Seminars

This study examines the changing dynamics of the “Italian” writer and how we, as cultural critics, need to re-think our definitions of the new Italian writer. In so doing, we must also re-consider the notion of the geo-cultural zones that we characterize as “Italian.” Namely, how do we categorize that writer who, having left Italy and now living beyond its geo-cartographic boundaries, writes in Italian? Similarly, who is that other writer who, originating from another country that is both culturally and linguistically different from Italy, writes in Italian? Finally, where within these two groups do we position the writer of Italian origin who also lives in another country and, different from the previous two types of writers, composes his/her work in the language of his/her host country? This seemingly odd triad of writers does not consist of what some may call distinct and disparate categories. I would submit, instead, that they share a closer relationship than some might imagine. First, they are all dialoguing to some degree or another with the sign we know as ‘Italy’. Second, at least two of the groups are “de-riva-tive” of Italy whereas the third, in its own right, is “ar-riva-tive”; the first two leaving, the third arriving, yet the common denominator is still Italy. It remains the central point of commonality.

I examine the writings of four Italian politicians, selected for the quality of their prose and the relevance of their institutional roles: Giorgia Meloni (the current Italian Prime Minister), Elly Schlein (the current opposition leader), Luca Zaia (governor of Veneto between 2010 and 2025) and Vincenzo De Luca (governor of Campania from 2015 to 2025, and now mayor of Salerno). What kind of stories do these politicians tell? What do they think about the role that widely shared stories play in a community? What do their stories have in common? While many scholars have studied the political orientations of Italian literary authors, far less attention has been given to texts written by politicians themselves. My research fills this gap. Raphaël Llorca, in Le roman national des marques (2023), claims that traditional storytellers (politicians and novelists) are no longer capable of telling communal stories. I disagree with him on this point: my first conclusion is that Italian politicians, in fact, fulfil their narrative function effectively. Their stories exemplify political visions and suggest types of behaviours to which listeners or readers can relate in precisely the ways Llorca describes. Some of the stories written by Meloni, Schlein, Zaia and De Luca emphasize individual commitment, ambition and efficiency, while others highlight collective effort, solidarity and honesty. Although they differ in focus, my second conclusion is that these divergent stories can be reconciled. This supports the "depolarization of our political system" that Carlo Guarnieri highlights in Il sistema politico Italiano (2021), countering simplified and overly negative portrayals of Italian politics.

My paper considers the sacred festival space of contemporary domestic altars to St. Joseph in Queens, New York, as a transnational Catholic contact zone, in adaptation of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept, in which piety, affluence, charity, and power dynamics coalesce in a religious urban setting. Based on twelve years of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how these votive rituals of gastronomic and consumeristic display and exchange bring together middle class Sicilian migrants and working-class Latino migrants, predominately, in an imbricated environment of religious, class, and ethnic significations. On and around March 19th, Sicilian Americans who migrated during the 1970s and 1980s and settled in Astoria and Whitestone create impermanent altars in their homes in thanks for the saint’s heavenly intercession by transforming domestic space into elaborate environments of faith and community. These sacred installations of extravagance, known as tavole, are defined by their cornucopia of donated fruit, homemade Sicilian pastries, and grocery-bought foodstuffs and household items. The ritualized performance space expands the domestic sphere into a site of communal gathering for extended family, paesani, neighbors, and strangers involving poetic recitation, staged reenactment, prayer and hymns, and feasting. Ultimately, the altars are the site of vernacular philanthropy. Devotees invite three “needy” families as guests. They may have a medical condition but a significant number of those invited are recent Latin American migrants. The ritualistic symbiosis of giving and accepting gifts allows the Sicilian devotees to fulfill their obligation to the saint in a culturally accepted manner. The reciprocal exchange between hosts and guests cannot be measured monetarily but must be understood within the rubrics of a triangulated relationship between the sacred and terrestrial. It is within this cultural-religious setting of embodied holiness and commodity munificence that a reciprocal, albeit uneven, relationship between these two communities is dramatized and engendered.

What does it mean to produce knowledge at the limits of human endurance? Inaugurated in 1893 on the border between Italy and Switzerland, the Queen Margherita Hut atop Monte Rosa remains to this day the highest building in Europe. This paper argues that it was not merely a site where science happened to meet nationalism, but a place where both projects depended on the same underlying logic: that extreme environments singularly reveal, test, and ultimately forge the capacities of bodies, institutions, and nations alike. Drawing on the writings of the Torinese physiologist Angelo Mosso alongside the archives of the Italian Alpine Club and the Sella family, I trace how a specific convergence of post-Risorgimento nation-building and late nineteenth-century experimental science produced a research program that could only have existed in this particular historical context. Mosso’s physiological investigations into human limits at altitude and the Alpine Club’s nationalist ambitions in the high Alps were not merely parallel projects that happened to share a building—they were, for a brief and fragile period, the same project, made possible by an extreme environment that rendered both scientists and alpinists equally vulnerable and mutually interdependent. The paper then follows the gradual unraveling of this convergence, as the shared institutional and physical space that hostile conditions had made necessary became, in more settled circumstances, the very terrain of bitter conflict and exclusion. In recovering this history, I propose that the Margherita Hut offers an unexpected lens onto the relationship between Italian scientific culture and national imagination in the liberal era—one in which the alpine frontier, at once natural, political, and physiological, was never merely a backdrop to modern Italy's self-making, but its very condition of possibility.

Adriana Bisi Fabbri (1881-1918) exhibited with the Futurists and historians of art have often labeled her a member of this group, but, like many women, her position within the avant-garde was marginal and ambivalent. Her cousin, Umberto Boccioni, invited her to exhibit at the first Futurist group show in 1911, but didn’t appreciate the caricatures of bourgeois womanhood that she submitted. She found an admirer in fellow satirist Luciano Folgore, who warned her that Futurist founder, F.T. Marinetti, was too elitist to do much in support of her humorous art. In 1915, she joined the staff of Il Popolo d’Italia, making her Italy’s first professional female political cartoonist. Yet she signed her cartoons with the gender-neutral Adrì and often attended editorial meetings dressed as a man. She was aware of her status as an “exceptional woman” in a man’s world. “Intelligence has no sex,” she told a colleague. A blurring of “high” and “low” art and an interest in the comedic, have come to be identified as harbingers of modernism, but the role women played as active makers of popular culture is underexplored. The outbreak of World War I tested political loyalties: Mussolini broke with the socialist party over his irredentist desires to enter the war on the side of the Allies. He founded Il Popolo d’Italia as a pro-war propaganda tool and Adrì became a cog in its machine; between 1915 and 1917, feminist sentiments took a backseat to patriotism as she created numerous images dramatizing German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman aggressions. This talk will explore her political cartoons as part of a rearguard effort to promote Italian intervention, situating them in relation to early- twentieth-century discourses about the innately aggressive and tragic character of humor (Freud, Bergson, Pirandello). It will argue that Adrì offers us a window onto the complex development of Italian feminist consciousness at the start of the twentieth century, before this process was interrupted by the forces of war and authoritarianism.

This paper analyzes the ‘counter memoir’ of Italo Orciani, an Italian grifter who, once rejected by the Italian Fascist militia fighting in Spain, joined the International Brigades. After several months in the Garibaldi Brigade, Orciani left Spain only to be arrested in September 1937 and sent to political confinement on the island of Tremiti. Once there, Orciani composed a ‘memoir’/ confession/ propaganda screed, designed to impress the Fascist authorities of his conversion to the Fascist cause because of the atrocities and immorality that he saw in “Red Spain.” This paper, addresses Orciani’s experiences in civil war-era Spain as told through the ideologically shifting prism of his campaign to liberate himself from political confinement in Southern Italy. Through Orciani’s counter memoir, the complexities, manipulations, and reactivity of Fascist political confinement emerge in the ways in which Orciani mobilized Fascist antisemitic and anti-communist discourses to make his case for conversion and confession to the Fascist authorities. In search of clemency, Orciani produced a counter memoir which transforms his personal experience fighting in the Garibaldi brigade in 1937 into a set piece of Fascist propaganda, revealing the ideological priorities of the Fascist regime in the late 1930s as it elevated Nazi-influenced antisemitic and transnational anticommunist tropes about the global communist-Jewish conspiracy which, they argued, was launched in Spain for the purpose of Soviet Union global domination. The Orciani memoir stands out as the only text about the International Brigades written from the perspective of non-leftist within the militias of Republican Spain.

In “Speaking of God: The Post-Secular Challenge for Italian Feminist Thought and Practices” (AdI 2011), I argued for a constructive dialogue between diverse feminist experiences in Italy, both secular and religious, to address shared concerns for agency and social justice. In my current research, I continue exploring women’s relationship with politics and religion in modern Italy by examining 21st-century literary depictions of secular feminism vis-à-vis monastic life. More specifically, I delve into readers’ “curiosity” about monastic life and the radical choice of service and prayer that this life entails and consider Dacia Maraini’s In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi (2013) and Julia Kristeva’s Teresa, My Love. An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila (2008). By reading these novels (partly hagiographies, partly autobiographies) comparatively, I discuss the language that contemporary culture employs to relate the encounter of the female subject with the absolute while investigating the notion of agency it advocates for women. Relevant to this study are other intellectual and artistic experiences. Feminist scholars have studied monastic life and women’s mysticism to interrogate the past and articulate new forms of expression of women’s bodies and minds. Feminist theology has redefined the ways in which we read and understand Scripture and access religion and its institutions. Cinema is the artistic medium which, in recent years, has offered the most original interrogations of faith, sainthood and the meaning of religious experience in today’s world. In my research, I weave these different voices together – each critically challenged by and constructively engaging with the other and the Christian tradition – to discuss how, by looking at the past and being challenged by it, contemporary literature and thinking by women configure new forms of participation and new models of spiritual practices in our post-secular society.

Why does Manzoni spend some of the final pages of I promessi sposi insisting that Lucia is not beautiful? When Renzo and Lucia settle in a new village after their marriage, the locals are disappointed to discover that the famous Lucia does not look like a princess. The scene is unsettling, and strangely disproportionate: at the very moment when the novel is rushing toward its conclusion, Manzoni pauses to dwell on the scandal of Lucia’s unimpressive appearance. My chapter argues that the episode is not incidental, but central to Manzoni’s aesthetics and to his skepticism—declared in Del romanzo storico—toward the novel itself. Lucia’s beauty is remarkably indeterminate. Unlike the heroines of the eighteenth-century English novel or the Gothic romance, she is never fully described, never framed within a recognizable literary canon of feminine beauty. Through readings of Fielding’s Sophia Western, Apuleius’ Psyche, Gothic heroines such as Gertrude, and Manzoni’s own reflections on aesthetics, I argue that Lucia’s “insipidity” is not a deficiency but a deliberate anti-romanesque principle. Manzoni strips Lucia of the exceptional, spectacular, and emotionally excessive beauty expected of novelistic heroines in order to imagine another form of beauty altogether. That alternative emerges most clearly in the plague chapters, especially in the figure of Cecilia’s mother, whose “Lombard beauty” reveals a spiritual beauty that resists both sensual idealization and aesthetic codification. My chapter ultimately proposes that I promessi sposi transforms the problem of feminine beauty into a meditation on literary beauty itself. Lucia’s elusive appearance becomes the sign of a deeper tension within the novel: Manzoni’s desire for a form of truth and beauty that the conventions of fiction can approach only imperfectly. In this sense, Lucia’s famous insipidity marks not the failure of the novel, but the limit against which Manzoni pushes the genre.

Since the earliest written accounts of the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra, chroniclers have sought to describe Italian organized crime in terms of dress. Many claimed to be able to identify mafiosi and camorristi through specific accessories and garments (cf. Alongi, De Blasio), or even proposed the existence of a uniform (cf. Lombroso, Mastriani, Tarde, Russo and Serrao) that could help categorize the phenomenon Southern Italian criminality. Later such discourses would find their full force in visual media, establishing fashion as a signature means of interpreting the Italian mafias. While our knowledge about Italian criminal organizations has changed drastically in the past half a century, the fascination with the clothing of mafiosi continues in current discussions of Italian mafias. An illustrative case is the media frenzy following the 2023 arrest of Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro, in which journalistic accounts made frequent mention of the latitante’s wardrobe at the time of his capture. The media coverage soon inspired a TikTok meme in which contributors modelled their own versions of the famous criminal’s wardrobe, affirming the obsession with criminal clothing in the popular imagination. To makes sense of the contemporary invocation of mafia style, this paper examines late-19 th and early- 20 th -century writings that foreground dress as a means of interpreting Southern Italian criminality. My discussion troubles the notion that “mafia fashion” originates in film and television media to show how the interest in criminal apparel originates in long-established discourses in Italy related to ethnic difference and the performance of gender. In juxtaposing these discourses with recent examples from social media and journalistic reporting, I link the historical and contemporary fascinations with the clothing of Italian mafias to demonstrate the privileged position fashion holds as an expression of subcultural criminal identities.

This presentation draws from my current book project, Wandering Roots: Italo Calvino, the Grimms, and Fairy Tale Ecologies, which reevaluates Calvino’s Fiabe italiane (1956) through the lens of material ecocriticism and critical folklore studies. Against the backdrop of fascist appropriations of folklore as a tool of racialized national myth-making, Calvino imagined a radically different editorial practice: one that reclaims the folktale as a repository of subaltern knowledge and a site of environmental imagination. Focusing on the subterranean and vegetal motifs that pervade the tales—wells, forests, roots, caves—I argue that Calvino’s collection constructs an “underground ecology” of belonging that resists the folklorization of subaltern culture as a resource to be extracted and aestheticized by the nation-state. These tales, originally gathered by 19th- and early 20thcentury scholars such as Giuseppe Pitrè and Benedetto Croce, are re-assembled by Calvino not as inert cultural heritage, but as living forms that stage encounters between humans, nonhumans, and landscapes. In doing so, Calvino also restores narrative agency to popular storytellers like Agatuzza Messia, whose voice—often effaced in nationalist and philological accounts—emerges with renewed epistemic dignity.This talk explores how metaphors of groundedness and rootedness—so often mobilized in nationalist discourse—are unsettled in the Fiabe italiane by vegetal, geological, and subterranean figures. I read Calvino’s editorial practice alongside Gramsci’s reflections on folklore and subaltern culture, arguing that the Fiabe italiane construct a counter-archive of belonging: one that is ecological rather than territorial, diasporic rather than ethnonational. In dialogue with the seminar’s interdisciplinary mission, I invite discussion on how literary form, folklore, and ecological metaphor intersect in shaping modern Italian cultural identity—particularly from below.

The dramatic Red Brigades trial which took place in Turin between 1976-1978 was a key moment in the struggle between the state and the Red Brigades. It saw the first use of the ‘rupture trial’ strategy, whereby the BR defendants would sack their own lawyers and refuse legal representation. The BR also used selective assassinations of key figures in the process to terrify potential jurors, a strategy which the state struggle to deal with at every level. This was a maxi-trial, which coincided with dramatic events elsewhere (such as the Aldo Moro kidnap and assassination). It has been little studied, with only one book dedicated to it (which mainly deals with legalistic issues). This paper, based on extensive archive and newspaper research, will argue that this trial was a turning point in the ‘years of lead’, but also marked the peak of BR media and legal power – putting the state on the back foot. It was also crucial to the birth of brigatisti in the dock as celebrities and led to numerous institutional and legal changes which made the trial process much more ‘securitised’ and repressive. Finally, the paper will argue that this trial was crucial to BR strategy overall, with murders and other actions linked above all to the internal needs of the ‘group’ as opposed to wider national or geo-political issues (as is usually assumed in the historiography).

This paper forms part of a broader research project funded by the European Research Council, which focuses on humanitarianism in Southern European countries. 1 It examines Italian trade union campaigns on behalf of political prisoners in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, developed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. Drawing on multi-archival research, the paper analyses the goals, practices, and language of Italian labour internationalism, which took shape at the intersection of diverse yet interconnected domains. These campaigns reflected a broad political vision: the promotion, throughout the Mediterranean region, of societies founded on the core values of freedom, democracy, and trade union rights. At the same time, mobilisation on behalf of political prisoners also sought to alleviate individual suffering, as evidenced by accounts of the harsh conditions endured by imprisoned trade unionists and the hardships faced by their families. It further involved denouncing the brutality employed by Mediterranean dictatorships as a tool of repression and drawing attention to the human rights violations inflicted on their victims. This paper argues that social justice, humanitarianism, and human rights were inextricably intertwined in the aims and actions of Italian labour internationalism. In doing so, it contributes to the historiographical debate on the relationship between workers’ rights and human rights, while also offering valuable insight into the broader – though less visible – circulation of human rights discourse prior to its full emergence in the field of international relations in the 1970s.

In 1934, Mussolini’s dictatorship introduced a national system of juvenile courts (the Tribunali per i minorenni) for the first time in Italy. The courts represented the final piece of the juvenile- justice system that the Fascist regime had introduced in penal and civil legislation over the previous decade. Located in each of Italy’s 26 appellate-court districts, the tribunals had full jurisdiction over children under the age of 18. In criminal cases, the courts enjoyed more flexible rules and procedures than those for trying adults in the regular courts. Juvenile judges, for instance, enjoyed sweeping powers to investigate the causes of juvenile misbehavior; to conduct private, summary hearings; and to individualize correctional measures according to the child’s personality. Magistrates also adjudicated matters involving non-criminal youths (e.g., abandoned, neglected, and wayward), committing thousands each year to indefinite “administrative measures” in reformatories. Armed with these weapons, the juvenile courts expressed the dictatorship’s aspirations to discipline and “reclaim” Italian children. They also allowed the regime to intervene in family life more than ever before and, consequently, to subject thousands of minors each year to re-education schemes in the name of child protection, 4 crime prevention, and racial purity. Using the juvenile court of Florence as a case study, my presentation will center on one of the most “fascistic” features of Mussolini’s juvenile justice: the indefinite detention of “socially dangerous” minors in both civil and penal cases. Sampling the unstudied juvenile-court records in the Florence archive, I will examine how – and how many – minors were brought before the tribunal; how and why judges declared some youths to be dangerous; and how these children fared in state custody. I will aim to determine from these cases the extent to which a distinctly “fascist” culture of juvenile justice was implemented in 1934 and administered until the fall of fascism.

This paper offers an intimate portrait of Arturo Giovannitti, the Italian-American poet and labor activist who became a central figure in the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Going beyond the mythologized image of Giovannitti as a romantic labor hero, it explores the emotional underpinnings of his activism, with particular focus on the libidinal and affective dynamics that shaped his political behavior before and during his incarceration. Drawing on an extraordinary cache of newly available private correspondence—especially letters to and from his lover, Carrie—this study investigates the complex interplay between love, desire, self-perception, and political commitment.The paper argues that Giovannitti’s politics were profoundly fueled by intimate emotions. Love for Carrie, idealized as both muse and moral compass, served not only as a personal refuge but also as a political driver, shaping Giovannitti’s perception of the strike, his rhetorical framing, and his courtroom strategy. These affective forces, including jealousy, resentment, solidarity, and self-aggrandizement, extended to his interactions with fellow activists, supporters, and enemies alike. While literature has often cast Giovannitti’s imprisonment and trial as an act of martyrdom for labor, this paper reveals his emotional experience as more ambivalent, even narcissistic, yet still consequential for the labor movement.By foregrounding the “rule of love,” the paper challenges the persistent rationalist understanding of radical activism and highlights the explanatory power of emotions in shaping historical agency. Giovannitti’s story ultimately demonstrates how intimate emotion—particularly romantic love—can galvanize public engagement and leave a lasting imprint on collective struggle.

Whereas border deaths should be the exception, they have become the norm through which mobility is regulated and collective indifference towards migrants dying en route grows across the world’s most contested and hyper-militarized borderlands (De Genova 2017; Squire 2017). The aftermath of this violence is manifold and its impact on the neighbouring communities remains an important yet neglected topic in both scholarship and practice (Grotti and Brightman 2020; Zagaria 2020). The proposed article contributes to fill this gap by addressing how the remains of the migrants who die in the Central Mediterranean routes to Europe affect the lives of borderland communities, leaving traces in their stories, practices, and memories. By doing so, it re-frames border deaths from a local perspective, focusing on its border-less reverberations and considering it as a pervasive phenomenon that concerns not only the dead and their families, but Mediterranean societies at large. This inclusive approach challenges traditional narratives surrounding border deaths and invites scholars (and ideally the wider public) to confront the realities faced by those living at the deadliest borders in the world – the island of Lampedusa (Italy). My ethnographic research is centred on strictly empirical data gathered around participant observation during several months of work with one of the oldest fishing crews on the island of Lampedusa. By exploring how these fishermen conduct their existence and by entering their life worlds with family members and friends as a new member of the crew, I propose to investigate how border deaths remain silenced or emerge through subtle moments, instances or anecdotes in ordinary life. I argue that migrants’ deaths are intimately connected to Southern European citizens’ lives, but that such webs of relations are hardly visible and importantly related to border policies which encourage indifference.

My talk explores the concept of sexual difference as formulated in Carla Lonzi’s Sputiamo su Hegel (1970), contrasting it with the definition offered by Adriana Cavarero and Olivia Guaraldo in their 2024 book Donna si nasce (e qualche volta lo si diventa). While Cavarero and Guaraldo acknowledge Lonzi as the founder of the pensiero della differenza—a feminist tradition they represent—I argue that their book develops this notion into an anti-gender stance that significantly departs from Lonzi’s 1970s radical feminism. I begin by examining the anti-Hegelian foundations of Lonzi’s thought. In response to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and its Marxist reinterpretations, Lonzi asserts that “woman is oppressed as a woman, at all social levels; not as a class, but as a sex.” Rejecting class-based analysis, she identifies patriarchy as the structural root of oppression and argues that 2 “Marxism has ignored women, both as oppressed people and as bearers of the future.” As sexual objects of heterosexual male desire, women represent an original form of male possession that is patriarchal. By grounding sexual difference in female pleasure, Lonzi views women not as natural beings destined for reproduction, but as political subjects. Building on this critique, I examine Lonzi’s concept of sexual difference in contrast to the binary logic of conservative, pro-family politics and the essentialism underlying Cavarero and Guaraldo’s biologically grounded definition of woman as generative sex. Cavarero and Guaraldo’s critique of expressions like “people with a uterus” and notions of “inclusion” misrepresents the LGBTQIA+ movement’s challenge to sexual binary and heteronormativity as an attack on women and heterosexuality. Rooted more in Cavarero’s (and the Diotima school’s) ontological feminism than in Lonzi’s existential and anti-Hegelian thought, Donna si nasce places the pensiero della differenza in sharper tension with queer theory than with the patriarchy itself. My talk reclaims Lonzi’s feminism to frame sexual difference as historical absence—not essence—and thus as a condition of agency.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Italian experimental poets turned their attention to the relationship between sound, meaning, and notation in language. Through experiments with puns, graphic notation, and recording technologies, these poets explored how language made meaning through sound and image. What remains unexplored in scholarship is how Chinese writing served as a source of fascination for Italian experimental poets, a way to explore and articulate ideas of translation and linguistic difference. Chinese writing is logographic, in which symbols (or characters) represent morphemes and words, in contrast to phonographic writing, in which symbols (letters) represent sounds. In this paper, I analyze notions of linguistic difference and translation, and the role of Chinese in these conceptualizations, in the work of Italian experimental poet Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996). Rosselli’s transnational upbringing between France, the UK, the US, and Italy informed her movement between Italian, English, and French in her writing. In her most translingual texts, Diario in tre lingue and Le Chinois à Rome (both 1954–1956, published 1980s), she turns to Chinese in her search for a language that unites sound, meaning, and notation. Although no characters appear in the texts, I argue that Rosselli’s homophonic and transliterative play between Italian, English, and French serves to reveal the inadequacy of phonographic writing to communicate meaning, and fantasize about the possibility of communicating differently. The transnational intellectual history I trace through Rosselli’s work reveals how ideas of China, Chinese culture, Chinese politics, and, above all, Chinese writing were formed in the Italian postwar, in networks that include sources from the US, France, Germany, and China. More broadly, I argue that this fascination with Chinese logographic writing provides an essential lens through which to understand theories of language and translation emerging in Italy from the 1950s to the 1970s.