Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861-1930

by Anthony L. Cardoza

Overview

This book provides the first full account of the Italian Sobility in the post-unification era, and challenges recent interpretations that have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites by highlighting the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles developed more indirect forms of influence, while remaining a separate and exclusive group with limited social contacts with industrial or managerial elites, until World War I transformed their old way of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521522298
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2002
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

List of tables; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The making of the Piedmontese nobility, 1600–1848; 2. The long goodbye: aristocrats in politics and public life, 1848–1914; 3. Old money: the scale and structure of aristocratic wealth; 4. Perpetuating an aristocratic social elite; 5. The limits of fusion: aristocratic-bourgeois relations in nineteenth-century Piedmont; 6. Retreat and adaptation in the twentieth century; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"An important contribution to Italian history and useful generally to historians of modern Europe. Upper-division undergraduates and above." Choice

"...Cardoza has produced a splendid account of an important component of Italian life. This book is recommended for college and university libraries, especially where graduate courses are offered." Andrew Rolle, History

"...a fine piece of scholarship." Rudolph M. Bell, American Historical Review

"...a valuable contribution to modern Italian historiography....another piece of the puzzle that is the unification and formation of the Italian nation....willprove useful to scholars who study either the history of railways or the European nobility." Charles L. Bertrand, Canadian Journal of History

"Anthony L. Cardoza of Loyola University of Chicago is the winner of the American Historical Association's Helen and Howard F. Marrano Prize. The book has been praised as a major contribution to our understanding of both the Italian and wider European nobility." The Historian

From the Publisher