Italian history

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• 1/22/2023
  

  The Pope at War: Pius XII and the Vatican's Secret Archives

  by James Thornton Harris

  David Kertzer's book argues that defenders of Pope Pius XII's actions during the Holocaust mistake his defense of the prerogatives of the Catholic Church for a defense of the victims of Nazi persecution and genocide. 

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• 12/18/2022
  

  Mussolini in Myth and Memory

  by Paul Corner

  Italians' recollection of Mussolini and the Fascist regime embody the replacement of historical memory with national mythology—a mythology that dismisses both the violence of the dictatorship and Italians' collective responsibility for it and enables the resurgence of the far right today.

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  11/10/2022
  

  Lunchtime in Italy: Work, Time and Civil Society

  by Jonathan Levy

  The Italian lunchtime insists that time be organized around communal rituals and sustenance, not work. Does the utter foreignness of this attitude in America help explain the current national derangement? 

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• SOURCE: Al Jazeera
  9/24/2022
  

  What Explains Fascism's Durable Roots in Italy?

  The success of a party with historical connections to fascists who survived the Second World War raises important questions about why Italians justify voting for the hard right. 

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  8/9/2022
  

  Mario Fiorentini (1918-2022): The Last Surviving Italian Partisan

  by David Broder

  After Nazi German occupied post-Mussolini Rome, Fiorentini escaped from prisons four times during twenty months of anti-Nazi struggle. He remained an important witness for a society prone to forgetting the horrors of far-right politics.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  6/3/2022
  

  Paul Ginsbourg: London-Born, Florence-Based Historian of Modern Europe

  Energized by student protests at Cambridge in 1968, Ginsbourg was drawn to study the European revolutions of 1848 and rise of the modern Italian nation. 

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• 10/10/2021
  

  Tracing World War 2's Impact on Sicily's Cultural Heritage Sites and Museums

  by Antonino Crisà

  World War II profoundly affected museums and antiquities in Sicily; a new research project is examining this underappreciated destructive consequence of war.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/8/2021
  

  Melting Glaciers Have Exposed Frozen Relics of World War I

  Melting glaciers have allowed access to a mountain barracks used by Austro-Hungarian soldiers fighting the "White War" in the Italian Alps. 

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• SOURCE: BBC
  4/28/2021
  

  France Arrests Ex-Members of Italy Extremist group Red Brigades

  Alleged members of the leftist terror group had been harbored in France under policies of its former Socialist president François Mitterand, with the proviso that such sanctuary was only for those who had not been involved in violence. 

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  4/25/2021
  

  Stop Pretending Italian Fascists Were Innocent Victims

  The growing far right has sought to draw a moral equivalency between Italian Fascists and the leftist partisans, including Communists, who fought to expel fascist forces from occupied Yugoslavia at the end of World War II. Historian Eric Gobetti says that victims of reprisals were targeted for fascist allegiance, not Italian ethnicity.

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• SOURCE: iItaly.com
  11/8/2020
  

  What Does The Triumph of Biden-Harris Represent Historically?

  by Stanislao Pugliese

  "Americans should not make the same mistake committed in Italy after World War II in thinking that fascism was merely a “parenthesis” in Italian history."

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• ‘One Man, and One Man Alone’: Mussolini’s War

  by John Gooch

  Mussolini acted on the spur of the moment, always sensitive to the need to be seen as Hitler’s equal.  Rarely did anyone ever try to talk him out of a chosen course, and when they did so they failed.  You couldn’t reason with him.