Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) is one of the most influential intellectuals of Italian and European twentieth-century history. As 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of Salvemini's birth, this special issue of Modern Italy aims to attract the attention of an international readership and contribute to filling the gap in scholarly publications in English, offering a tool to approach Salvemini's intellectual production and biography. We have chosen to focus on four aspects of Salvemini's life that we consider particularly suitable for introducing his personal trajectory and the evolution of his thinking, adopting a transnational approach: his interpretation of the Great War and the Adriatic question; his antifascist exile in Great Britain and, from 1934, in the United States; and the publication of his most important studies on Fascist Italy. The choice of these topics aims to shed light on Salvemini's contacts and stimulating exchanges with foreign scholars, his international experiences, and how these transformed his ideas on Liberal and Fascist Italy.

This article investigates the role that Italian food companies like Barilla pasta played in creating narratives of East African empire at the apex of the Fascist ventennio. It aims to use the commercial remnants of Fascist empire to provide a more thorough accounting of how colonialism shaped the modern cultural history of Italian pasta. To do so, I analyze the paper ephemera, that is, the pasta advertisements and packaging, that connected occupied East Africa to Italy, demonstrating how regime projects to promote grain evolved into corporate projects in private industry. I argue that these two stories form a single cohesive narrative, one that can unite much of the excellent work that has been done on Fascist agriculture in empire with the transnational history of Italian food companies. East African empire, as depicted by Italian pasta shapes and advertisements, was consumable. At stake in this inquiry lies the shifting question of Italian national identity, framed by food products in global contexts.

This article analyses the development of Italian health policies in the post-Second World War period. Shortly after the setting up of the ‘Beveridge model’ and the creation of the British National Health Service, Italy also introduced a new approach to health, which became part of the Constitution. However, the implementation of the necessary reforms was delayed due to resistance from the country's institutions and government parties. The introduction of a radical health reform became possible only in 1978 through pressure generated from social conflicts, trade unions and left-wing parties. The implementation of the National Health Service encountered a number of obstacles due to the specific conditions of Italy, but also owing to changes at the international level. The neoliberal policies started in the 1980s introduced restrictions in health spending, the regionalisation and privatisation of services, and a new selective approach to health. In spite of these limitations and contradictions, the Italian healthcare system has been considerably successful, leading to strong improvements in health and to a life expectancy at birth among the longest in Europe. The recent developments – and the experience of the pandemic – confirm the important impact of a public, universal health service and, at the same time, the persistent policy efforts aimed at weakening its reach.

On 3 February 2018, in the town of Macerata, an Italian citizen with far-right sympathies deliberately fired several shots from his car at nine African immigrants, injuring six. The article argues that this shooting can be considered an act of lone-actor terrorism, an anomaly in the Italian context. Based on the social science literature on this subject, the paper analyses the profile of the shooter and the dynamics of the attack. Moreover, adopting a relational perspective to radicalisation, it examines the attacker's interactions: on the one hand, he was in contact with different political organisations that could represent ‘echo chambers’ for the tacit validation or even the justification and amplification of radical beliefs, including on the relation between immigration and security; on the other hand, he was not subject to their discipline and social control. This peripheral social position helps explain this case of lone-actor terrorism, in a national context where far-right mobilisation and violence have historically assumed collective forms.

In 1958, A.J.P. Taylor's essay The Troublemakers explored the tradition of dissent against power politics in the United Kingdom. Gaetano Salvemini, who had always shown a consistent interest in British political and cultural debates, shared many of the positions put forward by these ‘troublemakers’, such as free trade, the fight against military expenditure, and suspicions regarding standing armies. At the outbreak of the First World War, Salvemini used these arguments to support Italy's involvement in the war against autocratic and militarist central powers. Salvemini's journal L'Unità reported the stances expressed by a ‘troublemaker network’ called the Union of Democratic Control, despite their criticism of the United Kingdom's line of action during the war. In the course of the conflict, Salvemini kept in close contact with a specific group of ‘troublemakers’ around Robert Seton-Watson's journal The New Europe. Salvemini championed The New Europe's fight for subject nationalities in the Habsburg Empire, though he criticised their support of Yugoslavian claims to Istria, Trieste and Venezia Giulia. This essay will focus on the complex relationship between Salvemini and these British ‘troublemakers’ through the former's writings and correspondence.

On 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Achille Occhetto, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), announced that the Party needed to transform itself, implicitly including changing its name. His announcement launched a 15-month-long process that culminated in the dissolution of the PCI and the rise of a new political organisation, which became a member of the Socialist International. Drawing on the individual and collective memories of former Turinese PCI officials, this essay examines the complex, tortuous abandonment of the communist reference and the disintegration of the political community surrounding the Party. Because of their highly varied reactions, the dissolution of the PCI caused fragmentation of the subsequent careers and paths of former Party ‘comrades’. To this day, the 1989 turning point continues to inspire highly diverse memories among former Italian communists.

Over the last 30 years, Silvana Patriarca, a professor of Contemporary History at Fordham University, New York, has deeply and consistently investigated the construction of the Italian national narrative: its ‘long term’ genealogy, its characteristics, its tensions. Her first book, Numbers and Nationhood (Patriarca 1996), focused on the co-production of statistical knowledge and the national image of Italy during the Restoration and the Risorgimento, rereading the interplay of science, culture, and politics in the formation of bourgeois ‘public opinion’ in the liberal period. In Italian Vices (Patriarca 2010), she dissected the rhetoric and tropes of the national character, its ostensible fragility, and the different political uses of the recurring discourse on Italian vices and virtues, from the Risorgimento to the Republic.

In 1925 the Fascist dictatorship forced Gaetano Salvemini to leave Italy and begin a new life in exile. Salvemini understood he could find political and financial support in London to achieve two main aims: to live a decent life as an antifascist exile and fight the Fascist dictatorship from abroad. Thanks to a network encompassing intellectuals, academics, journalists, and politicians, London provided Salvemini with a platform for sharing antifascist stances outside Italy. This essay will develop research on this topic by taking into account Salvemini's conference speeches, articles, books, and essays written while in Britain, from 1925 to 1934. The corpus of the selected texts will show that Salvemini carefully singled out topics that were able to attract the attention of a foreign audience, particularly British public opinion. Therefore, the analysis of Salvemini's intellectual production during this period and the reaction of the press will contribute to cast a new light on his antifascist strategies; in other words, it will lead to a consideration of the extent to which being part of a British intellectual network transformed his approach to the antifascist struggle.

In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.

In today's Europe, commemorations can be times at which to affirm international reconciliation, based notably on the knowledge produced by historians who are becoming progressively cosmopolitan. However, commemorations are also used by national-populist political parties for electoral purposes and can lead to tensions with neighbouring states. This was the case in Trieste in September 2019, when the city council executive (controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition) decided to erect a statue of Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 years after he had occupied the nearby city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in Croatia. This commemoration led to a series of debates among historians, especially in Italy. Based on a critical discourse analysis and an interdiscursive approach to narratives produced by historians for colleagues and for the broader society, the current research investigates the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history when in parallel a commemoration is coordinated by national-populist forces in a public space.

The article uses archival sources to critique the currently dominant etymological approach to the history of the word ’ndrangheta as used to refer to the Calabrian mafia. Scholars such as Paolo Martino and John Trumper have latched onto the word's ancient Greek origins to argue that the mafia organisation that we today call ’Ndrangheta has origins dating back many centuries. Moreover, according to Martino in particular, the flattering connotations of the word ’ndrangheta (courage, martial prowess, manliness) indicate that the ’Ndrangheta as a social phenomenon was rooted in the same positive values, and that it only later degenerated into criminality. This article proposes that the work of Martino and Trumper represents a largely evidence-free extension of etymology into the field of history. Analysing the latest archival evidence about the word from criminal trials conducted in the 1920s and early 1930s, and setting it in the context of current historiography and criminology on the ’Ndrangheta, the article argues that two conclusions about the history of the word are likely: that the use of ’ndrangheta as a name for the Calabrian mafia began at around the time it first appeared in the documentary sources; that the first to adopt it were mafiosi themselves.

This essay analyses Salvemini's major works on Fascism, namely The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), Mussolini Diplomate (1932) and Under the Axe of Fascism (1936). The focus of this analysis is twofold: to explore both Salvemini's methodology and the events leading to the publication of these works. In The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, Salvemini examines the origins and the rise of Mussolini's movement, highlighting the complicity of the monarchy, the army, and industrial magnates. In Mussolini Diplomate, he analyses Fascist foreign policy from 1922 to 1932, in which Salvemini is unable to identify a consistent strategy, but only a propagandistic approach aiming to foster diplomatic relations. In Under the Axe of Fascism, Salvemini dissects Fascist economics, debunking the idea that the corporate state was an original and equitable compromise in the conflict between capital and labour, as was being portrayed abroad. An analysis of these three volumes brings into focus some noteworthy aspects of Salvemini's so-called ‘historiographical workshop’, which have hitherto been overlooked by historians (such as his adept use of sources and his endeavour to combine social sciences and economics), as well as underscoring his ability to forge cultural and intellectual networks, an essential element for undertaking such a complex task.

This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the ‘outsiders’ turned into ‘enemies’ and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time.

This historiographical article will argue that the March on Rome (October–November 1922) was the end point of a serious and at that point unique insurrectionary project, which followed three intense years of Fascist violence (where the state had rarely if ever taken on the Fascists, and had often colluded passively or actively with them). It was accompanied by violence and constant threats of further violence, in Rome and across Italy. It was in no way a bluff – but also stood as a warning to all those who still imagined that Fascism could be opposed, on the streets, in parliament, or at the ballot box. The violence hit bystanders, but was also targeted at the private homes of communists, socialists and hated liberals, and at centres of urban resistance in Rome itself. This article will look in detail at the ways historians have understood the March on Rome, and systematically removed the violence from that event, ignored the March itself and played down the role of the squadristi. It will also look at the powerful role of a ‘what if’ counter-factual which has dominated most accounts of the March on Rome to date, with some recent exceptions.

This essay aims to analyse the presence of neofascist organisations and far-right terrorism in Italy in the early 1970s from a new perspective. Firstly, it will focus on the activities to combat the subversive structures of the ‘black galaxy’ carried out by regional institutions through the creation of special ‘regional commissions of inquiry on the problems of neofascism’. Between 1974 and 1975, these commissions carried out an extensive inventory of the movements, associations and organisations of the Italian far right. Their aim was to show the spread of the phenomenon and its local roots. Building upon the information gathered by the regional commissions, the essay will analyse the relationships between the various far-right groups in Italy and their European counterparts. The final part of the article will focus on the influence of local specificities in defining the relations between extremist movements beyond national borders.

Although there is a wide-ranging historiography dealing with psychoneurosis, various manifestations of psychic suffering widespread among traumatised soldiers during the Great War have received less attention. This essay, based on an analysis of soldiers' clinical files in Italian psychiatric hospitals, draws out these phenomena. The main forms assumed by this kind of trauma are three: soldiers who strip off their uniform and wander around naked; a sort of regression to childhood; and a particular type of hysteria. The essay stresses how existingstereotypes about women were adapted to form a new way of describing masculinity in crisis, and the new political subject: the masses. Too many emotions, too many nerves, define the affected men: they are subjects deprived of personality, and their predicament highlights the transition from soldier-hero to mass-soldier.

Long neglected, Gaetano Salvemini's years of exile (1925–1949) now constitute a crucial period for reconsidering his intellectual and political profile. This article intends first to propose an overall interpretation of Salvemini's exile that considers the years 1919 to 1925 as the culmination of a profound turning point in his life. The central part of the essay is devoted to reconstructing the genesis of Salvemini's relationship with the United States and dwells on the reflections written after his first trip overseas in 1927. In them it is possible to find a clear analysis of the impact of Fascist propaganda on American soil and a definition of the tasks that exiles were called upon to perform in their host countries. Building on these premises, the study rereads Salvemini's years of American exile by focusing on three aspects. Firstly, his great ability to adapt to the American academic world. Secondly, his commitment to the field of research, with works dedicated to the study of Fascism, some centred on a reinterpretation of the concept of democracy and others on the methodology of history. Thirdly, his prodigious activity carried out in the antifascist struggle.

The centenary of the March on Rome has prompted Modern Italy's Contexts and Debates section to focus on the public uses of history in reference to interwar Fascism. We are looking into the ‘Past, Present, and Future of the Italian Memory of Fascism’, to borrow the title of Guido Bartolini's interviews that were published in our issue 27 (4), 2022. While commemorations and anniversaries shouldn't inherently influence academic research agendas, a broader understanding of public memory can help us to understand the current political mood in Italy. For example, it can explain why the centennial and other comparable ‘fascist’ anniversaries now have little meaning for most of the Italian public and are scarcely addressed by politicians. Indeed, most Italians seems to suffer from political amnesia. The condition is so serious that not even a dramatic occurrence such as the victory of the proudly post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party at the election of September 2022 has proved able to cure it. Happening just a few days before the centenary of the March on Rome, the electoral results were surely expected to elicit a strong reaction by left-wing politicians and intellectuals – perhaps a mass demonstration, like the one that took place in Milan on 25 April 1994, in the aftermath of the first victory of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, when another post-fascist party, Alleanza Nazionale, took power. Yet nothing of that sort has happened in 2022. Why?

In 1881, Giovanni Verga defined Milan as ‘la città più città d'Italia’ (‘Italy's most urban city’). A statement of some significance, as at that time Rome and Turin could each legitimately claim to have much greater political if not economic clout. Almost one and a half centuries later, the role of the capitale morale as the pulsing heart of a country incessantly searching for both a modern national identity and a city-centred narrative remains unchallenged, as proved by two books straddling cultural history, personal memoir and current affairs.