This chapter investigates how coloniality and Indigeneity were locally negotiated at Monte Iato (Western Sicily) from the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. Architectural analysis and ceramic ‘fingerprints’ demonstrate that power-seeking elites employed Greek-style monumentalization to assert status while simultaneously fostering a counter-narrative of Indigenous authenticity. The interplay between imported and local cultural elements created multiple overlapping localities within the community. The evolving material culture reveals a dynamic process of sociopolitical differentiation and cultural entanglement, offering new insights into how locality and identity were co-constructed in a colonial matrix.

This chapter focuses on the Milan Exposition of 1906, an event of major national and international significance. I consider the Exposition’s musical and more broadly cultural activities in relation to contemporary fascination with Argentina, which was increasingly framed as a ’second Italy’. Musical highlights at the Exposition included a celebrated revival of Verdi’s classic La traviata: the first Italian staging of Verdi’s opera in period costume, featuring a creative team famous for their performances in Latin America. I examine the musical and cultural displays at the exposition before exploring the relationship between the Milan exposition and the La Scala production. If the exposition sought to reflect a specifically Milanese idea of ‘global’ space, I argue, operatic productions could at times operate in strikingly similar ways. In the context of shifting power relations between Italy and Argentina, operatic staging can therefore be understood as a significant discursive site for negotiating transatlantic relations, as operatic production became a vehicle of urban renewal at the end of Italy’s operatic nineteenth century.

The Sulcis region of southern Sardinia not only hosted the earliest Phoenician colonial settlement of the island (Sulky) but was also home to thriving Indigenous settlements of Iron Age Nuragic culture. The site of Nuraghe Sirai has yielded remarkable evidence that offers an insight in the relationships and interactions between these communities. Three detailed case studies of ceramic production and architecture show different skills and production techniques that were adopted and adapted over time. In the process, new traditions were invented, new economic connections were created and new power relations were built and imposed.

This chapter examines the transformations of the settlement of Morgantina in the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE though Appadurai’s concepts of “locality” and “colonization.” The use of local and imported vessels, particularly within the Four-Room Building’s dining assemblage, alongside inscribed names and other words in Greek and the Sikel language, highlights the overlapping networks with which the people of Morgantina engaged over time. By focusing on ritual and dining assemblages that showcase the adoption and adaptation of imported forms like Lakonian kraters and the endurance of local carinated cups, the dynamic production of locality at Morgantina is situated in broader Mediterranean networks.

This chapter examines the transatlantic career of Italo Montemezzi and particularly his opera L’amore dei tre re. Montemezzi’s work enjoyed a modest success in Italy but sensational acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera in 1914, where it was hailed as the finest Italian opera since the death of Verdi. On one level, the orchestral sophistication and overt symbolism of Montemezzi’s work appeared to blur familiar stylistic distinctions between Italian and German opera. But the breakneck pace of L’amore dei tre re also accorded with wider rhetoric of New York urbanism in the 1910s, at a time when musical modernism seemingly lagged behind the visual and literary arts. In the wake of the war, operatic criticism within Italy became newly militarised as Italian opera thrived across transatlantic stages, with efforts made to coordinate seasons between La Scala, Rome and the Colón. Montemezzi’s follow-up, La nave, failed to satisfy the ambitions placed upon it, even if L’amore was successfully presented at the Met for several decades. But La nave arguably marked the climax of efforts to frame Italian opera’s transatlantic reach as political power against waning geopolitical influence.

The Romantic Self is constituted by otherness, by relations that are in constant transformation. In the preceding pages, this issue has been addressed with a particular focus on the relationship between the self and nature. In this part of the book, we shall see that the same applies to the relationship between the self and history: the I cannot separate herself from, or impose herself on, the historical conditions in which she emerges; rather, these are part of the Romantic Self. In this chapter, in particular, I will show that the ‘defective’ essence of the Romantic Self hinders her to impose her sovereign will on the development of historical events. This is reflected in her incapacity to bring into unity the fragmentation of the modern age (described by Friedrich Schlegel through an opposition to the ancient epoch) and in the impossibility to interpret history as a manifestation of human progress. The absence of a unitary line in history challenges the hermeneutics of the present, too: on this, Schlegel’s genealogical perspective wants to give a solution.

This epilogue considers the operatic and political shifts that took place in Italy in the 1920s, as Mussolini’s government took power, a postwar economic crisis affected the theatrical sector, and new emigration laws were established in the United States. I argue that the Liberal Era has bequeathed key discourses about Italy, opera and italianità as well as influential operatic infrastructures that shape today’s transatlantic and global operatic industry. But the period is also firmly in the past: as witnessed by the transformation of Little Italy and La Boca into tourist districts and sites of memory. Several operatic stagings have sought to depict these two areas, shaped by Hollywood cinema and fascination with the mafia; but these are only one part of a broader historical landscape still awaiting full recognition.

This chapter shows how Minerva authors championed the Press, taught readers how to read them and helped to shift the culture in proto-Victorian ways. It collects together the solutions that women authors proposed to the range of domestic, social and political issues they tackled, argues that their iterative imitations created a community of readers, as well as of writers, and evaluates Minerva Press fiction by the Aesthetics of Reuse.

The chapter focuses on the Romantic philosophy of nature. This will permit us to point out how the relational idea of the Romantic Self is consistent with the image of the human being as located within nature. The human is not opposed to nature and is neither her master, but she is immersed in (and even constituted by) the entanglement of natural forces. Following a line of reflections that unites Spinoza, Leibniz, Herder, and Goethe to the Romantics, I will show the centrality of ‘life’. This is the inexhaustible source of forms created through repetitions and metamorphoses. As we will see at the end of the chapter, the Romantic interpretation of life is at the basis not only of their anthropology but also of their idea of normativity. Norms are, for the Romantics, instructions provided with a compelling force and are not only the formulation of interdictions. The dynamic conception of nature allowed the Romantics to reintegrate human beings into it and overcome the opposition between nature and freedom, nature and politics; however, a distinction between human and animal, or human and plants, is maintained. It is, though, not maintained in the sense of domination.