51/1-2 - Qualestoria. Rivista di storia contemporanea. LI, N.ro 1-2, Dicembre 2023

This article examines the analyses of Fascism and the content of the Anti-Fascist and Anti-Imperialist propaganda carried out within one of the dissident tendencies of Italian Communism in the 1930s: the Trotskyist one. It is based on articles published not only in Italian Trotskyist newspapers and periodicals but also in those issued by the two main national Trotskyist groups (the French and Us ones) and by the International Secretariat, the leading structure of the International Trotskyist Movement in the 1930s. Most of the articles were written by Alfonso Leonetti and Pietro Tresso, who were not only the main executives of Italian Trotskyism but also, at the same time, respectively a notable leader of the International Trotskyist Movement (Leonetti) and a member of the leadership of French Trotskyism (Tresso). Their articles dealt with the Anti-Fascist repression, the quarrel between Fascism and Catholic Action, but especially with Fascist imperialism, which led to the Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935.

The essay analyzes the Ricordi infausti by Emilio Stata, written in 1928 by one of the many Trieste people who fought in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian Army. The text tells of his war experiences in Galicia and his subsequent imprisonment in Ukraine, a situation on which the Revolution subsequently broke out. Many impressions and stories by the author enrich our knowledge of the war in that sector and the events of the Austro-Hungarian prisoners first in the Tsar's camps, then in revolutionary Russia.

The purpose of the essay is to reconstruct the personal history of the magistrate Carlo Materazzo in service in Tripoli before and after the Second World War. His biography allows us to highlight the characteristics of an Italian “colonial judge” during the fascist regime, the British military occupation and the process of independence of the so-called Italian “Quarta sponda”. What makes the story particularly interesting, in addition to the different forms of collaboration of Materazzo with apparently very different political regimes, is the publication by the magistrate of a memoir about his experience in Libia. By dialoguing archival documents and the memories of Materazzo, I tried to retrace a single aspect of the slow italian transition process from fascism to democracy.

Based on an accurate reconstruction of the historical, political, cultural, and intellectual debate that arose following the unification of Sardinia to the Savoy mainland states in 1848 and the consequent political-institutional repercussions that this union had on the Island, with the development of the so-called “Sardinian question”, the essay intends to reflect on the State-Region relationship starting from the birth of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia in 1949. This relationship was characterised by a latent conflict that gradually led the Sardinian’s political and intellectual elites to clash with the State authority for the affirmation of the autonomist ideal as legitimated by the Special Statute approved by the Constituent Assembly in 1948, which shortly afterwards led to the foundation of the regional authority, and to request extraordinary interventions from the national governments to resolve the ancestral economic and social problems that conditioned the Island’s growth and impeded its development.

Two different autonomies, such as the Basque example and the Sicilian example, can be compared to grasp points of convergence and differences, trying to grasp peculiarities and useful characteristics to understand aspects that are relevant to their history. These pages reconstruct the events relating to the processes of transition to democracy in these two regions, both exceptional in relation to their respective national political processes, both conditioned by phenomena of political violence and by the presence of nationalist political forces, independentist and separatist. However, the Sicilian separatist process took place before real channels of democratic representation were activated and is legitimized by its claim to have created the conditions for the industrial development of the island. Whereas in the Basque Country the processes of democratization of society and of local parties are indistinguishable from the events that determined the establishment of the autonomous community and are intertwined with identity and long-term national issues. These differences can tell us a lot about the performance and subsequent legitimacy of the respective regional institutions.

The proposal for a critical re-reading of Enzo Bettiza’s vast essay and literary production focuses on some works in particular: La campagna elettorale; Il fantasma di Trieste; Via Solferino. La vita del “Corriere della Sera” dal 1964 al 1974; Mito e realtà di Trieste; Esilio. The analysis underlines the strong link between the peculiar biographical path of the A. (journalist, politician, commentator, writer), and the interpretative narration, of political and literary value, of the experiences lived as a thinking Witness. The historical contextualization of the texts examined leads back to the crucial events, often tragic turning points, of the European twentieth century.

About fifteen novels are analyzed on the exodus which from 1943 to 1954 affected three hundred thousand Italians from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia. The theme is the same, namely the reasons why these writers left their homes to cross the border between communist Yugoslavia and the Free Territory of Trieste, governed until 1954 by the Anglo-Americans. But the point of view from which they tell their odyssey is very different, depending on whether the author wrote: before 1975, when with the Treaty of Osimo the borders stipulated in 1945 became definitive; or after 1989, that is, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 1990s, when those lands were the scene of another war and new exiles; or even after 2004, when Slovenia joined the EU. One can note the passage from a conflict read in cultural and political terms, to one centered on the recovery of a multiple identity, to the point of making the exile a meta-historical category. The story of the women is very different, who instead place themselves from a unique perspective, that of the loss of their home and the dispersion of their family

Studies on Italian fascism in Latin America have experienced an important development in the last two decades. The topics studied by the historians from Italy and other countries are: Mussolini and the Italian emigrants, ethnic press, cultural politics, diplomatic and economic relations, antifascism, neofascism. Other studies focus on the way local politicians and intellectuals have adapted the Italian model to their national contest, through a process that has been defined as “hybridization” or “creative adaptation”. After mentioning the main historiographical contributions on various topics, the article focuses on three questions: the definition of “Italianess”, “Latiness” and “Universality of Rome” as instruments of the fascist internationalism; the diffusion of corporativism overseas; the reception of Latin eugenics of Nicola Pende and Corrado Gini.

The essay analyzes the evolution of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union over a period of about twenty years, from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s. During this period, Washington followed a path that led it to positions diametrically opposed to those initially assumed towards Moscow: from an initial position of benevolent expectation, to economic and military support provided to the Ussr during the Second World War, to a vigilant attention against the former ally born before the defeat of Japan. This soon turned into open distrust that led the US government to prepare for a possible new military confrontation. The essay highlights the various steps that led the White House to develop the doctrines of containment and roll back that characterized the early years of the Cold War.

Exodus has been the theme of much literature since the time of Homer and his Odyssey, not forgetting to mention Virgil's Aeneid or numerous Canti of Dante. But this history of man, marked by the exile of both individuals and entire populations, has never exactly ceased, just as their artistic and literary expressions. Precisely for this reason, the present work deals mainly with authors and works of the 20th century, which draw their material from the lives of those who endured firsthand the experience of exile, turning into literature. In this regard works of Greeks Ilias Venezis and Didò Sotiriu are quoted that tell of "the great catastrophe" of the exodus of Greeks from the coastlife of Anatolia together with Armenians when both peoples were driven from their lands by the Turks. This is followed by other authors and pieces related to a more recent exodus, that of Bosnians, Croats and Serbs fleeing from ex Yugoslavia torn apart of 1991-1995 war, then also referring to Albanian and other writers who fled from totalitarian regimes. The article closes by taking into consideration the authors and works concerning the exodus, which most closely interests Diego Zandel, particularly the exodus of the Italian population, among others, from Istria, Rijeka and Zadar due to the annexation of those territories to Marshal Tito's communist regime.

An Italian piece of the composite European mosaic of forced population displacements that affected Europe after the Second World War as a consequence of the conflict and the opposed redefinition of borders, the Julian-Dalmatian exodus involved the large part of the Italian population of Istria in Fiume and Dalmatia. The contribution, after having analyzed the characteristics, dynamics and directions of the exodus, focuses on the refugees and their arrival in Italy, with particular attention to the assistance policies implemented by the Italian government and to the reception of the population in a still strongly marked by the wounds of war.

The essay aims to follow the events that led at the end of the World War II to the Devolution Acts for some regions and to the constitutional provisions which granted to the others legislative and administrative powers in some fields. It dwells largely on the different circumstances in which it became ripe the decision to drafting and to granting Devolution acts for Sicily, Sardinia, Valle d'Aosta and Trentino-Alto Adige (the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, although included among the special regions envisaged by the constitution, will be established only in 1963) as well as on the center-periphery relations within the political system.

The democratic transition in the Valencian Country offered a singular complexity in relation to the national problem, and for this it was a privileged scenario to observe the strategies that the state parties deployed when configuring the State of Autonomies in Spain. In this work we reflect on the attitude adopted by the main parties of the Valencian political scene towards the national problem. Even though many of them initially led initiatives that tended to assume a sensitive perspective in terms of nationality or region, this was an issue full of contradictions and internal tensions, especially between the state parties, for which it was not easy to deal with the identity conflicts that were originated within them. In these pages we will try to think about some positions that were improvised and adapted to a large extent, by some ruling elites that did not respond in a homogeneous or unequivocal way to the autonomic challenges after the approval of the Constitution and until the approval of the Statute of the Valencian Community in 1982.

Il presente fascicolo di «Qualestoria» è nato dall’idea di analizzare in chiave comparativa due processi di transizione da un sistema autoritario a uno democratico, mettendo al centro la questione regionale. I due casi considerati sono quello italiano e quello spagnolo, entrambi caratterizzati dal riconoscimento di forme di autonomia speciale a regioni che la rivendicavano per diverse ragioni e in diverse forme.

The Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis was a fond admirer of France (which helped Italy to become an independent nation) and supported its struggle against Prussia during the war of 1870-71. This predilection was confirmed by several writings, even when the establishment of a French protectorate in Tunisia in 1881 triggered the Italian public opinion against France. Analyzing the correspondence between De Amicis and the French writer Edmond Cottinet, this essay highlights the negative influence exerted by the press on the public opinion in the two countries. At the same time, the letters show how the two writers, despite this nationalist wave and their particular point of view, tried to find the path of reason and tolerance.

A research in the National Archives of London made it possible to examine the letter, dated the day of the Austro-German Caporetto offensive, from Luigi Cadorna, Chief of Staff, to his British counterpart William Robert Robertson. Starting from Cadorna's considerations, the authors investigate the complex dynamics of relations between “non-friendly” allies of the Entente, against the background of the particularly difficult relationship, common to all European states at war, between military personnel and politicians in the conduct of the conflict, which finally saw a prominence of the latter ones.

In 1918 Gabriele d'Annunzio called the artist from Trieste Guido Marussig to work for him. The Commander involves him in several projects using his ability to create effective symbolic images. Marussig is among the artists who most actively participate in the military and political enterprises of d'Annunzio. The paper investigates the nature of their working relationship through the correspondence between the two and some of the works of art that Marussig created for d’Annunzio. The purpose of the study is to underline the importance of the political component in these works.