Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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While in prison he wrote a series of letters (Lettere dal carcere (Letters From Prison)),

short stories for his sons (l’Albero del Riccio (The Tree of the Hedgehog)) and filled

numerous exercise books with notes on history, politics, literature, political theory and

philosophy. These were smuggled out of Italy and published after the war as Quaderni

del carcere (Prison Notebooks). It is largely these notebooks that established him as one

of the greatest Marxist theorists and philosophers of the twentieth century.

The themes of the notes have provoked much debate and controversy, since Gramsci

wrote them in different forms and used codes to avoid censorship. Nevertheless, Gramsci

clearly declared his initial intention in 1927 as the undertaking of an enquiry into the

creative popular mind, in its various phases and levels of development. He also made

clear that the notes constituted an investigation into how that mind was formed, educated

and controlled and could be freed from such hegemonies. In turn, this focus was

prompted by a consideration of the basis for the success of fascism, particularly how and

why it had won the support of the peasantry and middle classes whose role had been

neglected by communists and Marxists more generally, despite their being a majority of

Italians.

In a debate with Vico, Machiavelli and Croce, Gramsci asks what explains the way

the ideas of intellectuals are taken up by the great masses of people to become forces for

historical change? How do ideologies like fascism become ‘hegemonic’ and sustain

particular arrangements of political forces? Gramsci’s study was informed by his vast

reading of European sources, and his reflection on the peasant culture he had grown up in

and which had provided crucial support for fascism, while Communists ignored peasants

and their middle-class leaders. These reflections prevented the fascist plan to ‘stop this

mind working for twenty years’ becoming reality. Instead, his notes were successfully

written ‘fur ewig’ (forever), as he had hoped.

Gramsci’s critique of economic determinist Marxism, his emphasis on an optimism of

the will and his radical emphasis on democratic mass organization for change has made

his theory a fruitful source for research. The notes are still used extensively by literary

theorists, geographers, sociologists, historians and political scientists of the post-Marxist

generation.

Further reading

Buittigieg, J. (ed.) (1995) Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks, New York: Columbia University

Press.

Davidson, A. (1977) Antonio Gramsci Towards an Intellectual Biography, London, Merlin.

Golding, S. (1992) Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy,

Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge.

ALASTAIR DAVIDSON

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Grand Hotel

Probably the best-known fotoromanzo magazine, Grand Hotel was the first to launch the

love story in comic book form. The first issue appeared on 26 July 1946, published by

Editoriale Universo. Its cover was melodramatic: an elegantly dressed couple smiling in

the foreground, while the background featured the lobby of the ‘Grand Hotel’ and a

movie theatre, crowded with more elegant people waiting to see Anime incatenate

(Chained Souls), a film produced by a fictional film studio, the Edituniverso. The sixteen-

page magazine introduced the first episode of the love story, Anime incatenate, and the

last page was dedicated to letters from readers and an illustrated news item under the title

‘It Happened’. The aim of Grand Hotel was to entertain and educate a young female

readership who did not even have the right to vote. It was instantly successful and

continues to be so, having survived the market’s ups and downs by adapting to changes in

fashion and behavioural norms while adhering to its original format.

FRANCO MANAI

Grassi, Giorgio

b. June 1937, Milan

Architect and teacher

From his student years at the Politecnico of Milan, Grassi displayed an interest in

bridging architectural theory and practice, imagination and pragmatism, tradition and

invention. He expressed his views in the journal Casabella while engaged in a long and

uninterrupted teaching career. After the mid-1960s, Grassi combined design and research

with teaching architectural composition at Pescara University and the Politecnico of

Milan. In 1967 he published La costruzione logica dell’architettura (Principles and

Axioms in Architecture), elaborating views on contemporary architectural theory first

expressed in 1961 in a long article in Casabella. Drawing on a series of historical and

critical studies, he argued that logic and rationality can overcome the accidental rules and

obstacles of architectural design. His own architectural projects demonstrate how cultural

and historical properties can be translated into a new architectural form. He maintained a

critical attitude towards much of the modern movement, not only towards those trends

that developed from a rationalistic origin to functionalism, but also towards those that

measured the rationality of architecture by the purity of its form.

See also: architecture and design magazines

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Further reading

Crespi, G. and Pierini, S. (eds) (1996) Giorgio Grassi: I progetti, le opere e gli scritti (Giorgio

Grassi: Projects, Built Works and Writings), Milan: Electa (an illustrated anthology of Grassi’s

built and unbuilt architectural works in the years 1961–95, also contains unabridged versions of

his important writings as well as a complete list of his projects, exhibitions of his work and an

extensive bibliography).

FASSIL ZEWDOU

Greco, Emilio

b. 11 October 1913, Catania; d. 5 April 1995, Rome

Sculptor

Initally Greco worked as a funerary stone mason and then studied at the Palermo

Academy of Art. He had his first one-man show in Rome in 1946 and began to examine

the realist origins of his sculpture in his series of Omoni (Big Men) and Teste virili (Virile

Heads). From the 1950s onwards he worked mainly in bronze, producing portrait busts

and life-size female nudes, often figures of bathers and ice skaters. These works, though

still in a realistic vein, nevertheless contain parodic elements of classical statues and

represent an emphatic confrontation with sculptural tradition. An important example of

this later work is La grande bagnante (Large Bather) (1956), a figure of a standing

woman with her torso twisted in mannerist fashion like a column, for which Greco was

awarded the sculpture prize of the 18th Venice Biennale. In the early 1960s he was

commissioned to sculpt panels for the doors of the Duomo of Orvieto. Greco went on to

exhibit internationally and his work has been collected around the world.

LAURENCE SIMMONS

Gregotti, Vittorio

b. 10 August 1927, Novara

Architect, designer, editor and theoretician

A prominent member of the ‘second postwar generation’ of architects, Gregotti graduated

from the Milan Politecnico in 1952. Except between 1969 to 1974 when he worked alone,

Gregotti preferred the teamwork of the Gregotti Associati, first founded in 1953, then a

second team assembled in 1974 and finally the current one, founded in 1981. Professor of

architecture at the University of Venice since 1971, Gregotti has also taught in other

European and American universities. As an editor and writer, he has been actively

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engaged with current problems and ideas in architecture since the early 1950s. His

editorial involvement has included Casabella, Edilizia moderna, il verri, Lotus and

Rassegna while his books, Inside Architecture (1991) and La Città Visibile (The Visible

City) (1995) offer clear statements of his theoretical positions. Gregotti’s most recurrent

theme is a dialogue between architecture and its situation: its place, history and

environment. Urban design, installations, industrial and graphic design are all active

elements in Gregotti’s architectural experimentation. He has built throughout Italy and

internationally

Further reading

Rykwert, J. (1995) Gregotti Associati, Milan: Rizzoli (a thorough review of all Gregotti Associati

projects, with extensive bibliography).

GORDANA KOSTICH

Grillo, Giuseppe

b. 21 July 1948, Savignone, Genoa

Comedian and actor

One of the new generation of comedians to emerge in the late 1970s, Giuseppe ‘Beppe’

Grillo began in cabaret theatre and soon graduated to television. Despite a rising

popularity, his tendency to fire biting satirical broadsides against Christian Democrat and

Socialist politicians led to his being largely ostracized from the RAI in the 1980s. His

strongly environmental and anti-capitalist sentiments have continued to made him an

uncomfortable presence for the entire Italian establishment in the 1990s, although this has

only served to increase his popular appeal. He has also appeared in a number of films,

notably in Comencini’s Cercarsi Gesù (Looking for Christ) in 1981 and Laudadio’s

Topo Galileo (Galileo and the Mouse) in 1988 but, unlike fellow comics like Benigni and

Troisi, Grillo has not managed to successfully transfer his comic verve to the big screen.

In 1997, however, he was commissioned by the European Union to prepare and act in an

environmental video for wide distribution to schools.

GINO MOLITERNO

Gruppo 63

A loose configuration of self-consciously experimental painters, musicians, writers and

cultural critics, Gruppo 63 first came together at a conference in Palermo in 1963 (hence

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its name). Its membership varied during its brief existence, but its nucleus remained the

five ‘experimental’ poets already launched by the influential anthology I novissimi

(Alfredo Giuliani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta and Elio

Pagliarani) together with other emerging young writers, musicians and cultural critics of

the immediate postwar generation such as Alberto Arbasino, Renato Barilli, Umberto

Eco, Enrico Filippini, Francesco Leonetti, Giancarlo Marmori and Adriano Spatola,

many of whom had already been published in the prestigious cultural journal il verri. The

group also included figures such as Angelo Guglielmi who worked in the recently

established television industry.

Several members of the group held important positions in the major publishing houses

and this, together with a consummate skill in utilizing all the modern techniques of

advertising and marketing, helped to keep the group in the public eye and to foster the

perception of a common identity. However, the group only held one further public

meeting, another conference in Palermo in 1965 which discussed the so-called

‘experimental novel’. During this meeting the serious divergence of opinion which had

already been evident at the first conference became even more pronounced. Two years

later some members of the group initiated a cultural journal called Quindici, but this

closed after only two years due mainly to the contrasting responses of its key members to

the student protests of 1968. The journal’s closure signalled the definitive dissolution of

the group, whose members then went their separate ways. Giuliani and Guglielmi

withdrew ever more into the closed world of poetry, while Balestrini moved to the

leftwing publisher Feltrinelli where he took up publishing documents of the working-

class movement. Sanguineti continued to experiment with poetry but became more

deeply involved with the Italian Communist Party (see PCI) and began practising the

very parliamentary politics which the group had previously scorned. Eco took up a chair

at the university of Bologna and continued to chart his course to intellectual

superstardom.. In 1993, a commemorative conference at Reggio Emilia was organized to

mark the twentieth anniversary of the first Palermo conference, but some original

members of the group had died and other founding members such as Riva and Eco

refused to attend, branding the event an exercise in ‘instant nostalgia’.

Judgements on the group have varied enormously. Poet and critic Franco Fortini

dismissed it all as an odd mixture of techno-rationalism and instinctual irrationalism, and

there was also a great deal of criticism regarding the way in which the conference was

lavishly co-financed by Feltrinelli and the local council. Eco reportedly characterized the

group as ‘an avantgarde that only travels firstclass’, and clearly the group was not a

‘traditional’ avantgarde made up of struggling bohemian artists but rather a self-

conscious grouping of professional intellectuals holding prominent—and influential—

positions in the universities, the publishing industry and in the other mass media.

However, as some commentators have pointed out, it was precisely the middle-brow

make-up of the group and the influential position of its members inside the cultural

establishment that allowed them to evaluate more accurately the enormous changes that

were being wrought by the Italian ‘economic miracle’ and the challenges that were being

presented to a culture which, in spite of its postwar opening to European ideas, was still

rather provincial. In fact, despite the wide divergence of opinion amongst its members on

a range of issues, the group’s most important contribution was undoubtedly its clear and

commonly voiced recognition that the economic boom of the late 1950s, and the

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unprecedented consumeristic ethos that came with it, were changing fundamentally the

nature of Italian society. In the process, for better or for worse, new social subjects were

being created within a culture no longer linked exclusively to the time-honoured figures

of poets and artists, but rather produced and reproduced en masse by the media industry

itself. In the great marketplace of mass culture which advanced capitalism had thus

opened up, political, social and cultural values all became messages and products to be

produced and consumed like everything else. Within such an environment, the group

argued, artists, writers and intellectuals simply could not refuse the industrial role of

cultural ‘producer’, but they could, and should, explore new possibilities for ‘political’

action by using all the techniques of the mass media to subvert the easy consumption of

prefabricated messages and attempt to generate instead ironic, ambiguous, ‘open’

meanings.

In this sense, Eco’s Opera aperta (The Open Work), published a year before the

founding conference and presenting for the first time a modern aesthetic built on the idea

of unfinished or ‘open’ interpretations, could be regarded as something like the

gravitational centre of an otherwise highly differentiated intellectual cluster. Further-

more, with the innovative idea that all cultural activity presents the possibility for

political struggle, the group seemed uncannily to anticipate the war cry of the 1968

student movement: ‘everything is political’. Ironically, however, once such notions

became not only acceptable but common currency, both within the student movement

and in the society at large, the group had no more reason for existing and so, quite

appropriately, dissolved. Consequently, in spite of its brief duration, Gruppo 63 is justly

celebrated as perhaps the first moment when contemporary Italian culture became

selfconscious of its own modernity.

Further reading

Alexander, G. (1978) ‘Poetry and Politics: Sanguineti and the Novissimi’, Altro Polo, 193–214 (a

discussion of the nexus between poetry and politics in the novissimi poets and in the Gruppo 63

generally).

Balestrini, N. (1964) Gruppo 63: la nuova letteratura, Milan: Feltrinelli (a presentation of the

protagonists of the first Palermo conference).

Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work, trans. A.Cancogni, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ferretti, G.C. (1978) ‘Italy and the New Avantgarde’, Yale Italian Studies 2 (3): 233–41 (general

considerations on the importance of the Gruppo 63).

GINO MOLITERNO

Gruppo degli otto

The Gruppo degli otto (Group of Eight) were eight Italian artists—Afro, Birolli, Corpora,

Moreni, Morletti, Santomaso, Turcato and Vedova—who joined together for the

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purposes of commercially promoting their work and invited the eminent art historian

Lionello Venturi to be their spokesman. Keen to promote contemporary Italian art and

recognizing the importance of international markets, Venturi produced a brief catalogue,

Otto Pittori Italiani (Eight Italian Painters), with parallel French and English translations,

to accompany the group’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 1952.

Venturi argued that the members of the group were independent and autonomous

artists who stood above the petty squabbles between abstraction and realism and were

free of the taint of political association. After exhibitions in Rome and Hanover in 1953,

the group dissolved in 1954 and the members went their various ways, Morlotti to seek a

style expressive of national identity and Vedova to embrace the gestural.

Further reading

Somaini, L. (1986) Otto Pittori Italiani 1952–1954 (Eight Italian Painters 1952–1954), Rome: De

Luca/Mondadori (the most exhaustive treatment of the group).

MAX STAPLES

Guareschi, Giovanni

b. 1 May 1908, Fontanelle di Roccabianca; d. 22 July 1968, Cervia

Editor, cartoonist and novelist

Consistently ignored, when not openly reviled, by the literary establishment, Guareschi

nevertheless found an immense public following with his series of bestselling novels

recounting the humorous exploits of Don Camillo, a high-spirited parish priest, and his

tussles with the town’s communist mayor, Peppone. The first novel, Don Camillo (1948),

managed to portray through these two contrasting characters all the ideological Cold War

battles being waged in postwar Italy. The book’s huge success led to a series of sequels

with the same characters in situations which closely reflected the social and political

changes occurring in the country, as well as a number of popular films starring Gino

Cervi and Fernandel in the lead roles. Guareschi edited Bertoldo, a weekly satirical

magazine and, together with Giovanni Mosa, founded with another satirical periodical

entitled Candido in which, at one stage, he libelled Togliatti and as a consequence spent

several months in prison.

Long ostracized in cultural circles as a writer of conservative politics and little literary

value, Guareschi and his work have been recently reassessed and in 1998 Rizzoli

published Tutto Don Camillo (All Don Camillo), in three large volumes.

LAURA A.SALSINI

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Gucci

The internationally-recognized inverted ‘G’ logo designates a family dynasty whose

name was once synonymous with Italian fashion. Guccio Gucci, who learned about style

and aesthetic sophistication in Paris and London, returned to Italy and opened the first

Gucci leather goods shop in Florence in 1920. By the 1940s Gucci shops had sprung up

in most major Italian cities. Guccio, patriarch and artisan, bequeathed his business to his

five sons in 1953. With that passage came international expansion, with stores opening in

New York, Great Britain, France, Hong Kong and Japan. Along with expansion came

diversification into shoes, silk scarves, ties, leather clothing, bamboo-handle handbags

and watches. In the late 1960s the Gucci logo became a status symbol appealing to

celebrities such as Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis.

By the late 1980s, however, the Gucci label had lost some its appeal. The company

itself was caught up in family infighting and lawsuits, and Maurizio, Guccio’s grandson,

was named to head the family empire at the age of forty-seven. Maurizio began

downsizing and focusing on those articles which reflected Gucci’s artisan traditions and

which had been responsible for the company’s success: the famous handbag, suitcases,

shoes and the foulard. Maurizio also closed a number of boutiques. In 1993 he sold the

remainder of his own holdings in the company to Investcorp, an Arab multinational,

which thereby became sole stockholder of the Gucci Group.

On 27 March 1995 tragedy struck as Maurizio, the last heir of the Gucci dynasty, was

shot and killed on his way to work. Two years of investigation led to nothing. Motives

were initially linked to the enemies Maurizio had made in negotiating the sale of the

Gucci label. Finally Maurizio’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, was charged and convicted of

ordering the murder, together with her fortuneteller friend and a night porter, who were

responsible for hiring the assassin and the getaway driver. While admitting she often

wished her exhusband dead, Patrizia Reggiani continued to deny her involvement in the

murder but the prosecution claimed her resentment over their divorce, Maurizio’s plans

to remarry and a reduction in alimony payments had motivated her to order the killing.

In spite of personal tragedy, the 1990s have seen the Gucci Group bounce back from

the slump of the previous decade. The positive turnaround has been attributed to CEO

Domenico de Sole and creative director Tom Ford, a Texan who is considered

responsible for saving Gucci from bankruptcy. His designs, promoting classic elegance

combined with innovative twists, led to a sudden leap in sales and inspired the name of a

new fragrance, ‘Envy’, in 1996. His more recent designs include a return to the 1970s:

bellbottomed trousers, fringes, and suits with floral colours and the Jackie O’ purse

revived in bright colours such as turquoise, yellow and orange. The 1980s also feature in

his designs for the end of the millennium which celebrate ‘maximalism’ as opposed to

minimalism. Finally, to spite the animal rights group, he advocates a return to furs of all

types in all forms including fur jackets, fur coats and fur vests.

Despite Gucci’s revival, Ford and Domenico de Sole have other worries, mainly the

ongoing battle for financial control of the company. They have triumphed in the latest

round, with a Dutch court ruling in Gucci’s favour in the most recent hostile takeover bid

by LVMH. Ironically, all this might have been avoided had Gucci stuck to its motto:

‘Stay small to remain great’.

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BERNADETTE LUCIANO

Guccione, Piero

b. 1935, Scicli, Ragusa, Sicily

Painter

A significant artist who has exhibited widely both in Italy and internationally (several

times at the Venice Biennale), Guccione depicts scenes from the physical world, such as

landscapes, seascapes, fences and buildings, with an almost photo-realist technique, but

he composes and colours his work so as to highlight abstract patterns in a way that is

reminiscent of 1960s minimalism and colour-field painting. After a period in Rome,

Guccione returned to Sicily in 1980, which he used as subject matter in much of his

subsequent work. Study of the Sea (1982–3), for example, depicts a Mediterranean

seascape but also plays with the interaction between horizontal and diagonal patterns.

Further reading

Siciliano, E. and Sontag, S. (1989) Guccione, Milan: Fabbri Editori (an informative illustrated

monograph).

MAX STAPLES

Guttuso, Renato

b. 2 January 1912, Bagheria, Sicily; d. 18 January 1987, Rome

Painter

Despite disagreement about his quality as an artist, Guttuso remains the best-known

exponent of Italian social realist, or neorealist, art (see realism). He participated in the

Resistance as a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and after the war

responded to the communist demands for programmatic and realist art by depicting the

things and events around him: common people, interiors of ordinary homes and scenes of

class struggle. Nevertheless, his realism is not extreme and his paintings do not attempt to

dissemble their painterly nature. With its swirling line, thick black outlines and sombre

shadows, his style is figurative but perhaps better described as expressionist. The

Crucifixion (1941), for example, used a religious theme to suggest the repression

experienced under fascism. Condemned by the Church and the pro-fascist press, it

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showed a nude Magdalene cleaning the wounds of a Christ whose face is obscured while

the surrounding chaos of horses and weeping figures echoes Picasso’s Guernica.

Remaining loyal to the Communist Party, Guttuso achieved high office, becoming a

senator of the Republic in 1976–83 and receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in 1972.

Further reading

(1996) Guttuso, London: Thames & Hudson/ Palermo: Novecento Editore (exhibition catalogue

with a number of illuminating essays, colour reproductions, detailed biography and extensive

bibliography).

MAX STAPLES

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