Beyond the Myth of the ‘Good Italian’. Recent Trends in the Study of the Italian Occupation of Southeastern Europe during the Second World War

This article surveys the existing literature on the occupation policy Italy conducted in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War. The whole subject was largely neglected by scholars of contemporary Italian history up to the 1990s, but in the last twenty years a consistent flow of studies has begun to appear. The reasons for the previous disregard of the topic and, now, the growing interest in it are investigated in the first part of this article. The second part focuses on work done in recent years. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of this new literature, and maps out a series of a blank spots that should be addressed by future research.