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This article presents several letters by Queen Anna of Denmark that are currently preserved in the State Archives of Florence and Venice, and that were written by her foreign secretary, Master William Fowler (Edinburgh 1560–London 1612). Fowler is a well‐known presence in Scottish literary history, as a member of James' VI so‐called 'Castalian band of poets' in the 1580 s and a translator of Petrarch and Machiavelli into Scots. The letters penned by him and preserved in Italy, mostly postdating the move of the Scottish court to London, offer a new perspective on Fowler's career as Anna's secretary, and provide additional information on the internal workings of the Queen's secretarial establishment in London, prompting us to re‐evaluate both Fowler's professional trajectory and the nature and functioning of the Jacobean secretariat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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By analysing the Anglo-Italian imperial competition in the Arabian Peninsula, this article will show that, behind the façade of European partnership, a seditious covert war was being waged in that part of the world. Although this belligerency never erupted into an actual armed conflict between the two powers, what is striking is the underlying incompatibility of interests and long-term goals. British decision-makers and military planners persistently sought to preserve the security of their Empire and to maintain their network of sea communications and levels of trade and commerce. The fulfilment of this desire demanded the maintenance of the status quo and opposition to attempts to control the sensitive waterways through which British troops and materials were obliged to pass. There can be little doubt that Benito Mussolini's supreme goal was expansion, either by peaceful or warlike means. The realisation of this aim presupposed the domination of both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and the establishment of spheres of influence in the Arabian Peninsula. The fact that Anglo-Italian relations remained relatively undamaged up to 1935 was only due to the diplomatic, economic, military and political realities on the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pageantry marking James VI & I's royal entry into London in 1604 featured the participation of Italian and Dutch immigrants who contributed two of the entry's triumphal arches. This article examines the role of these immigrant communities within the production, and textual reproduction, of James's royal entry. The pageant records present contrasting approaches to the multiculturalism of early modern London. The first, represented by Thomas Dekker's official pageant text The Magnificent Entertainment, divides the city into 'the English' and 'the strangers', whose presence is celebrated for the symbolic possibilities of creating unity out of multiplicity. In the second approach, recoverable within the Italian and Dutch arches, immigrant populations maintain their distinct identities as unified communities possessing the historical and cultural right to welcome James to their city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questo intervento si inserisce nel solco di esplorazioni storiografiche promosse ad esempio da Aldo Berselli, Roberta Suzzi Valli e Claudia Baldoli. Questi studiosi si sono soffermati sui temi della propaganda fascista in area britannica oppure sulle visioni sviluppate dall'Inghilterra nei confronti di Benito Mussolini. Questo saggio intende principalmente offrire un contributo per colmare una lacuna storiografica. Infatti, gli sporadici volumi della letteratura secondaria reperibili su queste tematiche si sono in prevalenza occupati di analizzare le dinamiche ed i risultati relativi alle comunità di italiani emigrati in Inghilterra o di sondare l'atteggiamento della stampa periodica locale nei confronti dell'ascesa del dittatore in Italia e dei successivi decorsi della dittatura. Assumendo come estremi cronologici gli anni venti-quaranta e facendo leva su un corposo lavoro archivistico, questo saggio analizza l'utilizzo dell'italiano, la sua recezione e la sua strumentalizzazione politica all'interno dei poli universitari inglesi ed in altri settori della società e dell'alta cultura.

Following some interpretation, mainly based on Margaret Thatcher's memoirs, her relationship with Giulio Andreotti was a strained one. Actually this article, which is based on first hand archival sources, offered a by far more nuanced view of the relations between the British Prime Minister and the Italian statesman. Andreotti met the newly elected Mrs Thatcher in early 1979 when Andreotti was on the eve of leaving the role of Prime Minister and they appeared to share some common views. When Andreotti in 1983 became Foreign Minister, his contacts were mainly with various British Foreign Secretaries. Obviously, especially since the mid-1980s some strong difference of opinion about the European integration began to emerge between the British Prime Minister and Andreotti. But in early 1990 Mrs Thatcher hoped that it would be possible to create a sort of alliance between Britain and Italy in order to avoid or to slow down the German reunification. But Andreotti was convinced that a closer European union would be the best solution to the emergence of a reunified Germany. The British Prime Minister strongly opposed such an option, but her negative remarks about Andreotti were more the consequence of her resentment at losing power rather than a thoughtful evaluation of Andreotti's foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Kyd's The Householder's Philosophy (1588) is a translation of Torquato Tasso's Il padre di famiglia (1582). While translating Tasso's text, Kyd made some sizeable additions to it, which would appear to spell out his stance on a series of issues. In particular, Kyd significantly expands Tasso's discussion on usury. Kyd's take on usury can be divided into two sections: first, a fiery invective followed by a quotation from Dante; second, a less heated denunciation based on a rational argument summarizing Aristotle's take on the matter. While the former seems to be Kyd's own invention, as scholars have previously suggested, no one has ever pointed out that the latter is in fact plagiarized from another Italian text, namely Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Dante (1481). Among other reasons, this discovery seems especially interesting because it adds another piece to the patchy mosaic of Kyd's intellectual life. As it happens, Kyd's decision to insert elements from such an encyclopedically comprehensive humanist text of literary criticism as Landino's Comento into a philosophical tract imbued with humanist notions concerning society, the family, astrology, philosophy, and cosmography seems further to connect Kyd with the continental intellectual milieu. The latter thus appears to have caught Kyd's interest even beyond his well-known penchant for neo-Senecan drama and French Renaissance literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to reassess the British focus on 'knocking Italy out of the war' and the way it shaped political and military discussions in London long before the American ally joined the combined planning. Between 1940 and 1941 Britain planned four major military operations having Italy as their main target. This complex process drove a wedge between an aggressive prime minister and a more conservative planning staff. A clear separation between a minimalist and a proactive stance marked the entire process, highlighting the existence of a sharp divide within the British planning establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first years of the Royal Society's existence, a whole network of natural philosophical exchanges was set up between the Fellows and foreign gentlemen interested in the study of nature. From the exchanges with Italy, medicine appears to be one of the major topics of interest; and a series of medical papers based on Italian researches appear in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions (PT). This article is a linguistic and socio-historical analysis of 25 medical papers published in the PT in the first fifty years of its existence. The selected articles were either translations of Italian writings or reports of Italian research. The purpose of the study is: (1) to illustrate from a linguistic and socio-cultural point of view the nature of Italian medical contributions to the early PT; and (2) to investigate Anglo-Italian relations through the Royal Society's medical interaction with Italians by analysing the PT articles and further contextual resources from a critical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian Hospital in London was a voluntary hospital founded in 1884 to provide medical assistance, on a charitable basis, to the Italian community in the UK. Research conducted in local archives, contemporary newspapers and book literature, reveals the importance of the Hospital in the context of Anglo-Italian relations, whose developments it closely mirrored. An interplay between social, political and medical factors shaped the Hospital's fortunes until its closure in 1990. These factors include: the presence of a large community of poor Italian immigrants in need of the Hospital's services, its role as a symbol of UK - Italy cooperation and later as a political tool used by the Italian fascist regime, and the impact of the foundation of the National Health Service. With post-war prosperity, integration of the Italian community within British society and availability of free healthcare, the raison d'etre for the Hospital ceased. Today, only the elegant building in Queen Square remains to testify to the past of this institution and its importance for Anglo-Italian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, as the conflict degenerated into mass slaughter, belligerent governments were driven to manipulate domestic and foreign public opinion in order to maintain morale at home and to win allies abroad. The Italian Government lagged behind its Allies in the field of Propaganda, especially in developing instruments designed to project abroad its image. Italian propaganda addressing the home front and the war front has been extensively studied, but only a single study has been published about the Italian propaganda abroad. Drawing upon research in official Italian government's records - including new declassified material from the Historical-Diplomatic Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - this paper describes the activity carried out in Great Britain by the Italian Foreign Action Bureau which had been established in the late 1917 by the Italian Government. In exploring contents, and techniques used by the bureau a strong commitment to depict Italy as a modern country emerges. The paper examines a wide variety of propaganda programs, focusing, in particular, on cultural propaganda including exhibits and editorial initiatives. This new approach to the study of the Italian propaganda details the first steps of what later would be called "cultural diplomacy". However, the main problems beyond the lack of economic resources were unclear guidelines concerning the most important political and diplomatic aims of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Grand Tour is often implicitly circumscribed to the (long) eighteenth century, its origins actually date back to the sixteenth, as previously argued by Edward Chaney and Michael Brennan. The present article aims to reassess the complex role travel played in the education of the early modern elite, notably the contrasting responses this new social phenomenon elicited. While the crown actively fostered transnational experiences, regarding them as conducive to political and diplomatic wisdom, scholars and playwrights presented this form of transculturation as the fall from a condition of purity. Preoccupations concerning the newly acquired national and religious identity of England and Britain mingle in these texts with reflections on language, manners and morals. This anti-cosmopolitan campaign takes on different nuances, alternatively stigmatising the travellers’ affectation and portraying them as devilish. In the first half of the seventeenth century, however, a new paradigm of knowledge as pragmatically based on experience asserted itself, as shown by Francis Bacon’s works. This lead to a reassessment of travelling as a useful social practice and ultimately to the systematisation of the traveller’s gaze, as shown – among others – by the proceedings of the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. Moreover, the pressure the Ottoman Empire exerted on the Eastern borders of Europe contributed to alert Britons to a new religious and cultural faultline, prompting them to reassess their perception of intra-European differences.

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the 'body politic' as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after the Second World War and the signing of the 1947 Peace Treaty, Italy was faced with the traumatic loss of its African colonial Empire, an Empire whose establishment had been one of the main objectives of the Fascist regime's foreign policy. This article analyses Anglo-Italian relations in the Somalian context, highlighting the contributions made by Fascism and by the anti-Italian policies of British troops to the tensions that were to lead to the tragic events of January 1948. Attention is focused on the diplomatic mission carried out by Umberto Zanotti Bianco, President of the Italian Red Cross, an important figure in Italian Liberalism. Zanotti Bianco was conscious of the need for Italy to rejoin the 'club' of democratic powers and, in accordance with the diplomatic strategy of Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, he sought to reopen dialogue between Britain and Italy. The dispute between Italy and Britain brought about by the Mogadishu events and, more generally, by the Italian presence in Africa was soon brought to a close, due both to Zanotti Bianco's shrewd strategy and to the clear need for the Western Allies to strengthen De Gasperi's government on the eve of the decisive April 1948 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]