Where are sociologists when we need them?
Alessandro Cassin We are facing a new world: in recent months, the pandemic, the shortcomings of our political system, the unrestrained use of social media, the crisis of traditional journalism,…
Essays
Legitimizing Fascism Through the Holocaust?
The reception of the TV miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano in Italy. As the Holocaust becomes increasingly present in the political discourse in the US, Europe and Israel, this reflection by…
Images of Rebirth and the DP Camps in Southern Puglia
The of section UNRRA archive about refugees in Italy is filled with hundreds of thousands of documents. These give us a glimpse of the men and women who worked in the…
A Note From a Refugee of 75 Years Ago
While browsing the files of the UNRRA archive looking for data on the DP camps at Santa Maria di Leuca, I found this memo that a refugee named Ladislav Lang…
Never Again What?
On the Hard Questions Primo Levi’s Still Asking One hundred years ago Primo Levi was born in Turin, the first-born son of a middle-class Jewish-Italian family. They were turbulent…
Stateless: A Russian Childhood in Fascist Italy
Childhood – growing up in Italy 1925-39 In 1924, when I was born in Moscow, my father was working at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1925, we moved to…
Weightless
… our poor body, so vulnerable to swords, to guns and to viruses, is space-proof. Republished from: Granta Image: Ernesto Neto, The Body that carries me, 2006 What I would…
Defoe as a Possible Model
The structure of History, a Novel, departs substantially from Morante’s previous novels and poses some interesting interpretative questions. While critics have often pointed to similarities with the narrative structure of…
Cinema as Archive
Amos Gitai once told me: “When the credits scroll down at the end of a screening, a new film begins in the mind of the spectator.”With this image in mind,…
Mussolini’s Camps: Civilian Internment in Fascist Italy (1940-1943)
The train that left Ljubljana in the early hours of July 24th, 1942 with somewhere between 300 and 400 people crammed in the cars, without water or food, arrived at…