Professor Gene Brucker
Shepard Professor of History, Emeritus. University of California, Berkeley

FROM BIRTH TO DEATH: The Life Cycle in Renaissance Florence

This paper on the Florentine life cycle is based on one documentary source: the so called catasto, the tax declarations of thousands of Florentine heads of households, in which they reported the names and ages of their family members, often their occupation or profession, a description and evaluation of their property both real and personal, and a record of all debts and obligations. This information was used by tax officials to levy tax assessments. From this mass of demographic and economic data, I have culled evidence concerning the lifestyle of the Florentines, from the wealthiest like Cosimo de’ Medici, to the poorest and most destitute. I describe career choices for men and women, the vicissitudes of entrepreneurial activity, marriages and dowries, health problems and the care of the sick and infirm, and, finally, death. From the work of Florentine artists (Masaccio, Brunelleshi, Gozzoli, Pollaiuolo, Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, I have selected examples to illustrate the key events in the Florentine life cycle during the fifteenth century.

Over the last decade the television fiction has turned into the central story-telling system of Italian society. In a country where reading books and newspapers is a scarcely diffused habit, and where the national cinema ceased since the Seventies to be a medium of popular entertainment, television has managed to play the role of contemporary ‘supernarrator’. The production of domestica drama, which in the early Nineties had dramatically decreased under the impact of foreign imports, has significantly increased in a relatively short time; and a real explosion of huge successes has welcomed the intensive supply of homegrown fiction stories, firmly established in prime time of the main channels, where the american imports have to a lesser or greater extent disappeared. The presentation will reconstruct the ‘success story’ of end-of-century Italian TV fiction, within the context of cultural processes – globalization, to begin with – and industrial and regulatory factors that have grounded and supported it. The elements, either formal or representational, which relate the television story-telling to the Italian identity, will be focused on; with special reference to the powerful wave of stories which, at the turn of the millennium, have drawn inspiration and content from the source of catholic sentiment and the collective memory of the Italian population.

Additional workshop for RHD students by Prof. Milly Buonanno:
"Television landscape in contemporary Europe: industry, change, interchange"

Professor Paul Corner
Professor of European History at the University of Siena

FASCISM AND CONSENSUS: TIME TO MOVE ON?

Ever since Renzo De Felice broke with national tabu and asserted, in 1974, that there had been a mass consensus among Italians for the fascist regime, it has been difficult to discuss what Italians thought about fascism during the ventennio without getting involved in furious political debate. The debate is, of course, essentially about current Italian politics, given that present-day judgments about the fascist period are still used as a litmus test of current political orientation. Sometimes in rather strange ways. Very different from the German reaction to recognition of German consensus for Hitler, Italian acceptance of the consensus thesis has often been seen as a kind of justification of fascism: 'If we all agreed about fascism, it can't have been so bad after all.' Conversely, if we want to show we are anti-fascist, we have to deny the existence of consensus, as if it were axiomatic that Italians could not have been generally favourable to the regime.

This situation shows up the great difficulty Italy has had and still has in coming to terms with its fascist past – still very much part of Italy's present. In his paper, which relates mainly to popular opinion during the regime, I suggest that we should try to change the terms of the question and, as far as possible, attempt to remove the present-day political connotations of the historical question of what Italians thought about fascism. I suggest that a useful new approach to the problem may be to look at the ways in certain historians in other countries which experienced totalitarian or semi-totalitarian regimes are now researching their past. Their different methodologies may help historians of Italy reshape their approaches and direct their attention to new issues.

The first part of the paper looks very briefly, therefore, at research which has been done in respect of popular opinion in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, and in countries of the post-1945 east European communist bloc. The categories used can be extremely useful in helping us to take a fresh look, from new angles, at the question of popular opinion under fascism in Italy. A brief review of some of the findings of scholars like Sheila Fitzpatrick and Jochen Hellbeck for the Soviet Union, of Ian Kershaw and Robert Gellately for Nazi Germany, and of Martin Sabrow and Thomas Lindenberger for East Germany suggest that we might do well to look at the Italian situation with new eyes. Concepts such as 'internalisation', 'double reality' and (the untranslatable) 'Eigen Sinn', or the way in which Kershaw employs Max Weber's concepts of the 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' could help to throw new light on the ways in which Italians reacted to fascism.

The second part of the paper attempts to do just this – by looking at the degree to which these concepts are applicable to Italian fascism and, if they are, at what they tell us about the regime and about what people thought about the regime. Attention is paid principally to popular opinion as seen through police reports and the reports of police informers. Despite the obvious limitations of the sources, a clear picture does emerge. The conclusions suggest, hardly surprisingly, that the attitudes of the Italians were complex, ambivalent, and often very volatile and that any attempt to summarise the situation within the terms of the rather sterile 'consensus' debate distorts the reality and simplifies to the extreme. Above all it impedes any real appreciation of the ways in which many Italians experienced the fascist regime.

Professor Anna De Fina
Georgetown University

Ethnicity, identity and social practices: Italians in the U.S.

In the last twenty years the existence of a sense of ethnic belonging among immigrant groups of European ancestry in the United States has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics. In this talk, I argue that ethnicity cannot be understood if it is abstracted from concrete social practices, and that analyses of ethnic identity need to be based on ethnographic observation and on the study of communities and of talk- in- interaction. I focus on a community of Italian and Italian American men who participate in a Briscola club in the Washington area to show how Italian ethnicity is constructed as a central element of the collective identity of this group. I discuss how linguistic strategies, particularly code-switching, have a central role in such construction when seen in their connections with significant practices in the life of the club. The example of the Briscola points to the fact that Italian ethnicity may be expressed in a variety of ways among immigrant communities abroad, and that these forms of expression may be difficult to capture through traditional methods such as surveys and interviews.

Additional Research Seminar by Prof. Anna De Fina:
"Narrative and Identity" Download Leaflet

Professor Pierangela Diadori
Università per Stranieri di Siena, Italia.

Non verbal communication, gestures and Italian language teaching:
Intercultural pragmatics in the classroom.

Se cerchiamo di stabilire una gerarchia fra i codici che entrano in gioco nella comunicazione umana scopriamo che il codice verbale non sempre è il principale veicolo di trasmissione dei messaggi. Spesso sono soprattutto le componenti nonverbali della comunicazione quelle che forniscono una prima chiave di interpretazione. Così avviene nella prima infanzia, quando il bambino reagisce in primo luogo agli stimoli visivi (l'espressione del viso, i gesti) e sonori nonverbali (l'intonazione, la modulazione della voce, le pause) che provengono dai suoi interlocutori. Così avviene per l'apprendente di una lingua straniera che, nella formulazione di ipotesi sul contenuto verbale di un messaggio, si fa guidare dal contesto prima ancora che dalle parole (molte delle quali, del resto, gli sono sconosciute): l'aspetto dell'interlocutore, il suo tono di voce, i suoi movimenti. Argomento di questo intervento è in particolare la componente cinesica della comunicazione nonverbale in uso nell’Italia contemporanea, che verrà esaminata in una prospettiva glottodidattica, affrontando le seguenti tematiche:

La competenza comunicativa e i sistemi sensibili e concettuali della comunicazione umana. La cinesica: postura, sguardo, espressione del volto, contatto corporeo, gesti.
Precedenti storici della gestualità italiana.
Regionalismi e forestierismi gestuali.
Esiste oggi un repertorio gestuale italiano "dell'uso medio"?
Gestualità e mass media: cinema, giornali, pubblicità.
Gestualità e apprendimento dell'italiano L2: incomprensioni e equivoci interculturali.
Gestualità e didattica dell'italiano L2: quali abilità? quali strumenti?

Storia di un’utopia: Da Verga a Camilleri

"Gli scrittori siciliani hanno elaborato un'utopia, una lezione di moralità e di stile, di pensiero critico e di fiero antagonismo, a dispetto e contro una modernizzazione alienante che intanto sconvolgeva modelli e valori e troncava radici, omologando la Sicilia e la sua "diversità" all'Italia e al mondo. La loro fu una scommessa contro la storia, che si tradusse in un osservatorio critico e in un laboratorio intellettuale che non hanno uguali, per continuità e omogeneità, nelle altre letterature."