This special issue stems from the 2022 Association for the Study of Modern Italy conference, reflecting on key turning points in modern Italian history through the lens of ‘small histories’. Drawing on contemporary international historiography and the contributions in the present volume, this introduction discusses how microhistorical, biographical and related approaches may challenge or refine dominant interpretations in that they abstract from ‘grand narratives’ to instead highlight dynamics and actors that may appear to be on the margins of major historical processes. The studies in this special issue engage in particular with the intersections of identity, space and memory. Themes such as Fascism, the reshaping of Italian identity through cultural policies and the creation of a collective memory, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and evolving gender roles are explored in diverse contexts from interwar South Tyrol through to contemporary Palermo. Together, these ‘small histories’ demonstrate the methodological and interpretative richness of focused studies in tracing Italy’s transformation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They challenge binaries such as centre–periphery and local–global, while shedding new light on the relation between individual experiences and the creation of shared spaces, memories and identities.

The end of the civil war, the fall of the Italian Social Republic, the allied occupation and the gradual transition to the new Italian Republic not only set Italy on the path to democracy, but also gradually gave Italians access to a new public space. This article proposes to revisit the classic question of the legacy of Fascism by looking at the question of space and the difficult construction of a genuine democratic space. During the ventennio, opponents were largely denied access to common spaces, both symbolically and physically. The article raises the question of violence and the exclusive appropriation of space, showing that the representations and practices inherited from Fascism did not disappear overnight. But these practices of space were not always violent: by looking at aspects that are often neglected (graffiti, manifestos, noises and singing), the aim is to show that the transition took time and was sometimes complicated, despite the political leaders of the Italian Republic claiming to have opened up a completely new era.

This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth anniversary of Modern Italy, the issue examines lesser-known aspects of the Resistance, such as marginal groups, gendered experiences and transnational perspectives. Contributions include studies on Roma Resistance fighters, the Catholic underground press, American soldiers of Italian descent, and women in the Liberal Party. The articles emphasise the liminality and creative potential of the Resistance as a transformative period that redefined political and cultural identities.

When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power cast a mimetic spell that can be continuously reloaded: by blurring the boundaries between truth and lies; by exploiting crowd irrationality; by establishing boundaries between outsiders and insiders; by perpetuating negative sentiments of hostility, fear and envy within society; and by manipulating time. The argument, therefore, is that fascism has never ended, not merely in the sense of political and cultural continuity, but in the deeper sense of immanency within the body politic of Italy’s democracy. As such, it is meaningless to wonder whether fascism might come back. It is here and now, in the only form that current historical circumstances allow it to exist – and yet it might be countered by a process of rejection that individuals and political communities can and should exercise in their everyday life, adopting the political form generated by the Resistance.

Ludovico Luigi Nicola di Giura (1868–1947) was an Italian doctor who lived in Beijing from 1900 to 1931. In addition to his medical practice, di Giura actively engaged with the local elite, developed a profound interest in Chinese literature, and contributed to introducing Chinese reality and culture into Italy through journalistic, literary, and translation works. Upon his return to Italy, he constructed a ‘Chinese library’ at his family estate in Chiaromonte, located in the Basilicata region. This article adopts the ‘Heraclitean approach’ proposed by Weingarten (2022) to examine di Giura's personal library, analysing the evolution of both individual and communal cultural longings reflected by his collection and marginalia within the books spanning different periods. Drawing upon the primary sources recently discovered and catalogued from the library, along with archival and bibliographical materials from both Italian and Chinese sources, the paper not only aims to reveal di Giura's intellectual profile, but also aims to utilise his individual experiences as a lens for observing the social and cultural life of Italians in China during the early twentieth century.

Our essay aims to offer a biography of Elena Sengal (1911–1962), an Italian citizen of Ethiopian origin, whose life offers important elements to better understand both Fascist and postwar Italy. Elena was born into an Italo-Ethiopian family and became an Italian citizen after the naturalisation of her father, Sengal Workneh, a former Italian colonial subject and a lecturer in Amharic and Tigrinya at the Istituto Orientale in Naples. She grew up in Naples where she graduated and later held a teaching position, following in her father’s footsteps. When in 1939 her partner, Guido Cucci, fell in Ethiopia fighting the Ethiopian resistance, Elena found herself alone with a newborn child and struggled to make a living. Her life did not improve with the end of Fascism. Indeed, in postwar Italy it became so unbearable that she relocated to Ethiopia. However, racism and exclusion accompanied her life in the East African country too. This biography is based on archival materials as well as a body of personal letters of Elena Sengal, kindly made available by her granddaughter Maria Elena Cucci.

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

In the autumn of 1934, Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen/Bressanone denied two Italian-speaking priests, Carlo Torello and Giuseppe Ricci, permission to teach within his predominantly German-speaking diocese. In response, Benito Mussolini threatened to expel all Church representatives from the state education system and, by extension, to unravel the recently signed Lateran Accords. Untangling the motivations behind Geisler’s decision, the escalating tensions it precipitated, and, ultimately, the discussions that led to its quiet resolution reveal much about Fascist and Church ambitions in the newly annexed territory of Trentino-South Tyrol. This ‘Torello-Ricci Affair’ provides a micro-historical lens with which to better understand the political and cultural infrastructures of power in interwar South Tyrol and their relationship to institutions in Rome. In particular, it illustrates the ongoing battle between civil and religious officials to assert moral authority within the region, most importantly as it regarded the education of its children.

Through an analysis of the Italian context, this article illustrates how censoring attitudes shaped the modern meaning of pornography between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the years of the Great War. The difference between the ideas of pornography and obscenity is pointed out through a concise examination of censorship archive documents from the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, the State of the Church, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, followed by an overview about how sexuality was intended by Italian sexologists and moralist intellectuals during the period of nation-building following the unification of 1861. In their writings, pornography is described as a source of corruption, especially for young people, and a social threat to be stopped. From 1891 onwards, mobilisations and struggles against pornography were organised by associations and politicians: these activities and debates, which led to the demand for specific legislation to address this phenomenon, are here reconstructed through newspaper articles and archive documents until the Great War period, when the use of the word pornography became even wider, as well as the debates around it and its social meaning.

The role that Roma communities played in the Resistance during the Second World War is a little-known part of history, especially in Italy. Through consideration of their involvement, we can highlight the complexity of the Resistance, and recognise Roma communities as an integral part of Italian society. Roma involvement in the Resistance had distinctive characteristics compared to that of the gagi (non-Roma), particularly in how they viewed it not only as a fight against fascism, but also it as a means of honouring the mulé (the dead). However, only a handful of Roma partisans are recorded in the Ricompart archive, which contains documentation relating to those who participated in Resistance activities. To trace history, personal testimony, in addition to secondary historiography, is key. Roma communities share a rich oral tradition, which forms the basis of a significant part of this article, and which offers an account of civil resistance and armed action both within partisan groups and as part of small formations based on ethnicity. This piece examines the reasons why the Roma partisans who fought and died in the Resistance did not receive full public recognition, a form of historical amnesia of the postwar period rooted in the absence of a cultural ‘defascistisation’ whereby fascist-style racism permeated the Republic.

In 1912, the Italian parliament approved the extension of male suffrage, making it ‘almost’ universal. This process of revising representation transformed the very idea of the relationship between citizens and the state and shaped a profoundly different Italy. The aim of this article is to trace both the process leading to the approval of universal suffrage and its impact on the party system. With a compilation and analysis of data developed from scratch for the elections of 1909 and 1913, it was possible to analyse the main dimensions of the two rounds in a disaggregated manner. Three aspects make 1913 a year of transition. First, the degree of competition in the electoral process, especially in the South, increased considerably. Second, the decline of liberal formations was not transformed into defeat, thanks only to the Catholic vote. Third, the birth of the Popular Party and the failure to create a mass party of conservatives were causes of the imbalance in the party structure.

This article uses the postwar trial of Fascist Italy’s most prominent general, Rodolfo Graziani, to examine issues of transitional justice and the formation of popular memory of Italian Fascism and colonialism after 1945. During the Fascist ventennio, the regime constructed Graziani as the nation’s colonial ‘hero’ despite his leading role in genocidal measures during Fascist Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. His position as minister of defence in Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Salò Republic in 1943–5, however, threatened his heroic reputation as he worked with Nazi commanders and became responsible for atrocities against Italian civilians. After the Second World War, Graziani was tried for Nazi collaborationism at the Supreme Court in 1948, but his colonial conduct was left unquestioned. Unlike in the Nuremberg Trials in post-Nazi Germany, few Italians were tried for war crimes after 1945. This historical inquiry analyses the legal proceedings, transnational representation and outcome of Rodolfo Graziani’s 1948 trial as an emblematic case study to explore de-fascistisation and decolonialisation initiatives and their limitations in post-Fascist postcolonial Italy.

This article analyses the political determinants of antipoverty policy in Italy between 1948 and 2022, providing a long-term analysis of the Italian minimum income scheme. We look for an explanation of that evolution drawing on three theoretical perspectives: veto players, gradual institutional change, and party competition. Our methodology is process tracing which involves the examination of ‘diagnostic’ pieces of evidence for our broad political-historical analysis. We argue that the so called ‘neglect’ phase until 1992 can be explained by the veto players theory, the period after 1992 by gradual institutional change, whereas the final introduction of a minimum income scheme in 2018 is the result of competitive dynamics. The main lesson is that a case study analysis of the politics of anti-poverty policy offers fresh insights into a major challenge in capitalist systems, combating rising poverty trends.

This article explores the socio-ecological impacts of Fascist hydropower extraction in the Alpine valleys of Italy, focusing on the Toce river basin during the interwar period. It investigates the conflicts between local communities and hydropower initiatives by private energy companies under Fascism, thereby revealing the regime's communication strategies rooted in its political ecology. By analysing newspaper articles, propaganda outlets and communal archival documents, the study uncovers statal and local perspectives on infrastructure development and its enduring consequences. How the political ecology of Fascism in a high-altitude hydropower construction site became an expression of Fascist modernity will thereby be shown. Despite objections from valley inhabitants, Fascist hydropower projects persisted, perpetuating socio-ecological inequalities after 1945. Even postwar efforts for compensation failed to address the long-lasting impacts on mountain communities. This research reveals the intersection of political ecology and modernist infrastructure development in Mussolini's Italy, and thus also highlights the legacies of Fascist resource extraction policies on the country's peripheral Alpine regions.

This article reviews the evolution of the representation of Italy’s ‘Catholic partisan’. In essence, this involved adaptation of the model of the Catholic soldier, who was able to kill out of love and ‘without hatred’, to the context of a civil war. With particular reference to the case of the central Veneto, this examination looks back to earlier Italian experiences during wartime to help explain how Catholic activists and the partisan groups linked to the Catholic world addressed the key issues of the legitimation of Resistance violence and the control of its use. It emphasises the disparity between the rhetoric directed at containing the violence and the realities of guerrilla warfare. The article goes on to analyse the different models of the ‘Catholic partisan’ put forward in the immediate postwar period (1945–1950): the ‘Catholic soldier’, with his military bearing; the ‘pure martyr’, who never initiated violence; and the ‘devout partisan’, who managed to restrict his use of violence, assessing its costs and benefits, and was characterised by his inclination to forgive and, especially, to kill as little as possible. The conclusions consider how a particular rhetoric helped to shape the narrative of the active involvement of Catholics in the Italian Resistance.

Since its inception in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, a specialised unit within the ranks of the French military, has played a prominent role in the wars of both colonisation and decolonisation. This article seeks to trace the origins, development and eventual decline of an Italian and international ‘Legionary issue’ regarding the recruitment and employment of Italian volunteers in a foreign military force deployed in the French decolonisation war in Indochina. Through the examination of archival sources as well as autobiographical narratives by Italian legionnaires, this study offers a novel perspective on the interplay between Italy’s political, economic and sociocultural trends, the enlistment of Italian volunteers into the French Foreign Legion, and the evolution of Italo-French relations in the postwar period.

During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers of Italian origin were drafted into the US military and sent to fight overseas against the Axis powers. For many, this was an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the country and remove suspicions raised by Italian communities’ ties with the Fascist regime. The prospect of fighting in their homeland aroused mixed feelings among those who were sent to Italy from June 1943. On the one hand, the presence of cultural and family ties stimulated the establishment of supportive relations with Italians and was seen by Washington as a useful tool for promoting ‘good occupation’ policies in Italy. However, the ethnic background of these soldiers did not always act as a socialisation factor with Italians, but sometimes gave rise to contradictory and even hostile attitudes that were linked to harsh judgements about Italians’ responsibilities for Fascism and their predisposition, or otherwise, to democracy. This article reconstructs the contribution made by these ethnic personnel to the liberation of the peninsula and the particular views they held of Italy and Italians between war and liberation.

This paper analyses the period following the annexation of Veneto to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 from the standpoint of forest history. Recent historiography has demonstrated that the development of scientific forestry was a crucial factor in the state-building process. Post-unification Veneto provides an opportunity to explore these dynamics from a decentralised perspective, focusing on two critical aspects, relevant in Italy as in many other countries at that time: (a) the administration's attempts to study and manage forest resources, and (b) the forest conflicts arising from economic and institutional transformations in rural areas.

This article uses an original dataset to sketch a portrait of women mayoral candidates and women elected as mayors in Italy in the period 1993–2021. The analysis highlights several significant findings. Women must compensate for their political marginality by deploying other resources, such as higher levels of education. Nevertheless, women are penalised not only by the reluctance of parties to put them forward as candidates, but also by the elections themselves. More specifically, the electoral presence and strength of women decreases when the population size of the municipality grows, except for municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Moreover, women candidates are most disadvantaged in geographical areas where the socioeconomic condition of women is more marginal. However, women mayors running for a second mandate have the same chance of winning as men. Finally, it is the protest parties, rather than the left-wing parties, that are revealed as doing the most to promote women.