A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In The Other Renaissance, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly antihumanist sentiments. Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole.

An examination of the links between radicalism in Victorian England, and the Risorgimento movement in Italy. This book provides powerful new insights into the history of Italy's long Risorgimento, by tracing the entanglements of the Mazzinian "international". This informal group of men and women crossed the boundary of the Channel and the boundary of class to speak a common language and share a radical ideal: Giuseppe Mazzini's vision of a unified, republican Italy. Published in the radical press, the exile's writings on democracy, education, association and citizenship inspired both Oxford social reformers and self-improving artisans gathering in provincial reading rooms, co-operative societies, republican clubs and educational institutes: for them republican Italy became a transnationaldream. Indeed, when Italy was unified under a constitutional monarch in 1861, British Mazzinians were bitterly disappointed. Setting off for Italy on their first "co-operative tour" in 1888, East London workers embarked on an educational pilgrimage, dotted with Mazzinian landmarks. Despite the fin de siècle crisis, Victorian radicals' enduring faith in Italy's democratic future remained steadfast. Indeed, when Fascists subsequently appropriated Mazzini's national dream, post-Victorian Mazzinians would unequivocally voice their support for Italian anti-Fascists, who championed the principles of global democracy. Drawing on a wide range of material, the author adds a crucialnew dimension to the history of Victorian radicalism in Britain, and to the "new history of the Risorgimento". Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe is a Research Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

Italian Painting in the Age of Unification reconstructs the artistic motivations and messaging of three artists—Tommaso Minardi, Francesco Hayez, and Gioacchino Toma—from three distinct regions in Italy prior to, during, and directly following political unification in 1861. Each artist, working in Rome, Milan, and Naples, respectively, adopted the visual narratives particular to his region, using style to communicate aspects of his political, religious, or social context. By focusing on these three figures, this study will introduce readers outside of Italy to their diversity of practice, and provide a means for understanding their place within the larger field of international nineteenth-century art, albeit a place largely distinct from the better-known French tradition. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, nationalism, Italian history, or Italian studies.

The book aims rethinking the cultural history of Mediterranean nationalisms between 19th and 20th centuries by tracing their specific approach to antiquity in the forging of a national past. By focusing on how national imaginaries dealt with this topic and how history and archaeology relied on antiquity, this collection of essays introduces a comparative approach presenting several cases studies concerning many regions including Spain, Italy and Slovenia as well as Albania, Greece and Turkey. By adopting the perspective of a dialogue among all these Mediterranean political cultures, this book breaks significantly new ground, because it shifts attention on how Southern Europe nationalisms are an interconnected political and cultural experience, directly related to the intellectual examples of Northern Europe, but also developing its own particular trends. Contributors are: Çiğdem Atakuman, Filippo Carlà, Francisco Garcia Alonso, Maja Gori, Eleni Stefanou, Rok Stergar, Katia Visconti.

In the early 1800s, Rossini’s operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private. But after Rossini stopped composing, a sharp decline in popularity drove most of his works out of the repertory. In the past half century, they have made a spectacular return to operatic stages worldwide, but this recent fame has not been accompanied by a comparable critical reevaluation. Emanuele Senici’s new book provides a fresh look at the motives behind the Rossinian furore and its aftermath by examining the composer’s works in the historical context in which they were conceived, performed, seen, heard, and discussed. Situating the operas firmly within the social practices, cultural formations, ideological currents, and political events of early nineteenth-century Italy, Senici reveals Rossini’s dramaturgy as a radically new and specifically Italian reaction to the epoch-making changes witnessed in Europe at the time. The first book-length study of Rossini’s Italian operas to appear in English, Music in the Present Tense exposes new ways to explore nineteenth-century music and addresses crucial issues in the history of modernity, such as trauma, repetition, and the healing power of theatricality.

In The Struggle for Development and Democracy Alessandro Olsaretti proposes a humanist social science as a first step to overcome the flaws of neoliberalism, and to recover a balanced approach that is needed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In the 19th century, both Italy and the US were young countries pursuing liberal nationalism even as unity was threatened by a recalcitrant southern population. This nuanced analysis of abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism, Lincoln and Cavour, and the nation's two civil wars provides powerful new insights into their histories.

How is a new state built? To what ideas, concepts and practices do authorities turn to produce and legitimise its legal and political system? And what if the state emerged through revolution, and sought to obliterate the legacy of the empire which preceded it? This book addresses these questions by looking at nineteenth-century Greek liberalism and the ways in which it engaged in reforms in the Greek state after independence from the Ottomans (c. 1830-1880). Liberalism after the Revolution offers an original perspective on this dynamic period in European history, and challenges the assumptions of Western-centric histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, and its relationship with the state. Michalis Sotiropoulos shows that, in this European periphery, liberals did not just transform liberalism into a practical mode of statecraft, they preserved liberalism's radical edge at a time when it was losing its appeal elsewhere in Europe.

This volume examines the impact of the wars in the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1830, focusing both on the military, economic, political, social and cultural demobilization that occurred immediately at their end, and their long-term legacy and memory.

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created. It is the story of a generation of intellectuals and political thinkers from the Ionian Islands who experienced the collapse of the Republic of Venice and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of the Adriatic, and who contributed to the creation of Italian and Greek nationalisms. By uncovering this forgotten intellectual universe, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean retrieves a world characterized by multiple cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations that have since been buried by the conventional narrative of the formation of nation-states. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean rethinks the origins of Italian and Greek nationalisms and states, highlighting the intellectual connection between the Italian peninsula, Greece, and Russia, and reestablishing the lost link between the changing geopolitical contexts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans in the Age of Revolutions. It re-inscribes important intellectuals and political figures, considered 'national fathers' of Italy and Greece (such as Ugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannis Kapodistrias and Niccolò Tommaseo), into their regional and multicultural context, and shows how nations emerged from an intermingling, rather than a clash, of ideas concerning empire and liberalism, Enlightenment and religion, revolution and conservatism, and East and West.