History of Modern Italy — Spring

In June of 1861, Cavour died in his family palazzo in Turin. The loss of the brilliant Prime Minister at the most important moment of the unification movement was disastrous for the future of Italy. Fortunately, Italy had another great aristocrat who grew wine on his country estate who was ready to lead the new Italy: Bettino Ricasoli, (1809-1880) Barone di Brolio. Brolio was one of the greatest of Tuscany's vineyards. It was soon to be the oldest wine business in Italy.  Ricasoli had been the leader of the Tuscan liberation movement for years, and now that Florence had voted to join the new Kingdom of Italy, Ricasoli was the perfect successor to Cavour. In 1865, the new government would choose to move the capital of the Kingdom to Florence.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

This is the best one-volume history of Italy that includes the modern part that we want. It provides you with a nice introduction to earlier periods and those of you who studied the Renaissance last year will find these chapters an easy review. We will use the book all quarter.

During the first decade of the existence of the new Kingdom of Italy, the new state faced a number of challenges. There were still parts of the Italian peninsula that were not yet in the Kingdom, such as Venice and Rome. Austria still controlled Venice and there would be yet a third war of Italian independence in 1866 to liberate Venice.. Rome was still in the hands of the Pope with the protection of French troops. Emperor Napoleon III did not want to withdraw French troops without some plan of protection for the Pope because he depended on support at home in France from conservative Roman Catholic French voters. So he needed some reasonable agreement with the Kingdom of Italy for the protection of the Pope, if French troops left Rome. Then there was the constant changing of government leadership: Prime Minister after prime Minister, all with problems with the king who wanted to run the country by himself.  

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

Pope Pius IX (Italian: Pio IX; 1792 – 1878), born Giovanni Maria Ferretti,reigned as Pope from 16 June 1846 to his death in 1878. He was the longest-reigning elected pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving for over 31 years. During his pontificate Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council (1869–70), which decreed papal infallibility, but the council was cut short owing to the loss of the Papal States. Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was also the last pope to rule as the Sovereign of the Papal States, which fell completely to the Italian Army in 1870 and were incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. After this, he was referred to—chiefly by himself—as the "Prisoner of the Vatican". (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

As you begin reading about Week 24, you are assuming that it must be about ice cream since above is a photo of the most famous ice cream store in all of Rome (In order to see the photo, click on the Blue Date Title Bar for Week 24). Well, I just thought it was a good time for you all to learn the name of this great ice cream place just around the corner from the Pantheon for your visit to Rome. Giolitti the Prime Minister did not own it. Probably his cousin or someone. Giovanni Giolitti (1842 – 1928) was an Italian statesman. He was the Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. He is the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Benito Mussolini. He was a prominent leader of the Historical Left and the Liberal Union. Giolitti is widely considered one of the most powerful and important politicians in Italian history and, due to his dominant position in Italian politics, he was accused by critics of beign a parliamentary dictator. Giolitti was a master in the political art of Trasformismo, the method of making a flexible, centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right in Italian politics after the unification. Under his influence, the Italian Liberals did not develop as a structured party, they were, instead, a series of informal personal groupings with no formal links to political constituencies. The period between the start of the 20th century and the start of World War I, when he was Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior from 1901 to 1914 with only brief interruptions, is often referred to as the "Giolittian Era."

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

The Young Mussolini (1883-1943). It is the right time in our class to turn to the life of Benito Mussolini and to come to understand how his life and thought was rooted in the Risorgimento: what was achieved and what was not; where did the Risorgimento fail?  How did  the Italain state in the Twentieth Century find itself caught up in the horrors of Twentieht Century tyranny. Mussolin was born in a small town in the Romagna (a provincial name that echoes Rome but is a distinct area of norther Italy stretching east and west from Bologna.) near Forli. His father, Alessandro Mussolini was an extreme radical thinker in a very small town, who hated the church as much as he loved Garibaldi. Mussolini brought up his son in a household of hot political debate. All day all the time, they discussed and acted upon radical political motivations. The Mussolinis celebrated the "people" the "popolo." Alessandro Mussolini preached about the people and the rich nasty aristocrats who lived off of the poor and the downtrodden. So young Benito grew up in the middle of political debate. And he grew to be very good at it. HIs various breakthroughs into power were all  driven by his unique rhetorical power that was with him from the very beginning.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Our discussion of Mussolini may move you to want to know more about him. The best biography is this one by Christopher Hibbert.

From Amazon:
“Christopher Hibbert is a wonderful narrative historian who has illuminated many corners of Italian life and history. He has the gift of creating scenes and characters, of rendering the vividness of the past. His Mussolini is no exception. He manages to convey both the charisma and dilettantismo of Mussolini the revolutionary leader as well as the later folly of Il Duce, the dictator who began increasingly to believe his own rhetoric -- ''Mussolini is always right' -- in leading his country into World War and ruin.” ―Alexander Stille, award-winning author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism, and of The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi

Reviews:
“Hibbert is a remarkably prolific popular historian, who can take on almost anything, from Dickens to General Wolfe, from Agincourt to Garibaldi.” ―The Observer

“An excellent account...balanced and perceptive in outlook...well-written and entertaining.” ―Economist

“[Hibbert] is a superbly skillful historical writer.” ―The Spectator

“An adroitly written evocation of a compelling but enigmatic personality, a man whose ambition, idealism and opportunism would not seem out of place on the political scene today.” ―Publishers Weekly on Disraeli

“Hibbert's lively and engaging portrait of Benjamin Disraeli joins the author's numerous other well-received, popular biographies...A supremely readable and enjoyable study of a colorful, often astonishing and modern character.” ―Library Journal on Disraeli

The single best book in the English language to explain the power of Hitler and Mussolini with the crowds of followers and the power of their words is Eric Hoffer's brilliant The True Believer. The book is now more than fifty years old, and yet it is more relevant and more obviously true than when it was published in the 1950's. The secret of the dictators was that they knew how to touch the hearts of their trouble peoples and to engender in those hearts the willingness to sacrifice one's self to the larger cause. Hoffer explains what this was all about. The book is a masterpiece and is still read in universitie classes studying the mind and movements of the masses in the Twentieth Century. If you have never read it, this is the perfect time to do it.

The slow march to war that dragged across Europe for fourteen years and exploded in Serbia in August, 1914, was resisted by the international Socialist brotherhood. They dreamed of the day when all workers of all countries would unite and throw off their chains. But the other force of the late Nineteenth Century every bit as powerful as Socialism and Communism was Nationalism. The peoples of the various countries could be awakened very quickly with calls to a nationalistic brotherhood. Mussolini was caught in this dilemma in the early years of the Twentieth Century when his old Marxist teachers were all for resisting war. But he could see that the people wanted it. And his problems as a leader of the Left were the same for all the leaders of the Socialist and Communist Left as they all approached the seeming  inevitability of a World War.His move from Socialist Left to fascist right is very much rooted in his experience of war and what he learned about his Italian brothers and sisters in the war.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

In 1918, a teenager from Oak Park, Illinois arrived in Italy to serve with an ambulance brigade at the Italian front. He had chosen to place himself in a dangerous place in order to learn about the world and to have something important to write about. He knew he wanted to be a writer. And he knew there was nothing important going on in Oak Park, Illinois. So he came to Italy. He was only on the front up in the valley of the Sdige river for a few months when he was badly wounded. He was evacuated to a hospital in Milan where he received excellent care from an international team of doctors and nurses. He began to heal and he fell in love with one of his nurses. Hemingway's decision to go to war was both brave and brilliant. He wrote some very great short stories about the war. And later he wrote one of the greatest of all World War I novels: A Farewell to Arms. We will read A Farewell to Arms, and this unforgettable novel will take us to the front and give us a sharp clear view of Italy and the war.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Mussolini served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the Italian Socialist Party, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism, and later founded the fascist movement. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. Mussolini remained in power until he was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943. A few months later, he became the leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German client regime in northern Italy; he held this post until his death in 1945 (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Mussolini had sought to delay a major war in Europe until at least 1942. However, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in declarations of war by France and the United Kingdom and starting World War II. On 10 June 1940, with the Fall of France imminent, Mussolini officially entered the war on the side of Germany, though he was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity and resources to carry out a long war with the British Empire. Mussolini believed that after the imminent French armistice, Italy could gain territorial concessions from France and then he could concentrate his forces on a major offensive in North Africa, where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces. However, the UK government refused to accept proposals for a peace that would involve accepting Axis victories in Eastern and Western Europe, plans for an invasion of the UK did not proceed, and the war continued. In the summer of 1941 Mussolini sent Italian forces to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and war with the United States followed in December. On 24 July 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against him, and the King had him arrested the following day. On 12 September 1943, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian Communists. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

In June of 1861, Cavour died in his family palazzo in Turin. The loss of the brilliant Prime Minister at the most important moment of the unification movement was disastrous for the future of Italy. Fortunately, Italy had another great aristocrat who grew wine on his country estate who was ready to lead the new Italy: Bettino Ricasoli, (1809-1880) Barone di Brolio. Brolio was one of the greatest of Tuscany's vineyards. It was soon to be the oldest wine business in Italy.  Ricasoli had been the leader of the Tuscan liberation movement for years, and now that Florence had voted to join the new Kingdom of Italy, Ricasoli was the perfect successor to Cavour. In 1865, the new government would choose to move the capital of the Kingdom to Florence.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

This is the best one-volume history of Italy that includes the modern part that we want. It provides you with a nice introduction to earlier periods and those of you who studied the Renaissance last year will find these chapters an easy review. We will use the book all quarter.

During the first decade of the existence of the new Kingdom of Italy, the new state faced a number of challenges. There were still parts of the Italian peninsula that were not yet in the Kingdom, such as Venice and Rome. Austria still controlled Venice and there would be yet a third war of Italian independence in 1866 to liberate Venice.. Rome was still in the hands of the Pope with the protection of French troops. Emperor Napoleon III did not want to withdraw French troops without some plan of protection for the Pope because he depended on support at home in France from conservative Roman Catholic French voters. So he needed some reasonable agreement with the Kingdom of Italy for the protection of the Pope, if French troops left Rome. Then there was the constant changing of government leadership: Prime Minister after prime Minister, all with problems with the king who wanted to run the country by himself.  

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

Pope Pius IX (Italian: Pio IX; 1792 – 1878), born Giovanni Maria Ferretti,reigned as Pope from 16 June 1846 to his death in 1878. He was the longest-reigning elected pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving for over 31 years. During his pontificate Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council (1869–70), which decreed papal infallibility, but the council was cut short owing to the loss of the Papal States. Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was also the last pope to rule as the Sovereign of the Papal States, which fell completely to the Italian Army in 1870 and were incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. After this, he was referred to—chiefly by himself—as the "Prisoner of the Vatican". (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

As you begin reading about Week 24, you are assuming that it must be about ice cream since above is a photo of the most famous ice cream store in all of Rome (In order to see the photo, click on the Blue Date Title Bar for Week 24). Well, I just thought it was a good time for you all to learn the name of this great ice cream place just around the corner from the Pantheon for your visit to Rome. Giolitti the Prime Minister did not own it. Probably his cousin or someone. Giovanni Giolitti (1842 – 1928) was an Italian statesman. He was the Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. He is the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Benito Mussolini. He was a prominent leader of the Historical Left and the Liberal Union. Giolitti is widely considered one of the most powerful and important politicians in Italian history and, due to his dominant position in Italian politics, he was accused by critics of beign a parliamentary dictator. Giolitti was a master in the political art of Trasformismo, the method of making a flexible, centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right in Italian politics after the unification. Under his influence, the Italian Liberals did not develop as a structured party, they were, instead, a series of informal personal groupings with no formal links to political constituencies. The period between the start of the 20th century and the start of World War I, when he was Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior from 1901 to 1914 with only brief interruptions, is often referred to as the "Giolittian Era."

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

The Young Mussolini (1883-1943). It is the right time in our class to turn to the life of Benito Mussolini and to come to understand how his life and thought was rooted in the Risorgimento: what was achieved and what was not; where did the Risorgimento fail?  How did  the Italain state in the Twentieth Century find itself caught up in the horrors of Twentieht Century tyranny. Mussolin was born in a small town in the Romagna (a provincial name that echoes Rome but is a distinct area of norther Italy stretching east and west from Bologna.) near Forli. His father, Alessandro Mussolini was an extreme radical thinker in a very small town, who hated the church as much as he loved Garibaldi. Mussolini brought up his son in a household of hot political debate. All day all the time, they discussed and acted upon radical political motivations. The Mussolinis celebrated the "people" the "popolo." Alessandro Mussolini preached about the people and the rich nasty aristocrats who lived off of the poor and the downtrodden. So young Benito grew up in the middle of political debate. And he grew to be very good at it. HIs various breakthroughs into power were all  driven by his unique rhetorical power that was with him from the very beginning.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Our discussion of Mussolini may move you to want to know more about him. The best biography is this one by Christopher Hibbert.

From Amazon:
“Christopher Hibbert is a wonderful narrative historian who has illuminated many corners of Italian life and history. He has the gift of creating scenes and characters, of rendering the vividness of the past. His Mussolini is no exception. He manages to convey both the charisma and dilettantismo of Mussolini the revolutionary leader as well as the later folly of Il Duce, the dictator who began increasingly to believe his own rhetoric -- ''Mussolini is always right' -- in leading his country into World War and ruin.” ―Alexander Stille, award-winning author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism, and of The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi

Reviews:
“Hibbert is a remarkably prolific popular historian, who can take on almost anything, from Dickens to General Wolfe, from Agincourt to Garibaldi.” ―The Observer

“An excellent account...balanced and perceptive in outlook...well-written and entertaining.” ―Economist

“[Hibbert] is a superbly skillful historical writer.” ―The Spectator

“An adroitly written evocation of a compelling but enigmatic personality, a man whose ambition, idealism and opportunism would not seem out of place on the political scene today.” ―Publishers Weekly on Disraeli

“Hibbert's lively and engaging portrait of Benjamin Disraeli joins the author's numerous other well-received, popular biographies...A supremely readable and enjoyable study of a colorful, often astonishing and modern character.” ―Library Journal on Disraeli

The single best book in the English language to explain the power of Hitler and Mussolini with the crowds of followers and the power of their words is Eric Hoffer's brilliant The True Believer. The book is now more than fifty years old, and yet it is more relevant and more obviously true than when it was published in the 1950's. The secret of the dictators was that they knew how to touch the hearts of their trouble peoples and to engender in those hearts the willingness to sacrifice one's self to the larger cause. Hoffer explains what this was all about. The book is a masterpiece and is still read in universitie classes studying the mind and movements of the masses in the Twentieth Century. If you have never read it, this is the perfect time to do it.

The slow march to war that dragged across Europe for fourteen years and exploded in Serbia in August, 1914, was resisted by the international Socialist brotherhood. They dreamed of the day when all workers of all countries would unite and throw off their chains. But the other force of the late Nineteenth Century every bit as powerful as Socialism and Communism was Nationalism. The peoples of the various countries could be awakened very quickly with calls to a nationalistic brotherhood. Mussolini was caught in this dilemma in the early years of the Twentieth Century when his old Marxist teachers were all for resisting war. But he could see that the people wanted it. And his problems as a leader of the Left were the same for all the leaders of the Socialist and Communist Left as they all approached the seeming  inevitability of a World War.His move from Socialist Left to fascist right is very much rooted in his experience of war and what he learned about his Italian brothers and sisters in the war.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

In 1918, a teenager from Oak Park, Illinois arrived in Italy to serve with an ambulance brigade at the Italian front. He had chosen to place himself in a dangerous place in order to learn about the world and to have something important to write about. He knew he wanted to be a writer. And he knew there was nothing important going on in Oak Park, Illinois. So he came to Italy. He was only on the front up in the valley of the Sdige river for a few months when he was badly wounded. He was evacuated to a hospital in Milan where he received excellent care from an international team of doctors and nurses. He began to heal and he fell in love with one of his nurses. Hemingway's decision to go to war was both brave and brilliant. He wrote some very great short stories about the war. And later he wrote one of the greatest of all World War I novels: A Farewell to Arms. We will read A Farewell to Arms, and this unforgettable novel will take us to the front and give us a sharp clear view of Italy and the war.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Mussolini served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the Italian Socialist Party, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism, and later founded the fascist movement. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. Mussolini remained in power until he was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943. A few months later, he became the leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German client regime in northern Italy; he held this post until his death in 1945 (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

Mussolini had sought to delay a major war in Europe until at least 1942. However, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in declarations of war by France and the United Kingdom and starting World War II. On 10 June 1940, with the Fall of France imminent, Mussolini officially entered the war on the side of Germany, though he was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity and resources to carry out a long war with the British Empire. Mussolini believed that after the imminent French armistice, Italy could gain territorial concessions from France and then he could concentrate his forces on a major offensive in North Africa, where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces. However, the UK government refused to accept proposals for a peace that would involve accepting Axis victories in Eastern and Western Europe, plans for an invasion of the UK did not proceed, and the war continued. In the summer of 1941 Mussolini sent Italian forces to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and war with the United States followed in December. On 24 July 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against him, and the King had him arrested the following day. On 12 September 1943, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian Communists. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING

REQUIRED READING FOR SPRING QUARTER

RECOMMENDED READING