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"America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows that Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American 'domestic manners' were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, America in Italy is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought"--

Starting from a discussion of three new books, the article examines recent developments in Habsburg historiography, which have important implications for the ways historians explain nineteenth-century European history as a whole, and the Empire's relationship to its many nationalities in particular. Wolfram Siemann's monumental new biography of Metternich makes a crucial contribution to reassessing the historical context from which the Habsburg monarchy emerged. At the centre of this work is the statesman's political thought and his dramatic experience of political change between the French Revolution and the aftermath of 1848. Pieter Judson's history of the Habsburg monarchy exemplifies a substantial new body of research that has shifted attention from the antagonistic relationship between the Empire and its nationalities to the compatibility between a sense of national belonging and imperial loyalty. Both works complement the discussion of hybridity and national indifference during Emperor Franz Joseph's long reign, which Michaela and Karl Vocelka examine in a new biography.

This article challenges the common idea of Italy's obsession with Italian music, and with Verdi in particular, an image which supports stereotypes of Italians as narrowly focused on their own national culture, mentally sealed off from what is happening outside the peninsula. Starting from an analysis of the frequently rather mixed or even negative reception of Verdi's music in Italy, the article outlines the general crisis which affected Italian opera after Unification. One of the responses to this crisis was a remarkable internationalization of the repertoire on the Italian stages. Taking music and opera as an example, the article demonstrates the extent to which Italy articulated its experience of modernity and nation building through a transnational exchange of ideas and a generous reception of European culture.