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This paper analyses the role of the Centro Scalabrini in London in defining a sense of belonging and identification for Italians in Britain. The essay broadens the conventional focus on how community organizations contribute to constructing an ‘imagined community' for minority or migrant populations by suggesting that organizations are used as cultural objects and collective props for enacting and experiencing collective affective belonging abroad. The paper examines the processes through which community spaces themselves are constructed as scenes of ethnicity, for example, in the visual and narrative accounts of events found in the community press. However, rather than arguing that ethnic organizations simply reproduce an identity and culture, it is argued that the community centre offers intimations of ethnicity, as well as ‘intimate ethnicity', for those who use it and move through it. As a locale in which Italians and other migrants can find themselves again (ritrovarsi), what the centre offers is not the continuity or reproduction of the old world; it is the production of a portable Italianness through traces that are filled with sensuality, with the bodily experience of contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London today hosts more than 200,000 Italian people. A traditional point of arrival for Italian migrants since the nineteenth century, London is a setting characterised by the presence of the ‘old’ classic economic migration – of those who left Italy mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ‘new’ migration, made up mainly of highly-educated people in the professional, academic and arts sectors. These two groups differ as regards their time of arrival, socio-economic characteristics and educational background, and they rarely have the chance or find the need to interact. This paper is based on interviews with representatives of Italian institutions and associations, and with ‘old’ and ‘new’ Italian migrants; participant observation of Italian events happening in London; and some elements of discourse analysis. By means of this empirical material, I aim to show that, besides their well-known differences, the ‘old’ and ‘new’ communities present striking similarities in their migration narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the reaction to Garibaldi in Ireland during the Risorgimento, a reaction which, in its negativity, generally contrasted with the Italian's heroic depiction elsewhere. Attitudes towards Garibaldi reflected existing religious divisions in Ireland, with Protestants supporting him and Catholics condemning his actions in Italy. The study examines ballads, pamphlets and newspapers to illustrate the pro-papal fervour felt in Ireland and the strength of anti-Garibaldi feelings. The decision of Irishmen to form a battalion to fight in defence of the Papal States in 1860 reveals that, ultimately, denigration of Garibaldi became a badge of Irish nationalism. The study highlights the position of Britain in understanding the relationship between Ireland and Italy in these years, pointing out Irish nationalists' bafflement over Britain's support for Italian unification while it denied similar rights to Irish subjects. The article demonstrates how, in this context, domestic and tactical considerations coloured responses to Garibaldi in Ireland, with Irish issues projected onto the Italian situation, thus leading to entrenched and extreme attitudes towards the Italian soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Duggan made extensive use of the correspondence of the American Times journalist William James Stillman in writing his important biography of Francesco Crispi. This article focuses on Stillman’s published works that deal with the Italian statesman, principally his 1898 history of Italy since 1815, the first and only English-language biography of Crispi until Duggan’s, and the journalist’s own autobiography. It argues that, despite Stillman’s much vaunted love for Italy, he in fact despised most Italians, and saw in Crispi’s virtues a rejection of typical Italian conduct. While Stillman was extreme but not altogether unusual among British and American commentators on Italy in his passionate support for Crispi, his contempt for Italians was surprisingly widespread among late Victorian observers of the new nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Working at the intersection between literary history and periodical studies, this article investigates the role played by the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (Rome, 1948–1960) in processes of Anglo-Italian literary transfer. The article charts the journal’s British network, analysing quantitatively the presence of both established and new writers. Further, it focuses on Botteghe Oscure’s publishing and distribution policy in the United Kingdom, drawing on its founder Marguerite Caetani’s correspondence in order to interrogate the location of the journal within the Italian and the English literary systems, and thus illuminate the journal’s role as a site of literary production as it was shaped in both Italy and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the end of the Great War and the start of the Second World War, various Italians living in London, who for the most part had migrated there around the start of the twentieth century, started their own particular determined opposition to Fascism. Their initial aim was to counter Fascist monopolisation of London’s Italian community, contesting control of the community’s main associations, institutes and cultural bodies by theFascio, which had been established in London in 1921. Subsequently, these anti-Fascists also sought contacts outside London’s Little Italy, on the one hand with British political bodies and the British press, and on the other with anti-Fascists in other countries. While strong links were formed with the latter, British society showed only a muted interest. This is in part explained by the positive response to the Fascist experience by the Conservative press and various eminent British politicians, at least until the mid-1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the changing attitude of the Sicilian statesman Francesco Crispi towards Britain between the 1850s and the end of the century. While Crispi had enormous admiration for Britain, and recognised that Italy had much to learn from its political system, he also acknowledged that the British constitution was the product of a long process of historical evolution and could never be imitated slavishly in Italy. From the end of the 1870s in particular, Crispi felt that Italy could not concede the degree of freedom permitted in Britain until the state had completed its work of what he called ‘political education’. As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s Crispi looked to an aggressive foreign policy to strengthen Italy's beleaguered institutions, and he counted on British support to achieve this. The refusal of Britain to back him in the way he hoped left him perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the relationship between Italian heroism and literary history in relation to G.M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy. It firstly summarises some important features of the Victorian culture of public moralism that shaped Trevelyan's early work. It then discusses the influence of the poet, novelist and man-of-letters, George Meredith, on Trevelyan's Garibaldi books and historical practice. The comparison of Meredith and Trevelyan suggests that Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy should be understood as part of a project self-consciously undertaken by Victorian literary and political elites to consolidate, celebrate and, less frequently, to critique British liberal culture and politics. The article concludes that while a Mazzinian notion of dolcezza may have influenced Trevelyan's notion of the hero, his interest in the Risorgimento was ultimately motivated by the usefulness of Italy and Garibaldi in promoting what he considered to be a distinctly 'English'1 form of ethical patriotism, whose intellectual antecedents - Whig gradualism, constitutional compromise in the form of parliamentary monarchy and a hierarchy-inflected anti-Republicanism - stood in ambivalent relation to the concept of democratic nationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the British perceptions of contemporary Italy and Italian politics. Through the use of a number of sources (parliamentary debates, governmental documents, newspaper articles and interviews) it argues that Italy is not perceived, within Great Britain, as a great power within the European system nor it is viewed as a peripheral actor. Rather, it suggests that Italy seems to have finally found in the post-Cold War scenario its proper role-a European middle power, with important responsibilities within a regional sub-system. A frequent request-and expectation-coming from British politics and society is that Italy should take on more international responsibilities, even in the sphere of defence-as the different readings of Italy's role and leadership in Afghanistan and Lebanon reveal. However, Italy's ability to play this role is believed to be hampered by several factors: its uncertain political situation, its unwillingness to engage in military operations, its reluctance to respect international commitments and its structural economic problems. As a result, further possibilities of cooperation with other international partners as well as its potential for autonomous action on the international stage are, in several cases, precluded. Moreover, if the relations between Italy and the UK are usually seen in a positive way, and Italy is viewed as a reliable partner, the nature of the cooperation between the two countries is often considered to be fragile and based on short-term common interests and strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]