Italian and Italian American Studies

This book is about the presence of utopian and dystopian elements in the Italian literary landscape. It focuses on four authors that are representatives of the various positions in the Italian cultural debate: Pasolini, Calvino, Sanguineti, and Volponi. What did concepts like utopia and dystopia mean for these authors? Is it possible to separate utopia from dystopia? What is the role of science fiction in this debate? This book answers these questions, proposing an original interpretation of utopia and of the social role of literature. The book also takes into consideration four of the most influential literary journals in Italy: Officina , il menabò , il verri , and Nuovi Argomenti , that played a central role in the cultural and political debate on utopia in Italy.

This book traces the origins, life and death of Administrative Science in Italy as an academic discipline between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so by combining the study of ideas, institutional history, intellectual history and social history. The Faculty of Law first introduced Administrative Science in 1875, with the aim of providing the elite with the necessary tools to distribute wealth more equally, to take care of the population and, thus, to make the young Italian State more legitimate in the eyes of the emerging masses. Law and social sciences were merged with the aim of increasing reforms, including that of creating a State of Happiness for all citizens. Throughout its 70-year existence, Administrative Science was deprived of its contents and scientific independence, and academically overshadowed by Administrative and Public law. Finally, although the liberal elites discarded the reformer project of Administrative Science even before Fascism turned everything upside down, most of the original traits of this knowledge were absorbed into Fascist corporate and totalitarian structures.

This book proposes a significant new interpretation of the relations between Italian partisans and British forces during the Italian campaign of 1943-1945. The core of the argument challenges many assumptions that are today still present both in Italian and in the Anglophone historiography on the subject. In current historiography, the debate is still ongoing as to whether the British were a hostile force to the Italian Resistance, trying to weaken it to better control it, or a genuine and committed ally. Instead of a clear-cut and artificial dichotomy between the 'Italians' and the 'British' this book posits the idea that lines were often blurred, and relations existed on a scale that included lots of grey and overlapping areas. Thanks to an original approach that examines the Italo-British interaction from a point of view as close as possible to the ‘action’, it proposes a new interpretation based on the way the British image was cast in Italy. Politics is left in the background in favour of an analysis of the concrete problems and difficulties that Italians and the British had to face when working together and how these processes influenced the image of Great Britain in Italy in the following decades. This produces a final interpretation that enriches current historiography and pushes forward our understanding of the relationship between Italian partisans and British forces.

This much-awarded work by one of Italy’s most esteemed historians of fascism, Mauro Canali, is now available in English translation. Based on a wealth of previously unavailable judicial and archival material, it sheds light on how fascism exercised power through violence and corruption from the very beginning. The book reveals the motives that led Mussolini to order the kidnapping and murder of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, a turning point in Mussolini’s grasp of total power in Italy. Canali further explores the corrupt dealings between the Mussolini family and the American Sinclair Oil Company that Matteotti had intended to denounce in the Italian parliament the day after his death.