Ph.D. Dissertation: “Between the Local and the National: the Free Territory of Trieste, "Italianità,” and the Politics of Identity from the Second World War to the Osimo Treaty” (West Virginia University, 2014).
This political process ultimately reshaped the image of the Triestine border that, located at the Southern point of the Iron Curtain, gradually transformed from a wall into a bridge toward the Communist world. Thus, my work sheds light on the politics of identity in Cold War regions, the dynamic relationship between capital and frontier cities and the fluidity of notions of Italian nationhood in post-war Italy.
This dissertation relies on the in-depth analysis on a wide set of primary sources that I collected in more than 20 archives both in Italy and the United States. As a research fellow In Rome I examined state material from the Office of the Border Zones, the Central Archive, the Senate Archive as well as political records from the Don Sturzo, Gramsci, and Ugo Spirito Institutes. In the United States I traveled to the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Libraries, and also relied on the material of both the Library of Congress and the National Archives. Along with the examination of political records I also carried out the analysis of twenty-seven Italian and American newspapers as well as oral interviews with local political figures in both Trieste and Rome.
I am currently preparing a manuscript of my Dissertation whose tentative title is Trieste and its Territory: the Politicization of a Cold War Borderland.
Cold War Trieste: the Untold Story of Allied Military Occupation 1945-1954
In this work I argue that political leaders, parties, and associations used a wide range of political, economic, and social activities, which I later refer to as the politics of identity, to claim Italian sovereignty over the contested Adriatic border and reassert the Italian identity or “Italianità” of Trieste and its territory. Over time, however, ideas of Italian identity took a more dynamic as well as political and economic meaning that increasingly detached from former notions of an “imagined community” sharing a common language, culture, and past. While this dissertation initially traces the fluctuating meaning of “Italianità” from nineteenth-century irredentism to twentieth-century Fascism, it later explores government support of nationalist ambitions that survived the Second World War and only gradually adjusted to the dynamic logic of the Cold War.
My second project investigates the US strategy in Trieste by examining the views of a wide set of American actors who framed, formulated, and implemented the Cold War logic of containment at the southern point of the Iron Curtain. In line with new approaches to the Cold War that have increasingly shifted away from a narrow diplomatic focus and disputed its centralized nature, this study explores the Triestine problem within American public discourse, the thoughts of American officers and political appointees, and, above all, the views and actions of the Trieste United States Troops (TRUST). While unraveling the complex and dynamic interaction between political action and the public sphere, this study ultimately aims to shed light on the role that the ideology, political language and culture of the Cold War played in the Allied Military occupation of Trieste.
Refugees and Right-Wing Politics: How the European Project is drowning in the Mediterranean
Drawing from my in-depth study of the Triestine case and the Adriatic diaspora, this third project aims to comparatively investigate the rise of right-wing political extremism and the weakening of popular support for European integration during the refugee crises that accompanied the Yugoslav wars of succession of the 1990s and the political instability plaguing both the Middle East and North Africa since 2011. In particular, the project examines the parallels between European reactions to both incoming Yugoslav migrants/refugees and incoming refugees/migrants crossing the Mediterranean to unveil the specific sense of otherness that was forged within the European public. In discussing the politicization of the humanitarian tragedy that has transformed the Mediterranean from the “lake of Europe” into a no-man’s land, this project comparatively also explores the extent to which inner-European disagreements greatly impaired Europe’s ability to respond to the humanitarian emergency across its Adriatic frontier and south-eastern border. Aware of the specificities of each case, this project broadens scholarly understanding of the political costs of European discord in decision making, the challenges that have been placed on the project of European integration, and the surge in nationalist rhetoric that has weakened public support for a supranational, democratic, open, and tolerant Union.