This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

In this paper it is argued that the concept of pluralism – the most important value in the Italian media debate – is conceptually confused. The author identifies three mutually incompatible conceptions of pluralism used when discussing the public broadcaster Rai: (1) structural pluralism, satisfied when the public broadcaster is divided into autonomous channels or programme groups; (2) summative pluralism, satisfied when output is divided between political actors according to some ideal distribution; and (3) pluralism ‘lottizzato’, satisfied when a number of different political positions are ‘represented’ by journalists within the broadcaster.

Italian party coalitions (from both the centre-left and the centre-right) have enacted an average of 57% of the pledges included in their common manifestos. In relative terms, Italian political parties keep their electoral promises much less than parties governing in single-party government, but slightly outperform those that form post-electoral coalitions. Although this finding contradicts the widespread pessimism about Italy's performance, it also illustrates that there is no significant advantage to bipolarism and the existence of a common programme as opposed to situations where coalitions are formed after the elections. This might explain Italians’ dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their country.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse the eugenic pacifism of Giuseppe Sergi, one of Italy's most important anthropologists working at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sergi's eugenic proposal, while accepting the long-contested idea of Weismann's germ plasm theory, preserves Lamarck's theory of the conditioning effect of the environment through the cautious use of Gregor Mendel's theory of recessiveness. Sergi, co-founder of the eugenic movement in Italy, thus affirmed the ‘salvific’ power of an upbringing that would assume the task of carrying forward to future generations the recessiveness of traits of violence, which would thereby assure humankind a prosperous future guaranteed by ‘competition between the races’, a competition that would no longer be on the battlefield but in the fields of industry, art and science.

The historiography of contemporary Lombardy has been dominated by in-depth studies of local contexts but has rarely addressed the regional dimension. Those studies that have had a regional outlook have drawn divergent and fluid regional boundaries, rarely connected to the administrative and by now political reality of the region of Lombardy. This article aims to reconstruct some of the most salient moments of this ‘identification’ of Lombardy in the economic, social and administrative history of the region. It tries to trace the cultural roots and persistence of this identification, which has sometimes been embroiled in political controversy. Focusing mainly on more recent studies, this article will also address the aporias and unsolved issues surrounding the study of Lombardy.