"EUROPEAN AND ITALIAN MODERN HISTORY"
(a.a. 2023-2024)

This 42-hour (2 hours twice a week) study module is ideally aimed at non-Italian students by culture and language, also of very different origins and of different backgrounds. The aim would therefore be to introduce them to the history and mentality of our country and at the same time also provide references to European history, with regard to, at least, the common elements, in order to allow everyone to reach an adequate level.
In this perspective, the period 1789-1914 would be divided into four sections:
- The French Revolution and Napoleon: a moment of Europeanism
- From the Congress of Vienna (1815) to 1848: Romanticism, reaction, new seeds
- From 1848 to 1870: the making of Italy as a nation in comparison with other state realities
- From 1870 to 1914: the problems of Unification in Italy, the South, the Savoy State, the colonies
A diachronic system would be combined with a thematic system that allows students to focus on the great problems of the period in question, in a transversal way:
- Wars and civil populations (from the French Revolution to the Commune in Paris, to the Great War)
- Work (private work, public work, the rise – and current fall - of the working class) together with health issues
- Anti-Semitism and the Shoah (from Ghettos, their opening to the Dreyfus Affair to Auschwitz)
- Religion, information, literacy (from oral knowledge to newspapers – and, currently, internet -)
- From the Empire to the Nation (and towards European Community via globalization)
- Civil coexistence and fights between peoples and minorities (women, emigrants, immigrants)
The teaching will take into account the history and related historiography, in order to problematize the different phases, taking into account possible different readings and revision of the historical concepts involved.
A thematic and specific bibliography will be presented at the beginning of the course. A little history of the world by E.H. Gombrich (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 220-284) will be used as a text-book for all students, alongside C. H. Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 87-304), both available on the platform Moodle. After each class, the PowerPoint will be uploaded to the appropriate platform.
The work will be evaluated thanks to 4 (four) tests ministered during class time along the calendar, counting each 25% of the final mark. Twenty minutes class presentations will be available to selected portion of students only, in order either to avoid a fail mark or to better any mark, and they will consist in a reading agreed with the teacher and presented to the class-mates via a PowerPoint.