marco pignotti

Liguria is a region whose borders appear somewhat artificial and not actually shaped around the culture and tradition of the various communities which constitute it. As a result, historiography also seems to reflect this peculiar feature. The reason behind such strong diversity lies in the centuries old presence of the city-state of Genoa, a city which represented for over two centuries one of the most important financial and commercial centres of the world. Its wealth and prestige have ultimately dominated and devoured the whole ligurian territory. Still today, modern history reveals a large gap in the study of the region as a whole and not only of the enormous Genoese reality.

The note stems from the need to carry out a survey on recent international literature dedicated to populism, starting above all from the considerations contained in The Populist Temptation by Eichengreen, and in From Fascism to Populism in History by Finchelstein, as well as the results from the Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy. The contrasting reflections recorded around a phenomenon so debated allow to delineate the elements, that justify the introduction of a historiographical category in its own right and to project some definitions on the entire history of the Italian political system. The intention of this overview is to construct a catalog of the various interpretations of populism that have emerged in recent years. It is noteworthy that in the years following World War II until the present day, publications on populism have been produced in a discontinuous fashion, thus rendering the subject even more elusive and unc...