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The four quarterly numbers of Italian Studies that will be published in 2020 mark the seventy-fifth issue of the journal. To mark the occasion, the Senior Editors decided to commission a set of col...

From her early collaboration with the visual poets of the Florentine Gruppo 70, to her later conceptual art that brought her to the attention of leading international feminist critics and practitio...

This article explores how ‘Visual Culture Studies’ has emerged since the 1990s as a productively unstable cluster of research concerns and practices, extending beyond the sectorial bounds of traditional visually-oriented disciplines such as art history or architecture. The two areas of screen studies and photography are explored as case studies that demonstrate how Visual Cultures approaches have expanded research horizons and enhanced teaching and outreach practice in Italian Studies. The article highlights aspects of visual production that have been variously dominant or marginalised in Italian Studies to date and explores how the new, interdisciplinary field fosters interconnections and exchanges, opens up discussion of the complexity of cultural production and media, and is enriched by engagement with visual, textual, and media theory.

Our article maps the increasing prominence of interartistic and intermedial methodologies in modern and contemporary Italy, and advocates the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach for Italian Studies. We map some current trends in cultural, visual and comparative studies and explore the influence of these fields on the development of Italian Studies. We suggest that the future of our discipline is best understood in terms of an ‘interdisciplinary turn’, which entails a broadening of the object of study and opens up new perspectives on familiar and on previously unexplored objects. To conclude, we draw attention to three periods in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian culture that have been especially marked by interartistic experimentation: Futurism, the early postmodernism of the neoavanguardia and digital art. The perspectives we lay out in this article were developed during the first phase of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project, Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: Art, Music Text.

Gruppo 70 was an Italian neo-avant-gardist group of artists and critics, including Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari, Emilio Isgro, Ro...

This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon.

Richard Bosworth's masterly new study of the life of Claretta Petacci opens with her body in Piazzale Loreto, on April 29, 1954, strung upside down next to Mussolini, her lover for nearly twenty ye...

Ellen Nerenberg opens her excellent volume Murder Made in Italy by telling us that what we have in front of us are two books in one: there is the book that will satisfy both scholars and the cultur...

This essay challenges the traditional critical focus on D'Annunzio's fictional interiors as autobiographical reflections of the poet's own taste for interior decoration. By looking at D'Annunzio's early novels (Il piacere, L'innocente, and Trionfo della morte) and in particular their descriptions of interiors and the careful staging of objects and evocation of spaces, it argues that the relationship of both female and male characters with their domestic surroundings embodies not only important aesthetic and psychological functions, marking out the tastes of a certain class, but also serves as social critique, highlighting the social and financial crisis of the upper classes in fin-de-siecle Italy and also marking D'Annunzio's movement towards a new nationalism.

This essay focuses on the way in which Milan and its periphery in particular have been represented by successive generations of Milanese noir and crime writers. Most writers have mirrored and reinforced the idea of Milan as a city of strong contrasts surrounded by an undesirable periphery, which traditionally has been viewed, from both a socio-political and aesthetic perspective, as the locus of isolation, alienation and criminality. Yet works by some contemporary writers (Dazieri and Biondillo) also show signs of a new acceptance and understanding of urban life in the post-modern city, which has influenced the relationship between centre and periphery. The transformation of Milan in the post-industrial era into a citta diffusa, with its polycentric nature and easy access to all areas of the city, becomes, in the narrative of these writers, a metaphor for a new aesthetics and way of life in the post-postmodern age.

Italian crime fiction, after a difficult inception in the 1930s and 1940s and steady but modest growth in the postwar period, has witnessed remark-able and unprecedented popular success since the early 1990s. The popularity of the homegrown gialli, sustained by a number of prestigious Italian publishing houses, television, and critical interest, has transformed the Italian literary scene into a realm of the giallo and the noir.1 This phenomenon, which deserves further critical attention, has been characteristically undermined by literary critics, although, after the extraordinary success of the Sicilian detective writer Andrea Camilleri—who has been topping the Italian book charts since 1996—a lively and long-overdue debate on the merits of crime fiction has taken place, principally in national newspapers and magazines, which has both mirrored and fueled interest in this popular genre. Leading this new wave of Italian crime fiction is a considerable number of young writers, with the Bolognese Gruppo 13 at the forefront of this literary phenomenon. Gruppo 13, with their postmodern ironic reference to the neoavanguardia of the Gruppo 63, is in fact a loose label under the umbrella of which one can find a group of Italian giallisti working in and around Bologna.2 Luigi Bernardi, the co-editor of Einaudi’s first series dedicated to crime fiction, Stile libero noir, noted, “Actually Gruppo 13 is as if it never existed: they are not thirteen and they have probably never met all together. The group is a media invention.”3 The media, as we shall see, certainly played a central role in the diffusion of knowledge of the new Italian crime writers, given that the cultural climate in Italy had traditionally been very hostile to this popular fiction and was particularly so in the early 1990s.