History - 2023 - Vinale - Hi Story Telling An Introduction To Italian Alternate and Counterfactual History

(Hi)story-Telling: An Introduction to Italian
Alternate and Counterfactual History

ADRIANO VINALE
University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy
I
The dilemma of the history of the defeated is certainly not a novel topic
for political and historical enquiry. The experience of the unspeakable
forced the Auschwitz generation to question the meaning of historical
memory. Walter Benjamin posed this question very early on, when he
wrote in 1940 that ‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of
hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious’.1 The nagging for the
memory of the unspeakable obviously ran through the writings of Primo
Levi, who immediately recognised the fallacy and falsifiability of memory,
both personal and historical. ‘The memories which lie within us are not
carved in stone; not only they tend to become erased as the years go by, but
often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features.’2
Years before the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt also put the question of
memory and its manipulability. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
she reflects on the relationship between narrative and politics in these
terms: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule – she argues – is not the
convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction […] and the distinction between true
and false […] no longer exist’.3 Collective memory is hence a recurring
question in the aftermath of the Second World War and in particular after
the unaccountable experience of the concentration camp. The memory of
the drowned is never safe, firstly because the real witnesses of Auschwitz
are the ones who did not survive it, and secondly because the memory of
the past is always exposed to its posthumous falsification.4
1
W. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in id., Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940
(Cambridge MA, 2013), pp. 389–400, at p. 391.
2
P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 2017), p. 13.
3
H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1973), p. 471.
4
See G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, 1999), p. 12,
where he writes: ‘The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-
coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension’.
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356 (HI)STORY-TELLING
This questioning of the status of memory, both personal and historical,

had at least two moments of political and theoretical tension during the
second half of the twentieth century. The first is the so-called cultural
turn. Hayden White can usefully offer the general coordinates of the
theoretical discussion around the writing of history.
It is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past
by “finding,” “identifying”, or “uncovering” the “stories” that lie buried in
chronicles; and that the difference between “history” and “fiction” resides
in the fact that the historian “finds” his stories, whereas the fiction writer
“invents” his. This conception of the historian’s task, however, obscures the
extent to which “invention” also plays a part in the historian’s operations.5
When Metahistory was published in 1973, the European historiographical
debate had already been profoundly influenced by post-structuralism. As
a matter of fact, in the preceding years, books such as Michel Foucault’s
Le mots et les choses (1966), Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie
(1967), or Gilles Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (1968) had powerfully
occupied the public discussion in France and Europe. In those same
years, Roland Barthes had published Le discours de l’histoire (1967) and
L’effet du réel (1968), two essays destined to have a great echo in the
reflection on historiographical methodology. It is perhaps superfluous
to recall how the debate on the writing of history continued in the
years following Metahistory. Nonetheless, it seems important to point
out that works such as Lynn Hunt’s The New Cultural History (1989)
and Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) show that
the discussion on the writing of history has gone far beyond the seventies.
The interplay hypothesised by White between history and fiction, between
historiography and literature, has in some ways forced the historiography
of the second half of the twentieth century into a process of self-
reflection, starting with the recognition of the problematic connection
between reality and language, truth, and storytelling.6
Another relevant aspect of intellectual discussions over collective
historical memory after the Second World War was denialism. The
publication of Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case
Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (1976), David
Irving’s Hitler’s War (1977), and Robert Faurisson’s Le problème des
chambres à gaz (1978) constituted an authentic cultural trauma for the
generation of scholars formed after the Second World War. The very
fact that the extermination of the Jews, the concentration camps, and
the gas chambers could be questioned as real events – as historical facts
5
H. White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, 1973),
pp. 6–7. On White, see: F. Ankersmit, E. Domanska, and H. Kellner (eds.), Re-figuring Hayden White
(Stanford, 2009).
6
On postmodern history, see: B. Southgate, ‘Postmodernism’, in A. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the
Philosophy of History and Historiography (Chichester, 2009), pp. 540–49; N. Partner, ‘Postmodernism:
The “Crisis of Narratives” and the Historical Discipline’, in Ch. van den Akker (ed.), The Routledge
Companion to Historical Theory (London and New York, 2022), pp. 332–46.
ADRIANO VINALE 357
– made Benjamin’s admonition dramatically relevant: auch die Toten

werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein. The enemy, in fact,
became threatening again, taking on the guise of the historian. If the
condemnation of denialism has occurred first and foremost in politics and
public opinion, it is the reaction of European and American intellectuals
that is of particular interest to us. As a matter of fact, in the intellectual
debate, the condemnation of denialism has often been accompanied by an
equally severe condemnation of post-structuralism and post-modernism.7
The reasons are rather easy to understand. The idea that the writing
of history is equated with any other process of narrative invention,
that rhetoric is in the background of both reconstructions of the past
and works of fiction, is considered the conceptual matrix that allowed
denialism to arise. For denialists, if nothing escapes the domain of
appearance, if everything is an effect of reality, then even the Shoah can
possibly be considered fiction.
In the same years in which the negationist scandal broke out, Jean-
François Lyotard published his groundbreaking work: La condition
postmoderne (1979). As Nancy Partner has convincingly pointed out in
a recent essay, the reaction to postmodernism in the historical debate
was quite disproportionate. As a matter of fact, Lyotard, in his rapport
sur le savoir, did not examine history as a possible example of the
crisis of metanarratives, nor was history central to the reflections of
Fredric Jameson or Linda Hutcheon. ‘Postmodernism’s founding definers
and observers – Partner has then concluded, not concludes – seemed
indifferent to academic history, yet professional historians eventually
recognised in postmodernism a critical force of unprecedented threat’.8
Lyotard’s book impacted on the pre-existing debate on the writing of
history which had its origins in narrativism.9 From the 1950s onwards,
Arthur Danto had insisted on the relationship between history and
storytelling, showing in particular the mechanisms by which retrodiction
works in the writing of history. According to Danto, the historian
composes their narrative through a ‘retroactive re-alignment of the
Past’.10 In other words, from the narrativist’s standpoint, the historian is
inevitably posthumous, and the historical (re)construction of the past is
a retrospective story. Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Mink had
presented historical knowledge as an imaginative construction, outlining
the inescapable and structural link between history and fiction: ‘We could
learn to tell stories of our lives – he says in 1970 – from nursery rhymes,
or from culture-myths if we had any, but it is from history and fiction
that we learn how to tell and understand complex stories, and how it
7
See, most recently, L. McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge and London, 2018).
8
Partner, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 337.
9
See: V. Tozzi Thompson, ‘Narrativism’, in van den Akker, The Routledge Companion to Historical
Theory, pp. 113–28; K. Pihlainen, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past
(London and New York, 2017).
10
A. C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965); Narration and Knowledge (New
York, 2007), pp. 1–284, at p. 168.
is that stories answer questions’.11 It is in this context of historical-

philosophical discussion that reactions to Lyotard’s arguments and to
postmodernism took place. The liaison between epistemological reflection
and historiographical debate is, of course, represented by White. ‘The
events are made into a story – he wrote in 1978 – by the suppression or
subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by […] all
of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment
of a novel or a play’.12 In short, by the time the English translation of La
condition postmoderne was published in 1984, the discussion on the writing
of history had already taken on rather broad dimensions.
As Partner rightly points out, from 1989 onwards it has been the
journal History and Theory, in particular, that has hosted the debate on
history writing. Frank Ankersmit and Perez Zagorin in particular are the
ones leading the dance.13 It is impossible, nor perhaps useful, to go back
to the discussion between the two historians. Here, in fact, it seems more
important to recall some positions taken by Ankersmit in Narrative Logic,
which will later be reiterated in History and Tropology. In the first place,
he advocates for the total autonomy of narratio: ‘There are no translation-
rules – he wrote in 1983 – enabling us to “project” the past onto the
narrative level of its historiographical representation’.14 This is what
Ankersmit calls ‘narrative idealism’. Another of his fundamental theses
is that postmodernism is to some extent a radicalisation of historism.
As a matter of fact, according to Ankersmit, they share the idea of a
‘fragmentation of the historical world’, although the historical object
of postmodern narrativism ‘it is not part of a reified past but situated
in the distance or difference between past and present’.15 Finally, in a
similar direction seems to go Keith Jenkins, who in Why History? takes
both White and Ankersmit to the extreme. In a perspective of radical
narrativist presentism, Jenkins claims the superfluity of history tout court.
That is, starting from the assumption that history is and has always been
mythologised and ideologised, rhetorically represented, and emplotted,
Jenkins concludes that we should all realise that we live in a post-historical
world and take on its emancipatory aspects: ‘If Derrida, Baudrillard,
Lyotard, Rorty, Ermarth et al. can do without a historical consciousness
and especially a modernist upper or lower case one, then we all can’.16
In my view, the most balanced reaction on this issue is that of
Carlo Ginzburg, who polemicised against the spread of a postmodernist
fashion and, on the other hand, reconstructed some crucial steps in the
history of writing history. In doing so, Ginzburg managed to show how
11
L. O. Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, Historical Understanding (Ithaca,
1987), pp. 42–60, at p. 60.
12
H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 84.
13
See K. Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (New York, 1997).
14
F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague,
1983), p. 226.
15
F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology (London, 1994), p. 238.
16
K. Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London, 1999), p. 151.
ADRIANO VINALE 359
historiography used ab origine the weapons of rhetoric to make the truths

in its discourse effective. In this regard, Ginzburg spoke of an effect of
truth – explicitly polemicising against Barthes’ effet du réel – meaning that
truth in general, and historical truth in particular, has to do not only with
reality, but also with its transposition into a persuasive narrative.17
II
On these premises, it is not surprising that alongside the historiographical
debate, the so-called alternate history proliferated during the second half
of the twentieth century. Although it has to be considered literature in the
strict sense, alternate history closely investigates the very conception of
historical time, trying to question its deterministic linearity.18 The problem
alternate history deals with may be posed in a rather simple way: could
history have gone differently?
Karen Hellekson has defined this literary subgenre as follows: ‘The
alternate history (also known as alternative history, alternate universe,
allohistory, uchronia, and parahistory) is that branch of nonrealistic
literature that concerns itself with history turning out differently than
we know to be the case.’19 In brief, the narrative peculiarity of alternate
history is to identify a specific point on the past timeline – indifferently
referred to as nexus point, nexus event, Jonbar hinge, or Jonbar point – from
which a different development of the (hi)story is hypothesised.20 The point
of divergence from the acknowledged historical timeline is located in a
moment considered particularly significant for the future development of
events: Hitler’s rise to power, the Allies’ victory in the Second World War,
Kennedy’s assassination, and so forth. From this standpoint, one may say
that the main aim of alternate history is to show the precariousness of
historical time as such: it really could have happened that the Axis Powers
won the war, just as it could have happened, on the contrary, that the
Nazis did not rise to power at all, that Hitler was not born or that JFK
was not assassinated. On the other hand, though, narrating an alternative
history induces a critical reflection on the present. In this sense, we may
agree with Charles Renouvier when he defined uchrony as a ‘utopie dans
l’histoire’, imagining a more auspicious progress of Western civilisation
with its non-Christianisation.21 But we may also define it as a dystopia in
history when the alternative course of history presented to the reader has,
in reverse, frightening traits.
17
C. Ginzburg, ‘Description and Citation’, in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (London,
2012), pp. 7–24.
18
K. Singles, Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity (Boston, 2013).
19
K. Hellekson, ‘Alternate History’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (New York,
2009), pp. 453–57, at p. 453. In the following pages, we will use univocally the term ‘alternate history’.
20
The term Jonbar comes from John Barr, the main character of the novels The Legion of Time
(1952) by Jack Williamson. On the other hand, Stephen King – in 11/22/63 (2011) – speaks about a
watershed moment.
21
See Ch. Renouvier, Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du
développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (Paris, 1876).
The substantial difference between alternate history and

historiography, in the narrow sense, can be emphasised by resorting
to Hellekson again:
The link between cause and effect is always an interpretation made by the
person looking. In history, the effect will be the event expressed through the
trace – the battle, the treaty, the marriage, all recorded by contemporaries.
The historian will construct a reason for the effect, one grounded in letters,
tax rolls, legal decisions, and other traces. This reason will be her argument,
the thesis of her work. But in history, the leap between cause and effect
will always be an interpretation. In fiction (and of course in the alternate
history), the connection between cause and effect is not an interpretation
but an invention.22
While historiography therefore uses logical arguments and documentary
evidence, alternate history fiction, starting from real historical events,
invents a deviation, sometimes even minimal – a bullet that misses its
target (in the case of Kennedy) or, on the contrary, that hits it (in the
case of Roosevelt) – to imagine a different historical reality and induce a
critical reflection on the present.
III
Although it is often associated with it, the so-called counterfactual
history does not actually have much to do with alternate history. In
his extensive introduction to Virtual History, Niall Ferguson starts
from some epistemological assumptions – mainly related to Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle and Lorenz’s butterfly effect – to promote the use
of simulation in historical research. Assuming the aleatory nature of
historical phenomena, which are subject more to the laws of probability
than to those of causality, Ferguson proposes the use of counterfactual
conjecture in historiographical reconstruction as a virtual stress-strain
analysis of a research hypothesis. In epistemological terms, this means
to adopt what in criminal law is called the but-for test, which is the
hypothetical exclusion of certain causes that are supposed to have
provoked a certain event in order to determine its actual causation.23
Would this specific event have happened if there had not been that specific
cause?
As a matter of fact, all the essays collected in Virtual History aim to
verify specific what-ifs of history: What if there had been no American
War of Independence?24 What if England had remained neutral during
the First World War?25 What if the Wehrmacht had defeated the Red
22
K. Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, 2001), p. 29.
23
See H. Weber, ‘The ‘But For’ Test and Other Devices: The Role of Hypothetical Events in the Law’,
Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 34/2 (2009), pp. 118–28.
24
J. C. D. Clark, ‘British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?’, in N. Ferguson
(ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York, 1999), pp. 125–74.
25
N. Ferguson, ‘The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914?’,
in id., Virtual History, pp. 228–80.
ADRIANO VINALE 361
Army?26 What if Kennedy had not been assassinated in Dallas?27 Here

too, as in alternate history, the reader is placed before certain nexus
points, from which the author of the article hypothesises an alternative
development of events. The methodological difference is however very
clear and is established in the introduction by Ferguson himself: ‘We
should consider as plausible or probable – he argues – only those
alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence
that contemporaries actually considered.’28 For the virtual historian,
it is therefore a matter of standing somewhere in between the pure
literary invention of fictional narrative and historicistic determinism.
In other words, according to Ferguson, it is a question of assuming
the aleatoric nature of history, of showing its possible alternatives, in
order to emphasise how a given event could easily have had opposite
outcomes – for example, Britain could have stayed neutral in 1914;
Operation Barbarossa could have succeeded. But, as we have outlined,
the counterfactual hypothesis first and foremost aims to show the main
determining causes of a given event – for example, the hung Parliament
resulting from UK general election in January 1910; Hitler disastrous
interference with his High Command’s strategies in USSR in December
1941.
Although the book edited by Ferguson was met with a rather tepid
academic reception, it can certainly be said that Virtual history represents
an important moment in the historiographical debate at the turn of
the century.29 A few other historians have since tried to systematically
adopt the approach proposed by Ferguson. An example is the book
edited by Robert Cowley – What If? – where in their respective essays
Cowley himself and John Keegan show how the First World War could
have been avoided and how the Second World War could have been
won by Germany.30 Nonetheless, it cannot be argued that virtual history
fully succeeded in establishing itself as a historiographical research
method. The reasons for this are most likely to be found in the
understandable suspicion, following the spread of anti-Semitic denialism,
of any approach that claimed the use of imagination, or fiction, as a tool
for historiographical investigation. Denying the existence of the Shoah
and verifying the causes of the Nazi defeat by hypothesising their victory
were seen as two dangerously similar approaches.
26
M. Burleigh, ‘Nazi Europe: What if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?’, in Ferguson,
Virtual History, pp. 321–47.
27
D. Kunz, ‘Camelot Continued: What if John F. Kennedy had lived?’, in Ferguson, Virtual History,
pp. 368–91.
28
N. Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past’, in Ferguson, Virtual
History, pp. 1–90, at p. 86.
29
See: E. Weinryb, ‘Historiographic Counterfactuals’, in Tucker, A Companion to the Philosophy of
History and Historiography, pp. 109–19; G. D. Rosenfeld, ‘Counterfactuals’, in van den Akker, The
Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, pp. 462–80.
30
R. Cowley (ed.), What If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have
Been (New York, 1999).
IV
It is probably for these same reasons that alternate history and
counterfactual history have not had much editorial or academic success in
the Italian scene. Apart from Se Garibaldi avesse perso31 and La storia con
i se,32 there is not much other Italian research in this field. This silence has
been recently broken by a special issue of Rivista di Politica.33 The essays
written by Federico Trocini34 and Emiliano Marra,35 in particular, analyse
the parable of the so-called fantafascismo. Their detailed reconstruction
of a part of Italian uchronic literature, however, indirectly shows the
main reason for its poor fortune: the ideological compromise of some
Italian allohistory writers with fascism and neo-fascism. Starting from
these general coordinates, it is possible to show the main research aims
of the special section of the present issue of History. The three articles
that follow are the result of a lengthy discussion between the authors. Our
aim is to show how a tradition of alternate and counterfactual history
exists in Italy as well, although it is not easy to detect. This difficulty in
tracing alternate and counterfactual Italian writings, in our opinion, is
due to the non-explicit adoption of the rules and methods of these genres
of (hi)storytelling. As a matter of fact, writers such as Camillo Pellizzi,
Delio Cantimori, Corrado Alvaro, Guido Morselli, Luigi Malerba, Wu
Ming, and Antonio Scurati preferred to apparently assume the canon of
historiography, future narrative, or historical novel in order to produce a
hidden or implicit counterfactual effect.
From this standpoint, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte’s opening article
analyses some examples of narratives that present some of the typical
features of counterfactual history. Her article analyses the ante litteram
emergence of the counterfactual in historiographical discourse and in
particular in the literature on the so-called ‘missed revolutions’ during
Italian fascism. In this way, Chiantera-Stutte investigates the origins and
common motives of the political revolt of the young generation who
lived during Mussolini’s regime. More specifically, her essay considers
the interpretations of the ‘unfinished revolution’ given by Pellizzi and
Cantimori. She considers the topic of the ‘missed revolution’ as a cluster
of questions that the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century
had to face. The main aim of her reconstruction is to observe the
mutual connection of antifascist and fascist perspectives and, at the
same time, to understand the different attitudes towards politics and
political ideals, illustrating the different ways of being fascists during the
31
P. Chessa, Se Garibaldi avesse perso. Storia controfattuale dell’Unità d’Italia (Venice, 2011).
32
A. Benzoni - E. Benzoni. La storia con i se. Dieci casi che potrebbero cambiare il corso del Novecento
(Venice, 2013).
33
F. Trocini (ed.), What if: la letteratura ucronica tra realtà storica, finzione e politica, Rivista di
Politica, 1 (2022).
34
F. Trocini, ‘What if Hitler and Mussolini…? Il mondo dell’ucronia all’ombra della svastica e del
fascio littorio’, Rivista di Politica, 1 (2022), pp. 41–55.
35
E. Marra, ‘Mussolini nella letteratura ucronica italiana’, Rivista di Politica, 1 (2022), pp. 83–93.
ADRIANO VINALE 363
Ventennio. The reconstruction of the ‘missed revolution’ debate, occurring

as it did in a period of crisis, shows to what extent history became a
terrain of appropriation in the political and intellectual discussion. It
reveals not only the uses of history by political adversaries, but also the
interplay between history and politics in that specific genre of historical
writing which was on the borderline between historical reconstruction and
hypothetical narrative. From this perspective, Chiantera-Stutte aims to
show that the literature concerning ‘missed revolution’ is a true historical
genre, in which the personality, and the political and social values of the
writers eventually come into the light more clearly than in other historical
works.
Angelo Arciero’s article analyses the various uchronic reverberations
of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Italian literary context,
trying to show their political implications. The author shows that Alvaro’s
novels L’uomo è forte and Belmoro, Morselli’s uchronies Roma senza
papa and Contro-passato prossimo, and Malerba’s short story 4891 are
grafted – albeit in different ways – onto the theoretical reflections and
literary devices codified by Orwell. The comparison between Alvaro and
Orwell is indirect and layered in time. On the one hand, L’uomo è forte
represents a totalitarian dystopia by anticipating of several years the
conceptual devices of Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, Belmoro
– set after a hypothetical Third World War – is placed on a historical
juncture similar to Orwell’s last novel, developing in a science-fiction key
the implications concerning the relationship between man, science, and
technology. Arciero then outlines how the latent conceptual affinities with
Orwell that can be traced in Morselli go side by side with Malerba’s 4891
explicit reference to the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In both cases, he
argues, allohistory and future narrative aim to show, in a critical form, the
transformations that took place in the Italian society from the thirties to
the eighties.
The third and last essay reconstructs the course of the European
and Italian historical novel between the nineteenth and the twenty-first
centuries. The central hypothesis is that the historical novel, from its
origins, has supported traditional historiography. In the specific case of
Italy, then, the canon of the Risorgimento’s historical novel gradually
lost its epic and glorious traits, to be taken on as an instrument of
indirect criticism of post-Unification Italian society. The same function
it had in republican Italy, where the genre never completely disappeared,
continuing to exercise a role of historical reconstruction and social
critique. But it is at the turn of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries
that the historical novel has experienced an unprecedented publishing
fortune. From the publication of Luther Blissett’s Q to Umberto Eco’s
Il cimitero di Praga, the Italian historical novel at the turn of the century
has emerged as a renewed field of historical investigation on the transition
from the First to the Second Republic. Finally, it is with Antonio Scurati’s
three historical-documentary novels – M. Il figlio del secolo, M. L’uomo
della provvidenza, and M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa – that the historical-
reconstructive function becomes a perfect tool for a critical analysis of

collective memory, in particular of the historical memory of fascism. If
Scurati’s operation succeeds in this intent – this is the author’s hypothesis
– it is precisely because he uses an innovative form of counterfactual
narrative: the implicit uchrony.

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(Hi)story-Telling: An Introduction to Italian

Alternate and Counterfactual History

This questioning of the status of memory, both personal and historical,

– made Benjamin’s admonition dramatically relevant: auch die Toten

is that stories answer questions’.11 It is in this context of historical-

historiography used ab origine the weapons of rhetoric to make the truths

The substantial difference between alternate history and

Army?26 What if Kennedy had not been assassinated in Dallas?27 Here

Ventennio. The reconstruction of the ‘missed revolution’ debate, occurring

reconstructive function becomes a perfect tool for a critical analysis of

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