Albertina Vittoria. I luoghi della cultura: Istituzioni, riviste e circuiti intellettuali nell’Italia del Novecento

This informative and original work-to my knowledge, this is the first study to deal specifically with the apparato organizzativo (private initiatives and public institutions) of Italian culture in its entirety in the 1900s-opens in 1909, with Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini breaking with tradition by creating "nuovi luoghi della cultura," sites of intellectual activity outside academia, for example journals and book series.To that end, they used, when necessary, means typically associated with politics (7).Indeed, following the publication of "J'accuse…!" by Emile Zola in 1898, intellectual activity in Italy began to take on "obiettivi non esclusivamente culturali" (8).Papini and Prezzolini worked not in isolation, of course, but in concurrence with the historical avant-gardes and within the broad context of societal modernization.Additional impetus to this refashioning of intellectual life came in the form of the "rinnovamento interiore" of the individual advocated by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile.As traditional "letterati" morphed into "intellettuali" (9), "i luoghi della cultura" ceased to be exclusive to the intellectual elite and opened to include a wider public through cultural institutes, libraries, philosophical discussion groups, and bookstores (7).Scholarly activity was carried forth not only by individuals but now also by team effort-by the editorial staffs of journals and publishing houses.These transformations reflected economic and social changes ongoing in Italy, as it transitioned to a "società di massa" (9), a consequence of which was a growing need for "strumenti più agili per raggiungere un pubblico più vasto" (9).So, chapter 1 ("Il primo Novecento") examines the first twenty years of the twentieth century, beginning with the Giolitti era, a time when Italy, as Giovanni Amendola famously wrote in La Voce, "come oggi è non ci piace" (qtd.7).In this opening chapter, Albertina Vittoria looks closely at the "importante polo di aggregazione intellettuale" linking Naples, Bari, and Sicily, as constituted by Croce, Gentile, and Laterza Publishing, to then consider existing academies and cultural institutes, along with their intellectual involvement in nationalist, socialist, and Roman Catholic political movements.It closes with an examination of the mobilization of Italian intellectuals before and during the First World War.Chapter 2 ("Il fascismo") examines the relationship between the regime and intellectuals: first, the believers and the "embedded" (those enticed by stipends

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