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Italy

In 1994, Italian photographer Massimo Vitali, seeking to understand the Italy which had swept Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) comprehensively into power, took his camera to the beach at Marina di Pietrasanta ‘to see who the Italians were … [and] to understand their attitudes … at that precise moment in history’. In 2022, Italian politics returns to the beaches for a campagna balneare (a seaside campaign) conducted in a summer atmosphere of crisis when most Italians are taking their annual vacation.

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In its interrogation and negotiation of contemporary theoretical frameworks and practices at the core of the Italian–Australian migration complex, Francesco Ricatti’s comprehensive study offers a fresh and lucid understanding of the interrelation of core issues and processes affecting ...

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The final week of February in Australia means, among other things, that another summer is almost over. Yet in contrast to the fleeting nature of lived experience, a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia calls attention to the enduring power of art to capture and convey human passions ...

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Visitors to Siena are told about two major historical catastrophes that determined the future of the city: the Black Death in 1348 and the final capitulation to Florence in 1555. Such events manifest themselves respectively in the spectacularly incomplete Duomo and in the marked reduction of buildings and art creat ...

The Economist’s foreign correspondent John Hooper turns to a quintessentially English theme: Italians. Italians seem to be a sort of recurring obsession, a presence that periodically intrudes into the English imaginary. The cultural construction of Italy is a particularly sensitive and timely topic in the context of debates about the future of Europe. The a ...

So here we are. A house in Dosson, a village ‘almost joined to’ Treviso, which in turn is not far at all from Venice. A casa aperta, an open house, one to which friends and colleagues of the owner, a well-regarded musician, are drawn, not only by their confidence that a simple permesso will ensure welcome but because the owner ‘believes implicitly in the civilising effects of hospitality’. The maestro wants his friend to write a book. It will be about ‘music and art and culture and my friends and food and where I live’. He loves to cook and obliges the appointed scribe with a list of kitchen accoutrements, which will cover all occasions. It is admirably short and begins with ‘3 pots (one big one for 10 people, one medium one for 6, one little one for 2)’. Thoreau’s central explanation of his furniture comes to mind as a rejoinder to a casa affollata: ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ The book will include recipes, the writer decides, and it does. She tells the reader, ‘Maybe the book will get sorted out, maybe not.’

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One thing is certain: Mussolini would not like this book. Indeed, it is exactly the sort of writing that would rouse Il Duce’s ire. In the last disintegrating days before his ignominious end, when Mussolini realised that his erstwhile allies, the Germans, had outmanoeuvred him, that members of his inner circle were frantically making arrangements to flee Italy, and that partisan uprisings had set Lombardy and the Po Valley alight, the archbishop of Milan offered what was supposed to be a soothing observation: that Il Duce should take heart that he would be remembered by history. Enraged by this assurance, Mussolini declared: ‘History, don’t talk to me of history. I only believe in ancient history, in that which is written without passion and long afterwards.’

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The 120,000 expatriate Italians living in Australia, all of them newly entitled to vote in the recent election, contributed significantly to the knife-edge defeat of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in April 2006. Before the counting of all such votes in the four electoral regions into which his own government had divided the world, Berlusconi looked to have a one-seat majority. Then the votes of emigrant Italians swung the outcome the other way. For the first time, their say elected six expatriate senators and twelve deputies, including one of each from the Australia/Asia/Africa region – both of whom happen to live in Melbourne.

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In October 2005, Monash University hosted a workshop on Australians in Italy at its Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in Prato. Australians in Italy were certainly visible in the week of the conference. Wall posters in Rome advertised the Macquarie Bank and an exhibition, Viaggio nella Provincia di Roma di una pittrice australiana, the paintings of the expatriate artist Janet Venn-Brown. In Florence, the invitation to the opening of an international exhibition of Women’s Art bore the image of Tracey Moffatt’s photograph Something More 1 (1989). The workshop in Prato included papers on artists, writers, returned migrants, the Catholic clergy – and a vignette on the best-known Australian in contemporary Italy, the supermodel Megan Gale. Also on the programme was the contribution of Australian scholars to Italian Renaissance studies. Now extending to three generations, their work is no longer subsumed under ‘British’, and references are to ‘American–British–Australian’ approaches and research. A member of the first generation, Bill Kent, through his own writing and his training of PhD students, is the crucial figure in the ‘piccola scuola australiana’ (‘piccola’ only when confronted with the North American Renaissance industry), just as he was in the establishment of the Monash Centre in Prato.

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Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.

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