysis illustrates what it was about Aleramo's narrative technique which both aligns her with, but also sets her apart from, her predecessor, shedding new light on the connective associations between the two authors.

Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson

Reviewed by: Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 by Mary Gibson Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli Gibson, Mary – Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 336 p. Mary Gibson’s Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism 1861–1914 aims to emphasize the connections between the Italian experience and the broader cultural trends of that era. Such contextualization marks the first important challenge in the book: that of rethinking, through the Italian case study, some general assumptions in the history of modern prison. By going beyond the study of those countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that led the “first wave of reform” at the end of the eighteenth-century, new perspectives emerge in the analysis of the relation between prisons and modern society. The wider perspective generates two notable methodological choices: that of treating gender and age as important factors in the study of systems of punishment and that of combining small-scale, local realities with large-scale national and global ones. Gibson’s first contribution is to start a discussion about the chronology and geographical mapping of the accepted narrative concerning “the birth of the prison,” starting from an apparently peripheral viewpoint, that of late nineteenth-century Italy. Her introduction includes some short but pointed remarks on prison historiography (pp. 4–7), beginning with the so-called revisionist historians David Rothman, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ignatieff. Though fundamental, the work of these pioneers has been later criticized as presenting an oversimplified evolution from corporal punishment to penal incarceration based on the average adult-male prisoner. Gibson underlines the positive effect of Gender Studies in turning the attention towards prisons for women, as well as the usefulness of a broader approach to confinement practices during the Ancien Régime. From this perspective, the history of prisons in Italy appears much less isolated from the international landscape than could be thought at first. The book’s persuasive argument revolves around presenting the convergence on the Italian scene of three cultural currents that are crucial to understanding the success of the prison in modern penal systems. These aspects include the following: the traditional forms of confinement imposed by Catholics during the counterreformation; the revolutionary influence of Cesare Beccaria’s penal Enlightenment; and the interpretation of Positivism transpiring from the works on criminal anthropology by Cesare Lombroso. Following the Unification of Italy in 1861, such complex inheritance influenced the development of a “second wave of reform,” a phase that has been less intensely researched in previous scholarship, but that comes to the fore as central in Gibson’s book. During such a process of nation-building, Rome provides a case study within the larger Italian case study. Rome, being capital first of the Papal States and then of the Kingdom of Italy, is taken as a “laboratory” (p. 11) wherein the author retraces the politics of the liberal ruling class and party. The first chapter, “Punishment before Italian Unification,” deals with the Roman models of “proto-prison,” among which are the well-known examples of the Carceri nuove (1658) and of the Houses of Correction of San Michele a Ripa for children (1703) and women (1735) respectively. These new solutions supported by the popes received attention [End Page 708] from many contemporary observers and have been studied as early examples of cellular structures reflecting the internal activities of work and religious practice. Keeping in mind these significant beginnings, Gibson considers that the process of national unification marks a pivotal point in the passage from Rome’s leading role to that of other Italian regions that were more deeply imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment. During the Risorgimento, in fact, experts, reformers, and Italian philanthropists participated in a European debate concerning the Auburnian and Philadelphian models of confinement, while both the Roman and the Neapolitan models were fiercely opposed. William Gladstone’s letters are one example of such open criticism (p. 43). Italian patriots considered prisons as an emblem of oppression by the Restauration’s rulers, while Liberals inherited the role of Enlightenment thinkers from the previous century in leading the fight for reform. Nonetheless, these nationalist movements met with failure...

Reporting the Fantastic: Deferral and Pan-determinism in Ugo Tarchetti

This article explores how Ugo Tarchetti balances the fantastic and the real in his narratives through explicit real-world location together with a deferral of the impossible. I argue that Tarchetti allows the fantastic and the real to coexist by enclosing the fantastic with reassuring markers, deferring its authenticity to lost manuscripts, or by allowing the narrator simply to claim to be passing on a story. Additionally, I make the case that Tarchetti’s use of pan-determinism complements this effect, and that as well as balancing the real with the fantastic, he is also representing the new social reality of the rise of practices such as spiritualism in late nineteenth-century Italy.

Review: Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy, by Alessandra Campana

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy , by Alessandra Campana. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvi, 206 pp. Alessandra Campana launches her energetic, sometimes dense, always thought-provoking Opera and Modern Spectatorship with a disarmingly short statement: “This book claims that opera participated in the making of a modern public in post-unification Italy” (p. xiii). This is bracingly forthright intellectual ambition, and more follows: “the goal of these pages is to provide an alternative historical account of the aesthetics of opera, one that considers opera's construction of a mode of spectating” (p. xiii). On the following page, Campana clarifies that her book is “also about how Italian opera in the last decades of the nineteenth century shaped and responded to the necessities and anxieties of modernity”; she adds that it attempts to “attend to the specificity of Italian culture at this time” (p. xiv). I am not convinced that these statements provide an accurate sense of what Opera and Modern Spectatorship does best or where its value lies. But I have quoted them here because the expectations and queries they give rise to resonate throughout the book. Take the ambivalence about agency, for instance: who or what, one might ask, were the actual participants in this abstracted “making” of a modern public? Or, with “opera” subsequently identified as an active agent in the creation of a “mode of spectating,” to what extent is this new mode of spectating coterminous with the aforementioned new …

The Press, the Audience, and Emotions in Italian Courtrooms (1860s–1910s)

In late nineteenth-century Italy, the court, and especially the court of assizes, became a new and important public space: the law began permitting an audience in order to help control the judiciary power. This article shows that the court audience, hitherto placed at the margins of both historical narratives and historiographical analysis, played a key role in emotional interactions in the modern courtroom. Drawing primarily on court reports published in newspapers, this article offers a systematic and detailed analysis of the way in which the court audience’s emotional expectations, dispositions, experiences, and practices were described and critically evaluated by the press, by the judicial and political authorities, and by legal and social scholars. Furthermore, it highlights the gender and class dynamics at play in the portrayal and perception of the audience at court hearings. Finally, it analyzes the complex relationship between the court audience itself and consumers of court news. This article demonstrates that research on law and emotions should focus not only on the primary actors in the courtroom, that is the judge, defendant, plaintiff, and witnesses, but also on those at the margins: the audience in the courtroom as well as the virtual audience of consumers of court news. In doing so, it shows that the emotional interaction in the courtroom was a two-way process: those on trial performed for their audience, but the audience’s reactions also shaped the way in which future trials played out.

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy. By Alessandra Campana.

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy. By Alessandra Campana.

Beauty Italian Style: Gendered Imaginings of, and Responses to, Stage Divas in Early Post-Unification Literary Culture

In this article I argue that Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ — a major articulation of capitalist patriarchy which seeks to glorify the female body, yet covertly depreciates it — gained momentum in Italian culture at the end of the nineteenth century through the emergence of the cosmetic industry and divas’ advertising of beauty products in women’s magazines. Through a close reading of the literary culture (reviews of divas’ performances in women’s and theatre journals, as well as realist fiction), I show that the discursive construction of the Italian diva in this period was gendered: though women writers demonstrate an awareness of, and take pleasure in the diva’s ‘beauty’, but above all celebrate her skills and talents as a performing artist, male writers — without exception — pass comment on the diva’s appearance over and above a critique of her performing skills. This would suggest that ‘the beauty myth’ — the idea that a woman’s value is determined by her appearance — was an integral component of divadom in late nineteenth-century Italy, and, for male journalists and writers, an even more important attribute than the diva’s acting or singing abilities.

Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo

122 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY developed, in part as a consequence of the author’s preoccupation with the question of Robinson’s identity. For the newspapermen who kept the mystery before the public, Robinson’s veil could only be imagined as concealing a genteel woman who had fallen into disgrace. During and after the trial, we learn, Robinson was linked to a prominent Troy family, including a former student of Troy Female Seminary. Adler considers this claim at length, before exploring the more plausible scenario that Robinson was in fact an Anglo-Irish immigrant. But Robinson’s association with fallen gentility, rather than the immigrant Irish she lived among and killed, suggests a fascinating if unexplored class politics at work, both in Robinson’s history and the history of her notoriety. Likewise, it would have helped had Adler extended her investigation into Troy’s Irish immigrant community. Indeed, there are several missed opportunities for historical analysis here. This volume might have been a gritty exploration of antebellum political culture, the urban Irish, the immigrant underworld, and conceptions of crime, madness, and sexuality; instead, Adler’s discussion of such topics serves to illuminate the trial and support her investigation into Robinson’s identity. Yet, despite these shortcomings, this remains a fascinating story, one that will be of interest to scholars of urban life, crime, politics , and gender in nineteenth-century America. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945. By Jennifer Guglielmo, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 432 pages, $41.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Denise Lynn, Assistant Professor, History, University of Southern Indiana. Jennifer Guglielmo’s Living the Revolution seeks to highlight the silences in the historical literature about Italian immigrant women engaged in radical politics in the United States from 1880 to 1945. This activism was lost to us because historians have focused primarily on English-language sources and contemporaries believed Italian women were “unorganizable” and shackled by male authority. Additionally these women were caught Book Reviews 123 up in what Guglielmo describes as a diaspora that included South America and frequent and sometimes permanent return to Italy. This activism did not resemble the radical politics of other women or even Italian men. For one, these women did not seek inclusion into the United States polity nor did they initially work within established working-class organizations, like trade unions. Rather they drew on strategies adopted from Italy that included mutual aid, neighborhood organization, and direct action. Guglielmo argues that Italian radicalism is rooted in the upheavals of late nineteenth-century Italy where women became leaders in local protests against authority and industrial abuse. Meanwhile Italian men frequently migrated to the United States or South America to find work; leaving women to fend for themselves and their children. This allowed them to push the boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Many women also migrated and had to take on work that their families depended on for survival. In America, Italian women’s skilled labor, specifically sewing, became associated with unskilled, menial, and thus low-waged labor creating a “fabricated absence.” Meaning, Italian women were portrayed in the press as physically able to do hard labor yet they were docile; so their demanding and demeaning work was slandered and devalued (77). Guglielmo argues that radical activism was also racialized. Southern Italians were portrayed as primitives in Italy. In the United States racialization took on a different form vis-à-vis nonwhites. Italians were considered whites, but inferior whites. This racialization was also gendered as Italian women were painted as victims; in contrast, Chinese and AfricanAmerican women were more often viewed as perpetrators. Therefore, middle-class, white, female reformers, who were challenging gender conventions , found Italian women worthy of rescue. This racialization meant that while Italians were still believed to be inferior they could claim white status and enjoy the benefits of citizenship and state protection. Employers also used this ethnic conflict to their advantage to ensure worker discipline and reduce turnover. Guglielmo devotes the first half of the text to contextualizing Italian immigrant women’s roots in Italian radical politics and their place in immigration history, thus the volume’s title is somewhat misleading...

Emotional arenas: from provincial circus to national courtroom in late nineteenth-century Italy

This article investigates a revealing moment in Italian history, during which a court of law in Rome became a complex arena of emotions. Building on Barbara Rosenwein's concept of ‘emotional communities', the analysis presents the trial as an episode in which divergent communities' styles were adjudicated as part of an attempt to establish more uniform emotional standards for a relatively new polity. The murder victim, a circumspect official based in the capital, and his assassin, an exuberant circus acrobat from the distant provinces, represented different communities within the national fabric, and embodied opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The court exalted the victim's self-control and condemned the murderer's unmediated emotional exploits. Yet, the trial was not a simple object lesson in restraint vanquishing emotion. Instead, the analysis focuses on the way the state, eager to garner the legitimacy deriving from keen public participation in its processes, trod a fine line between the sober decorum of a court of law and the emotional colour of an ancient Roman circus. Ultimately, this case study suggests that for historians the task of discerning ‘emotional communities' is complicated by the fact that any such community is likely to be fraught with fault lines, among which variables such as gender, class, and geographical region are intersected by more volatile factors such as personal opportunity, social context, and historical moment.

Business Attitudes Toward Statistical Investigation in Late Nineteenth Century Italy: A Wool Industrialist from Reticence to Influence

Statistical representations are usually the result of negotiations and conventions with regard to what should be counted, and how it should be counted. A wide literature has shown that this has been the case for almost any kind of statistical data collected in the last few centuries, from censuses to demographic, social, and economic surveys and time series.

Pellagra in Late Nineteenth Century Italy: Effects of a Deficiency Disease

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre>Dans de nombreux pays du monde, &#224; diff&#233;rentes &#233;poques, la consommation de ma&#239;s comme unique denr&#233;e alimentaire a d&#233;velopp&#233; la pellagre. Maladie caus&#233;e par une extr&#234;me pauvret&#233; nutritionnelle, l&#8217;avitaminose B3 est une maladie de carence due &#224; la d&#233;ficience en niacine et en tryptophane. Depuis la fin du xviiie&#160;si&#232;cle, en Italie du Nord et particuli&#232;rement en V&#233;n&#233;tie, la pellagre demeure end&#233;mique jusqu&#8217;aux ann&#233;es autour de la premi&#232;re guerre mondiale. Le bouleversement caus&#233; par le &#8220;mal de la mis&#232;re&#8221; n&#8217;affecte qu&#8217;une seule classe sociale, celle dont l&#8217;alimentation est totalement fond&#233;e sur la consommation de polenta de ma&#239;s&#160;: les agriculteurs, notamment les journaliers, cat&#233;gorie professionnelle particuli&#232;rement d&#233;favoris&#233;e. Fond&#233;e sur des sources documentaires d&#8217;origines diverses et entreprise dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire, cette analyse retrace les m&#233;canismes &#233;pid&#233;miologiques, sociaux, politiques et d&#233;mographiques qui ont men&#233; &#224; la diffusion de la pellagre principalement parmi les agricultrices v&#233;n&#232;tes et lombardes d&#8217;&#226;ge fertile. L&#8217;observation de l&#8217;impact d&#233;mographique de la maladie sur la population paysanne f&#233;minine engage une discussion &#224; propos des &#233;ventuelles cons&#233;quences sur la natalit&#233; et la f&#233;condit&#233; des populations de ces deux r&#233;gions &#224; la fin du xixe&#160;si&#232;cle.

Narrativizing women's experiences in late nineteenth-century Italy through domestic fiction

Drawing upon the domestic fiction by Italian women writers of the late nineteenth-century, in this article I argue that we can use this as evidence of history as a cultural undertaking. Through a reading of a selection of popular novels and short stories intended for a female readership, I demonstrate how domestic fiction provides crucial textual evidence for us to rediscover and reinterpret the (hi)story of women's sentiments and experiences in late nineteenth-century Italy. In so doing, I align the role of the narrator with that of the historian to conceive of history as representation; that is, not as fictional, but as fictive.

The origins of the entertainment industry: the operetta in late nineteenth-century Italy

How does a new successful musical genre impose itself, define its audiences and repertoires and eventually replace older genres? The essay examines the case of operetta from its French origins to the specific diffusion in the Italian entertainment system. Here the popularity of the ‘little opera’ coming from France and later from Vienna grew along with a new system of theaters, politeama and café chantants. They were run by a new generation of entrepreneurs and publishers such as Sonzogno, interested in diffuse new forms of musical leisure. The rising of the Italian operetta found strong resistance from the traditional opera world at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the distinction between artistic music and music as entertainment was being consolidated and we can find a sort of passing of the baton between opera and operetta as the major popular musical genre.

Il signor Erminio Ekdal and the first translation of "The Wild Duck": domesticating Henrik Ibsen for late Nineteenth-Century Italy

The article focuses on the first Italian translation of Henrik Ibsen's "Vildanden" ("The Wild Duck") made by Enrico Polese Santarnecchi and Paolo Rindler in 1891. The emphasis is on how the translators domesticated the character of Hjalmar Ekdal, making him look closer to an authoritarian, Italian man rather than the lazy husband Ibsen depicted. This had a clear impact on the way the play was received in Italy, and has its foundations in a cultural milieu which Polese knew well and which he felt was unable to accept the sharpest and most sarcastic aspects of the original play.

Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome. A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica-Sinica I-IV (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome. A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica-Sinica I–IV John W. Witek Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome. A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica-Sinica I–IV. By Albert Chan, S.J. (Armonk, New York and London: M. E. Sharpe. 2002. Pp. xliii, 626. $145.00.) After the death of Francis Xavier on the island of Shangchuan off the southern coast of China in 1552, his confreres in the Society of Jesus continued to develop the mission in Japan that he had begun, but were also eagerly trying to enter China, which remained closed to foreigners. It was not until 1583 that Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) successfully [End Page 586] opened the first mission station in Zhaoqing, China, during the modern era. Although a few of their letters were printed shortly after their receipt in Europe, most remained as manuscripts which became the initial part of the collection that spanned the continuing presence of the Jesuits in China until the suppression of the Order there in 1775. The multivolume Western-language correspondence from China and Japan is known as the Japonica-Sinica collection and is divided by Arabic numbers. The Japanese and Chinese books written by Jesuits or collected by them as well as their reports from these missions are assembled under the title Japonica-Sinica I-IV. This latter collection in the Jesuit Archives in Rome is the focal point of the book under review. In 1970 at the request of Father Edmond Lamalle, S.J. (1900-1989), then the Director of the Archives, Father Albert Chan began to compile this descriptive catalogue of the Japanese and Chinese section. The only guide until then was a list taken from the Latin short titles on the covers of the books and document folders, but at times lacking the identity of the authors. At best this was a preliminary list with only a vague overview of the contents of the materials. As Chan indicates, these Chinese books and documents (there are only a few Japanese works) are "not numerous" and some of the sets are "incomplete." The suppression of the Jesuit Order in 1773, its restoration in 1814, and the subsequent political turmoil in late nineteenth-century Italy that led to the forced closure of Jesuit houses affected the physical condition of the Archives. For the sake of preservation the Archives were sent to Holland but were returned to Rome in 1939 at the order of Father General Wladimir Ledochowski (1866-1942), who foresaw a possible invasion of The Netherlands by the German army. For each of the 451 separately numbered items, the Chinese characters of the title, Wade-Giles romanization, the author, type and measurements of the paper, etc. are presented. The collection also includes some Chinese books by Dominicans and Franciscans as well as Manchu translations of several of the Jesuit works. The descriptions offer a summary of the contents of the book or document and in some cases an English translation of the preface or the postscript. Also discussed are comparative data of different editions in the collection and in the collections of Chinese books in the Vatican Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The descriptions provide valuable information about Christian and non-Christian Chinese who wrote about the missionaries' apostolic methods and also their interpretations of Chinese classical literature and history. In addition, there are separate indexes of book titles, printing houses and publishers, places, subjects, and persons. This erudite descriptive catalogue is an indispensable reference guide for all scholars pursuing research on the history of the Jesuit mission in China from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. John W. Witek Georgetown University Copyright © 2004 The Catholic University of America Press

Giovanni Gentile: philosopher of fascism

The recent rise in Europe of extreme right-wing political parties along with outbreaks of violent nationalist fervor in the former communist bloc has occasioned much speculation on a possible resurgence of fascism. At the polemical level, fascism has become a generic term applied to virtually any form of real or potential violence, while among Marxist and left-wing scholars discredited interpretations of fascism as a product of late capitalism are revived. Empty of cognitive significance, these formulas disregard the historical and philosophical roots of fascism as it arose in Italy and spread throughout Europe. In Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, A. James Gregor returns to those roots by examining the thought of Italian Fascism's major theorist. In Gregor's reading of Gentile, fascism was - and remains - an anti-democratic reaction to what were seen to be the domination by advanced industrial democracies of less-developed or status-deprived communities and nations languishing on the margins of the Great Powers. Sketching in the political background of late nineteenth-century Italy, industrially backward and only recently unified, Gregor shows how Gentile supplied fascism its justificatory rationale as a developmental dictatorship. Gentile's Actualism (as his philosophy came to be identified) absorbed many intellectual currents of the early twentieth century including nationalism, syndicalism, and futurism and united them in a dynamic rebellion against new perceived hegemonic impostures of imperialism. The individual was called to an idealistic ethic of obedience, work, self-sacrifice, and national community. As Gregor demonstrates, it was a paradigm of what we can expect in the twenty-first century's response, on the part of marginal nations, to the globalization of the industrialized democracies. Gregor cites post-Maoist China, nationalist Russia, Africa, and the Balkans at the development stage from which fascism could grow. The first book-length analysis in English of Gentile's thought in over thirty years, this volume is valuable not only as a work of historical scholarship but as a timely warning. While Marxism-Leninism has passed into history, fascism may yet reemerge as an external threat to democratic nations.

The Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity

The Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity