This book reviews the period from the unification of Italy to the fascist era through significant Neapolitan performers such as Gilda Mignonette and Enrico Caruso. It traces the transformation of a popular tradition written in dialect into a popular tradition, written in Italian, that contributed to the production of "American" identity.

This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresi...

December 20, 1943. Two Canadian infantry battalions and a tank regiment stand poised on the outskirts of a small Italian port town. They expect to take Ortona quickly. But the German 1st Parachute Division has other ideas. For reasons unknown, Hitler has ordered Ortona held to the last man. Houses, churches and other buildings are dynamited, clogging the streets with rubble. Germans with machine guns lie in ambush. Snipers slip from one rooftop to another. The Canadians seem to have walked...

Tourists, armchair travelers, and historians will all delight in this fluid narrative that can be read straight through, dipped into over time, or used as a reference guide to each period in Sicily’s fascinating tale. Emigration of people from Sicily often overshadows the importance of the people who immigrated to the island through the centuries. These have included several who became Sicily’s rulers, along with Jews, Ligurians, and Albanians. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, M...

Between AD 69 and 161 the composition of the Roman legions was transformed.Italians were almost entirely replaced by provincial recruits, men for whom Latin was at best a second language, and yet the 'Roman-ness' of these Germans, Pannonians, Spaniards, Africans and Syrians, fostered in isolated fortresses on the frontiers, was incredibly strong. They were highly competitive, jealous of their honour, and driven by the need to maintain and enhance their reputations ...

Diocletian and Constantine were the greatest of the Late Roman emperors, and their era marks the climax of the legionary system.Under Constantine's successors the legions were reduced in size and increasingly sidelined in favour of new units of elite auxilia, but between AD 284 and 337 the legions reigned supreme. The legionaries defeated all-comers and spearheaded a stunning Roman revival that humbled the Persian Empire and reduced the mighty Goths and Sarmatians ...

Oltre 400 modi dire del popolo gaetano raccontati e commentati da Nicola Magliocca e pubblicati a cura del nipote Nicola Tarallo.

Should a man be free to kill his adulterous wife? This is the most notorious trial for the most notorious crime of the eighteenth century. Count Guido Franceschini is accused of murdering his beautiful young wife Pompilia, said to have eloped with a handsome young priest. But did they actually commit adultery? Half of Rome believes she did; the other half claims she is innocent. In this book the trial is reconstructed from contemporary court reports, and the gossip of the time. Pompilia: g...

Unfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade. It provides insightful analyses of popular films that sensationalize violence, scapegoat women, or repress the homosexuality of male protagonists. Dana Renga examines these works through the lens of gender and trauma theory to show how the films engage with the process of mourning and healing mafia-related trauma in Italy.Unfinished Business argues that trauma that has yet to...

This book aims to describe and analyse the political and social thinking, attitudes and actions of the English Protestant churches since the late eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on how they have responded to the plight of the least privileged members of society – individuals and groups marginalised or placed at a disadvantage as a consequence of their ethnicity or socioeconomic circumstances. These have been the nation’s underdogs, the most powerless of its inhabitants, and th...

This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western all...

Peasant women were the largest female occupational group in Italy between the wars. They led lives characterised by great poverty and heavy workloads, but Fascist propaganda extolled them as the mothers of the nation and the guardians of the rural worlds, the most praiseworthy of Italian women.This study is the first published history of the Massaie Rurali, the Fascist Party's section for peasant women, which, with three million members by 1943, became one of the largest of...