Between October 1954 and May 1955 RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, transmitted its first operetta season on television, promoted by Radiocorriere, the RAI house weekly, in terms of ‘a world coming back’. Yet this comeback did not have the lasting impact that was evidently desired: Italian television would never again pay such close attention to operetta, and the 1954–5 ‘operetta season’ remains an intriguing one-off. This neglected encounter between mass media and music in twentieth-century Italy has rich historiographical potential, which the article explores. Among other issues, studying the 1954–5 RAI operetta season helps us better understand not only the deep connections between postwar Italian culture and its fascist past – still a contentious matter – but also the complex discursive, technological and affective interactions between a mass medium tirelessly promoted as new and a form of popular entertainment that was already perceived as hopelessly out of date.

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.

The aim of this article is to open a new way of understanding corruption by examining its place within the law and culture of the European semi-periphery, with a focus on inter-war Romania. My intention is to operate a twofold displacement of the analysis of the anti-corruption and the status of constitutional practice in this context. First, I aim to reposition the question of political corruption within a jurisprudential and legal historical context. In this way I inquire what is the legal theoretical importance of political corruption in a post-dependency context? In other words, what can the representation of corruption entail for law, and for a particular legal historical trajectory within the European periphery. Second, I move towards exploring the context of the inter-war period as well as the discursive construction of political corruption within the law and through the fascist criticism levelled against it.

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.

This article traces the evolution of Italian strategies for imperial expansion from the decades after unification—when many came to believe that imperial conquest would more advantageously position Italy in the liberal capitalist global economy—to the height of the fascist colonial project in the Horn of Africa—when the fascists tried to break with the liberal global economy and construct a new, radical mercantilist and corporatist empire. Taking inspiration from their predecessors, the fascist regime extracted capital, resources, and labor from Africans and Italians to finance its war against the Ethiopian empire and its colonization of the Horn. While the war temporarily stimulated Italian industry, employed hundreds of thousands of work-hungry Italians, and consolidated the regime’s many corporatist institutions, it drained Italy’s reserves and alarmed the Duce’s allies among Italy’s industrial and financial elite. The regime, thus, shifted strategies, focusing on reducing the cost of the empire by exploiting African workers, eliminating inefficient small enterprises, and creating vast concessions for Italian industrialists. Conquering new territories and markets, acquiring a variety of primary resources, and empowering industry, Mussolini and the radical mercantilist-corporatists aimed to resolve Italy’s perceived under-development, by placing Italy at the center of a great fascist Eurafrican empire that could dictate the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world.

This article links the study of transnational and imperial fascism in the context of the Italian occupation of Albania by examining how Italian authorities sought to turn Albanians abroad into assets rather than liabilities. Organising and monitoring Albanians occurred through conferences, youth institutions and consular activities. Studying such concrete contacts and negotiations allows us to explore the practical issues latent in expanding fascist political subjectivity in transnational and imperial contexts. On the one hand, Italians hoped to verse Albanians in a fascist identity by using existing organisational strategies while silencing or converting potential anti-Italian critics. On the other, many Albanians expressed and offered support for these Italian efforts, though with reservations and conditions, raising questions as to what it meant to be an Albanian nationalist and/or fascist in the years of occupation. The Albanian case therefore contributes to our understanding of the tensions inherent in ‘universalising’ fascism for colonial subjects.

In recent years, the architectural legacy and so-called ‘difficult heritage’ of Fascist Italy has become a flourishing field of research. These topics have also begun to make their way into the undergraduate classroom. To date, however, there has been little research carried out into the methods we use to teach the history of Fascism in particular. In this short article, we outline how we have applied problem-based learning and scenario-based learning approaches to tackle this topic. After presenting three assignments, we explain the benefits associated with a PBL/SBL approach, summarised under the headings of interdisciplinarity, creativity and authenticity, before highlighting some aspects on which colleagues may wish to reflect if they are considering adopting a similar approach in their teaching.

The ‘Fact Checking’ series of titles published by Laterza since 2020 is, in the first place, a response to the proliferation of historical fake news, which has grown exponentially as a consequence of social networks. But it is also a response to an increasingly systematic political abuse of history – not only in Italy. The authors and the public firmly believe in the necessity of restoring complexity and value to historical research, as well as in the importance of playing a significant role in the public debate about our past. In many ways the political use of history works in an authoritarian and anti-democratic manner, spreading erroneous and dangerous convictions among broad sections of society. Among the examples which appear in various sections of the article, we discuss the books in the series which problematise the ‘official’ and victimist version of events which took place on the Italian-Yugoslavian border at the end of the Second World War. Other parts of the article examine the instrumental readings of the history and experience of twentieth-century communism.

This essay analyses Salvemini's major works on Fascism, namely The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), Mussolini Diplomate (1932) and Under the Axe of Fascism (1936). The focus of this analysis is twofold: to explore both Salvemini's methodology and the events leading to the publication of these works. In The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, Salvemini examines the origins and the rise of Mussolini's movement, highlighting the complicity of the monarchy, the army, and industrial magnates. In Mussolini Diplomate, he analyses Fascist foreign policy from 1922 to 1932, in which Salvemini is unable to identify a consistent strategy, but only a propagandistic approach aiming to foster diplomatic relations. In Under the Axe of Fascism, Salvemini dissects Fascist economics, debunking the idea that the corporate state was an original and equitable compromise in the conflict between capital and labour, as was being portrayed abroad. An analysis of these three volumes brings into focus some noteworthy aspects of Salvemini's so-called ‘historiographical workshop’, which have hitherto been overlooked by historians (such as his adept use of sources and his endeavour to combine social sciences and economics), as well as underscoring his ability to forge cultural and intellectual networks, an essential element for undertaking such a complex task.