This summary presents the proceedings of the two-day conference held in December 2025 as part of the preparatory work for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Italian History. Conceived as a collective intellectual workshop, the conference brought together scholars working across chronological, thematic, and methodological boundaries to reflect on how modern Italy’s history can be narrated and rethought in handbook form. Over two days, participants discussed the construction of Italian identity, from the eighteenth century to the present, foregrounding the interaction between political cultures, social structures, and cultural representations. The eight panels explored national identity before and after unification; the role of media, Catholicism, and war; gender, sexuality, and race; crime and deviance; colonialism; urban development and environmental inequality; labour, industrialisation, and economic crises; Fascism and antifascism; and the architectural, cultural, and mnemonic legacies of the twentieth century. The conference functioned not merely as a presentation of individual chapters, but as a forum in which contributors tested interpretative frameworks, identified historiographical gaps, and refined their arguments. In doing so, it played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual coherence of The Bloomsbury Handbook, ensuring that it reflects current debates while offering a critical and inclusive account of modern Italian history.

By reconstructing the boundaries of a ‘community’ that shared the same emotional horizon when it came to love, this article explores the role that concepts of romantic love played in the development of modern ideas of sexuality, with a specific focus on the relationship between women, sexual desire and pleasure. After a brief description of the Italian historical and cultural context in which Paolo Mantegazza developed his sexual science and the role that romantic love played within it, I analyse his Fisiologia dell’amore to show how, even without explicit references to sexual acts, the book clearly alludes to sexual desire and pleasure. I then examine a selection of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the book. Finally, I show how ideas of romantic love and the introspective enquiry prompted by reading Mantegazza also affected women’s awareness of themselves as sexed beings capable of and entitled to experiences of pleasure.

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.

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 examines the Italian translations and reception of Winston S. Churchill’s The Second World War, using British and Italian archival materials and press sources. It shows how the Italian editions and serialisations introduced constant modifications – abridgements, omissions, textual cuts, and paratextual framing – in order to adapt the memoirs for a national audience. These interventions softened Churchill’s judgments on Italy, emphasised the ideological character of the war, and strengthened anti-Soviet themes, thus aligning the text with dominant cultural and political discourses of the postwar years. Analysis of contemporary reviews and newspaper debates highlights a polarised reception: critical distance or silence in intellectual journals contrasted with enthusiastic praise in mainstream dailies, where the memoirs were hailed as both literary achievement and democratic statement. The article argues that these editorial and translational strategies played a crucial role in integrating Churchill’s narrative into Italian collective memory, supporting a symbolic redefinition of Italy’s place from defeated nation to one of the victors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.