Alice A. Kelikian

Town and country under fascism : the transformation of Brescia, 1915-1926

This exploration of the economic and political consequences of World War I traces the origins of fascism in Brescia, one of Italys key manufacturing centers. Brescia offers a dramatic example of the commercial and social diversity which slowed the establishment of dictatorship in the country as a whole. Here, Kelikian shows how Mussolinis movements pitted town against country in the seizure of power by exploiting parliamentary frailty in the capital and civic fragmentation in the provinces.

Science, gender and moral ascendancy in liberal Italy

Abstract Following Italian unification ‘progressive’ physicians, jurists, and criminal sociologists, who constituted a sizeable if particular school of anticlericalism, adopted organic explanations separating responsible from pathological citizens. Positivist criminology enabled the conflation of sexual with political turbulence, of women with peasants and workers, of feminine deficiencies with Mezzogiorno underdevelopment. A secular, literate minority succeeded in resurrecting hierarchies grounded in gender, class and regional differences, and it did so without invoking the moral authority of the Catholic Church.

Female Sexual Inversion, Same-Sex Desires in Italy and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920

Chiara Beccalossi has undertaken to write a comparative study of female same-sex love in the Italian and British medical communities. Her book begins with a catalogue of women diagnosed as inverts: a 50-year-old cretin from Pesaro, a spinster in Liverpool, a middleclass teen in Padua, a litterateur in London, and so on. The monograph then proceeds to outline the emergence of sexology in France and in Germany before moving on to sexuality in unified Italy and Victorian England. After providing an overview of the historical contexts in which men of medicine put forward their theories on homosexuality in Italy and England, Beccalossi creates the case for cultures in contrast, and this makes the correlations she hopes to draw all the more difficult. At times she attempts to attenuate difference: whereas England did not have to battle the Vatican as Italian patriots did, it had a problem with Catholic Ireland. Both countries interned prostitutes, though on the peninsula the confinement in brothels dragged on for nearly a century, whereas in England the policy lasted a little over two decades, ostensibly because in 1886 ‘feminists had greater impact in England than in Italy’ (p. 34). Anglo-American homosexual tourism in Italy formed part of ‘a broader trend of reciprocal exchanges between Britain and Italy’ since the Renaissance (p. 19). But gay Germans went on holiday to Naples, Capri and Taormina too. The preference for the coastal South of the Kingdom owed, above all, to the fact that the justice system tolerated same-sex liaisons between consenting adults unlike the law at home. The Sardinian code and the Zanardelli code, not to mention the later Rocco code, never explicitly interfered in the domain of private behaviour unless that involved rape, pederasty or outrage to decency. Italian jurists, in this regard, followed the Napoleonic lead on sex offenses. In the most interesting part of her book, Beccalossi acknowledges that the ‘fashionable’ pathology of same-sex perversion in Italy derived from scholarship elsewhere on the continent. But one forensic physician at the University of Pavia put a new spin on the manifestation of the homosexual instinct in reaction to Carl Westphal’s Die contrare Sexualempfindung. First introduced by Professor Arrigo Tamassia, who had visited psychiatric hospitals in Berlin, Paris and Vienna, the term ‘inversione sessuale’ signified a mental disease, and Charcot and Magnan adopted the classification in 1882. Most studies on the subject skip the Italian connection between the Germans and the French. Book reviews

Reflections on Italian Nationalism and Fascism: Essays for Alexander De Grand

It is a pleasure to present this special issue of The Journal of Modern Italian Studies in honor of Alexander De Grand. Like so many scholars working in modern Italy, we have learned much over the years from De Grand’s work. From Italian nationalism, to the years of dictatorship and the alliance with Nazi Germany, to the Italian left in Italy and in exile throughout the twentieth century, De Grand’s writing is marked by a keen understanding of the workings of Italian political cultures, by a rare ability to write about the Italian right, and the left, in comparative perspective, and by an informed skepticism that has led him to read texts, and their authors, against the grain. These traits as an historian have informed his influential interpretations of the key movements and actors of modern Italy. Alexander De Grand’s bold explorations into the origins of fascism continue to dominate the historiography and rightly so. The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy (De Grand 1978) introduced the theme of Italian regeneration under the auspices of the right to an Anglo-American audience. In this path-breaking work, he followed the emergence of nationalist ideology before the war up until its integration into Mussolini’s movement during the fascist seizure of power. As Italy confronts its sesquicentennial celebration, this seminal line of inquiry still illuminates the controversies surrounding the Italian polity. De Grand did not only look at the role of conservative ideology when uncovering the roots of fascism. In Stalin’s Shadow: Angelo Tasca and the Crisis of the Left in Italy and France, 1910–1945 (De Grand 1985) offered fresh insight into the tragedy of the Italian Left during the postwar crisis. Obscured by the scholarly search light that always seemed to shine on his comrade Antonio Gramsci, Tasca became emblematic of Communist Party ideologues who tried to reject the pre-eminence of Stalin. After expulsion from the party in 1929, Tasca turned against Marxism and his old allies. De Grand then broadened his focus to encompass the histories of the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15(3) 2010: 333–335

Book reviews including 'Mission Italy: on the front lines of the Cold War', by Richard Gardner

Fosi’s study is concerned with the administration of justice in the Papal State, primarily between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the terminal date being ambiguous. Starting with a description of the complex system of jurisdictions, she examines judicial ideology and the micro-politics of enforcement. Her work, therefore, does not belong to the genre of history of criminality, pre-eminently represented for the papal domain by Peter Blastenbrei’s study of crime patterns in Rome in the period 1560 – 85 (Blastenbrei 1995). It is again to be contrasted with the work of the anthropologists Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen on mid-to-late sixteenth-century Rome (Cohen and Cohen 1993), which uses judicial records as windows upon social mores. Fosi’s concerns are not particularly with judicial testimonies. A major orientating theme of her work is the myth of ‘good government’ which was a significant facet of the Counter-Reformation papacy’s self-projection, one linked to the theme of a ‘purified’ Rome as new Jerusalem. Clearly there are exceptionally rich archival sources for judicial administration in the Papal States, pertaining to a multiplicity of jurisdictions. Hitherto, however, historical studies in this area have been under-developed, most notably by comparison with a well-established Venetian historiography. In addition to the aforementioned books (Blastenbrei 1995; Cohen and Cohen 1993), there is a discrete body of articles on Rome and on the Papal State as a whole. The concentration of these has been upon the sixteenth and, to a lesser extent, the seventeenth centuries. There are also local studies, which are difficult to access. With regard to the problems of order in the Papal State outside Rome, the emphasis of general studies has been upon banditry in the late sixteenth century. Fosi’s present work is unprecedentedly broad in scope, in terms both of chronology and of geographical area. The Papal State, in real terms, was essentially a creation of the sixteenth century, as the papacy sought to assert its suzerainty over feudatories and city governments. Here it pursued a grandiose project of control, moralization and maintenance of religious orthodoxy, in which there was no very firm distinction between civil and criminal jurisdiction and which was enforced by a bureaucracy and judiciary whose upper echelons became exclusively clerical. The utopian nature of this project was balanced by Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13(1) 2008: 103 – 131