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• Witnessing "another time within our time": Carlo Levi's Tutto il miele è finito

  10-27

  Giuliana Pias

  Views:

  195

  Tutto il miele è finito is part of Carlo Levi’s interest in Other cultures and in the continuity of the encounter with the anthropological diversity of Southern Italy inaugurated by Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. This article focuses on the theme of the archaic, and on the perspective of the “contemporaneity of times” that characterizes Levi’s thought, in order to demonstrate how from Tutto il miele è finito emerges the testimony “of another time that precedes history but that is itself contemporary of history and as present as history itself” (G. Agamben).

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

  62-76

  Marco Trotta

  Views:

  65

  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.

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

  140-160

  Marco Giani

  Views:

  579

  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.