Italian Studies: Key Resources

Bringing together new writing by some of the field's most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place.

Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser Ottanelli dig into the transnational experiences and the historical, social, cultural, and political conditions behind the phenomenon of anarchist violence in Italy. Looking at political assassinations in the 1890s, they illuminate the public effort to equate anarchy's goals with violent overthrow.

In The Mafia, Roberto M. Dainotto explores the irresistible appeal of this particular brand of organized crime, its history, and the mythology we have developed around it. Dainotto traces the development of the mafia from its rural beginnings in Western Sicily to its growth into a global crime organization alongside a parallel examination of its evolution in music, print, and on the big screen.