This article reconstructs the trajectory through which the first Prodi government (1996-1998) succeeded in bringing Italy back to the core of European integration after years of political marginalization, financial instability, and diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival material, it analyzes the dual challenge faced by Prodi: regaining the trust of European partners and restoring domestic credibility after the turbulent Berlusconi and Dini governments. The chapter examines the strategic centrality of Europe within the Olive Tree coalition's platform, the role of key technocrats such as Ciampi and Dini, and the intense diplomatic efforts undertaken between 1996 and 1998. Particular attention is devoted to the negotiations over the Maastricht parameters, the struggle to meet convergence criteria, and the creation of the 'Group of Four', which coordinated Italy's final push toward E.M.U. membership. Ultimately, the article shows how political determination, fiscal consolidation, and diplomatic activism enabled Italy to join the founding group of countries adopting the euro.
The recent wave of interest in the evolution of penal practices and institutions has brought renewed attention to the Roman Casa di Correzione for unruly boys, founded in 1703 by Pope Clement XI. The peculiar architecture of this punitive setting - one of the earliest examples of cellular confinement - has led scholars to regard it as the birthplace of the modern penitentiary. However, many details do not fit this interpretation. Drawing on printed sources and archival records, this article shows that the Casa, its punitive regime, its position in a wider circuit of punitive institutions, and the categories of inmates it targeted, are better understood as an attempt to institutionalize the traditional ideology of correctio. This perspective makes it possible to interpret this particular Roman episode not as the first step in a mostly linear development, but as a broken path within a range of possibilities that were far more numerous than their nineteenth-century actualizations.
This article reconceptualizes the small islands of southern Italy as state-organized nodes in punitive circuits between 1889 and 1943. Focusing on Ventotene, Ponza, Ustica, Lipari, Favignana, Pantelleria, and Lampedusa, it traces a non-linear sequence of consolidation, wartime repurposing, and Fascist re-specialization. In the liberal era the islands became a privileged destination-system for domicilio coatto and were linked to mainland high-custody nodes. Between 1911 and 1918 they served as modular depots for intake, sorting, quarantine, and redistribution across administrative, judicial, and military tracks. Under Fascism, the political/common distinction among confinati tightened island-mainland interfaces and culminated in hierarchical arrangements centered on Ventotene in 1940-43. Alongside these shifts, the article highlights enduring continuities in coerced mobility: escort routines, transit hubs, and transport 'chains' (catene) that integrated administrative and judicial populations. It thereby reframes modern punishment as a flexible configuration and suggests a periodization keyed to infrastructural consolidation and emergency-driven reconfiguration.
During the 1970s, the Italian prison system was shaken by a wave of protests that undermined the established 'order and discipline' of penal institutions. Prisoners' mobilizations progressively weakened traditional repressive tools such as solitary confinement, disciplinary transfers, and harsh-regime facilities. Faced with difficulties in controlling penal institutions, the prison administration developed an innovative response: the Camosci circuit, a maximum-security circuit that became operative in May 1977. It represented the practical implementation of the logic of differentiation applied to the penitentiary space, aiming to isolate dangerous inmates and disrupt their social and political ties. Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources, this article reconstructs the origins, development, and functioning of the circuit. It highlights spatiality as a key component of the new repressive strategies, showing how the circuit reshaped disciplinary mechanisms and revealed the flexibility of the Italian penal system in its transition from emergency responses to more structured forms of control.
This article examines the role of the Catholic and Italian legacy in the transnational public debate on prison reform during the first half of the nineteenth century. The hegemony of the Philadelphia model of 'solitary confinement' in contemporary discourse has long obscured the connections between this model and the 'cellular confinement' experiments of eighteenth-century Italian states, particularly the houses of correction in Milan and Rome.The emergence of a narrative asserting an Italian - later specifically Roman - 'primacy' in the origins of penal confinement developed across different punitive contexts and regimes, including Protestant and Catholic European networks as well as American Quakers. The invocation of Italian precedents relied on a range of rhetorical strategies aimed at legitimizing the 'modern penitentiary'.Focusing on the synchronicity and circulation of texts (essays, travel accounts, and newspaper articles) the article highlights the adaptability and flexibility of these narratives in shaping a prison social imaginary.
This introduction presents the special issue as an invitation to reconceptualize the historiography of punishment. It starts with the perception of a double shortcoming in the field. On the one hand, I observe the growing mismatch between the theoretical frameworks that we have received from the 1970s and the findings of the burgeoning literature that has been published on the topic during the last decades. On the other hand, I acknowledge that the new scholarship has most often confined itself to the empirical realm and has fallen short of providing comprehensive alternative conceptualizations. In this context, this special issue proposes some concepts as a starting point for a new analytical lexicon for our field: punitive sources, targets, legitimations, settings, institutions, regimes, circuits, circulations and configurations. The final section presents the six essays included in this special issue, highlights their contribution to the larger theoretical debate, and considers the relevance of a focus on "Italy" in this endeavour.
Prison guards, generally hidden behind penitentiary walls, are largely absent from the growing transnational historiography about the variety and evolution of modern punitive regimes. Yet they were important actors in implementing legal policy from above and shaping the quality of life for inmates under their control. As a liminal group in the hierarchy of everyday prison life, they derived power from their administrative supervisors but often shared the lower-class backgrounds of their charges. Shortly after unification, the Italian state established a national Corps of Prison Guards as a sign of modernity and of its commitment to prison reform. Recruits were first brought to Rome for training and then employed throughout the network of male prisons. Yet two other groups performed similar duties: nuns in female prisons and teachers in reformatories for boys. Thus, pluralism - defined by gender and age - rather than uniformity characterized the relationship between guards and prisoners in liberal Italy.
With its 1956 exit from the Movimento sociale italiano (M.S.I.), the neo-Fascist group Ordine Nuovo (O.N.) changed from party faction into political sect. During the 1960s, when the ruling Christian Democrats opened to the left and the M.S.I.'s insertion strategy stalled, O.N. evolved further by sponsoring movement-like growth on the terrain of civil society. Based on official reports from provincial prefectures and police stations, this study traces O.N.'s transformation - in parallel with its conspiratorial side - into a youth-based movement of the 1960s with zones of strength in Calabria, Campania, and Sicily. The findings provide grounds for a revaluation of O.N.'s organizational development as well as its relations to party politics, regional implantation, and moral framing.
This article offers an anthropological reading of Italy's State Road 268 (SS 268), officially designated as a strategic evacuation route in the event of a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Based on long-term ethnographic research (2012-2025), the road emerges not as a space of safety but as a site of structural vulnerability, everyday risk, and political disillusionment. Through fieldwork, local testimonies, and media analysis, the SS 268 is interpreted as a "liminal infrastructure" that embodies the contradictions of Italy's civil protection system: conceived to save lives, yet experienced as a trap. The essay introduces the notion of permanent temporariness to describe a condition in which emergency measures become normalized, suspending any durable solution. The road becomes a symbol of governance through neglect, a landscape where risk is distributed unequally across social and territorial lines. This case study contributes to broader debates within Italian studies and disaster anthropology by showing how infrastructures both reflect and reproduce systemic inequalities, failed planning, and everyday forms of abandonment.
The article analyses the foreign and international policy orientations of Italy's main political parties in the post-Cold War international order. It pays special attention to the two most significant political forces of the time: the Christian Democrats (D.C.), the largest party in Italy and a pivotal actor in all governments for over forty years; and the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.), the main opposition force, which dissolved in early 1991 and was succeeded by the Democratic Party of the Left (P.D.S.). The article draws on a wide range of sources, including documents from the D.C. and the P.C.I.-P.D.S., the party press, the electoral programmes of the P.C.I.-P.D.S. and the D.C., and American and British archive documents.
After the fall of the fascist regime, efforts to erase the signs of fascist ideology often coincided with the preservation of material legacies. Within this transition, artists become pivotal figures bridging fascist ideology and defascistization efforts. They were called upon to make decisions and to carry out demands for the removal of regime symbols. Yet, at the same time, they were most invested in safeguarding these works, often their own, and in ensuring their visibility and survival. This article seeks to broaden the understanding of the network of actors actively engaged in reimagining democratic Italy's public spaces and institutional settings. With the dual aim of examining both the management of fascist legacies in the early decades of the Republic and the role played by artists in this process, this study focuses on the Monument to the Legionnaire (1938-1968) by Romano Romanelli, an unfinished project of Fascist colonial propaganda entangled with hesitant efforts at defascistization.
Several years before Alexis de Tocqueville undertook his famous journey to America in 1831, he travelled to the Italian states in what was the twenty-one-year-old's first adventure abroad. This voyage gave rise to a lengthy essay whose surviving fragments have been little studied. In them, however, can be found reflections on history and historical change, which this article situates within a series of contexts for purposes of explanation and interpretation. It traces, amongst other things, tensions between pre-modern and historicist schemes of history, semantics of historical time, Montesquieuan modes of argument, and a burgeoning attempt to move from pronouncing the condition of the present to explaining it by elucidating the action of historical contingencies. The essay is shown to reveal the contours of Tocqueville's early historical outlook and instantiate currents of thinking characteristic of his social and intellectual matrix - above all, French perceptions of Italy and Enlightened patterns of thought. Its object is to demonstrate why Tocqueville scholars and Italianists should take interest in this text, while showing that it is important to approach Tocqueville as a historical thinker.
This article explores the transformations of Albania's architectural heritage across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing how the material legacy of dictatorship - from Italian fascist occupation to socialist rule and post-socialist transition - has been adapted, re-signified, or contested over time. It considers how successive political contexts, rather than producing wholesale erasure, have generated strategies of pragmatic reuse, selective preservation, and symbolic rewriting. In Albania, iconoclasm has been selective, partial, and politically contingent, shaped not only by ideology but also by economic constraints, shifting international alignments, and ambivalent memory politics. Focusing on Tirana's monumental core, the discussion points to how the city's-built environment embodies both continuity and rupture, revealing Albania's uneasy negotiation with its layered past. As Albania remains a largely understudied case, this perspective seeks to bring new insight to ongoing discussions on the heritage of dictatorship in Europe and on contested, dissonant, and difficult heritage in post-authoritarian and postcolonial contexts.
This article examines an alternative form of identification to the nation state which arose in Fiume in the context of the symbolic and political violence the city experienced during the years after the First World War (1918-1924). While historians mainly focus on the Italian-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's presence in the city (1919-1920), the conflicts following 1920 'Christmas of Blood' reveal ongoing violence between the supporters of the city-state's independence and Italian fascists and nationalists. These conflicts also point to persistent and readjusting forms of loyalty with roots in the late Habsburg period. They show how, between 1918 and 1924, the autonomy of Fiume and the option of a free state were seen as realistic alternatives to Italy and the Italian nation state. By focusing on the figure of Ernesto Zaller (1873-1923) and by providing some insight into the biographies of those involved in the postwar violence, this article will show how Fiumian autonomism was advocated as a potential contender to Italian nationalism, as well as how it developed into a form of loyalty and an agenda worth dying for in 1921-1923. Finally, the article will show how postwar violence in Fiume should be considered as part of the transition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as a legacy of D'Annunzio, and as a feature of emergent Italian fascism.
