Risorgimento Research Articles

Wiersze i wypowiedzi epistolarne Norwida o Rzymie i Papiestwie w kontekście polemik francuskich

Norwid was very much interested in the fate of the Papal State in the second half of the 19 th century, which is testified in some of his letters and poems. Many traces of his reading newspapers and essayistic texts (particularly in French) can be found in these texts. From Norwid’s point of view the Pope played an important, historical role. He believed that Pius IX should head a federation-based Italian state. The Pope’s main opponent was Giuseppe Garibaldi who in the 1860s decisively contributed to the Italian unity, although Napoleon III’s France did not allow him to capture Rome itself. Norwid – unlike the largest part of the Polish emigration – had a negative attitude towards the Italian republican leader. He did not consider him (in the period immediately preceding the January Uprising) a model to follow. The main reason of this negative assessment was Norwid’s concept of sacred history that presumes there must exist a relation between the history and sacrum. According to Norwid, Garibaldi’s armed struggle for the establishment of a modern nation state did not fit in the context of sacred history (by contrast, the peaceful manifestations on the streets of Warsaw in the years 1861-62 took an entirely different course). In particular, Garibaldi failed to appreciate the sacerdotal char-isma of the Rome’s ruler. But it was precisely this “Christian-Patriotism” on which the universal mission of the world capital (prefigured by pagan Rome) was based. Norwid, the author of the poem “Do wladcy Rzymu” [To Rome’s ruler], was convinced that this vision of Rome rooted in sacred history would – in spite of temporary setbacks – ultimately triumph.

Wiersze i wypowiedzi epistolarne Norwida o Rzymie i Papiestwie w kontekście polemik francuskich

Norwid was very much interested in the fate of the Papal State in the second half of the 19th century, which is testified in some of his letters and poems. Many traces of his reading newspapers and essayistic texts (particularly in French) can be found in these texts. From Norwid’s point of view the Pope played an important, historical role. He believed that Pius IX should head a federation-based Italian state. The Pope’s main opponent was Giuseppe Garibaldi who in the 1860s decisively contributed to the Italian unity, although Napoleon III’s France did not allow him to capture Rome itself. Norwid – unlike the largest part of the Polish emigration – had a negative attitude towards the Italian republican leader. He did not consider him (in the period immediately preceding the January Uprising) a model to follow. The main reason of this negative assessment was Norwid’s concept of sacred history that presumes there must exist a relation between the history and sacrum. According to Norwid, Garibaldi’s armed struggle for the establishment of a modern nation state did not fit in the context of sacred history (by contrast, the peaceful manifestations on the streets of Warsaw in the years 1861-62 took an entirely different course). In particular, Garibaldi failed to appreciate the sacerdotal char-isma of the Rome’s ruler. But it was precisely this “Christian-Patriotism” on which the universal mission of the world capital (prefigured by pagan Rome) was based. Norwid, the author of the poem “Do władcy Rzymu” [To Rome’s ruler], was convinced that this vision of Rome rooted in sacred history would – in spite of temporary setbacks – ultimately triumph.

Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War, by Brian Jenkins

According to the New York Tribune, Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, was ‘a model Embassador [sic]’. Made in 1862, almost half-way through Lyons’s diplomatic career, it was, in some respects, a perceptive comment, capturing the prevailing sense that he was a balanced and sober but, above all, professional diplomat; it is, however, also an ambiguous one, for, in praising Lyons’s courtesy, inoffensiveness and his fidelity to his instructions (and no more), the Tribune did not, in reality, offer a very precise definition of that model. Brian Jenkins refers to this judgement at different points in this meticulous biography of one of Britain’s pre-eminent nineteenth-century diplomats, agreeing with the notion that Lyons was unusually important, but lamenting that it has helped sustain imprecise and misleading understandings of Lyons’s work and impact. There is no doubt that Lyons was a significant figure in British diplomacy. Having first entered the diplomatic service as an unpaid attaché to Athens in 1839, he was soon given a paid role there, and during the 1840s and 1850s moved to postings in Dresden, the Papal States and Tuscany, before crossing the Atlantic to become Britain’s Minister to the United States in 1858. He was Britain’s minister in Washington during the American Civil War before taking up the ambassadorship in Constantinople in 1865, from where he then moved to Paris, serving as ambassador for twenty years from 1867 to 1887. He had the fortune, therefore, as Jenkins observes, to be ‘at the heart of four of the great international issues and crises of the second half of the nineteenth-century: Italian unification, the American Civil War, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and France’s replacement by the newly unified Germany as the dominant continental power’ (p. 6). Jenkins narrates these episodes from Lyons’s perspective, and draws attention to the ways in which diplomacy continued to be shaped by the actions of a limited number of individuals—and so, for example, Lyons’s personal role in settling the ‘Don Pacifico affair’ with Greece in the 1840s is stressed; likewise his ability to smooth British-American relations and avert collisions in the 1860s (not least over the Trent affair)—and in so doing Jenkins sheds a useful light on the machinery of diplomacy. Lyons’s determination to uphold British ‘prestige’ and to use his missions and embassies as reflections of national standing, down to securing appropriate furnishings for public buildings and providing good dinners for dignitaries, show how that machinery could be effectively oiled. This is an important contribution, therefore, to diplomatic history, and, though it might be judged to be an exaggeration in some respects, one can see why Jenkins argues that, for example, Lyons ‘held the future of Anglo-American relations in his hands’ between 1861 and 1864 (p. 11). Indeed, while much attention to Lyons has tended to focus on his ambassadorship to Paris (when he had reached ‘the pinnacle of his profession’), Jenkins prefers to see Lyons’s time in the USA as the most important period, politically, of his career (p. 6). Thus, the Washington years occupy about as much space in the book as the Paris ones (approximately a third each).

MILANO CITTÀ DI ESPOSIZIONI

Milan is the Italian city that, from the years following Italian unification onwards, has continually organized the highest number of expositions, exhibitions, trade fairs and reviews of productive sectors, in addition to the most varied kinds of activities. Such indefatigability, even in the most diverse of situations, is indicative of how well its formula has functioned. This paper is mainly about the Universal Exposition of 1881, the city’s first opportunity to present its achievements and to project a self-image as a productive, well-administered city that was proud of its ability to get things done, and capable of keeping pace with the rhythms of development and transformation that went along with modernity. Yet Milan could also be a modern city without destroying its ties with tradition and without forgetting – in terms of social welfare and humanitarianism – the weakest and least fortunate. Before the War in Europe irreparably changed its frame of reference, the International Exposition of 1906 was the second central event through which the city could look back with satisfaction on the route it had taken and the results it had achieved.

Desde la moda al feminismo: mujeres y prensa pedagógica (Italia, s. XIX)

A partir de la unificación de Italia (1861), las mujeres comienzan a participar de manera cada vez más activa en la vida social y profesional: se inscriben a las Escuelas Normales para obtener un diploma que les permita entrar en el mundo de la educación y ganar un sueldo. De hecho, podemos afirmar que se trata de la primera generación de mujeres con una cultura media, la cual les pone en una posición inmejorable para realizar una visión crítica sobre la desigualdad de género como– por ejemplo –el hecho de recibir por un mismo trabajo un salario más bajo que sus colegas hombres, o el de evidenciar la relevante condición de inferioridad de la mujer en la sociedad italiana. En la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, los periódicos empiezan a ser un extraordinario medio de comunicación de las ideas. Desde los años sesenta y hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial nacen muchos periódicos fundados y dirigidos por mujeres, a menudo por maestras, que se dedican a difundir información, noticias y cultura. Muchos periódicos se encuentran en un ámbito heterogéneo entre la familia, la escuela y la educación, como demuestran ampliamente los primeros títulos que aparecen: La madre di famiglia e la maestra elementare italiana, L’istitutrice, La maestra elementare italiana. La necesidad de formar profesionalmente las maestras genera la creación de otras revistas como La collaboratrice della maestra, en la que los artículos se centran en la didáctica y en la preparación de guías que pueden ayudar a las maestras en el trabajo en las aulas. Sin embargo, en los periódicos más atentos a la situación política y social aparece el fuerte carácter reivindicativo de los artículos sobre las dificultades de las mujeres en el mundo laboral, o sobre las disigualdades jurídicas. Periódicos como La Voce delle Donne son realmente pioneros porque son los primeros que adoptan una mirada de género para interpretar la realidad y denunciar las injusticias contra las mujeres.

Nick Carter (ed.), Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Nick Carter (ed.), <i>Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento</i>

The Eff ect of the Italian Uni fication on the Comparative Regional Development in Literacy, 1821-1911

This paper provides the fi rst ever diachronic homogenous estimates of literacy rates in the Italian provinces during the period 1821-1911, by gender. The estimates exploit the age structure information reported in the population censuses of 1881 and 1911 to back cast literacy rates to the early 19th century. Territorial differences were already huge in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, with Southern regions registering extremely low levels and essentially no change before the uni cation of 1861. Furthermore, the early rise of literacy rates for Northern women suggests a dimension of the North-South gap that signifi cantly the political uni cation of the country.

Confounding the Garibaldian Liars: The Letters of Albert Delahoyde, Irish Soldier of the Papal Battalion of St Patrick and Papal Zouave in Italy, 1860-1870

Albert Delahoyde was representative of the strong sense of Irish Catholic nationalism that inspired young Irishmen to volunteer to serve Pope Pius IX in 1860. His experiences aid us in understanding how the Irish viewed Italy during the nineteenth century, especially as his lengthy stay in Italy meant that he witnessed the completion of Italian unification in 1870. In the wider picture, the relationship between Ireland and Italy at this point in the mid-nineteenth century was one of lost possibilities. Despite a number of commonalities in the respective situations of Ireland and Italy, the events of the 1860s demonstrated how the two countries negatively impacted on each other, as, due to the transnational dimension of Catholicism, their respective causes could no longer remain the same.

Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Lady Morgan (nee Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish traveller and travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogue Italy (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputation she had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl , 1806) and a socio-political writer ( France , 1817), left a mark on Italy and on the understanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helped disseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irish public opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domestic autocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve the cause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home country under her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determination concerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusual for a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’s radical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her original methods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double, feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation with apparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of society news, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting on social and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history, Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources from which she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came to obtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aim of this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’s sojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, the activities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed.

The new public corruption: Old questions for new challenges

This paper focuses on corruption in public procurement. It describes the contemporary face of corruption by investigating the role of public accountability in the fight against corruption. The paper describes a specific episode of corruption relative to the awarding of government contracts for big events, such as the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. Relying on the philosophical insights of Rousseau, Popper, Kant and others, the study suggests the need for enabling a democratic control and constructing a public ethics for the common good.

The Italian Risorgimento and Sicilian Popular Balladry: The Problem of ‘Deep Images’ and Popular Reception

The recent cultural history of the Italian Risorgimento has claimed that it was a ‘mass movement’ which affected the lives of a far greater number of soon-to-be Italians than traditional revisionist and Marxist narratives have assumed. This new history has, however, left certain questions unanswered. There has still been little attempt to explore popular receptions of national discourses, and what Risorgimento politics meant to the mass of ‘ordinary' people who lived through these seismic changes. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which one particular Risorgimento audience – the rural and urban illiterate of the province of Palermo – responded to, and attempted to make sense of, national-patriotic discourses which were articulated through ephemeral street literature and the oratory of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Palermo. This research makes use of the textual transcriptions of popular oral balladry, collected and published by Sicilian folk-scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, to investigate how the people of Palermo received and internalized discourses on Italian nationhood. An analysis of the language of these song-texts reveals that much of the imagery and symbolism of Italian nationhood, elaborated through various discursive practices, was rebuffed and the traditional, familiar idiom of popular culture was employed in the representation of the events of 1860. This paper will propose that oral culture possessed its own internal and autonomous set of images and narrative features, and that people’s receptions of official-patriotic discourses were shaped by the familiar descriptive norms of popular balladry.

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. Edited by Nick Carter (London: Palgrave, 2015), £60.00 (cloth).

Racketeering in Campania: how clans have adapted and how the extortion phenomenon is perceived

Institutional studies on the Camorra and its illegal activities are much more limited in comparison to the Sicilian Mafia. The study of its various aspects remains marginal, even though, through the first decade after the unification of Italy, the Neapolitan Camorra, as a form of organised crime and its associates, and not the Sicilian Mafia, raised initial concerns from the emerging national State. Illegal activities of the Camorra are developed on the illegal and legal market. This paper analyses the phenomenon of racketeering because it is not possible to understand the historical transformation of the essential traits of racketeering or the persistence of it if the birth, transformation and development of the Camorra are not reconstructed. Extortion is to the Camorra what territory is to the Mafia.

Alice and Pinocchio: National Stereotypes and International Classic Fantasy

ABSTRACTCarroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio are among the most famous, most translated books in the world: they are national and international classics. Despite the fact that Pinocchio is widely regarded as stereotypically Italian and Alice as stereotypically British, they have transcended their national origins. The books share generic elements and tropes of international fantasy traditions modulated by their creative moments the Italian Risorgimento and the British high-Victorian period. In their globalization (or glocalization) through translations, adaptations, and Disneyfication, the national characteristics of these books have either been lost, or have been developed into caricatures and stereotypes (Pinocchio, like the Italians, is wild, emotional, and unreliable; Alice, like the English is calm, unemotional and self-assured). This article discusses the ways in which the national stereotypes and national characteristics (inherent or perceived) in these books are absorbed into, or conflict with, international concepts of fantasy.

Stai scherzando? ‘Are you kidding?’: Investigating the influence of dubbing on the Italian Progressive

While it is not surprising that English would influence certain domains such as international trade, information technology, and academia, to name a few, the impact of English on non-domain specific elements remains less vigorously studied. In Italian, for instance, an increase in the use of present progressive constructions in dubbed products has been reported by a number of authors (i.e., Ferro & Sardo 2008) who have also hypothesised that such an increase may have passed into real use Italian and that it may be due to the influence from English during the translation process. In consideration of the fact that in Italian the progressive form is not obligatory and that there are limitations on the possible semantic and morphosyntactic combinations, a general low frequency is expected. However, in this study, the diachronic quantitative investigations from written and spoken data of real use Italian have revealed that, from the Unification of Italy (1861) to 2011, the frequency of use of such a construction has more than quadrupled in writing and that, from 1965 to 2004, has more than tripled in speech. The paper also explores the hypothesis that such a phenomenon may go beyond a mere frequency increase; our data show that the process may be so deep that it has affected formulaic expressions such as scherzi? [do you joke?] Ǯare you joking?ǯ, which traditionally existed only at the simple form, by generating a progressive variant (e.g., stai scherzando?). The preliminary findings from the diachronic investigations also show plausible correlations with an English influence via dubbing.

Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento: Devotions under Pope Pius IX

Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento: Devotions under Pope Pius IX

La biografia nella storiografia e nella storiografia dell’educazione. Linee evolutive di un rapporto complesso

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the role and development of biography in the Italian history of pedagogy after Italian unification, when education historiography began to gain its own autonomy. The first step is to identify the main features of educators biographies; the second step is to describe their evolution in the last forty years. In order to gain a deeper knowledge of this evolution, a large part of this study is devoted to describe the relationship between biography and historiography and to analyze the different attitudes towards the «individual» and individual actions as much as the standard models of biography in the course of time. How to reference this article Zago, G. (2016). La biografia nella storiografia e nella storiografia dell’educazione. Linee evolutive di un rapporto complesso. Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion , 3(1), 203-234. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/ete.2016.003.001.11

A Short History of International Business in Italy: What We Know and How We Know It

This article is a voyage through the history of international business in Italy, one which takes contemporary studies and, in particular, studies conducted over time by business historians from the Italian Unification until the present day, into account. After a brief introduction, the first part of the article is devoted to an analysis of the literature, especially focusing on the early studies conducted on foreign capital until World War Two, on the investigations done in the second part of the twentieth century, and on the most recent trends and contributions in research. The second part of the article deals, in a stylised way, with a very short summary of the principal information that we have attained on foreign direct investments in the country, with a special focus on international business in Italy before the Great War, in the inter-war years, until the 1980s, and in the most recent decades. Finally, the conclusions indicate the possible main directions for future research in this field.

An Enchanted Journey: Discovering the Children’s Literature Collection of the MUSLI

An Enchanted Journey:Discovering the Children’s Literature Collection of the MUSLI Bahar Gürsel For the historians of the Risorgimento (Italian unification), the city of Turin possesses an indispensable place. Apart from being the keeper of the Holy Shroud and the owner of the world’s second greatest museum of Egyptian history, Turin became the first capital city of Italy in 1861 when the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia proclaimed the unification of the country. Only five years later the capital was moved to Florence, yet throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Turin remained to be one of the most important political and cultural landmarks of the country. This venerable Northern Italian city, at the foot of the majestic Alps still shelters a considerable number of concealed and conspicuous premises, and its dazzling baroque edifices host fascinating and precious surprises. Undoubtedly, one of these surprises is the School and Children’s Book Museum (Museo della Scuola e del Libro per l’Infanzia, the MUSLI), which is situated in Palazzo Barolo. The building is originally a seventeenth-century palace and was the house of Marquis Carlo Tancredi Falletti di Barolo (1782-1838) and his wife Giulia Falletti di Barolo (1785-1864), who are regarded as two of the significant names of the Risorgimento which commenced to flourish by the end of the Napoleonic rule. Since the couple never had children, they directed their attention to the moral and religious education of the infants in Turin and Piedmont. For that purpose, inside the walls of Palazzo Barolo, they opened a nursery (asilo infantile) in 1830. After the death of her husband, the marchioness constituted the Opera Barolo (http://www.operabarolo.it/), which continued to concentrate on numerous cultural, social, and educational activities. In 2002, the Foundation Tancredi di Barolo was born as an outcome of the initiative taken by the same charity/public work organization. The [End Page 53] entire children’s literature collection of the family of Professor Pompeo Vagliani—who is the Director of the MUSLI—was donated to the Foundation (www.fondazionetancredidibarolo.com). It is currently supported by numerous public institutions and private bodies, and it possesses an archive which comprises around twelve thousand primary sources (alphabet books, picture books, textbooks, costume books, music books, etc.) in numerous European languages and covers a time span from the eighteenth to the second half of the twentieth century. Every weekday from 9:00 to 14:00, the library, which is situated on the second floor of Palazzo Barolo, is open to all researchers who contact the foundation beforehand to make appointment. For a historian whose main area of interest is built on tracing the reflections of various political and cultural interactions, clashes, changes, and developments on late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century children’s literature, the MUSLI library is a genuine trove to explore. For instance, during my concise research on Italian textbooks in September 2015, I had the opportunity to consult numerous primary sources from the early nineteenth century to the end of Fascism and the 1950s. In addition, on the table which I was working, there was a variety of Pinocchio books in different languages that were going to be displayed in an exhibition outside the museum. The MUSLI’s collection of different translations and editions of Alice in Wonderland is also worth denoting. Numerous translations of Edmondo de Amicis’ Cuore [The Heart of a Boy]—which was published in 1886 in the form of a child’s diary to depict a primary school in late nineteenth-century Turin—demonstrate the popularity of the book in Europe during the indicated period of time. However, finding the exact location of the intended works to consult could be an initial problem for a researcher since the library unfortunately does not have a complete catalog due to insufficient funding; however, Prof. Vagliani personally guides everyone to the right shelf in one of the rooms of the library. Aside from the archival collection, certain sections of the museum are also remarkable within the scope of discovering significant works and aspects in the history of children’s literature. One part of the permanent exhibition is dedicated to moveable/mechanical picture books of...

Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

<i>Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy</i>. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.