Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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During the last years of his life, Fellini made commercials for a number of companies

(Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, the Banco di Roma), exhibited his sketches and cartoons all

over the world with great success, and received numerous honours—including the

Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale’s Film Festival in 1985 and the fifth Oscar for his

career in 1993. In 1987, a panel of professionals from eighteen European nations named

8½ the best European film of all time and Fellini Europe’s greatest director. In 1992 this

verdict was confirmed in another poll of international film directors conducted by Sight

and Sound, which ranked Fellini as the most significant film director of all time. These

directors also cited two of Fellini’s works (La Strada and 8½) in a list often masterpieces

which had the most profound influence upon them and the history of the cinema.

Fellini’s funeral in Rome was a national event, with throngs of people in attendance at

the church and thousands more filing by his coffin to pay him their last respects in the

huge Studio 5 of his beloved Cinecittà, afterward renamed Studio Fellini in his honor. A

foundation was subsequently established in Rimini to support the study and further

dissemination of his work.

Further reading

Bondanella, P. (1990) Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York, Continuum,

2nd revised edn (a survey of postwar film in Italy that places Fellini in a national context).

——(1992) The Cinema of Federico Fellini, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (a detailed

account of Fellini’s life using archival sources).

Bondanella, P. and Degli-Esposti, C. (eds) (1993) Perspectives on Federico Fellini, New York:

G.K. Hall (an anthology of critical interpretations of Fellini’s cinema from a wide variety of

theoretical perspectives).

Costantini, C. (ed.) (1995) Conversations with Fellini, trans. Sohrab Sorooshian, London: Faber &

Faber (a very useful series of interviews with Fellini covering his entire career).

Kezich, T. (1987) Fellini, Milan: Camunia (the indispensable, classic biography by Italy’s best film

critic).

PETER BONDANELLA

Feltrinelli

Founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (1926–72), then aged twenty-nine, the publishing

house was one aspect of an ambitious project of promoting left-wing and antifascist

culture in Italy. In 1949 Feltrinelli set up what later became the Institute, while book

publishing followed on from the experience of a co-operative producing popular editions.

The bookshops were launched in the late 1960s, and by the firm’s thirtieth anniversary

there was a chain of fourteen outlets. The publishing activity took off in 1957 with the

world’s first edition of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and this success was

consolidated with Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and García Marquez’s One

Hundred Years of Solitude. The company created an impressive fiction list, consisting not

least of innovative young writers, both Italian and foreign. The non-fiction list under

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Giangiacomo Feltrinelli included works representative of political movements in Latin

America (a famous photograph shows him with Fidel Castro) and the Third World, not to

mention New Left writings in Europe. Mystery still surrounds the publisher’s death (he

was found dead in 1972 at the foot of a pylon outside Milan, apparently the victim of his

own bomb) but it seems that his fears of a coup d’état drove him to espouse the armed

struggle. His memory and legacy is still honoured in a company that continues to

combine capitalist organization with ideas critical of capitalism.

ROBERT LUMLEY

feminism

Of all the social and civil movements which swept across the nation in the 1960s and

1970s, it was arguably feminism which had the most substantial and long-term impact on

personal, family and economic life in Italy. New wave feminism emerged amidst the

political fervor of the late 1960s, but went on to challenge all aspects—legal, financial,

moral, cultural—of women’s lives in Italy.

This feminism represented a dramatically new phenomenon in its refusal to separate

private life from the public and the political, and in its ability to undercut and disrupt

traditional forms of politics by appealing to a constituency unlimited by age or class.

New wave feminism also marked a radical break from older forms of feminist

organization such as the suffrage campaign at the turn of the century or the reformist,

emancipationist movements after the Second World War, which had failed to achieve

mass support and which had sought to enter, rather than to challenge, existing forms of

civic politics. These earlier demands for women’s rights had tacitly and implicitly

recognized the legitimacy of the state in their demand to participate in the political

process on equal terms but feminism in the 1970s, while campaigning vigorously for

legal and civic reform, also came to question emancipation and equality as ultimate goals,

seeing in them an erasure of sexual difference. While remaining rooted in political

activism, demanding equality in family law and fighting for divorce and the right to

abortion, the new feminism also sought to understand ways in which women remained

oppressed by linguistic structures and philosophical categories as well as by ideology and

legislation.

By the late 1960s, rapid urbanization and increased educational opportunities had

radically transformed the expectations of Italian women; no longer content with their

traditional role, they sought professional employment and equal status. Women were

active in trade union agitation in the factories, but the egalitarian rhetoric of left-wing

activism was undermined by a continuing stereotype of women’s roles. Women were

deemed politically immature and strategically naive, and their contribution to the

revolution was held by all too many to be sexual rather than intellectual. Once again the

political parties of the Left—as in the days of Anna Kuliscioff’s struggle within the

Socialist party at the turn of the century, or as in the period immediately following the

Second World War and the drama of the Resistance—refused to acknowledge the

dimension of gender within radical politics.

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From 1970 onwards, feminist groups began to emerge in the larger cities. The increase

in their education and the decrease in the birth rate gave women the time and means to

consider events around them, while the increased complexity of women’s lives, their

‘double presence’ in the home and in the workplace, made this imperative. The American

influence was decisive in a nation where traditional politics was alien ground to most

women. Women began to practise their own form of consciousness raising, or

autocoscienza, a movement which established numerous informal contacts and elaborated

the inseparability of personal experience from ideological structures. Women analysed

both Catholic ideology, which characterized women exclusively as home-makers, and,

more bitingly, left-wing politics which replicated the patriarchal structures of the Catholic

party. This move marked a significant break from the more moderate reformism of

organizations such as the UDI (Unione donne italiane), which was affiliated with the

Communist Party (see PCI) and which, despite the influence of Togliatti and Gramsci,

continued to seek alliances between social classes. Class-based political analysis was

soon dismissed as inadequate and hostile to women’s interests. Many of the earlier

feminists emerged from the student movement appalled by its reactionary mode of

organization. Carla Lonzi, one of the most influential thinkers of these early years, in the

Demau (Demystification of Authority) manifesto of 1966, denounced Marxism for its

occlusion of women’s perspectives, for its failure to address the patriarchal dimension of

social structures and for its continuing blinkered obsession with a class analysis which,

unable to deal with the different positions of men and women, effectively eliminated

gender difference. The oppression of women could thus no longer be understood purely

in terms of class.

Women rapidly organized into local and regional groups, thus reflecting the

continuing regional nature of cultural life in Italy. These groups constituted a loose

federal structure, so that, in the case of Italy, it would certainly be more correct to speak

of ‘feminisms’ rather than ‘feminism’: they included the Libreria delle donne (Women’s

Bookshop) and Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt) in Milan, the Movimento Femminista

Romano (Roman Feminist Movement), Diotima in Verona and Transizione (Transition)

in Naples. Autonomous women’s research and study centres were set up, as well as

numerous feminist journals and magazines such as Effe and Quotidiano Donna (Woman

Daily). Feminism began to elaborate a new politics based on the transformation of

everyday social relations and sought women’s liberation not through external structures

but through a revolution in the sphere of the private, the subjective and the personal. The

group Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle), for example, campaigned for wages for

housework. While their approach was criticized for a sterile economic reductionism

which would have logically required state intervention in every area of family life, they

did succeed in bringing into the open the question of women’s domestic labour, as well as

pointing out the wage gap suffered by women in paid employment.

The 1970s saw a wave of reforming legislation covering all aspects of family and

personal life. The MLD (Movimento di Liberazione della Donna (Movement for the

Liberation of Woman)), affiliated to the Radical Party, demanded contraception,

abortion, free medical services, legal equality, the end of economic exploitation and the

end of discrimination on grounds of sex. In 1970, a divorce bill finally went through

Parliament and was upheld by referendum in 1974 despite the opposition of the

Catholics. This was a serious defeat for the Christian Democrats (see DC), since it was

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women themselves who were decisive in the campaign to defeat the referendum. In 1975,

the Christian Democrats and the Communists united to pass a reform of family law which

finally abolished adultery (by women) as a criminal offence and gave illegitimate

children equal civil rights. However, the campaign which saw the greatest cohesion of all

the disparate and local women’s groups was that for abortion, finally legalized in 1978

and upheld overwhelmingly by referendum three years later. Feminists turned the issue

from a matter of civil rights to a question of ownership and control of women’s bodies,

analysing and exposing the exercise of coercive power over women’s lives. With the

achievement of these major pieces of legislation, the women’s movement returned largely

to its former loose, fragmented and local forms of organization, integrating into the

municipal, provincial and regional administrative structures (see regional government;

local administration). Nonetheless, these campaigns had powerfully demonstrated the

extent to which feminism cut across traditional class and political lines in its challenge to

the traditional political, and moral, status quo.

As well as achieving significant legal reform, feminists also sought to challenge wider

cultural and literary codes and expectations. The new feminist presses published new

work by women writers and reprints of long-discarded works as well as translations of

key foreign texts, while women’s study and research centres, such as the Centre Virginia

Woolf (Virginia Woolf Centre) in Rome, were set up in order to provide an alternative

syllabus to that offered by the universities. Women writers challenged the supposed

neutrality of art and explored both women’s access to artistic discourse and their

representation by the dominant cultural forms. Novelists and poets sought to produce

accounts of women’s lives rather than high art, and set themselves the task of

investigating female subjectivity and sexual identity. In the decade of the 1970s,

aesthetics became a branch of politics.

The successful campaigns for legal reform marked a transitional moment. By the end

of the 1970s women had made real gains, while sending an effective challenge to the

organization of politics and the dominance of the traditional parties. The end of the mass

campaigning by women—for abortion, for divorce and for an end to sexual violence—

coincided with the fragmentation of other political and grassroots movements in Italy

following the Communists’ ‘historic compromise’ and a general weariness with

struggles and ideologies. Feminism lost its ability to mobilize on a mass scale and turned

in the 1980s from the streets and squares, and from a demand for radical changes in the

civic and legal status of women, to a more reflective theoretical and political

consideration of questions of sexual difference. Here Italian feminism showed its

eclecticism, influenced not only by the militant radicalism and pressure group politics of

the United States, but also by the philosophical and theoretical traditions of French

feminism. Italian feminism, after emerging from women’s movements formed in the

hothouse atmosphere of Italian political life in the 1960s and early 1970s and engaging in

protracted political and legislative campaigns, was markedly successful in bridging the

gap between theory and praxis, between an academic, theoretical analysis and an

engagement with those issues which affected all women.

Italian feminism’s most significant and original theoretical contributions are its

elaboration of theories of sexual difference, and its strategies for new forms of sociality

between women. Sexual difference can be mapped neither onto biological determinism

nor onto the social construction of gender. The demand for equality is set aside as

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foreshadowing the assimilation of women into orthodox male conceptualizations and the

annihilation of difference. The philosophical elaboration of sexual difference requires a

shift in thought and discourse to accommodate a multiple perspective on the world. The

philosophical perspective on sexual difference has unravelled somewhat, however, on

legislation dealing with equal opportunities. The practice of affidamento, or entrustment,

on the other hand, sought to connect women of different levels of knowledge and

experience in a form of network mentoring, focussing on the other woman as reference

point. Affidamento was closely related to the analysis of maternity which led to the

rejection not only of motherhood but of the figure of the mother as oppressive and static,

and the adoption of another woman in the search for more dynamic and open-ended

relationships between women. While the success of both these theoretical enterprises may

be open to question, the Italian emphasis on relations between women, and on the figure

of the mother, is striking, a reflection perhaps of the feminist challenge to the dominance

of traditional cultural accounts, whether Catholic or communist, of women’s lives.

Two decades of feminism saw women active in all areas of work and cultural and

political life, but still in a minority. Women were largely silent spectators of the collapse

of the First Republic. Since first achieving the vote in 1946 the percentage of women in

parliament has not risen above 10 per cent. Quota systems were introduced in the 1993

local elections, guaranteeing 30 per cent representation by women, but this controversial

measure has only been partly successful and vociferously opposed by some women as

well as by parties such as the Lega Nord, despite its strong base among women voters.

Indeed, in recent years the few women to have caught the public eye in politics have been

on the Right rather than the Left, in Catholic rather than progressive parties; generally,

social, political and cultural structures remain irreducibly male-dominated. There have

been some changes: the 1991 equal opportunities law clarified the 1977 law on equality,

and there are moves towards a law on sexual harassment, and a growing debate on

violence, as well as a new willingness among professional women to organize and debate

issues, a move perhaps more productive than the idea of affidamento. While feminism in

the 1990s finds itself somewhat adrift politically, with few clear and tangible objectives

in pursuit of which women can come together, there has nonetheless been a

transformation of women’s personal and family life not registered by orthodox politics.

Further reading

Beccalli, B. (1994) ‘The Modern Women’s Movement in Italy’, New Left Review 204:86–112 (an

overview of the movement).

Bono, O. and Kemp, S. (eds) (1991) Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell (a

comprehensive volume drawing together in English translation all the most important

documents of Italian feminism together with rigorous chronology and bibliography).

Doria, M.R. (ed.) (1987) La ricerca delle donne: studi femministi in Italia (Women’s Research:

Feminist Studies in Italy), Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier (an interdisciplinary survey of feminist

research in Italy, including chapters on history, anthropology, economics, psychoanalysis and

philosophy).

Ergas, Y. (1986) Nelle maglie della politico.: femminismo, istituzioni e politiche

sociali nell’Italia degli anni ‘70 (In the Weave of Politics: Feminism, Social and Political

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Institutions in Italy in the 1970s), Milan: F.Angeli (studies the relationship of the feminist

movement to political parties in Italy).

Kaplan, G (1992) Contemporary Western European Feminism, London: UCL Press (see especially

pp. 229–58 for a general but comprehensive overview of the strategies and achievements of

Italian feminism).

SHARON WOOD

feminist cinema

Before the emergence of what might be termed feminist cinema in Italy in the 1970s,

only two women had gained a reputation in the predominantly male world of Italian

cinema: Lina Wertmüller and Liliana Cavani. Wertmüller replied to Scola’s film Se

permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk About Women) (1964) with the successful

commercial film Questa volta parliamo di uomini (This Time We Talk About Men)

(1965), while Cavani confronted the delicate issue of the Resistance in Le donne nella

Resistenza (Women in the Resistance) (1963) and reinterpreted the legend of Antigone in

I cannibali (The Cannibals) (1969).

Of course, many women already worked in the film industry as scriptwriters and

assistants to male directors. However, with the rise of feminism, women began to

produce, write and direct their own feature films. In 1972 Elda Tattoli’s Il pianeta Venere

(The Venus Planet), the first Italian film about a woman under class and gender

oppression, was presented at the Venice Biennale. In 1977 Lù Leone wrote and produced

Io sono mia (I Am Mine), a film adapted from Dacia Maraini’s novel Donne in Guerra

(Women in War) and directed by Sofia Scandurra with an all female crew. Loredana

Dordi, Marina Tartara and Tilde Capomazza produced two series for the RAI, entitled La

donna e la salute (Women and Health) (1975) and Si dice donna (It’s Called Woman)

(1977), both completely written and directed by women.

Both feminism and feminist cinema began during the 1968 student protest. There were

many analogies between the two movements: the demonstrations, the endless meetings,

the congresses, the propaganda, the occupations and the militant cinema documenting the

struggle. Women started discussing gender and sexual relations, as well as the institution

of the family and ‘Il privato è politico’ (The personal is political) became their slogan.

Acts of violence, oppression and abuse came to light, and women tried to document

them. Thus, in those years feminist cinema was largely the mirror of the women’s

movement. Painfully aware of the complex nature of reality, women nevertheless

attempted to document their political struggle and tell their private stories. They

reinterpreted Greek mythology from a feminist perspective and narcissism became a

means of escaping the traditionally imposed male point of view on women. The film

titles during this period are eloquent: Destino casalinga (Housewife’s Fate) by Armenia

Balducci, La madre della sposa (The Bride’s Mother) by Alessandra Bocchetti, Essere

madre a 40 anni (Being a Mother at 40) by Loredana Dordi, Aborto: parlano le donne

(Abortion: The Women Speak) by Dacia Maraini, Il rischio di vivere (The Risk of

Living) by Anna Carini and Annabella Miscuglio, 8 marzo, giornata di festa e di lotta (8

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March, Day of Celebration and Struggle) by the Arcobaleno co-operative, Euridice by

Valentina Berardinone, Medea by Pia Epremian and Cenerentola, psicofavola femminista

(Cinderella, Psychological Feminist Fairy Tale) by Lina Mangiacapre.

Generally, however, the new women’s cinema alluded to actions rather than showing

them. It observed reality rather than commenting upon it, as exemplified in Processo per

stupro (The Rape Trial) (1978) by Rony Daopoulo, Annabella Miscuglio and Maria

Grazia Belmonti, a television documentation of the first open-doors rape trial and a

documentary well received and screened internationally. Daopoulo and Miscuglio also

co-directed a number of historical feminist films, such as La lotta non è finita (The

Struggle Is Not Over) (1972), a 16mm short which documented the police charge at the

first women’s movement demonstration in Rome; A.A.A.Offresi (1979) a video recording

a prostitute’s work and shot with a hidden camera (this documentary was censored and

eventually withdrawn by RAI itself in spite of women’s demonstrations demanding a

public screening); and I fantasmi del fallo (The Phantasms of the Phallus) (1980), a

documentary about the shooting of a porno film. This documentary was screened in 1984

at the New York University seminar, ‘Italian and American Directions: Women’s Film

Theory and Practice’, and was favourably received by American feminists and critics

alike.

Italian feminists also focused on the problem of sexuality and the rediscovery of the

body, with a high value placed on alternative lifestyles, a new way of living among

women and a withdrawal from the male world. Fiorella Infascelli shot a psychoanalytic

session in Ritratto di donna distesa (Portrait of a Reclining Woman) (1980), Liliana

Cavani presented Lou Andreas Salomé in Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and

Evil) (1978) and Giovanna Gagliardo directed a film inspired by Luce Irigaray’s work,

Maternale (Motherhood) (1978).

During the 1980s, comedy and irony entered women’s films, and the label feminist

cinema became outdated. The struggle for equal opportunities achieved some major

successes and several women were able to make their directorial debut even if only a few

managed to continue, among them Francesca Archibugi, Cinzia Torrini, Cristina

Comencini and Giuliana Gamba, the only woman director of erotic films. Largely

unknown to a wider public but occupying an important position in the development of

Italian feminist cinema were directors such as Gabriella Rosaleva with Processo a

Caterina Ross (The Caterina Ross Trial) (1984), Adriana Monti with Gentili Signore

(Kind Ladies) (1988) and Emanuela Piovano with Le rose blu (The Blue Roses) (1990).

The lack of interest in women’s cinema displayed by producers and distributors was

paralleled by a lack of critical interest which continued to put women film-makers at a

disadvantage. Significantly, until the late 1990s no woman held a chair of film studies in

any Italian public university. The female public took refuge in the reassuring romantic

image given by the male perspective, film critics discovered trash and B-grade movies

and even feminists themselves came to prefer investigating the female imagination in

Hollywood films. The definition of women’s cinema itself became largely obsolete.

However, there are now two Women’s Film Festivals, one in Florence and one in

Sorrento, several Lesbian Film Festivals and some film schools for women.

The most significant phenomenon during the 1990s was the appearance of vibrant,

new generation of female directors represented by Roberta Torre, a Milanese working in

Sicily, who graduated from the Milan Film School and subsequently coordinated several

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collective projects such as Femmine Folli (Mad Women) (1991), a practice typical of

both feminism and feminist cinema during the 1970s. At the 1997 Venice Biennale she

presented her first fiction film, Tano da morire, a mafia musical starring an international

porn star.

Further reading

Bruno, G. and Nadotti, M. (eds) (1988) Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, London and New

York: Routledge.

ADRIANA MONTI

Fendi

In Italian fashion, the Fendi name dates back to 1925 when Eduardo and Adele Fendi

opened a leather and fur store and workshop in the centre of Rome. Eventually the

couple’s daughters, Paola, Carla, Anna, Franca and Alda, all went to work for the family

business, which moved to an old movie theatre in via Borgognona, the very same street

that today houses five Fendi shops. The business grew in status through its alliance with

German designer Karl Lagerfeld, who inspired new ways to work with fur and invented

the Fendi logo, the inverted FF. In 1969 Fendi presented a ready-to-wear fur collection at

the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. In addition to its innovation and creativity, the collection

offered furs at more accessible prices. The Fendi sisters expanded their repertoire to

include clothing to be worn underneath their furs and the more youthful Fendissime lines

as well as other licences. Today Fendi boutiques can be found all over the world.

BERNADETTE LUCIANO

Fenoglio, Beppe

b. 1 March 1922, Alba, Cuneo; d. 18 February 1963, Turin

Novelist

Fenoglio’s experience in the Piedmont Resistance during the Second World War formed

the nucleus for most of his works, with the partizan movement symbolizing an existential

as well as a political crisis. Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partizan), Fenoglio’s most

famous novel, although not published until after his death, portrays the protagonist’s

struggles with both internal doubts and the more immediate threat of death. Fenoglio’s

rendering of the material and his focus on the disenfranchised led to his being regarded as

a neorealist writer, though he was very much a loner and his talent remained under-

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appreciated. One of his few sponsors was Elio Vittorini, who published Fenoglio’s

collection of short stories I ventitré giorni della città di Alba (The Twenty-Three Days of

the City of Alba) for Einaudi in 1952. Having taught himself English, Fenoglio read and

translated many authors from Shakespeare to Coleridge and his later novels, most

published posthumously, reflect the strong influence of such American authors as

Hemingway and Dos Passes. After several decades of relative neglect, Fenoglio’s work

and reputation have more recently been re-evaluated.

Further reading

Ioli, G. (ed.) (1991) Beppe Fenoglio Oggi (Beppe Fenoglio Today), Milan: Mursia (a re-evaluation

of his works).

O’Healy, A. (1990) ‘Four Critics and Fenoglio’, Italica 67 (1):42–52.

Saccone, E. (1996) ‘War and Peace in Beppe Fenoglio’s Partizan Novels’, MLN 111 (1):31–7.

LAURA A. SALSINI

Ferragamo, Salvatore

b. 1898, Naples; d. 1960, Fiumetto

Footwear designer

Ferragamo served an apprenticeship in Italy before establishing a shop in California in

1914, where he attracted the patronage of Hollywood for his exclusive handmade

designs. He returned to Italy in 1927, and established himself in Florence two years later.

Despite bankruptcy in 1933, he was soon serving the international jet-set. While in

America, he had scrutinized mass production techniques, as well as studying anatomy

and balance, and he applied this knowledge to the creation of many glamorous and

graceful styles. Some of Ferragamo’s most innovative work was produced during the

war, when severe shortages inspired him to work with unconventional materials such as

fish skins and cellophane. His most famous designs include the ‘platform’ (1938), and the

‘invisible’ shoe (1947). After his death his family expanded production internationally

and added clothing ranges, while maintaining a reputation for quality.