The term ‘transnational history’ has made rapid ground in recent scholarly debate. In some ways the latest manifestation of an approach that has been variously described as international, comparative, world or global history, transnational history seeks to overcome a historiography focused on the nation and to displace the focus on the nation-state by studying non-governmental institutions, civil associations, informal groups and/or individual actors. Its primary claim to innovation lies in an emphasis on movement, interaction and interpenetration between and across different groups, societies and political units. Thus, the main concern of transnational history is with linkages and networks, perhaps especially in the so-called ‘Global South’; with respect to the latter, an implicit aim of the approach is to challenge the ‘Eurocentrism’ characteristic of historical writing at least since the Enlightenment.

It is imperative that we create; we, people from this epoch and this generation, because we have the duty to make the face of the Fatherland unknowable both spiritually and materially. In ten years, comrades, Italy will be unrecognizable! This will be because we will have transformed it, we will have made a new one, from the mountains which we will have covered with their green coat, to the fields which will be completely reclaimed…. (Mussolini 1926)

This issue marks the end of our five year term of office as joint editors of Modern Italy. We are pleased to say that our excellent working relationship has remained undamaged by the experience, and that we have found the job to be continually interesting, stimulating and also challenging. There are many individuals that we would like to thank for all their help and kindness over the period. From our predecessors, Anna Cento Bull and Martin Bull, we inherited a journal which was efficiently run and well organised. We are very grateful to them for all their help and advice, particularly in the first year of our editorship. Our colleagues at Taylor & Francis have been very supportive throughout and we would like to record our debt of gratitude to the managing editors we have worked with, above all Madeleine Markey, as well as the two colleagues who have been at the sharp end, dealing with the production of the journal: Sarah Evans and Sarahjayne Smith.

This is the first issue of Modern Italy to focus on disability. We want to thank the general editors of the journal, Philip Cooke and John Foot, for having welcomed our proposal for it. The original nucleus was the panel ‘Disabilities' at the conference ‘Language, Space and Otherness in Italy since 1860’, which David Forgacs organised at the British School at Rome on 24-25 June 2010. The decision to include a panel on that topic was influenced, in turn, by Rachele Tardi's experience in 2009–2010 of managing a project in Ethiopia, funded by the Italian Foreign Ministry, for the NGO Comitato Collaborazione Medica, which worked with local partners on community-based rehabilitation (CBR) of people with disabilities. Our discussions of CBR at that time stimulated our interest in looking more closely at the contemporary situation of disability rights in Italy. Our main objective in editing this issue has been to offer readers a representative sample of writing both by Italian disability activists and researchers and by non-Italian scholars working on Italian disability issues. We deliberately sought a mix of academic writing and writing by people actively engaged in work for disability rights. Giampiero Griffo, who was the discussant at the conference panel and is one of the authors included here, was a willing mediator for other articles, and we would like to thank him for his support and help in making this issue happen. We also thank Franco Baldasso for his hard work assisting the editorial process, our peer reviewers for their invaluable input, and our translators, Bryan Brazeau, Kristin Szostek Chertoff, Brian DeGrazia and Stuart Oglethorpe. We should also like to thank Pier Vittorio Barbieri, Claudia Bertolè, Flavia Monceri and Antonio Pascale.

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.

Voluntary associations of persons with disabilities have played an important role in bringing issues related to disability onto the national agenda in Italy in the absence of effective provision by the state or representation by other bodies, such as the political parties and trades unions. At the same time, the nature of Italy's welfare state – weak, clientelistic, particularistic – and its way of conceiving disability as a set of bodily deficits has also shaped the character of disabled persons' organisations in Italy and the ways in which they have framed their demands and policies. These organisations have tended either to represent fragmented subsets of people with disabilities or, more recently, to form large federations that, while they reflect a more comprehensive understanding of disability, have left some categories of people with disabilities feeling excluded or under-represented

While vacation colonies, camps for children and young people, well-equipped beaches and playgrounds, and the first national parks were conceived in Italy during the Liberal period, it was not until the late 1920s/1930s that they were created and transformed by the Fascist regime. This article will analyse the purposes of the use of the environment and protected areas by Fascist organisations during the Fascist regime by different social groups and classes. It will try to answer several questions: how did Fascist mass organisations (youth organisations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) and Gioventò Italiana del Littorio (GIL), leisure organisations like the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), sports associations) relate to environmental space? Which popular activities were conceived for open-air, urban and national parks? How did the relationship between outdoor leisure and the environment develop in the ‘new’ middle class in the 1930s? How did Fascism conceive of the relationship between human beings and nature? The Nazi regime and the US New Deal were the strongest models at that time in terms of the politics of land conservation and leisure time. Did Fascism look to those experiments; did Fascism find its own modern ‘conservative’ relationship with the environment? This article will try to answer some of these questions, mindful of the lack of studies on Italy in comparison with the expanding historiography on the German and American cases.

The history of the Habsburg Empire in the post-Napoleonic era is frequently approached from the perspective of its various component nationalities. These were traditionally portrayed in the historiography as engaged in more-or-less open struggle with control from Vienna. This article argues that the over-privileging of such national categories can distort the picture. By looking at a number of case studies – the naming of Lombardy-Venetia, the Biblioteca italiana, the Panteon veneto – the relationship between Venice (and its Terraferma) and Habsburg rule during the second Austrian domination is examined. It will be argued that it is more profitable to see Venetian identities (municipal, local, Italian, and as part of a wider transnational European culture) as capable of working for as well as against the empire, and that Habsburg policy was as often concerned with managing potential local rivalries (notably between Lombards and Venetians) as with controlling a perceived Italian threat. It is also suggested that, while cultivation of local identity was often used to reinforce the national, the Austrian authorities were also happy to annex both to further imperial interests.

In this article I use the case of mountains to explore the ways in which the Fascist regime articulated its vision of nature/human relationships. I will show how mountains were considered as creative environments which could produce a special type of people: the montanari (mountaineers), meaning with this word mountain villagers rather than mountain climbers. The Fascist regime praised people from the mountains – especially from the Alps - as the true and better stock of Italians; that environment made them strong, healthy, pure, and disciplined, as the rhetoric of the Great War had supported. The Fascist regime celebrated the virtues of montanari by birth, those who were born and raised in the mountains, but it also aimed at employing the creative power of nature in its plan to shape the new Italian. In the article I show how the regime employed mountains in its discourses and practices of ‘bonifica umana’ (human reclamation) which involved both body and soul. In the Fascist narratives, mountains were the open air gymnasium for building a stronger man, a living archive of ruralism for reproducing the true Italian, and the secular church of the collective memory for the making of national subjects. The blend of nature, culture, and politics in the Fascist discourse on mountains and people is at the core of this article.

This article discusses recent academic and theoretical approaches to disability in Italy, situating them in relation to Anglo-American disability studies as well as within the Italian academic context, and sketches out the contours of an emergent Italian disability studies. The discussion centres on three terms that have emerged recently in Italy: superabilità (implying both ‘ability to overcome’ and ‘exceptional ability’); diversabilità (being ‘differently abled’); and transabilità (the desire for, or identification with, a disabled body by a non-disabled subject). The article considers the role of narrative in each of these categories, as well as the way that each deals with the question of limits. While discourses in each category construct or confirm a strong disabled identity, the article argues that transabilità might also be understood as the transcendence of identity on the basis of ability. This alternative understanding puts pressure on the question of identity itself and challenges the very need for narrative (re)construction.

The article discusses new studies of foreign soldiers in the Italian armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorgimento against the background of recent scholarship on ‘transnational soldiers’, which acknowledges the complexities of foreigners' initial motives for enlistment and of the transnational processes inside the single armies. The article suggests that from the mundane structures of military life to the perceptions of the rank-and-file, many aspects of the soldiering experience in the multinational armed groups on all sides of the Risorgimento actually advanced rather than obviated national boundaries. This paper further demonstrates that the military cultures of the nationalists and the anti-unity forces were much more porous and mutually constitutive than is often recognised. The histories of the ‘transnational soldiers’ in the armed groups of the Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento are crucial for a possibly new, comparative history of the armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorigmento. This paper explores approaches of the culturally revived ‘new military history’ and suggests that it provides much still unrealised potential for Risorgimento historiography.

The nineteenth century was a critical phase in the construction of European penitentiary systems. The eighteenth century had seen the evolution of the concept of punishment and the corresponding development of the practice of imprisonment as central to new ideas about penal sanctions. As a result, between 1830 and 1848 grand plans to reform prison systems were put forward in almost all the larger European countries. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies played its part in this process: an innovative reform plan was developed here, ahead of the rest of the Italian peninsula, which was fully implemented between 1832 and 1845 but had its origins in an earlier period, being given its initial impetus by modernisation on the legislative front. Sicily was particularly rich in terms of legal experimentation in this area. Here, informed by the most recent developments in contemporary science, plans to reform prison legislation were produced as early as the 1820s; these attest to the interest with which lawyers, philanthropists and government officials approached the issue. The analysis of two plans discovered in the Archivio di Stato in Palermo is especially helpful in demonstrating the existence of a ‘workshop for prison legislation’ that addressed concrete problems while also being the manifestation of a sophisticated legal culture.

In this article, it is argued that Garibaldi's global fame owes much to his own experiences as a migrant and exile in the Americas. Overseas, Garibaldi not only acquired several practical and political skills, he also built up an important network of friends and supporters and became a hybrid figure able to adapt his image to diverse political settings. At the same time, Garibaldi relied on the trope of exile, developed by people like Ugo Foscolo, to define his opposition to, first, Italy's Restoration governments and, after Italian unification, the new moderate liberal regime. The article also looks at Garibaldi's life on Caprera and it is further argued that here Garibaldi combined elements of his previous experiences to fashion a role for himself as a ‘foreigner in Italy’. Garibaldi was a symbol of many worlds as well as a hero of two and it is precisely this hybrid nature of his appeal that can explain his global popularity.

Nature conservation is a complex venture, with a great impact, among other things, on local and national power relationships. Nature conservation also depends on a wide set of variables to determine any one planned initiative's long-term success or failure. This article explores what made the difference between success and failure in the history of nature conservation under Mussolini's regime. Many parks were planned in those years in Italy, but only a handful were effectively instituted. This essay will address the following questions: What were the reasons behind the planning and creation of these national parks? What was the role of Fascist ideology in determining the long-term success of a park proposal? Was there anything specifically Fascist in Italian nature conservation in the 1920s and 1930s? Which other variables impacted on the involved decision-making processes?

This article examines the monumental cemeteries of nineteenth-century Italy with regard to their role as platforms for the tensions between Church and state. In that burial grounds were publically owned yet administered by the clergy, they represented a space where conflicts between secular and clerical powers might be played out – conflicts that reached a peak in the final decades of the Ottocento following the annexation of the Papal State to unified Italy. Particular attention is given to the adoption of cremation as a practice that was advocated by anticlerical, liberal and radical factions in opposition to the Catholic Church. That opposition was manifested in the design and layout of Italian burial grounds and in construction of new crematoria.

The definitions of disability adopted in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) necessitate an important change in the way disability is assessed and introduce a new idea of justice in relation to persons with disabilities. The article starts by reviewing the various ‘models of disability’ prevailing in the past and the respective ideas of justice underlying them. The charity model, for instance, was rooted in ideas of divine justice and human beneficence, where care for the disabled led in practice to their being segregated from the rest of society, while the medical model saw justice in terms of treatments or compensations for individual pathologies rather than of positive enablement for active living. The CRPD overturns these models and the related conceptions of justice by emphasising society's obligations towards persons with disabilities and, above all, their human right to full inclusion and participation in society. The key concepts are empowerment and capability. In Italy these concepts and this new conception of justice have started to be applied by the Osservatorio nazionale sulla condizione delle persone con disabilità, the body created to monitor the effective application of the CRPD in Italy, and they are included in the two-year action programme on disability, approved by the Italian government in October 2013.

Since 2001 DPI Italia, the Italian section of Disabled People's International, has played an important role in a series of research projects in the European Commission's Daphne Programme on violence against women with disabilities. Several different types of violence have been identified, from sexual abuse to removal of women's control over their environment to invasion of their privacy in healthcare contexts to control of their reproductive capacity, particularly of women with intellectual disabilities. In the light of these projects, and of the CRPD's recognition of the multiple discriminations experienced by many women with disabilities, the article argues for a shift away from an ethics of care and dependency towards one of equal reciprocal relations between disabled women and others and to a bioethics grounded not in exceptional need but in everyday life. Peer counselling among disabled women is particularly important in effecting this shift.

The revival of interest in music evident in recent historiography has led to an investigation of the specifically transnational nature of musical languages and practices. This article explores the possibility of re-reading in a transnational perspective the classical theme of the relationship between the Risorgimento and opera. It focuses on two different points of view: on the one hand, the construction of the librettos as a delicate balance between European romantic narratives and dramatic themes evoking nationalistic sentiments; on the other, the fact that ideas and practices of the theatre as a vehicle of political mobilisation developed in a broad international context where Mazzini and many other nationalists found inspiration in multinational political experiences and discourses. The article concludes by saying that the meanings of terms such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism need to be carefully weighed when we look at nineteenth-century opera production. Only in the closing decades of the century did genuine competition between national traditions arise, which led in Italy to a veritable ‘obsession’ with ‘Italianness’ in music.

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.

During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.