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This article, showing how ubiquitous male youth prostitution was in 1950s Italy, exposes the pederastic and (homo)sexual vivacity of this decade. Moreover, this article also suggests that even if police, the media, and medical institutions were trying to crystallize a rigid chasm between homo- and heterosexuality, there were still forces in Italian society that resisted such strict categorization. The young hustlers described by contemporary observers bear witness to the sexual flexibility of the 1950s in Italy. These youths inhabited queer spaces lacking a clear-cut hetero-homo divide, spaces where \"modern\" sexological categories and identities had not yet entered. Prior to the mass circulation of rigid sexual labels, it was still possible for many Italian boys, youths, and young men to dwell in liminal queer spaces. The exchange of money purified their acts, guaranteed their maleness, and effaced potential stigmatization.

This article, showing how ubiquitous male youth prostitution was in 1950s Italy, exposes the pederastic and (homo)sexual vivacity of this decade. Moreover, this article also suggests that even if police, the media, and medical institutions were trying to crystallize a rigid chasm between homo- and heterosexuality, there were still forces in Italian society that resisted such strict categorization. The young hustlers described by contemporary observers bear witness to the sexual flexibility of the 1950s in Italy. These youths inhabited queer spaces lacking a clear-cut hetero–homo divide, spaces where “modern” sexological categories and identities had not yet entered. Prior to the mass circulation of rigid sexual labels, it was still possible for many Italian boys, youths, and young men to dwell in liminal queer spaces. The exchange of money purified their acts, guaranteed their maleness, and effaced potential stigmatization.

Despite their undeniable importance, the leaders of the Fascist and Nazi youth organizations have received little attention from historians. In Shaping the New Man , Alessio Ponzio uncovers the largely untold story of the training and education of these crucial protagonists of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and he examines more broadly the structures, ideologies, rhetoric, and aspirations of youth organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Ponzio shows how the Italian Fascists' pedagogical practices influenced the origin and evolution of the Hitler Youth. He dissects similarities and differences in the training processes of the youth leaders of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, and Hitlerjugend. And, he explores the transnational institutional interactions and mutual cooperation that flourished between Mussolini's and Hitler's youth organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.

Before Hitler’s seizure of power, Hitlerjungen and Balilla had little contact with each other. The Nazi youth organization was still very weak, and the relationships between Fascist and Nazi leaderships were all but warm.¹ In 1922 Mussolini almost ignored the existence of the Brown Shirts, and, even though The Times defined Hitler as “Mussolini’s promising Bavarian pupil,” the Italian Duce considered the leader of the NSDAP an obscure political agitator.² After the Beer Hall Putsch, the Duce described Hitler and his followers as buffoni (fools). Even though Göring and other prominent Nazis were granted asylum in Fascist Italy after November

Many young Italian survivors came back from the battlefields persuaded that the Great War had been the beginning of a new age. They had survived a great ordeal and believed that because of this they had achieved a more important place in Italian society. They saw themselves as members of a new “war aristocracy” whose mission was to regenerate the nation by means of radical political and institutional changes. After having fought against the Central Powers, it was necessary to continue fighting against the “internal enemies”: against the prewar liberal elite and against the antinational Socialists. Mussolini’s Fascists, one of

The ideal aim of the Opera Nazionale Balilla was to transform Italian youth into Fascist believers, shaping their bodies and their souls according to Fascist ideology, immersing them fully in a new Fascist culture. This radical transformation could take place only by means of a well-framed educational process. Every local committee of the ONB, in addition to its sport and military activities, organized educational tours, film screenings, concerts, political conferences, and choral singing lessons. In the case del Balilla (Balilla houses), the structures in which the Fascist youth gathered, there were not only sporting facilities, but also libraries, theaters, reading

The Hitlerjugend, like the Opera Nazionale Balilla, could not carry out an effective educational program without establishing its own cadre of leaders. This chapter will focus on how the Germans tried to create a well-trained corps of HJ-Führer. Beginning with the early days of the Hitlerjugend, it will explore how the Nazi youth organization managed the training of the leaders following strategies sometimes similar to—and sometimes quite different from—the Fascist youth organization. It will examine how the training system of youth leaders developed by the ONB, centered around the Accademia Fascista di Educazione Fisica e Giovanile, contrasted sharply

War was at the heart of Nazi and Fascist ideologies. Both regimes emerged from the devastation of World War I and both regimes committed themselves to transforming their citizens, and above all their youth, into soldiers. When World War II broke out the German and the Italian youth leaders felt that they had to leave for the battlefield. For years they educated Pimpfe, Hitlerjungen, Balilla, and Avanguardisti to follow respectively the Nazi and the Fascist ideology. For years they trained German and Italian youth, trying to transform them into fighters. World War II became for the youth leaders the moment

In the decade after the Nazi seizure of power the relationship between Fascist and Nazi youth organizations was intense, complex, and prone to change. We could roughly single out four distinct phases. Between 1933 and 1937, the first phase we have already discussed, meetings between Fascist and Nazi youth were occasions for cultural and ideological exchange, and both groups used them to improve their educational practices. In 1938, the second phase, the Nazis changed their diplomatic strategy and presented themselves as peacemakers. Although their aim was the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, they tried to placate Britain and France.

The training of the top leaders of the youth organizations was for both Fascists and Nazis of paramount importance. As we have seen, the president of the ONB tried to solve this problem by opening, less than two years after the creation of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Fascist Academy of Physical and Youth Education. The Nazis, once they had recognized the necessity of improving the educational system of the top leaders of the Hitlerjugend, started planning the creation of an institute similar to the ONB Academy much later, almost three years after the Nazi seizure of power. As a