CONTEMPORARY HISTORY OF VENICE

N.B. Students cannot attend classes or take exams if they are not officially enrolled in this course. For any information about the SIE English-taught courses for exchange students, please visit this webpage: https://www.unive.it/pag/35228/

The course explores a number of topics relating to Venice in the Contemporary age (1789 - present).

The course will cover a wide time frame and touch on multiple topics to give the students a solid understanding of Venice’s specificities and how those interacted with the wider Italian and European frame. In addition to the knowledge of the aforementioned topics, students will enhance their abilities to discuss and present topics.

There are no prerequisites to following this course

The syllabus focuses on Venice’s history during the XIX, XX, and XXI centuries. Venice will be the main focus of the course; however, since the city’s history cannot be studied in isolation, it will be placed into its broader historical frame in Italian and European history. The first part of the course will focus on Venice before its inclusion in the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, analysing the role of the city in the Austrian Empire, its relationship with the idea of the Risorgimento, and its ties to the broader European dimension especially as an idealised visiting spot for artists. After 1866, the course will focus on the integration of the city and its surroundings in the networks (cultural and economic) of the Kingdom of Italy, also focusing on the Italian aspirations of reclaiming Trento, Trieste, and the Dalmatian coastline and the role that Venice played in them. The course will also examine the period before the First World War in Venice, as Venetian irredentism coalesced into political movements and pushed Italy into the war. The war will be covered in the central part of the programme, with particular attention given to both the material effects of the conflict and its ideological ones. Starting with the delegitimisation of the parliamentary process before and during the war, the economic devastations, the trauma of Caporetto, and finally, victory. The course will then move to the afterwar years, analysing the aftermath of the First World War and its political repercussions. The Italians frustrated expectations at the Paris Peace Conference and the birth of the myth of a “mutilated victory”. Venice will also be analysed in the context of the “red biennium” of 1919-1920, as social tensions ramped up in the country, while the city saw the birth of the far-right para-military formation, the Cavalieri della Morte, which will be explored in relation with Italian nationalism and the newborn Fascist movement. The course will then touch on the Fascist takeover of the country and analyse the ways the regime perceived and imagined Venice as an Italian city. The programme will then move to the Second World War, the effects of the Allied bombings, the fall of Mussolini and the Resistance. Moreover, the course will also focus on the role of Venice and its harbour in the Allies’ plans to liberate the North of Italy and how the peculiar position of the city conditioned their efforts. After the end of the war, the course will touch on the economic rebirth of the city and the boom which affected the whole region (and the country), which turned the Veneto from one of the poorest to one of the wealthiest regions of Italy, also altering the relationship between Venice and the mainland. In the final part of the programme, students will examine the increasingly large Venetian tourism industry and its long-lasting effects on the city’s life. The idea of Venice as a museum of the world, but also the one of Venice as a museum rather than a city, will be analysed with special attention given to issues such as depopulation, privatisation, and environmental problems.

Albanese Giulia, Alle origini del fascismo. La violenza politica a Venezia 1919-1922, Padua: Il poligrafo, 2001.

Albanese Giulia and Marco Borghi (eds.), Memoria resistente. La lotta partigiana a Venezia e provincia nel ricordo dei protagonisti, Portogruaro: nuovadimensione, 2005.

Albanese Giulia, Il fascismo italiano. Storia e interpretazioni, Rome: Carocci, 2021.

Benzoni Gino and Gaetano Cozzi (eds.), Venezia e l’Austria, Venice: Marsilio, 1999.

Caposano Vito, “Giuseppe Turcato. La Resistenza a Venezia tra azione, narrazione, memoria”, Venetica rivista di storia contemporanea, 61, 2021, 211-228.

Cooke Philip, The legacy of the Italian Resistance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Cosmai Franca and Stefano Sorteni (eds.), L'ingegneria civile a Venezia: istituzioni, uomini, professioni da Napoleone al fascismo, Venice: Marsilio, 2001.

Davis Robert C. and Garry Marvin, Venice, the tourist maze. A cultural critique of the World’s most touristed city, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Franzina Emilio, Il Veneto ribelle. Proteste sociali localismo popolare e sindacalizzazione, Udine: Paolo Gaspari editore, 2001.

Foot John, Blood and Power. The rise and fall of Italian Fascism, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.

Isman Fabio, Venezia, la fabbrica della cultura: tra istituzioni ed eventi, Venice: Marsilio, 2000.

Isnenghi Mario and Stuart Woolf (eds.), Storia di Venezia, L’Ottocento e il Novecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 2002.

Isnenghi Mario and Daniele Ceschi (eds.), La grande guerra: dall'intervento alla vittoria mutilata, Turin: UTET, 2008.

Isnenghi Mario, Se Venezia vive. Una storia senza memoria, Venice: Marsilio, 2021.

Nardo Loredana, “Un mondo in attesa di costruzione: il Ppi veneziano”, Venetica rivista di storia contemporanea, 61, 2021, 69-88.

Pignotti Marco, Il diario politico di Francesco Cocco Ortu (1922-1929). Dalla delegittimazione del distema parlamentare alla legittimazione della dittatura fascista, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2021.

Piva Francesco, Lotte contadine e origini del fascismo. Padova-Venezia 1919-1922, Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1977.

Pomoni Luciano, Il dovere nazionale: i nazionalisti veneziani alla conquista della piazza, 1908-1915, Padua: Il poligrafo, 1998.

Riall Lucy, Risorgimento: the history of Italy from Napoleon to nation-state, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Salerno Giacomo-Maria, Per una critica dell’economia turistica. Venezia tra museificazione e mercificazione, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2020.

Salerno Giacomo-Maria, “Touristification and displacement. The long-standing production of Venice as a tourist attraction”, City, 26:2-3, 2022, 519-541.

Stringa Nico, “Venezia ’900: il secolo delle mostre”, Laboratoire italien, 15, 2014, 167-178.

Ventura Angelo, Risorgimento veneziano: lineamenti costituzionali del governo provvisorio di Venezia nel 1848-49, e altri saggi su Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione del 1848, Rome: Donzelli, 2017.

Zannini Andrea, “Il turismo a Venezia dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi”, Laboratoire italien, 15, 2014, 191-199.

As a mid-term exam, students will be asked to produce a short piece of writing:
A source analysis using one of the sources examined during class. The analysis shall include what the source is, who produced it, why, where, how, on which support, which were the goals of who produced it, and in which conditions it was produced. (Max 1,000 words).

As a final exam, students will be asked to produce a piece of writing:
Each student shall produce a short essay (1,500 words) answering one of the questions examined in class. Students will then have to discuss their writing during an oral exam to prove their knowledge of the topic.

Classes will include two sections. The first will be a lecture on the class topic, framing the issue in the broader national and European context. The second will discuss a primary source relevant to the class’s topic (a diary page, a snippet from a newspaper article, or a photograph…). This exercise will allow students to start thinking about primary sources and the way historians use them to understand the past, giving them a tangible example of a cultural product from the time period they are examining in class and providing a “tangible” example of the issues covered by the class topic.

English

written and oral