The image of England was very important to the political culture of Italian liberals during the Risorgimento and the post-unification period. Even if it was viewed as unreachable, it still constituted an example of progress that Italy could strive towards. This article reconstructs the stages of the process that saw a section of Italian political culture become alienated from this image, just at a time when a more complete form of industrial democracy was becoming eswtablished in Britain. This alienation is interpreted here as having its roots in attitudes to the issues raised by the workers’ movement: Italian liberals were reluctant to give it full legitimacy and engage it on the open terrain of social and political competition. The first two sections of the article go over the traits of Italian Anglophilia up to the end of the nineteenth century and single out the earliest reasons for alienation. The third section identifies the Boer War, the figure of Chamberlain and the cluster of issues linking democracy, imperialism and protectionism as key factors in the change of direction. The fourth section shows that the constitutional conflict in Britain and the Parliament Act were a further, decisive, step in Italian liberals’ disaffection with the ‘English model'.

The unprecedented increase in literary production in Friuli in the post-war period has coincided with the rise of popular ethno-nationalism in the region. Although there is an evident connection between the political, social and cultural fields in Friuli, this relationship is both complex and full of potential conflicts. This paper provides a brief overview of Friulian regionalism, before considering the specific role assigned to literature in Friulian by proponents of regional autonomy. It examines the problematic nature of the dominant ideology of friulanità and discusses the responses of a number of authors to the prevailing themes of cultural discourse in the region. In conclusion, it examines the ideological conflicts caused by modernisation in the region, and considers the impact that the transformation of the region has had on the literary debate, concentrating on the difficulties caused by Friulian linguistic purism.

This article considers the Italian household product design company Alessi as quintessentially Italian and international. The interplay of mass-production and craft techniques at Alessi, an extended design process and the presentation of the family in company publicity exemplify the ambiguities identified within Italian design. The extent to which Alessi typifies Italian post-war design is questioned with reference to the company's international design team and the marketing of its products to foreign consumers as manifestations of italianità. The findings are based on primary research in Milan and the Alessi factory, including a series of interviews with designers, retailers, curators and media workers, combined with secondary material centred upon design history.

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.

Organized by the ‘Comitato nazionale per il centenario della nascita di Ignazio Silone’, this conference was the culmination of a year of events. Held in collaboration with the three universities of the Abruzzo, its aim was to avoid an overly celebratory tone and to provide a working forum for ongoing research. The theme was not just Silone as writer and political activist but also the broader context of his early career. The organizers wanted to make a serious academic contribution to the debates which have raged over the last three years as to whether Silone collaborated with the Fascist political police. The press has created the impression that there are two fronts or camps: those who believe Silone was an informer (‘led’ by the historians Maurizio Canali and Dario Biocca, co-authors of the L'informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia1) and those who believe the evidence has been exaggerated or even invented (Mimmo Franzinelli, author of I tentacoli dell'Ovra2 and Giuseppe Tamburrano, director of the Fondazione Pietro Nenni). For the. rst time, this centenary conference set out to bring the two sides together away from media clamour and, unsurprisingly, they appeared neither united in themselves nor united against each other.