The aim of this article is to analyse the Italian Nuova Destra. The first part examines the birth of the Nuova Destra within the current of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), referring particularly to Pino Rauti, a founder and leader. Following the experience of the magazine La Voce della Fogna and the Hobbit Camps, the first publishing initiatives of the Nuova Destra – Diorama letterario and Elementi, influenced by Alain de Benoist and the French Nouvelle Droite – were established. The second part analyses the path of the Nuova Destra as an autonomous cultural current. After Marco Tarchi’s expulsion from the MSI in 1981, the Nuova Destra launched an aggressive publishing strategy that failed to make the necessary organisational leap and came to an end around 1994. Nevertheless, the Nuova Destra has created a recognisable current, culturally eclectic and capable of ranging over different fields of knowledge with ‘metapolitics’ and ‘right-wing Gramscism’.

This article examines the activism of far-right women who, beginning in the late 1970s, produced the magazine Eowyn. It reconstructs the foundational principles of far-right feminist thought in Italy, which these women self-identified as personalising feminism, situating this framework within the broader currents of contemporary feminist discourse and its cultural referents. The essay further explores the reception of Eowyn by Marxist feminists and far-right male actors, illuminating the tensions and dialogues that shaped the movement. A distinct feminist typology emerges – one that neither repudiates an organicist conception of society nor reduces women’s history to narratives of oppression, while remaining sensitive to the risks of the massification and masculinisation of the female figure. This approach advocates for women’s equal opportunities while offering a sustained critique of a society and state perceived as retrograde, highlighting the complex intersections of gender, ideology, and political culture in late twentieth-century Italy.

This article reconstructs the history of the ‘Centro per gli Studi sullo Sviluppo Economico’ created through a collaboration between the SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno) and the Ford Foundation and active between 1958 and 1969. Through the analysis of unpublished documentation from the SVIMEZ archives, the article shows how the ‘Italian laboratory’ of Southern Italy became an international case study in the context of the Cold War and the dawn of development economics. The Centre played a crucial role in training economists and officials and in disseminating the Italian experience at the Mediterranean and global levels, combining international theoretical approaches with the empirical legacy of policies for the ‘Mezzogiorno’. The paper highlights how this experience represented a meeting point between American philanthropy, Western modernisation and bottom-up development practices, contributing to the construction of transnational networks and the spread of development culture in the era of decolonisation.

This article considers the function of American food and its exchange at the time of the Allied occupation of Italy to revisit the complexity of the encounter with the local population. Through unpublished diaries and confidential reports of the Psychological Warfare Branch, as well as video materials, published interviews and published diaries, the article makes the issues around food central to the understanding of the dynamics of the Italian occupation. While contributing to the growing literature on food availability in the Second World War, the article expands in particular on the historic function of American comfort food and rations, to explore the experience of the Italian occupation through the interactions of gifting, bartering and black market trade. It illuminates the complexity of mutual perceptions shaped by hope, nostalgia, supremacy, and fairness. It concludes with a reading of John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, which, as a cultural product, brings together and makes valid for future generations, the contrasting image of a benign and a damaging occupation explored in the article.

This study examines the political communication strategies of the Italian Marxist-Leninist and neo-Stalinist party, Sovereign and Popular Democracy (DSP), through a qualitative thematic analysis of its online discourse. The analysis identifies the core elements of the party’s agenda and assesses their potential alignment with the red-brownist movement, often linked to the pro-Russian far right. The research investigates the historical and political intersections between the Stalinist communist sphere and the postfascist Eurasianist and red-brownist factions. Particular attention is given to their shared anti-Western stance and historical connections to ‘left-wing fascism’ in the post-Second World War era. Italy provides a crucial case study, given its postwar role as a hub for radical movements on both the left and the right. The analysis also considers the ideological trajectory of the Italian far-right, particularly the Jeune Europe movement, to situate DSP’s discourse within broader historical and ideological frameworks.

This article aims to reconstruct the social history of norms against the apology for fascism since 1945, focusing on the public debate and the consequences of these norms in Italian society. The primary sources are case law and media debate. This study aims to examine how non-militant Italians perceived the threat posed by fascism and related movements, and how their attitudes towards antifascist legislation evolved over time. By examining case studies highlighting the evolution of non-militant Italian society’s position towards neofascism, the article assesses whether there has been a dialogue between society and the courts.

In times of crisis, the role of the mayor encompasses not only political and administrative functions but also ethical and identity-oriented aspects, with the aim of strengthening relations with the community. This dual profile offers the opportunity to reassert their institutional role. In this context, our research analyses the leadership style of mayors during the Covid-19 pandemic through case studies of five mayors in Sicily, a region of Italy characterised by significant structural economic deficits. The research makes an original contribution to the study of crisis leadership by integrating two areas of analysis: communication and political strategies. These reveal different attempts to reconcile operational responses to crises with the need for communication to encourage the community’s acceptance of strict rules and compliance. In particular, this research highlights crisis response strategies that reflect different ways of relating to the community, suggesting new avenues of analysis that can guide future research.

The trajectory of Allied control in occupied Italy was characterised by the easing of pressure on local institutions in its progression from military government to institutional supervision. The structure of control was imagined as following three institutional steps, according to which the Allied Military Government would be succeeded – upon the re-establishment of a functioning Italian government – by an Allied Control Commission tasked with maintaining a supervisory role. A lesser-known institution, the Advisory Council for Italy, was established with the external contribution of Russian, French and subsequently Greek and Yugoslav representatives. This third body contributed to the political management of Italian affairs through a series of recommendations which helped shape the direction of the Allied occupation. By analysing the Council’s documentation, this article outlines its political objectives, institutional practices and internal tensions, while highlighting the development of a more widely co-ordinated Allied control policy for Italy.

This article revisits the often contradictory experience of Allied rule in Italy, challenging the narrative of liberation and proposing instead to embrace more emphatically the lens of ‘occupation’. Building on the author’s own contribution to the field and reviewing the evolution of the literature over the past decades, it explores five central themes that help redefine our understanding of this era: the temporal and spatial backdrop against which Allied rule unfolded, shaped by the notion of ‘co-belligerency’; the impact of total war on Italian society; the role of British and American military and political leadership in shaping occupation policy; the cultural and symbolic influence of American forces; and the impact of war and occupation on women. It argues that the occupation regime profoundly shaped Italy’s experience during the mid-twentieth century as well as its postwar identity, contributing to a persistent national pacifism and ambivalence towards the new superpowers.

This summary presents the proceedings of the two-day conference held in December 2025 as part of the preparatory work for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Italian History. Conceived as a collective intellectual workshop, the conference brought together scholars working across chronological, thematic, and methodological boundaries to reflect on how modern Italy’s history can be narrated and rethought in handbook form. Over two days, participants discussed the construction of Italian identity, from the eighteenth century to the present, foregrounding the interaction between political cultures, social structures, and cultural representations. The eight panels explored national identity before and after unification; the role of media, Catholicism, and war; gender, sexuality, and race; crime and deviance; colonialism; urban development and environmental inequality; labour, industrialisation, and economic crises; Fascism and antifascism; and the architectural, cultural, and mnemonic legacies of the twentieth century. The conference functioned not merely as a presentation of individual chapters, but as a forum in which contributors tested interpretative frameworks, identified historiographical gaps, and refined their arguments. In doing so, it played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual coherence of The Bloomsbury Handbook, ensuring that it reflects current debates while offering a critical and inclusive account of modern Italian history.

After introducing the topic of antifascism on the internet and the issues that scientific publications encounter when facing the web, the first part of this contribution in Contexts and Debates examined the first of three digital history projects connected to this topic, the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste. In this following section, the attention is focused on two more publications: IF – Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista, a project tied to the issue of mobility for people persecuted by the Fascist regime; and Memorie in Cammino, a project that approaches its content and the user’s interaction with it in an entirely non-linear manner, reconstructing the lives and actions of those who resisted the regime.