The FORUM devoted to the environmental history of fascism.

The September edition of “Annali.Reviews.Online” was published in recent days, last issue of 2023. It opens with an interesting Forum devoted to the book of Marco Armiero, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Roberta Biasillo, La natura del duce. Una storia ambientale del fascismo, reviewed in the Italian edition (published by Einaudi) by Simona Leoni Boscani (Bern) and in the English edition Mussolini’s Nature (published by MIT Press) by Anna Koch (London). The book offers a detailed analysis of the political ecology of fascism, examining the practices and discourse through which the regime shaped the perception and the configuration of nature, in order to adapt it to its own ideological needs. Such a reflection is topical, both in terms of natural disasters and in terms of the memory of the monuments and other traces that fascism left in the landscape. This publication shows very efficiently the potential of the approach of environmental political history, a field of research that has become very relevant in recent international historiography.

As usual, ARO furthermore presents the latest publications in the field of early modern and contemporary history, devoted to multiple research themes, among which the history of archives reconstructed in Rossella Ioppi’s monograph dedicated to the archives of the prince-bishop of Trent published by FBK Press ). Another interesting study is that devoted to diplomacy between Italy and Russia, which is covered in Giulia Bianchi’s volume on relations between Rome and St. Petersburg in the short but intense and complex period from the Racconigi Agreement of 1909 until the outbreak of World War I, reviewed by Antonio Varsori.

Among the many exciting reading proposals collected in this issue, it is worth noting the biography written by Vittorio Coco of General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa one of the protagonists-if not “the key-man”-of the reaction of the institutions of republican Italy to the onslaught of terrorism and the Mafia between the 1960s and early 1980s, reviewed by Chiara Zampieri.

The next “Annali.Reviews.Online” issue will come out in Spring 2024. From 2024, the journal will be published twice a year, 31 March and 30 September, respectively. The structure and the multiplicity of topics that have characterized “Annali.Reviews.Online” from its creation in 2018 will remain the same, thanks to the invaluable collaboration of a large group of editors.

Newsletter subscription: [https://aro-isig.fbk.eu/newsletter/?]