Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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elegant and sophisticated executive dressing, appealing above all to women who wore

suits by day but welcomed the rebirth of the grand ball gown by night. His first perfume

for women was launched in 1984, with a men’s fragrance following in 1986. The first

high fashion collection designed by Ferrè met with an enthusiastic response in Rome in

1986, and in 1989 he was selected as chief designer for the prestigious French House of

Dior. After eight years with the French company Ferrè left Paris to return home to work

at the centre of Italian fashion in Milan. His international appeal, however, continues to

spread with boutiques now on every continent.

BERNADETTE LUCIANO

Ferreri, Marco

b. 11 May 1928, Milan; d. 9 May 1997, Paris

Film director

One of Italy’s most eccentric comic directors, Ferreri addressed the shortcomings and

absurdities of the white, capitalist and patriarchal world in an outrageous cocktail of

surrealism and black humour reminiscent of Luis Bunuel’s social satires. Ferreri’s cinema

is caustically ideological and inscribed in the post-1968 overthrow of petit bourgeois

institutions and values. Especially memorable is his 1973 attack on excessive

consumerism in La grande abbuffata (La Grande Bouffe), the story of a weekend-long

orgy climaxing in cannibalistic annihilation. From the bizarre parody of the Western

genre in Non toccare la donna bianca (Don’t Touch the White Woman) (1975) to the

deconstruction of masculinity which culminates in the male protagonist’s self-castration

with an electric knife in L’ultima donna (The Last Woman) (1976), Ferreri’s films are

always provocatively excessive in their representation and denunciation of Western

society’s dehumanizing materialism.

Further reading

Mahéo, M. (1986) Marco Ferreri, Paris: Edilig (a detailed study in French of Ferreri’s films).

DOROTHéE BONNIGAL

Ferrero, Lorenzo

b. 17 November 1951, Turin

Composer

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Lorenzo Ferrero’s fusion of classical and pop traditions has made him one of the most

widely acclaimed opera composers of his generation. Initially self-taught, he went on to

study with Massimo Bruni and Enore Zaffiri before conducting research into electronic

music at Bourges (1972–3). His involvement in multimedia composition began in 1974

when he began collaborating with the Musik-Dia-Licht Film Galerie in Munich. The

chamber opera Rimbaud (1978) shows the crystallization of the increasingly eclectic

elements of Ferrero’s mature style, which is unashamedly neo-tonal and employs ostinato

techniques derived from rock music. This was to lay the foundations for his success with

Marilyn (1980), which focuses on scenes from the private and public lives of Marilyn

Monroe. During the 1980s Ferrero embarked on a series of imaginative works for the

stage, notable among which are the children’s opera La figlia del mago (The Magician’s

Daughter) (1981) and the operas Mare nostro (Our Sea) (1985) and Charlotte Corday

(1989). He has served as artistic director of the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago (1980–

4), and of the Arena di Verona (1991–4).

Further reading

Gerhatz, L.K. (1982) ‘Auch die Avantgarde steht in Entwicklungsprozessen…Gesprach mit dem

italienischen Komponisten Lorenzo Ferrero’ (On the Development Processes of the Avantgarde:

Conversation with Lorenzo Ferrero), Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 9:4–7.

JOHN KERSEY

Ferroni, Giulio

b. 1943, Rome

Literary critic and essayist

Ferroni’s first critical works were close analyses of developments in Italian theatre both

during the Renaissance and in the twentieth century, after which his attention shifted to a

variety of topics from Romanticism to the current state of narrative in Italy. He has

devoted his attention particularly to an intelligent and lively discussion of both

contemporary criticism and fiction writing, a discussion carried out in scholarly journals

as well as in major newspapers such as Il Corriere della sera. Ferroni has also been

involved with pedagogic publications such as an authoritative History of Italian

Literature published in 1991 by Einaudi. The distinctive characteristic of his acute

analysis of contemporary literary theory and practice has been that of distinguishing

literary works which carry a broad ethical and universal message behind their complex

stylistic structures from those deriving merely from fashionable trends.

ANDREA CICCARELLI

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Ferrucci, Franco

b. 1936, Pisa

Writer and literary critic

Ferrucci has been living in the Unites States for many years and is Professor of Italian at

Rutgers University in New Jersey. As a scholar, he has concentrated mostly on Italian

authors of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism, and on the concept of myth

throughout western culture. He has written numerous novels, amongst them Il cappello di

Panama (The Panama Hat) (1973), Il Mondo creato (1986), translated as The World

according to God, and Lontano da casa (Far Away from Home) (1996). Ferrucci’s

narrative is characterized by a search—often within the broader context of a cosmological

pessimism—for a stable and positive existential condition, the possibility of which is

usually only glimpsed or barely guessed by the characters of his books.

ANDREA CICCARELLI

Ferruzzi

A family-owned industrial group based in Ravenna with international trade in cereals and

sugar at its core, Ferruzzi was a shooting star of Italian big business. In 1986, thanks to

Mediobanca’s blessing, Ferruzzi—then ruled by Raul Gardini, son-in-law of Serafino

Ferruzzi, the group’s founder—became the main shareholder of Montedison, a chemical

group then in grave financial crisis. However Gardini’s ambition of relaunching the

Italian chemical industry through ENIMONT, a joint venture with ENI, failed because of

strong political interference and furious disputes between the prospective partners.

Ferruzzi consequently sold its major interest in the Montedison chemical plants to ENI,

making a very large profit, but paid massive bribes to the ruling parties. Business turned

into tragedy when Gardini broke off with Ferruzzi and finally in 1993, after Tangentopoli

inquiries, preferred to commit suicide rather than face trial for corruption. Of fiery

temperament and a charismatic leader, Gardini became very popular in the early 1990s

thanks to his sailing boat, Il Moro, which successfully competed in the America’s Cup.

He was the only real entrepreneur of the family, and after his death Ferruzzi had to be

rescued and fell under the control of Mediobanca and other banks.

STEFANO BATTILOSSI

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Festa dell’Unità

One of the most important social events in the PCI calendar, the Festa dell’Unità

(Festival of Unity) was instituted by a group of party militants in Milan in September

1945 to celebrate class solidarity and collect money for the party’s newspaper, l’Unità.

Originally functioning largely as communal picnics for party members and their families

concluding with a few political speeches, the feste soon became important annual

occasions for spreading the faith, both at the local and the national level. During the

1950s, when tension between communist and centre-right forces was at its height, the

festivals came to include noisy parades with placards and banners as well as fervent

political speeches, often leading to violent clashes with police. The festivals changed

during the 1960s, becoming progressively less stridently political and more broadly

cultural events, thus inviting and attracting a much wider public participation from non-

party members. This trend towards a more pluralist political orientation and an increasing

focus on culture and entertainment continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and when

in 1991 the PCI transformed itself into the PDS, it was feared the festivals might

disappear altogether. However this fear proved to be unfounded and, at the end of the

1990s, the national Festa dell’Unità still featured as a major media event in the Italian

calendar.

GINO MOLITERNO

Fiat

Probably the best-known industrial group in Italy, with a large multinational network,

Fiat played an extraordinary role as promoter of postwar mass motorization. The Fiat

500, a popular economy car, was a symbol of the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s, and

Fiat itself has always been synonymous with the motor car industry, although its actual

identity has become far more complex. One of the oldest Italian enterprises—established

in Turin in 1899 by Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the dynasty—Fiat is also the largest,

and Enrico Cuccia once justifiably referred to it as the Mont Blanc of Italian capitalism,

surrounded by hills but no comparable mountains.

While continuing its traditional core business of motorcars and industrial vehicles, Fiat

widely diversified its activities towards a number of unrelated sectors such as aircraft,

railway systems, telecommunications, construction and civil engineering, cement,

insurance and chains of department stores. Consequently, motor cars, which accounted

for 65 per cent of group’s total sales in 1970, declined to 40 per cent just ten years later.

Facing a grave crisis in the late 1970s, when car sales fell both in Italy and abroad and

costs and debts rose with no restraint, Fiat undertook an effective restructuring plan and

regained a successful position in international motor car markets. Under a new

management, led by Cesare Romiti and Vittorio Ghidella, workers’ opposition was

crushed, employment was heavily reduced (from 139,000 to 78,000 employees in the

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motor car division alone), the introduction of new automated technologies was

accelerated, production was partly decentralized, new cars were planned (the Uno proved

the most successful) and debt was reduced thanks to new Libyan shareholders (a striking

financial operation managed by Mediobanca). The dramatic 1980 dispute between Fiat

and the unions proved to be not simply a company affair but rather represented an epoch-

making struggle with a nationwide impact, since it marked a general decline of union

power and the beginnings of the ‘entrepreneurial revenge’ of the 1980s. For its own part,

Fiat stuck to its traditional bureaucratic organization, which relied upon a rigorous

vertical hierarchy, an extreme centralization of decision making and a marginalization of

unions. Fiat’s top managers subsequently attempted to make the organization more

flexible by launching a ‘total quality’ programme in 1989, vaguely echoing Japanese

managerial doctrines; this was supposed to improve products by actively involving

workers but remained largely bombast.

Nevertheless, Fiat changed greatly in the 1990s. After Ghidella’s exit, Fiat gave up its

‘motor carcentred’ strategy, which involved an alliance with Ford to block Japanese

penetration into Europe, and heavily diversified towards hi-tech sectors (electronics and

space industry, biotechnology), finance (banks and insurance) and other activities such as

the food and drink industry through an alliance between IFIL, a financial holding owned

by the Agnelli, and the French group BSN Danone. A further reduction of labour was

carried out in 1992–3 which affected 12,000 employees, mostly middle managers and

white-collar workers in the motor car division. Production was mostly moved towards

new factories in southern Italy (such as Melfi) and abroad, so that Turin was no longer

considered a core location. The large conglomerate thus enters its second century of life

under a cloud of uncertainty, more than ever in need of a strong alliance with a leading

foreign car maker in order to compete in global markets.

Further reading

Bonazzi, G. (1993) Il tubo di cristallo. Modello giapponese e fabbrica integrata alla Fiat auto (The

Glass Tube: The Japanese Model and Integrated Factory at Fiat Auto), Bologna: Il Mulino (a

study of the attempt to adapt Japanese managerial doctrines to Fiat’s car making division).

Enrietti, A. and Fornengo, G. (1989) Il gruppo Fiat: dall’inizio degli anni Ottanta alle prospettive

del mercato unificato del 1992 (The Fiat Group: From the Early 1980s to the Prospect of the

Single Market in 1992), Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica (a detailed and well-informed analysis

of the Fiat group’s structure).

Lerner, G. (1988) Operai: viaggio all’interno della Fiat (Workers: A Journey Inside Fiat), Milan:

Feltrinelli (a journalistic inquest on the impact of the technological changes of the 1980s on

Fiat’s workers).

STEFANO BATTILOSSI

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Figini and Pollini

Luigi Figini (b. 27 January 1903, Milan; d. 1984, Milan) and Gino Pollini (b. 13 January

1903, Rovereto; d. 1991, Milan) were founding members of Gruppo 7, which initiated

‘rationalist’ architecture in Italy in 1927. After the war they continued their collaboration

with Adriano Olivetti, for whom they designed a whole sequence of works at Ivrea,

including the Olivetti factory in various stages, 1934–57. A summation of their earlier

elegance is found in the Apartment and Office Building in the Via Broletto, Milan (1947–

8), but their works subsequently became more textured in surface and complex in

geometry. Of these, probably the most significant was the Church of the Madonna of the

Poor (1952–4) on the outskirts of Milan. A translation of early Christian basilical form

into industrialized materials, tough, introverted yet deeply penetrated by light filtered

through blocks of randomly laid stone, its gritty ‘unfinished’ state is characteristic of the

postwar climate.

Further reading

Gregotti, V. and Marzari, G. (eds) (1996) Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini Opera Completa, Milan: Electa

(the most comprehensive catalogue and analysis to date).

ROSS JENNER

film actors

In part because of the popularity of Italian cinema itself and in part because of the

strength of their on-screen personae as well as the assumed glamour of jet-setting

lifestyles, Italian actors and actresses achieved international renown in the postwar

period. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni became household names even in the

depths of middle America, connoting both Italian cinema and stardom. Furthermore,

although many Italian film actors came from the theatre—as, for instance, Mastroianni

and Gassman, who started their careers side by side under Visconti’s artistic direction—

many also became so vitally associated with the directors who used them to express their

highly individualistic vision as to function as alter Rossellini and Anna Magnani,

Michelangelo egos. It is indeed impossible to separate Roberto Antonioni and Monica

Vitti, Mariangela Melato or Giancarlo Giannini and Lina Wertmüller and, of course,

Fellini and Mastroianni.

Neorealism first celebrated what Rossellini called the ‘spontaneous creations of the

actors’. Such faith and trust in actorial inventiveness elicited brilliant performances from

non-professionals such as Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, the forgotten

protagonists of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948) or Carlo

Battisti, better known as Umberto D (1952). But neorealism also gave great scope to the

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talents of professionals like Fabrizi and Magnani, who were able to transform themselves

from comic vaudevillians to serious dramatic stars.

The 1960s marked the heyday of Italian postwar cinema and the rise of big stars such

as Claudia Cardinale, Vittorio Gassman, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. A

very strong tradition of comic actors simultaneously bred huge names like Ugo Tognazzi

or even Totò, who, though a national star for some time, only became internationally

known in 1966 with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s political parable, Uccellaci e uccellini (Hawks

and Sparrows). The political cinema of the Taviani brothers, Francesco Rosi or Elio

Petri likewise consecrated actors like Gian Maria Volonté who also owed his renown to

the very popular spaghetti westerns.

The actor-star system declined in the days of the so-called New Italian Cinema of the

1980s and 1990s, which gravitated more towards the figure of the actor-director

epitomized by Carlo Verdone, Massimo Troisi, Roberto Benigni and, most of all, Nanni

Moretti. However, as evidenced by Diego Abatantuono’s numerous collaborations with

Gabriele Salvatores, or Enrico Lo Verso’s work with Gianni Amelio, character actors

remained important mediators in the expression of a director’s vision even though the

growing internationalization of Italian film productions predictably lessened the

importance of the national identification of particular actors.

DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL

film composers

During the first decades of the cinema, Italian composers like Pietro Mascagni and

Ildebrando Pizzetti (Cabiria, 1915) contributed to the success of the new medium by

composing either musical guide lines or original music scores to accompany silent films.

The introduction of sound opened up a new and more essential role for music and for the

film composer. The first Italian film with sound, Giovanni Gennaro’s La canzone

dell’amore (The Song of Love) (1930) used Nino Bixio’s composition ‘Solo per te,

Lucia’ (Lucia, Only For You) both as leitmotiv and as commentary on the narrative. In

general, however, the carefree world of the telefoni bianchi (white telephone) films did

not expand the potential of film music, which remained largely anchored to the idea of

pleasing the audience with easy listening and often amusing tunes. Such light and

unremarkable musical scores were flanked by the highly rhetorical and bombastic scores

of heroic pseudo-historical epics so dear to the Fascist regime.

Although film scores still remained illustrative in the 1940s, during the neorealist

period composers such as Fernando Previdali, Franco Ferrara, Enzo Masetti, Giovanni

Fusco and Nino Rota were able to introduce the fundamental notion that the film’s

psychological element should also be appropriately explored and expressed through its

music. However, it was only with the advent of a finer and often more complex

correlation between image and music, such as in Rota’s collaboration with Federico

Fellini and Fusco’s scores for the early Antonioni films, that film music began to

approach its full potential.

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This new approach was also carried on in the 1950s by other composers such as Mario

Nascimbene and Ennio Morricone, who were willing to experiment and thus succeeded

in creating interesting and unusual relationships between image and sound. New paths

were also explored by composers who had been active earlier but who had remained

more conservative in their music, such as Piero Piccioni who worked extensively with

Francesco Rosi, and Armando Trovajoli who later worked on many of the films of Ettore

Scola. Such composers introduced jazz into Italy, both in film scores and more widely in

the musica leggera (light, popular music). Trovajoli was particularly influential as

orchestra director for some of the Sanremo Festivals.

In the panorama of contemporary film music, Morricone deserves a place of his own.

His music has become known throughout the world, especially since the mid-1960s when

his name became closely associated with the phenomenon of the ‘spaghetti western’.

However, he has worked with most of the major Italian directors such as Elio Petri, Gillo

Pontecorvo, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini as well as with many

international names such as Roman Polanski, Brian De Palma, Roland Joffè, and more

recently Pedro Almodovar. At ease with all film genres, Morricone has even worked with

Italian horror film master Dario Argento, in L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird

With Crystal Feathers) (1969).

The other outstanding film composer of the postwar period was undoubtedly Nino

Rota, whose memorable musical themes and compositions became indissolubly wedded

to some of Fellini’s most striking images in a collaboration that lasted twenty-seven

years, from Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik) (1952) to Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra

Rehearsal) (1978). Rota’s work with directors outside Italy included his scores for

Coppola’s Godfather films, with Godfather II winning him an Oscar in 1974.

In Fellini’s last films, Intervista (Interview) (1988) and La voce della luna (The Voice

of the Moon) (1990), Rota’s place was taken by the talented Nicola Piovani, who tried to

maintain Rota’s distinctive touch. Piovani had started his composing career with the

young generation of the 1970s, achieving notable success with his work for the Taviani

brothers on La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars) (1982) and Kaos

(1984). More recently he has worked with Nanni Moretti on La messa è finita (Mass is

Over) (1985) and Palombella rossa (Small Red Dove) (1989).

In the most recent Italian cinema, the music has often been composed by singer-

writers such as De Gregori, Antonello Venditti, Lucio Dalla, Edoardo Bennato and

Gianna Nannini.

Further reading

Comuzio, E. (1992) Colonna sonora. Dizionario ragionato dei musicisti cinematografici (Sound

Track: Annotated Dictionary of Film Musicians), Rome: Ente dello spettacolo.

CRISTINA DEGLI-ESPOSTI REINERT

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film industry

At the end of the Second World War, the Italian film industry was in tatters. Most of the

country’s movie theatres had been destroyed during the war years, and in 1945 Cinecittà

itself had been requisitioned by the Americans as a refugee camp with much of its

equipment having already been looted by the retreating Germans and Fascists.

Nevertheless the industry slowly started to function again and, in spite of crushing

difficulties, twenty-five films were made in 1945, many of them landmarks of not only

Italian but of world cinema.

The situation clearly demanded a great deal of improvisation and ingenuity, such as

the ability to film outside studios and to stretch limited budgets by using non-professional

actors. The result of such measures was an experimental documentaristic look which

came to be known as neorealism. Films like Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Open City)

(1945) and De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946) reflected, both in their themes and in

their production, the severe hardship of the time. Although they would later be

recognized as masterpieces, when these films were first released they received little or no

attention since the Italian audience was, at the time, in need of more escapist fare.

From 1945 to 1946 Italnoleggio, Istituto Nazionale LUCE and Cinecittà were the

production companies that, under the protection of the Ente Gestione per il Cinema (Film

Development Board), sustained and defended the Italian film industry. By 1946 the

number of films produced reached sixty-two, and it increased slowly in the following

years (in 1950 there were 100) until the explosion of the economic boom. Gradually the

Istituto Luce was able to produce and distribute films that found favour with the public,

such as De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) (1949) and Pietro Germi’s In nome della

legge (In the Name of the Law) (1949). The profit share of national films in 1946 was

only 13 per cent, but by the end of 1950s it reached 34 per cent. Furthermore, by the end

of the 1950s Italian cinema was living through a new period of creative ferment.

Enjoying great success abroad, films like Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and Antonioni’s

L’avventura (1960) helped to renew a sense of the cinema a form of art.

Supported by a series of regulating laws, the production of Italian films increased

throughout the 1960s. The great box office success, first domestic then international, of

films like De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women) (1960) and Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi

fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960) led new patterns of production and distribution,

especially of the cinema d’autore or ‘art film’, which could now be exported.

Furthermore as new genres developed—the commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian style),

the spaghetti western, the peplum and so on—more production companies came into

being; by 1970 they numbered almost 400.

Yet the history of the industry in the 1970s is indissolubly tied to television, which had

begun to take an active part in the production or co-production of films since 1968, when

the RAI public television network had joined Italnoleggio in the process of making films.

Positive in some ways, this partnership would nevertheless in the long run lead to a slow

decline of cinema at all its levels. Among the positive results were films like Berto-

lucci’s La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem) (1972), Olmi’s L’albero degli

zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs) (1978) and the Tavianis’ Padre padrone (My

Father, My Master) (1977), but by the late 1970s the industry faced a major crisis,

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provoked to a great extent by the increasing dominance of television and above all by the

private networks (see private television) which sometimes broadcast up to five (often

foreign) films a day. If this contributed on the one hand to a fall in cinema attendance, on

the other hand it also led to a decline in quality since many films of little value were

made programmatically in order to meet demand.

By the beginning of the 1980s, most of the successful models and genres of the

previous two decades had become exhausted and many of the directors of this generation

began to look back nostalgically to the tradition of neorealism and that of a committed

cinema. Furthermore, during the 1980s, as the RAI and Berlusconi’s Fininvest

increasingly replaced the old distributors in financing films, the final product came to

look more like television and less like cinema. Consequently, a number of new

production companies were started which eventually produced some of the best films of

the following period: Colorado Film Production was founded in 1986 by producer

Maurizio Totti, director Gabriele Salvatores, and actor Diego Abatantuono, and Sacher

Film was founded by Angelo Barbagallo and director Nanni Moretti, with Sacher also

running a movie theatre in Rome.

In 1996 there were some 175 active production societies which had produced at least

three successful films. Perhaps the most significant large producer is the Cecchi-Gori

Group, which began in the boom years of the 1950s but which continues to play an

important role in both finance and distribution. Cecchi-Gori has produced many of the

most significant films of recent years including Salvatores’ Oscar-winning Mediterraneo

(1991), Fellini’s La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon) (1990), Mazzacurati Il

toro (The Bull) (1994), Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders’s Al di là delle

nuvole (Beyond the Clouds) (1995) and Leonardo Pieraccioni’s I laureati (The

Graduates) (1995).

At the end of the 1990s the number of movie houses and the volume of moviegoers is

about a fifth that of the 1960s and 1970s. National production during this decade has

varied from 12 to 30 per cent of the total Italian market. Responsible for emptying the

cinemas, television has nevertheless also provided substantial economic support to the

film industry ranging from advertising on private television channels to direct financing.

By creating a new market, home video actually expanded the consumption of domestic

films in the 1980s, although since 1994 the trend has slowed considerably. Television co-

production as well as computer technology appear to be fundamental for cinema in the

near future. As cinema and the Italian industry enter the new century it is clear that

creative drive, cyber technology and choices of production will all have to work together

in order to keep the Italian film industry alive.

Further reading

Bondanella, P. (1983) Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York: Ungar.

Liehm, M. (1984) Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

Sorlin, P. (1996) Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996, London and New York: Routledge.

Wagstaff, C. (1996) ‘Il cinema Italiano nel mercato internazionale’ (Italian Cinema in the

International Market) in G.P. Brunetta (ed.), Identità italiana e identità europea nel cinema

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