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The nation and the South in the work of Rosario Romeo: A debate between John Dickie, Lucy Riall and Giuseppe Galasso∗: The idea of nation in Romeo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

John Dickie ,
Lucy Riall  and
Giuseppe Galasso
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Extract

The last seven or eight years have brought a flood of printer's ink dedicated to the issue of national identity in Italy. At the same time, the new political forces that have emerged since Tangentopoli have all, in various ways, contributed to the re-emergence of patriotism in the language of the public sphere. What would Rosario Romeo have said about this new cultural and political climate? How would he have sought to intervene? It seems likely that he would have turned his famously acerbic critical intelligence on many of the volumes published. A signi. cant number of them merely offer versions of the same old pathologizing version of Italian history, or even, ahistorically, of the Italian national character. All the Sicilian historian would have to do would be to dust off his criticisms of those Anglo-American and Marxist historians who portrayed Italy, in his view, as having had the ‘wrong’ history, of having certain aboriginal defects.

Type
Contexts and Debates
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , May 2002 , pp. 59 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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References

Notes

1. Dickie, John, ‘The idea of nation in Romeo’ (in this issue of Modern Italy).Google Scholar

2. Edited by Galasso, Giuseppe, Adelphi, , Milan, 1991 (first edition Laterza, Bari, 1932).Google Scholar

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