Italy, a site of high culture from the Renaissance on, suddenly found itself at once the center of, yet displaced by, a set of global relationships that textured everyday life in a singular way. That is, everyday life was caught up in the double spiral of uneven development: both belated, in the introduction to modernity, and advanced, in terms of the accelerations and changes that would soon come to be associated with globalization: the economic restructuring of the 1970s often called post-Fordism. While diaspora and exodus enabled the miracle, the miracle did not enable an improved everyday life. To the...