In the Kingdom of Italy from the Unification to the Great War, monumental statuary represented one of the most interesting episodes, from both artistic and political point of view. Commissioned by spontaneous committees, associations and local authorities, the statues honoured and illustrated characters and episodes from recent history, and pro-posed historical figures as representatives of national identity. Many statues were explic-itly desired, defended and supported by Freemasonry, in open dispute with the Catholic Church. The essay proposes some exemplary cases.

The essay reconstructs the journey and stay in the USA and England of the Soviet delegation invited to the International Youth Assembly in 1942. The delegation travelled for four months, with high-level meetings but also numerous popular meetings. The main sources used were, in addition to the Soviet-era archives, the newspapers of the time, in particular to recognise the reaction to a soldier woman, a sniper, which was a complete novelty and disconcerting for the Western media. On the whole, the distance and the difficulty of understanding the condition of the war in the USSR emerge. Some lesser-known aspects of L.M. Pavličenko’s life are also reconstructed.