Twentieth-century Italy Research Articles

Introduction: Gender and work in twentieth-century Italy: new approaches

AbstractThis introduction to the special issue ‘Gender and Work in Twentieth-Century Italy’ draws on key strands of historical scholarship on gender and work, including women workers’ experiences, labour market discrimination, domestic work, the impact of gender norms, and ideas of masculinity and femininity on work identities. It traces the development of feminist influence within this scholarship, from making women workers’ experiences visible to challenging essentialist notions of gender identities. Drawing on post-structuralist and intersectional perspectives, particularly influenced by Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler, the scholarship on which this special issue is based understands gender as a system of power signified through language and social constructions, and builds on the critique of the dichotomies and essentialisations of traditional labour history, proposing a systemic and structural approach to understanding gendered experiences of work. By exploring the intersections of gender, work and power, this collection offers insights into wider European developments and challenges established historical concepts and narratives. It highlights the importance of understanding gender dynamics in shaping labour relations and social structures, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of labour and power dynamics in twentieth-century Italy and beyond.

A Project of Her Own: Emma Carelli's Enactment of Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century Italy

Abstract The story of soprano and opera impresaria Emma Carelli (1877–1928) has often been recounted as the tale of a successful prima donna who rather abruptly turned to opera management in order to assist her husband, Walter Mocchi, in his entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished primary sources – including Carelli's scrapbooks, critics’ reviews and a set of letters she wrote to the impresario, critic and agent Adolfo Re Riccardi – my article demonstrates that Carelli's choice was entirely self-motivated and the product of her unique set of individual attributes. The significance of Carelli's journey can best be understood by situating the singer and impresaria within her contemporary social landscape and by examining her personal story through the lens of women's history. Such a perspective unveils the strategies that she adopted to enact a stirring ideal of femininity in opposition to the values of the liberal state in early twentieth-century Italy.

Ancient tragedy, yet modern music: musical compositions in the classical performances (1921–39)

Abstract This contribution aims to analyse the role of music in the revival of Greek theatre that characterized twentieth-century Italy. In particular, it explores and compares the music composed for INDA productions between 1921 and 1939. From the beginning of the festival, music occupied a crucial role, thanks to Ettore Romagnoli’s emphasis on the musical component in reviving ancient Greek drama. The years from 1921 to 1927 were characterized by the collaboration between Romagnoli and Giuseppe Mulè, who attempted to revive ancient Greek music according to modern criteria. By 1930, the festival, run by an entirely Fascist committee, had taken on a nationalistic character, and music was integral to this. Indeed, during these years (1930–39), music acquired a pivotal role in emphasizing the heroic instances of ancient drama that had become functional to the Regime’s policy. Moreover, it was considered indispensable for this increasingly mass-oriented type of performance.

“A Desirable Class of Homeseekers”: Colonization, Race, and Italian Migration in the Progressive Era US South

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century in Italy and the United States, a transnational media dialogue emerged that promoted facilitated emigration policies that their supporters called colonization. Designed to permanently transfer a highly mobile population to a region with a proportionally small foreign-born population, colonization's press coverage exhibited an elite class and race consciousness that sought to remake landless Italian migrants, undesirable in other areas of the United States, into good citizens working their own farms in the American South. A close reading of articles published in Progressive Era magazines in Italian and English, and direct appeals for settlement to the Italian ambassador in Washington, demonstrate how proposals to colonize Italians in the American South shaped the debate over desirability in a period grappling with policy solutions, both in Italy and the United States, to an emerging immigration problem. Race and the immigration problem intersected powerfully in the Progressive Era South in unusual ways as colonizationists adopted their own definitions of racial desirability that centered white southerners’ economic needs. When historians take distribution policy as seriously as Progressives did, the public debate over desirability that drove turn-of-the-century restrictionism becomes more complicated and the significance of the regional setting more pronounced.

En plein air: Light, space and fashion in Filippo de Pisis’s aesthetics

This article addresses the concept of en plein air regarding men’s fashion in early twentieth-century Italy. The act of painting outdoors has been addressed at length in the field of art history as one of the most radical practices of nineteenth-century avantgardes. It focused on the changing appearance of light and weather conditions, as in the case of the renowned French Impressionist painters, who often represented women and their clothing in the natural environment. However, en plein air can also provide an opportunity to reframe men’s fashion in its relationship with the environment. The Italian painter and dandy Filippo de Pisis (1896–56) relied on en plein air to constitute his peculiar vision of ‘pictorial elegance’, connecting painting skills with the experience of wearing clothes in open spaces, for instance, during a stroll in the Mediterranean sunshine. This article analyses de Pisis’s artworks and writings on male elegance and its pictorial qualities, aiming to explore the under-investigated invisibility of men’s fashion in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it challenges the misogyny of the antifashion rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics. The case of de Pisis is particularly interesting in this regard because it provides an illuminating pictorial and textual affective interpretation of the interdependences between men’s bodies, the colours and fabrics of their clothes and the qualities of the open-air environment in which they were experienced. This contribution intends to shed light on the concept of ‘pictorial elegance’ that was for de Pisis a queer, destabilizing and poetic transfiguration of masculinity in the context of European Modernism.

Women's participation and social demands in the Italian 1960s: the case study of the National Council of Italian Women

ABSTRACT The National Council of Italian Women (CNDI) was an internationally-oriented confederation of women's associations founded in Rome in 1903, which was affiliated with the International Council of Women (ICW). Previous studies on the Italian Council have considered its origins and the biographical aspects of its members in the first half of twentieth-century Italy, while the Council developments and action during the democratic regime of the second half of the twentieth century have been less studied. First, this article aims to understand the impact of female associations on Italian social policy developments by examining the CNDI between 1958 and 1963. The study makes a historical reassessment of an emancipatory narrative, addressing the participation and social demands of Italian women in the context of the ‘economic miracle’. Second, this article reflects on the role of NGOs and voluntary activism in shaping welfare state developments in the post-war period. The analysis will use primary and edited sources from the CNDI and the Ministry of Labour held at the Central Archive of the State in Rome. The CNDI represents a significant case study that aids in our understanding women's social demands from below.

An Automatic Organ for the Pope: Mechanized Music and the Catholic Church in Twentieth-Century Italy

An Automatic Organ for the Pope: Mechanized Music and the Catholic Church in Twentieth-Century Italy

“A Global Web of Elegies”

Abstract Is the elegy global? To wrestle with this impossibly large question, can we approach it intrinsically by searching within elegy for traces of the genre’s worldwide reach? A contemporary elegy that can serve as a portal to the genre’s globality is Edward Hirsch’s book-length Gabriel (2014), a lament for the poet’s son that weaves a global web of elegies, citing more than a dozen mourning poets from classical and Edo Japan, medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic Britain, Renaissance Poland, nineteenth-century Germany and France, and twentieth-century Italy, Russia, and India. Though not comprehensive, Hirsch’s gathering makes visible the elegy’s global resonances, divergences, and scope.

Time, Deindustrialisation and the Receding Horizon of Working-Class Activism in Late Twentieth-Century Italy (Fiat, 1979–1980)

This article seeks to understand how experiences of time change after influential social groups and institutions are disempowered. By analysing the response of a wide range of actors to key disputes at car manufacturer Fiat between 1979 and 1980, it suggests that changing conceptions of time came to register Fiat workers’ disempowerment within Italian society during the late twentieth century. A new present-centric sense of time came to predominate amongst laid-off Fiat worker activists, while a future-orientated sense grew amongst company managers. With a feeling of loosening connection with the immediate past and anxiety about the future, an indefinite present became the point of departure for workers’ inquiries into the past. The history of the Italian workers’ movement after 1980 shows the inextricable link between undermining collective organisation, delegitimising shared experiences of time, and the plausibility of transformative visions of the future.

IL SOLDATO INESISTENTE DI BUZZATI E KADARE (IL DESERTO DEI TARTARI E IL GENERALE DELL'ARMATA MORTA)

The two novels, Deserto dei Tartari (The desert of the Tartars) (1940) by Dino Buzzati, of the early twentieth century in Italy and Il Generale dell'armata morta (The general of the dead army) (1963) by Kadare, an Albanian writer of the second half of the twentieth century, are considerably successful books of a wide reception and translated into several languages. The background to both works is the Second World War. A war that is about to begin in Buzzati and the memories and consequences of this war in Kadare. A general and a lieutenant have almost the same mission and the same duty, that of leading an army of soldiers and preparing to fight. But neither of them carries out his military duty, there is no enemy to fight against. In both novels the war turns out to be a strong disappointment. The lust for glory of both the general and the lieutenant is contrasted with strong symbolism by the search for a definitive truth about his own existence. The only truth that unites the two authors is death. The lieutenant who awaits death and the general who gathers it everywhere are another common aspect that unites them. The strong presence of nature could not be a random element, it is the ongoing background to the mood and human emotions. Although they do not claim to be exhaustive, these observations want to highlight the fact that these two beautiful novels have many things to say and represent a beautiful literary heritage, shared between two writers joined and separated by the same sea, the Adriatic.

First Communion in Early Twentieth-century Italy: a Rite of Passage within Childhood

In traditionally Catholic countries, First Communion has widely functioned as a key rite of passage. In the modern age, and in particular during the eighteenth century, children were not admitted to the sacrament of the Eucharist until adolescence or even until the age of twenty. The ceremony thus represented a rite of passage that marked the transition to adulthood. A reversal of tradition came in some pastoral experiences of the nineteenth century and was officially established by the decree Quam singulari Christus amore – ordered in 1910 by Pope Pius X – which set the age for receiving Holy Communion at around seven years. First Communion still retained the form of a rite of passage, albeit without the adultist religious language surrounding Confirmation and without the pessimism about childhood that had been inherited from the past. The new educational outlook initiated by Pius X was also confirmed by his successors. Analysis of official Church pronouncements, devotional literature for children, and selected religious images – examined with an interdisciplinary heuristic approach – allows to shed light on a key shift in the Italian Catholic educational imaginary over the first half of the twentieth century, when Communion was seen as a typical childhood experience, in accordance with the changes underway in the upbringing and socialization of children and with the educational theories that valued children’s spontaneity and experience.

«Non eravamo mica in un romanzo»: Women’s Stories as Inspiration and Education

This article looks at the role(s) of girls and women as depicted in some early twentieth-century popular texts and in one more recent text set during those years: Bianca Pitzorno’s Il sogno della macchina da cucire (2018). Pitzorno’s coming-of-age novel explores the power of education, literature and work for an orphan girl, a sartina whose sewing skills allow her a degree of independence, and whose determination to learn, particularly through reading and conversations with other women, allows her to protect herself in a society in which women of her class and background are highly vulnerable. The novel’s engagement with turn-of-the-century popular culture both celebrates and critiques its importance in the lives of women, as the dramatic and melodramatic stories recounted in genre fiction, novels and opera offer the protagonist an escape but also an education. Through the tales – often tragic and cautionary – of Madama Butterfly, Jane Eyre and, above all, Carolina Invernizio’s Giselda (Storia di una sartina, 1892), Pitzorno helps a contemporary audience comprehend the strictures faced by women in earlier times, while also furnishing her young sartina with much greater agency than those antecedents. In reading about this girl’s reading, and about the lives of her friends and employers, we gain new insights into women’s work and leisure in early twentieth-century Italy, and see social expectations and class dynamics brought to life. We also encounter sobering parallels with ongoing issues in today’s society.

Conservation principles and structural performance of Modern heritage: the church of San Giovanni in Bosco in Bologna

The knowledge of the design and construction practice of peculiar works that belong to the Modern heritage is an essential prerequisite for its conscious conservation. In the transition phase between Modern Italian construction and the beginning of prefabrication in the late 1960s, a significant episode is the construction of the church of San Giovanni Bosco in Bologna between 1963 and 1969, one of the most recent, and the last Bolognese work, by the architect Giuseppe Vaccaro. On the one hand, the church presents some technical features that confirm the construction practice consolidated during the Twentieth century in Italy, identifiable as a mixed construction. On the other, innovative elements were introduced to integrate three different structural technologies, such as load-bearing masonry walls, reinforced concrete frames and steel trusses. The paper proposes the repertoire of the construction techniques of the church, which represents a condition of uniqueness within the local building heritage. This complexity and the particular combination of different load-bearing materials make the structural components invisible, being an obstacle for assessing the structural performance of the existing building according to traditional methods.

What is visual Vaporwave? Vaporwave arts and their history and position in China

By Vaporwave we refer to a digital-born electronic music genre and a trend in visual aesthetics. It emerged in some US-based online communities in the early 2010s, and now its visual expressions are in vogue in Chinese visual media context. In this article, Vaporwave’s aesthetics are discussed through three stages of analysis. In the first part, the paper outlines relevant theories and general features of Vaporwave’s (both visual and musical) aesthetics; next, the paper focuses on Vaporwave's visual characteristics, and, to provide a deeper understanding of its visual aesthetics, I discuss a school of painting derived from early twentieth-century Italy—Metaphysical art. In the second part, the article discusses why and how vaporwave aesthetics are inseparable from some Japanese visual characteristics and how it is represented in China, with particular reference to examples of Japanese comics from the 1980s/early 1990s and one popular Chinese video-focused social media TikTok in recent years. In the third part, the article focuses on illustrating Vaporwave's visual features in the Chinese context in recent years, and several examples are provided.

Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue. By Daniela Saresella. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. viii+262. $114.00 (cloth); $102.60 (e-book). Papal Diplomacy from 1914 to 1989: The Seventy-Five Years War. By Dennis A. Castillo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. Pp. xvi+246. $95.00 (cloth); $90.00 (e-book).

<i>Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue</i>. By Daniela Saresella. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. viii+262. $114.00 (cloth); $102.60 (e-book). <i>Papal Diplomacy from 1914 to 1989: The Seventy-Five Years War</i>. By Dennis A. Castillo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. Pp. xvi+246. $95.00 (cloth); $90.00 (e-book).

Rome Award: The ‘modern’ soprano: performing the donna nova in early twentieth-century Italy

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The (Re)Birth of a Mediterranean Migration System. The Case of Tunisian Migration in Sicily

ABSTRACT The appearance of Tunisian communities in Sicily towards the mid-1960s was one the very first cases of international migration towards twentieth-century Italy. However, the coexistence of immigration with the difficult economic situation of the destination area still raises interpretational difficulties: how is it possible that one of the poorest European regions became an area of immigration and, the very first in its own country? This article suggests an answer to this question adopting a comprehensive approach integrating political, social, and economic elements. The article defines and frames migrants movements in the Channel of Sicily as components of a broader migration system connecting Sicily and Tunisia. The deconstruction of the migration system follows three directions: the Italian institutional and diplomatic background against which Tunisian migrations emerged, the economic salience of transnational economic activities in the Channel of Sicily, and the history of connections between the opposing shores of the Central Mediterranean.

El teatral regreso de Celestina a Italia y las políticas culturales fascistas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial

The return of Celestina to Italian publishing houses during the Second World War has been examined in a series of recent research publications. These studies have not, unfortunately, described in a satisfactory manner the reasons underpinning this interest in a foreign piece; nor have they explained how it came to be one of the most regularly performed Spanish classic texts in twentieth-century Italy. The aim of this article is to settle this critical deficit, taking into account the political, cultural and theatrical contexts which enabled said return. Seen from this broader perspective, the reappearance of Celestina offers testimony to the cultural relationships between Spain and Italy in times of fascism, along with providing ways of approaching and appropriating a morally challenging text. Celestina, I argue, is a particularly revealing case study for understanding the role of classics in the construction of European identity throughout the twentieth century.

Daniela Saresella. Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue.

In recent years, historical literature has highlighted the transnational dimension of progressive Catholicism, which in various phases animated the political and cultural climate of the second postwar period. Italy emerged as one of the major hubs of this network, which among other things tried to build bridges between the Catholic and the Marxist culture. This book by Daniela Saresella, Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue, confirms the “singularity” (9) of the Italian scenario while presenting a comprehensive history of the relations between Catholics and the Left in the twentieth century. The title of the book is somewhat misleading, as is the surprising choice for the cover—the famous photograph of Aldo Moro held captive by the Red Brigades, which mistakenly suggests a conflictual and dramatic narrative. This is not just the story of the relationship between Catholics and Communists but between Catholics “and the Left” (57,...

Conrad’s Critical Fortunes in Early Twentieth Century in Italy. Carlo Placci and Other “First Readersµ

Conrad’s Critical Fortunes in Early Twentieth Century in Italy. Carlo Placci and Other “First Readersµ