Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti's aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war's relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino.

A number of Italianists have recently argued the need to reconsider the term impegno in the light of feminist and queer critiques. Such critiques do not simply highlight the way in which impegno has usually been construed as a masculine, heterosexual domain. They also note that its employment often presupposes a gendered, heteronormative account of politics itself. Complicating this sense of politics via a reading of recent work in queer theory which insists that desire and need are intertwined, this essay argues for a reconsideration of the work of Italian poet Sandro Penna – someone whose oeuvre has regularly been construed by literary critics as apolitical – as an example of impegno. Bringing together psychoanalysis, the work of Michel Foucault, and historical materialism, the essay argues that, in their historical context, Penna's poems staged a resistance to what Freud termed the genital organisation of the libido and are thus ‘anti-Oedipal’.

The article discusses the thinking of Mario Einaudi in relation to the ambitious measures with which the Italian government sought to move towards land reform in the immediate post–war period. Einaudi, an intellectual and academic, was by birth Italian but moved to the United States during the Fascist period. Like his father Luigi, the noted economist, he was convinced of the need to stimulate the free market in land in order to increase productivity and modernise cultivation methods; in his writings he repeatedly sought to develop a plan of action that would facilitate collaboration between Rome and Washington in this field, identifying the Tennessee Valley Authority approach as especially suited to the Italian case. However, while his ideas achieved a good public airing, they had a limited impact: on the political front, Cold War priorities pushed Italian and US Marshall Plan experts more towards the redistribution of landownership than towards stimulating the productivity of agricultural businesses, in the attempt to rapidly build a consensus behind the government; and on the cultural front, at the end of the 1950s the issue of backwardness in the rural South started to be interpreted in terms of cultural and social anthropology, an approach which did not directly relate to the development of political programmes.

This article considers the emergence of a corpus of victim centred-narratives addressing the experience of political violence during the anni di piombo in the period surrounding the establishment of the ‘Day of Memory for the Victims of Terrorism’. Bringing a critical victim-studies approach to bear, it explores how the victim of terrorism is portrayed in the corpus of victim-centred narratives and asks what is claimed, effected and achieved by the corpus in cultural terms. It further explores how the perspective of survivors of terrorist attacks and of relatives of the victims reshapes the cultural imaginary of the anni di piombo in the new millennium.

Language as it appears in the public space is at the centre of investigations into linguistic landscapes. Language agents immersed in a given geo-historical context contribute to the construction of spatialised meaning and to the transformation of space into place. The visibility of a language in a linguistic landscape does not just index a reality, i.e. the use of one or more languages within a community, but contributes to the symbolic construction of a given space. The current study aims to investigate the peculiarities of place-making and -marking of the Slovenian-speaking community in the area of Trieste via an analysis of written signs displaying the minority language. The paper will show that the tension resulting from achieved equality in the legal status of Slovenian and the perception of unequal power relations between different ethnic groups is reproduced in the construction of the local linguistic landscape. The final part of the discussion will suggest that public use of the Slovenian language is central to the performance of a material border.

This article examines the coverage of Naples since 2000 in the Guardian and the Independent, paying particular attention to their portrayal of the Camorra and the refuse crisis. It argues that this coverage was not simply riddled with stereotypes but was also characterised by significant inaccuracies and omissions. Analysts in Italy have detailed how the trash emergency in 2008 was the outcome of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity and that organised crime, although intent on exploiting the situation, was not a determining factor. The British press, instead, tended to conflate the breakdown of the urban waste cycle with the dumping of toxic waste and, by inverting cause and effect, to point the blame at the Camorra. These accounts, it is argued, are partially explained by the very nature of foreign news that seeks out dramatic and clearcut stories for an otherwise disinterested audience. They also reflect the heightened interest in the Camorra following the Secondigliano War and the English translation of Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. However, the article suggests that it is the press's assumption that Naples is already an ‘out of the ordinary’ urban setting that ultimately precludes the possibility of an informed coverage of the city and its predicaments.

During 2011 Italy reached the verge of a financial default because of its huge public debt. Neither the centre-right nor the centre-left governments that alternated in power in the 2000s were able to introduce the reforms necessary for reducing the debt and promoting growth. The impotence of the government became incompatible with the requirements of the country's continued presence in the eurozone. In November 2011, under the pressure of financial markets and eurozone institutions and leaders, the incumbent centre-right government was obliged to resign, and was substituted by a government composed of technocrats and experts, the Monti government. This lasted until December 2012 and was supported in parliament by a cross-partisan coalition; it was able to introduce some of the structural reforms required, because of the threat of default but also because it did not need to seek the electoral support of powerful constituencies. This article advances an interpretation of the Italian crisis of November 2011, identifying the political and institutional structures and the specific political conditions that fostered a policy stalemate in the country in the 2000s and whose persistence makes the continuation of reforms after the February 2013 elections uncertain.

The article reflects on the ‘absent connection’ between the fictional Watussi of the Italian hit song of 1963 and the real Tutsi, many of whom had fled Rwanda at that time to escape violence from the ascendant Hutu majority in the last years of Belgian rule. It considers the song's long afterlife and the stubborn persistence, decades later, of comic stereotypes of ‘Africans’ in Italian popular culture despite the growing number of African migrants and their children in Italian society.