Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

This essay re-examines the question of Montaigne’s view of contemporary Italy and Italians by focusing on his allusions to Tasso in the Essais. It places Montaigne’s Italianism in the context of the virulent anti-Italian polemics in France in the 1570s and 1580s, and argues that his strategic choice of Tasso as an emblem for Italy, following his tour of the peninsula in 1580 to 1581, points to a conflicted, deeply ambivalent perspective on Franco-Italian relations in the late 16th century. In the Essais, Tasso and Italy become associated with brilliance and decay, madness and tragic decline.

This article analyzes the reaction of the British press to the Neapolitan government’s disaster relief efforts following a massive earthquake which struck the Basilicata region in late 1857. The Bourbons’ failure to provide substantive relief and their corresponding effort to hide the scope of the destruction led to a wave of outrage in a range of British periodicals, most notably in literary journals. The article shows how this campaign helped consolidate British public opinion against the Bourbon monarchy at a time when British support for Italian unification was essential. Special consideration is given to Household Words by Charles Dickens, which provided the definitive commentary on the disaster, retelling the story of horrific destruction, local incompetence and ultimate (British) relief efforts with a narrative touch calculated to marshal antipathy towards the Bourbons.

Questo scritto esamina la poesia del Risorgimento Italiano prodotta fuori d'Italia. Per molti versi, tale poesia può considerarsi come un'importante componente del ben più vasto fenomeno del Romanticismo Europeo. Poeti di grande rilevanza, come Ugo Foscolo – che può considerarsi un precursore del Risorgimento Italiano – Giovanni Berchet, Giovanni Visconti Venosta e altri, vissero buona parte della loro vita in esilio, sia perchè banditi politicamente dall'Italia sia per l'espatrio da loro stessi voluto. La loro attività fuori d'Italia contribuì fortemente alla causa italiana, all'unità e all'indipendenza della loro nazione natia. In particolare, questo saggio esamina la posizione del Foscolo e del Berchet, quali figure esemplari di questo specifico fenomeno avvenuto fuori dall'Italia, i cui riflessi e le cui ripercussioni furono molto funzionali al processo stesso di unificazione e indipendenza italiana.

This essay analyzes a novel entitled Doctor Antonio, published in 1855 in Edinburgh by an Italian exile, Giovanni Ruffini. During their ‘forced’ stay in an isolated village in the western part of the Italian Riviera, the aristocrat Sir John and his daughter Lucy discover a part of Italy that Northern European travelers had neglected until then. The romantic love story between Lucy and the Italian patriot Doctor Antonio contributed to make the region of Liguria a popular destination among British tourists, who eventually transformed the small village of Bordighera, where the novel is set, into a ‘British paradise,’ as Italian novelist and journalist Edmondo De Amicis defined it in an essay published at the beginning of the 20th century (De Amicis, 1906).

Giuseppe Mazzini announced, but never actually wrote, a biography of the Italian patriot and poet, Ugo Foscolo. This article recounts Foscolo’s last years in exile by means of available documents in order to explain why Mazzini renounced the writing of Foscolo’s biography and decided instead to complete and publish, under the latter’s name, an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy that Foscolo had merely begun to sketch.

This article uses Eugenio Montale's poem ‘Dora Markus’ to reflect on considerable complications attending the concept of the patria vera, or the homeland, in borderland Italy. The geographical locales are Istria – the peninsula southeast of Trieste on the Adriatic coast – and Carinthia some distance to the north, where Italy meets Austria and Slovenia. Both places have been multiethnic and politically contested regions for centuries, changing political hands so frequently that they make a mockery of the very notion of homeland. This article considers historical, poetic, and linguistic knowledge to offset much of the nationalist, ideological rhetoric surrounding the two world wars.

As a writer of travelogues from Europe, Morocco and Constantinople, Edmondo De Amicis is unique in his ability to combine descriptions of foreign places and peoples with impressions regarding his own country. The encounter with Africa, which De Amicis explores on many levels, reaches beyond the reporting of sights and customs to assert the validity of Western values and beliefs. The present analysis of the travelogue Marocco (1876) demonstrates how travel writing as practiced by De Amicis represents a journey toward self-knowledge, which, given the writer’s immense popularity in late 19th century Italy, has important implications for the broader notion of Italian nationhood.

‘Thus, one should not let this opportunity pass, for Italy, after so much time, to see her redeemer. I cannot express with what love he would be received in all those provinces that have suffered from these floods from outside’ (Machiavelli and Mansfield, 1998: 105).

Using the theories of Niccolò Machiavelli, I study in this article, from a transatlantic perspective, Italians who helped build the Chilean nation. Italians did not emigrate to Chile on a grand scale; however, the success of those immigrants is a study in fortuna and virtù. Those honored by Chile with ‘monuments,’ or those who built edifices of their own, such as Pastene, Rondizzoni and Toesca, among others, can be called ‘monuments of Italian identity’ in Chile. In this context, Machiavelli's oeuvre serves as a rhetorical framework for understanding the actions of Italians who fought for and helped shape the Chilean nation.

A number of writers from the USA lived in Italy during the years of the unification of Italy, both during the years of the Roman Republic and after Rome had become the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Among the most important figures were William Dean Howells, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Henry James. In some of their writings, these authors discuss several aspects of Rome, taking into consideration especially the artistic importance of the city, but also and inevitably its social and political relevance in the Risorgimento.

This article seeks to arouse the readers’ interest in the literary works inspired by the Italian Risorgimento and its close connection with emigration to the United States. Though this is not a widely known branch of the Italian–American literary canon, it has, at least, two great merits. Firstly, it helps to project a more positive picture of the average Italian immigrant away from the cliché of the ‘dago’. Indeed, the majority of Italian immigrants were honest and hard-working people, who had escaped from absolute poverty, hoping to build a better future in America, where they generously contributed to its economic and social growth. Secondly, it arouses Americans’ sympathy with Italy’s fight for freedom, if for no other reason, because the ideals at stake were certainly comparable to those of pre-Civil War America. (See the short story ‘Domenico's New Year’, in which the protagonist puts his life at risk for American freedom and democracy.)

This short paper addresses thorny issues in the dynamics of the social imagination and public debate. Insofar as they deal with the ongoing acute political and economic crisis, these topics are difficult to gauge and easily misunderstood. I will attempt nonetheless to sketch the image Italy has of itself, evaluating how plausible and trustworthy it might be, whether it needs rethinking, and what the reasons would be if this were not to happen.

Is it possible to write a history of the relationship between Islam and Italian identity? This paper refuses the possibility of a history progressing uninterrupted from the Middle Ages to the present day. In order to verify other possible approaches, the author proposes to consider the history of Italy and Islam by identifying specific subjects, or thematic spaces: war and politics, diplomatic relationships, trading history; but also an analysis of the contacts between groups and individuals (for example slaves and renegades) and other cultural exchanges. Finally, the article considers the contemporary problems posed by imperialism and orientalism in the 19th and 20th centuries and by the recent migratory movements which have led to a new Muslim presence within Italian territory.

From 1968 to 2005, Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro made mixed-media sculptural installations featuring the well-known geographical ‘boot’ of Italy. He placed these curious maps, fitted with ironic titles, in various positions – hanging, tilted, inverted, lying on the ground – and locations. The works have elicited multiple interpretations, ranging from formal, material experiments and anecdotal vignettes to wry references to the darker side of Italian history. Fragmented and united, light and heavy, simple and complex, Fabro’s Italie pose deeper questions about the contradictions of Italy’s national identity as it struggles to emerge from its past into modern times.

During the crucial years in which Italian society for the first time in its history became an advanced industrial society, took part in a free international economy and consolidated the foundations of its young democracy, a group of Italian and American trade unionists started to look at ways to transform work and business in Italy. These attempts sometimes met with success but at other times with failure.

Italian trade unionism split into different parts: the CGIL trade union remained tied to the economic culture and praxis of the Third Communist International, while the CISL mixed the ideas of J Commons and J Maritain and M Mounier, changing completely its strategy between 1948 and 1950. It was a ‘new union’ walking away from its own traditions: many of CISL’s opponents called it the ‘American Trade Union’ and accused it of imitating the USA’s productivity, industrial democracy, vertical organization and its complete autonomy from the state and political parties.

So far, the historiography has read this event only in the context of the Cold War, but this point of view does not explain all those matters that persisted in the Italian Labor market: today’s policies for productivity, the new collective bargaining reforms and the problems of industrial democracy are just some examples that demonstrate that at the end of the Cold War the same issues remained.