This book provides the first full account of the Italian Sobility in the post-unification era, and challenges recent interpretations that have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites by highlighting the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles developed more indirect forms of influence, while remaining a separate and exclusive group with limited social contacts with industrial or managerial elites, until World War I transformed their old way of life.

This book offers a fresh, original and interdisciplinary interpretation of what the Catholic Reformation meant at local diocesan level in the face of attempts by Rome to regularize worship c. 1550-1700. In the process of protecting the spiritual integrity of their patria, representatives of Italian local history such as Pietro Maria Campi of Piacenza (1569-1649)--who provides the focus of this wide-ranging study--significantly broadened the boundaries of historical study and helped to lay the foundations of Italian national history writing.

This book provides a meticulous examination of the ideology, structure, and functions of the papal police as they operated in the city and province of Bologna in the period before Italian unity, and in doing so offers an important new interpretation of the Risorgimento. The author argues that after the Restoration the new police soon found themselves incapable of dealing effectively with overwhelming problems of crime and public order. In allowing Bologna's elites to arm themselves in posse-style "citizen patrols" on two occasions, the papal government had opened the doors to reform and,...

This is the first social and cultural study of the principal "free" professions in Italy between unification and the First World War. It is a major contribution both to the history of the bourgeoisie in Italy and to the developing role of professions in modern European society. The first section discusses the formation of modern Italian engineering, notarial occupations, law, and medicine. The second section provides an analysis of the interrelation among the professions, the nobility and Parliament, and examines the social status of members of the professions.

This book covers one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not only over theology but over all branches of knowledge. By drawing extensively upon newly-opened sources in the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office, generally known as the "Inquisition," it affords a more articulated and objective assessment of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship on religion and culture in early modern Italy.