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In the first half of the 19th century, Adriano Balbi (1782–1848) was one of the greatest geographers in Italy and Europe, having an extremely vast and constantly updated scientific output. He tried to keep up with new discoveries of 'unknown and unexplored' territories. His work influenced geographers and cartographers, who used it as a source. Evangelista Azzi (1793–1848), a cartographer and military topographer from Parma Duchies, produced a wide corpus of school maps. His Mappamondo (1838) was conceived as an enormous wall map (2 × 4 mt), that summarised the geographical, historical and ethnographic knowledge of the time, as an encyclopaedic work. To collect data, he used contemporary geographical and cartographic works, including those of Adriano Balbi, having a close epistolary relationship with him. Balbi understood the importance of a cartographic restitution of his works and supported Azzi transferring numerous notions to him. Among these were the seas and oceans, which in the world map are named according to Balbi's works. The Mappamondo is the first map where the Balbi's definition of 'Open Mediterraneans' appears. The paper's primary objective is to identify the dialogue between geographers and cartographers in conveying a common narrative of the seas. Considering Azzi's cartographies as the visual synthesis of Balbi's geographical proposals, the paper explores a direct transposition of knowledge from text to map. Finally, the metaphor of water and liquid worlds lends itself well to observing the dynamism of small pre-unitary Italian actors that dialogued on global issues, going beyond state borders and moving within a common Risorgimento context. • Analyse the network of relations between intellectuals in Eighteenth Century. • Understand the constructing of Geographical discipline and comprise the dissemination of geographical ideas and concepts. • Re-discover the drawing of new geographical taxonomies in/through maps. • Highlight the dialogue between geography and cartography. • Understand the importance of school pupils as audience to widespread geographical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mary Shelley's Valperga, the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the gradual corruption of Castruccio, reveal the destructive effects of 'party spirit' on human benevolence and the progress to political justice. By contrast, Euthanasia, fictional ruler of Valperga, embodies a cosmopolitan ideal that animated radical politics in the early 1790s whereby the principle of universal benevolence extended human rights across national borders. This article contends that, in her portrait of Euthanasia, Shelley builds on the ethical framework of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works represented love of humankind as integral to her democratic convictions. Euthanasia personifies a cosmopolitan ethic of caring, considering herself 'bound in amity to all' by principle as well as sentiment, but she also wrestles with the ingrained allegiances and personal desires typical of human psychology. I argue that, through her resulting dilemmas and eventual fate, Shelley interrogates the viability of the cosmopolitan ideal in a world riven by party spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I discuss the murder of journalist Raffaele Sonzogno, the director of the Rome-based daily La capitale, in February 1875, and the trial of his murderers which took place the same year. I explore how the events were presented in the press at the time, in particular the democratic newspaper Il secolo, and more broadly how the Sonzogno murder and his assassins’ trial can help us understand the print networks of the time. I offer two main readings, one ideological and one more material: on the one hand, I discuss the presence and shadow of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Risorgimento legacy over these events (a rhetorical presence, but also a very literal one). On the other, I consider the role that the written-word networks (newspapers, books, periodicals) played in the construction of Raffaele Sonzogno as a democratic hero, a modern mediatized victim, and an object of commercial exploitation. Lastly, I consider the dynamics of the murder and the figure of Sonzogno’s material assassin, Pio Frezza, as he emerges from the trial depositions, to argue that his brief moment of political visibility does not enable him to intervene critically in Garibaldianism, and in the political discourse of Unified Italy. Rather, Frezza’s patriotism is exploited against him – forcing him to wordlessly, violently make his way into the printed world.

Carlo Collodi's Le Avventure di Pinocchio has undergone an extraordinary number of manipulations, showing the great malleability of a text whose protean capacity echoes that of its main character. I analyse Pinocchio from a psychoanalytical standpoint, considering the Unheimlich – uncanny – as a pivotal stylistic element of the story and exploring its function in Collodi's critique of the Risorgimento's prescriptive moral code. The uncanny pertains to a class of frightening experiences that lead back to what is known and has been removed by repression. In this light, Pinocchio emerges as a tale deprived of any morally successful teleology: instead of engendering a new bourgeois life, the transformation of the puppet into a 'bambino perbene' exposes the contradictory phenomenology of this metamorphosis, subtly announcing Pinocchio's radical death. Pinocchio's dead wooden body reveals the ineffectiveness of the moral-teleological project of the Risorgimento, which renounces its inability to restrain those unsettling forces that destabilise it from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A group of historians offers to their master, colleague and friend Umberto Levra (1945-2021) the result of original researches mainly but not only about the Italian Risorgimento, that is to say the unification of Italy, concerning politics, institutions, personal dialogues and fierce disputes, charity, social and health assistance, use of history and strategies of historical museums communication, use for 19th century politics of Constantin’s roman imperial alliance between throne and Church and of medieval reciprocal influences among different ethnic groups installed in the same territories.

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Santa Rosa’s Archive is an extraordinary private noble archive, which preserves the documents produced over four centuries by a family that actively participated in public life and who lived through the most significant stages of the profound transformation of Piedmont from the Savoy state into the Kingdom of Italy.

Henry James’ short story, 'Last of the Valerii' (1874), articulates the author’s final assessment of the Anglo-American style. The marriage between the American heiress and impoverished Italian nobleman expresses the transition in the American economy from rural agriculture to one driven by industrial wealth and the creation of large estates. By making the Italian aristocracy the protagonists of his Anglo-Italian novels, James also provides a cursive acknowledgement of the restoration of the Italian aristocracy which was at the heart of the revolutionaries’ nationalist debate during the Italian Risorgimento. The creation of a unified and independent Italy in 1871 also included a king, Victor-Emmanuel II. The desire to acquire the habits and style of the genteel European nobility was grafted onto the new American interest in collecting the aesthetic treasures of Europe then being acquired by wealthy Americans to form the major museum collections of America. Towards the turn of the century, Anglo-Italian authors and artists lost their interest in the revolutionary cause of Italy and centennial America, and replaced this cause with a new pure aestheticism, lacking an underlying political and moral agenda. James’ novels articulate a new crisis in marriage in which men declare their independence from their dependent women. James’ reversal of the women’s movement issue approaches domestic gender roles from the male perspective. His protagonists are educated aesthetes who long for escapism from the confines of societal gender and marriage roles. The new wealth acquired by Americans towards the end of the century during the Gilded Age, afforded such perversions of traditional male duties, without overtly supporting the women’s suffrage movement and rehabilitation of women’s employment.

In the last ten years, Noi credevamo (We Believed) (Martone 2010) has been the subject of a very careful criticism interested not only in its historical-ideological implications but also in its semiotic specificities. The purpose of this article is to summarize the cardinal points of these two positions and to add to them some critical observations that have not been noted so far. On the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting how, as a historical film, the work is connected with the history of emotions, a recent historiographical trend that aims to detect the narrative devices of ideological propaganda and the diffusion of feelings since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, the article proposes a new interpretation of Mario Martone's film, starting with the analysis of phenomena that are not only historical but also technical and structural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of a group of Neapolitan political activists incarcerated in Naples after the 1848 Revolution, this article aims to rescue the Italian convicts' experience from its subsidiary status, presenting the prisons as a site of struggle and in particular highlighting the international, European dimension of political imprisonment in the nineteenth century. I argue that together with the exiled, political prisoners also acted as transnational actors of the Risorgimento; they aroused the interest of both public opinion and the world of diplomacy and were perceived as a humanitarian cause. Neapolitan political prisoners became spokespersons of their national and political cause abroad, had a clear agency and exploited European public opinion. This study will thus explore the dynamics of the Risorgimento from a transnational perspective, as well as in relation to British and French imperialistic policies in the Mediterranean, the international de-legitimization of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and more generally in terms of foreign humanitarian interventions in the nineteenth century and the role of political prisoners. The Neapolitan dungeons were not significantly different from those of other European states; however, they became the target of international diplomacy showing how Naples was considered somewhat in between European and non-European states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906) was not only a celebrated diva of the Italian and international theatrical scene of the nineteenth century, but also a protagonist of the political scene during the period of Italian Unification. However, her political engagement has not received the critical attention it merits, which explains why her interpretation of the biblical heroine Judith has been generally overlooked, although this female figure was considered at the time to embody the spirit of the resurgent Italian nation. This essay first highlights Adelaide Ristori's contribution to the Italian Risorgimento, and then analyses Ristori's staging of Giuditta, the tragedy written for her by Paolo Giacometti in 1857 and first performed in Madrid on 10 October the same year. It is shown that this actress and metteuse en scène made a crucial contribution to the writing of the playtext and gave the most celebrated display of her creative genius in her performance of the title role on stage. The essay argues that in Ristori's interpretation the character of Judith loses some of her more traditional attributes and gains a unique heroic dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Societa e Storia is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This review discusses Axel Korner's book on the role played by the United States in the political and cultural imagination of the Italian Risorgimento. It highlights the extent to which the book moves away from a historiographical tradition inaugurated by Robert Palmer in 1959, taken on in Italy by Giorgio Spini in the 1960s, and recently revitalised by Jonathan Israel, that locates the American revolution at the origins of modern democracy and treats it as a model that was imitated and discussed in the Western world. The originality of Korner's work is twofold. First, it combines cultural history with history of political thought, exploring as it does opera, literature, as well as political pamphlets and parliamentary debates. Second, it highlights the extent to which Italians were often critical of America. The review stresses the extent to which the America played a peculiar role in Italian culture in the age of nationalism due to its very geographical distance and the lack of knowledge about it among Italian, who conveyed their more pressing political and social concerns in relationship to France and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about the Risorgimento has always been played out in the historiographical battlefield, as well as in the public arena. The article weaves together these two contexts by focussing on the genre of biography in all its manifestations. The first section looks at the exemplary case of Anita Garibaldi, from the various stages of her life to the images and representations of this heroine after her death. The second part analyses the great biographical dictionaries of the 20th century which allow us to place the Risorgimento tradition within the context of Liberal, then Fascist and finally Republican Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with significant aspects of Byron's propensity to ventriloquize when appropriating the character of famous figures in literature and his tendency to transform them into Byronic heroes and, in some ways, representations of himself. His visit to Tasso's cell in Ferrara inspired his Lament of Tasso, a dramatic monologue spoken by the poet Tasso who had been, in Byron's view, unjustly imprisoned. The second part of this paper focuses on The Prophecy of Dante a dramatic monologue composed in terza rima and written at the request of Teresa Ciuiccioli who wanted Byron to enter the lists and break a lance on behalf of the revered Italian poet by defending him against his denigrators, who had impugned Dante's patriotism while acknowledging his greatness as a poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the activities organised in Italy to support the Polish Uprising of 1863 and the speeches and narratives used to present this foreign question to the Italian public. This international event brought to the forefront the same issues that had been raised by Italian nationalism, and also when discussing foreign national movements, Italy reflected both on her own identity and past history. In particular, the democratic ideals of the Risorgimento found their fulfilment in supporting the Polish rebels. The article, using archival sources, tries to build a transnational approach to Italian nationalism with a particular focus on how both Italian patriots and public opinion perceived and acted towards other 'oppressed nationalities' while also struggling to complete its own unification. Supporting a foreign cause was not only an expression of solidarity, but it also strengthened national sentiment and provoked a reflection on Italian national pride and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent cultural history of the Italian Risorgimento has claimed that it was a ‘mass movement’ which affected the lives of a far greater number of soon-to-be Italians than traditional revisionist and Marxist narratives have assumed. This new history has, however, left certain questions unanswered. There has still been little attempt to explore popular receptions of national discourses, and what Risorgimento politics meant to the mass of ‘ordinary' people who lived through these seismic changes. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which one particular Risorgimento audience – the rural and urban illiterate of the province of Palermo – responded to, and attempted to make sense of, national-patriotic discourses which were articulated through ephemeral street literature and the oratory of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Palermo. This research makes use of the textual transcriptions of popular oral balladry, collected and published by Sicilian folk-scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, to investigate how the people of Palermo received and internalized discourses on Italian nationhood. An analysis of the language of these song-texts reveals that much of the imagery and symbolism of Italian nationhood, elaborated through various discursive practices, was rebuffed and the traditional, familiar idiom of popular culture was employed in the representation of the events of 1860. This paper will propose that oral culture possessed its own internal and autonomous set of images and narrative features, and that people’s receptions of official-patriotic discourses were shaped by the familiar descriptive norms of popular balladry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Liang Qichao viewed the Italian Risorgimento, with the focus on his reflections on its meanings in the historical contexts of Chinese politics and tradition. It will identify and analyze the many forces and ideas that influenced Liang as he formulated his reflections, especially the timing around the turn of the twentieth century and the discourses of nascent nationalism in Japan where Liang lived in exile. The way Liang created - or recreated - the Italian story demonstrated that the Chinese had finally begun to realize a crucial point about the building of a modern nation. While Britain, the United States, and France were able to build a modern nation by starting from the grass roots and more closely observing Enlightenment ideals, China did not have the luxury or the time to follow the same path. In the age of high imperialism, the weak would simply be weeded out quickly. Without national salvation, there could be no modern nation. National salvation, as exemplified by the Risorgimento, involved maintaining and glorifying the country's own traditions and core values, which would in turn unify different social segments. Liang and his fellow reformers realized the importance of having simultaneously a national cause, a single political party, and a single leader, instead of having to take separate steps toward awakening. Liang's awakening paved the way for the unfolding of the great Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, led first by the Kuomintang and then by the Communists. Following Liang's track of thinking, they both strived to build - or rebuild - a political centralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main causes of U. Rattazzi's relative absence from the historical records of the XX century is the lack of books, articles and essays documenting the development of his political thought. On the contrary, plenty of the speeches he gave at the 'Camera subalpina' (1848-1860) are available. This article aims at analysing said speeches, in order to understand and better interpret the fulcrum of the political thought of the statesman, especially with regards to the following issues: the decision making behind the union with the Lombardo-Veneto and the resume of the first independence war; the seven year collaboration with Cavour, the so-called Connubio, between 1852 and 1858, and its collapse after the armistice of Villafranca in 1859, with the resulting controversy for the concession of Nice to France (1860) and the consequent damage to the concept of national unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay's aim is to analyze the public use that the Italian cinema made of history trying to unveil the mechanism of memory and oblivion and the reasons behind them in crucial occasion: the celebrations for the centenary of Italian unity. The focus is obviously on the movies about the Risorgimento. Not only history, but also gender roles are at the basis of the patriotic discourse. Therefore the essay tries also to understand how they were represented in history movies. Four films are taken into account: La pattuglia sperduta (1952), Senso (1954), Viva l'Italia! (1961) and Il Gattopardo (1963).

"Il Vittoriano" is the great memorial dedicated to the first king of Italy Vittorio Emanuele II and it was built in Rome's historic centre and inaugurated in 1911 during the celebrations for the fifty years of the unification of Italy. Over the years his role has changed several times: first a place of exaltation of the Risorgimento, then a place of remembrance for the dead of World Wars and finally the current form of museum and art gallery. 'Il Vittoriano', however, has ever been a place of tourist interest and so over the years it has been affected by changes of tourism structure, a fundamental phenomenon of the Twentieth century. This article aims to analyse the history of this monument focusing not only on political aspects but on tourist ones too.

The article aims to analyze the phenomenon of "secular pilgrimage", or the number of trips and parades that during the first fifty years of Italian unity, saw the places of memory as the protagonists of the Risorgimento as ossuaries, battlefields, monuments and tombs of the fathers of the fatherland. Although the number of "pilgrims lay" is not never approached the numbers involved from the far more deep-rooted traditions and religious organizations, from many sources found emerges as the involvement of patriots, the number of sponsoring organizations, the "places of worship" and anniversaries (official or not) they have been, as a whole, particularly significant. Necessary starting point to introduce the topic will be the examination of the element vocabulary, borrowed from the religious. The rest of the text will have as its purpose the creation of a map - on a national scale - of the places of pilgrimage divided according to the "utilities". Correspond to different destinations, in fact, different types of pilgrimage, mirrors the realities of liberal policies.

The Unification of Italy may be celebrated with modern forms of pilgrimage in the places where the Unification was built, places of the collective cultural heritage of our country, connected to the recovery of memory of this past event. In this paper we will analyse the existing literature on the issues of memory and tourism and on the role of tourism in shaping the collective memory and the national identity of a population and we will discuss how the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy are promoting the cultural heritage, both material and immaterial, it has produced.

The first film producted by an italian studio was "La presa di Roma - 20 settembre 1870" (Albertini & Santoni, 1905) and the Italian Risorgimento will continue to be one of the most favoured subjects of italian cinematography. In the period of silent screen films, between 1905 and 1927, aproximately 60 films were produced in Italy concerning the Risorgimento, of which at least 30 were regarding Garibaldi and his epic actions. Even in the cinema, Garibaldi continued to be the most representative and emblematic figure of the Risorgimento, and his popularity is often exploited in misleading ways by the figures of power during the first decades of the twentieth century to ideologize the figure of Garibaldi, still through cinema.

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the 'body politic' as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]