The power exercised by the mother on the son in Mediterranean cultures has been amply studied. Italy is a special case in the Modern Era and the phenomenon of Mammismo italiano is indeed well known. Scholars have traced this obsession with the mother figure to the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, but in fact, it is more ancient. What has not been adequately addressed however, is how Mammismo italiano has been manifested in complex ways in various modern artistic forms. Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture focuses on case studies of five prominent creative personalities, representing different, sometimes overlapping artistic genres (Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Carlo Levi, Federico Fellini). The author examines how the mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped their work. Although the analysis uses mainly a psychological and psychoanalytical critical approach, the belief of the author, substantiated by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, is that historical and cultural conditions contributed to and reinforced the Italian character. This book concludes with an analysis of some examples of Italian film comedies, such as Fellini's and Monicelli's where mammismo/vitellonismo is treated with a lighter tone and a pointed self irony.

In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi’s lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. From page one of this study, de Palchi’s voice is in constant dialogue with the Italian poets of his time. Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of the relationship between de Palchi’s asymptomatic creative paradigm and what was taking place around him. While the majority of de Palchi’s life was spent outside of Italy, he continued to engage with Italy in his poetry, in translating Italian poets into English and for close to fifty years as co-editor, with Sonia Raiziss, of Chelsea magazine, a biannual that published a significant number of translations of twentieth-century Italian poets. Through Chelsea magazine de Palchi also became a conduit, bringing Italian poetry to non-Italian-speaking poetry aficionados in the United States. It is especially his own verse, written outside the geocultural boundaries that we know as Italy, which makes this study by Giorgio Linguaglossa all the more important.

Trump and Mussolini: Images, Fake News, and Mass Media as Weapons in the Hands of Two Populists compares two historic men of power and influence, Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini, to analyze the commonality of practices and mannerisms between the two. From rhetoric to body language, to their control over oral and written communication and analogous power strategies, they both possess an unusual talent for new technologies which they utilize to their advantage in unique moments in history. Mussolini lived at the beginning of mass society, Trump at the height of social media, both controversial leaders finding means to utilize these periods of time and the tools surrounding them to further their own agendas and influence society, culture, and authority. The authors examine a plethora of topics and themes such as outward personalities and consuming charisma, means and tools of communication and propaganda, and treatment of women, just to name a few, in order to define the relationship and similarities between these two controversial figures. This book was written before the Capitol Hill assault on January 6th 2021. Mussolini in November 1922 in front of the Parliament said: “I could have made a bivouac of this gloomy gray hall: I could have shut down the Parliament and formed a Government exclusively of Fascists; I could have done so, but I did not wish to do so, at least not at this moment.” Trump, however never said anything like this, but indeed, tried to do it.

The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula provides a microhistory of life in a Southern Italian province in the decade following Unificationand of Vincenzo Padula, who wrote single-handedly from March 1864 to July 1865 — a period when pro-Bourbon loyalists were attempting to exploit the discontent of the Region’s poor masses by fomenting brigantry and reverse the Unification — Il Bruzio, a pro-Government periodical published in Cosenza. The pro-government reformist Padula pointed out not only the successes but also the shortcomings and failures of the Savoy regime, so as to consolidate their rule. He gave particular attention to the problems of daily life through the correspondence of a literary creation, Mariuzza Sbrìffiti. The difficult integration of the South, in Padula’s view, was often exacerbated by the unwillingness of the “piemontesi” to learn the social, political, and economic realities of the South. Padula enables us to view from multiple angles both macroscopic issues, such as the relationship between the Church and the New Italy, and the dire state of the infrastructure and economy, and microscopic ones, such as the peasantry’s misplaced hopes in Garibaldi, clerical obscurantism, popular beliefs and culture, contradictions in the structure of the new liberal regime, and the status and role of women in such a society. He views his subjects from a unique perspective, one is defined by its empathy for and identification with the marginalized “persons of Calabria.”

Belliotti analyzes the role of positive duties in moral theory, the efficacy of theocratic republicanism, strategies for political revolutions, the implications of an enduring Sicilian ethos, and the profits and perils of the individual-community continuum, while distinctively interpreting the lives and ideologies of Mazzini, Gramsci, and Giuliano.

This volume examines the significance of place in contemporary Italian American literature from an ecocritical perspective. It fills a gap in the theoretical discourse on Italian American culture, whose concerns about environmental justice have been mostly overlooked. From mid-twentieth-century poets such as John Ciardi and Diane di Prima to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction writers such as Carole Maso and Salvatore Scibona, the study combines Italian American literary criticism with the spatial turn that, over the last decades, has asserted the interpretive significance of place and the environment in literary texts. Questioning the prejudice that sees Italian American culture as detached from ecological issues, these works show that such diasporic heritage has helped forge different modes of relationship and new forms of expression in contact with the “American” land. Their relevance lies not so much in defining or redefining Italian American ethnicity but in forging ideas and futures beyond their immediate framework and subject matter. By focusing on the intersection of gender and ethnicity with local and transnational spaces and aesthetic practices, Italian American Poetics of Place contributes to the growing field of inquiry that explores the resources of the literary in laying the basis for more dialogic and inclusive forms of awareness and community with both the human and other-than-human.

This is an interdisciplinary work that philosophically analyzes concepts such as heroism; practical wisdom; honor; Nietzsche’s notions of will to power, the overman, and the three metamorphoses; Plato’s understanding of love; creating meaning in life; the issue of morally dirty hands in political administration; the relationship between political means and ends; the proper role of positive duties in society; the aspirations of grand strivers; and the linkages between biological, biographical, and autobiographical lives, all in the context of explaining and evaluating the lives and works of fourteen historically significant Italian: Gaius Julius Caesar, Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, Caterina Sforza, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Francesca Cabrini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Antonio Gramsci, Salvatore Giuliano, Oriana Fallaci, Giovanni Falcone, and Paolo Borsellino. By dissecting the lives and philosophies of the figures discussed in this work, by extracting moral, political, and existential lessons from their aspirations and enterprises, by reflecting on their ideals from the vantage point of our divergent social context, by evaluating their virtues and vices from a wider perspective, and by confronting the conceptual puzzles and social impediments hampering the exercise of practical wisdom and heroism, we may confront the people that we are and reimagine the people we might become.