Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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however, the ‘Craxi era’ seemed to renew the myth of the Italian economic prosperity
and to encourage, more than ever, an ethos of unfettered consumerism. A decade later the
explosion of Tangentopoli and the Mani pulite investigations again introduced a more
sober note of restraint as they uncovered the unscrupulous way in which the wealth had
been accumulated. Nevertheless, by this stage Italians had become, and now remain,
inveterate consumers although the object of greatest desire of the 1990s is no longer the
refrigerator or the sports car but the ubiquitous mobile phone.
See also: advertising
Further reading
Crainz, G. (1996) Storia del miracolo italiano (History of the Italian Economic Miracle), Rome:
Donzelli (for a new interpretation of the ‘boom’ phenomenon).
Lanaro, S. (1992) Storia dell’Italia repubblicana (History of Republican Italy), Venice: Marsilio
(see ch. 5 ‘Consumi e costumi’ (Consumption and Customs)).
Mastronardi, L. (1962) Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher of Vigevano), Milan: Einaudi (a novel
about the darker aspects of consumerist culture).
RICCARDO VENTRELLA
Contini, Gianfranco
b. 4 January 1912; d. 1 February 1990, Domodossola, Novara
Academic and literary critic
Widely regarded as one of Italy’s foremost literary scholars, Contini was professor of
Romance Philology at the universities of Freiburg and Florence and later at the Scuola
Normale of Pisa from 1938–52. A life member of the elite Lincei and Crusca academies,
he also served as president of the Società Dantesca Italiana (Italian Dante Society, 1956–
68) and director of the journal Studi Danteschi (Dante Studies).
Contini’s critical methodology, most characteristic in his studies of Dante and
Montale, rests on a close philological analysis of textual variations which allows him to
meticulously reconstruct the historical, stylistic and aesthetic dimensions of the text’s
composition and progressive development. Contini produced numerous seminal studies
of medieval poets and of Petrarch, Ariosto, Leopardi, Croce and Gadda, as well as
important critical editions of thirteenth-century poets and of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.
Editor of some of the most authoritative and fundamental scholarly editions of Italian
literary historiography, Contini also published a number of sensitive translations of the
poetry of Hölderlin.
SHERRY ROUSH
Entries A–Z 191
Continuità
Founded in Rome in 1961, Continuità included Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero
Dorazio, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli and Giulio Turcato among its founder members.
Some had previously been members of Forma, founded in 1947 to promote abstract art.
The original members were soon joined by Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro
and the art critic Giulio Carlo Argan, who became the group’s main spokesman.
Inherent to the group’s general aim was the notion of continuity—to regenerate the
traditional greatness of Italian art—and an ideal for specific works of art, each painting or
sculpture reflecting the order and continuity of its creation. This was in opposition both to
the social realists, such as Renato Guttuso and Armando Pizzicato, and to the informalist
trends among artists of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (New Front of the Arts) and the
Gruppo degli otto pittori Italiani, which had come out of the immediate postwar years.
Some members of the group, Turcato in particular, went through many phases, from
expressionism in the 1930s to geometrical abstraction in the 1960s. Accardi, Perilli and
Novelli incorporated geometrical writings or ‘signs’ into their work. After going through
an intense abstract phase, Accardi broke almost programmatically with painting as such.
Her coloured plastic tents (1965) were intended as a rejection of the passive role of the
spectator with regards to painting, and an attempt to create a situation which would
surround and involve the spectator in a more active relationship with the work. Fontana,
the most influential and openly abstract artist to be associated with the group, developed
a further side to Continuità, the idea of continuity of a work within its surroundings, as
for example in his Spatial Environment (1949), which was a precursor of environmental
art. From the late 1950s onwards he also suggested continuity with space behind the
paintings in his slit canvases known as Tagli (Slashes). Among the sculptors, Giò
Pomodoro made cast bronze reliefs with irregular surfaces, creating a sense of integration
with the surrounding wall or floor. Continuità, like Forma, before it, represented a
convergence of artists with similar aims rather than a definitive or programmatic
movement.
Further reading
(1971) New Italian Art 1953–71, Liverpool: Walker AG (exhibition catalogue, introduction by
G.Caradente).
OLIVIA DAWSON
Controspazio
A magazine of ‘architecture, urbanism, technology and design’, Controspazio was
founded by Paolo Portoghesi in Milan in 1969 and was explicitly intended as an
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 192
alternative to Ponti’s Domus, which had begun with a focus on contemporary product
design but had eventually come to dominate the entire architectural scene. The manifesto
of Controspazio, published in the first issue, declared an uncompromising, critical
position ‘regarding both research and action’, and the magazine sought to provide a
venue for different theoretical views, thus helping to reactivate discussion regarding the
relationship between architecture, urbanism and wider social issues. It hosted
contributions from architects such as Massimo Scolari, Enzo Bonfanti and Virgilio
Vercelloni (members of the initial editorial board) as well as Sergio Petrini and Marcello
Fabri, whose interests lay in the wider cultural and social milieu of architecture. The
magazine continued its active involvement in all important architectural debates. In 1983
the directorship passed to Marcello Fabri.
See also: architectural and design magazines
GORDANA KOSTICH
Convegno per un Nuovo Teatro
A landmark event in the history of Italian neoavantgarde theatre, the Convention for a
New Theatre was held at Ivrea between 9 and 12 June 1967, sponsored in part by the
Olivetti foundation and attended by most of the leading practitioners and sympathizers of
what was regarded as the new or experimental theatre. Following on from a polemical
manifesto previously printed in the prestigious theatrical journal Sipario (Curtain) and
signed by many of the participants, the convention sought to sanction a new direction for
Italian theatre which included a thorough reform of the major training institutes and the
stabili (statefinanced repertory theatres), an emphasis on theatrical experimentation
especially in the direction of group work and a broadening of the social scope of theatre
by moving it into public spaces in the form of communal feste or festivals.
Much theatrical activity during the next five years did indeed follow this more
experimental line although theatre historians are divided in estimating the extent to which
the convention was responsible for such developments rather than merely bearing witness
to them. What is generally agreed, however, is that the convention’s open rejection of the
theatrical status quo contributed to a renewal of Italian theatre.
GINO MOLITERNO
co-operatives
The evolution of the co-operative system in Italy has closely followed developments in
the country’s economy as a whole. After some pioneering moves in the mid-nineteenth
century, the real beginning of Italian co-operatives coincided with the economic
depression at the turn of the century, consolidating during the Giolitti era and then
Entries A–Z 193
slowing during the Fascist period. After the Second World War, during both the
economic boom years of the 1960s and in the twenty years that followed, the movement
generally strengthened and consolidated its position in order to become the biggest in
Europe.
Among the historical peculiarities of Italian co-operatives, when compared to similar
experiences in other European countries, is the lack of a leading sector for the movement
as a whole. Neither the consumer co-operative (as in Great Britain) nor the credit co-
operative (as in Germany) or the co-operative society for work and production (as in
France) constituted the absolute point of reference for the whole system. In the Italian
case, all sectors were present from the very beginning but no single form prevailed upon
the others. Another important feature of the movement in Italy was the division of the
various co-operatives according to political ideology, an element obvious in the federal
structure of the base co-operatives. During the Fascist years, there was an attempt to
reorganize the whole movement on a unified basis, but this came at the cost of an
authoritarian imposition which in reality modified the movement’s most profound ideals.
On the eve of the Second World War there were around 12,000 co-operatives with three
million members in Italy.
After the war, a number of organizations similar to those of the pre-Fascist period
were re-created. Among these, uniting the so-called ‘red co-operatives’, was the National
League of Co-operatives and Mutual Aid which was socialist and communist inspired;
the Confederation of the Italian Co-operatives, which was supported by the Christian
Democrat Party (see DC) and brought together the ‘white’ or Catholic co-operatives; and
the General Association of Italian Co-operatives, of a more generic social democratic
character, united the so-called ‘green co-operatives’ and was supported by the Social
Democrats and the Republican Party (see PRI). Later, a newer organization, the National
Union of Italian Co-operatives, also joined the three historical groups but there
nevertheless remained a considerable number of independent co-operatives not affiliated
to any of these larger umbrella organizations.
In the postwar years the co-operative movement expanded rapidly. During the 1950s
development followed the traditional pattern, but from the 1960s there was a re-
consideration of both the economic organization of the system and the organization of its
basic units at the level of the firm, which led to strategic choices being made in the
sectors of finance and credit, consumer goods and building construction, all of which
facilitated the strong consolidation and development of the movement during the 1970s.
The 1980s saw the beginning of co-operatives in areas until then untried, such as the
advanced tertiary sector and social solidarity.
Overall, during the years following the Second World War, the co-operative
movement developed more—as it had always done—in the centre and the North, being
almost non-existent in the south of Italy; a credit co-operative in Sicily was the only real
exception to this general trend. However, in the 1980s a modification of legal regulations
and in particular the passing of a law aimed at encouraging entrepreneurial activity by
young people began to redress this imbalance in favour of the South.
In the early 1990s the Italian co-operative movement embraced 160,000 companies
which employed about 500,000 people, with the total number of co-operative members
estimated to be at almost ten million.
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Further reading
Earle, J. (1986) The Italian Co-operative Movement: A Portrait of the Lega Nazionale delle Co-
operative e Mutue, London: Allen & Unwin (centred on the Lega but discusses the other co-
operative organizations as well).
Holmström, M. (1989) Industrial Democracy in Italy: Workers’ Co-ops and the Self-Management
Debate, Aldershot: Avebury (a comparative study, with focus on Italy).
Thornley, J. (1981) Workers’ Co-operatives: Jobs and Dreams, London: Heinemann (see ch. 8 for
a brief but comprehensive overview of the nature and development of the Italian movement).
PIETRO CAFARO
Coppi, Fausto
b. 15 September 1919, Alessandria; d. 2 January 1960, Tortona
Cyclist
Coppi began his string of victories in 1940 by winning the Giro d’Italia (see cycling) at
age twenty-one. In the Milan velodrome two years later, before leaving to fight in the
war, he set the new mark of 45.871 km for the Hour Record, a race against the clock.
When cycling resumed in 1946 he won the Milan-San Remo, but was placed second after
Bartali in the Giro. The next year Coppi bounced back, and this time it was Bartali’s turn
to be runner-up. In 1948, Coppi won his second Milan-San Remo.
In 1949 Coppi began a remarkable season by winning the Milan-San Remo, and went
on to first place in both the Giro and the Tour de France, a feat no other rider had
accomplished before. Switching from road to velodrome, he then became World Pursuit
Champion. In 1952, Coppi again won both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France. In
1953 he added the World Road Race Championship to his record-equalling fifth victory
in the Giro.
Coppi died prematurely of undiagnosed malaria in 1960, but the memory of the
campionissimo (the champion of champions), lives on: in his honour, the highest peak of
the Giro now bears the official name of Cima Coppi.
PAOLO VILLA
Il Corriere della sera
With an average daily circulation of around 700,000 at the end of the 1990s, Il Corriere
della sera was, for almost a century, the closest Italy came to having a national
newspaper. Founded in Milan in March 1876 by Eugenio Torelli Viollier as an afternoon
daily (hence its name, ‘Evening Courier’), it always expressed an attitude of firm but
Entries A–Z 195
enlightened conservatism and, from 1900 onwards under the directorship of Luigi
Albertini, came to be closely modelled on the London Times. Its prestige and leadership
continued to grow during the immediate postwar years, but in the mid-1970s which led to
a number of disruptive changes in it faced both a series of severe financial crises,
ownership and direction, and a direct challenge from the new Roman daily La
Repubblica. Its reputation was further damaged in 1981 by revelations of its association
with the Masonic P2 Lodge, and in 1986 the unthinkable happened and it was overtaken
in sales by La Repubblica. However, greater financial stability and able leadership during
the 1990s enabled it to regain its lead in sales and its influential voice in public affairs.
See also: newspapers
GINO MOLITERNO
Corti, Maria
b. 7 September 1915, Milan
Academic, writer and critic
Corti was born in Milan, where she currently resides after retiring from a long and
successful career as a university professor first in Lecce and then in Pavia. For many
years she taught philology and the history of the Italian language, and gained an
international reputation as a linguist and semiotic critic. She is still active in the research
center she established Pavia, which collects manuscript material of contemporary authors.
Her academic publications are wide-ranging and include annotated editions of
Cavalcanti, Dante, Leopardi, Vittorini and Fenoglio. While primarily a literary critic,
Corti is also a writer of fiction, a testament to her belief that the best critics are also
themselves writers. Throughout her career Corti has been recognized for the high quality
of her fiction, winning the Crotone prize in 1963 for her first work, L’ora di tutti
(Everyone’s Time) and the Pavese Prize for Il canto delle sirene (The Sirens’ Song)
(1989). In 1990 she received the Premio della Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri
(Prime Minister’s Prize) for literature. She has served as editor and co-director of
important literary journals, has contributed to periodicals such as alfabeta and Strumenti
critici and has also occasionally written for national newspapers such as Il Giornale and
La Repubblica.
BERNADETTE LUCIANO
Corto Maltese
Corto Maltese is the best-known fictional character created by Italian cartoonist and
illustrator, Hugo Pratt. An intrepid adventurer and wandering seaman, reminiscent of
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 196
characters in Joseph Conrad’s novels, Corto first emerges (quite literally from the sea) in
the Ballad of the Salt Sea, a story Pratt published in 1967 in the Genoese illustrated
magazine Sgt. Kirk. In this early story, however, Corto plays a largely supporting role,
sharing the limelight with the ruthless pirate captain Rasputin, the mysterious criminal
boss ‘Monk’ and the Pacific Ocean itself. He becomes the more suave and elegant sea
captain, and the major protagonist of his stories, only in 1970 in the pages of the French
magazine Pif Gadget. In subsequent stories we find him indulging his wanderlust,
confidently roaming the world in the early twentieth century, becoming entangled in real
historical events and crossing paths with both fictional and historical figures. By 1983 he
had become famous enough to appear in an illustrated travel and adventure magazine
named in his honour.
A recent re-issue of the Ballad of the Salt Sea in English bears a perhaps apocryphal
but significant quote from Umberto Eco which illustrates the overwhelming respect
which Pratt’s character and the magazine had achieved in the 1980s: ‘When I want to
relax I read an essay by Engels; when I want something more serious I read Corto
Maltese’.
Further reading
Pratt, H. (1996) The Celts: A Corto Maltese Adventure, trans, from the French by I.Monk, London:
The Harvill Press (contains six stories that recount Corto’s adventures between 1917 and 1918).
GINO MOLITERNO
Cossiga, Francesco
b. 26 July 1928, Sassari
Politician and statesman
An expert in constitutional law and a Catholic activist, Francesco Cossiga joined the DC
in 1945. Elected as a deputy in 1958, he became a junior minister in 1966. As Interior
Minister between 1976–8, he oversaw the establishment of Italy’s anti-terrorist squads
and was responsible for handling the Moro crisis. Moro’s assassination provoked his
immediate resignation. Prime Minister in 1979–80, he was regarded with extreme
suspicion by the Left yet was elected President of the Republic at the first ballot in 1985
thanks to PCI support. From 1990, as he was drawn into the Gladio scandal, he adopted
a highly controversial and outspoken political stance, supporting those seeking major
institutional reform and attacking even his own party, which he left. His resignation from
the presidency in April 1992 influenced the process of government formation during a
critical phase of political developments. Appointed a life senator in 1992, he later became
a vitriolic critic of Silvio Berlusconi in particular and the Freedom Alliance more
generally (see Polo della Libertà). His formation of the UDR in 1998 may have been
Entries A–Z 197
intended to encourage the ‘Europeanization’ of Italy’s apparently enduringly anomalous
Right.
MARK DONOVAN
Costanzo, Maurizio
b. 28 August 1938, Rome
Television presenter
Host of his own nightly chat show on Canale Cinque—and still portly despite a drastic
diet undertaken in 1997—Costanzo is a familiar companion to insomniacs. His show
offers a sly mixture of the topical, the salacious, the curious and the obvious: typical
guests might include a politician, an author, several showgirls, a psychologist and an
aspirant comic. Costanzo himself wanders between his guests posing questions in a
confidential, understated way, raising his voice and rudely interrupting them only when
an opportunity arises to play on the sympathies of his live audience. A political
chameleon who supported the Olive Tree coalition in 1996 after having been associated
in turn with the DC, the Radical Party, the Socialists and the ‘lay’ area, as well as
Gelli’s P2 Lodge, he became the only prominent Berlusconi employee not to publicly
back Forza Italia. Nevertheless, he is in no way a marginal figure. In addition to his own
show, he presents the Saturday afternoon show Buona Domenica and, in late 1997, he
became director of Canale Cinque.
See also: private television; television talk shows
Further reading
Veltroni, W. (1992) I programmi che hanno cambiato l’Italia (The Programmes That Changed
Italy), Milan: Feltrinelli (see pp. 60–3, Maurizio Costanzo show).
STEPHEN GUNDLE
Cottafavi, Vittorio
b. 30 January 1914, Modena; d. 14 December 1998, Anzio
Film and television director
A versatile and refined director with a background in law, literature and philosophy,
Cottafavi is unfortunately most remembered for ‘sword and sandal epics’ like La rivolta
dei gladiatori (The Revolt of the Gladiators) (1958) and Ercole alla conquista di
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Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis) (1961). After graduating from the Centre
Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1938, Cottafavi worked as scriptwriter and then as
assistant director to Vergano, Blasetti and De Sica. His first solo direction was in 1943
with I nostri sogni (Our Dreams), from a play by Ugo Betti, followed in the early 1950s
by a number of films that led French cinephiles to compare him to Antonioni. In the late
1950s he directed several popular mythological and pseudo-historical epics in the genre
that became known as the ‘peplum’, but from 1965 chose to work almost exclusively in
television, directing numerous literary adaptations ranging from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
to works by Dostoievsky, Lorca and Tennessee Williams. His adaptation of Pavese’s Il
diavolo nelle colline (The Devil in the Hills) was shown at Cannes in 1985 to much
critical acclaim.
GINO MOLITERNO
Council of Ministers
The Council of Ministers is the cabinet of the Italian government, which has varied in
number from 18 to 32 members. According to the constitution (article 92), the Council
of Ministers is nominated by the President of the Republic on the advice of the Prime
Minister (that is, the President of the Council of Ministers). In practice, in the ‘First’
Republic, ministries and junior ministries were a reflection not only of the strength of the
parties who made up the coalition but, above all, of the factions within the DC. There are
three specifically economic ministries (Treasury, Finance and Budget). The size of the
various ministries varies from over a million employees (Education) to less than 500,
which has led to considerable fragmentation. In contrast to the Westminster system, there
is no doctrine of cabinet responsibility and very little collegiality or policy co-ordination;
it was thus a first when, in May 1996, Romano Prodi declared that his cabinet would
work in unison in pursuit of L’Ulivo’s electoral programme, although there have been
examples of ministers breaking ranks since then.
JAMES WALSTON
Craxi, Bettino
b. 24 February 1934, Milan; d. 19 January 2000, Hammamet, Tunisia
Politician
Having ‘modernized’ the PSI and created a relatively factionless party, Craxi’s intention
was to lead it to victory on the ‘long wave’ of socialist success. In the event, he became
the very symbol of the political corruption of the so-called ‘First’ Republic and, in the
process, brought about the complete demise of the Socialist Party.
Entries A–Z 199
Craxi began his political career in 1956 as a PSI town councillor; he became a member
of the party’s Central Committee in 1957 and of the executive in 1965. He was a
councillor and member of local government in Milan from 1960–70, a deputy in the
national Parliament from 1968–94 and a member of the European Parliament in 1979.
Most importantly, he was party secretary between 1976–93 and Prime Minister from
1983–7.
After the PSI’s disappointing results in the June 1976 elections, Craxi was elected
secretary at a meeting at the Midas Hotel in Rome. At the time he led a minority faction,
and was seen as a compromise candidate rather than effecting a dramatic change of
direction for the party. However Craxi began to reorganize the party and, for the first
time in the PSI’s history, he succeeded in uniting it. He also changed the party symbol
from the hammer and sickle to the red carnation, and brought the PSI into the mainstream
of European socialism.
Craxi maintained the party’s support for the governments of national unity against the
threats of terrorism, but emphasized the PSI’s distance from the PCI. When the national
solidarity governments failed and the historic compromize was shelved, Craxi again put
the PSI forward as the DC’s only possible interlocutor on the left. With a socialist as
President of the Republic (Pertini) and the DC in electoral decline, Craxi became Prime
Minister in 1983 and held the post for almost four years (the longest prime ministership
in the history of the Republic). His government introduced a new Concordat with the
Vatican (see church, state and society) and removed the scala mobile (index-linked
wage increases). The party’s electoral shares increased, even if only gradually, and it
became increasingly southern.
Both as Prime Minister and subsequently, Craxi grew ever more authoritarian, putting
forward the doctrine of decisionismo—whereby he felt empowered to take decisions
without consultation with other party members—and ‘governability’, a buzzword for
giving more power to the executive in some sort of presidential system, obviously with
Craxi as president. His growing authoritarianism was wellportrayed by the political
cartoonist Forattini, who always showed him in black shirt and jackboots. From 1989–92,
and in spite of his no longer being the Prime Minister, Craxi still effectively controlled all
public resources, sharing these with the Christian Democrat powerbrokers Giulio
Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, in an ominous clientelistic triumvirate known as the
CAF.
As a result, the Socialist party and its secretary became closely identified with a high-
spending system based almost entirely on tangenti or kickbacks, most for the parties but
some for the individual leaders (see Mani pulite; Tangentopoli). Craxi’s high profile,
especially in Milan where the Tangentopoli investigations began, meant that he and the
PSI took even more responsibility for the corruption than they probably deserved. In
1993, Craxi abandoned the secretariat of his party and then the country, refusing to stand
trial in person. Since then, he has lived in gilded exile in Hammamet in Tunisia, while
some of his faithful have tried to rehabilitate him. His first definitive conviction for
corruption was handed down in 1996. A number of trials were still pending when he died
in Hammamet in January 2000.
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