Congratulation to Glauco Schettini for receiving the Association for the Study of Modern Italy Postgraduate Essay Prize. The ASMI is a UK-based organization founded in 1982 by the Oxford historian Christopher Seton-Watson, and promotes research into Italian history, society, culture, and politics from the eighteenth to twenty-first century.
Glauco’s essay, “Building the Third Rome: The New District in Prati di Castello, 1870-1895,” examines the creation of a new neighborhood in Prati di Castello (the area surrounding the Vatican) after Rome’s annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. The new district, he argues, became, “a political landscape, in which concurrent powers articulated their aspirations and values, negotiated their respective authorities, and transmitted political ideas.” He therefore contends that urban spaces took on political meanings. He wrote the paper for Dr. Rosemary Wakeman’s class (“European City: 1700-2000”) in Fall 2016, during his first semester at Fordham. While not directly related to his dissertation, his paper is concerned with his broader research questions regarding European nationalism and religion and politics.
Glauco will receive the prize at the ASMI Conference, which will take place in London this year on December 1st and 2nd. While at the conference, he will be presenting a separate paper, “The Politics of Family in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy”, which aims to shed light on how “family” became a metaphor for the nation by arguing that a new image of the family was created in late eighteenth-century Italy against the backdrop of the emergence of the modern concept of “republic” and of a wider rethinking of the relation between the public and private sphere.
Congratulations Glauco!