This series offers a history of Italy from the early Middle Ages to the 21st century and presents recent historical perspectives on Italian history. This volume covers the period from the French Revolution to the end of the 19th century.

This is the first major book to present a panorama of Italian painting from 1797 to 1900, placing it firmly in the mainstream of art history of the nineteenth century. Ottocento reveals the historical context for nineteenth-century Italian painting and presents major works by important Italian artists who are little known outside their native land.

Conceived in the 1850s and opened to navigation in 1869, the Suez Canal's construction coincided with Italy's path to unification and its first foray into nineteenth-century globalization. Since then, the history of Italy and the Canal have intertwined in many ways, throughout peace and war. This edited collection explores the fundamental technical, diplomatic and financial contributions that Italy made to the production of the Canal and to its subsequent development, from the mid-nineteenth century to the Cold War. Drawing from unpublished public and private archival sources, this book is the first comprehensive account of this long and multifaceted relationship, providing innovative perspectives on Italy's diplomatic, economic, social, colonial and cultural history. An insightful read for those studying maritime, diplomatic or Italian history, this book contributes to a growing body of research on the Suez Canal, which has largely emerged from international business, labour and social history, and offers new insights into the Euro-Mediterranean region. Barbara Curli is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, Italy. She is an editorial board member of Italia Contemporanea and is on the Scientific Board of the Fondazione Leonardo - Civiltà delle Macchine.

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

The delight of Bacchus, wine has ever been man's solace and joy. Growing out of the poorest soil, the wild grape was tamed and blended over millennia to produce a royal beverage. But the nineteenth century brought a near revolution in the production of wine, and democracy in its consumption; technology made wine an industry, while improved living standards put it on the people's dinner table. The vintners of France and Italy frantically bought land and planted grapes in their attempt to profit from the golden age of wine. But the very technology which made possible swift transportation, with all its benefits to winemen, brought utter devastation from America—the phylloxera aphids—and only when France and Italy had replanted their entire vineyards on American stock did they again supply the thirsty cities and discriminating elite. In an exhaustive examination Professor Loubère follows the wine production process from practices recommended long ago by the Greeks and Romans through the technical changes that occurred in the nineteenth century. He shows how technology interacted with economic, social, and political phenomena to produce a new viticultural world, but one distinct in different regions. Winemen espoused a wide range of politics and economics depending on where they lived, the grapes they grew, and the markets they sought. While a place remained for carefully hand-raised wine, the industry had, by the end of the century, turned to mass production, though it was capable of great quality control and consistency from year to year. The author uses a wide range of sources, including archives and contemporary accounts. The volume contains extensive figures, tables, graphs, and maps.

Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and “other” kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday—a momentary escape from the familiar—but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was “part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.” The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first survey of Italy’s monumental cemeteries, the book explores the relationship between architecture and politics, or how architecture is formed by political forces. As cities of the dead, cemeteries mirrored the spaces of the living. Against the backdrop of Italy’s unification, they conveyed the power of the new nation, efforts to construct an Italian identity, and conflicts between Church and state. Monumental cemeteries helped to foster the narratives and mentalities that shaped Italy as a new nation.