During the Cold War, Italy was not allowed by the international treaties to detain its own nuclear arsenal. However, owing to its strategic geographical position amid the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian peninsula provided an ideal launch platform for NATO’s warheads and aeroplanes. Thus, the indirect involvement of Italy in the Cold War was crucial, albeit underrated and too often passed over in silence by both Italian politicians and intellectuals. Mariani’s fine volume aims to challenge such a grey zone of the Italian memory, by investigating how the discourse on Italian participation in the Cold War was addressed by some Italian authors and intellectuals of the time, namely Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia.
Close Encounters in War 