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This book examines the fascinating origins and the complex evolution of Italian national citizenship from the unification of Italy in 1861 until just after World War II. It does so by exploring the civic history of Italians in the peninsula, and of Italy's colonial and overseas native populations. Using little-known documentation, Sabina Donati delves into the policies, debates, and formal notions of Italian national citizenship with a view to grasping the multi-faceted, evolving, and often contested vision(s) of italianità. In her study, these disparate visions are brought into conversation with contemporary scholarship pertaining to alienhood, racial thinking, migration, expansionism, and gender. As the first English-language book on the modern history of Italian citizenship, this work highlights often-overlooked precedents, continuities, and discontinuities within and between liberal and fascist Italies. It invites the reader to compare the Italian experiences with other European ones, such as French, British, and German citizenship traditions.

This article is a short introduction for a special edition on Italian nationhood. The articles that comprise the special edition are the following: From a cosmopolitan to a fascist land: Adriatic irredentism in motion; Erecting fascism: nation, identity, and space in Trieste in the first half of the twentieth century; Building Italianità in northern Adriatic: The case of population from Pola.

During the Fascist ventennio , prominent Italian writers and journalists, such as Mario Appelius, Raffaele Calzini, Arnaldo Cipolla, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, Roberto Suster and Cesco Tommaselli, reported from China, Japan and Korea for Il Popolo d'Italia , Corriere della Sera and La Stampa . Their travel narratives were crucial for the creation and diffusion in Italy of the dominant representation of China and Korea as remote, decadent and exotic societies; and of Japan as a progressive society resonant with Fascist Italy. The narrativisation of these countries in Italian travelogues from the Fascist ventennio was part of a widespread discursive practice by Italian intellectuals willing to subscribe to, and actively disseminate, the guiding principles of Fascism. When emphasising China's and Korea's irreconcilable difference from, and Japan's affinity with, Fascist Italy, these intellectuals extolled the Italian race and culture, justified Italy's position in geopolitical dynamics, and propagandised the exceptionality of the Fascist ideology. Durante il ventennio Fascista, alcuni tra i più importanti giornalisti e scrittori italiani (Mario Appelius, Raffaele Calzini, Arnaldo Cipolla, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, Roberto Suster and Cesco Tommaselli) viaggiarono in Cina, Corea e Giappone per Il popolo d'Italia , il Corriere della Sera e la Stampa . Le loro narrative di viaggio furono determinanti per la costruzione e diffusione in Italia delle rappresentazioni predominanti della Cina e della Corea come società esotiche, lontane e decadenti, nonché del Giappone come una società progressista e affine all'Italia fascista. Questi resoconti di viaggio furono dunque parte di estese pratiche discorsive, promosse da intellettuali italiani che si riconoscevano nel fascismo e ne disseminavano i principi guida. Attraverso l'enfasi posta nell'irriconciliabile differenza tra l'Italia fascista, la Cina e la Corea, nonché nell'affinità tra essa e il Giappone, costoro elogiarono la razza e la cultura italiane. Inoltre, essi propagandarono l'eccezionalità del fascismo e giustificarono l'orientamento politico della nazione italiana nelle dinamiche geo-politiche del tempo.

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.

This article explores Adriatic irredentism, a complex political, cultural, and social movement, by specifically analyzing the unique role it played in the legitimization of Italian territorial claims over “language frontiers” such as Trieste and its hinterland. Through a close reading of first-hand sources, it examines how Italian irredentist intellectuals, public press, and associations purposefully utilized anti-Slav and anti-German arguments to shape public perception of both the Italian nation as well as Trieste's Italian identity or “Italianità.” Although recent historiographical interpretations have emphasized continuities in local understandings of “Italianità,” this article examines the discontinuities in the debate over its identity. It suggests that although Italian identity was first conceived as an expression of cultural and linguistic autonomy within the broader intellectual framework of Adriatic multi-nationalism, this idea gradually vanished amidst the structural crisis triggered by the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 and then inexorably faded on the eve of the Great War. Thus, notions of Italian national identity took an exclusionary and sometimes xenophobic meaning that was publicly used by a wide set of political actors to justify the territorial reincorporation of the “unredeemed” land within the borders of the new Italian state. The fascist regime, especially, utilized Italianness to further its aggressive and chauvinist agenda toward the Adriatic borderland. Consequently, Italian language and culture became instruments as well as symbols of repression and imperialism that were used to fulfill the regime's ambitions of “fascistization” of the Slavic population living in the region.

In March 1861, after almost thirteen centuries of political fragmentation and multiple states, the divided Italian peninsula was unified under the House of Savoy and the Italian kingdom proclaimed from the city of Turin. This Italian state stretched from the Western Alps to Sicily and excluded, for important reasons of international politics, the Venetian and the Roman provinces that remained under Austrian and pontifical rule until 1866 and 1870 respectively. Even though realized in a “truncated” way, the national ideal of political unification was finally achieved, thanks to a combination of skilled diplomatic negotiations, Piedmontese dynastic aspirations, French military interventions

In liberal Italy female citizenship enjoyed a specificity of its own in comparison with the corresponding male membership status. In Chapter Two, whose purpose was to make the female part of the population visible within the history of Italian citizenship, we saw that Italian women (as wives and mothers) did not enjoy an independent nationality that could be retained upon marriage and be transmitted to the offspring. Fathers and husbands alone determined the national membership status of all members within the household, and this legal situation would change only from the mid-1970s. Also, the pre-1922 Italian female path toward civic,

Between 1876 and 1914, Italy witnessed the largest mass exodus of expatriates ever registered in its entire post-unification history. Those years represent the epoch when “the beautiful country” (il bel paese) was a land of emigration, and more particularly when the Italians were “the Albanians” of many destination countries, to paraphrase the title of a recent Italian publication about migration and xenophobic stereotyping.¹ Millions left the peninsula as permanent or temporary migrants, pushed by a despair that was well summarized at the time: “What do you want! Here I cannot have hope […], I cannot have any hope of improving

This chapter-concluding the book-offers a full discussion of the vision(s) of Italian national identity that emerge from analysis of the citizenship policies and related official discourse carried out throughout our historical journey. Going back to the two metaphors introduced at the start (i.e., “citizenship as a mirror” and “citizenship as a pencil”), it uses these two allegorical instruments to summarize the major findings and elucidate the closing arguments. In so doing, it offers an overview of the origins and the historical evolution of citizenship and identity in Italy from 1861 to 1950 in order to show, in the longue durée, that italianità is by no means a fixed notion, that it can be dual, multidimensional and variable, and that it has been shaped by homegrown traditions of racial thinking concerning, in different ways, Southern Italians, Italian Jews, Italian colonial subjects and the historical origins of the Italics.

This chapter analyzes the differentiated citizenship policies and political discourses as formulated in Italy during the liberal period in reference to two specific categories of foreigners: the Italiani non regnicoli and the non-Italian immigrants. Focusing on these two types of alienhood, the chapter first provides an overview of the historical context and a discussion over the multiple definitions of italianità that were articulated at the time. It then illustrates the generous citizenship strategies introduced for the first category of aliens, and examines notions of “citizenship” and “nationality”-as different terms-within a period of irredentist objectives. It surveys the citizenship status reserved for he non-Italian immigrants, and provides a systematic analysis of their individual files of “grand naturalization.” By exploring the use of jus soli up to 1922 vis-à-vis the second generations born in Italy, the chapter concludes with an additional comparison with contemporary Germany.