Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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The overwhelming popularity of the comic book, which appealed both to younger pre-

teen readers as well as to a more mature audience, seemed largely to derive from its

clever marrying of the private detective and the supernatural horror genres, but always

with a strong dose of irony and self-conscious humour. The young and handsome Dylan

(‘Mr Dog’, as he’s often addressed by strangers or mere acquaintances) is modelled on

English actor Rupert Everett, lives in London at 7 Craven Road and is a professional

‘investigator of nightmares’. As such, he fearlessly takes on all sorts of cases which

involve him in gruesome and deadly battle with ghosts and vampires, werewolves and

aliens, but he is also openly terrified of flying and of dentists, suffers from vertigo and

claustrophobia and in between cases is shown relaxing at home doing nothing more

exciting than practising his clarinet or eternally attempting to assemble a model boat. A

further touch of oddball and selfconscious humour is provided by the ubiquitous presence

of a butler called Groucho, who not only physically resembles the vaudeville comedian

Groucho Marx, but is also continually making quips and banter in the Marx Brothers

style.

All these quirky features, presented in a visual style clearly influenced by the language

of film, are further enhanced by a marked propensity for postmodern pastiche and

citation. Frequent inter-textual allusions to everything from Hitchcock films to Umberto

Eco contribute a higher cultural and literary dimension for the benefit of more educated

readers, while the younger set probably remain more drawn by its splatter visuals and its

gothic atmospherics.

After increasing meteorically for almost a decade, sales began to fall in the mid-1990s,

but by then Dylan Dog had become so familiar to Italians that in 1996 the character was

used in a concerted advertising campaign to convince young people to wear seat belts in

cars.

GINO MOLITERNO

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earthquakes

Due to its position above the convergence of African and Eurasian tectonic plates, Italy

is, together with Greece, the European country most exposed to the risk of earthquakes

and nearly half the Italian territory is regularly subjected to shakes. Scientists use a

magnitude scale to measure the size of earthquakes ranging from a magnitude of 1.0,

roughly equivalent of breaking a rock the size of a bus, to magnitude 9.0, the equivalent

of a fault rupturing through hundreds of kilometres of continental rock. Strong Italian

earthquakes are usually in the magnitude range of 5.0 to 7.0. A complete catalogue of the

earthquakes that have occurred in Italy in the last 2,000 years has now been compiled by

the Italian National Institute for Geophysics (ING), but recognition of the role played by

the tectonic faults in earthquakes has been slow, with a result that the need for

preventative measures has only recently come to be addressed.

Italy has suffered several strong earthquakes since 1945, and this has led to greater

research into earthquake generation and hazard assessment. In 1979, an earthquake of

magnitude 5.9 struck Norcia, in the Apennines, and was believed to form a small fault

scarp. The formation of a fault scarp, the place where a fault rock rupture reaches the

ground surface, pointed to a connection between faults and earthquakes. That connection

was dramatically driven home by the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia in southern Italy, which

registered a magnitude of 6.9, originating 3–15 km below ground but breaking all the

way to the surface and causing a long meter-high fault scarp. Given the severity of the

Irpinia earthquake, which killed 3,000 people and completely levelled a number of small

towns, the Italian government finally moved not only to provide earthquake relief but

also, through a new law promulgated in January 1986, to establish appropriate and

compulsory building codes in areas of seismic hazard.

Since the Irpinia earthquake, several more strong earthquakes have occurred including

at Valcomino in 1984, a quake of magnitude 5.5, and at Potenza in 1990, with a quake of

magnitude 5.2 centred on the southeast end of the Irpinia fault. Then in 1997 in

Colfiorito, located in the central Apennines, a magnitude 6.0 tremor occurred 10 km

below ground, shaking the surface strongly enough to kill twelve people and leave 80,000

homeless throughout Umbria and the Marches region. With strong aftershocks that lasted

for several weeks, the Colfiorito earthquake left in its wake extensive damage to a large

number of historic and artistic sites, including the 800-year old Basilica of Saint Francis

at Assisi. The Department of Civil Protection was called upon to assist over 38,000

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people in the first three days following the earthquake, and total reconstruction costs were

estimated at about 10 trillion lira.

Current research suggests that 45 per cent of the Italian territory should be classified

as ‘seismic’ and so subject to certain strict regulations for new construction. However, 86

per cent of all of Italian dwellings were built before earthquake codes were developed

and thus remain at risk. Furthermore, although there are three categories of ‘seismic’

classification related to needs for increased level of regulation, zoning in the country

takes into account only the definition of broad seismic source zones and does not factor

in surface faulting. This is further complicated by the fact that the enforcement of seismic

codes is the responsibility of the communes (see local administration), which

themselves determine what criteria new construction must meet. In addition, although

there has developed a tradition of fully supporting the victims of natural disasters with

state funding, Italy still has no earthquake insurance.

On the positive side, the government has instituted the Department of Civil Protection

and the National Seismic Survey of Italy, a division of the National Technical Surveys,

which has among its missions the conducting of seismic risk assessment and the

collection of information on the effects of strong earthquakes. The National Seismic

Survey provides information about earthquakes to the public by mailing information

along with electrical bills as well as from a web site.

LARRY MAYER

Eco, Umberto

b. 5 January 1932, Alessandria

Novelist, semiotician and theorist of narrative and popular culture

After beginning a traditional academic career with a dissertation on the aesthetics of St

Thomas Aquinas at the University of Turin supervised by Luigi Pareyson in 1954, Eco

began working for Italian state television (RAI). In 1959 Eco also began his long

association with the Bompiani publishing house in Milan. After obtaining his degree in

aesthetics in 1961, he received the Chair of Visual Communications at the Faculty of

Architecture of the University of Florence. In 1971 he moved to the University of

Bologna in a new experimental faculty and was later awarded Italy’s first chair in

semiotics. In 1993, he became the chairman of a new department at the university

devoted to the sciences of communication.

Few if any contemporary Italian writers have enjoyed the international fame that Eco

has earned from his critical theory and fiction. Opera aperta (The Open Work) gained

him national renown in 1962 with his novel and original aesthetic theory which

distinguished between traditional ‘closed’ art and the truly avantgarde art which Eco

defined with a particularly felicitous term as ‘open’: examples are Joyce’s Finnegans

Wake, the mobiles of Alexander Calder or the music of Luciano Berio. With Diario

minimo (Misreadings) in the following year, Eco added a popular audience to the

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academic public he had won through his scholarship with witty, humorous parodies and

satirical essays; the book became a bestseller and a classic overnight.

Fascinated by the problem of devising a critical theory capable of analysing both

manifestations of high culture and those of mass or popular culture, Eco turned his

attention to popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s, producing a number of seminal

works in what he calls his ‘pre-semiotic’ stage. In 1964, in Apocalittici e integrati:

comunicazioni di massa e teorie delta cultura di massa (partially translated as

Apocalypse Postponed), Eco provided a brilliant discussion of the ways in which

intellectuals approach popular culture. A number of essays in journals or anthologies—

eventually published in 1976 as Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo

popolare (partially translated as The Role of the Reader)—confirmed Eco’s original

theoretical approach to popular culture. The book included Eco’s single most famous

essay, ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, a study of Ian Fleming’s character James Bond,

which would lead Eco toward the adoption of semiotics as a master discipline

encompassing all forms of human culture. The 1976 publication of a major semiotic

treatise, Trattato di semiologia generate (A Theory of Semiotics), established Eco as

Italy’s foremost semiotician, a rival to Roland Barthes in popularity and originality.

Eco’s fiction combines all his intellectual interests—popular culture, medievalism, the

detective novel, literary and semiotic theory—and may be said to embody the most

innovative aspects of literary postmodernism. His first novel in 1980, Il nome delta rosa

(The Name of the Rose) earned numerous Italian and foreign literary prizes and sold tens

of millions of copies all over the world. No single Italian book in the twentieth century

has enjoyed such commercial or critical acclaim. Eco provided every possible audience

with something of interest: for the mass market reader, he offered a ‘whodunit’ complete

with a Sherlock Holmes surrogate, a monk named William of Baskerville, who attempts

to solve a series of murders in an abbey; for the intellectual or academic audience, the

book was filled with history, arcane information and medieval philosophy that was thinly

disguised contemporary semiotic theory. Eco’s own assessment of his novel in Postille al

‘Nome delta rosa’ (Postscript to ‘The Name of the Rose’) in 1983 was subsequently

hailed by critics as one of the most intelligent and persuasive definitions of the term

‘postmodern’.

Eco’s two subsequent works of fiction continued his postmodernist, pastiche style,

combining the most erudite forms of literary theory and arcane lore about the past with

other generic traits of the thriller, the adventure story and the mystery novel. In 1988, Il

pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum) detailed the adventures of a group of friends

working for Milanese publishers who stumble upon (and help to create) a plot to take

over the world. In the process, Eco pokes fun at deconstructionism and cranks who view

the world through paranoid eyes. L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before)

(1994) represents a cross between Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and the

swashbuckling historical romances of Alexandre Dumas: it proposes a fascinating and

original parallel between only apparently bizarre ideas typical of Baroque culture in the

seventeenth century and similar concepts accepted today as exemplary notions of

postmodern thought.

Eco’s witty and learned ruminations on the nature of fiction are found in what may be

his most charming work of literary theory, originally presented as the prestigious Norton

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lectures at Harvard University in 1992–3, then published as Sei passeggiate nei boschi

narrativi (Six Walks in the Fictional Woods).