Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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which the author experimented with an interweaving of Sicilian dialect and Italian

language). The use of dialect survived in some theatrical experiments of the work of

Roberto de Simone and other young Neapolitans, but came to be used more extensively

in poetry.

Within a year of the publication of the anthology Poesia dialettale del Novecento

(Twentieth Century Dialectal Poetry) (1952), edited by Mario Dell’Arco and Pier Paolo

Pasolini, the more advanced critics realized that an ideological division had opened up

between older and newer experiences of dialectal poetry. The anthology, and especially

Pasolini’s introductory essay, manifested an awareness of the possibilities for a renewal

of linguistic expression and the advent of a literature which showed itself willing to

loosen itself from its ties to the popular, impressionistic and folkloric tradition of the first

half of the century.

By the 1960s, Pasolini’s stance—the demand for a refinement of the instrument of

language to the point where dialectal poetry could stand on a par with poetry in Italian—

had already affected the work of many of the leading poets. It is no mere coincidence that

it was Pasolini’s beloved Friuli region and soon the Veneto area more generally that

produced the results which served as models for literature in the other dialects. The

important figures here were Virgilio Giotti, Biagio Marin, Giacomo Noventa and Andrea

Zanzotto, with a new poetry which, having accepted its break with tradition, pursued

expressionistic aims and asserted itself as no less noble than any other literary form in the

national tongue.

The 1970s saw an extraordinary proliferation of poetry in dialect and the emergence of

new authors such as Franco Loi, Raffaello Baldini, Franco Scataglini, Amedeo Giacomini

and many others. This poetry was expressed in marginal idioms, in some cases

manifesting no link whatsoever to any literary tradition. It was written in a dialect which

was being spoken less and less but which had thus become precious and more responsive

to the text’s essential expressive needs. It often stood out as a linguistic code reinvented

by the speaker-poet (especially notable in Loi’s work), adapted to his specific capacities

and requirements.

In more recent years, the number of poets using dialect has increased immeasurably to

the point where critics, such as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, note the practical impossibility

of detecting common lines or currents that might serve to group the individual poets

together. Attempts at ordering such a fluid mass of material have been made in several

anthologies such as Franco Brevini’s Poeti dialettali del Novecento (Dialectal Poets of

the Twentieth Century) (1987) and Achille Serrao’s Via Terra. However, the

characteristics of the selected poets have been so strikingly dissimilar that the editors

have generally limited themselves to highlighting the importance of such individual poets

within the general phenomenon of dialectal poetry. In this sense, the most significant

figures are undoubtedly the above-mentioned Franco Loi, Raffaello Baldini, Franco

Scataglini and Amedeo Giacomini, together with Giose Rimanelli, Dante Maffia,

Roberto Giannoni, Piero Marelli, Giancarlo Consonni and Marcello Marciani.

Further reading

Bonaffini, L. (1997) Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy: Texts and Criticism, a Trilingual Anthology,

New York: Legas.

Haller, H.W. (ed.) (1986) The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry, Detroit:

Wayne State University Press (a rich and comprehensive bilingual anthology with a general

linguistic and cultural introduction plus individual introductions and bibliographies for each

region).

Serrao, A. (ed.) (1992) Via Terra (Via Earth), Udine: Campanotto.

Stussi, A. (1993) Lingua dialetto e letteratura (Language, Dialect and Literature), Turin: Einaudi.

ACHILLE SERRAO

literature of emigration

In older Italian scholarship, literature of emigration has usually been used to refer to

writing which focuses on migratory themes, produced outside Italy by Italian emigrants.

This traditional approach has undergone major revision in more recent times, and is being

transformed into a more comprehensive notion able to respond to the changing national

and international cultural situation and the new multicultural dimension of countries

which, like Italy, have only recently become permanent hosts to masses of foreign

immigrants. Understanding the import of these changes and of the way in which they

have transformed the very notion of a literature of emigration necessitates an initial

clarification of issues.

Literature of emigration as an anthropological definition might be applied to a wide

variety of cultural situations, and could include both works written in the original national

language or in the many foreign languages acquired by the emigrants in their host

countries and then naturally transmitted to their descendants. One major critical tendency

has been to regard the latter as part of Italian ‘culture’ for the amount of anthropological,

sociological and ethnological information which they preserve, but with a clear notion

that they are really part of a specific cultural field distinguished from both Italian culture

and the culture of the host country, even if the original emigrant status, with its implicit

or explicit tales of emancipation and assertion of the new identity, remains a natural and

understood background in most of these works. Typical in this sense are the English

works of the prolific Italian-American literary world. After decades of being catalogued

or dismissed simply as the product of Italian folklore, or as ethnic American literature in

the most fortunate cases, it is nowadays clear that Italian-American literature is part of a

broad and growing field of its own, not just classifiable as literature of emigration. This

field, now formally known as ItalianAmerican Studies, is strongly connected with both

the Italian cultural heritage and the new, immense international cultural horizon opened

up by the English language, with all the stylistic and ideological ramifications that such

linguistic choice implies and offers. In other words, for quality, quantity, variety, and for

its specific and recognizable development, Italian-American culture—as well as any

other well-established ethnic culture in a cosmopolitan or multicultural society—is an

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area which must be approached for its own and in its own world, even if this world can

refer to its original as well as to its host cultural background.

Turning to works written in Italian (or in a dialect or in a derivative of it), other issues

arise. One of them is the theoretical problem concerning the cultural definition of an

emigrant and consequently of an emigrant writer. While in other European countries such

as Spain, France or England, the strong presence of a post-colonial literature or the

political situation which forced hundreds of Eastern European intellectuals to leave their

countries for the Western world have caused a continuous and keen critical attention to

the matter, several historical circumstances have instead prevented Italian culture from

addressing this issue more consistently. The fact that Italy has been for many decades a

country of emigration rather than of immigration has heavily influenced the scholarly

approach to the subject. The almost uninterrupted exodus whereby millions of people left

the many underdeveloped areas of Italy for the sake of survival in the years between

political unification in 1860, and the immediate postwar period resulted in the

identification of the figure of the emigrant with poverty, desolation, linguistic

incompetence and scant formal education. This influenced the scholarly definition of

emigration literature in Italy, leading Italian academic culture to classify it as something

pertaining mostly to the sociological sphere, with little or nothing to do with the modern

and contemporary Italian literary tradition except in the cases of works devoted to the

subject by well-known writers. Because of this distinction, even the connection between

emigration and exile was largely neglected. The identification of literature of emigration

solely with works written by emigrants who belonged to the under-privileged population

driven to migration by poverty and not by ideological and political reasons, limited the

concept of literature of emigration not only thematically, but also culturally. This critical

assumption, in fact, encouraged a notional gap between emigration and exile, the latter

being the cultural condition of authors forced out of the country for political motives, for

instance, during Fascism (see also fascism and neo-fascism). Thus the connection

between emigration and exile was reduced largely to a sense of nostalgia or a depiction of

the pain and suffering involved in the migrational experience. It is significant in this

regard that Italian authors who were exiled or chose to leave the country during Fascism

were very rarely seen as ‘emigrant writers’. Their books, as for example in the most

famous case of Ignazio Silone, may have focused on sociological and political themes

which sometimes had to do with emigration, but their real aim seemed to be the raising of

anthropological and ideological issues. This double-faceted approach to the subject

strengthened the separation between literature of emigration and literature of exile in

modern Italy, the latter being the traditional product of educated intellectuals who fully

belonged to the mainstream of Italian literature, while the former remained for decades

almost entirely a matter of sociological surveys.

And yet, one could easily argue that Italian literary culture itself had long been the

product of exile and emigration caused by the geo-political divisions and the foreign

dominations which afflicted the peninsula for centuries, and obliged many Italian writers

to be, feel and live like perennial emigrants within Italy itself. And this situation was not

purely literary; on the contrary, the only common cultural thread which united Italians for

the longest time was, in fact, the literary language which stemmed from the fourteenth-

century Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Authors who willingly and

passionately struggled to learn and master the revered Tuscan literary language politically

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belonged to Italian states, often ruled by foreign countries, which could be at war with

Tuscany herself! A telling example of the depth of this ambivalent cultural perception

which created a distinction between being an Italian author and, simply, an Italian, is

provided in the early nineteenth century by the case of the major poet, Ugo Foscolo

(1778–1827) who, having been born on a Greek island of the Venetian republic, was

registered by both the Milanese and the Florentine bureaucracy as a ‘foreigner’. While no

cultured Italian of the time would have dared to consider Foscolo’s poems, novels and

plays the work of a foreigner, it was clear that, for the official culture, Foscolo’s only

claims to being Italian were his literary language and his works while his biographical

and historical status was officially that of a foreign ‘emigrant’.

Paradoxically, the emphasis placed upon unity and nationalism during the struggle to

unify Italy—a struggle which was as much cultural as political, and that indirectly fuelled

the nationalistic rhetoric that favoured the rise of Fascism after the First World War—

helped to obscure the secular and vital connection between exile, emigration and Italian

culture. After the Second World War, the absence of a strong and widespread ‘Italophone

culture’ (a term originally employed to indicate Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland)

and the fortunate democratic status which ruled out the possibility of exile as a legal form

of punishment or the necessity to leave the country for political reasons, kept the topic

almost entirely out of the critical eye.

However, it has been precisely the fading of the socioeconomic conditions which had

prevented literature of emigration from being integrated within the illustrious stream of

the Italian literary tradition which has forced many critics to reconsider the limits and the

definition of subject. Italy’s spectacular economic growth and its consequent more central

role in European politics, the ever-increasing percentage of well-educated Italians who in

recent years have emigrated to take part in the growing international job market, the

gradual transformation of Italy from a country of emigration into a country of

immigration, have all impacted on attentive scholarship. These changes have created a

new awareness of the growing multicultural nature of Italian literary culture leading to

the questioning of other traditional and monocultural classifications, once accepted

without reservations. Some of these debates have taken up the theoretical opportunity to

examine Italian literature not only for its national but also for its ‘transnational’

characteristics and this has highlighted the need for more inclusive terms for

contemporary Italian literary production such as, for instance, the substitution of the

traditional definitions of ‘Italian literature’ and ‘Italian authors’ with more flexible terms

like ‘literature written in Italian’ and ‘authors who write in Italian’. A conspicuous

number of African migrants who reside in Italy have in fact begun writing in Italian,

entering the official literary scene as ‘Italian writers’. In view of this literary output, some

scholars have suggested a broadening of the concept of literature of emigration in order to

indicate a field which contains both the works of immigrants who write in the new

adopted language or of an emigrant who preserves his/her own written language,

regardless of the topics of their works. This new definition would allow the works of the

growing number of Italian authors who live and operate abroad, as well as the works of

educated foreigners who have chosen to write in Italian—not necessarily the typical

emigrant according to the old socioeconomic classification—to be considered in a new

light. Such an attitude would make possible richer but more specific interpretations of

authors such as Fleur Jaeggy, Giorgio Pressburger, Edith Bruck, Fulvio Tomizza and

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Enzo Bettiza, whose works reflect an artistic and intellectual pattern often mirrored in

their original and multifaceted cultures. Even Italian authors who belong to the

cosmopolitan colony of writers who live and work abroad—in the United States, for

instance, one could name Ferrucci, Valesio, Rimanelli, Fontanella, Pasinetti—can

ultimately benefit from a theoretical approach which considers the imagery of their works

in a transnational light, deeply implanted in both the native culture and that of the host

country.

See also: Italian and emigration; Italian outside Italy

Further reading

Biasin, G.P. (1995) ‘Le periferie della letteratura’ (The Margins of Literature), Intersezioni 3:439–

49.

Gnisci, A. (1992–3) ‘Verso un nuovo concetto di letteratura nazionale-mondiale’ (Towards a New

Concept of National-World Literature), I Quaderni di Gaia. Almanacco di letteratura

comparata (Gaia’s Notebooks: Almanac of Comparative Literature) 5–7:135–9 (includes

indication of Italian works written by non-European immigrants).

Marchand, J.J. (ed.) (1991) La letteratura dell’emigrations. Gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel

mondo (The Literature of Emigration: Italian-Language Writers Throughout the World), Turin:

Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli (the most important volume on the subject to date, it includes an

authoritative and wide-ranging introductory essay, plus a complete bibliography covering

theoretical, historical and cultural issues, specific national identities and authors).

ANDREA CICCARELLI

Lizzani, Carlo

b. 30 April 1922, Rome

Writer, director, actor and scriptwriter

Lizzani began as a film critic but soon worked as an actor in Vergano’s Il sole sorge

ancora (The Sun Still Rises) (1946). After making a number of political documentaries,

including Nel mezzogiorno qualcosa è cambiato (Something Has Changed in the South)

(1947) and Modena città dell’Emilia rossa (Modena, Communist City) (1948), he

collaborated as scriptwriter with Giuseppe De Santis, Roberto Rossellini and Alberto

Lattuada. His first feature film, Achtung banditi! (Achtung Bandits!) (1951), depicts an

episode of the Resistance, drawing out its historical and social implications.

In his long career, Lizzani has made a wide variety of films, often exploring crimes

and social violence as in Svegliati e uccidi (Wake Up and Kill) (1966) but also producing

successful adaptations of literary works such as Cronache di poveri amanti (Chronicles

of Poor Lovers) (1954) and L’amante di Gramigna (Gramigna’s Lover) (1968). He is

also the author of a history of Italian cinema and teaches at the Centre Sperimentale di

Cinematografia. In 1995 he directed Celluloide, an interesting but ultimately

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disappointing attempt to portray the making of Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta (Rome,

Open City) (1945).

CRISTINA DEGLI-ESPOSTI REINERT

local administration

Italy is the land of the cento città, the ‘hundred cities’ that can trace their origins to the

self-governing communities of the Middle Ages. The fierce pride that many Italians have

for the town and province of their birth posed a challenge to the nationbuilders of a united

Italy. Aspirations for local and regional autonomy were encouraged by the collapse of

Habsburg, Bourbon and Church power in the nineteenth century, and, fearing the political

fragmentation that federalist and autonomist demands might bring, Cavour and Giolitti

were determined to impose the authority of the national state on the communes and

provinces that constituted Italy’s local administration. Although Article 5 of the 1948

constitution made provision for ‘local autonomy’, most of the local government

legislation from the Liberal and Fascist eras remained in place. Luigi Einaudi’s demand

to ‘get rid of the prefects’ was ignored by De Gasperi and his successors, and Italy

retained what was to be one of the most centralized systems of local government in

Western Europe.

Italy’s local government is characterized by its large number of territorial units, which

can vary greatly in terms of their size of population. There are essentially three tiers of

local government. The basic level of local administration is the comune or commune; the

equivalent of a British or American county is the provincia or province; and since 1970

all of Italy’s regions now have their own elected authority with limited legislative powers

(see regional government). There are over 8,000 communes, ranging from just a few

thousand inhabitants to several millions (in the case of Rome and Milan). Each commune

elects its own council, and since 1993 concurrent direct elections for the post of mayor

(sindaco) have been held. The sindaco is both the political figurehead of the municipality

and a government civil servant who is charged with a number of important public

functions (for example, organizing and scrutinizing all political elections). It is the task of

the mayor to appoint the council’s executive body (la giunta) which is composed of a

number of assessori (equivalent to commissioners in US local government or

departmental directors in the United Kingdom). Assessori may be drawn from elected

councillors or from outside the council chamber. In either case, the giunta is independent

of the elected council in so far as the operational and managerial work of the commune is

concerned. However, the council as a whole has the power to approve or reject the

giunta, its programme and its proposed budget.

Italy has some ninety-four provinces which, as with the communes, elect a council by

proportional representation. The councillors then elect a giunta headed by a president,

which operates in a similar way to that of the commune. Historically, provincial

government has been the least significant tier of local government in Italy, having few

direct responsibilities (apart from the upkeep of minor roads, some public buildings,

aspects of water supply, and limited community health and social services) and limited

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expenditure. With the advent of the ‘ordinary’ regions, the situation improved for

provincial administrations, which found themselves the beneficiaries of delegated

regional responsibilities such as transport, agriculture, commerce and tourism. The 1990

local government reform also gave the provinces greater administrative responsibilities in

environmental protection, inter-communal public transport, public health, and education

and training, and the provinces’ traditional intermediary function in the area of land use

and planning was also strengthened. However, the rationalization of local administration

in the form of self-governing metropolitan areas has remained a vague aspiration which

perhaps confirms the persistence of historic ties to territorial identities that no longer

possess an administrative rationale.

Further reading

Dente, B. (1991): ‘The Fragmented Reality of Local Government and Urban Affairs in

International Italian Local Government’, in J.J. Hesse (ed.), Perspective: Analyses of Twenty

Western Industrialised Countries, Nomos: Baden-Baden, 517–49 (explores the variety of local

government in Italy and the problems this entails).

Hine, D. (1993) Governing Italy: The Politics of Bargained Pluralism, Oxford: Oxford University

Press (ch. 9 ‘Regional and Local Government’, provides a concise account of substate

government since the institution of the ‘ordinary’ regions).

SIMON PARKER

Longhi, Roberto

b. 28 December 1890, Alba, Cuneo; d. 3 June 1970, Florence

Art historian

An eminent art historian who taught at the universities of Bologna and Florence from

1934 to 1961, Longhi exerted a strong influence not only on art critics and writers but

also on film-makers such as Pasolini. Longhi assiduously practised connoisseurship and

the careful study of the formal aspects of works of art, all expressed in an elegant literary

style. His early work was on Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca and Venetian painting,

but he also supported some contemporary art, recognizing Giorgio Morandi as a

pioneering modernist and one of Italy’s best living painters.

In 1950 Longhi founded the journal Paragone (Comparison) with his wife, Anna

Banti. He also fought a long and bitter feud with Lionello Venturi, another eminent art

historian, who kept Longhi out of a prized post at the University of Rome. Nevertheless,

Longhi did well out of art, particularly through his promotion of seventeenthcentury art to

dealers and collectors, and he endowed the Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte

‘Roberto Longhi’, an institute for the study of art history, which was established in

Florence in 1971.

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MAX STAPLES

Longo, Luigi

b. 15 March 1900, Fubine Monferrato, Alessandria; d. 16 October 1980, Rome

Politician

A founding member of the PCI as a leader of its youth movement, Luigi Longo was in

the front line during the Spanish Civil War, where he gained military and political

experience subsequently invaluable to him as party leader in northern Italy throughout the

Resistance. He became party secretary in 1964 upon the death of Togliatti, with whom

he had been a close collaborator in developing the ‘Italian road to socialism’. He

continued Togliatti’s revisionist process and rejection of anti-clericalism. Unlike most of

the PCI leadership, Longo took a positive view of the challenge to the social order

launched in 1968 by the student movement and sought to promote dialogue between the

party and the movement, although without particular success. Known for his

organizational skill rather than strategic or political innovation, he was effectively a

caretaker secretary, succeeded by Berlinguer in 1972.

CLAIRE KENNEDY

Longobardi, Nino

b. 1953, Naples

Painter and installation artist

Longobardi lives and works in Naples in the sphere of the transavantgarde. His first

solo exhibition was in 1978 at the Studio Giovanni Pisani in Naples, and he subsequently

participated in numerous group shows including ‘Italian Art Now: An American

Perspective’ at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1982, and the Avanguardia e

Transavanguardia’ (Avantgarde and Transavantgarde) exhibition at the Galleria Mura

Aureliane in Rome in 1983.

Although originally influenced by conceptual art and arte povera (poor art),

particularly through the work of Kounellis and Paolini, Longobardi distanced himself

from these influences in the 1980s, developing a stylistic eclecticism and a cultural

nomadism which then became his hallmark. The critic Achille Bonito Oliva identifies in

him a typically Mediterranean sensibility, oscillating between the representation of

movement (reminiscent of futurists from Balla to Schifano), and baroque still-life, where

the recurring images come from both the high culture and popular iconography of

Naples: fountains, coffee machines, skulls, boats, marine fossils and nude figures. An

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archaic element in his later paintings suggests a concern with humanity’s link to nature

and history.

OLIVIA DAWSON

Loren, Sophia

b. 20 September 1934, Rome

Film actress

While Sophia Loren has often been celebrated as the sexiest woman in the world, her sex

symbol status hardly accounts for the depth and intelligence of her acting skills, amply

recognized by a number of Academy and Golden Globe Awards. Once Sofia Scicoloni, a

sixteen-year-old extra playing a slave girl in Leroy’s Quo Vadis (1951), Sophia Loren

became famous overnight in 1953 thanks to her performance as the leading lady in a for

the history of cinema was Loren’s encounter in film adaptation of Verdi’s Aida. More

momentous 1954 with Vittorio De Sica, the director who was to give her some of her

greatest roles. In the same year, Sophia Loren met the other major influence in her life,

film producer Carlo Ponti, who became her husband.

From her collaboration with De Sica (five films), Sophia Loren won an Academy

Award in 1961 for her outstanding performance in La ciociara (Two Women). She was

often paired with Marcello Mastroianni, forming one of Italian comedy’s most

legendary couples. In 1998 she was awarded a Golden Lion at Venice for her career in

cinema.

Further reading

Harris, W.G. (1998) Sophia Loren: A Biography, Kernel Hempstead: Simon and Schuster.

DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL

lotteries

The traditional Italian propensity for lotteries was strengthened after the war by the

spread of greater affluence. During the period of reconstruction and the so-called

‘economic miracle’, along with the revival of traditional lotteries such as Lotto and

Enalotto (both of them drawn in twelve towns), Italy saw the birth of several new forms

of mass gambling. These were closely related to the main symbols of success, such as

football and television, and their immense popularity can be considered an aspect of

Italy’s modernization. Totocalcio, a skills game based on the results of Serie A matches

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(see football), was launched by a private company, SISAL, in 1946 and then nationalized

by the government in 1949, due to its unexpected success. Totocalcio rapidly became a

national mania and its schedina (coupon) systematically provided CONI, the national

Olympic committee (see Olympics), with remarkable revenue. In the 1960s and 1970s

another mass phenomenon—and a major revenue for the state as well—became the New

Year’s Eve lottery, aligned with one of the most popular television programmes,

Canzonissima (renamed Fantastico in the 1980s), a variety show mixed with a song

contest. After a period of relative decline, lotteries have achieved a revival in recent

years, when SISAL—which has continued to manage Totip and Tris (based on results of

horse racing)—took over the flagging Enalotto from the state in 1996 and turned it into a

national jackpot, Superenalotto, which again succeeded in seducing Italians with dreams

of multi-billion lira wins.

STEFANO BATTILOSSI

Loy, Nanni (Giovanni)

b. 23 October 1925, Cagliari; d. 1995, Rome

Actor and film director

Graduating from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Loy began his directorial

career as assistant to Luigi Zampa. One of his first feature films as sole director was

Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Brave Robbery by the Usual Suspects) (1959), an obvious

attempt to repeat Monicelli’s success with I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street)

(1958). Loy achieved national and international renown with Le quattro giornate di

Napoli (The Four Days of Naples) (1962), a film in the neorealist style recounting the

insurgence of the people of Naples in September 1943 against the occupying German

forces. For the following three years, however, Loy was engaged in a television project

called Specchio segreto (Secret Mirror), a candid camera type of programme which

attempted to secretly record the reactions of ordinary people as they were placed in

unusual situations, thus bringing out the ingrained habits, idiosyncrasies and taboos of

Italian society. Loy’s ironic commentary on Italian society continued in later films such

as Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (Waiting to be Sentenced) (1971) and Mi manda Picone

(Picone Has Sent Me) (1983).

CRISTINA DEGLI-ESPOSTI REINERT

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