Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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instrumental reasons (financial help, domestic tasks) than other Europeans, but rather
more likely to find emotional support from them.
Further reading
Bruckner, E. and Knaup, K. (1993) ‘Women’s and Men’s Friendships in Comparative
Perspective’, European Sociological Review 9 (3):249–65.
Hollinger, F. and Haller, M. (1990) ‘Kinship and Social Networks in Modern Societies: A Cross-
Cultural Comparison Among Seven Nations’, European Sociological Review 6 (2):103–24.
DAVID MOSS
Fruttero and Lucentini
Under the single name ‘Fruttero and Lucentini’, these two authors (Carlo Fruttero, b.
1926, Turin; Franco Lucentini, b. 1920, Rome) have collaborated on a myriad of articles,
satirical essays and a number of bestselling novels which employ an ironic tone and a
rich narrative style. Most of their novels are loosely based on the giallo or detective
format (see detective fiction) but are sophisticated and polished works which have
achieved both critical and popular success. Among these are La donna della domenica
(The Sunday Woman) (1972) and Enigma in luogo di mare (An Enigma by the Sea)
(1991). Together, Fruttero and Lucentini also edit the science fiction magazine Urania,
and have edited an anthology of translations of English tales of the supernatural called
Storie di fantasmi (Ghost Stories) (1960). Lucentini, as well as being a literary translator,
has explored neorealist themes and style in his own novels La porta (The Door) (1947)
and Notizie degli scavi (News of the Excavations) (1964), while Fruttero has co-edited
with Sergio Solmi an anthology of science fiction tales titled Le meraviglie del possibile
(The Marvels of the Possible) (1959).
LAURA A. SALSINI
Fubini, Mario
b. 18 March 1900, Turin; d. 29 June 1977, Turin
Academic and literary critic
Fubini taught Italian literature at the universities of Turin, Palermo, Trieste and Milan
before the Second World War, when he was forced to seek asylum in Switzerland in
order to avoid racial persecution. He returned after the war to teach history of criticism at
the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. A member of the Accademia dei Lincei, he served
Entries A–Z 351
as editorial director of the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana (Historical Journal
of Italian Literature) and the Utet series of Classici italiani (Italian Classics), as well as
being president of the committee for the national edition of the works of Ugo Foscolo. He
made numerous contributions to the study of French literature in Italy (especially on de
Vigny and Racine), as well as studies of Giambattista Vico, Giuseppe Parini and Vittorio
Alfieri, but the bulk of his critical energies were dedicated to Foscolo. Into what was
fundamentally a Crocean, historicist methodology, Fubini integrated a careful attention to
stylistics, which became the basis of his works on criticism, metrics and poetry.
SHERRY ROUSH
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G
Gaber, Giorgio
b. 25 January 1939, Milan
Singer-songwriter and performer
One of Italy’s most accomplished stage performers, Gaber (real name Giorgio Gaberscik)
began his long showbusiness career in the mid-1950s, attempting unsuccessfully to
become a rock musician. Eventually, in the thriving cabaret milieu of Milan, he teamed
up with Enzo Jannacci in I due corsari sari (the Two Buccaneers), an act which featured
iconoclastic and irreverent songs permeated by a surrealist sense of humour. In the early
1960s he achieved national exposure by presenting the RAI’s Canzoniere Minimo
(Miniature Songbook) and Le nostre serate (Our Evenings), television programmes
which showcased the new popular music. Throughout the 1960s he also competed
repeatedly but with little success in the Sanremo Festival. His career took a decisive turn
in 1970 when he re-created himself as Il signor G (Mr G), a new stage persona which
became the basis of numerous one-man shows which integrated elements of theatre,
cabaret and song in an exploration of the major themes of the day. Having dealt with the
protest movement during the 1970s, Gaber’s reviews during the 1980s became more
centred on the individual while in the 1990s shows such as E pensare che c’era il
pensiero (And to Think There Was Once Thought) (1996) have tended to articulate a
sense of dismay at the loss of community spirit and increasing social isolation.
GINO MOLITERNO
Gabetti and Isola
Professors of architectural composition at the Turin Faculty of Architecture, Roberto
Gabetti (b. 1925, Turin) and Aimaro Oreglia d’Isola (b. 1928, Turin) generally worked as
a duo. Their professional craftsmanship is especially manifest in their furniture designs.
They also built the Turin Stock Exchange (1952–6, with Giorgio and Giuseppe Raineri)
and the Bottega d’Erasmo (1953–6), a fine example of neoliberty architecture which was
regarded as something of a ‘scandal’ at the time because it appeared to be a retreat from
Entries A–Z 353
the modern movement. Best known among their numerous residential and public
buildings, mostly in Turin and the Piedmont area, are the headquarters of the Turin
Equestrian Society (1962), the ‘crescent in curtain-wall’ Olivetti housing centre at Ivrea
(1969–70), and a refined residential building on the via Sant’Agostino in Turin. The LIS
bookshop built in 1992 is another example of their ‘total design’ (architecture and
furniture), in this case a masterfully illuminated high-tech ‘shelter’. Their approach to the
landscape is unobtrusive and delicate.
Further reading
Guerra, A. and Morresi, M. (1996) Gabetti e Isola: opere di architettura (Gabetti and Isola:
Architectural Works), Milan: Electa.
GORDANA KOSTICH
Gadda, Carlo Emilio
b. 14 November 1893, Milan; d. 21 May 1973, Rome
Electronics engineer, essayist and novelist
Carlo Emilio Gadda is unanimously considered among the most influential writers of the
twentieth century. By exploring and carrying to extreme the expressive and
communicative potential of language, his narrative lays bare the existential illness that
affects the individual in contemporary society and drives him to neurosis and depression.
Born into a Lombard bourgeois family left in difficult straits by the father’s death,
Gadda enrolled in the Polytechnic of Milan in 1912 to study engineering. After fighting
as a volunteer in the First World War, he graduated in 1920 and worked as an engineer
both in Italy (1920–2) and in Argentina (1922–4). On his return to Italy in 1924, he
taught mathematics and physics to high school students and enrolled in the University of
Milan to study philosophy without ever completing his degree. Meanwhile, he began to
contribute to the Florentine literary journal Solaria with short prose works and the
important essay Apologia manzoniana (Apology of Manzoni) (1927), which documented
his interest in the nineteenth-century novelistic tradition, particularly in Alessandro
Manzoni’s narrative and linguistic theory, and also his revisionist perspective on the
genre which he was already experimenting. In the 1920s and 1930s Gadda worked at his
first novel, Racconto di ignoto del Novecento (An Italian Tale by an Unknown Author of
the Twentieth Century), posthumously published in 1983, on several texts that were to
remain unfinished—the philosophical treatise Meditazione milanese (Milanese
Meditation) and the novel La meccanica (The Mechanic)—and on several collections of
short stories: La Madonna dei filosofi (The Madonna of the Philosophers) (1931), Il
castello di Udine (The Castle of Udine) (1934) and Le meraviglie d’Italia (Italy’s
Wonders) (1939). The significance of these early writings lies in Gadda’s ability to mix
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Italian, dialect and varieties of jargon in order to masterfully represent human psychology
and social dynamics.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, after having long divided himself between his engineering
profession and literary activity for economic reasons, Gadda turned definitively to
literature and moved to Florence where he met intellectuals such as Gianfranco Contini
and Roberto Longhi, and the poets Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale. He also
published the short story collections L’Adalgisa. Disegni milanesi (Adalgisa: Milanese
Sketches) (1944)—a colourful description and a sarcastic critique of the Milanese
bourgeoisie—and excerpts from his autobiographical novel La cognizione del do lore
(Acquainted with Grief) (1938–41), which he was later to publish again in two expanded
yet unfinished versions in 1963 and 1970. In this novel, set in a non-existent South
American city (a disguised postwar Italy), Gadda recounts Gonzalo Pirobutirro’s solitary
life with his mother, progressively focalizing the character’s psychological illness,
obscure in its essence but tragically affecting his relationship with his self, his mother and
the surrounding community. Besides its penetrating analysis of the complexity of the
human psyche and its subtle insights into the contradictions of contemporary society,
Gadda’s narrative offers a unique sample of stylistic inventiveness and linguistic
richness, as it mixes Italian and Spanish and interweaves different linguistic levels.
In 1950 Gadda settled in Rome, where he collaborated with RAI to produce cultural
radio programmes (1950–4). He published a new short story collection, Novelle del
Ducato in fiamme (Stories of the Duchy in Flames) (1953), which earned him the
Viareggio Prize in 1953, and the autobiographical Giornale di guerra e di prigionia
(Journal of War and Captivity) (1955, expanded in 1965), based on his experiences in the
First World War. The publisher Livio Garzanti urged him to resume writing his detective
story Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana),
which had partially appeared in the journal Letteratara in 1946. In this intricate novel,
adapted into a movie by Pietro Germi in 1960, Gadda tells of superintendent Ciccio
Ingravallo’s investigations on the brutal murder of a woman in Rome. As the story
unfolds, the mystery becomes more obscure and the reader is plunged into an inextricable
pasticcio (pastiche, mess) or groviglio (entanglement) of contrasting perspectives on the
case. In Gadda’s view, reality is a multifaceted human theatre, the hilarious set for the
confused emergence of multiple voices among which is the author’s, each speaking its
own language be it Italian, dialect—from Tuscan to Romanesque, from Neapolitan to
Venetian—professional jargon or literary or scientific language.
Like Gadda’s critical essays and previous fiction, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via
Merulana originates from a notion of language and literature as the means to explore and
represent reality as a process of constant metamorphosis, where one term and its opposite
co-exist and no centre is given to ground them. Aiming at the most completed and
systematic representation of the various aspects of the world, Gadda registered as many
voices, languages and objects as possible, endlessly accumulating. Yet the logical
consequence of such an obsessive desire to transcribe each detail of reality was the
impossibility of any completion. In fact, Gadda never came to the end of his stories; his
major novels, La cognizione and Pasticciaccio, (both masterfully translated into English
by William Weaver), have no conclusion: the former ends with the unsolved murder of
the protagonist’s mother, the latter with the ongoing police search for Liliana Balducci’s
murderer.
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In his later years, although withdrawing from the cultural scene, Gadda continued to
revise his previous works and published the collections of essays I viaggi la morte
(Voyages of Death) (1958) and Verso la Certosa (To the Certosa) (1961), as well as Eros
e Priapo (Eros and Priapus) (1967), a fierce pamphlet against fascism and its rhetoric.
Gadda’s ingenious linguistic expressionism and the unfinished feature of his works
proved an inspiration to many postwar writers who attempted in their narratives to
represent a sense of irreversible existential and historical fragmentation characterising
late twentieth-century society
Further reading
Bertone, R. and Dombroski, R. (1997) Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Dombroski, R. (1974) Introduzione allo studio di Carlo Emilio Gadda (Introduction to the Study of
Carlo Emilio Gadda), Florence: Vallecchi.
Roscioni, G.C. (1969) La disarmonia prestabilita: studio su Gadda (A Pre-Established
Disharmony: Study on Gadda), Turin: Einaudi.
Sbragia, A. (1996) Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, Gainsville, FL: University
Press of Florida.
FRANC ESC A PARMEGGIANI
Gardella, Ignazio
b. 30 March 1905, Milan; d. 1999, Oleggio
Architect and civil engineer
After graduating from the Milan Politecnico in 1930, Gardella adhered to Pagano’s
Casabella architectural group from 1931–49 and then taught at the IUAV from 1949 to
1975. His early work exemplifies the genuine spirit of rationalism and is manifested in
the Anti-Tuberculosis Dispensary at Alessandria (1938). One of the leading figures of
modern Italian architecture, Gardella was the first recipient of the Olivetti National Prize
for Architecture in 1955 for his Recreational Centre Complex at Ivrea. His 1950s
masterpieces are characterized by elegance and purity of composition, deriving their
inspiration from the specifics and culture of place, such as the Thermal Baths at Ischia
and the Borsalino corporate building at Alessandria. The house on the Zattere in Venice
became a symbol of the Italian deviation from the rules of the Modern movement. The
postmodernist slant of his later years is evident in his reconstruction of the Carlo Felice
theatre in Genoa (1981–3, with Aldo Rossi).
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Further reading
Fera, S. (1996) ‘Ignazio Gardella: la grammatica dello spazio’, (Ignazio Gardella: The Grammar of
Space), Abitare 347:57–9 (profile of Gardella in Italian and English).
GORDANA KOSTICH
Garin, Eugenio
b. 9 May 1909, Rieti
Academic and historian of ideas
For many years Professor of the History of Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore
of Pisa, Garin published numerous studies on Italian Humanism, the Renaissance, the
English Enlightenment and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian intellectual and
cultural history. As a cultural historian, Garin stresses the transmission and continuity of
ideas and values, initially disputing the widely held assumption of the total ‘overthrow’
of medieval culture by Renaissance humanism, and emphasizing the contribution made
by late medieval Studia humanitatis to the early modern ethical, political and economic
disciplines. He similarly posits a continuity between humanistic culture and modern—
specifically, Enlightenment—ideological and cultural tendencies. In the mid-1960s he
engaged in what was a highly divisive question for Italian historiography, namely the
continuity or discontinuity of pre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist culture. In the mid-
1980s his interests engaged with more contemporary issues.
SUZANNE KIERNAN
Gassman, Vittorio
b. 1 September 1922, Genoa
Actor
Widely regarded as one of the leading actors of stage and screen in postwar Italy,
Gassman studied at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome during the war
years and later opened his own theatre school in Florence. Establishing a reputation for
intelligent bravado and keen attention to language in his interpretation of classical texts,
Gassman devoted much of his theatrical career to ancient Greek drama and to the
tragedies of playwrights such as Shakespeare, Alfieri, Manzoni, Ugo Betti and Pier Paolo
Pasolini. Although much of his earlier work in film—in Italy and in America—saw him
cast as the crafty villain, Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) (1958)
Entries A–Z 357
revealed a considerable talent for comedy which was subsequently given scope in many
of the later films of Monicelli, Dino Risi and Ettore Scola.
Further reading
Lucignani, L. (ed.) (1982) Vittorio Gassman: intervista sul teatro (Vittorio Gassman: Interview on
the theatre), Rome-Bari: Laterza.
WILLIAM VAN WATSON
gay movement
The Italian gay movement was born in Milan in May 1971 founded by a group of leftist
militants from Turin, Rome and Milan. Originally called the Italian Revolutionary
Homosexual Front (FUORI, a word which means ‘out’), it published a magazine under
the same name from June 1972 until 1976. The Front’s ideology was anti-capitalist and
against bourgeois morality but, confronted with the ‘machismo’ of the new communist
organizations, it sought and found political support in the Radical Party. In 1974,
FUORI’s decision to officially join the Radical Party led to the secession of the Milanese
branch, which became the ancestor of the autonomous groups of the late 1970s.
During the 1976 national elections, FUORI decided to come to terms with the
bourgeois institutions and, as a result, its leader Angelo Pezzana was the first openly gay
member in the Italian Parliament. Pezzana’s reformist ideology was not shared by the
movement’s left-wing groups, whose common denominator was the practice of self-
awareness under the slogan of ‘what is private is political’. The activity by these groups
culminated in the 1977 student revolt, centred in Rome and Bologna.
In 1978 FUORI’s new magazine, Lambda, became the voice of the movement, which
also had its first national gathering in Bologna on May 26–8. Felix Cossolo had been
responsible for the magazine’s political transformation, and he also became the organizer
of the first Italian gay camp in the summer of 1979, an event which then became the
major annual gay gathering for the following ten years.
In the early 1980s, significant changes gave the movement its present configuration.
By 1981 FUORI was no longer a national organization, Lambda had ceased publication,
and a new gay group was born within the ranks of the Italian Cultural and Recreational
Association (ARCI), whose political referents were the communist and socialist parties.
In 1982 the city of Bologna gave the local gay organization an official headquarters,
called ‘Il Cassero’. In Milan, Felix Cossolo and Ivan Teobaldelli became the editors of
Babilonia, which remains the only national gay and lesbian magazine. In 1983, all the
Roman groups were unified and renamed Circolo Culturale Mario Mieli after the most
famous theorist of the gay movement who had recently died.
During the following years the movement had to fight for its rights as well as its life.
By 1986 the movement had founded the AIDS Solidarity Association (ASA) and the
Italian League for the Fight against AIDS (LILA). It was only in 1988 that the health
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ministry financed a prevention campaign, and health emergency funds were not allocated
until 1990.
On the electoral front, ARCI-gay, which had recently become national, successfully
campaigned for Paolo Rutter, an independent candidate for the Communist Party, who
became Milan’s first gay town councillor in 1985. After the 1990 administrative
elections, six gay representatives were members of town, provincial and regional
councils. The ARCI-gay’s constant efforts to legalize domestic partnership were also
partially rewarded by the European Parliament’s recognition of gay and lesbian rights in
1994. Two years earlier, Paolo Rutter had publicly married eight gay couples and one
lesbian couple. Among them was Gianni Delle Foglie, co-owner with Francesco
Ingargiola of Libreria Babele, the only gay and lesbian Italian bookstore.
During the 1990s, a series of specialized groups were born. As well as a number of
religious organizations that appeared during the 1980s such as Il Guado, Davide e
Gionata and the Collettivo assistenza pastorale omosessuali e transessuali, there now also
exist Gay Bears (Orsi), Gay Swimmers (Collettivo pesce) Cybergays and Parents of Gays
(AGEDO). The cultural environment has changed, and gay and lesbian people are more
visible than ever. For three consecutive years (1994–6) Rome, Bologna and Naples have
respectively seen large demonstrations of gay and lesbian pride, but fragmentation is still
the movement’s major internal problem. In 1996 ARCI-lesbica, which, contrary to the
separatist lesbian tradition, had shared the leadership of the organization since 1988,
decided to go its own way. At the same time in 1997 political and personal conflicts
between ARCI-gay and the Circolo Mario Mieli produced two separate gay pride
parades, one in Venice and the other in Rome, with limited participation.
Further reading
Mieli, M. (1980) Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, trans. D.Fernbach,
London: Gay Men’s Press (the major text on 1970s queer theory in Italy).
Rossi-Barilli, G. (1997) Storia del movimento gay italiano (History of the Italian Gay Movement),
Milan: Babilonia edizioni.
EUGENIO GIUSTI
gay writing
Much postwar homosexual writing in Italy reflects the ambiguities and tensions of a
prevailing antihomosexual ethos within Italian culture. Lesbian or woman-identified
literature, a very recent phenomenon, needs to be placed in the context of secondwave
feminism, while writing by gay males is less easy to categorize within the political
framework of the gay liberation movement.
Until the 1980s the lesbian literary tradition in Italy was, with only minor exceptions,
a tradition of reading and not of writing. A substantial corpus of work attempted to
theorize lesbianism as a sociopolitical phenomenon, but purely literary representations
Entries A–Z 359
were scarce. At the literary level, AngloAmerican texts and writers, from Radclyffe Hall
and Virginia Woolf to Rita Mae Brown and Adrienne Rich, dominated the scene. There
are some examples in modern Italian literature of texts in which lesbians are seen as
minor characters providing marginal storylines, but very few which deal with the
specificity of the lesbian experience. Annamaria Borgonovo’s La gabbia (The Cage)
(1964), in which the lesbian protagonist eventually commits suicide, and Bibi Tommasi’s
La sproporzione (Disproportion) (1980) are of only historic interest. Dacia Maraini’s
important Lettere a Marina (Letters to Marina), a feminist meditation in epistolary form
published in 1981, seems to mark a turning point for lesbian writing in Italy. It is from
this point that the woman-identified weltanschauung, for the first time, becomes
privileged. For Italian lesbians, 1981 was indeed a watershed, a year which saw the first
national lesbian conference and the formation of the first Italian lesbian organization, the
CLI (Collegamento Lesbiche Italiane). These two factors, together with the publication in
1980 of a collection of interviews with Italian lesbians, functioned to focus public
attention on lesbianism as a phenomenon distinct from its gay male counterpart.
Two other writers, Fiorella Cagnoni and Liana Borghi, are worthy of note. Borghi’s
Tenda con vista (Tent With a View) (1987) is a lesbian subversion of the Scheherazade
tale, a modern conte philosophique. Cagnoni’s two lesbian feminist thrillers, Questione di
tempo (A Matter of Time) (1985) and Incauto acquisto (Imprudent Purchase) (1992),
feature a lesbian amateur sleuth.
While the 1980s marked a flowering of the literature of lesbian experience, male
homosexuality had been a consistent thematic of postwar literature. In the works of many
mainstream heterosexual writers, Alberto Moravia (Agostino, The Conformist), Elsa
Morante (Arturo’s Island), Vasco Pratolini (Tale of Santa Croce) and Giorgio Bassani
(The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles), homosexuality is unfailingly situated within a poetics of
difference and the homosexual experience is loaded with negative connotations.
This negative position is also evident in the work of certain gay writers like Pier Paolo
Pasolini and Dario Bellezza. In Pasolini, two homosexual types can be identified: the gay
and the male prostitute. Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi) (1955) and Una vita violenta (A
Violent Life) (1959) describe the world of the sub-proletarian street kids in Rome who
prostitute themselves out of sheer economic necessity. The truly gay characters are
stereotypically drawn as the simpering and impotent victims of an almost acceptable
persecution, whereas the ragazzi di vita with their mercenary indifference to gay sexual
relations evoke a degree of sympathy from Pasolini, who sees in them a lost Eden of
sexuality.
In Bellezza’s first novel, L’innocenza (Innocence) (1971), Nino, the protagonist,
consciously chooses the perdition and corruption of a living homosexual hell. In
Bellezza’s infernal world, homosexuality can be nothing else but prostitution and
neurotically masochistic obsessions: in Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom) (1972),
his conclusion is that everything is Hell and that the only salvation is the systematic
refusal of the self.
For other writers homosexual guilt was exorcised, either on the model of Forster’s
posthumously published Maurice in works like Umberto Saba’s Ernesto, or on the model
of an essentially heterosexual transfiguration of the lived homosexual experience which
one finds in Giovanni Comisso and Aldo Palazzeschi
. Palazzeschi managed to leave not
a single trace of his homosexuality in anything he wrote except for a vague, ephemeral
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