During World War II 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were detained in the United States. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, most of these soldiers agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and to collaborate in the fight against Germany. At the Letterkenny Army Depot, located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, more than 1,200 Italian soldiers were detained as co-operators. They arrived in May 1944 to form the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion and remained until October 1945. As detainees, the soldiers helped to order, stock, repair, and ship military goods, munitions and equipment to the Pacific and European Theaters of war. Through such labor, they lent their collective energy to the massive home front endeavor to defeat the Axis Powers. The prisoners also helped to construct the depot itself, building roads, sidewalks, and fences, along with individual buildings such as an assembly hall, amphitheater, swimming pool, and a chapel and bell tower. The latter of these two constructions still exist, and together with the assembly hall, bear eloquent testimony to the Italian POW experience. For their work the Italian co-operators received a very modest, regular salary, and they experienced more freedom than regular POWs. In their spare time, they often had liberty to leave the post in groups that American soldiers chaperoned. Additionally, they frequently received or visited large entourages of Italian Americans from the Mid-Atlantic region who were eager to comfort their erstwhile countrymen. The story of these Italian soldiers detained at Letterkenny has never before been told. Now, however, oral histories from surviving POWs, memoirs generously donated by family members of ex-prisoners, and the rich information newly available from archival material in Italy, aided by material found in the U.S., have made it possible to reconstruct this experience in full. All of this historical documentation has also allowed the authors to tell fascinating individual stories from the moment when many POWs were captured to their return to Italy and beyond. More than seventy years since the end of World War II, family members of ex-POWs in both the United States and Italy still enjoy the positive legacy of this encounter.

During World War II, the US government interned more than 1,200 captured Italian soldiers at the Letterkenny Army Ordnance Depot located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. These troops collaborated with the United States in a collective effort to defeat the Axis powers. They formed the 321st Italian Quartermaster Battalion, and their work consisted mainly of stocking and shipping materials--ammunition, military vehicles, weapons, and machinery parts--to the war fronts in the European and Pacific theaters of operation. For entertainment, the soldiers formed an orchestra and band and for sport, several different company soccer teams. As a sign of their faith, they built a chapel and bell tower, which are still used today. Many POWs forged deep friendships with Americans, and after the war, a few married their sweethearts and returned to live in the United States. Today, warm relations still continue between children and grandchildren of the POWs and the wider Chambersburg community.

This book brings together historians from Great Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Austria, and Latvia who have worked and published on fraternisation between Prisoners of War and local women during either the First or Second World War, providing the first comparative study of this multi-faceted phenomenon in different belligerent countries. By focusing on prisoners as wartime migrants and studying the nature and impact of their interactions with the local female population, this book expands the existing framework on prisoner of war studies. Its substantial scope and comparative approach make it an important point of reference in the growing research field of POW studies.

Controlling Sex in Captivity is the first book to examine the nature, extent and impact of the sexual activities of Axis prisoners of war in the United States during the Second World War. Historians have so far interpreted the interactions between captors and captives in America as the beginning of the post-war friendship between the United States, Germany and Italy. Matthias Reiss argues that this paradigm is too simplistic. Widespread fraternisation also led to sexual relationships which created significant negative publicity, and some Axis POWs got caught up in the U.S. Army's new campaign against homosexuals. By focusing on the fight against fraternisation and same-sex activities, this study treads new ground. It stresses that contact between captors and captives was often loaded with conflict and influenced by perceptions of gender and race. It highlights the transnational impact of fraternisation and argues that the prisoners' sojourn in the United States also influenced American society by fuelling a growing concern about social disintegration and sexual deviancy, which eventually triggered a conservative backlash after the war.

Interned in a camp in the Texas panhandle, more than 3,000 Italian POWs spent the last years of World War II an ocean away from their family and friends. A handful of men in camp were artists, and it was this small group of prisoners who struck a deal with the priest of a nearby Catholic church. In exchange for a home-cooked meal each noon, the artists agreed to decorate the plain church with murals and carvings. This compassionate story of courage and kindliness is as enduring as the artwork that still graces the walls of a modest Catholic church in a tiny Texas town.

Values, Virtues, and Vices, Italian Style illustrates the story of the evolution of Italian values, virtues, and vices is a narrative of longing, exhilaration, and devastation, a journey of the spirit that all human beings necessarily undertake but navigate with varying degrees of success. The lives of Caesar, Dante, Machiavelli, and Garibaldi demonstrate how we can lead staunchly meaningful lives even within an inherently meaningless universe. The ambition of this work is nothing more, nothing less, than entangling, through a careful examination of the values, virtues, and vices of four famous historical figures, a host of overlapping but distinct concepts, such as pride, honor, justification, excuse, repentance, and forgiveness that frame human existence. Belliotti’s objective is that by conducting such an interdisciplinary inquiry we might better position ourselves to craft our characters within the limitations enjoined by our cosmic circumstances. As always, however, we must deliberate, choose, and act under conditions of inescapable uncertainty; assume responsibility for the people we are becoming; and, hopefully, depart the planet with honor and merited pride. Along the way, we might even magnify our link in the generational chain that defines our identity.

The power exercised by the mother on the son in Mediterranean cultures has been amply studied. Italy is a special case in the Modern Era and the phenomenon of Mammismo italiano is indeed well known. Scholars have traced this obsession with the mother figure to the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, but in fact, it is more ancient. What has not been adequately addressed however, is how Mammismo italiano has been manifested in complex ways in various modern artistic forms. Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture focuses on case studies of five prominent creative personalities, representing different, sometimes overlapping artistic genres (Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Carlo Levi, Federico Fellini). The author examines how the mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped their work. Although the analysis uses mainly a psychological and psychoanalytical critical approach, the belief of the author, substantiated by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, is that historical and cultural conditions contributed to and reinforced the Italian character. This book concludes with an analysis of some examples of Italian film comedies, such as Fellini's and Monicelli's where mammismo/vitellonismo is treated with a lighter tone and a pointed self irony.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders. This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

This is an interdisciplinary work that philosophically analyzes concepts such as heroism; practical wisdom; honor; Nietzsche’s notions of will to power, the overman, and the three metamorphoses; Plato’s understanding of love; creating meaning in life; the issue of morally dirty hands in political administration; the relationship between political means and ends; the proper role of positive duties in society; the aspirations of grand strivers; and the linkages between biological, biographical, and autobiographical lives, all in the context of explaining and evaluating the lives and works of fourteen historically significant Italian: Gaius Julius Caesar, Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, Caterina Sforza, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Francesca Cabrini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Antonio Gramsci, Salvatore Giuliano, Oriana Fallaci, Giovanni Falcone, and Paolo Borsellino. By dissecting the lives and philosophies of the figures discussed in this work, by extracting moral, political, and existential lessons from their aspirations and enterprises, by reflecting on their ideals from the vantage point of our divergent social context, by evaluating their virtues and vices from a wider perspective, and by confronting the conceptual puzzles and social impediments hampering the exercise of practical wisdom and heroism, we may confront the people that we are and reimagine the people we might become.