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• Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity

  62-76

  Marco Trotta

  Views:

  24

  Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.

• Goliarda Sapienza atypical "militant journalist"

  198-214

  Alessandra Trevisan

  Views:

  244

  This paper retraces Goliarda Sapienza’s no-fiction production between 1981 and 1988, considering in particular two feminist reviews of that period such as «Quotidiano Donna» and «Minerva: l’altra metà dell’informazione» on which she wrote articles about society, most of them never considered before today. Excluding the topic of the prison in her most important novels L’università di Rebibbia (1983) and Le certezze del dubbio (1987), the 80s could be defined as a moment of experience inside and beyond the Italian political context. Her reflections on Feminism authorize an interpretation of her “anomalous” way of thinking. At the end, the need to belong to a group will also open the following season.

• Ondina and the ondine: Representation issues (verbal and iconographic) of the sporty woman in fascist Italy (ca. 1933)

  140-160

  Marco Giani

  Views:

  559

  In late 1933, L'Osservatore Romano fuelled an argument against Il Littoriale, mouthpiece of the Fascist sport policy, about women’s sport: the Vatican Italian-speaking newspaper was against the public women’s athletic meetings, and the “immoral” shorts dressed by the young Italian athletes, such as Ondina Valla, going-to-be the first Italian woman to win an Olympic gold medal (1936, Berlin). Which was the situation of Italian female sports, at that time? Which was the influence of new women models coming from US? What was considered “immoral” by conservative people in 1933 Italy watching a women’s athletic or swimming meeting? How Hollywood stars could help Ondina and her mates on the road of female emancipation? These are the questions this essay is going to answer, helped by a lot of historical images, useful to reconstruct a whole collective imagination.