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Marano: a disputed fortress: The crisis of political-diplomatic relations between the main European powers following the coup d'état on Marano in 1542
46-59Views:271Venice’s reconquest of Marano in 1542 was a key moment in the history of the Republic. The fortress of Marano was in fact at the top of its glory between the XV and XVI century, when it was contested between Austria and Venice. When it fell in the hands of Austria in 1513, Venice tried to reconquest it with every possible means. After years of unsuccessful attempts, the feat was carried out by Beltrame Sacchia, an ambitious and adventurous merchant from Udine, who occupied the fortress in 1542 in name of the King of France. This article analyses the repercussions of Marano’s reconquest on European political equilibrium. What happened on the morning of January 2, 1542, as well as making a turning point in the boundary dynamics between Venice and the Austrian, deeply damaged the diplomatic relations between the main powers of Europe: the Venetian Republic, France, the Empire and the Ottomans.
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Narrating the crisis and legitimizing the use of emergency legislation: political crime as a premise of the authoritarian state
18-29Views:76During the liberal era, from unification to the rise of fascism, many governments experimented with emergency legislation to control public order or repress the mobilization of opposing political groups. With the approval of the new penal code, political crimes remained an ill-defined offense. Consequently, Crispi and Di Rudinì implemented a state of siege on two separate occasions to condemn any attempt to spread values and principles contrary to the old constitutional foundations of the Albertine Statute.
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"Please, milady". The representation of the schoolmistress in literature and cinema: from Maria Messina to Alberto Lattuada
49-64Views:194This article aspires to open a new prospective of study on the figure of the schoolmistress in the first half of the Italian twentieth century. The essay focuses on three lesser-known narrative works (two by women writers), with a look at two movies of the 1940s and 1950s. The study offers a thematic analysis on the character of the schoolmistress, who is not always adequately recognized and analysed. In the first part, a group of three short stories is analysed: Maria Messina’s L’ora che passa (1911) revolves around an emptied and disillusioned teacher, Rosalia, who has not found the means to emancipate herself in her profession; Ada Negri’s Anima bianca (1917) instead presents a teacher, Rosanna, fully realized in her role to the point of letting herself die when an event undermines her ability to teach; finally, Federigo Tozzi’s Un’osteria (1920) opens a contemporary debate on the suffering of those teachers, like Assunta, forced to work far from home. In the second part of the essay the discussion shifts to cinema: Vittorio De Sica’s Maddalena... zero in condotta (1940) is the parable of the teacher Elisa Malgari, who has to learn the most important lesson: letting herself be loved by a man. Finally, Alberto Lattuada’s Scuola elementare (1954) opens a glimpse into the crisis of the substitute teacher Laura Bramati in search of her true professional identity.
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Foscolo and the friends of the Conciliatore
31-46Views:184The first issue of Conciliatore was published in September 1818; its history includes heated discussions. Silvio Pellico, who was its most consistent proponent, felt himself to be part of a hegemonic intellectual elite. There is a Foscolian mark to the works
of these young intellectuals of the new generation. It is the crisis of a generation that comes to attack the very idea of literature that sees the passage from the certainties of the Enlightenment to the Romantic disquiet. The querelle des anciens et des modernes brought to light the unbridgeable hiatus that put Foscolo in a position of contrast with his friends and pupils. The position assumed by the exile risked placing him against his dearest friends, the Romantics, and bringing him closer to his detractors, the Classicists. Foscolo does not manage to see any possibility of experimenting a valid mediation. A clear symptom of his peremptory closure. -
Staying or leaving? On the non-stereotypical representations of Naples
36-53Views:519The literary image of Naples, “Capital of the South”, that sees periodic alternations of crisis and splendour in the arts, is certainly dichotomous: on the one hand the locus amoenus in which inventiveness flourishes and different cultural traditions intersect and live together, on the other the symbolic place of immense social disparities, an outbreak of epidemics and the cradle of a lax and reactionary mentality. The image used by Benedetto Croce to define the city, “a paradise inhabited by devils” dates back to the Middle Ages, and is denied from time to time by the authors who intend to build a positive myth of Napoletanità, but already in the early 20th century, and then especially in the period from 1943 (to the present day), there are increasingly critical accents towards this image, which result - more than in hatred or in contempt for the city and its inhabitants - in a tendency to move away from Naples, to abandon a contradictory reality that does not solve its problems, but like a virgin forest grows back destroying every element of progress. The writers examined in the article are: Carlo Bernari, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Fabrizia Ramondino, Ermanno Rea, Giuseppe Montesano, Elena Ferrante.
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Populism: A Controversial Historiographical Category
80-94Views:449The note stems from the need to carry out a survey on recent international literature dedicated to populism, starting above all from the considerations contained in The Populist Temptation by Eichengreen, and in From Fascism to Populism in History by Finchelstein, as well as the results from the Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy. The contrasting reflections recorded around a phenomenon so debated allow to delineate the elements, that justify the introduction of a historiographical category in its own right and to project some definitions on the entire history of the Italian political system. The intention of this overview is to construct a catalog of the various interpretations of populism that have emerged in recent years. It is noteworthy that in the years following World War II until the present day, publications on populism have been produced in a discontinuous fashion, thus rendering the subject even more elusive and unclassifiable.