Studies of the Lega Nord (Northern League) have tended either to ignore the existence of earlier movements for regional autonomy in the 1950s – such as the Movimento Autonomista Bergamasco – or, on the contrary, assume continuities between the two movements at the expense of analysis of the significant discontinuities. This article argues that neither approach has been successful in capturing the importance of precursors to leghismo and that a more nuanced analysis is required. Focusing on the Movimento Autonomista Bergamasco (MAB) in its various incarnations between 1947 and 1970, I argue that the Bergamascan autonomists of the post-war period in many ways laid the foundations for Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord; however, it is historically inaccurate to claim a direct line of continuity between mabismo and leghismo due to the differing contexts in which each movement operated: the critical junctures of the post-war era and post-tangentopoli respectively. What emerges from a closer analysis of the relationship between the two movements, as mabismo evolved into leghismo in the 1980s is a picture of regional autonomism distancing itself from the ideal of national unity and being increasingly drawn to secessionism.

With Italy’s entry into the Second World War, Anglo-Egyptian authorities repatriated Italian diplomats from Egypt, arrested around 5,000 Italians, and sequestered both personal and business accounts. Italian institutions were indefinitely closed, including the Italian state schools. Hope for a future in Egypt among the roughly 60,000 Italian residents faded. The Salesian missionary schools, whose goal since the late nineteenth century had been to inculcate nationalist-religious sentiment in Italy’s emigrants, remained the only active Italian educational institution by claiming Vatican protection. As such, the missionary schools assumed a central role in the lives of many young Italians. After the war, these same young Italians began to depart Egypt en masse, in part driven by the possibilities opened up by their vocational training. Building on diplomatic, institutional and private archives, this article demonstrates how the Salesian missionary schools attempted and failed to integrate Italian immigrants into the Egyptian labour force through vocational training. This failure combined with socio-economic and geopolitical changes to propel Italian departures from Egypt, making emigrants out of immigrants.

In this essay, I argue that despite the Vatican’s condemnation of Nazi racism as an anti-Christian ideology, some Catholic sectors in Fascist Italy were not impervious to anti-semitic and racial prejudices. Looking at the discussion on race and anti-semitism in the propaganda of clerical Fascism and its simultaneous echo in Church discourses, this research delves deeper into the formation of a specific Catholic trend of racial anti-semitism that excluded Jews from a religiously and ethnically homogeneous definition of the Italian nation. A significant part of the propagandists of clerical Fascism attempted to define a racial and anti-semitic narrative that could be suitable for both Fascist racism and Italian Catholic culture. I examine the Catholic appropriation of racial anti-semitism on a broad spectrum of positions, ranging from Catholics who only flirted with racialist rhetoric to those who dismissed the transformative value of conversion because of alleged racial barriers. Challenging the traditional distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-semitism, the examples under examination demonstrate the entanglement of religious and racial arguments in the shaping of a ‘Jewish race’ that was considered foreign to the italianità celebrated by the regime.

In this article, I offer a reading of the ‘creation’ of femminicidio and of its role in the emergence of a new women’s question in Italy. I concentrate on three central steps in the legitimation of the word and the worlds femminicidio: Unione delle Donne Italiane (UDI)’s political use of the term in 2006, UDI’s Staffetta in 2008/2009, and the birth of the movement Se Non Ora Quando in 2011. By following Rancière’s understanding of politics as a ‘reconfiguration of the sensible’, I argue that the emergence of femminicidio fostered the emergence of a ‘community of sense’ of women as a new political subject. This community did not gather mainly around ideas of who a woman is or should be, nor did it arise from a common acknowledgement of the nature of ‘violence’. Rather, it was structured around shared feelings and affects, triggered by women’s sense of being actual or potential objects of violence.

Political and criminal violence are an integral part of recent Italian history. Killings and mass murders have moulded everyday life and the collective memory of the Italian people, changing the shape of public life. Veneration of the dead has taken on a symbolic function and become part of a new ‘civil religion’, which has redefined Italy’s national identity. Scholars are currently examining the role of mafia victims in this phenomenon, concentrating in particular on the bombings that took place in 1992. Following the crisis that marked the end of the First Republic, symbolic ties to figures like Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino became an essential aspect of redefining democratic mobilisation. Nevertheless, when examined from a long-term perspective, the relationship between the Italian population and the celebration of mafia victims is more complex than it may at first appear. This article aims to analyse the contradictions inherent in the issue, focusing on the funerals of mafia victims in order to examine the relationships between political and institutional bodies, the Italian population as a whole, and the local community, in the celebration of the dead. Through this analysis, it seeks to consider both the achievements and failures in the construction of this new ‘civil religion’ in a contemporary society.

Between 8 September 1943 and the end of the war, Italian Military Internees were confronted daily with a stark choice between continued resistance and opting to assist the Reich by fighting or working. Extraordinarily, over 600,000 said no, and endured internment or forced labour until they were liberated or died. Paradoxically, the minority who made the more predictable choice of opting to cooperate, the so-called optanti, constituted an anomaly. This article examines their motivation by giving an overview of the political background, the experience of deportation, the Lager environment and the phases and methods of propaganda. Primary sources indicate that hunger was a common denominator in their decision, but that the weight of other factors, which varied with individuals, broadly speaking fell into three categories: bleak honesty, specious cynicism and maverick idealism. These categories are illustrated by four case studies: the mass adhesion at Biala Podlaska and the individuals Pietro Faraci, Tranquillo Frigeni and Remo Faustini.

Propaganda from the BBC directed at Italy during the Second World War played a dual role. The ‘Radio Londra’ programmes, on the one hand a propaganda tool of the British government and on the other moral support to many Italians, are part of the cultural heritage of the war. This article explores what topics and types of programme were broadcast during the period of the Allied occupation of Italy (1943–1945) in order to engage the support of different social categories, including ordinary men and women, soldiers, factory workers, former Fascists, and intellectuals. The first part analyses some of the programmes in order to determine their propaganda strategies, while the second part focuses on the letters sent by listeners in Italy to the BBC broadcaster Colonel Stevens. It will be seen how both the use of cultural stereotypes and the attention to the detail of daily life for Italian civilians contributed to the success of the programmes.

This paper examines intersections and divergences between Catholic universalism and Fascist ethno-nationalism in the pages of La Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, a satirical weekly newspaper for Italian military personnel in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Military propagandists appealed to grassroots Catholicism to motivate demoralised Italian soldiers in the last year of war against the communist-led Yugoslav partisan movement. Their use of Catholic themes revealed overlapping values but also apparent incongruities between Christianity, Fascism, and Italian military culture that had been evident throughout the ventennio. While Catholic anti-communism blended relatively seamlessly with nationalist-Fascist anti-Slavism to depict the partisan enemy as a dehumanised Other, the use of conventional piety and Christian humanitarianism in the army’s propaganda contradicted Fascist and military concepts of the ideal Italian ‘new man’. In the process, military propagandists sowed the seeds for the brava gente myth that dominated postwar memory and national identity in Italy.

This article takes as its starting point the so-called ‘sex scandals’ surrounding Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during the last years of his premiership (2009–2011), which have filled Italian newspaper columns and legal case files. Political discourses and media interpretations of women’s freedom at the time represented genders through the eroticisation of power. The deployment of postfeminist and stereotyped representations of gender relations produced a complex and ambivalent frame for female sexuality and agency which reproduced the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric that locates freedom and emancipation in the market. This narrative was further inflected by class and race, as it was deployed through the opposed images of white, Italian, respectable, caring women, and cynical young women and migrants using their bodies as a resource in a sexual-economic exchange with men occupying positions of power. Through feminist reflections on work I frame and discuss the use of the notions of choice and freedom in these discourses. Shifting the focus from women’s behaviour to the analysis of a peculiar image of masculinity displayed by the then premier, the article highlights how racism, colonial legacies and homophobia are enmeshed in this historically and culturally based gender imagery.

This article presents the results of some empirical research on extortion in Palermo. The project is based on the administration of a structured questionnaire with traders in various districts within Palermo and villages in the provincial interior, in two phases, the first in 2007 and second in 2012. The objective was to explore traders’ opinions on the various aspects of the phenomenon of extortion: its characteristics, causes, possible solutions, and the responsibilities of every actor in the battle against this illegal enterprise. In the period in which the research was undertaken, there was a wave of strong anti-mafia and anti-racketeering activism, particularly stimulated by the emergence in 2004 of the Comitato Addiopizzo and culminating in the establishment of the first ‘antiracket’ association in Palermo.

After Mussolini’s regime collapsed, Italy rebuilt itself as a nation and a democracy. The Republican Constitution approved in 1948 rejected the ideologies of both racism and racial discrimination, which had been strengthened and made harsher by Fascism since the mid-1930s. Yet, despite this, racism and racialisation continued in the post-Fascist years. The article analyses how the presence of former colonial subjects in Italy between the 1940s and 1960s was perceived, represented and managed, and demonstrates that the hegemonic discourse of the post-war period still considered Italy to be a white and ethnically homogeneous nation. It considers the stories of people from Libya and Eritrea who applied for Italian citizenship and the life in Italy of some Somali students in the 1960s. From different perspectives, these case studies show how in republican Italy inclusion and exclusion, as well as concepts of identity and otherness, were the consequence of processes of racialisation and ideas inherited from the previous period.

In the public debate played out in the media, the financial crisis in Italy is often depicted through a culturalist frame; the country’s difficulties are traced deterministically to an ethos, supposedly widespread among Italians, of amoral familism and a limited sense of civic engagement. This paper illustrates three issues that exemplify the country’s financial problems, and which are often seen through this type of culturalist lens: i) a lack of discipline in managing public finances; ii) a lack of interest in co-operation caused by the excessive importance given to family ties; iii) a lack of agency from the people involved, symbolised by a reluctance to leave home and to adopt an intense pace of work. Considering the relevant literature and various statistics, we show that a culturalist approach helps to spread a stereotyped and misleading view of these three issues. Instead, we suggest that a more accurate reading of the situation, and more stimulating when it comes to public debate, can be obtained by observing the way individuals adapt to the limitations and opportunities of the context in which they operate.

This article explores the racialisation of women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy at the intersection between the national imagination and transnational cultural and commodity flows. Starting from the experience of a young Italian woman whose work centres on the commodification of her sexual desirability and who is recurrently classified as ‘foreign’, it discusses the roots as well as effects of the racialised male gaze under which she negotiates her agency. In so doing, it examines the meanings of her failure to be recognised as an Italian citizen as she navigates between contempt and desire, stigma and praise, alienation and pleasure. On the one hand, the article traces the thread between her experience and the othering processes underpinning the construction of Italy as a nation state and an empire, and whose legacies persist in the country’s postcolonial present. On the other hand, the article explores women’s racialisation as a process which can magnify the social and economic value of their desirability in a context increasingly characterised by the sexualisation of culture and trade. Based on ethnographic research undertaken in 2012–2013, this article contributes to the emerging body of postcolonial scholarship and intersectional studies on women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy.

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, a velina, challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to the velina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

This article studies post-war Italy’s forgetful attitude towards its Fascist past by interpreting a political measure, the Togliatti amnesty (1946), and 1950s film censorship as ‘institutionalised forms of (…) amnesia’ (Ricoeur 2004, 452). The amnesty, which erased the Fascists’ legal responsibility for war and political crimes, represented the first act of oblivion of the Republican political establishment, embodying a forgetful mindset that influenced Italian culture through institutional instruments like film censorship. In 1950s Italy, censorship acted as a further form of institutionalised amnesia aimed at erasing from films the traces of the compromising continuity between the Fascist past and the democratic present. The story of the making and unmaking of the Italian episode of I vinti by Michelangelo Antonioni is a meaningful example of this dynamic. Producers and government commissioners censored the plot and changed it from a story about a neo-fascist militant to one about a young bourgeois who smuggles cigarettes. However, Antonioni resisted the institutional imposition to forget by choosing locations where the material dimension of the landscape still embodied the Fascist legacy of the country.

This article contributes to the expanding body of scholarship investigating the problematic correlations between racism, the legacy of colonialism, and configurations of national and cultural identity in post-war Italy. It does so through a yet unexplored perspective: that of the attitude of Italian publishing towards literature from former colonies. More specifically, it examines the reception of anglophone Caribbean novels written by ‘Windrush writers’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The article provides evidence of how Italian agents and publishers – belonging to the country’s intellectual elite, and many of whom publicly espoused anticolonial positions – not only proved to be more interested in the exotic, picturesque contents of Caribbean literature than in its historical, ideological, and political significance, but sometimes actively opposed the circulation of texts containing anticolonial or pro-Black identity claims. Some of their comments demonstrate the persistence of racist and derogatory assumptions of an imagined black and colonial Other, and a negation of their identity as both political subjects and cultural producers, if they failed to conform to dominant expectations. The expectations and the evaluation criteria active in the reception of Caribbean novels allow for an assessment of the ambiguous attitude of Italian publishing agents towards colonialism, race, and alterity.