From the end of 1955 to the middle of 1959, the quiz programme Lascia o raddoppia? transformed the way that Italians watched television, attracting a mass audience and appealing to viewers of different class backgrounds and levels of education. The quiz, watched by 15 million Italians at its peak, was more than Italy’s first successful television show: Lascia o raddoppia? also reflected the social and cultural transformations of Italy’s economic ‘miracle’, and confirmed the growing importance of mass culture and education in modern Italy. Yet, the role and response of the viewer in this television phenomenon has been largely overlooked. Viewers, if discussed at all, are often represented as an ‘Everyman’, mediocre, or the victims of Americanisation. This article examines the audience responses to the quiz by connecting the Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) broadcaster’s audience enjoyment ratings to the programme transcripts, specific contestants and media coverage. The audience data, when linked to individual programmes and contestants, reflects important changes in society and education and challenges the myth of the passive viewer, demonstrating even that 1950s television audiences were not as malleable or as conservative as contemporary commentators and many histories suggest.

This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon.

In 2011, Edoardo Nesi – a former industrialist in the Prato textile district – won the most prestigious Italian literary prize for his autobiographical novel Storia della mia gente, a book centered on the contrast between Prato’s past industrial success and present decline. Nesi has since become a regular contributor to Corriere della Sera, among other newspapers, and with his following book, Le nostre vite senza ieri, he has further emphasised his role as a public intellectual. In Nesi’s view, Italy’s participation in the global economy has exposed Italian manufacturers to a level of competition that they were not ready to meet. This disadvantage, Nesi contends, was exacerbated by the adoption of the euro, which put an end to the former practice of using monetary policy to offset trade deficits. As a result, many firms lost market shares, and the Prato textile district ended up being largely taken over by Chinese businesses. This paper criticises Nesi’s account of the Italian industrial decline. In particular, it argues that his sympathetic view of the former political-industrial system is mostly an expression of self-complacency and does not positively contribute to the current debates on the Italian economic crisis.

This article aims at showing how and why two cultural periodicals, namely the German edition of Tempo, published by Mondadori between 1940 and 1943, and the German magazine Italien, the official periodical of the Deutsch-Italienische Gesellschaft from 1942 to 1944, contributed to shaping the German readership’s idea of contemporary Italian literature. The analysis of the contents of these journals shows a rather diversified cultural offer, promoting authors that would be later associated with the anti-fascist struggle. To this end, the article will particularly focus on the way these periodicals presented Elio Vittorini, who would be heralded as one of the most engaged writers of post-war Italy.

This article evaluates the discourse developed around Benedetto Croce in the Italian cultural periodical press between 1944 and 1947 and it discusses the forms of adversarial discourse and the agents involved in the anti-Croce polemics that unfolded in the Communist Party’s official cultural journal Rinascita. Specifically, this article focuses on a selection of intellectuals who moved away from Crocean idealism to embrace Marxism in order to investigate how their conversion was presented in Rinascita.

In this paper, I examine the unpublished First World War diaries of Giovanni Pirelli – heir to the helm of the Pirelli tyre company – for their account of how the war and fall of Fascism may have catalysed his dissociation from his family, his class, and his ideological foundation. In the post-war period, Pirelli traced the source of his rejection of his inheritance to his experiences during the Russian retreat, but in the moment, the expression of this kind of transformation is fragmentary and complex. Scholars often look to war diaries and letters for their testimony to the state of the individual in combat. Through close reading, I trace how Pirelli’s writings negotiate his immense privilege and his attempt to construct a moral identity in the midst of war. I consider how they demonstrate his break with his wartime ideals and Fascism and how they anticipate his later transition from industrial heir to socialist activist. My examination of these diaries reveals the ambiguities inherent in this transformation of Fascist and bourgeois subjectivity.

Matteo Renzi’s eruption on to the Italian political scene is now overcoming the inertia of the Italian political system, with a highly personalised leadership style which is challenging the Democratic Party’s (Partito Democratico, PD) organisational model. Renzi’s great innovation on the Italian left is the enforcement of a post-ideological leadership which is able to attract wide support due to a vigorous style of communication and skill in the use of traditional and new media. This article analyses the rise of this new charismatic leadership and the way in which it challenged the traditional organisational model of the PD, and aims to identify the main elements that define it at national and party level.

Most books by or about Antonio Gramsci reproduce on their covers the same studio photograph dating from the early 1920s. It is a head and shoulders portrait showing Gramsci with longish hair, dark coat buttoned at the neck, unsmiling and looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. This was also the image of him most commonly displayed in Communist Party branches all over Italy from the late 1940s to 1991. Yet if we compare it with other extant photographs of Gramsci, as well as with those of other revolutionary leaders adopted as iconic in the communist movement, we can see it differs from the former and resembles the latter in several ways. The most striking difference is the erasure of any sign of Gramsci’s bodily impairment: the curvature of the spine and short stature resulting from the spinal tuberculosis he had as a child. The article examines the history of this photograph and the way it became adopted as the approved image of Gramsci and considers what was at stake in removing from official memory a condition of disability that was central to his own personal and political identity.

Long neglected by critical literature and historians, the Neapolitan journal Sud (1945–1947) shared similar aims and objectives with the more famous Il Politecnico, although the two journals were inserted into and connected with lively yet different cultural environments and networks, which crucially influenced their outputs. Most notably, both journals paid significant attention to politically committed literary and essay translations. By combining an analysis of the journals’ articles and translations with the editors’ published and unpublished correspondence, the article reassesses the journals’ relationship and illuminates the engagement of the two editorial boards through translations. The analysis of the two intellectual networks and projects will re-establish the relevance of Sud in stimulating a transnational dialogue and will reconsider the role of translation in shaping the editors’ political identities. Finally, the article offers a geo-cultural perspective on post-war Italian impegno by charting its multiple, both national and transnational, identities.

The body partially disrobed as a visual strategy for self-branding is the theme of this article. During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon. Mussolini’s partial nudity is considered here as a powerful political tool. The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic (Sperling 2014, 21). Deconstructing the visual language of Fascist propaganda that made the man into a myth, this article illustrates the most iconic aspects of Mussolini’s visual strategy, demonstrating his innovative capacity to take advantage of a modern attitude towards self-representation, similar to that adopted by today’s heads of state.

The ‘école barisienne’ refers to a group of intellectuals, active between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, who brought their academic and political activity together in order to bring the cultural heritage of Italian communism up to date and to construct a new theory of the revolution. Interpreting the student movement of 1968 as the historical agent of a social and political revolution, their intention was to transform the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a ‘partito-società’ (‘party-society’) that could take hold of the new generation’s demand for democracy and overturn the hegemony of Christian Democracy, understood as the ‘partito-Stato’ (‘party-state’). This article retraces the life of this intellectual grouping, from the education of its proponents, marked by the Southern Question as a national question, through to the demise of their project. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the research activity of the école, highlighting some significant analytical categorisation used in its historiographical output, its political activity, and the national position of the PCI.

This article looks at two sites of memory in northern Italy that are geographically and temporally close but are remembered and narrated in different ways. Referring to specific tragic events that took place in the Valle Antigorio (northern Val d’Ossola) – the destruction of a village by the construction of a hydroelectric basin in 1938 and a massacre of partisans on a cableway in 1944 – it shows how memory can not only be divided but also connected and disconnected through fluid memoryscapes and remembrance practices that respond to shifting political contexts and a varying sense of belonging.

Working at the intersection between literary history and periodical studies, this article investigates the role played by the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (Rome, 1948–1960) in processes of Anglo-Italian literary transfer. The article charts the journal’s British network, analysing quantitatively the presence of both established and new writers. Further, it focuses on Botteghe Oscure’s publishing and distribution policy in the United Kingdom, drawing on its founder Marguerite Caetani’s correspondence in order to interrogate the location of the journal within the Italian and the English literary systems, and thus illuminate the journal’s role as a site of literary production as it was shaped in both Italy and Britain.

This article examines the most important documentary film about the Italian ‘victory’ in Ethiopia, Il cammino degli eroi, by Corrado D’Errico (1936), the primary aim being to shed light on its complex iconographic system of representation. The first part examines the representation of the ‘African Mussolini’. In the second part, the article analyses the ‘conqueror’s gaze’ in the visual perspective employed by D’Errico in his account of the new Italian colony. The third part is devoted to arguing the juxtaposition between ‘Italian Creation and Ethiopian apocalypse’. Finally, the last part of the article deals with the reasons for the Ethiopian war.

This essay explores the 1950s as a space of cultural transition through two bodies of iconic images: Tazio Secchiaroli’s 1958 reportage of Aiché Nanà’s striptease and Franco Pinna’s documentation of the rituals of mourning during his work in Salento with anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. Produced on the eve of the miracolo economico, these images are iconic condensations of the contrasting cultural horizons defining the national imaginary of 1950s Italy. Challenging the self-containment of these images, the essay journeys outside the frames into the surrounding historical, cultural and geographical landscapes. To explore how, through photography, Italy visually negotiated the persistence of the past and the advent of modernity, the author traces a genealogy of Italian photography from political action to paparazzismo and examines the significance of the ethnographic journey to the south. Pinna’s photography and de Martino’s ethnography emerge as sites where post-war Italy faces the intractable realities of death and the return of a ‘bad’ past. The essay investigates how ritual mourning engages the photographic image to reveal an amnesiac culture of the spectacle exposing Italy’s relation to history as a modern repressed.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the phenomenon of ransom kidnapping in Italy between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, a period in which hundreds of citizens were abducted and held by Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian Mafia, and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. While ransom kidnapping far surpassed political kidnapping in the number of victims it produced, it has received only a fraction of the scholarly attention that has been given to political abductions during the anni di piombo. Tracing the different roots, periods, and development of ransom kidnapping, this article sheds light on the distinct uses that banditry, the Mafia, and the ’Ndrangheta made of this crime; highlights the impact that national economic transformations and the state had on the increase of this phenomenon; and demonstrates how for the Italian underworld, kidnapping was both a reaction to and a means of modernisation. It also argues that particularly in the case of the ’Ndrangheta, kidnapping became a veritable industry.