In an academic and social context where quantitative evidence increasingly seems to be the only acceptable kind, Niamh Cullen's excellent book makes a refreshing and convincing case for the simultaneous study of ‘hard’ subjects like economic growth and the ‘soft’ sources of individual accounts and cultural materials. The economic ‘boom’ that Italy experienced between the late 1950s and early 1960s was responsible for its transformation into the urban and industrial nation it is today. The boom was about much more than increased wealth: it encapsulated American influence, consumer culture, urbanisation, secularisation and changing gender roles. It is a period which has been described as a tug-of-war between the United States, the Soviet Union and the Vatican (Pojmann Reference Pojmann2013, 6). In simplistic terms, Italians were negotiating existential choices between modernity and change or tradition and regression. Increasing employment and the rise in the purchasing power of Italians ground down previously fierce political participation (particularly in left-wing organisations). American intervention in Italy sought to quash the rise of global communism. Although still largely confined to domestic roles, women's employment posed questions around previous spatial gender divisions. The Vatican railed against feminism's threat to traditional family structures. All of these elements of the boom have been uncovered and discussed by historians, but never have they been explored through the individual emotional accounts of private diaries. Love, Honour and Jealousy: An Intimate History of the Italian Economic Miracle asks what we can learn about the economic miracle through the emotional lives of Italians.
The book is a triumph in moving between the micro and the macro, taking first-person texts such as memoirs and diaries to form an overview of social and political mores during this period. The diary sources are held in the National Diary Archive in Pieve Santo Stefano and appear to be carefully chosen to reflect regional, class and gender diversity. The book also takes the unusual path connecting romance and politics. Cullen divides her discussion broadly by emotion: romance, desire, jealousy, honour and the breakdown of love. These categories allow the reader to consider how Italians enacted and reacted to the social structures of boom-time Italy. This book is part of the series Emotions in History, but it may well have been called History in Emotions because, as Cullen eloquently proves, history is written by, and in the sentiments of, its citizens. It was not the divorce reform of 1970 that first changed Italians’ expectations of love unions, but changing ideas about partnership – and cultural texts like Pietro Germi's film Divorzio all'italiana – that fomented and culminated in new legislation. This is just one example from Cullen's book that makes a robust case for causal links between emotional, economic, political, criminal, labour, film and social histories.
Inevitably for Italians, those great gatekeepers of ideological change in the form of the Catholic Church and popular culture are ubiquitous in constructed ideas of acceptable unions. A striking example of this comes in Cullen's discussion of coercion, jealousy and violence as part of ‘romantic’ unions. Diaries and fumetti provide ample accounts of jealousy not only being acceptable, but in some cases desirable behaviour in a partner in postwar Italy. Cullen juxtaposes these attitudes with the infamous case of the 1965 kidnapping of Franca Viola and her subsequent rejection of reparatory marriage to her abductor to illustrate how possessive behaviours were becoming socially deplorable. Jealousy is also highlighted as a social convention that was particularly constraining for women, often provoked by their increasing mobility. Although women were led to believe that it was a ‘proof of love’, diaries reveal that this quickly soured within the confines of the domestic sphere. Cullen concludes that ‘jealousy was the emotional and physical manifestation of male anxiety’ (p. 147), establishing emotion as a barometer of social change as much as salary tables or crime statistics.
Gender and women's experiences are key strands in Cullen's analysis. In oral history, women's narratives are often dismissed as chatter and gossip. In the context of autobiographical writing, Cullen reframes women's narratives as important, giving value to their lexis of emotion. When studying the economic miracle, a table showing women's increasing employment in factories tells us little; far more meaningful is a diary detailing how a woman felt about this work and how it affected her daily life and relationships. The book underlines surprising distances between received ideas of men and women and their emotional realities. Male memories of love and attraction are romantic and intense. For example, ‘I finally met Her: a pronoun that I write with a capital’ (p. 22, footnote 2). In contrast, women's recollections of meeting and marrying partners are more circumspect and ambivalent. This contrast highlights the precarious position of women, who stood to lose so much by marrying. Such revelations are reminiscent of Gabriella Parca's collection of women's agony aunt letters, Italian Women Confess (Reference Parca1963), and pose important questions about differences between public and private discussions of emotion.
Peppered throughout the book are excerpts from magazines, fumetti, newspapers and film stills. These materials are used effectively by Cullen as a counterpoint and a reflection of the contents of the diaries. Wedding dresses, for example, appear to be common in popular narratives of romance and yet the diaries tell us that not only were they hardly ever worn, but that marriage ceremonies themselves were discussed more in terms of anxiety and duty than fairy-tale spectacle. Such clashes between representations and lived experiences throw light on the gap between idealised elements of Western European culture and the reality of life in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. Cullen's enquiry also shows that social change is not linear, but can happen in shuffles or leaps. She compares the aspirations of adolescents of the early and late 1950s; although separated by just a few years, the shift in their emotional expectations of marriage was significant.
It is easy to be seduced by the romantic content of Cullen's book, but make no mistake, its contribution to literature on the Italian economic miracle is far from being all'aqua di rose. This study is of interest to historians of all stripes as well as those working in gender studies and economics. The work makes a solid and vivid case for scholars to give attention and value to sources which make up the pixel details of sweeping historical landscapes.
