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The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion.  As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation. In Postal Culture , Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.

Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani represent two of the most prominent Jewish voices of the Italian modern literary tradition, recognized both nationally and internationally. Their literary portrayals of Jewish life and of the tragic experience of the Shoah have undoubtedly marked a new era in the representation of Jewish Italians. Little critical attention, however, has been paid to other Jewish Italian writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This essay aims to provide a first mapping of nineteenth-century Jewish Italian writers, while arguing the importance of studying Italy's Shoah narratives within the context of not only Fascism, but also of nineteenth-century Jewish history and the literature produced during the complex process of Jewish integration in post-unification Italy.

The first Jewish woman to be appointed to an official institutional position in unified Italy, Erminia Fuà Fusinato lived and worked in Rome as a school reformer in 1871–1876. During this time she inspected schools in the provinces of Rome and Naples, founded in Rome a high school for women, and started a series of lectures for the cultural and professional advancement of women. In order to marry a man with whom she had madly fallen in love, the poet Arnaldo Fusinato, in 1856 she converted to Catholicism, a faith, however, she never practiced. This essay argues that the story of Erminia Fuà Fusinato illustrates the challenges encountered during the post-unification period by Jewish public figures seeking integration into an Italian society which, however, allowed little space for public display of religious or ethnic diversity.

The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy.Writing to Delightprovides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteenth-century Italy, made available to an English-speaking audience for the first time through this translation. The stories that make up this anthology are written in a realistic vein and describe the life and concerns of women at a time when Italy was going through major social and economic changes. Imbued with didactic aims, the authors of these stories strove to inspire and at the same time educate their public. In this regard,Writing to Delightalso serves as an instrument for a critical investigation of both the cultural productions of nineteenth-century Italy and the process of formation of modern Italian identities. With the growth of the middle-classes and a more diffuse literacy among the population, women became a visible and conspicuous social force as consumers of cultural goods, such as books and newspapers. Many of the writers included in this anthology - Matilde Serao, Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Contessa Lara - were not only very successful writers of fiction but also worked as journalists for some of the main national newspapers of the time. They were well acquainted with their readers' tastes and expectations and made such awareness an integral part of their creative process. Their fiction thus reflects the many topics and concerns that informed the social and cultural debates of nineteenth-century Italy.

InPostal Culture, Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics.

Matilde Serao famously defined Lotto as the “acquavite di Napoli” (opium of Naples), a demonic game that intoxicated the people of Naples, vividly described by the author as they wait, indeed live for, the weekly drawings of the winning numbers.¹ Servants, shoeshiners, glove makers, clerks, porters, as well as shop owners, lawyers, judges, and even members of the aristocracy, all fall victim to the illusion of quick financial gains as they delude themselves into thinking they will guess the lucky combinations of numbers (amboorterno) extracted on Saturday afternoons. They are portrayed as doomed daydreamers, seeking a sudden turn

An analysis of what critics have defined as \"postal culture\"-that is, the rise in the nineteenth century of social and cultural practices developed around the letter-might shed some light on this question. 4 The starting point of my inquiry is the institutional and cultural transformation of post-unification Italy, namely the nationalization of the postal service and the growth of the printed media, both of which popularized the use of the letter and of letter-writing. Reader-response criticism and reception studies have amply demonstrated the significant role the reader plays in the construction of textual meaning; my emphasis here, however, is on the creation of a fiction in the late nineteenth century which, in line with the general process of democratization of culture, favored the communicative aspect of the epistolary exchange, the interplay between the various correspondents inhabiting both the internal space of the fictional representation and the external arena of the cultural event.5 Letter-writing might be as ancient as writing itself, but it is in the modern age, to use Foucault's rationale, when the raison d'état transformed everyone into subjects of a modern state, that epistolary fiction becomes in the literary imagination an arena of public exchange and interaction.