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,…
Essays
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…
What exactly is a concentration camp?
L’internata numero 6/Internee n. 6 – The earliest known diary of daily life in a fascist concentration camp. You see, it is as if we were crossing a bridge. Does…
Little Scenes of Rhodes
Conversations between Stella Levi and Isabelle Levy The Department Store of Salomon Alhadeff The Department Store of Salomon Alhadeff was founded in the mid-1800s. It was the biggest department store…
Periodic Words: Stranger
Periodic Words: Stranger In the Preface to If This Is A Man, Levi warns the reader about some possible consequences of organized political systems: “Many people—many nations—, can find themselves…
Current scholarship on Italian Fascist anti-Semitism in honour of Michele Sarfatti
Journal of Modern Italian Studies: On the 80th anniversary of the Racial Laws. Articles reflecting the current scholarship on Italian Fascist anti-Semitism in honour of Michele Sarfatti. Annalisa Capristo and…
Year End
“If this has happened, it can happen again, when all the conditions necessary to trigger the mechanism are in place once again.” Primo Levi From its inception, Printed Matter has…
Publishing and Culture: The Alchemy of Ideas
Since the days of Gutenberg and probably long before, publishers have depended on what was most popular, and therefore profitable, for their existence. From breathless, half-imagined travelogues to more salacious…
Translating Giorgio Bassani
The work of relatively few Italian novelists from the 20th Century has so far been translated more than once, but only Giorgio Bassani’s —in part or in its entirety— has…
New Book Explores America’s Flirt With Italian Fascism
Mauro Canali’s La scoperta dell’Italia examines the activity, impact, and perspectives of American correspondents in Italy from 1900 to 1945 and the beginnings of the modern tradition of international political…