SEMINAR: Sport and Leisure History, Univ of Hertforshire

SPORT AND LEISURE HISTORY SEMINAR

'PEASANTS INTO SPORTSMEN: SPORT AND THE MAKING OF MODERN ITALY'

Speaker: Simon Martin (British School at Rome/University of Hertfordshire)

During the last century sport stimulated and revealed social change,
political transition and economic development in Italy, while providing
rituals and shared experiences that were fundamental in the construction
of the nation’s modern identity. This paper will explore how sport became
such an integral part of Italian social, economic and political life. It
will also reveal how the formerly elitist, minority pastime that was
restricted to the cultural margins of the newly created, industrially
retarded and regionally divided nation-state, metamorphosed into a
national, mass cultural and social institution that symbolises and
reflects Italy’s modernisation.

Through analysis of specific events and sporting personalities in liberal,
Fascist and postwar democratic Italy this paper will consider why sport
has been such a consistently important feature of twentieth-century
Italian life; what is its relationship with Italy’s social, economic and
political modernisation; to what extent, and with what success, Italian
sporting traditions and communal experiences been exploited to inculcate a
sense of shared, national identity by all governments; and how sport help
us rethink traditional questions about modern Italy?

Dr Simon Martin won the British Society for Sport's History’s Lord
Aberdare Prize for literary history in 2004 for his book Football and
Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini (Berg, Oxford, 2004), which was
based on his PhD thesis. Awarded postdoctoral funding by the Leverhulme
Trust, he continued his research on sport and modern Italy and his
forthcoming book, Sport Italia. The Italian Love Affair with Sport, will
be published by IB Tauris in 2010. Dr Martin has taught at UCL and the
University of Hertfordshire, where he currently holds a Visiting
Fellowship, and is a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome.

Time and Date: 5:15 PM, Monday, November 2nd
Location: Ecclesiastical History Room, Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.

All are welcome. For more information, please contact our seminar
secretary, Dion Georgiou, at sportshistory@hotmail.co.uk.