Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789-1914

Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914 breaks new ground in the history of nineteenth-century Italy. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating the relationships between the personal and political; the presence of male, female and same-sex desires that defied norms of respectability and acceptable gender roles; the sexual behaviour of different classes and subcultures; and transnational sexual encounters. This volume sheds light on the sex lives of nineteenth-century men and women in Italy, on the ways they understood and experienced their sexual desires, and how their sexual behaviour was organised, regulated and constrained.

Valeria P. Babini is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of Bologna, Italy. She has worked on psychiatric, anthropological, social and gender history. Publications include: La donna nelle scienze dell'uomo (1986), Una 'donna nuova': Il femminismo scientifico di Maria Montessori (2000), Il caso Murri: Una storia italiana (2004) and More than Pupils: Italian Women in Science at the Turn of the 20th Century (2007).

 
Chiara Beccalossi is Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research interests lie in the fields of history of sexuality and history of medicine and human sciences in Italy and Europe. Chiara has written a monograph, Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, ca. 1870-1920 (2012), co-edited A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (2011) with Ivan Crozier, and published several articles in the field of history of medicine and sexuality.
 

Lucy Riall is Professor of the Comparative History of Europe at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe with a particular focus on European Empires and on the politics and culture of Italy. Her publications include Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859-1866 (1998); Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007); Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2009); and Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (2013).

1. Introduction; Valeria P. Babini, Chiara Beccalossi and Lucy Riall
PART I: SEXUALITY, POLITICS AND FAMILY
2. Sexuality and Politics; Lady Morgan and the Morality of the Italians, Roberto Bizzocchi
3. The Sex Lives of Italian Patriots; Lucy Riall
PART II: SEXUALITY, CLASSES AND SOCIAL GROUPS
4. Sex in Belli's Rome: Eros, Social Groups and Religion; Pietro Gibellini and Edoardo Ripari
5. After Respectability: Women, Sexuality, and the Circus in Pre-Sexology Italy; Mark Seymour
6. Sidney Sonnino and Natalia Morozzo della Rocca: Adulterous Love, Aristocracy and Politics between Two Centuries; Paola Carlucci
PART III: WOMEN BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
7. Literary and Epistolary Figurations of Female Desire in Early Post-Unification Italy, 1861-1914; Katharine Mitchell
8. Infanticide and the prostitute: Honour, Sentiment and Deviancy between Human Sciences and the Law; Silvia Chiletti
9. Between Public and Private: Sexuality and Maternity in three 'New Women'; Sibilla Aleramo, Maria Montessori, Linda Murri and Valeria P. Babini
PART IV: SAME-SEX DESIRES
10. The 'Italian vice': Male Homosexuality and British Tourism in Southern Italy; Chiara Beccalossi
11. J. A. Symonds, Horatio Brown and Venice: Friendship, Gondoliers and Homosexuality; Sean Brady
12. Italian Medical and Literary Discourses around Female Same-sex Desire, 1877-1906; Charlotte Ross
PART V: MARRIAGES AND SEXUALITY
13. British Women Travellers and Italian Marriages, c. 1789-1844, Ross Balzaretti
14. The Making of the Italian Husband in Nineteenth-century Italy; Linda Reeder