Rosario Forlenza

Re-narrating Italy, reinventing the nation: assessing the presidency of Ciampi

Abstract Italian political and public debate since the ‘earthquake years’ 1992–1994 has to a very high degree focused on the countrys identity, on the notion of ‘nation’ and how to interpret it, and on the countrys historical past and how to link it meaningfully to the (political) present. It has been less recognized that the crisis of the party political system in the 1990s also gave a new role to play for Italian Presidents at both the institutional and symbolic levels. In particular, this article argues that a fundamental change took place in the bespeaking of the Italian nation during the presidency of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, 1999–2006. Ciampi gave Italians a new language to speak and think with, a language that has become tied to a series of novel or reinvented memory practices. The aim of this article is to analyze this new nationalist discourse as it developed through Ciampis seven years as President of the Italian republic. At the empirical level, the article focuses on spoken and written texts by Ciampi himself. Those texts were either read or published in connection with particularly meaningful dates (2 June or 25 April) or places (‘le fosse Ardeatine’ or Cefalonia). At the theoretical level we argue for an anthropological approach to political transition and meaning-formation. Political regimes change as societies undergo the dissolution of established power structures, affecting not only institutional forms but also affective relations and symbolic universes of people. It is in such a context that Presidential speeches as official discourse and ‘high politics’ can come to function as a symbolic surplus and have a real effect on the semantic underpinning of nation and demos.

Giuseppe Dossetti: L'avventura politica di un riformatore cristiano

rather than having been written after the event. The editors note that the mistaken assumption that keeping a diary was impossible within the lager has meant that there has been very little investigation of such sources. They do highlight the difference between the camps in Italy and those in Germany: it was easier to communicate with the outside world while imprisoned in one of the Italian camps, Fossoli or Bolzano; after reaching the Nazi lagers communication typically ceased. Third, in making these extracts available, Avagliano and Palmieri add another layer to our understanding of the complexities of 1943–1945. Interwoven with the deportees’ discussion of their suffering, their hopes, and their fears, another aspect emerges: a good number of these political deportees were devout Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. The majority of the extracts come from men and women whose testimonies have not previously been published. A number of extracts come from individuals whose wartime experiences are better known. Lidia Beccaria Rolfi’s memoir, L’esile filo della memoria, has been available since 1996. On the one hand, it might appear redundant to republish selections of her memories in this collection; on the other, it provides a broader context in which to understand her experience. Her words are a powerful voice for the victims collectively and the goals of the editors in particular: ‘I want to live to go home, to remember, to eat, to get dressed, to put on lipstick and to tell and to shout out loud to everyone that hell exists on earth’. While one might quibble with the occasional editorial decision – such as reducing the font size in the introductions to a degree that is unhelpful – overall, Voci dal lager fulfils its purpose of giving a voice to a marginalized sector of Italian victims.

Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy

Abstract This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic ‘modernity,’ bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective.

Il professorino. Giuseppe Dossetti tra la crisi del fascismo e la costruzione della democrazia, 1940–1948

reflect on the events being presented: they were to ‘feel’ history, instead of ‘knowing’ it. The third and arguably most important sentiment that the directors strived to create in the audiences was fear of Communism. If Italy wanted to become a respected member of the European Community, it had to distance itself from the Soviet Union. In conclusion, Schooling in Modernity is a ground-breaking study, because it directs the attention of scholars of modern Italian culture towards an area of study that has remained largely untouched until now. Although Bonifazio’s readings of the films confirm for the most part what we already knew about post-war Italian politics, the documents she has discovered (and the ones still buried in the archives) give us a richer and more complex image of that period. Furthermore, if at least some of these films were to be digitized and made available to the general public, as I hope, they would constitute a terrific didactic tool for students of modern and contemporary Italian culture.

Magic, religion, and the South: notes on Ernesto De Martino

Abstract This article deals with the work of the Italian anthropologist, ethnographer, and historian of religions Ernesto De Martino (1908–1965) and, more specifically, with his ‘ethnographic expeditions’ in Southern Italy in the 1950s. Here, in some of the poorest regions of Italy, De Martino carefully examined the intermingling of popular religion, magic rituals, and official Catholicism. Beyond the specific context of post-World War II Southern Italy, De Martino’s work offers a sophisticated framework to study humanity’s relationship with the sacred, which can be helpful to historians, anthropologists, and sociologists examining religious practices, beliefs, and experiences across time, space and place. More specifically, De Martino’s framework can encourage scholars to better foreground the influence of historical contexts on cultural forms and psychic constellations, the stratification and intersection of popular and official forms of religion, and the cultural and symbolic role of magic and religion.

Das Abendland: The politics of Europe’s religious borders

The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture the actual complexity of Europe’s borders. There are four religious and thus four cultural-symbolic borders, which are increasingly defining the continent: north-western Europe is Protestant, southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox and increasingly nationalist, and the South and Near East are Muslim. The cultural purity and the values that Europe craves in search of identity and order are simply not available in a world of global interconnectedness and social diversity.

Politics, Power and Soccer in Postwar Italy: The Case of Naples

Fittingly, for a nation that has given the world the Renaissance, grand opera and Machiavelli, a history of Italian soccer reveals a beguiling mixture of the artistic, the overblown and the scheming. Unlike football played in Spain, Germany or France, say, Italian soccer possesses a uniquely seductive quality that often amounts to more than the sum of its parts. This is because soccer in Italy is not as it is in other countries: this is a nation where the largest selling daily newspaper (Gazzetta della Sport) is dedicated almost entirely to soccer, and where two other popular daily newspapers focus on sport (mainly soccer), where one of its much discussed and controversial prime ministers, Silvio Berlusconi (1994–1995, 2001–2006, 2008–2011), owned and still owns one of the league’s most famous clubs (AC Milan), and where the political organization he founded in 1994 was named after the chant to encourage the national team (Forza Italia, i.e., Let’s Go, Italy!). Soccer, it seems, is Italy, and Italy is soccer, and so, inevitably, a narrative about the game cannot help but be a narrative about the country as a whole—its dynamics, its preoccupations, its outlook and its problems—and about its politics, its history and its identity.

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

Abstract The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.

Fragile Modernities: Critique, Crisis, and Emancipatory Politics

The twenty-year period from 1948 to 1968 was one of relative stability for Italy. The competing modernities of Communism and Christian Democracy described in the previous chapter developed in some sort of antagonistic harmony, and within an institutional (and constitutional) framework that was recognized by everyone. Governments kept changing, but the Christian Democrats remained in power. Italy normalized, democracy normalized, and from the 1950s the economy started to grow, slowly but surely—and from 1957 onward not so slowly at all.

What If We Were Never Modern

The study of Italian political history is a privileged prism for the unfolding of alternative and sometimes competing modernities. The figurations of political thought and culture that emerged in twentieth-century Italy can be seen as a microcosm of Europe’s twentieth-century age of ideologies. To think about Italy less as a latecomer to modernity and more in terms of its composite Mediterranean and European specificities means to reopen its historical archive and reassess its history.