In April 1848, a proclamation of friendship to the Germans sent by the Provisional Government of Milan to the Fünfzigerausschuss (Committee of Fifty) in Frankfurt was rejected by the latter, creating widespread outrage in Italy. Concurrently, a parallel controversy over the possession of South Tyrol arose between the two revolutions. This article provides an exploratory analysis of these two episodes, examining the role they played in shaping relations between the two revolutions, and in influencing the image Italians had of the revolution in Germany. Shedding light on an episode until now overlooked by historiography, this article seeks to contribute to the salient debate on the peculiar relationship between internationalist ideals and nationalist claims during the 1848 revolution. It argues that the disillusioning impact on revolutionary audiences of specific ‘episodes of friction’, such as those examined in this article,was greater than the ‘natural convergence of goals’ of the various national revolutions in 1848.

Through the comparative reading of Italian literature of the Great War (letteratura di guerra) published between 1915 and 1940, it will be shown that both among veterans of the conflict and civilian writers there existed a standardised image of falling ‘beautifully’ in combat that entailed specific components relating to location, time, final gestures and last invocations, and which aimed to make death in battle more militarily and culturally palatable for Italian audiences. At the same time, the letteratura di guerra presented naturalistic descriptions of the anonymous mass death of peasant soldiers and, thereby, created a pathos of beauty and suffering that made the Italian literature of the Great War prototypical for a new kind of spiritual realism that became one of the mainstreams of cultural expression in Fascist Italy.

By the end of the 1930s in Italy, ambitious winter and summer camps or colonie cimatiche for the young had been erected along Italy's coastline and in its Alpine resorts. Here, thousands of Italian children from the country's urban centres were sent to experience a regime of fresh air, exercise and Fascist propaganda. The small village of Fai in the autonomous province of Trento in the Italian Alps was home to the first such Alpine colonia managed by the Italian Fascist youth organisation, the Opera Nazionale Balilla. Through an examination of a range of contemporary Italian publications, this article will reveal how the Alpine colonia climatica went beyond its official remit of ‘climatic assistance to childhood’. It offers evidence of the Fascist regime's exploitation of these establishments in newly-annexed Trentino as a tool to unify and italianise, and argues that they were used to promote a militarised view of the national landscape.

The socio-cultural and environmental shifts that have taken place in southern Italy over the last 30 years can usefully be traced by their impact on folkloric texts which present modifications that tend to emerge progressively over time. An analysis of such modifications to a body of southern Italian folkloric texts – as used in practice over the last three decades – finds that these reflect and are driven by changes in the people's living environment denoting a cultural dilution and a growing distance between people and the natural world, particularly the land. These modifications also expose a shift of emphasis from ends (e.g. food) to means (e.g. money), indicating increased commercial dependence driven by socio-economic changes. These changes are also reflected in folkloric texts which demonstrate a decline of direct, physical experience of some aspects of the natural world while including references relating to the local environment. Understanding these processes allows us to gauge the extent to which verbal folklore connects contemporary societies to past knowledge.

In Il serpente, Luigi Malerba's first novel, the writer moves from the objectifying perspective, working-class protagonists, and themes of neorealism to a subjective realism that sets aside the direct dialogue of his first book (La scoperta dell'alfabeto, a collection of brief narratives) in favor of the exterior monologue. The narrating voice of Il serpente feels compelled to relive the guilt, shame, and humiliation of his youth. He prevaricates habitually because he is anxious as to how he appears, primarily to himself: he is caught between the need to express himself and the fear of being punished for having done so. The changes in narrative strategy, along with the psychological plausibility of the narrative and Malerba's analysis of Italy's ‘grey zone’, populated by those who did not actively participate in the civil war following the fall of Fascism, make Il serpente worthy of our close attention.

The paper explores the tale of two 'epicentres’ – metropolitan New York and Lombardy – and seeks to depict the socio-demographic patterns that characterise the worst cases of infection, hospitalisation, and death during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. By drawing upon secondary data concerning sub-territorial units within the two regions – ZIP-code level and counties in New York and municipalities in Italy – the paper compares the characteristics of the two areas in an effort to understand both how they became the original major epicentres and how their experiences of the pandemic differed. We suspected initially that the pandemic in Lombardy was a function of a complex constellation of variables, such as the age of the population, the unexpected emergence of the virus, and features of the local health system. In New York, the pattern seemed to fit a more familiar dynamic, the kind one would expect from the course that most pandemics take: the poor suffer the worst. The paper tries to extend the understanding of the complex and not univocal mix of social variables that can facilitate the spread of a pandemic and make its effects extreme.