American Academy in Rome - Summer Programs

Participant Information

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Seminar Proposals

Organization
Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four | Week Five

How will the seminar be organized?
The seminar has been conceived as an intensive collective enterprise, whose dynamic will come as much from the participants as the course directors. Its different components - lectures, field-trips, discussion groups, thematic presentations, films and individual research projects - all form part of a single complementary and integrated process of learning and exchange. Its aim will be to harmonize structured and informed inquiry with informality, openness and collegiality.

The seminar will normally meet three times a week for a total of seven to eight hours: two of these meetings will be at the American Academy in Rome, and the third will take the form of field trips. In addition, each week there will a showing of a film relating to the history of the Risorgimento, followed by discussion. In addition to lectures, discussion groups, field trips and film showings, the directors will be available to meet with participants at regular office hours each week. Each participant will also meet with one of the directors in the first and second weeks and these conferences will be devoted to defining and developing the paper that each participant will prepare during the course of the seminar for presentation at the mini-conference with which the seminar concludes.

The English language literature on the subjects covered in the seminar is extensive, but a working knowledge of Italian permits much deeper exploration. Readings and texts will include literature in Italian as well as English. However, in their individual projects participants will be free to decide how much weight they wish to put on Italian-language materials, making use of other European languages as appropriate as well.

The program includes weekly field trips in Rome to explore the monuments of the Risorgimento era and the ways in which the Risorgimento was commemorated; the Jewish ghetto and the symbols of Rome's uneasy cohabitation with the Papacy after 1870; the collections of Risorgimento art and iconography in the city's museums. These field trips will make use of public transport but also involve a certain amount of walking, and applicants should bear in mind that Rome can be very hot in July. There will be a full day expedition to the town of Civitella del Tronto in the province of Abruzzo to explore the Roman provinces and one of the most important sites of the Risorgimento, as well as guest lectures by visiting U.S. and Italian experts in the field.

In addition to the library resources available at the American Academy in Rome, participants will be able to use the principal reference libraries in Rome and will be given guidance and introductions to facilitate this.

The Outline Seminar Schedule

Week One: How Unique was the Risorgimento?
Until recently Italy's journey to nationhood in the 19th century has been treated as something exceptional, but also deeply flawed. Much of the historical literature in the period after the Second World War sought to trace the origins of fascism to the political shortcomings of the Liberal state, which were in turn linked to Italy's economic and social backwardness at the time of Unification. These arguments were advanced by both Marxist historians and non-Marxist historians in very similar terms. Both reflected the broader theories of modernization proposed in major comparative studies of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy. In these perspectives the Italian nation-state that emerged from the political struggles of the Risorgimento was either a 'failed capitalist revolution' or a case of 'unsuccessful modernization'.

These comparative models and the assumptions that link the origins of political democracies to a form of economic modernization--for which England's precocious eighteenth century 'industrial revolution' served as a model--have for some time been under critical assault. Social historians meantime have tested and in general found wanting the criteria by which Italy was deemed to be 'backward'. Much of this has resulted from applying to Italy debates and studies that were developed in other historiographical contexts.

How then is it possible to identify the continuities in the longer span that made Italian society and politics distinctive but not exceptional? How can Italy's nineteenth century appointments with modernity be studied comparatively without imposing abstract normative models?

Texts: Putnam, R.D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press 1993); Davis, J.A. (ed) Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press 2000); Davis, J.A. "Remapping Italy's Path to the Twentieth Century' Journal of Modern History; Riall, L. The Risorgimento; State, Society and National Unification (London 1994): G. Tommasi di Lampedusa The Leopard (New York 1960)

Week Two: Nationalism: the Construction of Identities and Memories

What did it mean to be Italian? What was the role of nationalism in transforming the struggles for Italian independence into the political unification of all the pre-unification Italian states and rulers? To what extent were these changes the products of shifting European geo-political alliances? What part did nationalism play in this process? What were the social roots of political discontent in Italy? Why and in what ways did nationalist ideas and symbols find a response amongst sections of the elites? How were nationalist identities constructed and transmitted? Were those new identities a product of national unification rather than its cause? In what ways did nationalist representation change and develop after Unification? How were memories made and remade? How did nationalist identities coexist with other social identities - class, gender, religious, ethnic? What grounds are there for arguing that - compared with France, Germany, Britain or the US - Italians at the end of the 19th century had a 'weak' sense of national identity? This segment makes use of new cultural approaches to European political history.

Texts: Ascoli, A. & Von Henneberg, K. (eds) Making and Remaking Italy (2001) Lyttelton, A. in Teich and Porter (eds) The National Question in 19th century Europe (1994): Banti, A. La Nazione del Risorgimento (Laterza, Rome 1999).

Film: Senso (Visconti 1957)

Week Three: Religion and Society
Italian unification came about against the wishes of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the Church was the single most influential opponent of unification, and the Vatican's continuing efforts to de-legitimate the Italian state following unification would have grave long-term consequences for Italian society and politics. We here examine attempts to reconcile Catholicism and unification and why they failed. We look at the attempts of the Church both to call on the Italian faithful to combat the emerging new state and its efforts to solicit foreign intervention in battling the Italian government. We examine the trauma produced by unification on the Church and the rearguard action fought by the Vatican (e.g., the Syllabus of Errors, the First Vatican Council). Special attention is devoted to the use of ritual and symbol by both state and Church to undercut the authority of the other and, in the case of the state, to win popular allegiance to the Italian monarchy.

Texts: Chadwick, O. The Popes and the European Revolution (Oxford 1981); Kertzer, D.I. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Knopf/Vintage 1997)

Film: In Nome del Papa Re (Luigi Magni 1977)

Week 4: Family, Social Welfare, Gender and Sexuality
One of the changes in the historiography of the Risorgimento to emerge in recent years is the increasing attention paid to the ways in which the political changes identified with the period were linked to changes in family and gender norms and behavior. Of central interest here is how the separation of Church and state, introduced by Italian unification, altered the way in which gender, family and sexuality were regulated. Two examples will provide our main focus: prostitution and infant abandonment. In both cases a system in which the Church and Church-linked norms and agencies played a major role in regulating deviant behavior came to be replaced by a system in which the Church was to play little role. Yet, while the changes can be seen as linked to particular changes in Italy's political evolution, they mirror changes found elsewhere in Europe, and the reasons for these similarities need to be explored. These areas also allow us to examine the ways in which the new Italian state differed from previous regimes, and the relationship between political change and change in the most intimate regions of people's lives.

Texts: Gibson, M. Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860-1915 (Rutgers U.P., 1986); Journal of Modern Italian History - special issue vol.7 n 1 (2002) on womens' history in Italy edited by M.Gibson; Kertzer, D.I. Sacrificed for Honor. Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Beacon Press, 1993)

Film: Allonsanfan (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, 1991)

Week 5: Two Italies: How the South Made Italy
Many of the issues raised in the previous sections come together around the 'rediscovery' of Italy's Southern Problem. The concluding session will consider the ways in which the history of the South before and after Unification has been distorted by the terms of the Southern Question. Participants will be asked to reflect on the relationship between the South and the Southern Problem, on parallels with other 'southern questions' (Britain's Irish Question, the French Bretons, Spanish Catalans and Basques, and also the U.S. South) and on the roles played by the Southern Problem in the formation of Italian identities that resulted from Unification. How peculiar, in short, was Italy's 'Southern Problem' and what roles have the South played in the development of modern Italian society and politics?

Texts: N. Moe The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question.(California University Press 2001); J.Dickie Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno 1860-1900 (Macmillan 1999) Film: The Leopard (L.Visconti, 1967)

Overview
Introduction, why in Rome, topics and themes

The Directors
Background of Professors John Davis, RAAR'01, and David Kertzer, RAAR'00

Organization
General operation of seminar, schedule outline

Logistics
Housing and accommodations, stipends and expenses

How to Apply
Required materials, downloadable application form, contact information