America in Italian Culture: The Rise of a New Model of Modernity, 1861-1943. By Guido Bonsaver

Charting the place of American culture in Italy from unification in the 1860s to the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943, Guido Bonsaver's America in Italian Culture: The Rise of a New Model of Modernity, 1861Modernity, -1943 presents a stimulating, comprehensive, and multilayered account of how this culture came to have a significant influence on Italian cultural norms as well as Italians' understandings and definitions of their own country in the twentieth century.Placing itself among the scholarship on American cultural influence in Italy and its attendant social, economic, and political impact, America in Italian Culture distinguishes itself through its chosen time frame, illustrating the decline of French cultural dominance and notions of modernity in the peninsula over the second half of the nineteenth century and the rise of a dynamic, new modernity embodied by the various mass products and cultural models coming from across the Atlantic from the turn of the century and achieving prominence following the First World War.To best illustrate Italy's "epochal-move from one hegemonic, foreign model of modernity to another: from France to America," the book is divided into two parts: The Discovery of America, 1861-1919 and American Culture in Fascist Italy, 1922-1943 (vii).In Part 1, Bonsaver explores how Italians lauded French culture and derided American culture, the latter of which came to Italy primarily through the country's "techniques" or through France itself, as did American literature via French literary debate (493).This "Frenchization" of Italians primarily occurred among the educated elite, which resulted in views on America and its growing geopolitical and economic importance in these decades primarily reflecting "americanata"-a vision of America as a "childish," "ridiculous," and "unsophisticated" nation, as seen in La Domenica del Corriere articles from the time (10, 2, 50).Part 2 examines when "the transnational and the totalitarian. ..came head-to-head," exploring how the Fascist regime engaged with the growing presence of American culture in the peninsula (viii).In contrast to French culture, which appealed solely to Italy's educated elite in the prior decades, American culture had a mass appeal and thus a larger influence that permeated multiple levels of Italian society.In this section, the intertwining of cultural