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Between 1946 and 1948, roughly five thousand ethnic Italians from the northern Adriatic shipbuilding town of Monfalcone relocated to the newly communist Yugoslavia. This rare case of eastward Cold War migration demonstrates how ordinary people conceived of liberation during the transitional years between World War II and the early Cold War—a time when Monfalcone was both the object of competing Italian and Yugoslav territorial claims and the subject of Anglo-American military occupation.

In The Red Italians of Monfalcone, Luke Gramith undertakes a deep and detailed analysis—based on archival sources in Italy, Slovenia, and the United States—of how the Monfalconesi came to understand Fascism and communism through everyday experience and how those emergent ideologies affected and were affected by their migration. In the course of his analysis, Gramith also examines the failure of “defascistization” and how it fueled strong (but ultimately unsuccessful) pro-Yugoslav and communist movements.

In The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity, Gregor Kalas examines architectural conservation during late antiquity period at Rome’s most important civic center: the Roman Forum. During the fourth and fifth centuries CE—when emperors shifted their residences to alternate capitals and Christian practices overtook traditional beliefs—elite citizens targeted restoration campaigns so as to infuse these initiatives with political meaning. Since construction of new buildings was a right reserved for the emperor, Rome’s upper echelon funded the upkeep of buildings together with sculptural displays to gain public status. Restorers linked themselves to the past through the fragmentary reuse of building materials and, as Kalas explores, proclaimed their importance through prominently inscribed statues and monuments, whose placement within the existing cityscape allowed patrons and honorees to connect themselves to the celebrated history of Rome.

Building on art historical studies of spolia and exploring the Forum over an extended period of time, Kalas demonstrates the mutability of civic environments. The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity maps the evolution of the Forum away from singular projects composed of new materials toward an accretive and holistic design sensibility. Overturning notions of late antiquity as one of decline, Kalas demonstrates how perpetual reuse and restoration drew on Rome’s venerable past to proclaim a bright future.

Isabella Marincola lived between two cultures. The child of an Italian military officer father and a Somali mother, she was never fully part of either culture. In Somalia, she was seen as a child of the ruling colonizers, while in Italy her darker skin made her an object of both fascination and contempt. Even as she worked as an actress and model in postwar Italy, she was valued for her exotically beautiful body, not her keen mind or her captivating voice.

Titled after Isabella’s Somali name, Timira is a unique combination of novel, archival sources, and oral history. It finally gives her a chance to articulate her experiences of being a Black Italian woman in different epochs of Italian history, from Fascism to the 1990s, in all of which italianità was assumed to be exclusively white. 

Cowritten by her son Antar Mohamed Marincola and a founding member of the Wu Ming writers’ collective, it is based on a series of writings and interviews Isabella gave towards the end of her long, eventful life. A compelling novel rooted in truth, Timira reflects on Italy’s colonial legacy and ingrained racism, while telling the story of a courageous woman and her struggles to assert herself in a nation unprepared to accommodate its Black citizens. 

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.

These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

A history of Turin, home to Fiat, the Einaudi publishing house, and writers including Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg.

Unknown to most foreigners, as they follow each other around Florence and Siena, Rome and Venice, the Italy they see today is the result of a second renaissance. And its seat was a city they needed to discover, in all its enigmatic allure, if they were truly to understand the nation it brought into being. As Umberto Eco says, “Without Italy, Turin would have been more or less the same. But without Turin, Italy would have been very different.” This baroque jewel at the foot of the Alps provides a unique prism on the story of modern Italy: not just as a founding capital, but also in kindling a political, cultural, and economic regeneration after the tragedies of dictatorship and civil war.

Their emergence as a dynamo of national industrialization, symbolized by Fiat, had made the factories of Turin the original seat of both Italian capitalism and socialism, and, accordingly, the heart of resistance to Mussolini. After the Second World War, the city experienced parallel revivals. On the one hand, Fiat proved a foundation stone for Italy’s famous “economic miracle"; on the other, the Einaudi publishing house became a platform for the greatest local flowering of Italian culture since the days of the Medicis, not least through several of its own employees, including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. These competing energies were personified by the respective enigmas who presided over these agencies of renewal, Gianni Agnelli and Giulio Einaudi.

But their rivalry also only demonstrated the polarities that have long defined this royal city of arcaded streets and squares, with its wild mountain backdrop. That contrast is expressed even by the city’s rival football teams: the seigneurial Juventus, long bankrolled by the Agnelli family, its perennial success toasted throughout the peninsula; and Torino, the fallen giants whose tragic legacy commands the underdog fidelity of local nostalgics, workers, and rebels.

Exploring the contribution of Turin to modern Italy, Chris McGrath entwines some of the nation’s most celebrated names with less familiar citizens who illuminate the gaps: from the forgotten poet who bears exquisite witness to the city’s crepuscular atmosphere at the turn of the last century, to the Torino footballer who fought with the partisans before becoming a star of neorealist cinema.

Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: none of these decisive phases in Italy’s modern evolution would have been the same without this unsung city.