This article examines the organisation of the Italian state after political unification, amid peasant revolts and Hegelian intellectuals. It also examines the differences and the interdependence between the country’s north and south. In Italy, during the liberal period, statebuilding and nation-building went together with the centralization of the state and the rejection of political parties. After World War I, the crisis of the liberal state did not lead to a transition to a democracy based on organized parties, but rather produced the system of «national blocs» formed by Liberals, Conservatives and Fascists. The Fascist regime then achieved total identification of the state and the nation with the Fascist Party (PNF). Once this identification between nation and Fascism had occurred, the country’s unity was broken, because all of Fascism’s enemies were excluded from the country. This was stated by a nationalist like Federzoni and by a liberal like Croce. After World War II, the new constitution of 1948 established a democracy based on mass parties and a state of social rights. After the defeat in the War, over a fifteen-year period, Italy was to become a developed country and a welfare state.

The article reproduces a report that Palmiro Togliatti (Ercoli) submitted to a meeting (Moscow, summer 1938) of the leaders of the Communist International. The document comes from the Comintern Archives, and is published here for the first time. The report focused on the latest phase of Italian policy, i.e. the autarchic plan in the economy and strengthening the alliance with the Third Reich (Spanish Civil War, etc.), both signalling a «Fascist» war in the near future. Togliatti observed that in Italy, the alliance was causing the Nazification of the Fascist regime, and forecast the split between two tendencies in the Fascist Party: against or in favour of Germany. He supported extending the «popular front» – the policy of the communists and other antifascist movements – to the Catholics and those Fascists who intended to revolt against Hitler.

The article describes the various racist tendencies in Italy in the first half of the 20th century and the implementation of racist legislation in 1938-1939. Mussolini’s contradictory policies prior to 1938, the trends in his party, the development of a racist campaign in literature and the press, and the role of jurists are analyzed. Translating the notion of «race» into juridical language was very difficult for lawyers, because the scientific and normative system of Italian law was founded upon different concepts. The experience in the colonies allowed doctrines against the Jews to be gradually developed and then adopted in the metropolitan area. In that sense, juridical science had a sort of continuity apart from changes in political decisions, which destroyed everyday life for Jews in Italy, before they were exterminated by the Nazis and their Fascist allies.

Snagovi jegyzetek, the «Notes from Snagov» by Imre Nagy, the symbolic figure in the 1956 insurrection, are neither memorial nor political testament, but a study of the uprising’s causes, its particular features, and its repression. Imre Nagy rejects the charge of counter-revolution made against him by the regime, and asserts the revolutionary nature of the events that occurred in Hungary between October and November 1956, when he was Prime Minister.
He defends the political reforms that he carried out in the period of his first premiership (1953-1955), and explains his point of view on the most important topics that marked the insurrection: the achievement of political pluralism in Hungary, the declaration of neutrality, and Soviet military intervention in the country. The study was written in Snagov (Romania) between late November 1956 and mid-March 1957.

The crisis of the Italian Republic became decisive in the second half of the nineteen-seventies, when it abandoned the formula of the Center-Left government and attempted collaboration between the two major parties: Aldo Moro’s Christian Democracy and Enrico Berlinguer’s Communist Party. However, in the seventies and eighties, the crisis also favored, through the initiative of such major political leaders as Craxi and Giulio Andreotti, the rise in business (and, eventually, also in politics) of a skilled and intelligent figure like Milan’s Silvio Berlusconi. In just a few years, Berlusconi had managed to become a major seller of apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods and, above all, a remarkable advertising and private media entrepreneur. In the eighties, Berlusconi, through the broadcast of soap operas from the United States and Latin America, managed to gain a «cultural hegemony» among Italian families, women and the elderly – and among young people as well.

For 250 years, from the mid-twelfth to the late 14th centuries, the northern periphery of the kingdom of Castille – Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa – was the scene of a royal city-building strategy. This paper aims to describe the process’s development and its legal basis; some cases are studied as a reflection upon the most relevant characteristics of these new towns. At the end of the process, by the late fourteenth century, beside the old Episcopal sees, we find a dense web of large, mid-sized, and small new towns, concentrated on the coast and with a vibrant economic life.

This study re-examines the various, and often poorly interpreted, sources of financing for the construction of the Neapolitan cathedral (13th-14th centuries). Although King Charles II of Anjou, in a document from 29 August 1299, takes credit for founding the city’s new cathedral, it was also built with the economic aid of the city community, and probably also of the Neapolitan Archbishop, whose engagement, while not documented, has been erroneously emphasized in recent studies. The building’s ordinary maintenance activities were financed mainly by the Archbishops, while monarchs and the city community still collaborated towards extraordinary maintenance.

During the 14th century, Siena’s butchers set in montion three revolts against the city government.
Certainly, although the most famous occurred against the Nine in 1318, this government, despite its long duration (1287-1355), faced serious forms of political dissent on more than one occasion. The city’s guilds, even the strong one of butchers and animal dealers, had no access to the government, although they were not formally excluded from it.
However, butchers’ rebellions cannot be considered artisans’ or workers’ revolts, because the butchers always acted jointly with judges, notaries and powerful magnates – and not only against the government of the Nine. Starting from the so-called 1318 rebellion, current research is studying Sienese butchers and their conspiracies throughout the 14th century.