Download or read book Italy and the Potato A History 1550 2000 written by David Gentilcore and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little has been written about the potato's Italian history. This book examines the important role it has played in Italy's social, cultural and economic history.

Download or read book Nature and History in Modern Italy written by Marco Armiero and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation’s long experience in managing domesxadtixadcated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparxadable. The interplay of Italy’s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.

Download or read book Observing Agriculture in Early Twentieth Century Italy written by Federico D'Onofrio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural Economists in Early Twentieth-Century Italy describes how Italian agricultural economists collected information about the economy of Italy, between the Giolittian and the Fascist era. The book carefully describes three main forms of economic observation: enquiries, statistics, and farm surveys. For each of these forms of observation, the main participants to the investigation are discussed with their respective agendas, alongside the purposes of the investigation, and its practical constraints. This work introduces the concept of "stakeholder statistics", and stresses the two-way relation between the observer and the observed in the co-production of observational knowledge. Practices of observation developed together with agricultural economics as a discipline and a profession. The study of forms of investigation therefore shed light on the constitution of a coherent and self-conscious group of agricultural economists in Italy, and the scientific and methodological alliances they forged with agricultural economists elsewhere in Europe. Thanks to ambitious research projects, Ghino Valenti in the Giolittian period, and Arrigo Serpieri, after the First World War, led the transformation of Italian agricultural economists from agents of estate owners, to social and economic experts in the service of the Italian state. The group of agricultural economists who gathered around Serpieri played an important role in supplying the ideology of the agricultural elites with economic content, especially after the First World War, along lines that resemble the development of agrarian ideologies in other countries of Central Europe. This work discusses how observation entered the political debate on agricultural policies of the Fascist regime, namely the so-called Ruralismo.

Download or read book Naples in the Eighteenth Century written by Girolamo Imbruglia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1734 the kingdom of Naples became an independent monarchy, but in 1799 a Jacobin revolution transformed it briefly into a republic. In these few but intense decades of independence all the great problems of the age of the Enlightenment became apparent: attacks on feudalism and on the power of the Catholic Church, the struggle for a modern economy, and aspirations to change the administrative machinery and the judicial system. Yet Naples was also the city visited by Winckelmann and Goethe, the city of Sir William Hamilton, of the study of Pompeii and Herculanum, and of the greatest musicians of the age. This collection of essays addresses a range of issues in the city's political and cultural history, and demonstrates the city's importance in shaping the modern, enlightened culture of Europe.

Download or read book The Nation of the Risorgimento written by Alberto Banti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a translation of La Nazione del Risorgimento, one of the most important and influential works on modern Italian history published in recent years. It analyses the aspects of the ideas of nationhood and patriotism that impassioned and energized the Italian Risorgimento movement during the first half of the nineteenth century. Employing an innovative interdisciplinary approach that examines the cultural production and consumption of the period, the author has challenged the orthodoxies of post-1945 Italian historiography. He explores the developing themes that gave strength to the idea of the Italian ‘nation’, and in the process persuasively explains why so many young men and women were willing to lay down their lives for the ‘patria’ and its independence.

Download or read book Naples and Napoleon written by John A. Davis and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Naples and Napoleon John Davis takes the southern Italian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as the vantage point for a sweeping reconsideration of Italy's history in the age of Napoleon and the European revolutions. The book's central themes are posed by the period of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy was the Mediterranean frontier of Napoleon's continental empire. The tensions between Naples and Paris made this an important chapter in the history of that empire and revealed the deeper contradictions on which it was founded. But the brief interlude of Napoleonic rule later came to be seen as the critical moment when a modernizing North finally parted company from a backward South. Although these arguments still shape the ways in which Italian history is written, in most parts of the North political and economic change before Unification was slow and gradual; whereas in the South it came sooner and in more disruptive forms. Davis develops a wide-ranging critical reassessment of the dynamics of political change in the century before Unification. His starting point is the crisis that overwhelmed the Italian states at the end of the 18th century, when Italian rulers saw the political and economic fabric of the Ancien Régime undermined throughout Europe. In the South the crisis was especially far reaching and this, Davis argues, was the reason why in the following decade the South became the theatre for one of the most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe. The transition was precarious and insecure, but also mobilized political projects and forms of collective action that had no counterparts elsewhere in Italy before 1848, illustrating the similar nature of the political challenges facing all the pre-Unification states. Although Unification finally brought Italy's insecure dynastic principalities to an end, it offered no remedies to the insecurities that from much earlier had made the South especially vulnerable to the challenges of the new age: which was why the South would become a problem - Italy's 'Southern Problem'.

Download or read book Porta Palazzo written by Rachel E. Black and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Porta Palazzo, arguably Western Europe's largest open-air market, is a central economic, social, and cultural hub for Italians and migrants in the city of Turin. Open-air markets like Porta Palazzo have existed for centuries in Europe; although their function has changed over time—traditional markets are no longer the primary place to buy food—they remain popular destinations. In an age of supermarkets and online commerce, markets offer unique social and cultural opportunities and bring together urban and rural worldviews. These factors are often overlooked in traditional economic studies of food distribution, but anthropologist Rachel E. Black contends that social relations are essential for building and maintaining valuable links between production and consumption. From the history of Porta Palazzo to the current growing pains of the market, this book concentrates on points where trade meets cultural identities and cuisine. Its detailed and perceptive portraits of the market bring into relief the lives of the vendors, shoppers, and passersby. Black's ethnography illuminates the daily work of market-going and the anxieties of shoppers as they navigate the market. It examines migration, the link between cuisine and cultural identity, culinary tourism, the connection between the farmers' market and the production of local food, and the urban planning issues negotiated by the city of Turin and market users during a recent renovation. This vibrant study, featuring a foreword by Slow Food Movement founder Carlo Petrini, makes a strong case for why markets like Porta Palazzo are critical for fostering culinary culture and social life in cities.

Download or read book Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy written by Axel Körner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-08-18 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring theatre and opera, architecture and urban planning, the medieval revival and the rediscovery of the Etruscan and Roman past, this book analyzes Italians' changing relationship to their new nation state and the monarchy, class conflicts, and the emergence of new belief systems and of scientific responses to the experience of modernity.

Download or read book Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth Century Rome written by Jeffrey Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Coping with Crisis The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre Industrial Settlements written by Daniel R. Curtis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why in the pre-industrial period were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while other settlements were vulnerable to crisis? Indeed, what made certain human habitations more prone to decline or even total collapse, than others? All pre-industrial societies had to face certain challenges: exogenous environmental hazards such as earthquakes or plagues, economic or political hazards from ’outside’ such as warfare or expropriation of property, or hazards of their own-making such as soil erosion or subsistence crises. How then can we explain why some societies were able to overcome or negate these problems, while other societies proved susceptible to failure, as settlements contracted, stagnated, were abandoned, or even disappeared entirely? This book has been stimulated by the questions and hypotheses put forward by a recent ’disaster studies’ literature - in particular, by placing the intrinsic arrangement of societies at the forefront of the explanatory framework. Essentially it is suggested that the resilience or vulnerability of habitation has less to do with exogenous crises themselves, but on endogenous societal responses which dictate: (a) the extent of destruction caused by crises and the capacity for society to protect itself; and (b) the capacity to create a sufficient recovery. By empirically testing the explanatory framework on a number of societies between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in England, the Low Countries, and Italy, it is ultimately argued in this book that rather than the protective functions of the state or the market, or the implementation of technological innovation or capital investment, the most resilient human habitations in the pre-industrial period were those than displayed an equitable distribution of property and a well-balanced distribution of power between social interest groups. Equitable distributions of power and property were the underlying conditions in pre-industrial societies that all

Download or read book The Continuity of Feudal Power written by Tommaso Astarita and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Continuity of Feudal Power is the first modern study of an aristocratic family in the kingdom of Naples, the largest Italian state, during the period of Spanish rule, 1503-1707.

Download or read book Feeding the World written by Giovanni Federico and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished. Feeding the World synthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.

Download or read book Italian Victualling Systems in the Early Modern Age 16th to 18th Century written by Luca Clerici and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illustrates the complexity and variety of victualling systems in early modern Italy. For a long time, the historiography of urban provisioning systems in late medieval and early modern times featured a conceptual opposition between victualling administration and the market. In this book, on the contrary, the term ‘victualling system’ (sistema annonario) is employed according to its historical meaning, designating an organised set of public and private channels, evolved typically in urban contexts, for the procurement and distribution of the goods essential for the daily life of common people. According to this definition, specifically, a victualling system included also the market, as one of the different channels for the procurement and distribution of goods. What characterises the Italian case in the European context are both the earliness of these institutions and the long-lasting political and economic fragmentation of the peninsula: these factors determined the great variety and complexity of the solutions adopted. In order to show these features, the analysis focuses on four central issues: the configuration of systems, institutional pragmatism and variety, articulation of circuits, and plurality of actors. The seven relevant case-studies included in this book, all based on direct archival research, cover a wide range of geographical contexts and institutional arrangements, from the North to the South of the peninsula, and include both large-sized cities (Milan and Rome), medium-sized cities (Bergamo, Vicenza, and Ferrara), and entire regions (the March of Ancona, and Sicily). This allows the reader to appreciate regional and local differences in detail, making this book of interest for academics and scholars in economic, social, and urban history.

Download or read book Leading the Economic Risorgimento written by Silvia A. Conca Messina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-05 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lombardy, with about 10 million inhabitants, is today the most populated and prosperous region of Italy, and Milan is a renowned capital of art, fashion and design. During the 19th century until WWI, the region gradually became the leader in Italy’s economic development and distinguished itself in the European economic landscape for its long-standing industrial strength and diversified economy, which included one of the Europe’s most productive agricultural systems. It was the economic locomotive of contemporary Italy, contributing to the economic Risorgimento that complemented the country’s political resurgence. The present volume gathers the contributions of some major experts on the subject, providing an in-depth analysis of Lombardy’s pattern of development, consisting of an exceptionally symbiotic and balanced interplay of sectors (agriculture, industry, trade, and banking) in a gradual yet steady growth process, also supported by progress in the education system. During the century, there was a shift away from an economy based on agriculture and commerce to a progressively more industrial economy and this process accelerated from the 1880s. The secret of this dynamic balance was Lombardy’s active relationship with the rest of Europe and with the international markets. Aimed at scholars, researchers and students in the fields of early modern and modern history, economic and social history, the book provides a clear explanation of Lombardy’s economic development during the long 19th Century.

Download or read book The Wealth of Communities written by Matteo Di Tullio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early decades of the sixteenth century were a turbulent time for the Italian peninsula as competing centres of power struggled for political control. Nowhere was this more true than the area contested by Milan and Venice, that was constantly crossed and occupied by rival armies. Investigating the impact of successive crises upon the inhabitants of the Po Valley, this book challenges many fundamental assumptions about the relationship between war and economic development and draws conclusion that have implications for early modern Europe as a whole. In traditional historiography, periods of war and general crisis have often been regarded as promoting a shift in resources from the communal towards a small number of individuals. However, through a close micro-study of a single region, this book offers a different perspective. Rather than promoting an aggressive individualism, it is argued that in times of general crisis, social networks aimed to reproduce themselves and the original status quo by developing creative solutions and institutions favouring co-operation. Furthermore the elites could not always exploit ’local’ wealth because of the need to protect their position of leadership within the community, which required the preservation of that very community. This thesis not only challenges the received wisdom, but also fuels a new debate about the ways in which economic growth occurred in Early Modern Italy and Europe.

Download or read book Resilience in Papal Rome 1656 1870 written by Marina Formica and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-23 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the evolution of the city of Rome, in particular, papal Rome, from the plague of 1656 until 1870 when it became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. The authors explore papal Rome as a resilient city that had to cope with numerous crises during this period. By focusing on a selection of different crises in Rome, the book combines cultural, political, and economic history to examine key turning points in the city’s history. The book is split into chapters exploring themes such as diplomacy and international relations, disease, environmental disasters, famine, public debt, and unravels the political, economic, and social consequences of these transformative events. All the chapters are based on untapped original sources, chiefly from the State Archive in Rome, the Vatican Archives, the Rome Municipal Archives, the École Française Library, the National Library, and the Capitoline Library.

Download or read book Gramsci RLE Gramsci written by John Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘passive revolution’ to describe the limitations and weaknesses of the 19th century bourgeois state in Italy which permitted economic development whilst thwarting social and political progress. This detailed study consists of seven essays each exploring a different theme of the economic and social basis of the Liberal state, providing a broad understanding of the background against the emergence of Italian fascism and present a number of debates and controversies amongst Italian historians. By critical discussion of Gramsci’s reading of modern Italian history, the essays present an analysis of the structure and development of social and economic relations in the formation of the Liberal state, illustrating the transition from liberalism to fascism.