Since its unification in 1861, the Italian nation has been viewed, both internally and externally, as always ‘late’: late to modernity, to unification, to nationalism.

Yet Italy’s apparent backwardness can be viewed as the mark of unsettling earliness. This lecture will explore some of Italy’s contested pasts and histories through a comparative and transnational analysis and will consider how Italian texts, images, and signifiers travel and are transformed in other contexts

Carlo Carrà, L'ovale delle apparizioni (The Oval of Apparition, 1918) Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome