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Italy at the turn of the twentieth century could be said in many respects to be a figment of the imagination. When the disparate states of the Italian Peninsula were brought together as a nation in 1861, statesman Massimo d'Azeglio is famously reputed to have said, ‘we have made Italy; now we must make Italians’. But by 1900 his ambition had yet to be fulfilled, and creating a culturally homogeneous nation would remain a matter of pressing concern well into the new century. From the 1880s onwards the high hopes of the Risorgimento had been replaced in the minds of Italian intellectuals by a pervasive sense of anticlimax and disillusionment with the new state. Rather than narrowing regional, social and cultural divisions, the much-yearned-for unification had merely served to make them deeper. The north and south of Italy were, to all practical intents and purposes, separate countries, the economic inequalities between them having been exacerbated by rapid industrial modernisation in such northern cities as Milan and Turin. Regional allegiances remained stronger than national pride, emigration was rising sharply and unrest among new, disaffected social groups was on the increase. Creating a strong sense of shared identity and a unified, prosperous, modern Italy was therefore imperative, both in order to maintain stability at home and in order to present a united front to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

September 8 and the King's Flight Protagonists' accounts September 8, 1943, are even more contradictory than those concerning other events of the period. It becomes impossible to clarify the individual responsibilities for “the full folly of the Italian Government and Supreme Command.” The irrational behavior of Admiral Raffaele de Courten, chief of staff of the Italian Royal Navy, between the signing of the armistice on September 3 and its proclamation on September 8 is one of many elements that is difficult to explain. The roles played by various other actors in this drama and their relations with one another remain unclear. Obviously, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, head of government, kept the king informed, but the other military leaders also knew more than they admitted. After the fact, almost everyone claimed to have been kept ignorant of the negotiations, as if they had all been afflicted by amnesia. General Antonio Sorice, the war minister, even stated that he was told of the armistice only on September 8. Sorice was lying, because he had at least participated in the meeting with Badoglio on September 3, mentioned earlier. Ambrosio himself claimed that he had informed Sorice of the signing of the armistice in early September and had told de Courten and Sandalli of the negotiations as early as the end of August. On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely that Ambrosio, who, as chief of the General Staff, saw the three armed services chiefs “nearly every afternoon,” did not keep them informed of what was happening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Formulations of British Strategy and the Role of Italy, “The Weakest Link of the Axis” (1940–41) Italy entered the war in June 1940 at a time of intense stress for Great Britain, as the defeat at Dunkirk and the fall of France exposed it to a possible German invasion. Over the following months, British strategy was based on mobilizing existing resources, which were inadequate for offensive operations against the Axis powers and barely sufficient for maintaining a defensive position. In this situation, Great Britain attempted to create conditions for weakening the Axis countries, focusing on eroding their will to fight and undermining their morale by various means such as propaganda aimed at showing the inevitability of an Axis loss, air raids on their cities and naval blockades of their coasts. In this first phase, the British also relied on plans developed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British secret service, to “set Europe ablaze,” that is, to foment resistance and opposition movements within German-occupied countries by sending volunteers and weapons that were later to assist British liberating armies. The British placed enormous trust in the destructive effects of aerial bombardments, to the point of imagining the collapse of Germany and Italy, which would have made direct military action unnecessary. This optimistic view was expressed by Churchill in a July 1941 letter to Roosevelt, in which he described future British plans: We have been considering here our war plans, not only for the fighting of 1942 but also for 1943.…In broad outline, we must aim first at intensifying the blockade and propaganda. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The armistice between Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, marked a decisive turning point in World War II, both on an international level and regarding Italy's internal affairs. The armistice signaled the imminent fall of the Axis and the final victory of the Allies. It also demonstrated the ineptitude of the Italian political and military elite, as well as the inability of the monarchy to lead the country out of the war and sever its Fascist connections, an inability that sealed the monarchy's fate. September 8, 1943, has come to be regarded by Italians as one of the most tragic moments in the history of united Italy. It has become a symbol not only of the total collapse and dissolution of the state, but also of a deeply rooted crisis of the nation itself. The announcement of the armistice was followed by the precipitous flight from Rome of King Victor Emmanuel III, the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio and the Supreme Command of the armed forces. The highest authorities of the land left as their only directive to the Italian armed forces the last words of the proclamation read on the radio by Prime Minister Badoglio as he announced the armistice: they were to cease hostilities against the Anglo-American forces, but retaliate “against any attack from any direction whatsoever.” The consequences of these events were devastating for Italy. An army of more than a million men disintegrated almost completely within a few days. Some units chose to go on fighting the Germans, and in some cases they held out for several weeks, but the results were tragic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To gain broader perspective this chapter will compare and contrast Locorotondo with several other Italian settings. First it is useful to understand that the small proprietor based, rurally dispersed, peasant population which typifies Locorotondo, while relatively infrequent in the mezzogiorno, is not unique, and in fact probably belongs to a roughly definable type to which other locales can be ascribed as well. Second, the chapter will emphasize the point that Locorotondo's peasant population shaped itself and the local landscape it continues to occupy through strategic choices. Contrasts will be drawn with several other Italian places which share certain characteristics with Locorotondo and neighboring towns, but where peasant choice-making behaviors and strategic abilities were severely limited by the choices and strategies of dominating landowners. Locorotondo's development emerged instead from landowner and peasant strategies, and the particular nature of the settlement pattern and landscape it produced depended more heavily upon peasant choices than upon those of the local agrarian middle class, which in certain ways were more constrained by both local historical experience and by the nature of the landscape. LOCOROTONDO AND TYPES OF PEASANTRY IN THE 'MEZZOGIORNO' To grasp the nature of Locorotondese peasant sociocultural patterns it is useful to draw contrasts with other zones in the Italian south. Arlacchi has contributed a broad study of three distinctive Calabrian areas, each described for the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century period, which helps do just that (1980). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND In Locorotondo, in the heel of Southern Italy, the rural folk repeat a proverb: “If you want to eat bread, stay far from the church bells.” This book is about the meaning of that proverb. It explores the history, causes, and sociocultural ramifications of the unusual settlement pattern found in Locorotondo and in other towns located in a zone of Apulia in Southern Italy known as the Murgia dei Trulli (the Plateau of the Trulli). Trulli are peasant dwellings characterized by cone-shaped domes surmounted by whitewashed finial ornaments, and are found only in this zone of Italy. Here a high proportion of residence in the countryside accompanies a moderate degree of peasant prosperity in what one turn-of-the-century geographer called “an oasis of small property in a zone of large estates” (Maranelli, 1946). The settlement pattern of Locorotondo originated at least as far back as the early eighteenth century, consolidated during the nineteenth, and has endured through the upheavals of the twentieth into the present. A little over 50 percent of the town's population continues to live in the countryside, and relative prosperity, based upon the building trades adopted by the sons of generations of peasant small proprietors, persists in the countryside. After a day's visit in 1974 during a journey home from the Island of Pantelleria, my other field site, and after much library research, I chose the Murgia dei Trulli for concentrated study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francia o Spagna, purché se magna. (France or Spain, as long as we can eat.) The supposed growth of state power was long considered as one of the defining elements of the early modern period. Whether it be Burckhardt's state as a work of art or Weber's bureaucratic impersonal state, historians up to a generation ago saw the rise of a centralized, absolutist state as a central characteristic of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in most of Europe. The works of Federico Chabod are perhaps the best application of these ideas to Italian history. In the last twenty-five years or so, however, historians have begun to doubt the actual extent of state power; while the state apparatus certainly grew in bulk, its effectiveness in replacing or weakening other centers of power has been called into question. Historians have studied phenomena like patronage and clientage networks, and Italian historians in particular have stressed the persisting importance of local elite groups and traditional institutions in Italy's regional states, and the dialectic relationship between center and periphery within them. State power grew, when it did, in fits and bounds, and often in the service of the vested interests of particularistic groups. The concept of absolutism does little justice to a complex process that witnessed the continuing thriving of traditional centers of power and social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! In its feudal stati, the Neapolitan aristocracy was secure. With a minimum of expense and care, the stability of feudal revenues and of feudal rule over the università could be maintained. Even after the mid-seventeenth century difficulties, the feudal aristocracy preserved most of its powers and income and kept them well into the eighteenth century. In the fiefs, the aristocracy met with limited challenges to its position, and in most cases the vassals shared the aristocracy's tendency to follow the ways and traditions of the past. It was in the capital that the old feudal aristocracy had to face more forceful challenges to its status, due to the consolidation of Spanish rule on the kingdom. The last two chapters of this study will examine how the aristocracy responded to these challenges in its defense of family wealth and prestige, and in its relations with the state. The main aim of an aristocratic family was the preservation of its wealth and status. Each of these two was needed to support and legitimate the other. Genealogists and others who wrote about the aristocracy in Spanish Naples saw an explicit link between social prestige and economic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beatrice: Rustic people, indiscreet people! It does not befit you to decide the rights of those who are destined to be your masters. The preceding chapters have discussed the patrimony of the Caracciolo Brienza and have shown the considerable importance that feudal lands and rights had for the barons' income throughout the viceroyal period. The traditionalism and continuity that marked the barons' management of their revenues from the fiefs also characterized other aspects of the relationship between the lord and his vassals. Feudal power affected the communities beyond its strictly economic consequences, and the presence of the lord was not only a burden for the communities but could represent an advantage, due to the paternalism that at times informed feudal rule. The location, population, and economic and social characteristics of the communities, their local traditions of feudal rule, and the ease with which external powers like the church or the central state could intervene between lords and vassals, determined the strength and traits of feudal power. The four communities which constituted the feudal stato of the Caracciolo Brienza differed greatly in the degree and form of their subjection to their lord, and their study allows us, therefore, to discuss the varying conditions of feudal rule in the kingdom of Naples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It gives one position and it prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land. It was through the acquisition of a fief, and later of a title, that the Caracciolo Brienza established themselves as a new, separate family within the Caracciolo clan. As late as the Aragonese period (1442–1503), many families and clans of undisputed nobility, including several members of the Caracciolo clan, did not own fiefs and were content with the ownership of allodial land in or near the city of Naples where they resided. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, the old urban patriciate and the provincial baronage had become much more integrated; many barons moved to Naples and managed to enter the Seggi before their closure, while the increased commercialization of fiefs, encouraged by the Aragonese and Spanish kings, led to greater availability of fiefs for both new and old aristocratic families. The fief, and especially the titled one, became, therefore, an essential element of the aristocratic patrimony, both for its economic value and for the status and powers it conferred. By the late sixteenth century, and until the abolition of the feudal regime in 1806, to be a member of the high aristocracy of the kingdom meant to be a feudal lord, to be a baron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable The early modern Neapolitan aristocracy shared many characteristics with its Northern Italian and European counterparts. It acknowledged the superior political authority of a government that in turn recognized the aristocracy's predominant social role. It was the wealthiest group in society and the source of its wealth lay primarily in its landed patrimony, as was becoming increasingly true of most Northern Italian patriciates. Though it did not always reside in the capital, to a large extent the Neopolitan aristocracy shared in the urban culture and lifestyle common among Venetian or Florentine patricians. Finally, it occupied a preeminent share of the military and bureaucratic offices the early modern states needed to man. But the aristocracy of the kingdom of Naples was considerably different from the Venetian or Florentine patriciates, as well as from other Italian and Western European nobilities, in its feudal character. Although there were feudal lands, which endowed their owners with feudal rights and exemptions, in all the Italian states, in none of them were feudal institutions and powers so widespread, pervasive, and influential as in the three kingdoms among them — Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the states of the Italian peninsula, as in the rest of central and western Europe, the news of the activities and doctrines of Luther, followed by those of Zwingli and later by those of the Anabaptists, the Anti-Trinitarians and Calvin, fell on ground ready to receive it. Among the numerous ecclesiastics, memories of Savonarola's preaching were not always propitious; thus the best-known Italian translator of Holy Scripture along Lutheran lines, the Florentine Antonio Brucioli, was violently hostile to Savonarola. But there were the hopes raised by the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) especially in certain Florentine and allied circles in contact with the Venetian patrician and Camaldolese hermit, Blessed Paolo Giustiniani (1476–1528); there was a desire for greater morality and austerity of life in the laity, the hierarchy and the curia; people were fully aware of the ‘abuses’ originally devised to meet the needs (in money and staff) of the financial administration and the centralised policy of the church, not just the needs of the Holy See as an Italian state in matters of politics and war. There was also a strong desire for a more spiritual conception of Catholic religious life: for men like Giustiniani (and his friends included Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian nobleman, later to become famous as a cardinal) the consequence of such an infusion of the spirit occupied pride of place. These leanings were not in any way meant to affect the spheres of dogma, liturgy, discipline, traditions, the fundamental structure of the church, or the papal authority, but would, it was hoped, be capable of supplying these with energy enough to purify the church ‘in capite et in membris’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious life, in its many various forms, is deeply woven into the texture of Catholicism. The state of the orders is usually a reliable indication of the health of the Catholic church as a whole, and from early times the great formative periods of Catholicism have been marked not only by reforms in the existing orders but also by the creation of new ones, responsive in the first instance to the needs or the mood of a new epoch, though generally concealing surprising powers of survival and adaptability. The Counter-Reformation Catholic revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no exception to this rule. The period was one which witnessed far-reaching changes in European society, and these set crucial and perplexing problems before a Catholicism resurgent, indeed, but no longer in enjoyment of a religious monopoly, faced with curtailed and shrinking frontiers in Europe, and in many places fighting for very existence. The history of the religious orders in this age shows the working out of the customary formula of restoration and new creation, but in a setting far more complicated and unfavourable than monasticism had ever faced before. A comprehensive judgment on the state of the religious orders at the outbreak of the Reformation is extremely difficult to arrive at. The currents of reform of the previous 150 years, which had divided all the orders of friars into Observant and Conventual groups and had produced the various Observant Benedictine congregations in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and France, had long been dying down, though they were by no means everywhere quite dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ibn Jubayr, a twelfth-century Muslim pilgrim and traveller from Andalusia, left Acre on 18 October 1184 on a Genoese ship bound for Messina. Of his departure he wrote that: Our stay there [at Acre] was prolonged twelve days, through the failure of the wind to rise. The blowing of the winds in these parts has a singular secret. It is that the east wind does not blow except in spring and autumn, and, save at those seasons, no voyages can be made and merchants will not bring their goods to Acre. The spring voyages begin in the middle of April, when the east wind blows until the end of May … The autumn voyages are from the middle of October, when the east wind (again) sets in motion … it blows for (only) fifteen days, more or less. There is no other suitable time, for the winds then vary, that from the west prevailing… at daybreak of … the 18th of October the ship set sail… Steadily, we sailed on, under a propitious wind of varying force, for five days. Then the west wind came out of ambuscade and blew into the ship's bows. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the later Middle Ages the Muslim states of North Africa had by and large been fairly pacific. Although there had always been a certain number of corsairs amongst their populations, they were certainly not renowned for their bellicosity and for their prosecution of jihād against the Christian infidel at sea. Indeed, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it had been Christian, and particularly Catalan, corsairs who had been the major threat to maritime traffic in the western Mediterranean. According to Ibn Khaldūn, Maghrebin pirates and corsairs first assumed serious dimensions around 1360 at Bougie. By 1390 corsairs operating from Tunisia had become a severe enough menace to Christian shipping to provoke Genoa to organize a Crusade against Mahdia. Native Maghrebins and Moorish exiles from Spain were always to remain active as corsairs in North Africa throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it was Ottoman corsairs under Kemāl Reis, moving to the Maghreb around 1487, who ushered in the great days of the Barbary corsairs. The move to the Maghreb was a logical extension of the Ottoman push westwards to the shores of the Ionian; however, as we shall see, it was not to offer the Barbary corsairs the same logistical advantages that the push to the west coasts of the Balkans did the Ottomans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the storms and dangerous squally conditions created in winter by localized meteorological phenomena, because of the strong northerly winds prevailing in that season, and because of the hazards caused by reduced visibility to coastal and celestial navigation as a result of overcast skies and fogs, commercial shipping generally avoided navigation in the winter whenever possible. This remained true from antiquity through to the sixteenth century. Naval warfare and piracy or privateering, the guerre de course, were also normally suspended. However, this suspension of maritime activity in winter was certainly never absolute. Neither did the degree to which seafaring was suspended remain uniform across the centuries. As a result of improvements in both ship design and in navigation techniques, particularly in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the sailing season extended gradually back into early spring and forward into late autumn. By the sixteenth century it was far longer than it had been in the Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader periods. In Boeotia of the eighth century BC, Hesiod, admittedly a landlubber, limited the safe sailing season to a mere 50 days in mid summer after the summer solstice; that is, from c. 21 June to c. 10 August, although he did admit a short but dangerous sailing season in early spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seven centuries which elapsed between the rule of Hadrian and that of Charlemagne saw profound changes in the geography of Europe. The Roman empire, at the height of its power and prestige in the second century, faced increasing difficulties from late in the third. It was under pressure from without. Germanic peoples were threatening its frontiers in Europe, while to the east the empire never succeeded in defining its boundary against the Parthians and other peoples of the Middle East. Within the empire the constitutional role of the emperors was not defined, and no law of succession was ever promulgated. Some emperors nominated their successors, but their choice was always liable to be challenged or overthrown by the unruly soldiery. There were times when one might say that the choice of emperor devolved upon the praetorian guard, a pampered corps of elite soldiers which was stationed just outside the walls of the city of Rome and served as an imperial guard. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY The vast extent of the empire, from northern Britain to the Euphrates and from the Danube southward to the Sahara, would have posed profound problems even without dangers from barbarian enemies without and from weak and incompetent rulers within. In the later centuries of the empire, its resources were stretched to the limit. Its old provincial structure was with only minor changes retained, but for administrative purposes the empire was divided into two – at one time even into four – parts, with as many coequal emperors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article, Eric Cochrane has analyzed the field of Neapolitan historiography over the past few decades. Although some of his comments are polemical, he points out correctly that the attention of historians has been unevenly distributed, and that large gaps remain in our understanding of the history of Spanish Naples. Demography, popular religion, literature, law, and administration have all been the object of historical analysis. Several studies have treated the social and economic history of the kingdom, though the general context and broader interpretations provided by Galasso and Villari in the 1960s have not been significantly challenged or revised. Several recent studies on the social and economic history of Spanish Naples have discussed the position of the aristocracy, and stressed the persistence of aristocratic power and privilege in the kingdom throughout the Spanish period and into the eighteenth century. Most of this work, however, has focused primarily on agrarian history and has presented only a limited picture of aristocratic wealth and power. It has often neglected the broader social and political aspects of aristocratic power and the non-landed elements of aristocratic wealth. The feudal nature of the Neapolitan aristocracy and the pervasiveness of feudal institutions in the kingdom have been acknowledged by these writers, but they usually regard feudalism only as the root of aristocratic lawlessness and of social conflict at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]