In his pivotal study on the rise of the Aryan myth in Europe, Leon Poliakov contended that Classicism and Roman Catholicism hindered the diffusion of Aryanism in nineteenth-century Italy. Despite the growing amount of evidence disputing such a thesis, nobody has yet scrutinised the sources mentioned by the French historian or provided an updated analysis of the impact that studies of India and the ‘Orient’ had on Italian culture and politics. In this context, Fabrizio De Donno's recent investigation of the emergence of Orientalism between the Risorgimento and Fascism offers a fresh approach to the relationship between linguistics, racialism and nationalism in modern Italy.

De Donno argues that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy not only did Orientalism, Indology, and Aryanism spread widely, but they chiefly served the purpose of identity politics (p. 9). The author draws on the Saidian notion of Orientalism as a way of representing Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through different disciplines and approaches. De Donno contends, however, that Italian Orientalistica was primarily concerned with reconstructing the ethnic identity of Italians and defending the prestige of the nation in an era of increasing international tensions and competition (p. 12). De Donno's analysis unfolds, in effect, as a timeline for the development of these studies and their engagement with major cultural and political trends, from the querelle between Classicists and Romantics of the 1810s to the implementation of Fascist racial legislation in 1938. The author divides the book into two parts to underline how the thesis of an Indo-European cultural identity cultivated by Risorgimento Orientalism eventually turned into a racial ideology following the Unification, imperialism, and escalating antagonism among European powers (pp. 15, 137).

The book starts with the birth of Orientalism as a pan-European phenomenon, the legacy of the British Asiatic Society and German linguistics and their engagement with Italian Classicism and Romanticism. It also explores the role that comparative philology and Indology played in fostering a cross-disciplinary debate on the origins and progress of European – and, particularly, Italian – civilisation vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Then, De Donno delves into the embrace of Orientalism by key figures of Italian Romanticism, and into the ways that Classicists reacted to this new cultural trend. As he points out, one of the main issues of contention regarded the positioning of Italy, both as a Mediterranean and European country, and how such a liminal condition affected the oscillation between cosmopolitanism and Eurocentrism. The central chapters of the book deal with the development of Italian academic Orientalism in the philosophical context of Positivism, and an increasing comparative study of languages, myths, and religions. This new approach laid the ground for the marginalisation of biblical and classical cosmogonies, the formulation of a new Indo-European Aryan identity, and, consequently, the ‘de-Judaisation’ of Christianity. A corollary to this ‘Aryanisation’ of Italy was the inclusion of classical antiquity in the history of Aryan civilisational progress.

A further step in this process unfolded with the making of the Aryans into a race. In this transition, Orientalist ideas extended from the comparative study of languages and religions to contiguous fields like ethnology, anthropology, craniology, and criminology. This process accelerated the further naturalisation of the supposed ‘inequality’ between Aryans and other ‘races’. In this context, Italy became the arena of the opposing racial narrative of Mediterraneanism, which aimed to offset the pretensions of Northern European ‘Nordicist’ Aryanism. The liminal condition of Italy both as a white, European country and as a ‘minority partaker’ in the greater imperialist struggle reverberated in fiction. As the author remarks, when dealing with India and the ‘Orient’, fin-de-siècle writers projected their ambitions and anguishes on the condition and role of Italy vis-à-vis the major European powers (pp. 154, 219, 278, 292–293). This increasing frustration may also explain the proliferation, at the turn of the century, of Mediterraneanism, as well as the theories that aimed at restoring Roman Italy as the cradle of the Aryan civilisational progress. This explains how, in the context of growing hostility toward Western democracies, Fascism ultimately embraced Nazi Aryan myths and enacted infamous racist legislation, rapidly and opportunistically rejecting decades of ambivalence toward Aryanism (pp. 296–323).

De Donno has produced a rich and detailed analysis of the emergence of Orientalism on the peninsula. He demonstrates how, despite a late start, Italy became one of the most promising places for Orientalist studies. The sections on fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Orientalistica are extremely detailed and convincing, as in the explanation of Angelo De Gubernatis’ transition from philology to physiology in illustrating ethnic differentiation processes (pp. 192–194). Moreover, De Donno convincingly illustrates that Fascism's embrace of Aryanism was not a predictable outcome given the presence of conflicting racial theories sponsored by the regime (p. 296).

While the chapters dealing with late nineteenth-century Orientalistica are the forte of the book, De Donno's thesis of an alleged metamorphosis of the Risorgimento's cultural Indo-Europeanism into the post-Unification racial ideology deserves further reconsideration. Racial Aryanism, in fact, already emerged in the 1850s with the ethnologist Giustiniano Nicolucci – the ‘father’ of Italian anthropology – and the philologist Giovenale Vegezzi-Ruscalla. Nicolucci's inclusion of the ‘Semites’ into the Aryan ‘race’ still requires further investigation, and one could hypothesise that the ‘Aryanisation’ of Hebrews by Jewish scholars like Cesare Lombroso and Graziadio Ascoli might reflect some relevant (but as-yet unexplored) developments in early Italian anthropology rather than a mere attempt to counter anti-Semitism (pp. 195–199). Overall, early nineteenth-century Italian racialism still deserves further scrutiny if we think that even a classicist like Vincenzo Cuoco argued for a Eurasian ethnogenesis of the Italians. Lastly, one may contend that nineteenth-century Orientalism provided the ‘intellectual foundation’ of Fascist and Nazi institutional racisms (p. 296). On the other hand, the thesis according to which these dictatorships can be seen as the ‘fulfilment’ of the racist ‘potential’ of Franz Bopp's Orientalism is debatable since there is no evidence that the Shoah was the foregone conclusion of early nineteenth-century Indology (p. 295). Rather, it appears more convincing, as De Donno himself suggests, to ascribe the turn toward full-fledged institutional racism to Fascism's desire for national ‘regeneration’ and supremacy (p. 323).

Despite these shortcomings, De Donno's book is a well-crafted and solid study on the emergence of a phenomenon that has been overlooked by recent historiography. Due to the relevance of its topic and the cohesiveness of its argument, Italian Orientalism is a must-read for every scholar interested in the history of the close relationship between culture and nationalism in modern Italy.