Features

Books February 10, 2026

The Talking Dead

On ‘Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean’ by Karla Malette (The University of Chicago Press, 2021) Lives of the Great Languages is – and…

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”. …

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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…

Books March 29, 2012

Fascism and the Police

Jonathan Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Based on research using official documents, this account of the role of the police in the…

Books March 29, 2012

The Ghetto Reveals Rome

Luca Fiorentino, The Ghetto Reveals Rome, Gangemi editore, 2005 Benjamin walked down from the Capitoline Hill towards the Circus Flaminius in order to reach the other Jews on the banks…

Books March 29, 2012

The Holocaust and the Book

Jonathan Rose, The Holocaust and the Book, Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2008 Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act…