'An innovative scholar of twentieth-century Italian culture and a major scholar of Antonio Gramsci, Forgacs is known for studies that have questioned the conventional periodization of modern Italian history by showing cultural continuities between the fascist regime and the democratic Republic. Here too he often moves across conventional space-time compartmentalizations to dissect the ways in which Italian culture and nation formation have produced exclusion and social marginality, creating spaces that belong in the nation and yet are placed outside of it: from urban peripheries, to the colonies, the south, insane asylums, and 'nomad' camps … Forgacs's critical analyses of counterrepresentations offer indispensable tools for those who are involved in the work of cultural critique.' Silvana Patriarca, The Journal of Modern History