Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Ernesto De Martino’s scholarly enterprise spanned the fields of philosophy, folklore,
history and anthropology. Although De Martino was a member of Benedetto Croce’s
intellectual circle, he was also influenced by Heidegger, Hegel, Marx and Gramsci.
These influences prompted him to contest Croce’s ideas by attempting to historicize
cultures that Croce considered to be ‘without history’. Anti-fascist and socialist
tendencies oriented his postwar work, but rather than ascribing a progressive role to
popular culture, he maintained that the popular culture of Italy’s subaltern classes led,
through superstition and mystification, to their unwitting participation in their own
exploitation. His studies of ritual mourning, the evil eye, and tarantism reflect this
perspective, but they also critically analyse the dominant culture’s misunderstandings of
these phenomena. His work continues to influence both discussions of the Southern
Question and studies of Italian popular culture.
Further reading
Saunders, G. (1993) ‘Critical Ethnocentrism and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino’, American
Anthropologist 95 (4):875–93 (an analysis of De Martino’s contribution to anthropology).
THOMAS KELSO
De Marti no, Francesco
b. 31 May 1907, Naples
Politician
A classical scholar and author of works on the Roman constitution and economy, De
Martino fought in the Resistance with the Partito d’Azione (Action Party). After the war
he joined the PSI (Italian Socialist party), rose to its national leadership and served as
general secretary for much of the period from 1964 to 1976. Deputy-President of the
Council of Ministers in DC-PSI governments from 1970 to 1972, he subsequently
adopted a more pro-communist stance, promoting PCI—PSI alliances in local and
regional councils after gains by both parties at administrative elections in 1975. He also
favoured the left-wing alternative at national level, where the PCI however preferred its
historic compromise with the DC. De Martino instigated a government crisis in 1976,
which led to a general election at which the PCI’s vote increased greatly while the PSI’s
remained unchanged. He was then ousted from the PSI leadership by Bettino Craxi, who
set the party definitively on a course of competition with the PCI. After a long career as
an elected member, De Martino was appointed a life senator in 1991.
Entries A–Z 231
Further reading
Zavoli, S. (1998) De Martino: Intervista sulla sinistra italiana (Interview on the Italian Left), Bari:
Laterza.
CLAIRE KENNEDY
De Mita, Ciriaco
b. 2 February 1928, Nusco, Avellino
Politician
A Catholic university graduate, De Mita joined the DC in 1950. He became a deputy in
1963, serving both as a minister and then briefly, in 1988–9, as prime minister, although
his career in the party was more important. A member of the faction which had favoured
the opening to the Left in the early 1960s, he became party vice-secretary in 1969 but
failed in his attempt to facilitate political reform by encouraging recognition of the PCI as
a legitimate opposition. As party secretary from 1982–9, he again sought vainly to
legitimize the PCI while personally countering Craxi’s bid to turn the PSI into the DC’s
principal competitor. Although partially successful in modernizing the party’s
management of the state, he was nevertheless unable to end the oligarchic clientelism of
his party. Himself a southern notable, with Avellino as something of a personal fiefdom,
he returned to Parliament in 1996 via a stand-down arrangement with the Ulivo (Olive
Tree). Thus, despite his exclusion from Parliament in 1994–6, he again became
influential in the PPI.
MARK DONOVAN
De Santis, Giuseppe
b. 11 February 1917, Fondi; d. 19 June 1997, Sant’Ivo
Film critic and director
Now generally acknowledged as one of the ‘fathers’ of neorealism, De Santis studied at
the Centre Sperimentale di Cinematografia in the late 1930s and, together with
Visconti and Antonioni, was one of the militant critics writing for the journal Cinema
who advocated a greater sense of realism in Italian films. In 1942 he helped write and
direct the film regarded as the landmark of neorealism, Visconti’s Ossessione. His first
feature film, Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt) (1946), was critically well-received but his
next film, Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice) (1948), although hugely successful at the box
office—it was even nominated for an Oscar—was almost unanimously and ferociously
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attacked, especially by left-wing critics, for mingling social criticism and eroticism. De
Santis succeeded in making several other films during the 1950s and early 1960s, but
continued to be ostracized and, in spite of many scripts and projects, was unable to make
any major film after his Italiani brava gente (Good People the Italians) in 1964.
Somewhat belatedly, in 1995 he was awarded a Golden Lion at Venice for his career in
cinema.
GINO MOLITERNO
De Santis, Pasqualino
b. 24 April 1927, Fondi; d. 23 June 1996, Rome
Cinematographer
Younger brother of the neorealist film-maker Giuseppe De Santis, Pasqualino De Santis
started his career as the assistant of Piero Portalupi in the 1950s. In the 1960s he became
the assistant of Gianni Di Venanzo, one of Italy’s most eminent cinematographers. The
tragedy of Di Venanzo’s death in 1966 led De Santis to take over his mentor’s position
for Mankiewicz’s The Honey Pot and thus pursue his career as a full-fledged
cinematographer.
De Santis’s uniform talent for both improvisation and stylization made him as
equipped for the polished sophistication of Luchino Visconti’s films (La caduta degli Dei
(The Damned), 1969, amongst others), the stark realism of Robert Bresson (Lancelot du
Lac, 1974), or hand-held camerawork as in Rosi’s Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair)
(1972). De Santis is especially famous for his lasting collaboration with Rosi, for whom
he photographed almost a dozen films. De Santis died while working on Rosi’s 1996
film, La Tregua (The Truce).
DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL.
De Seta, Vittorio
b. 15 October 1923, Palermo
Film-maker
In spite of making only a very limited number of films, De Seta is widely regarded as one
of the best Italian documentary film-makers of the postwar period. Born into an
aristocratic Sicilian family, he studied architecture in Rome before turning to cinema.
After a brief apprenticeship as assistant director to J-P. Le Chanois on Le village magique
(1954), he made nine short but impressive documentaries between 1954 and 1960, all
depicting harsh aspects of life in Sicily and Sardinia and all written, produced, directed
Entries A–Z 233
and photographed by himself. His first feature film, Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits at
Orgosolo), explored the phenomenon of Sardinian banditry by using genuine Sardinian
shepherds to play the roles and received wide acclaim when it was shown at the Venice
Film Festival in 1961. After only two more films in the 1960s, Un uomo a metà (Half a
Man) (1966) and L’invitata (The Guest) (1969), in the 1970s De Seta made several
documentaries for the RAI, the best known being his Diario di un maestro (A Teacher’s
Diary) in 1973.
GINO MOLITERNO
De Sica, Vittorio
b. 7 July 1901, Sora; d. 13 November 1974, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Actor and film director
Born into a very poor family in Southern Italy, De Sica grew up in Naples. He began
acting on the stage when he was still a teenager, and by 1918 had appeared in his first
film. However, it was his starring role in Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (Men!
What Scoundrels!) (1932) that transformed him into Italy’s most popular matinee idol of
the 1930s. In these early ‘white telephone’ films he generally played the role of the bravo
ragazzo (nice guy), and was thus immensely popular with female audiences.
In his long career he acted in over one hundred films, often using the proceeds to
finance his own productions. The first films he directed were mostly adaptations of stage
plays but his fourth, I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us) (1942), was
to be the key to his postwar films. The film uses a child’s perspective on an adult
adulterous affair to elicit a sentimental response from its viewers and, in directing it, De
Sica teamed up with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in a partnership that would be the
most significant of his career. With Zavattini as scriptwriter, general assistant and often
uncredited co-director, De Sica went on after the war to make a series of films which
would define the neorealist canon: Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946), Ladri di biciclette
(Bicycle Thieves) (1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) (1951) and Umberto D
(1952). Each of these films dealt with a particular social problem (crime, unemployment,
homelessness) using the vehicle of a powerfully emotive personalized story. However,
despite being hailed by film critics like Andrè Bazin as a cinematic masterpiece, Umberto
D was a box office failure and is now often regarded as the last great neorealist film.
De Sica had already been wooed by Hollywood when David O.Selznick had offered to
produce Bicycle Thieves if Cary Grant would be allowed to play the leading role. On that
occasion De Sica refused, but eventually in 1953 he succumbed and moved to Hollywood
to make Stazioni termini (released as Indiscretions of an American Wife), which
showcased Selznick’s wife Jennifer Jones in the main role. De Sica turned out eight films
for the lucrative American market in the 1960s, of which Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow) (1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style)
(1964), both starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, are by far the best.
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De Sica also continued to act for other directors. He appeared in Luigi Comencini’s
extremely successful Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams) (1953), and gave
a striking performance in Roberto Rossellini’s Il generate Della Rovere (General Della
Rovere) (1959). After his lacklustre commercial films of the 1960s (the so-called
‘rosetinted comedies’), De Sica returned in the early 1970s to a more committed style of
film-making with Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi Contini) (1970),
adapted from the novel by Giorgio Bassani and dealing with the incarceration of Italian
Jews during the Second World War. This last film succeeded in creating a renewed
interest in his work as a film-maker.
Further reading
Daretta, J. (1983) Vittorio De Sica: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston: Hall and Co. (a
comprehensive guide to materials on De Sica which includes a compact biography and list of
films).
Pecori, F. (1980) Vittorio De Sica, Florence: La Nuova Italia (a history of De Sica as director with
analyses of individual films and a full filmography).
LAURENCE SIMMONS
Debenedetti, Giacomo
b. 25 June 1901, Biella; d. 20 January 1967, Rome
Literary critic and essayist
After formative years spent under the influence of Croce’s philosophy, Debenedetti
became attracted by psychoanalysis, sociology, phenomenology and anthropology. As a
result, his critical approach betrayed a wide range of interests that could not be restricted
to a single methodology and his analysis of authors was based to a large extent on his
own personal experience. He founded the literary journal Primo tempo and worked for
several Italian cultural magazines. During Fascism, due to his Jewish origins, he was
forced to work as a ghost-writer for numerous film scripts. He also wrote several books
on the Second World War experience such as Otto ebrei (Eight Jews) (1944) and 16
Ottobre 1943 (October 16, 1943) (1944). Most of his critical works were collected under
the title Saggi critici (Critical Essays) and published in three different series. Many other
important works were published posthumously, amongst them Il romanzo del Novecento
(The Twentieth Century Novel) (1971), Poesia italiana del Novecento (Twentieth
Century Italian Poetry) (1974) and Pascoli: la ‘rivoluzione inconsapevole’ (Pascoli: the
Unconscious Revolution) (1979).
ANDREA RICCI
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Del Giudice, Daniele
b. 11 January 1949, Rome
Writer
Part of the ‘new generation’ of Italian novelists and regarded by many critics as the heir
to Italo Calvino, Del Giudice’s prose is characterized by measure, control and meticulous
description, using very precise and often scientific language. Several of his novels and
short stories confirm a fascination with flying and aircraft. His first novel, Lo stadio di
Wimbledon (Wimbledon Stadium) (1983), recounts a young writer’s attempt to piece
together the life of a mysterious literary figure long dead whilst his second, Atlante
occidentale (translated as Lines of Light, 1985) deals with the opposition between science
and literature. Nel museo di Reims (In the Reims Museum) (1988), a text accompanied by
the paintings of Nereo Rotelli, examines themes of vision whereby its central character,
who is losing his sight, has a young woman describe to him the paintings in a museum he
visits. Staccando l’ombra da terra (Takeoff) (1994) contains a series of pieces on the
theme of flying and Mania (1997) continues this format of thematically connected stories
with six pieces on the themes of violence and war.
LAURENCE SIMMONS
Del Monte, Peter
b. 29 July 1943, San Francisco, California
Film director
Peter Del Monte stands out among the film-makers of his generation as an auteur of
cinema made of feelings and emotions, removed from realism. Del Monte grew up
between the United States and Italy, where he graduated in literature from the University
of Rome in 1965. In 1969 he received his diploma from the Centre Sperimentale di
Cinematografia by presenting the short film Fuori campo (Off Screen) which defined
his style and his interest in exploring characters’ psychology. After working for television
for several years, he entered the film industry in 1975 with Irene, Irene, which confirmed
his preference for a non-realistic, almost abstract, cinema. He became more widely
known with Piso Pisello in 1981 and Giulia e Giulia (Julia and Julia) in 1987, the first
high-definition feature-length film. In 1990 Del Monte produced the fourteen-episode
film Tracce di vita amorosa (Traces of Love Life), followed in 1995 by Compagna di
viaggio (Travel Companion).
ANTONELLA FRANCINI
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Della Volpe, Galvano
b. 24 September 1895, Imola; d. 13 July 1968, Rome
Philosopher
Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Messina and the most
influential postwar Italian Marxist philosopher, Della Volpe was formed within the neo-
idealist tradition associated with Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce, but soon
rejected their idealist position in Critica dei principi logici (Critique of Logical
Principles) (1942). He joined the PCI (Italian Communist Party) in 1944, and in the
immediate postwar years explored the relationship between Marxism and the work of
Hegel, culminating in his first major Marxist work, Logica come scienza positiva (Logic
as Positive Science) (1950). Della Volpe helped form a generation of younger Marxist
philosophers, of whom the best-known is Lucio Colletti. His most widely-read work,
Rousseau e Marx e altri saggi di critica materialistica (Rousseau and Marx and Other
Essays on Materialist Criticism) (1957) traces the two strands of modern democracy—
civil liberty and social liberty—back to their eighteenthcentury origins. Della Volpe then
argues that only the ‘socialist legality’ of communism can provide an effective historical
synthesis of these two traditions. Nevertheless, Della Volpe’s most influential book
remains a work of aesthetic theory. In Critica del gusto (Critique of Taste) (1960) he
attempts to develop a ‘rational poetics’ by demonstrating that conceptual meaning cannot
be separated from aesthetic effect.
Further reading
Fraser, J. (1977) An Introduction to the Thought of Galvano della Volpe, London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
LAURENCE SIMMONS
Delli Colli, Tonino
b. 20 November 1923, Rome
Cinematographer
With over seventy feature films to his credit, Tonino Delli Colli is one of Italy’s most
prominent and versatile cinematographers. His eclectic talents, combining a taste for
classical simplicity with a sophisticated and innovative approach, especially served the
cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. As early as Pasolini’s first two films, Accattone (1961)
and Mamma Roma (1962), Delli Colli wholeheartedly embarked upon Pasolini’s
aesthetic project, agreeing to subvert the rules of photography so as to show the sacred
Entries A–Z 237
side of gritty realities or, conversely, to recall the human scope of myths and religions, as
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew) (1964) best
epitomizes.
Delli Colli also collaborated with many other major European film-makers: Mario
Monicelli and Dino Risi with whom he made many comedies, Louis Malle (Lacombe
Lucien, 1974), Sergio Leone (C’era una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in
America), 1969), Federico Fellini (on the director’s last three films), Marco Ferreri
(Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness), 1983, and Il futuro e donna (The
Future is Woman), 1984) and Polanski (Lune de Fiel, 1992 and Death and the Maiden
1994).
DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL.
Democrazia Proletaria
Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy) was an umbrella organization formed by
a variety of small parties and organizations to the left of the Communist Party in order to
contest the national elections of 1976. In spite of what had originally appeared to be a
groundswell of popular support for its various component groups, the organization itself
failed to draw votes away from the PCI and only polled 1.5 per cent of the vote. In the
wake of this defeat, several of the organizations left and some, like Lotta Continua
(Continuous Struggle; see extraparliamentary Left) actually dissolved. The DP
nevertheless continued, as a deeply divided and rather mixed party, to contest national
elections in subsequent years but never achieved more than 1.7 per cent of the vote. In
June 1991, after Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) split from the
newly formed PDS, Democrazia Proletaria decided to dissolve itself and merge with
Rifondazione which, ironically, was carrying on staunchly the old traditions of the very
PCI which Democrazia Proletaria had been founded to oppose.
GINO MOLITERNO
D’Eramo, Luce
b. 17 June 1925, Rheims, France
Novelist and essayist
The daughter of an officer of the Fascist party, D’Eramo grew up in Paris and moved
with her family to Italy in 1939. After the fall of Mussolini, she decided to investigate
first-hand revelations of Nazi atrocities. She went to Germany in 1944, worked in a
factory in Frankfurt and joined Todt, an organization created to bring foreign workers to
Germany. During this period, she also volunteered to work in the concentration camp at
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Dachau. However, after discovering the reality of Nazi atrocities, she escaped to
Magonza. While assisting bombing victims there, she suffered wounds that left her
permanently paralysed. She returned to Rome in 1945, and earned degrees in Italian
literature, history and philosophy. Her early publications were the collections of essays
Raskolinov e il marxismo (Raskolinov and Marxism), L’opera di Ignazio Silone (The
Works of Ignazio Silone) (1971) and Cruciverba politico (Political Crossword Puzzle)
(1974). In her fictional narratives, D’Eramo explores political themes and focuses on the
marginalized. Among these are Deviations (Deviation) (1979), an autobiographical
account of her experiences in Germany, and Nucleo zero (Zero Nucleus) (1980), one of
the first novels to deal with Italian terrorism.
VIRGINIA PICCHIETTI
design education
Given the reputation of Italian design in the international arena it is perhaps surprising
that, unlike Great Britain and a number of other countries, Italy did not until fairly
recently have a very extensive design educational system. There is no equivalent in Italy
of Germany’s ‘Bauhaus’ or ‘Hochschule fur Gestaltung’ at Ulm, or of Great Britain’s
Royal College of Art, schools which have produced leading designers for industry
through this century. Most of Italy’s designers were trained as architects, many of them
graduating, in the interwar years and beyond, from the polytechnics of Milan and Turin
where they were trained in the tenets of European modernism.
Many of the anti-design protagonists of the 1960s—members of Superstudio and
Archizoom among them—received their education in the architectural department at the
University of Florence where, among others, Adolfo Natalini was a key teacher of those
years. Michele de Lucchi was among the many to emerge from this hothouse, bringing
his background to Milan when he moved there in the 1970s. Architecture provided then,
and to a great extent still provides, the pedagogic framework for Italian industrial
designers, allowing them to move freely across objects and media.
The first school to concentrate on training designers, the Domus Academy, was
established in Milan in 1982 by Maria Grazia Mazzochi, Valerio Castelli and Alessandro
Guerriero (the last having also been the force behind the radical Studio Alchimia which
had been in operation since 1979). Andrea Branzi, a leading member of Studio Alchimia,
was appointed as the first director of the Academy and he instantly made it a landmark
within international design education.
A private institution, Domus Academy attracts young designers from around the world
and invites them to Milan, the design centre of Europe. It provides a postgraduate
education for these young people in what it calls the ‘New Design’, in which the
emphasis falls less upon the finished object than on the experiential process of designing.
In the 1980s, Branzi encouraged the students to concentrate on the sensorial qualities of
design. With the assistance of Clino Trini Castelli, who had been working since the early
1970s on what he called the ‘reactive surface’, and Massimo Morozzi, who worked in the
Entries A–Z 239
area of ‘soft design’, the school encouraged a move away from formalism towards a more
appropriate design for the late twentieth century.
Much of a student’s time at the Domus Academy is spent studying the context within
which design fits, from its socioeconomic to its technological framework. Ezio Manzini
has also played an important role there as a teacher, developing new projects with plastics
and formulating his ideas about ‘semantic pollution’. Other teachers have included Carlo
Alfonso, Valerio Castelli, Michele de Lucchi, Gian Franco Ferre, Alberta Meda,
Francesco Morace, Gianni Pettena, Daniela Puppa and Pierre Restany. More recently,
possibilities for design education have expanded in Italy, and the Polytechnic of Milan
now offers a course in industrial design as well as architecture.
See also: anti-design; interior design
Further reading
Branzi, A. (1984) The Hot-House: Italian New Wave Design, London: Thames and Hudson.
PENNY SPARKE
detective fiction
Detective fiction is also known as giallo (yellow), from the yellow covers of the
Mondadori series that launched the genre in Italy in 1929, importing the classics—from
Edgar Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson to Agatha Christie and Rex Stout—and
creating a readership for this genre of popular literature.
The first Italian giallo, Il settebello (The Seven of Diamonds) by Alessandro Varaldo,
appeared in 1931 and introduced the first Italian detective, Police Commissioner Ascanio
Bonichi, a down-to-earth character from the countryside who solved his cases by chance
rather than by using Holmesian scientific rigour. Other prewar detective writers included
Alessandro De Stefani, Giorgio Spini and Ezio D’Arrico (creator of an Italian version of
Simenon’s Maigret, Commissioner Emilio Richard). Augusto De Angelis provided the
Italian tradition with a complex and well-defined character in Commissioner De
Vincenzi: educated and pessimistic, he carried out his investigations utilizing
psychological analysis.
In the late 1930s the Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture banned detective fiction, and
it was only after the war that the genre once again became widely diffused. The classic
detective novel, based on detection, continued to have a readership but the model of the
American hard-boiled school, which focused on chasing and capturing the criminal in a
metropolitan jungle where the investigator uses the same methods as the criminal,
became more popular. Franco Enna and Sergio Donati were two authors of the period
who imitated this model. A series of authentic and original Italian detective novels were
published by Giorgio Scerbanenco between 1966 and 1969. Novels such as Venere
privata (Private Venus), Traditori di tutti (Traitors of Everybody) and I ragazzi del
massacro (The Guys of the Massacre) used a successful recipe, mixing features of the
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