Technological Progress and Health Convergence: The Case of Penicillin in Postwar Italy

Throughout history, technological progress has transformed population health, but the distributional effects of these gains are unclear. New substitutes for older, more expensive health technologies can produce convergence in population health outcomes but may also be prone to elite capture and thus divergence. We study the case of penicillin using detailed historical mortality statistics and exploiting its abruptly timed introduction in Italy after WWII. We find that penicillin reduced both the mean and standard deviation of infectious disease mortality, leading to substantial convergence across disparate regions of Italy. Our results do not appear to be driven by competing risks or confounded by mortality patterns associated with WWII.

‘From Zionism to Communism’: Emilio Sereni and the Consiglio di Gestione in postwar Italy

This essay demonstrates that it is impossible to appreciate the actions of the Italian communist Emilio Sereni without considering his Zionist background. Anyone who is interested in understanding the complexities of communism in the past century and to avoid simplistic conclusions about this ideology will benefit from the study. The problem at stake is that researchers often approach communism in a monolithic manner, which does not adequately explain the multiform manifestations (practical and theoretical) of that phenomenon. This ought to change and to this extent this essay hopes to contribute to that recent strand of historical research that challenges simplistic views on communism. More specifically, by analysing the Management Councils that Sereni created in postwar Italy, we can see that many of their features in fact derived from, or found their deepest origins in, his previous experience as a committed socialist Zionist. The study, then, also relates Sereni to and looks at the broader experiences of early twentieth-century Zionism and Italian communism in the early postwar years.

Literature and Photography in Italy

Since its invention in 1839, photography—its aesthetics, practices, and product—has incited, inspired, and occupied Italian literary writing. Both literature and photography in Italy have responded to social and cultural changes occurring in the country from photography’s first arrival and since Italian unification in 1861. Literature’s relation to photography, therefore, can be understood by looking at the country’s connection to modernity and to its interlinks with the powerful aesthetic and visual perspective typical of Italian culture. Through photography, fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry have dynamically and often ambiguously engaged discourses and reflections on reality, authenticity, and subjectivity. Such a relationship has offered a multitude of imaginary, emotional, and stylistic possibilities that have implied a challenge to literary realism as well as to photographic claim of truth and objectivity. Early daguerreotype plates of classical ruins, architecture, and landscapes were central to the first creative stage that joined photographic images and written words. At the end of the 19th century, during Italy’s transition from a pre-industrial age to an industrial one, photography appeared to embody the ideal model of that objective relationship to reality longed for by Positivism. The potential power of the camera to record the world also enchanted the veristi writers who established a relationship between resistance and acceptance with photographic image and practice. Concerns about the power of photography to alter the human perception of reality persisted into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the interrelation between literary texts and photography offered further viewpoints that multiplied or expanded perceptions of events, places, and people. Writers and artists also creatively and subversively exploited this relationship, especially thanks to modern printing techniques. During the Fascist period, at a time of crucial cultural transformation and modernization, photography became particularly instrumental in promulgating the regime’s ideology. Through mass circulation of popular illustrated periodicals, photographs also entered sophisticated photo-textual collaborations that developed further in postwar Italy. The documentary nature of the photographic image was challenged during the neorealist period and in diverse post–World War II literary works. At the same time, especially since the 1950s, Italian literature amplified earlier patterns of fictional investigations, and photography entered more dynamically into discourses and reflections on subjectivity, memory, and language. Following the emergence of international theoretical approaches to photography in the 1970s and 1980s, Italian literature engaged more critically with theory to investigate the social and political impact of photography, as well as its historical and artistic significance. The creative pairing of the photograph’s capacity to offer precise details of the real and simultaneously provoke a significant degree of referential uncertainty, in particular through digital technology, has continued to inspire Italian writers and bring changes in contemporary imaginative reproduction.

Labyrinths as Figures

Rosi’s groundbreaking trilogy Salvatore Giuliano, Il caso Mattei, and Lucky Luciano addresses the profound cultural and political transformations of postwar Italy. In Salvatore Giuliano (1962), which concerns the enigmatic death of the legendary folk hero, Rosi offers a complex portrait of Sicilian society violently ruled by the Mafia in collusion with the police and the state. Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) investigates the suspicious death of one of the most influential figures in the postwar economic boom. Lucky Luciano (1973), the treacherous figure of organized crime, is at the center of Rosi’s inquiry into the Mafia’s labyrinthine web of political alliances. Deploying his own metodo dell'inchiesta (“method of inquiry”), Rosi digs beneath the surface of official accounts of these public scandals, unearthing an underlying pattern of corrupt and lethal connections. His open endings attest to his belief in the director’s ethical responsibility to create an actively engaged spectatorship.

Disorder and Chaos

Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City, 1963), Rosi’s indictment of local civic corruption, maps the labyrinthine spaces and power hierarchies of Naples, the city that exemplified for him scandalous urban developments in postwar Italy. The film, which exposes the rapacity of land speculators operating in collusion with local government, features spectacular collapse and eviction scenes that reflect Rosi’s rapport with Neapolitan theater and his aesthetic ties to Cartier-Bresson. Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s Il contesto, is Rosi’s noir on the Mafia’s ascendancy to a de facto partner in national government. The film, which unfolds around a series of unsolved murders of distinguished jurists, reflects Rosi’s political unease with the “historic compromise.” To capture these political maneuverings, Rosi breaks with “documented” realism and devises a neobaroque view of the South as an iconic site of corruption, doubt, conspiracy, suspicion, and visual theatricality.

Civilian Disarmament: Public Order and the Restoration of State Authority in Italy’s Postwar Transition, 1944–6

Despite its impact on the breakdown of public order and on the rise of armed violence, the role of civilian disarmament in post-Second World War transitions is yet to be properly investigated. This article argues that the disarmament of the population was a key passage in two critical aspects of the normalization of postwar Italy: the reaffirmation of State authority and the reconstruction of control structures in response to the delegitimization of established authorities that followed their collapse in September 1943. Specifically, the article focuses on the intersection between the proliferation of war weapons, public order policing, and the recovery of Italian sovereignty in the aftermath of the Second World War. This article will demonstrate that disarmament was instrumental in reshaping Italian institutions according to the imperative of regaining control over the national territory in a context marked by foreign occupation, conflicting claims of legitimacy and the inversion of the monopoly on legitimate violence. The urgency to disarm incentivized both Italian and Allied authorities to rebuild the State control system in accordance to the pre-existing model of a centralized, authoritative administration. This led toward the preservation - in the sphere of public security - of agencies and individuals strongly compromised with the Fascist regime.

Displaced Persons and the Borders of Citizenship

This chapter examines how Italy's loss of empire and debates over classifying displacees produced a binary citizenship regime whose primary differentiation lay between citizens and aliens. Though the citizen/alien distinction seems commonsensical and unremarkable today, it was rearticulated in postwar Italy through the process of reckoning with the dual displacements of decolonization and war. The chapter studies these post-1945 transformations, first offering a brief discussion of the development of Italian citizenship codes during the era of imperial expansion before turning to detailed analysis of those displaced persons whose statuses challenged and tested the limits of Italian republican citizenship, as well as the incipient category of international refugee. In theory, the distinctions that emerged after 1945 in Italy between citizen and foreigner—like those between national refugee and international refugee—were clear. However, in practice there existed a good deal of ambiguity and debate as to who should or would help Italy's “own” refugees. These debates over assistance reflected deeper dilemmas over determining just who among the displaced counted as an Italian.