In 1961 the peace activist and anti-mafia campaigner Danilo Dolci spoke at a protest event at the Italian centennial of unification celebrations hosted by the City of Philadelphia. The reactions to the talk he gave on development initiatives in Western Sicily provide some insight into the transnational discussion that was developing around the mafia, governance and leadership in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dolci and his supporters made the suggestion that the problems encountered by the post-war governments in Italy, Sicily and Philadelphia were a result of leaderships which presented or made the appearance of change but did not fix the underlying problems. This article maps how the conversation developed, why the idea of the mafia as a ‘thing’, an operating criminal organisation with Sicilian origins, was such an important narrative, and what it meant for those trying to make a claim to leadership positions.

This article shows how the discovery of electrical energy that could be transmitted and used in industry triggered a huge effort to take advantage of Southern Italy's water resources and improve its natural environment. In the early years of the twentieth century, primarily through the initiative of Francesco Saverio Nitti, the great statesman and environmental expert, the rivers and forests of the South became an object of particular attention in that they were to be the central element in conservation measures whose aim was to produce cheap electricity, but which also necessarily involved reforestation, state control of forestry, the embankment of rivers and other changes. For southern reformers such plans were envisaged as the way to launch industrialization in the South.

The focus of this article is the revisionist course which the Italian Socialist Party embarked upon after 1956 and which led up to the first Centre-Left government. The article challenges two quite well established views. One view is that the transformation experienced by the PSI during the 1956-64 period was simply tactically expedient and devoid of any substance and consistency. This article argues, by contrast, that these years represented, in Alessandro Pizzorno's words, a veritable ‘Copernican revolution’. This period of revisionism was as important as the better-known revisionisms elaborated during the same period by other European Socialist parties such as the German SPD or British Labour. The second main argument is that ‘structural reformism’, the new strategy adopted by the PSI after 1956, was not, as it has often been described, an expression of ‘duplicity’ owing to the party's incapacity to behave like a genuinely reformist party - a phenomenon that has allegedly long characterized parties of the Left. Instead, the strategy was reflected in the changes to European socialism during the early 1960s. In particular, this period marked a contrast to the previous years which were characterized by the dominance of ideas of ‘redistributive’ socialism, à la Anthony Crosland. This period marked also a shift among Socialist parties towards the acceptance of greater state controls over the economy by way of public planning and ownership.

From 2008 Sicily’s president was Raffaele Lombardo, leader of the Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA), a party founded by politicians who were already well established in the city of Catania and its province. In the summer of 2012 Lombardo’s government was forced to resign following an investigation that exposed the connections between the president and Mafia families in eastern Sicily. This article draws on two ethnographic studies carried out in Catania between 2009 and 2013: in describing the political behaviour and power relations between voters, local councillors and MpA executive officers, the research examined the tendency to internalise the widely understood narrative about politics and patronage in Sicily that Lombardo and his colleagues embodied. By relating ethnographic data to the legal documents showing the links between MpA leaders and Cosa Nostra bosses, I argue that social and cultural support for the party will have included support from local Mafia members.

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.

The new media system that has emerged worldwide since the early 1990s is characterized by increasing use of digital technologies in every area and convergence between once distinct media. In Italy there have been a number of national variations on this global pattern: relative weakness of state regulation, a move away from the dominance of the system by ‘generalist’ television, a high rate of cellular phone use and a slower than average growth of Internet use. As far as consumption is concerned, the most common categories used to describe the emergent system—personalization of media, increased individual choice and mobility—do manage to capture some important aspects, in Italy as elsewhere, but they obscure others, notably the structural constraints limiting individual choice, the formation of new media microcommunities and, conversely, the exclusion of particular groups of citizens from full participation in the new system.

Celebrity scandals are a useful tool to reveal the pervasiveness of expected ways of behaving within a particular culture or society. Italy of the early 1960s was particularly marked by these kinds of scandals, including that of singer Mina’s pregnancy by Corrado Pani in 1963. This article takes this scandal as a case study to explore how star image in this period in Italy was influenced by the established ideologies that governed social convention, morality, and traditional gender roles. It examines in detail the ways in which the popular press reported on this scandal, using the reports that covered the announcement of the pregnancy and then the birth to cast light on the extent to which the mainstream social values and ideas regarding the status quo and expected ways of behaving for women in Italy during the early 1960s were destabilised and/or reasserted through the star persona of Mina.

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.

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, a velina, challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to the velina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

The satirical film, Un americano a Roma is examined as a commentary on the absorption by Italians, and especially Italian youth, of fads and fashions deriving from America during the economic boom. Although no masterpiece, the film is an important reflection on Italian identity at a time of rapid and bewildering change. It reveals that, while America became ‘everyone's second culture’, loyalty to domestic traditions and customs remained strong.

Studies of the Lega Nord (Northern League) have tended either to ignore the existence of earlier movements for regional autonomy in the 1950s – such as the Movimento Autonomista Bergamasco – or, on the contrary, assume continuities between the two movements at the expense of analysis of the significant discontinuities. This article argues that neither approach has been successful in capturing the importance of precursors to leghismo and that a more nuanced analysis is required. Focusing on the Movimento Autonomista Bergamasco (MAB) in its various incarnations between 1947 and 1970, I argue that the Bergamascan autonomists of the post-war period in many ways laid the foundations for Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord; however, it is historically inaccurate to claim a direct line of continuity between mabismo and leghismo due to the differing contexts in which each movement operated: the critical junctures of the post-war era and post-tangentopoli respectively. What emerges from a closer analysis of the relationship between the two movements, as mabismo evolved into leghismo in the 1980s is a picture of regional autonomism distancing itself from the ideal of national unity and being increasingly drawn to secessionism.

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

This article explores the practical, ethical, and epistemological issues which arise when carrying out and sharing research in contexts of Italian migration, highlighting how greater reflexivity on our own geographic and historical location as researchers can productively inform and shape our understanding of sites of contact, exchange and confrontation in relation to contemporary Italy. Specifically, we write as researchers informed by ethnographic theories and practices, and who through our research have engaged in emplaced and embodied cultural encounters in sites which are identifiable as both transcultural and Italian. Drawing on vignettes from research in Italy and the UK, the article highlights some of the particular contradictions, opportunities and responsibilities generated by our respective positions. We address how our positionings as white, English and female scholars located within nationally-defined Italian Studies structures have raised pertinent questions of power, privilege and voice, as we place our own biographies and bodies, themselves shaped by specific colonial, national and local histories, into critical dialogue with those on and with whom we research. Through a discussion of these ‘irresolvable tensions’ of our research, we seek to practically engage with the broader imperative of finding new ways of studying and writing culture.