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In the summer of 1938, Italy's Fascist regime announced its new 'racial' policy, soon to be followed by a series of draconian racial laws. The policy was based on the principle that Catholic Italians were of the Aryan race and Jewish Italians belonged to a separate race of non-Aryans. Previously the Vatican had made no such racial distinction. Yet, notwithstanding the frequent claim that the Church has never distinguished between Catholics and Jews on racial grounds, the Vatican quickly began to assimilate to the Fascist state's distinction of Jews as racially marked as non-Aryan. The opening in 2020 of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII (1939–58) has made available a huge trove of documents bearing on the way the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state dealt with Italy's racial laws and with the subsequent persecution of Italy's Jews during German occupation. As shown in this article, these documents make clear the Vatican's use of racial language and racial concepts as it dealt with the racial laws and the persecution of Italy's Jews from the time the racial laws were introduced in 1938 to the years of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the war was going badly in early 1943, Mussolini took the dramatic step of replacing most of his government ministers. Of the men sacked, none drew more attention than Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, who had served as minister of foreign affairs since 1936. The announcement that Ciano would immediately be appointed as Italy's ambassador to the Holy See sparked much speculation in the diplomatic community, where it was viewed as a possible move by Mussolini to employ the Vatican to broker an Italian exit from the war. Others saw the appointment as a desperate move by Ciano himself to find a way out of the war. The recently opened Vatican archives for these years, along with archival evidence from Germany, Britain, the U.S., France, and Italy, offer new insight both into Ciano's attempts to ingratiate himself with Pope Pius XII and to how he in fact operated in his role as Italian ambassador to the Holy See in the months preceding the collapse of the Fascist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the quality of life of foundling infants in 19th-century Bologna, Italy, focusing on the point when foster families ceased to receive subsidization for their care. Findings indicate that ties between foundlings and their foster families were stronger than popularly believed, and therefore received important social and emotional support.

This symposium article is based on a roundtable discussion at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, December 1989, in Washington, D.C. The subject of child abandonment is attracting increasing attention among European historians and has been explored in recent booklength publication by several of the roundtable participants as well as other scholars. Although each part of the symposium article has been edited for purposes of integration, each, in the main, continues to reflect the author's involvement in the session as a commentator on recent publications in the field, or, in Professor Ransel's case, as a respondent to the comments. Louise A. Tilly is Professor of History and Sociology, and Chair of the Committee on Historial Studies, New School for Social Research. Rachel G. Fuchs is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. David I. Kertzer is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College. David L. Ransel is Professor of History at Indiana University and Editor of the American Historical Review.

Reviewed in light of evidence from the commune of Casalecchio, the Hajnal thesis and its subsequent reformulations are shown to be in need of modification. With respect to the 'Mediterranean marriage pattern' (postulated by Peter Laslett), the Casalecchio evidence shows a strong patrilocal tradition of postmarital residence but not a concomitant early female age at marriage, a large spousal gap, or a small proportion of people who never marry. Moreover, marriage age remained relatively high during the period of proletarianization and the proletarian segment of the community married at much the same ages as the most traditional sharecropping population. The relationship between the impact of industrialization and marriage age in particular is therefore more complex than has been hypothesized.

Within the larger debate over Italians' attitudes toward the decision to join the Second World War on Germany's side, and their subsequent attitude toward fighting alongside the Nazis, the question of the role played by the Roman Catholic Church remains controversial. By focusing on Italy's three major Catholic daily newspapers for the years 1939 to 1943, and on the behind-the-scenes actions of the Fascist authorities, we here show one of the principal ways that the institutional Church communicated to Italy's Catholics the proper attitudes to take toward the war. The active role played by the papers and their editors in urging Italian Catholic support for the Axis cause is made clear. We examine the Bologna-based L'Avvenire d'Italia, the Rome-based L'Avvenire, and the Milan-based L'Italia, along with a variety of government and church-related archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role played by Christianity and Christian churches in the demonization of the Jews by the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes remains a subject of intense controversy. The historiography at the base of this debate has been largely rooted in research on either Germany or Italy, yet comparative empirical study is particularly well-suited to allow broader generalizations. Such work is especially valuable given the very different relationships the two regimes maintained with the churches. This article identifies similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both mixed pseudoscientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet while the Italian publication, reflecting the Fascist regime's close relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, took care to present itself as in harmony with the Church, the German publication adopted a much more critical attitude toward contemporary German churches and churchmen, casting them as having strayed from the true teachings of Jesus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With only a slight delay, Italy too has seen an explosion of works on the history of women in general, and the history of sexuality in particular. The development of [...]