In the early decades of the Nineteenth Century, the Jewish legal situation in Rome and in the State of the Church experienced a radical reversal: actually the two papal Restorations erased the civil and political emancipation thanks to which full citizenship and equality had been recognized to the Jews in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, and in Italy too. A very effective example of how the Jewish situation within the Papal State in the early Nineteenth Century had worsened than in the previous decades is offered by the little-known story of a Roman family of merchants, the Ascarellis. Since 1783  they had settled down in Civitavecchia, a town devoid of the ghetto, and there they led flourishing trades for almost 50 years. In 1802 the Congregation of the Holy Office started a trial which went on until 1829 and which ended with the definitive expulsion of the family and the closing of all its mercantile and financial activities, causing no little damage to the port town and to the State. The story of the Ascarellis is an eloquent testimony of the political and ideological changes that made the Catholic anti-Judaism one of the main ensign of the Restoration and a specificmean of the anti-modern fight throughout the Nineteenth Century and until the following Century.

Keywords: Roman Jews; Civitavecchia; Restoration; Catholic anti-Semitism.

The Republican and Mazzinian Giuseppe Petroni was born on February 1812 in Bologna, but his name is linked to the history of Rome and the “Third Rome of the People” dreamed by Giuseppe Mazzini. His revolutionary activities began in 1831 when Romagna rose in arms against the papal government. The following year he enrolled in the “Young Italy” (a secret political association). Because of his open criticism of the pope’s (Gregory XVI) system of government he was imprisoned (even if just for a few months in the fall 1834). When he was released, he had to respect a precept of law. He moved to Rome in 1845 and became a lawyer in the court of the “Sacred Roman Rota”. When the Republic was proclaimed at Rome in the year 1849, he became “general secretary” of the Minister for Justice Giovita Lazzarini, contributing to the battle for the rejuvenation of the backward and succeeding Roman judicial institutions, managing, among other things, to make trial hearings open to public. At the time of the fall of the Republic, he remained in Rome and became the referent of Mazzini. In 1853 he was arrested, tried and convicted for his conspiratorial activities. He remained in the prisons of the pope until September 21, 1870. He resumed his role next to Mazzini and assumed the direction of the last Mazzini’s newspaper, “La Roma del Popolo” (1871-72). In the same year he became a Mason and brought in the Grand Orient of Italy the pedagogical and educational ideals of Mazzini. He became Grand Master of the Italian Masons and exasperated the positions of anti-clerical Italian Masons. In his old age he became a Methodist. He died in Terni in 1888. Prominent figure in the Nineteenth Century, democratic and Masonic Italian, Petroni has enjoyed little luck as far as historiography is concerned, perhaps because of the rigidity of his republican positions.

Keywords: Petroni; Rome; Risorgimento.

This essay analyses the circumstances that allowed for the realization of the luxury Grand Hotel in Rome at the end of the Nineteenth Century. By examining the behaviour of the main actors and the comments of the contemporaries, it wants to contribute to the on-going debate on the real modernization of Italian ruling class. To do this, it does not remain locked within the narrow boundaries of a local history but compares the habits of the ruling classes of the main capital cities of Europe with the behaviour of the Italian one. In this case study, we have the opportunity to analyse what we assume as the outstanding part of the cultural values, which characterized a modern European society, suddenly placed in the middle of the Roman upper class. Haute cousine, the world of the gourmets and the existence of several associations, magazines and most famous cooks, all these were (and still are) one of the columns of the cultural hegemonic influence of a ruling class or a nation in front of others classes or nations. In 1894, the opening of the Grand Hotel by César Ritz and August Escoffier (the first one, the owner or director of many luxury hotels in several European countries; the second one, the heir of the outstanding Carême), near the thermal baths of Diocletian, makes it easier to reflect on the real efforts of the ruling class of a very young nation to homologate itself to the upper classes of the older, stronger and more modern states in Europe.

Keywords: Nineteenth Century Rome; Ruling class; Modernization; Habits.

Italian deputy between 1892 and 1913, Angelo Celli, a renowned physician and an expert in malarial diseases, regarded his political appointment in Parliament as a vehicle to support his professional activities. Indeed, he used his influence in order to bring to the attention of the institutions the fight against the scourge of malaria, which he and a few other researchers undertook. As a scholar, Celli published widely on the topic and never tired of drawing the attention of the political establishment to malaria, not only as main cause of disease and mortality in Southern Italy, but also as an endemic factor of social and environmental malaise. He was convinced that drastically reducing such phenomenon would equate to contributing a solution to the Southern Question. He therefore did not hesitate to take on challenges of all sorts (including opposition due to strong economic interests) in order to obtain that the State promote and finance a specific sanitary policy based especially on the therapeutic effects of quinine and its administration to the rural population. Results followed. Celli and a few other researchers did not ignore, however, that malaria was also the effect of the mismanagement of the environment, and pointed his finger at absentee estate landlords. Eradicating the roots of malaria would be closely connected with tackling the causes of such absenteeism.

Keywords: Malaria; Environment; Estate Landlords.

The anniversary of the capture of Rome by the Italian army (20 September 1870) was an enduring object of dispute between Italian authorities and the Holy See. In 1910, this dispute turned into an unusually harsh verbal confrontation between pope Pius X and mayor Nathan, a Jew and mason of English origin. Nathan, who was at the head of a democratic, socialist and anticlerical administration, praised the new Rome’s modernity by comparison with catholic Church’s obscurantism and condemned papal infallibility. The pope, on the other hand, restated catholic Rome’s religious primacy and lamented the mayor’s interference in religious matters. This controversy received a lot of international attention. The wound suffered by the Church was only partially healed in 1930, after conciliation between Italy and the Holy See, when Mussolini decided to abolish the 20 September public holiday.

Keywords: Twentieth Century Rome; Nathan; Pius

The Macedonian issue is one of the essential moments of the complex history of the Balkans. Its repercussions were felt in the entire Balkan geographical area and strongly influenced the life of the newly constituted Principality of Bulgaria. The Macedonian issue involved more or less directly also all the territories that gravitated around the Adriatic Sea, like Albania, causing worries in the Italian political leaders. In the period of time between the Berlin Congress (1878) and the Young Turks’ takeover in Constantinople (1908), the “Consulta” followed the events with constant attention, fearing that they could have led to a new Balkan conflict or even to an European war. Moreover, Italy feared that a certain instability in the area could favour Wien’s politics in the Albanian territories where Rome also aspired to impose its own influence and to put the basis of an embryonic economical presence. In 1908, the Young Turks’ takeover, the annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina by Wien and the independence of Bulgaria produced a series of changes in the Balkan context. A new crisis was about to explode, but not due to the Great Powers, but to the Italian endeavours in Libya. The Balkan wars (1912-13) determined the division of the Macedonian territories and the disappearance, at least for a long while, of the Macedonian issue from the agenda of the Great Powers and that of Italy.

Keywords: Macedonia; Italy; Austria; Bulgaria

The First Balkan War was fought by the members of the Balkan League (Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro) in order to take Macedonia away from the Ottoman Empire. Hostilities were opened on 8th of October 1912 and after the peace treaty signed in London on May 30, 1913, the Second Balkan War began when Serbia, Greece, and Romania quarrelled with Bulgaria over the division of their joint conquests in Macedonia. Serbia and Greece formed an alliance against Bulgaria and the war began on 30th of June 1913, when Bulgarian troops attacked Serbian and Greek forces in Macedonia. The Bulgarians were defeated, however, and a peace treaty was signed between the combatants on August 10, 1913. Under the terms of the treaty, Greece and Serbia divided up most of Macedonia between themselves, leaving Bulgaria with only a small part of the region. Serbia almost doubled its territory enlarging its population. The Balkan wars deprived the Ottoman Empire of almost all its remaining territory in Europe. The Italian General Staff Army’s Historical Archive provides a valuable record of the transactions in question and allows detailed analysis.

Keywords: Italy; Balkan Wars; Italian General Staff Army

Between the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917 hopes that the war would soon come to an end were growing. In the same period some Italian democratic pacifists, especially the Nobel peace prize winner in 1907 Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, entertained the idea of promoting the birth of a Federation of European States as a guarantee for lasting peace and stability. Following Moneta’s death in the first weeks of 1918 and Wilson’s fourteen points at the end of the war many Italian bourgeois pacifists, especially the radical Member of Parliament Edoardo Giretti, embarked on the more ambitious project to found a supranational League including all, or almost all, the States of the world. To this end they willingly joined the “Italian Family for the League of Nations”, founded at the end of 1918. Analogous associations had been created in the USA, in Great Britain and in France to accelerate the organization planning process and, after completing it, to promote its initiatives aimed at the peaceful co-existence among States and at the respect for peace treaties.

Keywords: Italian Pacifism; Edoardo Giretti; League of Nations.

After the March on Rome and Mussolini’s designation as Prime Minister, most of the Italian ruling class were convinced that fascism was meant to be absorbed into the framework of representative institutions and liberal culture. In many cases, however, comments were not limited to accepting the fait accompli but expressed enthusiastic support. This attitude cannot be explained in terms of opportunism and misinterpretation of the fascist phenomenon alone: indeed, it calls into question the actual nature of Italian liberalism. For a significant share of those who defined themselves as liberals – the most typical case being the philosopher Giovanni Gentile – fascism represented the outcome and fulfilment of an evolution that had its roots in the Risorgimento; it was the final chapter of a narrative that held together the cult of the strong State and the celebration of the revolutionary moments that had marked national history.

Keywords: Twentieth Century Italy; Fascism; Italian Liberals.

The article focuses on the Faisceau, the first France’s fascist party founded in 1925 by George Valois. Writer, publisher, economic and political organizer, Valois went from early anarcho-syndacalism to the Maurrassian Action Française, then to Fascism and finally to libertarian Socialism. The Faisceau’s radical thought and aims (strong national State representing all social classes, authoritarianism, corporatism, revolt against bourgeois rule and plutocracy etc.), its paramilitary organization and style and the same name initially had in the Italian Fascism of the early 1920s a clear point of reference. At the same time the party attempted unsuccessfully to combine nationalism and socialism, incurring in obvious contradictions. After some initial success, since the end of 1926 it knew a fast lost of militants who had hoped in its revolutionary action. After the formation of the right-wing government led by Poincaré and the stabilisation of the franc, entrepreneurs and middle classes withdrew their support and in 1928 the Faisceau disappeared.

Keywords: Twentieth Century France; Fascist party; France, Valois

The essay aims to analyze some unknown aspects of the agricultural experimentation’s history during Fascism and in the first years after the end of World War II, in the light of the categories “modernity/backwardness”, “continuity/discontinuity”. Under the fascist regime Italy appears to be linked to the traditions, conservative and protector of national identity, but also involved in technological modernization efforts in agriculture, conducted in authoritarian terms, essentially based on the idea of power. This essay reconstructs the activities of the Ministry of Agriculture, experimental stations and research institutes in the field of agriculture, as well as of landowners, technicians and Catholic Church, actors in various capacities of the processes of transformation of Italian agriculture. Italy is at the crossroads of plants and seeds and of an intense flow of scientific and technical information, despite the self-sufficiency of Fascism. The essay also adopt an international point of view: the fascist colonialism in Africa, in the Thirties, and, after World War II the UNRRA and the ERP (Marshall Plan) funds used in the programs of agricultural experimentation promoted by the United States in Italy. The documentary sources for this article mainly come from the State Central Archive in Rome, the National Archives in Washington and the University of Iowa.

Keywords: Agricultural Experimentation; Fascism; American Technical Assistance

Sixty year after the death of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Fabbri considers that the intellectual and political formation of the “Lay Pope” (Antonio Gramsci) of the Italian culture has always referred to the confrontation with the heritage of the Marxist doctrine (to which he approached in his youth) and to the strong controversy against the politic representatives of the Socialist Italian Party and, above all, of the Italian Communist Party to its Leader, Palmiro Togliatti. Fabbri focuses four crucial issues in the politic intervention of Croce in the Italian history: 1) the dispute with Antonio Labriola and the “Marxist Doctrine” at the end of the Nineteenth Century; 2) the participation as Minister of Public Education of the Giolitti’s Government (1920-21) and his commitment to «not accept the impositions of the (socialist) strikers and to reject the strikes»; 3) his participation after the “Svolta di Salerno” to the Badoglio Government and, after the Liberation of Rome, to those negotiations with the Allied Forces and with the Cln Parties ? that will cause the abdication of the King, and the Referendum of the June 2nd, 1946; 4) finally, at the age of 80, his attendance in the Italian Republic’s Constitution and his criticism to the Italian Communist Party and to the “So-called Communist Intellectuals”, as Senator of the Liberal Party (1948).

Keywords: Twentieth Century Italy; Benedetto Croce; Antonio Gramsci.

The article recalls the crisis of the Italian university system through the work and the judgment of Rosario Romeo, one of the most important Italian historians of the Twentieth Century and true inventor and founder of the Free International University of Social Studies (Luiss) in Rome. According to Romeo, this reform should have anticipated an expansion in the number of assistants and teachers proportionate to the needs of the new mass society. It would also grant greater autonomy for students of the humanities in the definition of their curricula. However it was necessary to maintain the maximum rigor in evaluating the results of the studies of the students and the recruitment of teaching staff and assistants should have taken place only through national competitions. Instead, the student revolt of 1968, supported by teachers ideologically communist, frontally attacked the Italian university system with the intent not to reform, but break it from its foundations. Romeo strongly opposed to the demands of the students to be able to take exams collectively and not individu ally, to have political votes, to organize self-managed lessons. For this reason he was heavily threatened, physically as well. Romeo judged that the abolition of the entitlement of the course decided by the government was an attack on freedom of teaching. He believed that the reform of 1980 ? which decided the assumption of tens of thousands of professors and researchers indefinitely and without public competitions ? was not made to meet the real needs of the university system, but to give a populist response to the request of the trade unions professors. According to Romeo, these measures had irreparably damaged the Italian public university, depressing its scientific level and seriously barred access to it for future generations of teachers. For this reason Romeo proposed to the President of Confindustria, Guido Carli, to create the Luiss, a private university, where excellence and freedom of research and teaching, seriously compromised in the State University, were safeguarded. Romeo was rector of the Luiss University from 1978 to 1984, but left this University in 1984 when he came into conflict with Carli because Carli wanted attribute the recruitment of teachers to the Board of Directors and not to the Faculty.

Keywords: Twentieth Century Italy; Crisis of the University; Rosario Romeo; Luiss Guido Carli.

 The construction and improvement of communication systems and transport is a fundamental component of the birth and life of national States. The networks of transportation and communication are very important for the institutional functioning national States, in particular for the economic and social development, because the growth of national wealth is based on the exploitation of the many and diverse resources of all the territories, and because they generate cohesion between areas with different levels of wealth. Looking at Italian history from 1861 to today, as well as to the birth of the European Union, this essay analyzes the public decisions made in the field of communication networks and their effects on both the economic development of nation states, and on the convergence between regions in different stages of development. Strategies of communication that have included all regional areas have strongly contributed to the growth of national wealth and to the overcoming of the North-South divide. On the contrary, when richer territories have been privileged, the gap between North and South has widened resulting in a reduction of overall national wealth. One of the original goals of the EU was an ambitious program of continental networks and an ambitious program of territorial and regional cohesion. Neither one has been fully realized. The most serious global financial crisis and the strict fiscal policies of austerity have reduced the spending power of the member states. But above all, Europe is still lacking political union and a clear strategy of exploitation of the resources of the Mediterranean regions.

Keywords: Twentieth Century Italy; Economic Development; Transport Networks.

The article is an attempt to interpret the history of Italy through the centuries. The core of the interpretative hypothesis is the long dichotomy between Country and Nation, that is between cultures, politics, local identities and that institutional organization then called national State. Italy is a land of cities and then of small states, with heterogeneous cultural and political identities, which for long time enhanced the vital energy and the creativity of their people until the modern national States were born across Europe. When the Absolute States constituted a more advanced form of organization of the socio-economic life, our Country suffered a condition of competitive disadvantage and it was margined both by the Mediterranean traffic, both by the new global dimensions of the Atlantic trade. Such ancient phenomenon, together with the historical trend of the leading class to break the national pact (the state of siege in the Liberal age, the Fascism, the separatism of Sicily, the attempted coupe d’état during the Republican age, the secessionism of “Lega”, and so on), increased very much in recent years. The emptying of the great mass political parties, which constituted a great cultural and social glue, and the decline of the national States due to globalization had the effect to produce the emergence of ancient and new fragmentations and divisions.

Keywords: Twentieth Century Italy; Nation; Country; State; City; Identity; Territory.