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New Books in Italian Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

00:43:42

The Afterlife of a Fascist Murder: Giacomo Matteotti...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/10/05

In this episode, I speak with Dr Amy King of Bristol University about her book, The Afterlife of a Fascist Murder: Giacomo Matteotti in Myth and Memory, 1924–2024, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.The year 2024 marked a century since socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti's assassination. Widely commemorated in Italy, he's often remembered within a national narrative of antifascist resistance. But how was this narrative built and how has the far right responded? This Element traces the

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00:49:26

The Romans: A People’s History with Paul Chrystal...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/10/01

The Romans loom large in the imagination, credited with roads, aqueducts, politics, plumbing and empire – yet these familiar achievements tell only part of the story. The Romans: A People’s History (Reaktion, 2026) turns away from generals and emperors to focus instead on the millions of ordinary men and women whose voices rarely made it into history. Drawing on inscriptions, literature, household objects, mosaics and myth, it reveals how plebeian lives shaped the culture that still surrounds us:

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55:36

Edward Cutler, "This Beautiful Country: How Italy's...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/09/01

InThis Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation(Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it.Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely

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63:36

Jane Draycott, "Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/08/22

Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman.Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically

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65:18

Gianluca Fantoni, "Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/08/07

Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade(McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026)tellsthe compelling story of the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group (JBG), a five-thousand-strong military unit, recruited primarily from the Jewish population of Palestine, and the only exclusively Jewish military unit to fight under the British flag during the Second World War. Gianluca Fantoni reconstructs the military and human experience of the brigade in Italy and investigates its enduring

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49:08

Bradford A. Bouley, "The Barberini Butchers: Meat,...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/07/18

In 1644 four norcinior pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a blind eye to such horrendous acts. This fabricated story

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45:35

Krzysztof Rowiński, "Failure Narratives Beyond...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/07/07

Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland, Italy, and the United States,

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46:41

Catherine Fletcher, "The Firearm Revolution: From...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/06/23

In Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later in that century Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a faster-firing, more portable handgun that could be hidden beneath a cloak. As the gun proliferated in society, it became both a means of self-defence and a threat to civic order. In The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires (Princeton

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51:04

Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/06/15

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the

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35:48

Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/06/12

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amountsof capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata

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95:50

Susanna Drake, "Veiling in the Late Antique World"...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/06/08

Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an emotion such as grief. Late Roman mosaics show people covering their hands with veils when receiving or giving something precious. They covered their altars, doorways, shrines, and temples; and many covered their heads when sacrificing to their gods. Early Christian intellectuals such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa used these

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3:45

Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man:...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/05/25

Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses,

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46:48

Italo Calvino on the Written and the Unwritten Word

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/05/10

In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983.Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War II, publishing his debut novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, in 1947. He went on to write some of

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58:10

Paola De Santo, "The Ambassador and the Courtesan:...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/05/02

Paola de Santo joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy (U Delaware Press, 2026). Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear unrelated, this book demonstrates their shared relation to the body politic, including the

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50:58

David Potter, "Master of Rome: A Life of Julius...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/04/11

By any measure, Julius Caesar is one of the most significant and famous figures in Roman history. Self-identified as a "popular" politician, he advocated for effective government to better the lives of average Romans,but believed such a government could not be based upon the existing democracy. Only through his personal authority and the massive organization he built to overthrow the government could the prosperity of all Rome's citizens be ensured.Through a careful analysis of the ancient

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37:15

Marta Lorimer, "Europe As Ideological Resource:...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/04/05

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing

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42:40

Martha Feldman, "Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi,...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/03/22

Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin and conditions, not least the last of them, Alessandro Moreschi. In Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome (Zone Books, 2026), musicologist Professor Martha Feldman declines to accept these deep-seated mysteries and

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95:14

Jake Nabel, "The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/03/16

At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this (open access) book The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations (U California Press, 2025), Jake Nabel analyzes Roman-Parthian interstate politics by focusing on a group of princes from the Arsacid family—the ruling dynasty of Parthia—who were sent to live at the Roman court. Although Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and

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49:41

Jessica Clarke, "A New History of Ancient Roman...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/03/13

"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referred to as ‘Roman playwrights,’ and Rome itself is generally regarded as the driving force behind the development of theatrical culture in Italy. But was this early theatre in Italy specifically or characteristically Roman? Using previously marginalised archaeological source material and placing it in constructive dialogue with the surviving ancient

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61:38

Kim Bowes, "Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the...

New Books in Italian Studies ·

2026/03/12

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor. Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the

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