First let me express my gratitude to the American Bar Asociation for its kind invitation to address you this afternoon and to the DePaul University Center for Church/State Studies for organizing this showcase presentation. I would like to commend the American Bar Association for bringing important issues of public concern to the attention of the nation at large. I would also like to pay tribute to the DePaul Center for Church/State Studies because of its impressive initial efforts at sustained legal research into the complex relationship between religion and government in American Society.

I have been asked to address a topic to which I have devoted considerable time and reflection during the past year: the role of the religious leader in the development of public policy. I want you to understand clearly at the outset that I do not come before you as a politician or a policy expert; I am a believer and a pastor in the Catholic Church. What I say to you this afternoon is a reflection and an extension of the concern of the teaching and practice of the Church throughout the world.

In Present-day English blame is known to be the only verb which participates in what Levin (1993) calls the ‘blame alternation’ (e.g. Mira blamed the accident on Terry vs Mira blamed Terry for the accident). This article investigates how the modern usage has developed since the verb was borrowed from Old French at the beginning of Middle English, an area which has received little attention so far. With a comprehensive survey of the quotations database of the OED Online, the main focus is on the diachronic relationship between different syntactic patterns and the animacy of the target of blame. It will be demonstrated that, contrary to the common accounts in grammars and previous studies, the target is often not an animate being, and the two constructions forming the blame alternation have a very different origin and development, with a gap of five centuries between their first attestations. The status of the participant role expressing the cause of blame, which is considered to be omissible if it receives a definite interpretation from the context (e.g. Mira blamed Terry), will also be questioned.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.