This article explores the Italian government’s attitude towards Trieste and its territory in public discourse and the unique role of the disputed area as a means of reinforcing, challenging or disrupting nationalist rhetoric of Italian nationhood after 1945. It argues that the central government’s projected image of the disputed border vacillated between that of a wall and a bridge at the southern tip of the Iron Curtain and was utilised to either strengthen or weaken past nationalist conceptualisations of Italian identity or ‘italianità’ within and outside the Adriatic city. While producing significant resistance within the Triestine community and its émigrés, this political process also succeeded in transforming this disputed territory from a stronghold of Western democracy into a bridge toward the socialist world within public discourse. This close reading of both political and public views of Italy’s eastern border ultimately reveals the inherent fluidity and constructed meaning of ideas of nationhood in Cold War Italy.

This article explores the intellectual discourse of Il Mulino’s intellectual group in relation to the transformation of Italian politics during the period leading up to the centre-left governments. First, it investigates Il Mulino’s cultural project of overcoming the hegemony of idealism by endorsing the empiricist approach favoured by Anglo-American social sciences, while establishing a new role for intellectuals. Then, it focuses on the group’s political agenda aimed at rationalising Italy’s ‘imperfect two-party system’. We argue that, within the Italian intellectual-political scenario, Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse sought to establish a new relationship between culture and politics. It tried to do so both by anchoring Italian political culture to the liberal- and social-democratic European tradition and by contributing to the stabilisation of Italian democracy, while proposing a reduction in the number of political parties.

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

This article is primarily concerned with interconnections between forms of impegno (political engagement) and aesthetic choices, as they were articulated in the literary and cultural journal Officina. In order to reassess the role of Officina within the Italian cultural and political debate of the day, this article considers two main narratives unfolding in the journal: the aesthetic rejection of Novecentismo, understood as the epitome of artistic autonomy, and the articulation of a form of Marxist impegno suitable for a neo-capitalist society and stemming from the class-based idea of the organic intellectual. Using published and unpublished correspondence, we argue that Officina had a pivotal role in producing a theoretical framework for the conceptualisation of a post-neorealist idea of Marxist critical analysis as well as of intellectual, aesthetic and political engagement.

The development of welfare policies aimed at mothers and children has been deeply influenced by women’s agency. This article explores the role played by Italian women politicians in the passing of the 1950 law on maternity rights. It examines the campaigns conducted by both left-wing and Catholic women,1 and discusses the arguments and strategies they used to ensure that this gendered issue was on the political agenda. Particular attention is given to the parliamentary history of this legislation. While the law was being debated antagonism between the parties was at its height, and competition between the opposing women’s organisations was fierce. Despite this, at a parliamentary level cross-party collaboration between women politicians was possible on this specific issue and was a crucial factor in the law being passed.

This article explores Gabriele Basilico’s photographs of the contemporary Italian environment and argues for their status as both iconic – that is to say, distinctive, highly visible, and memorable – and anti-iconic symbols or images. The discussion first explores the anti-iconic impulse in Basilico’s work. It marks out his standing as one of the most prominent proponents of the trend in contemporary Italian photography which sought to counter the mythic view of the country’s landscape and highlights his involvement in the trend’s seminal exhibition, Viaggio in Italia (1984). The article then makes a case for the simultaneous iconic nature of Basilico’s photographs by looking at the 2007/08 exhibition Milano si mostra. 1 Km con Gabriele Basilico, examining the ways in which Basilico’s images were made into icons of Milan’s urban identity.

Although Italian mafia scholars have recently been turning their attention to the Calabrian mafia (known as the ’Ndrangheta) diaspora in Australia, their efforts have been limited by conducting research remotely from Italy without the benefit of local knowledge. Australian journalists and crime writers have long played an important role in documenting ’Ndrangheta activities, but have in turn been limited by a lack of expertise in Italian language and culture, and knowledge of the Italian scholarly literature. As previously in the US, Australian scholarly discussion of the phenomenon has been inhibited, especially since the 1970s, by a ‘liberal progressive’ ‘negationist’ discourse, which has led to a virtual silence within the local scholarly literature. This paper seeks to break this silence by bringing the Italian scholarly and Australian journalistic and archival sources into dialogue, and summarising the clear evidence for the presence in Australia since the early 1920s of criminal actors associated with a well-organised criminal secret society structured along lines familiar from the literature on the ’Ndrangheta.

Tony Gentile’s photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino is one of the most reprinted Italian photographs of the twentieth century. Deriving a special status from its connection to the lost dead bodies of the judges, Gentile’s photograph is a cultural icon, which makes demands on viewers in the present like an uncanny revenant from 1992. This paper considers examples of ways the photograph has been visually, symbolically and materially manipulated by social agents in the years since the judges’ assassinations, to reflect on the polysemous power of the photograph. Considering visual adaptations of the photograph from anti-mafia demonstrations to monuments, and commemorative stamps; from football stadiums to political cartoons, this paper will show how Gentile’s photograph has become the quintessential visual symbol representing the struggles over the memory and meaning of the war against the mafia in contemporary Italy.

Italian visual propaganda often makes use of well-established imagery, to exploit its proven impact. Renaissance masterpieces with religious subject matter were recurrently reproduced on political posters in the early post-war years and during the referenda campaigns of 1974 and 1981, mostly to characterise the parties as Christian. In Italy and elsewhere these images now tend to be employed in a secular way, for instance to denounce injustices and atrocities, and invite compassion and solidarity for the victims. Symbolic motifs traditionally associated with specific ideological traditions also used to feature strongly in Italian visual propaganda; they virtually disappeared in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Christian-Democrat and Socialist parties in the wake of the Mani pulite investigations, and the Communist Party’s transformation into a social-democratic party. They have been replaced by new icons. Iconographic motifs dear to fascism and Nazism, however, continue to be used, by stealth or unabashedly, by Italian far-right organisations.