Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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homoeroticism in his epistolary novel, Allegoria di novembre (A November Allegory)
(1958). Comisso, like Saba, left a posthumous homosexual novel, Giochi d’infanzia
(Childhood games) (1969), but, like Saba, reads homosexuality as a state of arrested
adolescence in the autoerotic-homosexual-heterosexual continuum common in much
contemporary psychoanalytic practice.
A number of writers were primarily concerned with the reconciliation of their
homosexuality with their Christian faith, hardly surprising in Catholic Italy. Of these,
perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most widely translated, is Carlo Coccioli,
whose Fabrizio Lupo, printed for the first time in Italy in 1978, had been a classic for
twentyfive years in Latin America. Coccioli seeks to condemn the attitudes of the
Catholic church to homosexuality but without seeking at the same time to deconstruct its
phobic position. Public intellectuals like Alberto Arbasino, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi,
Goffredo Parise and Gian Piero Bona offer an aristocratic, often snobbish view of the
homosexual world, a world where the proletariat is seen as homosexually available but
projected out of history.
Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s debut text, Altri libertini (Other Libertines), was banned for a
short period immediately after publication in 1980 on the grounds of obscenity. Altri
Libertini treated old taboos aggressively and with a deep sense of irony which was not to
extend into subsequent works. His last and only truly homosexual novel, Camere
separate (Separate Rooms) (1989) displays all of the standard canonically internalized
attitudes to relationships between males. Like Alberto Arbasino (L’Anonimo Lombardo
(The Anonymous Lombard) 1959), Tondelli’s homosexual protagonists are a cultured
and cosmopolitan group whose playground is Europe and whose concerns are far
removed from the reality of what it is to be homosexual in contemporary Italy.
Aldo Busi is perhaps the most difficult of all Italian writers to categorize. A truly
postmodern figure, his output reflects a deep concern for the minutiae of that construct
which is Italy. In novels like Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (The
Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman) and Sodomie in corpo 11 (Sodomies
in Elevenpoint), Busi dazzles with the baroque richness of his language, shocks with his
defiant approach to the often explicit nature of his descriptions of gay sexual relations
and stimulates with his postmodern reflections on the very nature of literature itself.
Further reading
Dall’Orto, G. (1984) Leggere omosessuale. Bibliografia (Reading Homosexuality: Bibliography),
Turin: Edizioni Gruppo Abele (a comprehensive bibliographic study of all works with
homosexual content, both Italian and foreign, published in Italy).
Gnerre, F. (1981) L’eroe negate. Il personaggio omosessuale nella narrativa contemporanea (The
Denied Hero: The Homosexual Character in Contemporary Narrative), Milan: Gammalibri (a
detailed study of the homosexual protagonist in works by Italian homosexual authors).
Mieli, M. (1977) Elementi di critica omosessuale (Elements of Homosexual Critique), Milan:
Einaudi (the major theoretical contribution of the Italian gay liberation movement).
STEPHAN RIEDEL
Entries A–Z 361
Gemina
Once a share parking of Montedison (then owned by ENI), in 1981 Gemina (Generale
Mobiliare Interessenze Azionarie) passed under joint control of Mediobanca and Fiat
and bought a large parcel of Montedison shares from ENI, thus giving Enrico Cuccia and
his allies control of the chemical giant. Led by Cesare Romiti and later by Giampiero
Pesenti, during the 1980s Gemina abandoned Montedison (which was nationalized again)
but bought Rizzoli-Corriere della sera, a giant publishing group then on the verge of
bankruptcy, became a shareholder in AmbroVeneto, a Catholic banking group, and
eventually turned itself into a holding of merchant banking and insurance activities. In
1995 Mediobanca planned to transform it into a giant chemical conglomerate,
SuperGemina, which had to amalgamate Montedison (in deep crisis after Ferruzzi’s
collapse) and chemical companies of the Fiat group. The project was given up after an
enormous loss in Rizzoli’s balance sheet was discovered and Gemina’s managers were
prosecuted. More recently, Gemina has given up control of Rizzoli to HDP (Holding di
Partecipazioni), a financial holding of which Gemina itself is a shareholder, has
abandoned the financial services business and has focused on merchant banking in favour
of emerging middle-size companies.
STEFANO BATTILOSSI
Germanà, Mimmo
b. 1944, Catania, Sicily; d. 1992, Milan
Painter
Germanà studied at the Accademia d’Arte in Rome at the same time as Sandro Chia. He
completed his studies in 1970 and in 1980 he moved to Milan. His first solo exhibition
was in 1970 at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome. His paintings are representational,
vibrantly coloured and strongly expressionistic. From 1977 to the mid-1980s, Germanà
was one of the artists included in the broad current known as the transavantgarde,
although by the late 1980s he was no longer numbered amongst its active members.
OLIVIA DAWSON
Germi, Pietro
b. 14 September 1914, Genoa; d. 5 December 1974, Rome
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Film director
Once characterized by Fellini as ‘il grande falegname’ (the great carpenter), Germi was
undoubtedly one of the best artisans of Italian postwar cinema. Having begun his
directorial career with dramatic films, he nevertheless became one of the undisputed
masters of the comic genre with films which, for all their comedy, offered some of the
most mordant and incisive critiques of contemporary Italian society.
Germi studied acting and film-making at the Centre Sperimentale di
Cinematografia in Rome under Alessandro Blasetti, and then started by making
neorealistic films marked by a visibly dramatic vein. In 1948 he made In norm della
legge (In the Name of the Law), a gripping story about the Sicilian mafia. This was
followed by his neorealist masterpiece Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope)
(1950) which narrated the epic journey of a group of Sicilian workers to France in search
of a better life, a film which patently reflected the influence of Visconti’s La terra trema
(The Earth Trembles) (1948) as well as being a stylized reprise of the narrative patterns
of the classical Hollywood Western as exemplified in the films of John Ford. In fact, the
narrative rhythm of Germi’s films would always owe much to American cinema, and he
was much loved in the USA, especially by Billy Wilder.
In 1961, Germi moved suddenly to comedy with Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian
Style). Divorzio was slightly removed from the then traditional ‘comedy Italian style’ in
theme, but similar to it in terms of its satirical intent. The film marked the birth of the so-
called ‘Southern comedy’ which became a genre in itself because the economic boom
was taking place well away from the South where human beings were not being faced
with a fast- paced, industrialized society, but rather with the ancestral southern
civilization. However, in spite of their difference from the so-called ‘comedies Italian
style’, Germi’s comedies were quite as aggressive and ferocious. In fact, Divorce Italian
Style was initially meant to be a dramatic film, and yet, at the completion of the script,
Germi realized that in the backward Sicily that served as the setting for the story, even
the most dramatic events, such as the delitto d’onore (crime of honour), then still
sanctioned by the penal code, could easily take on farcical tones.
In 1964 Germi directed Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned), in which
he portrays a monstrous society caught up in an almost medieval and tribal culture. The
film is nearly an anthropological documentary on a barbaric world where an archaic
penal code allows, and almost encourages, the use of matrimony to repair the ills caused
by sexual violence and exploitation. The same kind of remoteness which characterizes
Germi’s Sicily qualifies his Veneto in Signore e signori (Ladies and Gentlemen) (1966)
where Germi again investigates backward sexual and social behaviours. With Le
castagne sono buone (Chestnuts Are Good) (1970), Alfredo, Alfredo (Alfred, Alfred)
(1973) and his last but unfinished film, Amici miei (My Friends) (1975), completed by his
friend Mario Monicelli, Germi returned to comedy to express bewilderment at the new
and nostalgia for the past.
A fairly isolated but important figure in the history of postwar Italian cinema, Germi
constantly attempted to combine two apparently opposing tasks: cinema as entertainment
and cinema as commitment to social and political commentary.
Entries A–Z 363
Further reading
Giacovelli, E. (1991) Pietro Germi, Milan: Il Castoro (a concise and useful survey of Germi’s
career and his films, with a complete filmography and selected bibliography on individual
films).
MANUELA GIERI
Geymonat, Ludovico
b. 11 May 1908, Turin; d. 29 November 1991, Passirana di Rho
Philosopher and historian of science
Appointed in 1956 to Italy’s first chair of Philosophy of Science at the State University of
Milan, Geymonat was the foremost Italian representative of empiricist or logical
positivist thought, although Geymonat himself often preferred the term ‘neopositivist’. In
his many publications, Geymonat’s chief concern was to bridge the gulf he saw between
science and philosophy in Italy since the CounterReformation. At times locked in fierce
debate with his coeval, Norberto Bobbio, Geymonat also had a long history of anti-
fascist political activism, including participation in the armed Resistance and
membership of the Communist Party in the immediate postwar years. Having abandoned
the PCI in the 1970s, he stood as an independent candidate for Democrazia Proletaria
(Proletarian Democracy) in the national elections of 1983. In 1985 he was awarded the
Feltrinelli prize by the national Accademia dei Lincei.
SUZANNE KIERNAN
Giacosa, Dante
b. 3 January 1905, Rome; d. 31 March 1996, Turin
Engineer and industrial designer
After graduating from the Milan Polytechnic in 1927, Giacosa joined the Fiat motor
company. Displaying much talent and promise, he was soon given the pressing task of
designing a car for the mass Italian market which would be small, cheap and economical
to run. Giacosa’s solution, unveiled in 1936, was the legendary 500cc economy car which
came to be universally known as the Topolino (little mouse) because of its look and
diminutive size. Although successful, the model remained out of the reach of most
Italians and was eventually discontinued in the early 1950s to be replaced by a 600cc
model and a new 500cc, both also designed by Giacosa. The new 500cc, a tiny but
efficient two-door sedan with a foldback sunroof, affectionately known as the Bambina
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(little one), proved to be the car of the Italian economic miracle, and 3.7 million were
produced before it too was discontinued in 1973.
Giacosa also designed many of Fiat’s other successful models and became head of its
Research and Development Division before retiring in 1975. He later recounted his
remarkable career in I miei 40 anni di progettazione alla Fiat (My 40 Years of Designing
for Fiat), published in Milan by Automobilia in 1979.
GINO MOLITERNO
Gigli, Romeo
b. 12 December 1949, Castelbolognese, Faenza
Fashion designer
Defined as the ‘minimalist’ of fashion and a ‘romantic’ intellectual whose look has been
labelled pre-Raphaelite, Romeo Gigli’s designs contrast dramatically with the business
look created for the new executive woman. His designs aim to be soft and fluid, often
opting for muted but rich colours, and are inspired by the Empress Theodora of
Byzantium Byzantine churches. A very private man, Gigli set up and the women depicted
in the mosaics of Ravenna’s his own label in 1983, and in 1991 he broke with his former
partners to establish his new ‘Romeo World’. His preferred fabrics are linen, chiffon,
gauze, wool, cashmere and silk. He also works in crushed velvet and designs
embroidered scarves. In 1991, England’s Bath Costume Museum selected one of his
outfits (a midnight blue velvet pantsuit, a stripedsunset blouse, and a gilt-embroidered
cummerbund) as its Outfit of the Year.
BERNADETTE LUCIANO
Ginzburg, Carlo
b. 1939, Turin
Cultural historian
Carlo Ginzburg (son of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg) studied at the Normale Superiore
of Pisa and at the Warburg Institute in London. He now teaches history at the University
of Bologna and several universities in the United States. One of the foremost Italian
practitioners of the so-called ‘new erudition’ characterized by ‘interdisciplinary
incursion’ (his term), Ginzburg ranges from structural anthropology, ethnography and
sociology to literary studies, art history and stylistic analysis. A practitioner of
‘microhistory’, he employs novelistic techniques to recount the mental life of individuals
in the past reconstituted from evidence that is not exclusively documentary. One of his
Entries A–Z 365
books, The Cheese and the Worms, has garnered a readership beyond the scholarly
community, becoming an international bestseller.
Further reading
Ginzburg, C. (1976) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
SUZANNE KIERNAN
Ginzburg, Natalia
b. 14 July 1916, Palermo; d. 7 October 1991
Writer
Ginzburg (born Natalia Levi) was born in Palermo but grew up in Turin where, as a
young writer, she befriended anti-fascist intellectuals such as Cesare Pavese, Primo Levi
and Leone Ginzburg, whom she married and whose name she kept after his death at the
hands of the regime. Her novels, short stories and plays are populated with mediocre
characters often defined by their indecision, their inconsistency and their inability to
extricate themselves from unhappy family situations. In fact, family relationships and
domestic life have been the constant themes in Ginzburg’s literary and dramatic
production. The play Ti ho sposato per allegria (I Married You for Fun), published in
1966 and soon adapted for the cinema, focuses on a newlywed couple struggling to make
sense of their recent marriage. With this text Ginzburg captures the uneasiness and
insecurity of the 1960s generation, eager to discard traditional family values in an attempt
to establish new means of relating. In this as in so many of her other works, the writer’s
compassionate irony accompanies the portrayal of the characters’ failures, endearing
them to the reader.
See also: Jewish writers
PIERA CARROLI
Il Giorno
Il Giorno (The Day) is a daily newspaper, published by Sogedit in Milan, with a
circulation of approximately 170,000 copies (1992 figures). Launched on 21 March 1956,
the paper broke with the traditional old-style format of Italian dailies by inventing a
quality newspaper with headline banners, brief articles and a new eye-catching layout. It
thus appeared to be making history as the first truly modern newspaper in Italy. The
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paper was initially under the dominant financial control of Enrico Mattei who, as
president of the stateowned ENI and a prominent member of the DC, exerted a decisive
influence. Following Mattei’s death and a wave of concentrations, ENI took over 99 per
cent of the capital and became the paper’s publisher. Significantly, in 1963 Il Giorno
became the first newspaper to hail the centre-left government (see opening to the Left).
However, having openly supported Bettino Craxi and the PSI in the 1970s and 1980s, Il
Giorno was hit particularly hard by Craxi’s fall from grace and after 1992 it underwent a
crisis from which it never fully recovered. It closed in 1997.
See also: newspapers
JAN KURZ
Giudici, Giovanni
b. 26 June 1924, Le Grazie di Portovenere, La Spezia
Poet and essayist
Giudici grew up in Rome and worked in Ivrea and Turin before settling in Milan as
copyright editor for Olivetti from 1958 onward. Up to the late 1960s his poetry
juxtaposes autobiographical elements and the ironic description of everyday minutiae in
an essentially prosaic style. Frequent in his collections is a jocose fascination with the
grotesque—uncommon in Italian contemporary poetry—that serves to counterbalance the
evident conflict between the poet’s Catholic and Marxist personae. Giudici’s later poetry
develops lyrically around an identity crisis engendered by his refusal to accept the
monotonous repetitions of daily existence. As a result, the poems acquire a linguistic
sobriety and meditative tone that contrasts with the poet’s earlier playfulness, and the
autobiographical elements often displace the previous work’s social concerns.
Further reading
Giudici, G. (1991) Poesie 1953–1990 (Poems 1953–1990), Milan: Garzanti (selected poems with
bibliographical references).
VALERIO FERME
Giuliani, Alfredo
b. 23 November 1924, Pesaro
Entries A–Z 367
Poet and critic
Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Chieti, Giuliani is
one of the chief promoters of the neoavantgarde movement. He edited the
groundbreaking poetic anthology I novissimi (The Very New) in 1961, organized the first
historic meeting of the Gruppo 63 in Palermo and, together with Nanni Balestrini, also
edited the proceedings of that meeting. In the 1960s and 1970s he edited the anthology
Poeti di ‘Tel Quel’ (Poets of the Tel Quel) and also published in journals such as il verri,
Quindici and Grammatica.
The first important tenet of the neoavantgarde movement is that to regard language as
an accurate reflection of the world is to become complicit with a political, economic and
ideological system. For Giuliani, as for the entire neoavantgarde movement, poetry
should refuse the functional use of language to recount the experiences of one’s life and
instead should attempt to dramatize the difference between language and reality by
generating an incongruous grammar. The work of poetry thus becomes a continual
challenge to conventional truths. This leads Giuliani to a sort of schizophrenic or
schizomorphic writing which highlights all the inconsistencies of grammar. In this
respect, Giuliani’s poetry can be considered the heir of Theodor Adorno’s negative
dialectics.
Further reading
Smith, L.R. (1990) ‘Alfredo Giuliani: The Poetics of Schizophrenia’, La Fusta: Journal of
Literature and Cultured 136–57.
ERNESTO LIVORNI
Giuliano, Salvatore
b. 16 November 1922, Montelepre, Sicily; d. 5 July 1950, Castelvetrano
Bandit
Giuliano, or the ‘King of Montelepre’, as he was also known, was the most famous bandit
in postwar Italy. A small-time black marketeer who in September 1943 killed a
policeman to avoid being arrested with contraband, Giuliano soon achieved a Robin
Hood reputation as leader of the most notorious bandit gang in Western Sicily. What
came to distinguish Giuliano from other bandits, however, was his willing participation in
the Sicilian Separatist Movement; by 1945 he had become a colonel in EVIS, the
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Voluntary Army for Sicilian Independence. When the movement eventually collapsed
Giuliano came under the influence of a reactionary grouping of local monarchists,
landowners and possibly the mafia, that feared the rise of the Left. Giuliano’s band then
fired indiscriminately on a May Day celebration in 1947, killing 11 people and injuring
27. Giuliano himself was killed in July 1950 in mysterious circumstances. The official
version reported that he had died in a gun battle with police but eventually Gaspare
Pisciotta, Giuliano’s brother-in-law and lieutenant, confessed to having shot him while he
was sleeping as part of a deal with police and others. Soon after Pisciotta was poisoned in
his prison cell, leaving many questions unanswered, making the case of Giuliano the first
of many dark skeletons in the closet of the ‘First’ Republic.
Further reading
Candler, B J. (1988) King of the Mountain: The Life and Death of Giuliano the Bandit, DeKalb, IL:
Northern Illinois University Press (an illuminating and thorough examination of all aspects of
the Giuliano case).
GINO MOLITERNO
Gladio
The existence of a secret military organization codenamed ‘Gladio’, set up in the mid-
1950s as part of what the Americans called their ‘stay behind network’ in Europe and
administered from within the Italian secret services, was reluctantly revealed in
Parliament in 1990 by Prime Minister Andreotti and subsequently confirmed by then
President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga. Originally declaring that the organization
had been disbanded in 1972, Andreotti was later forced to admit that it was still in place.
The network, consisting of some 620 covert operatives divided into forty commando
units and five rapid action forces, with access to weapons and ammunition in 140 arms
caches hidden throughout the country, was designed to be able to offer armed resistance
to any Warsaw Pact invasion or attempted communist takeover. Following controversy
and a great deal of public outcry, the government officially dissolved the organization in
October 1993, but the existence of such a structure has continued to cause disquiet, not
least regarding the possible participation of the ‘gladiators’ and their arms in Italian right-
wing terrorist activities especially during the 1960s and 1970s.
Further reading
Ferraresi, F. (1992) ‘A Secret Structure Codenamed Gladio’, in S.Hellman and G.Pasquino (eds),
Italian Politics: A Review, vol. 7, London: Pinter.
GINO MOLITERNO
Entries A–Z 369
Gramsci, Antonio
b. 22 January 1891, Ales; d. 27 April 1937, Quisisana, Rome
Communist Party leader and Marxist theorist
A founder member of the Italian Communist Party (1921), its second leader (1923–37)
and a leading Marxist theorist, Gramsci was born in Sardinia to a petty-bourgeois
landowning family. His father, Francesco, worked in the land registry and his mother,
Giuseppina, was the daughter of the local tax collector.
Gramsci developed a hunchback in infancy and, when his father was jailed for fraud,
became the butt of the mockery of peasant children. As the child of the hated local
landowning notables, he had a miserable youth. After a secondary education at the liceo
Giovanni Maria Dettori in Gagliari, he won a scholarship to the University of Turin
(1911) and studied letters.
After a brilliant academic start he abandoned the university, joined the Italian Socialist
party (1913) and became a journalist for Avanti and Il Grido del Popolo, writing a regular
theatre column. With his colleagues, Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Palmiro
Togliatti, he conducted educational campaigns in the working class, setting up the club
di vita morale (clúbs for moral living). All were greatly influenced by the Russian
revolutions of 1917 and thereafter supported a revolutionary end to Italy’s disastrous
participation in the First World War. Together, they established the newspaper Ordine
Nuovo (1919), which promoted the creation of factory councils which would teach
workers how to manage economic production.
Joining with other groups, notably Il Soviet led by the Neapolitan, Amedeo Bordiga,
they split from the Socialist party and set up the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Gramsci
was soon marginalized by his Neapolitan rival, who continued to advocate violent
revolutionary policies despite the rise of fascism and the defeat of socialist forces in
1921–3. He was sent as delegate to the Communist International in Moscow in 1922–4
and while there he met and married Giulia Schucht, with whom he had two sons. In 1924
he returned to Italy to organize a new leading group to replace Bordiga, and was elected
for the Veneto.
The political triumph of the Fascists redirected Gramsci’s attention to an investigation
of the reasons for its success and how best to organize opposition to such a movement.
Before any concrete opposition could be mounted he was jailed for twenty years, five
months and four days, under the Exceptional Laws of 1926 which banned all opposition
political parties. These laws effectively crippled the Communist Party, which was
condemned to illegality and reduced to a few thousand disorganized members until 1943.
Gramsci spent his jail sentence in many Fascist jails, mainly at Turi di Bari but also in
Ustica, Formia and various clinics. The difficult conditions, poor diet and constant
harassment progressively destroyed his health and ultimately led to an early death.
Gramsci had opposed Comintern policies from 1922 onwards, as he was too much to
the Left. He refused to openly criticize Trotsky, and broke with Togliatti on the issue in
1926. From 1931 onwards he also opposed Stalin’s policies, which added to his isolation
and made his leadership of the Communist Party little more than nominal after his
imprisonment.
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