This introduction situates the Allied occupation of Italy as a distinctive yet comparatively underexplored case within the broader history of mid-twentieth-century military occupations. It traces the origins, peculiarities, and contradictions of Allied rule, foregrounding the tension between liberation and occupation that shaped both contemporary experiences and subsequent historiography. After outlining the fragmented development of the field and the long predominance of liberation-centred narratives, it calls for recontextualising the occupation of Italy within wider transnational and comparative frameworks. Rather than examining the Italian case solely through an exploration of its domestic impact, the article proposes treating it as an early laboratory for Allied ruling practices that were later applied elsewhere. In addition, it suggests exploring the Italian case through a set of research themes that have emerged from the new comparative field of Occupation Studies. The special issue advances this agenda by combining attention to hitherto marginalised aspects of the era with critical reflection on established subjects, thereby contributing to a reassessment of Italy’s place within the history of Allied rule in mid-twentieth-century Europe.

During the Fascist period, the extractive industry played an important role in Italy’s economic and political landscape, and sulphur was considered the autarkic mineral par excellence. This article reveals how the rhetoric surrounding the vigorous extraction of sulphur in Sicily was part of a larger project of reconstruction and reorganisation, which involved the division of land, reclamation efforts, military operations and colonisation. Drawing on examples of visual and written narratives from public reports, essays, illustrated magazines and exhibitions of the time, the article demonstrates that extraction was both the actual site of resource extraction and the Fascist extractive logic of consensus. The use of specific discourses and definitions enabled and justified the portrayal of humans and lands as extractable resources, creating images and imaginaries that normalised exploitation and transformation, and the regime’s extractive force.

This article examines the experiential and perceptual environment in which social encounters between soldiers and civilians occurred in Allied-occupied Italy (1943–45) and its enduring impact on the lives of those who experienced it. It does so by applying Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical framework of the ‘contact zone’ to the case of occupied Italy and by exploring it through the lens of oral history sources. The critical analysis of interviews with Antonio Taurelli, an Italian teenager in 1944 who fought with American soldiers, and Harry Shindler, a British veteran who married an Italian woman during the war, sheds light on how ordinary individuals shaped their own experience of occupation within the contact zone as well as on the life-changing impact of their encounters with ‘otherness’. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the social experience of the Allied occupation of Italy and the impact of military-civilian encounters in occupation environments more broadly.

This article analyses the agony column ‘Voi e il cinema’, launched in November 1938 in Cine illustrato, one of the most popular film magazines of the time. ‘Voi e il cinema’ invited readers to share their acting aspirations, but also to send in photographs of themselves that might contain the defining feature of a diva: photogenicity. The magazine was flooded with images of ‘ordinary young Italian women’ that created an intermediate visual grammar. Focusing on both the photographs and the editors’ responses, the article reveals how shared consumption practices redefined the relationship between public and private space. It also highlights the distance of the readers’ self-representations from Fascist models and sheds light on the role of American star culture in creating the ‘modern’ subject. Although they were not politically opposed to Fascist models, the photographs reveal a strong desire for social change and the perception of such change, particularly in relation to traditional female roles.

Author of Il Regno del Sud (1946), an influential first-hand history of the Kingdom of Italy that was set up in Allied territory after the 1943 armistice, Agostino degli Espinosa did much to shape Italian memory of the Allied occupation of Italy. In this article I examine for the first time degli Espinosa’s doubts about Italy’s postwar future, which appear in the margins of his history, and which come to the fore in his fiction. I argue that the critical re-evaluation of the work of this emblematic but understudied figure can shed light on Italy’s divided memories of the Second World War and the Allied occupation.

Public art is fundamental in the shaping of a city’s identity: in the city of Bologna’s case, this identity is inextricably tied to the Resistance. The presence or absence of women in monumental commemorations, then, becomes a way to either include or exclude them from this shared identity. By centring its analysis on the monuments dedicated to the Resistance’s fallen erected since 1945, this article will utilise the case study of Irma Bandiera to analyse women’s presence within the commemorative topography of the city. Through the study of two monuments, the Monumento Ossario ai Caduti Partigiani and the Memoriale alle 128 partigiane cadute, this article will also highlight the role of the local community in the creation of a shared and representative identity.

This article addresses cinematic remediations of literary works treating the Allied occupation of Naples: Liliana Cavani’s La pelle (1981) and Francesco Patierno’s Naples’44 (2016). Taking a memory studies approach, it surveys the corpus of cultural representations of the occupation and asks what the remediations studied contribute to the Italian cultural memory of the occupation. Analysis focuses on the diverse strategies deployed by the films to reshape the cultural memory of the occupation for their respective audiences. I argue that where Cavani’s remediation seeks to construct a feminist counter-memory of the Allied occupation, Patierno’s film betrays a contradictory impulse to both revive and lay the cultural memory to rest. I close by asking how successful the two films are in becoming meaningful ‘media of cultural memory’ (Erll 2010, 390) and what that may tell us about the place of the Allied occupation in Italian cultural memory at distinct historical junctures.

Through the analysis of a series of different documents preserved in the Fondo Tremaglia, I reconstruct the genesis and development of the National Day of Italian Labour Sacrifices in the World (Giornata nazionale del sacrificio del lavoro italiano nel mondo). The holiday was conceived by Minister for Italians in the World Mirko Tremaglia and designated by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the end of 2001. The analysis focuses on the recovery and exaltation of the memory of the Italian miners who died in the Marcinelle mining disaster in 1956, on the political and cultural dynamics of Italy at the time, and on Tremaglia’s saloino (he voluntarily joined the Italian Social Republic and was enlisted in the National Republican Guard) and missino (term used to refer to the members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano) past. The result is a multifaceted scenario for a commemoration that still exists today, but is largely unknown in the country where it was created.

During the Second World War, Allied-occupied Italy became the setting for a wide range of intimate encounters between local women and the occupiers, especially American soldiers. These relationships – ranging from romantic and consensual to transactional and coercive – reflected complex interactions with perceived ‘otherness’ and exposed tensions around race, gender, and power. US authorities, concerned about its social, cultural, and political implications, monitored ‘fraternisation’ closely. This article explores these dynamics by examining US Army marriage regulations and oral history interviews with Italian women who married American soldiers. Women’s experiences – shaped by region, class, and individual circumstance – represent a spectrum ranging from disillusionment to long-term partnership. These narratives offer a complex portrait of gender relations under occupation, revealing how military policy also intersected with and shaped the everyday lives of women during occupation.

This article analyses the relationship between Italian feminism and mental health in the 1970s, focusing on Turin. It explores the main theoretical debates that dominated feminist magazines and meetings during those years. In feminist groups and collectives, discussions about women’s wellness and illness began with the broader theme of health and knowledge of one’s body. However, they subsequently expanded to include personal, theoretical, clinical and political issues related to mental health. New experiences such as autocoscienza (consciousness-raising) and the practice of the unconscious allowed feminists to examine the effects of gender roles and models, existential contradictions, distress and intolerance, discomfort with doctors, psychiatric hospitalisation and the shortcomings of territorial services. The case of Turin shows that these experiences paved the way for subsequent interactions between feminism and the psychiatric reform movement.

The aim of this article is to analyse the Italian Nuova Destra. The first part examines the birth of the Nuova Destra within the current of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), referring particularly to Pino Rauti, a founder and leader. Following the experience of the magazine La Voce della Fogna and the Hobbit Camps, the first publishing initiatives of the Nuova Destra – Diorama letterario and Elementi, influenced by Alain de Benoist and the French Nouvelle Droite – were established. The second part analyses the path of the Nuova Destra as an autonomous cultural current. After Marco Tarchi’s expulsion from the MSI in 1981, the Nuova Destra launched an aggressive publishing strategy that failed to make the necessary organisational leap and came to an end around 1994. Nevertheless, the Nuova Destra has created a recognisable current, culturally eclectic and capable of ranging over different fields of knowledge with ‘metapolitics’ and ‘right-wing Gramscism’.

This article considers the function of American food and its exchange at the time of the Allied occupation of Italy to revisit the complexity of the encounter with the local population. Through unpublished diaries and confidential reports of the Psychological Warfare Branch, as well as video materials, published interviews and published diaries, the article makes the issues around food central to the understanding of the dynamics of the Italian occupation. While contributing to the growing literature on food availability in the Second World War, the article expands in particular on the historic function of American comfort food and rations, to explore the experience of the Italian occupation through the interactions of gifting, bartering and black market trade. It illuminates the complexity of mutual perceptions shaped by hope, nostalgia, supremacy, and fairness. It concludes with a reading of John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, which, as a cultural product, brings together and makes valid for future generations, the contrasting image of a benign and a damaging occupation explored in the article.

This study examines the political communication strategies of the Italian Marxist-Leninist and neo-Stalinist party, Sovereign and Popular Democracy (DSP), through a qualitative thematic analysis of its online discourse. The analysis identifies the core elements of the party’s agenda and assesses their potential alignment with the red-brownist movement, often linked to the pro-Russian far right. The research investigates the historical and political intersections between the Stalinist communist sphere and the postfascist Eurasianist and red-brownist factions. Particular attention is given to their shared anti-Western stance and historical connections to ‘left-wing fascism’ in the post-Second World War era. Italy provides a crucial case study, given its postwar role as a hub for radical movements on both the left and the right. The analysis also considers the ideological trajectory of the Italian far-right, particularly the Jeune Europe movement, to situate DSP’s discourse within broader historical and ideological frameworks.

The trajectory of Allied control in occupied Italy was characterised by the easing of pressure on local institutions in its progression from military government to institutional supervision. The structure of control was imagined as following three institutional steps, according to which the Allied Military Government would be succeeded – upon the re-establishment of a functioning Italian government – by an Allied Control Commission tasked with maintaining a supervisory role. A lesser-known institution, the Advisory Council for Italy, was established with the external contribution of Russian, French and subsequently Greek and Yugoslav representatives. This third body contributed to the political management of Italian affairs through a series of recommendations which helped shape the direction of the Allied occupation. By analysing the Council’s documentation, this article outlines its political objectives, institutional practices and internal tensions, while highlighting the development of a more widely co-ordinated Allied control policy for Italy.

This article revisits the often contradictory experience of Allied rule in Italy, challenging the narrative of liberation and proposing instead to embrace more emphatically the lens of ‘occupation’. Building on the author’s own contribution to the field and reviewing the evolution of the literature over the past decades, it explores five central themes that help redefine our understanding of this era: the temporal and spatial backdrop against which Allied rule unfolded, shaped by the notion of ‘co-belligerency’; the impact of total war on Italian society; the role of British and American military and political leadership in shaping occupation policy; the cultural and symbolic influence of American forces; and the impact of war and occupation on women. It argues that the occupation regime profoundly shaped Italy’s experience during the mid-twentieth century as well as its postwar identity, contributing to a persistent national pacifism and ambivalence towards the new superpowers.

After introducing the topic of antifascism on the internet and the issues that scientific publications encounter when facing the web, the first part of this contribution in Contexts and Debates examined the first of three digital history projects connected to this topic, the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste. In this following section, the attention is focused on two more publications: IF – Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista, a project tied to the issue of mobility for people persecuted by the Fascist regime; and Memorie in Cammino, a project that approaches its content and the user’s interaction with it in an entirely non-linear manner, reconstructing the lives and actions of those who resisted the regime.