Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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Majorino, Giancarlo

b. 7 April 1928, Milan

Poet and writer

A high school teacher by profession, Majorino was also the founder of the journal Il

Corpo (The Body) as well as a contributor to magazines such as Quaderni piacentini and

il verri. His first book of poetry, La capitale, del Nord (The Capital of the North) (1958)

showed a propensity for the linguistic experimentation that would continue throughout

his work. Yet, following in the tradition of Lombard poetry, his own presence in his work

remains thematically secondary to the external world’s social and moral concerns. The

collections that followed, Lotte secondarie (Secondary Struggles) (1967) and Sirena

(Siren) (1976), reveal in their titles the poet’s progressive disillusionment with a world in

which a sense of civic duty and the desire for social change have been lost. In his more

cryptic recent work, Majorino, having assessed the impossibility of effecting change

through poetry, shifts his attention to his own impending death, as the title of his last two

collections, Ogni terzo pensiero (Every Third Thought) (1990) and Tetrallegro

(Darkandhappy) (1995) attest. Majorino has also edited an anthology of twentieth-

century poetry titled Poesia e realtà 1945–1975 (Poetry and Reality, 1945–1975) (1977).

VALERIO FERME

Malaparte, Curzio

b. 9 June 1898, Prato; d. 19 July 1957, Rome

Novelist, poet, playwright, polemicist, journalist film-maker

During the Fascist era, Malaparte (real name Kurt Erich Suckert) wrote for a number of

newspapers, and was chief editor of La Stampa from 1929 to 1931. Multi-talented but

mercurial—and always strongly polemical—he published several profascist works, and in

1926 joined the ultranationalist strapaese movement in advocating fascism’s return to

squadrismo (street gangs) and to Italy’s agrarian tradition (see also fascism and neo-

fascism). However, he also violently opposed the bureaucratization of fascism and so

was sent into internal confinement to Capri in 1933, where he remained for the rest of the

war. By 1943 he was writing for the Communist L’Unità.

After the war, Malaparte published three books set in occupied Naples, including the

international best-seller Kaputt and La pelle (The Skin), later adapted for film by Liliana

Cavani. In 1950 he wrote and directed one interesting, if highly rhetorical, film, Il Cristo

proibito (The Forbidden Christ). His late essays, written in a beautiful villa on an isolated

promontory of Capri, were collected in Maledetti toscani (Those Cursed Tuscans) and

continue to advocate Italy’s return to regional agrarian life.

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Further reading

Martellini, L. (1977) Invito alla lettura di C. Malaparte, Milan: Mursia (an introduction to the

author’s work with a complete bibliography).

VALERIO FERME

Il Male

Originating from an idea by cartoonist Pino Zac, Il Male (Evil) lasted barely three years

but passed into history as the most famous, or infamous, satirical magazine of the postwar

period. Beginning as a fortnightly tabloid in February 1978 under the editorship of

Tommaso Chiaretti, the magazine soon became a weekly, but at the same time the

editorial collective changed with alarming speed. The most frequent contributors to the

magazine were cartoonists Vincino (Vincenzo Gallo), Angese (Sergio Angeletti),

Vincenzo Sparagna, Andrea Pazienza, Giuliano Rossetti, Riccardo Mannelli and Roberto

Perini, and writers Angelo Pasquini (under the pseudonym ‘Marlowe’) and Jacopo Fo

(son of Dario Fo) who signed his pieces ‘Karen’.

The counterculture of post-1968 had spawned a large number of satirical magazines,

newspapers and broadsheets, but these had generally articulated clear, if extreme, left-

wing political views. The great novelty of Il Male was precisely the absence of any

definite or coherent political stance beyond the dadaist desire to lampoon everyone and

everything, including itself. The full frontal irreverence of the magazine’s cartoons and

commentary was directed at all persons and institutions which took themselves seriously

including, of course, the Vatican and the Italian Communist Party (see PCI) which at

this stage was attempting its ‘historic compromise’ with the Christian Democrat Party

(see DC). Emblematically, the cover of the first issue, designed by Zac, depicted a

bedpan full of excrement, ornamented with the crumbling sculptured heads of the leaders

of all the main political parties. A month later, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red

Brigades handed Il Male an opportunity for even greater irreverence. Whilst the serious

press treated the matter as a national crisis, Il Male published scurrilous photomontages

of Moro in the ‘people’s prison’ making sardonic comments such as ‘If they don’t get me

out soon, I’ll be washing dishes forever’.

The magazine became most notorious for its meticulous and convincing counterfeits

of the front pages of respected national newspapers. Just when the Communist Party was

supporting the Christian Democrats in a government of national solidarity, Il Male’s

special issue of the Communist Party organ, L’Unità, published photographs of a twenty-

eight hour rally attended by seven million people at which party secretary Enrico

Berlinguer had pronounced the historic words: ‘We’ve had it up to here with the

Christian Democrats!’ A similarly faked front page of the Corriere delta sera seriously

reported the landing in Mexico of a spaceship from Mars together with realistic

photographs and an explanatory article written by Umberto Eco. The most famous fake

of all, however, remained the special issue of Paese Sera which sported a photograph of

Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 492

the famous comic actor Ugo Tognazzi held by carabinieri (police) beneath the giant

headline ‘Ugo Tognazzi Arrested: He is the Leader of the Red Brigades’.

Members of the magazine also organized public happenings and dadaist street theatre.

The magazine’s irreverence and sexual explicitness appealed to the post-1968

counterculture, but it offended all the political parties and national institutions which

unfailingly responded with attempts at legal suppression, thus making the magazine even

more sought after. Nevertheless, internal frictions between the editorial collective, which

in any case had never been united, soon led to the magazine’s demise in 1981 and all

attempts at reviving it proved unsuccessful. Surviving members of the collective

attempted to relaunch the magazine in the run-up to the national elections of 1994 as a

gesture against the advance of Silvio Berlusconi but this also failed dismally, confirming

that the best days of Il Male had been consigned to history.

Further reading

Chiesa, A. (1990) La satira politica in Italia (Political Satire in Italy), Bari: Laterza (see ch. 11, ‘La

rivoluzione del Male’).

GINO MOLITERNO

Malerba, Luigi

b. 11 November 1927, Berceto, Parma

Novelist, screenwriter and journalist

Malerba (real name Luigi Bonardi) employs a surrealistic style in both his novels and

screenplays. His early work owes its thematic influence in part to the Gruppo 63, a

group of experimental artists and writers to which Malerba belonged. Perhaps his most

famous novel is Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet) (1986), a work which depicts a

political assassination and well illustrates Malerba’s typical sarcastic approach as he

examines the corrupting influence of hatred. Other notable works include the detective

fiction Salto mortale (Deadly Leap) (1968), in which all the suspects have the same

name, and Itaca per sempre (Ithaca Forever) (1997), which recounts the return of Ulysses

to Ithaca but from Penelope’s point of view. In 1990, Il fuoco greco (The Greek Fire)

won Malerba the prestigious Flaiano Prize for narrative, though his failure to win the

Strega Prize when he was shortlisted in 1996 led to the publication of a fiery pamphlet

Che vergogna scrivere (How Shameful to be a Writer). His film work includes co-writing

the screenplays for Lattuada’s Il cappotto (The Overcoat) (1952), La lupa (The She-

Wolf) (1952) and one episode of Amore in città (Love in the City) (1953).

LAURA A. SALSINI

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Manfredi, Nino

b. 22 March 1921, Castro dei Volsci, Frosinone

Actor

Eventually to become one of the best-known and best-loved faces of Italian postwar

cinema and a constant presence in the films of the so-called commedia all’italiana

(comedy Italian style), Nino Manfredi was formally trained at Rome’s Academy of

Theatre from which he graduated in 1947. His film career was launched by two

collaborations with Mauro Bolognini in 1956, and his talent was then impressively

confirmed in 1958 with the first of the six films he made with director Dino Risi,

Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon and You). He co-starred in a number of classic

comedies with Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman, and gave what is considered one his

very best performances in Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We Loved Each Other

So Much) (1974). Although he continued making films into the 1990s, he is perhaps best

remembered for his performance in what is regarded as the most brilliant and

representative film of the commedia all’italiana, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and

Chocolate), directed by Franco Brusati in 1973.

DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL.

Manganelli, Giorgio

b. 15 November 1922, Milan; d. 28 May 1990, Rome

Literary and art critic, short story writer, novelist and translator

A prolific and multi-talented personality, Manganelli’s activities and interests as a writer

spanned diverse fields. With a doctorate in political science, he nevertheless worked for a

time as tutor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Rome. He

participated in the Gruppo 63, contributed to various publications including Il Corriere

delta sera and Epoca, and acted as editorial consultant for several publishing houses. He

also translated works by O. Henry, T.S. Eliot and Edgar Allen Poe, published essays of

art criticism including Salons (1987), and wrote travel literature such as Cina e altri

orienti (China and Other Orients) (1974). Manganelli was also a theorist of the

postmodern movement and published works of literary criticism, including La letterature

come menzogna (Literature as Falsehood) (1967) and Laboriose nezie (Industrious

Nonsense) (1986). His fictional prose is distinguished by a complex, postmodern

syntactical style coupled with a science fiction or visionary content, as exemplified in

Hilarotragoedia (The Tragicomic Play) (1964), Amore (Love) (1981) and Tutti gli errori

(All the Errors) (1986).

VIRGINIA PICCHIETTI

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Mangano, Silvana

b. 21 April 1930, Rome; d. 16 December 1989, Madrid

Film actress

Silvana Mangano became a star in 1949, thanks to her performance in Giuseppe De

Santis’s neorealist masterpiece Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) though, paradoxically, contrary

to the film’s original purpose (which was to denounce the corrupting influence of

Hollywood glamour), Mangano thereby became a pin-up and a sex symbol.

However, thanks to Pier Paolo Pasolini with whom she made three films, the plastic

purity of Silvana Mangano’s features came to symbolize an aristocratic beauty

reminiscent of Renaissance representations of the Madonna. Wife/mother of Oedipus in

Pasolini’s Edipo re (Oedipus Rex) (1967), she applied her aesthetic sophistication to

portray an upper-class wife and mother in Pasolini’s next film, Teorema (1968). Not

surprisingly, in Il Decameron (The Decameron) (1971), she was cast as the Madonna in

Pasolini’s cinematic reconstruction of a fresco by Giotto. Thus from the pin-up to the

Madonna, Silvana Mangano has with equal talent explored the whole spectrum of the

female iconography.

DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL

Mani pulite

Mani pulite (Clean Hands) is the shorthand term for the extensive series of investigations

into major political, administrative and business corruption conducted by group of

magistrates in Milan from 1992 onwards. Their results ended the careers of many

members of the local and national political elites, made a public hero of a key member of

the magistrates’ team (see Antonio Di Pietro) and helped to reshape the Italian political

system. The investigations also exacerbated the running conflict between politicians and

magistrates over the extent and accountability of judicial power, provoked by the key role

played by magistrates in the struggle against political violence in the 1970s and against

the mafia in the 1980s.

The unfolding of Mani pulite

Mani pulite grew out of separate prosecutions of corruption in Milan’s local government

in the late 1980s, which suggested the existence of systematic bribery and extortion

linking political parties, the public administration and business. In early 1992 Mario

Chiesa, the manager of an old people’s home and leading figure in Milan’s Socialist

Party, was trapped into arrest as he was actually receiving a bribe. His subsequent

confessions confirmed that most political parties and senior politicians supported

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themselves largely from the bribes paid by firms to ensure the award of public contracts,

particularly in the public works and health sectors. Further arrests produced immediate

confessions from men who who were surprised to discover that neither their political

power nor their entrepreneurial prestige could preserve their immunity from

investigation. By the end of 1994, about one thousand politicians, public administrators

and businessmen had been investigated by the Mani pulite team, two hundred had been

sent for trial and five hundred were under arrest pending trial. More than 30 billion lire

was retrieved from the guilty, and fines amounting to 14 billion lire were imposed.

Indictments for bribery and extortion in relation to public contracts and tax audits,

violation of the law on party finance, and illegal accounting practices were brought

against leaders of all the governing parties, senior managers of Italy’s largest public and

private firms and senior ministerial bureaucrats. Few institutions, from the fashion

industry to the financial police themselves, escaped unscathed. Some especially

conspicuous figures (Gagliari from ENI, Gardini from Ferruzzi) committed suicide

rather than face the courts: others, such as the former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi,

chose exile. Pursuing the evidence uncovered by Mani pulite, magistrates in other cities

began similar investigations, revealing networks of systematic corruption across Italy.

Only the communist-administered Third Italy was relatively, if not completely, exempt

although members of the PCI and some party-managed cooperatives were implicated in

corruption elsewhere.

Obstacles to investigation

Investigations of corruption did not proceed without controversy or opposition,

particularly when in 1993 they reached the person, business associates and media empire

of the first elected Prime Minister of the post-Christian Democrat era, Silvio Berlusconi.

Every act and pronouncement of the Mani pulite team was attacked by Berlusconi’s

media, ministers and defence lawyers; intimidatory ministerial inspections were ordered

into its work and one magistrate from the team, later elected an MP for Berlusconi’s party

Forza Italia, resigned, charging her colleagues with political bias in their investigations.

Di Pietro was exposed to particular pressure, simultaneously wooed with the offer of a

ministerial job and threatened with the revelation of details of his allegedly discreditable

personal financial dealings. However, although in 1994 he resigned to contest,

successfully, a series of trumped-up charges against him, the investigations directed by

the remaining core prosecutors (Borrelli, Colombo, Davigo) did not slacken. The

governing parties also attempted to protect themselves, proposing in 1993 retroactively to

decriminalize violations of the laws on party funding and in 1994 to eliminate pre-trial

detention on corrup-tion charges. Both proposals provoked the immediate public

opposition of the Mani pulite magistrates, who received unprecedented displays of

popular support, and the proposals were therefore withdrawn. However, accusations that

unelected magistrates were using their investigative powers to bring down elected

politicians for political advantage rather than to simply uphold the law continued to be

voiced, particularly once Di Pietro himself had entered politics in 1996.

Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 496

The success of Mani pulite

Since the early 1970s, recurrent scandals had indicated the existence of significant

political corruption, yet no prosecution had reached party leaders or damaged their parties

electorally, let alone discredited an entire political elite. What factors, therefore, enabled

the prosecutors of Mani pulite to make a dramatically greater impact on corruption than

their predecessors had managed? In the first place, the new code of penal procedure

(1989) offered improved co-ordination and protection for judicial enquiries. Second, the

model of judicial teamwork which had been vital in prosecuting terrorism and mafia

was extended to the problem of corruption. Third, computer skills enabled the Mani

pulite team to track and assemble essential data from an otherwise unmanageably large

array of separate local and national contexts. Fourth, open popular support encouraged

prosecutors to pursue their enquiries in the face of the political elite’s resistance. In

Northern Italy, the successes of the Lega Nord after 1990 were already revealing the

collapse of the consensus hitherto enjoyed by the parties, notably the DC and PSI, from

which the first defendants came. Their detailed confessions, which provided the chance

for prosecutors to bring charges to court before the evidence could be destroyed or the

time limits for prosecution expired, signalled the disengagement of the political and

business elites themselves from the increasingly complex bargaining, bribery and

blackmail of systemic corruption.

See also: clientelism; legal system; political parties; Tangentopoli

Further reading

Chubb, J. and Vannicelli, M. (1988) ‘Italy: A Web of Scandals in a Flawed Democracy’, in A.

Markovits and M. Silverstein (eds), The Politics of Scandal, New York: Holmes & Meier

(scandals in Italian politics before Mani pulite).

Colombo, G., Davigo P. and Di Pietro, A. (1993) ‘Noi obbediamo alla legge non alla piazza’ (We

Obey the Law, Not the Street), MicroMega 5:1–20 (the Milanese pool’s description of its work).

Nelken, D. (1996) ‘A Legal Revolution? The Judges and Tangentopoli’, in S. Gundle and S. Parker

(eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London:

Routledge.

Patrono, M. (1996) ‘Fra toghe e politica’ (Between Prosecutors and Politics), in M. Fedele and R.

Leonardi (eds), La politica senza i partiti (Politics Without Parties), Rome: SEAM (a critical

account of the increasing politicization of Mani pulite).

Pederzoli, P. and Guarneri, C. (1997) ‘The Judicialization of Politics, Italian Style’, Journal of

Modern Italian Studies 2 (3):321–36.

Tate, N. and Vallinder, T. (eds) (1995) The Global Expansion of Judicial Power, New York: New

York University Press.

DAVID MOSS

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il manifesto

A highly-regarded communist daily founded in 1971, il manifesto offers an alternative

source of news and opinion to that of mainstream newspapers, presenting itself as

libertarian, antibureaucratic, critical, reflexive and independent. Its origin and evolution

constitute one of the most interesting facets of Italian political life in general and of the

publishing industry in particular.

In 1969, a group of PCI leaders published a monthly periodical, il manifesto, in which

they criticized their party for not taking a firm enough stance against the USSR’s violent

military repression of the Czechoslovak reform movements. Expelled from the party,

they continued to publish the periodical, which became a national daily paper as of 28

April 1971. At the outset, Il manifesto consisted of only four pages devoted exclusively to

politics with no general, local, book, society, crime or sports news and no advertising. Its

success (with sales increasing from 15,000 to 40,000 copies daily) contradicted general

opinion, which presumed the death of political ideologies and foresaw the disappearance

of a purely political press. The paper filled a space neglected by the historical left-wing

parties (the PCI and the PSI) and their newspapers L’Unità (Unity) and L’Avanti!

(Forward!), and provided a forum for expressing and discussing ideas concerning

political and social renewal related to worker and student agitation of 1968. Articles in il

manifesto were written in very elegant, often difficult language, emphasizing theoretical

considerations but always inviting the reader to assume an active role without feeling

manipulated because the topics dealt with were given ample background through short

informative articles. This appealed to a readership made up of political leaders and

politicized intellectuals more than to one of students and workers. It also attracted readers

of differing political opinion or those in search of one.

The paper always dedicated much space to international politics, and was especially

critical of the Soviet policy of isolation and military power. It headlined all instances of

opposition, such as the renewal and reform movements in Eastern Europe, and also

linked communism and freedom. The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Third World

struggles for independence were used as prime examples. The paper’s critique of

authoritarianism and universalism extended its concern to sexual politics, and feminism

became one of the newspaper’s basic interests both as a social movement and as a new

critique of knowledge.

The main thrust of the paper’s domestic politics was to propose an alternative to the

rule of the Christian Democrat Party (DC). It expressed this in daily attacks on

government decisions and in strong campaigns such as those against Fanfani (1971),

against restrictive divorce laws (1974) and against the PCI’s historic compromise.

Social issues that were addressed emphasized struggles against the organization of

capital: in factories and universities, in hospitals and prisons.

From the late 1970s onwards, confronted with social and political fragmentation and

the diminution of left-wing values, il manifesto changed its editorial policies, dedicating

more and more pages to cultural topics such as general news, philosophy, literary

criticism, popular culture and computer science. Unremunerated contributions were made

by well-known Italian and foreign intellectuals such as Remo Ceserani, Cesare Cases

Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 498

and Noam Chomsky. By 1985 it had become a major informative and political

newspaper, and in the 1990s its daily circulation reached 50,000.

It has maintained its critical stance by promoting political and cultural struggles. In the

1980s it gave strong support to the anti-nuclear movement and dealt daily with issues of

justice, the environment, peace, non-violence, the rights of new immigrants and the

problem of drug addiction. Never having been supported by either a political party or a

big lobby interest, the paper has often encountered considerable problems, but has

survived to date due to strong financial support from its readers.

Further reading

Bruno, V. (1985) ‘Gambia “il manifesto”’ (‘The Manifesto’ Changes), L’Editore 8 (81):26–7 (a

comment on the alterations of style, content and format the paper undertook in 1985).

FRANCO MANAI

Manzoni, Pietro

b. 13 July 1933, Soncino, Cremona; d. 6 February 1963, Milan

Artist

Manzoni began in traditional figurative painting, but in the mid-1950s he changed to oil

paintings featuring the impressions left by paint-dipped objects and became influenced by

the spazialismo of Lucio Fontana. This resulted in a series of whitish paintings whose

surface was built up from rough gesso and then scratched or marked. He continued to

produce these ‘achromes’ throughout his career. As Manzoni’s art moved rapidly towards

the conceptual, he drew lines of varying lengths and conserved them in canisters, signed

living bodies as artworks, sold boiled eggs signed with his thumbprint, or inflated

balloons containing Fiato d’artista (Artist’s Breath). His most notorious work, ninety tins

of Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), was sold by weight for the equivalent of the current

price of gold. A forerunner of the arte povera movement, Manzoni thus presented a

challenge to the artificial politeness and sterility of bourgeois culture at the very moment

when the economic miracle was generating a new affluence.