The Middle Ages and historical journals in Italy: a medium-term view (1960-2012)
After the end of the Second World War, a new generation of scholars deeply changed the methods and themes of medieval history in Italy. This renewal also affected the two general historical journals that had long existed on the scene («Rivista storica italiana» and «Nuova rivista storica»), as well as both leading periodicals specializing in medieval studies («Bollettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo» and «Studi medie-vali»). During the sixties and seventies, as in other sectors of the discipline, structural and social history represented the main issues and the most important field of debate. Medieval history claimed ever more space in the pages of more recent journals («Qua-derni storici», «Società e storia», and, more gradually, «Studi storici») and a new sectoral review was founded («Quaderni medievali»). The peak of the success and fortune of medieval history came during the eighties. At the same time, as interest in economic and social structures declined, politics and institutions acquired new importance, while religious and ecclesiastical historians constituted a more distinctive branch of study, with the High and Late Middle Ages being established as two separate areas. The main innovation of the last twenty years – i.e. the turn to linguistics and culture – was never the focus of debate in Italian journals and historiography, but influenced recent research all the same. Nevertheless, interest in material resources is currently returning to the fore. In the meantime, new and active journals («Storica» and «Reti medievali. Rivista») are being created. Lastly, academic practices are moving towards a likely change: the ranking of academic journals may cause more concentration of semi-nal essays and increased historiographical debate in leading Italian historical reviews.

Luigi Russo and Georges Sorel: on the origins of the «modern Prince» in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
The starting point of this article is the distinction between «new Prince» and «modern Prince» in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Whereas the former, attested in the Notebooks since 1930, refers to Gramsci’s intention to rewrite Machiavelli’s booklet, the latter appears for the first time in January-February 1932, with a completely different meaning. In fact, it is a metaphor designating not a text but a concrete political organism: the party. This presentation is organized around the turning point marked by the first occurrence of this lemma. As will be shown, the idea of a «modern Prince» is a response to Luigi Russo’s Prolegomeni a Machiavelli (1931), a book which is not only an interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought, but also an attempt to strengthen liberal Antifascism through the inclusion of democratic and «national popular» topics. This goal is achieved by adopting the idea – drawn from Croce’s «religion of freedom» – that religion and politics cannot be separated, and that Machiavelli’s Prince, with its tension between the «cool» political analysis in the first 25 chapters and the «prophetic» impulse of chapter 26, is exemplary in this sense. In the «modern Prince», Gramsci focuses on the same question as Russo. Now Gramsci agrees with the thesis that the conjunction of politics and religion is the main premise of any political action because popular masses are spurred into action only if they really share a sense of community with their leaders; and this can be produced only by the evocative power of religious language. However, Russo’s argument is only a premise for Gramsci. His main concern is precisely whether and how the political movement stirred up by religious language can at the same time be a democratic one; whether and how critique as a collective practice can be developed from it. That’s the reason why, at the very moment that Gramsci adopts Russo’s thesis, he also resorts to Sorel’s notion of «myth». As will be shown, the «myth» is for Gramsci one of the many «effects» of Marx’s notion of ideology, and as such it contains in itself a link to the question of the «truth» and thus cannot be reduced to the irrationalistic dimension it has in Sorel’s elaboration. Playing Sorel (Marx) against Russo, at the beginning of 1932 Gramsci sketches an entirely new approach to the main question of the struggle for Communism in Fascist Italy.

On the «invention of tradition»
This paper deals with the history of the «invention of tradition» as a historic concept in Hobsbawm’s historical inquiry. In 1983, Hobsbawm and T. Ranger edited a book of essays on the building of social memory. This paper analyses the contents of the two essays by Hobsbawm that appeared in it. Hobsbawm already disclosed some ideas on this concept in the early 1970s (The social function of the past, in «Past & Present», 1972) and at the end of that decade (The revival of Narrative, in «Past & Present», 1980). After the publication of The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm, at least three times, wrote systematically on memory as construction and invention: in 1989, in Nation and Nationalism; during the nineties in On History; and in 2012, in his last book, Fractured Times, in which he wrote: «There is a major difference between the traditional scholar’s questions about the past – What happened in history, when and why? – and the question that has, in the last 40 years or so, come to inspire a growing body of historical research: namely, How do or did people feel about it? Studies of historical memory are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present».

Revolutionary or reformist? Victor Schoelcher and the abo-lition of slavery
The article concerns the life and work of Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), architect of the abolition of slavery in the French Antilles (1848), beginning with his Alsatian origins which sharpened his sensitivity to the often dramatic problems of ethnically mixed territories, and going on to analyze both the «cult of Schoelcher», liberator and revolutionary, and the radical accusations of his being no more than a moderate reformer and an instrument of assimilation. His fight against slavery – in the context of the European abolitionary movement at large – is examined from his initial concept of gradual abolition to his later championing of immediate abolition, in contrast to the precisely opposite development of another prominent abolitionist, Cyrille Bis-sette. The article concentrates on such basic aspects of the Antillean reality as the frequent conflict between blacks and mulattos, and the difference in attitude between the receptiveness of the plantation owners and the strong opposition of «small-time» whites fearful of black competition. Finally, the article describes Schoelcher’s last years – his opposition to the coup d’état of December 21, 1851, his exile in London, and his engagement in many progressive struggles for, among other causes, women’s rights, social assistance, and the abolition of usury and of the death penalty. It concludes by pointing out that though «Schoelcherism» was on the wane until briefly revived at the time of Mitterand, it nevertheless remained very much alive in the Antilles.

Southern Europe in the construction of the Cold War bipolar system. Italy and Greece in the U.S. strategy, 1945-1946
The paper focuses on the role played by Italy and Greece in the formation of the international policy line adopted by U.S. policy-makers towards Europe in the crucial period between early 1945 and mid-1946, during the construction of the Cold War bipolar system. What emerges from the analyzed archival sources is a White House foreign policy focused on the European Mediterranean scene. As documents in the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park allow us to observe, starting in the first half of 1945 Italy and Greece were considered by the United States as crucial to preventing Western Europe falling under the expansion of the communist bloc, and were major geostrategic theaters sensitive to national security. The two strong domestic Communist parties were elements that in Washington’s analysis combined the Greek and Italian theaters, and the Mediterranean peninsulas were both evaluated by the Truman administration’s top advisers as critical points for the post-war global order.

The 1840 reforms by Charles Albert and the mathematics edu-cation of land surveyors and architects at the University of Cagliari
At the end of the short phase of reform policies that King Charles Emmanuel III had ordered in 1764, the University of Cagliari entered a long period of stagnation. At the beginning of the 19th century, in the climate of difficulties caused by the French invasion of Piedmont and the flight of the Savoy family to Sardinia, the crisis of the university reached its zenith. In this phase, the teaching of mathematical subjects was greatly neglected. It was not until 1840, under King Charles Albert, that the study of the exact sciences was re-started on the basis of a model that attempted to combine university teaching and the theoretical and practical training of architects and land surveyors. This article is on the reforms of 1840 and, more generally, the teaching of the exact sciences at the University of Cagliari in the years 1840-1860.

Southern Italy and the Great Depression. Foreign capital, entrepreneurs and trafficking between crisis and transformation
The long depression that affected Italy and Sicily between 1873 and 1896 exploded in Catania as a serious shortage of liquidity. This resulted in a long chain of economic failures that concerned the main import/export agencies created to market Sicilian agriculture and mining resources. This contribution attempts to introduce the history of the Peratoner family and to provide a second reading intended to examine in depth certain «revisionist» theses regarding the crisis that, far from being a long and still recessive period, appeared as a speculative explosion affecting both the banking and finance systems. However, what the long depression left as heritage to the south was the important development of the railway industry, which completely subverted the patterns of economic, social and political life, as well as people’s way of thinking.

Antonio Segni and the «centro-sinistra»
The Historiography has stressed above all the points of contrast between Aldo Moro and Antonio Segni, reinforcing the image of two alternative politicians. Nevertheless, during the years of the centro-sinistra (centre-left government), meetings were more than a few, and were highly relevant. These convergences strongly influenced the choices of the Democrazia Cristiana, the duration of some governments and the presidential election. This paper proposes the hypothesis that the relationship between Moro and Segni profoundly influenced the opening on the left and the outcome of the experience of the centro-sinistra even before the events of the summer of 1964. Here the author attempts to prove this hypothesis, dwelling in particular on six moments: the election of Moro as secretary of the DC; the fall of the second Segni government; the attempt to form the third Segni government; the election of Segni as president of the Republic; the formation of the first Moro government; and lastly, its fall. This is not to belittle the importance of the events that took place in July and August of 1964, but this essay would like to point out that the experiment of the centro-sinistra starting in the early days of that summer was particularly fragile. Its fate had been, if not permanently marked by, then strongly bound to the new political, economic and international context.