In 1987, Roy Orbison crowned his critical rehabilitation with this concert in Los Angeles, where he runs through his greatest hits with the help of some famous friends. Those joining the Big O for such classics as 'Only the Lonely', 'Crying', 'It's Over' and 'Oh, Pretty Woman' include Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, Steven Soles, J.D. Souther, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Jennifer Warnes.

This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western alliance and the European integration process, without any pretension to exerting a substantial international influence. Eleven contributions by leading Italian historians reappraise Italy’s international role, addressing three complex and intertwined issues, namely, the country’s political-diplomatic dimension; the economic factors affecting Rome’s international stance; and Italy’s role in new approaches to the international system and the influence of political parties’ cultures in the nation’s foreign policy.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States encountered unexpected challenges from Italy and France, two countries with the strongest, and determinedly most anti-American, Communist Parties in Western Europe. Based primarily on new evidence from communist archives in France and Italy, as well as research archives in the United States, Alessandro Brogi's original study reveals how the United States was forced by political opposition within these two core Western countries to reassess its own anticommunist strategies, its image, and the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology. Brogi shows that the resistance to Americanization was a critical test for the French and Italian communists' own legitimacy and existence. Their anti-Americanism was mostly dogmatic and driven by the Soviet Union, but it was also, at crucial times, subtle and ambivalent, nurturing fascination with the American culture of dissent. The staunchly anticommunist United States, Brogi argues, found a successful balance to fighting the communist threat in France and Italy by employing diplomacy and fostering instances of mild dissent in both countries. Ultimately, both the French and Italian communists failed to adapt to the forces of modernization that stemmed both from indigenous factors and from American influence. Confronting America illuminates the political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural conflicts behind the U.S.-communist confrontation.

There are little doubts that Italy has attempted to play a more assertive role in the international arena since the end of the Cold War. During the first forty years of its Republican history, conditioned by both the polarized international context and an antagonistic domestic political system, Italy delegated its main choices in international affairs to external actors, most notably NATO and the European Union. The transition from a bipolar to a unipolar/multipolar world order provided Italy with new opportunities to pursue its political and commercial interests more autonomously, as well as new responsibilities, to actively contribute to solving conflicts and addressing new global threats. At the same time, the collapse of the traditional parties (linked to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Clean Hands enquiries) and the changes of the electoral law (from a proportional representation into a quasi-majoritarian system) generated two heterogeneous coalitions which have regularly alternated in power, but do not always share the same views and approaches-with differences at times of form, and more often of substance. Against this background, Italy in the Post-Cold War Order: Adaptation, Bipartisanship, Visibility, edited by Maurizio Carbone, seeks to explain the evolution of Italy's international action over a twenty-year span (1989-2009). Three central questions are addressed. First, how does Italy adapt to transformations of the international system? Second, how does its ever-changing political system influence Italy's choices in foreign relations? Third, how do domestic structures constrain (or enable) Italy's place on the world stage? To answer these questions, this book consists of two broad parts. The first part sets the context and discusses issues 'horizontally, ' focusing on foreign policy, security and defense policy, development cooperation, and multilateral action. The second part, which takes a 'vertical' approach, discusses Italy's relations with key countries and regions of the world

Although seen widely as the twentieth-century's great religious war, as a conflict between the god-fearing and the godless, the religious dimension of the Cold War has never been subjected to a scholarly critique. This unique study shows why religion is a key Cold War variable. A specially commissioned collection of new scholarship, it provides fresh insights into the complex nature of the Cold War. It has profound resonance today with the resurgence of religion as a political force in global society.

In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the first systematic study of nuclear expertise in Italy, Davide Orsini focuses on the ensuing technopolitical disputes concerning the role and safety of US nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean Sea from the Cold War period to the closure of the naval base in 2008. His book follows the struggles of different groups—including local residents of the archipelago, US Navy personnel, local administrators, Italian experts, and politicians—to define nuclear submarines as either imperceptible threats, much like radiocontamination, or efficient machines at the service of liberty and freedom. Unlike inland nuclear power plants, vividly present and visible with their tall cooling towers and reactor containers, the mobility and invisibility of submarines contributed to an ambivalence about their nature, perpetuating the idea of nuclear exceptionalism. In Italy, they symbolized objects in constant motion, easily removable at the first sign of potential harm. Orsini demonstrates how these mobile sources of hazard posed special challenges for both expert assessments and public understandings of risk, and in contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where unique social power dynamics held sway over the outcome of technopolitical controversies.

The authors employ previously classified documents in Russian and Italian archives, including reports to Stalin on the virtually daily meetings of Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, with Soviet diplomats. This recent, post-revisionist scholarship underscores the role of Stalin's ambitions and their incompatibility with liberal-democratic systems in the development of the Cold War. Stalin and Togliatti come across as shrewd politicians, implacable enemies of the capitalist West, yet acutely aware of the limits of their power.