Features

Academia, Books October 16, 2025

La Storia

Elsa Morante. Excerpts from La Storia, remembering October 16, 1943 Not even from her mother had she ever heard this denomination “Aryans”; in fact, the de-nomination of Jews itself, for…

Essays, Interviews June 9, 2025

Thruth and the Holocaust

“If you no longer want to believe the truth, nobody will want to believe you.” Zelman Lewental, prisoner of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, quoted in Franco Fortini, “I cani del Sinai”. …

Essays September 2, 2024

Hatching the Cobra

Let no one praise Perillus, who was cruder than the tyrant Phalaris, for whom he constructed a brazen bull, promising that when a man was enclosed therein and a fire…

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Books March 31, 2012

Threads and Traces

Carlo Ginzburg, Trad, John Tedeschi and Ann C. Tedeschi, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, University of California Press, 2012 Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a…

Books March 30, 2012

Mussolini and Fascism

John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton University Press, 1972 Mark Weber (Institute for Historical Review), America’s Changing View of Mussolini and Italian Fascism America’s image…

Books March 29, 2012

The Holocaust and Italian Culture: 1944-2010

Robert Gordon, The Holocaust and Italian Culture: 1944-2010, Stanford University Press, 2012 The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed…

Books March 29, 2012

The Enemy of the New Man

Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2012 In this first in-depth historical study of homosexuality in Fascist Italy, Lorenzo Benadusi…

Books March 29, 2012

A European Memory?

Magorzata Pakier, Bo Stråth, A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, Berghahn Books, 2010 “As the most comprehensive scholarly venture to use the memory concept for a broad…

Books March 29, 2012

Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy

Michael Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy, Cambridge University Press, 2010 Between 1926 and 1943, the Fascist regime arrested thousands of Italians and deported them to island internment colonies and…