The Rubbettino publishing house celebrates its 50th anniversary with a great History of Italy in four volumes, edited by some of the most authoritative specialists of the Risorgimento and the Republic. The new publishing venture will be presented in a national preview during “Più libri più liberi”, the national fair for small and medium-sized publishing, on Wednesday 7 December, at 3 pm, in the Sala Elettra della Nuvola at Eur in Rome.
The “great work” is organized according to a thematic and temporal scansion: 1) Risorgimento: constitution and national independence (1815-1849 / 1849-1866) by Roberto Balzani and Carlo M. Fiorentino; 2) Country, political representation and social change (1866 – 1887 / 1887 – 1903) by Andrea Ciampani and Sandro Rogari; 3) Nation and State, State and Nation (1903 – 1924 / 1925 – 1946) by Gerardo Nicolosi and Giuseppe Parlato; 4) Republican Democracy (1949-1969 / 1970 – 1994) by Andrea Ciampani and Giovanni Orsina.
The first of the four volumes has just been published, the others will be published by 2024. The scientific direction is entrusted to Andrea Ciampani, full professor of Contemporary History at the Lumsa in Rome while the editorial coordination is by Maurizio Serio, associate professor of History of Political Doctrines at the ‘Guglielmo Marconi’ University of Rome.
“There could not have been a better occasion than the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the publishing house for the publication of Rubbettino’s Storia d’Italia – explains the publisher Florindo Rubbettino – A work that is grafted onto a well-established tradition of Italian publishing which has produced some notable ‘major works’ (as they are usually defined) which today constitute a significant piece of our country’s cultural heritage. Re-proposing a multi-volume story today in the age of the web and Wikipedia might seem almost narcissistic and even too ambitious, but it is a challenge that we have deemed appropriate to face and which seems decidedly stimulating to us”.
The project of this history of contemporary Italy with many voices was born, in fact, to meet a fascinating cultural challenge: “to connect scientific research – always explains Florindo Rubbettino – to the historical narration and thus correspond to an individual and collective need, in part manifest and partly latent, which comes from many areas of our society.If for over twenty years there has been no reconstruction of the Italian events of the last two centuries, not only has historical research continued intensely, but it has produced innovative studies, capable of offering a greater interpretative capacity of reality as it unfolds to those interested in critically meditating on the Italian paths in the European and world context in order to arrive at formulating their own point of view”.
The itinerary addressed by the four volumes of the work highlights the choice to privilege the political profile of the history of contemporary Italy. In today’s sensitivity, political research allows us to account for crises and transitions, reforms and revolutions, slowdowns and accelerations, economic and structural changes, single events and long-term dynamics, allowing us to escape closed categories and avoid the limits of a long duration understood as immobile space, to restore strength to the passages of a historical becoming in continuous movement.
What changes and what remains the same in the long history of formation, growth and development of our country as a unitary state? What are the main stages, the protagonists, the political cultures and the living currents of our common history? How have the fractures that still divide us been articulated, what tensions have they generated on the social body and what stimuli for unity have the challenges coming from outside given us? These are the main questions that the authors of the four volumes try to answer.