Abstract

The methodology of cultural history penetrates throughout Luisa Mangoni's research on twentieth-century Italy and Europe; the figure and work of Don Giuseppe De Luca were the essential standard of comparison. From this vantage point, her "In partibus infidelium. Don Giuseppe De luca: il mondo cattolico e la cultura italiana del Novecento" (Einaudi, 1989) appears to be a periodizing book: the initial categorization of the history of intellectuals, centred upon the connections between the State and civil society, approaches the concept of the "civilization of crisis" that embraces a century of European history (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). This concept defines a specific temporality for the history of culture, of particular effect for investigating the events and the cultural "exchanges" between liberal Italy, fascist Italy, and republican Italy.