More than any other nation, Italy -- from its imperial past to its subordinate present, from its colonial forays to its splendid isolation -- embodies the myriad and contradictory historical forms of nationhood. This volume covers a range of subjects drawn from Italy and abroad to study Italian national identity. Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, the essays reveal how cultural identity is constructed and manipulated -- an issue made urgent by the influx of African, Indochinese, and Eastern European immigrants into Italy today. Topics include exile, nationalism, and imagined communities, Italy's colonial "unconscious", and Mussolini's adventures in North Africa.

Unlock your full potential with this revision guide which focuses on the key content and skills you need to know. My Revision Notes Edexcel AS History: The Triumph of Fascism in Italy, 1896-1943 closely combines the content of this Edexcel AS unit with revision activities and advice on exam technique. In addition each section has a model answer with exam tips for you to analyse and better understand what is required in the exam. - Makes revision of the content manageable by condensing topics into easy-to-revise chunks. - Encourages active revision by closely combining content with a variety of different activities. - Helps improve exam technique through tailor-made activities and plenty of guidance on how to answer questions.

Five case studies show how different people and places were marginalized and socially excluded as the Italian nation-state was formed.

The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country. In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.