Data and studies on the gap between Southern Italy and Italy’s other regions over the long term
Several aspects of the gap between Italy’s Mezzogiornoand its central and northern regions since 1861 are reviewed. At Italy’s Unification, Southern Italy showed signs of economic inferiority in comparison with the country’s more advanced regions; however, the Mezzogiorno’s more advanced areas stood ahead of major areas in Central Italy. Industrialization in the three main regions in the north widened the gap impressively. After the Second World War, a process of convergence took place until the mid 1970s, when the gap stabilized; although no economic catching up has taken place until now, a substantial and impressive convergence is being shown in important well-being indexes. Southern Italy is characterized by a long-term, structural redundancy of labour. In spite of this, the evidence does not allow us to state that public intervention for the Mezzogiorno’s development has failed.

The South and Italy (1861-2001)
The essay reconstructs the relations between Northern and Southern Italy, from Unification to the present, through the basic lens of unbalanced interdependence. The South made a great contribution to the North’s industrialization, keeping the balance of payments steady through immigrants’ remittances. The partial industrialization of Naples in the liberal age was followed by limited comprehensive land improvement and electri fication in the fascist age. In the republican age, Italy made its most important attempt at modernizing the South by means of extraordinary State intervention, through the fund for the development of Southern Italy. Productive investments ended in 1973, coinciding
with the end of Fordism and the beginning of globalization. Public expenditure was then to support private incomes and an increased consumption of northern products – a mech anism that was to last for twenty years. But the structural consequences were to be unfavourable, especially after the 1980s: deindustrialization, widespread unemployment, low-quality public services, and increased organized crime. In the 21st century, Southern Italy is characterized by uneven modernity, a low-quality ruling class, and absolutely no organization of government policy.

Disequilibrium growth, luxuries and subsistence wage. A correspondence between Piero Sraffa and Renato Zangheri (1967-1969) 
The paper presents the hitherto unpublished correspondence between Piero Sraffa and Renato Zangheri in the late 1960s. The letters have a twofold interest: first, because the topics examined are of relevant significance, from both the political and the analytical viewpoints. Secondly, because they offer a good example of Sraffa’s peculiar reluctance to explain his own theoretical approach. In the Appendix, a detailed letter to President Luigi Einaudi on the «Physiocratie» is pub-
lished (together with his response), for the first time in the original Italian.

The losers’ memory. The many-sided history of the Battle of Milazzo
The Expedition of the Thousand may be considered the first media event in Italian history. Many journalists from all over the world followed Giuseppe Garibaldi to Sicily and enthusiastically described the various phases of the war before international public opinion. In particular, such famous writers as Alexandre Dumas transformed the Battle of Milazzo into myth, in line with the winners’ point of view. Nevertheless, there are also the memories of the losers. And although these memories certainly represent a partial viewpoint, they may be useful to those historians that wish to reconstruct a multifaceted history that cannot be reconstructed from the myth.

The British National Party and neofascist ideology in contemporary Europe

This article analyzes the «new English fascism»: notably the British National Party and its ideology. It essentially calls for a long term historical analysis. In so doing, it argues that this party is heir to a specific, old British (and European) «tradition». While much of the recent academic literature in the social sciences considers this type of movement as a «populist» phenomenon quite different from the «old», extreme right, this essay argues that the party is characterized by (neo)fascist doctrinal influences. In sum, readers will note how it is the «past» that influences «present times» for English right-wing extrem ists. The article also highlights a party’s political imagination that rejects all egalitarian principles, and promotes nationalistic myths, defence of tradition, and «purity» of race.

A mother’s second life. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the culture of memory 
This essay analyzes the contemporary culture of memory in Buenos Aires. The development of this culture since the democratic transition – and since Nestor Kirchner’s turn in government in particular – is investigated. Data come from field-work research during the period of Cristina Kirchner’s election victory in 2007. The official explanation of the duty to remember in order to re-establish the nation’s democratic basis is shown through an analysis of Buenos Aires’s urban landscape, and the building of such places of memo ry as the Museum of Memory and the Park of Memory, coinciding respectively with Nestor Kirchner’s first election, and with Cristina Kirchner’s election. The analysis of contem porary collective sensibility about the past dictatorship introduces an interview with a Madre de Plaza de Mayo, suggesting the task of watching over memory, and of coping with its current multiple interpretations.

Land managers and farms in central Italy in the early twentieth century (1900-1926) 
The aim is to highlight the changes that Italian agriculture saw in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries – changes which also affected large farm managers (fattorior agenti rurali). When the royal schools established farming practices, land managers underwent a radical change: practical training, hitherto an exclusive component of professional education, joined a school curriculum that was also based on the teaching of theory. The documentation in the archive collection at the Agricultural Institute of Todi (Umbria) reveals a number of issues, related not only to the progressive modernization of agriculture but also to the educational and professional trajectories of those intermediate social groups, such as land surveyors, to which traditional historiography has devot ed little attention.

«San Francisco will see the Old Masters». The fascist regime’s Vanity Fair in 1939 
In 1939, the fascist Government accepted an invitation from the director of San Francisco’s De Young Museum to send 27 masterpieces of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art to the Golden Gate International Exhibition. Although it was intended as a trade fair, a pavilion was devoted to the enjoyment of art, where people could admire paintings and sculptures selected by Giulio Carlo Argan and Roberto Longhi in response to the invitation from Giuseppe Bottai, Minister of Education. The precious loan crossed the Ocean from Genoa to New York, reaching San Francisco by train without insurance, except for paintings coming from private collections. The GGIE was the first stop on the American tour of the fascist regime’s cultural propaganda: the 27 stars later moved to Chicago and the New York Worlds’ Fair, just before Italy’s intervention in World War II.

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