Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789-1914

Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914 breaks new ground in the history of nineteenth-century Italy. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating the relationships between the personal and political; the presence of male, female and same-sex desires that defied norms of respectability and acceptable gender roles; the sexual behaviour of different classes and subcultures; and transnational sexual encounters. This volume sheds light on the sex lives of nineteenth-century men and women in Italy, on the ways they understood and experienced their sexual desires, and how their sexual behaviour was organised, regulated and constrained.

Valeria P. Babini is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of Bologna, Italy. She has worked on psychiatric, anthropological, social and gender history. Her publications include:La donna nelle scienze dell'uomo (1986), Una 'donna nuova': Il femminismo scientifico di Maria Montessori(2000), More than Pupils: Italian Women in Science at the Turn of the 20th Century (2007) andLiberi tutti. Manicomi e psichiatri in Italia: una storia del '900 (2009).

Chiara Beccalossi is Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research interests range across the history of sexuality, the history of medicine and the history of human sciences in Europe, in particular Italy. She has written a monograph, Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920 (2012), co-editedA Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (2011) with Ivan Crozier and has published several articles in the field of history of medicine and sexuality.

Lucy Riall is Professor of the Comparative History of Europe at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe with a particular focus on European empires and on the politics and culture of Italy. Her publications includeSicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859–1866 (1998), Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007),Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2009) andUnder the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (2013).