Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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on the other hand, is used extensively in the province of Turin, in the Valle d’Aosta—the

region holding special status since 1945—where both French and Italian constitute the

high register, and in the towns of Faeto and Celle di San Vito in the Apulian province of

Foggia.

German dialect varieties sporadically line the Alpine range from Piedmont to the

Veneto. Established in the South Tirol in the tenth century, the Alto Adige community

with its close to 300,000 speakers in the province of Bolzano represents the most

important Germanic region of Italy and enjoys significant protection in the public sector,

despite the limited competence of the population in standard German. Unlike the Tirolian

origin of these dialects, the speech of the four German enclaves in the Trentino and

Veneto regions is of Bavarian origin. While the mòcheni (from German macken ‘to make,

do’) community in the Fersina Valley today counts several thousand speakers, the

German dialects in the isolated town of Luserna, on the highlands of Asiago, and in

thirteen Veronese villages are either extinct or eroding rapidly. The German dialects are

better preserved in the tourist town of Sappada/Plodn (province of Belluno), and in the

Carnian linguistic islands of Sauris, Timau and Val Canale. Finally, Alemannic dialects

are spoken by the Waldensian colonies who settled in the Eastern Valle d’Aosta area

(Gressoney Saint Jean and Gressoney la Trinité) and in the provinces of Novara and

Vercelli in the Middle Ages.

Friulian is among the most homogenous of the linguistic minorities, with a common

variety, based on that of Udine, recognized by many of its 700,000 speakers. Following

the 1976 earthquake, Friulian consciousness was revitalized and the language was

recognized as autonomous vis-à-vis the Italian dialects, even though it is used with less

integrity by younger generations. Ladin, the central Rhaeto-Romance variety, is spoken

in the Dolomite valleys of Fassa, Gardena, Badia, Livinallongo, Boite and Piave by some

30,000 people.

In the provinces of Gorizia, Udine and Trieste, some 60,000 people speak Slovenian

as their mother tongue, and the Adriatic coast from the Marche to the Molise was until

the nineteenth century sporadically populated by Slovenian and Croatian minority groups

who fled the Turkish invasions of the fifteenth century. Today, only three Croatian Italian

groups survive in the province of Campobasso (Acquaviva Collecroce, San Felice Slavo

and Montemitro).

Known as arbarèsh, the Albanian tosco variety is still used in some forty-five towns

across south—central regions from Abruzzo to Sicily, together with the local dialects and

Italian. The slight difference between this variety and the standard shqip may explain

why some prestigious Albanian poets such as Giuseppe Variboba and Girolamo De Rada

originated in Calabria.

Neo-Greek communities are found in the Salentine peninsula around Lecce and in the

Calabrian towns of Condofuri, Bova and Roccaforte; however, language erosion in these

communities is now at an advanced stage.

According to linguistic typology, the Logudorese and Campidanese varieties in

Sardinia constitute an autonomous Romance language group. Given the lack of a

generally accepted Sardinian standard and the importance of Italian, diglossia tends to be

the norm here, despite many autonomist claims to the contrary. Sardinia also numbers

two small linguistic communities: the Catalan community of Alghero (some 20,000

people), which is the remainder of a colony established by the Aragonese in 1354, and

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the Ligurian group, which came from the Tunisian island of Tabarca in 1738 to settle in

Carloforte and Calasetta.

Finally, the Gipsy languages Sinti and Rom have been spoken in Italy by a

considerable multilingual nomad population represented in the north and south—central

regions since the fifteenth century; their different internal varieties can be ascribed to the

various dialect superstrata. Jewish Italian speech, flourishing in the peninsular diaspora

since the Roman Empire, has been extinct since the midtwentieth century. On the other

hand, residues of Gallo-Italian dialects are still found in Sicily (Piazza Armerina, Nicosia,

Sperlinga and so on) and Basilicata (Tito, Picerno, Trecchina, etc.), even though they

have been strongly dialectalized. Samples from the Gallo-Italian dialect of San Fratello

have found their way into a novel by Vincenzo Console, Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio

(The Smile of the Unknown Sailor) published by Einaudi in 1992.

See also: Italian language; language policy

Further reading

Francescato, G. (1993) ‘Sociolinguistica delle minoranze’, (The Sociolinguistics of Minorities) in

A.A.Sobrero (ed.), Infroduzione all’italiano contemporaneo. La variazione e gli usi

(Introduction to Contemporary Italian: Variation and Use), Bari: Laterza (an excellent survey

with particular attention to the sociolinguistic issues involving minority language speakers and

communities).

Telmon, T. (1992) Le minoranze linguistiche in Italia (Linguistic Minorities in Italy), Turin:

Edizioni dell’Orso.

——(1994) ‘Aspetti sociolinguistici delle eteroglossie in Italia’ (Sociolinguistic Aspects of Italy’s

Heteroglossia), in L.Serianni and P.Trifone (eds), Storia della lingua italiana (History of the

Italian Language), vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi.

HERMANN W.HALLER

minority religions

Largely due to the efforts of the CounterReformation papacy which, through the

Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books, worked tirelessly to extirpate heretical

sects from the peninsula, until the 1970s Italy remained an overwhelmingly Catholic

country. Only the Waldensians of Piedmont survived the persecutions of the Duke of

Savoy (immortalized in the words of the English poet, Milton: Avenge oh Lord thy

slaughtered saints whose bones lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’) so that today

the Waldensians and Methodists (united since 1989) count some thirty thousand

members. There are now also Baptist and Anglican churches in most of Italy’s major

cities, the latter having a largely expatriate following.

Other major non-Catholic groups are the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons and

the Pentecostalists, with roughly 170,000 adherents. These groups, and the Jehovah’s

Witnesses (reputedly 150,000 followers) were introduced into Italy (especially the South)

by return migrants from America in the interwar years. The Rome telephone directory

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attests to the enormous success of the Pentecostalists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the

last two decades.

The oldest Italian non-Catholic community is the Jewish. The Italian Jews were the

most integrated of all Europe’s communities and have played a prominent role in

public—and especially cultural—life since the Risorgimento. Originally granted a special

statute by Mussolini in 1931, they were later victimized by his Racial Laws introduced in

1938, and eight thousand of the forty thousand indigenous Italian Jews were deported to

their deaths in concentration camps by the Germans between 1943 and 1945. A further

five thousand emigrated to Israel after 1945 (see Jewish writers; Primo Levi).

However, Italy’s largest—and newest—religious minority is undoubtedly the Muslim

community, the result of massive migration in the 1980s and 1990s from North Africa,

especially from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and to a lesser extent from the

Indian subcontinent. The largest Muslim community is in Rome, where there is now a

major mosque and a thriving Islamic cultural centre. The leaders of Italy’s 300,000

Muslims have decided to exercise their power by asking for the right to choose that .008

of their income tax be dedicated specifically to the religious, cultural and charitable

activities of their own community.

As in other European countries, a number of Eastern religious cults such as the

Krishna, Saia Bai and the Buddhists have also established themselves in Italy since the

1970s. Increased enthusiasm for Buddhism, in particular, was generated by Bernardo

Bertolucci’s film The Little Buddha (1993).

A new Concordat between the Vatican and the Italian state, signed in 1984, has

assured greater freedom and security for all non-Catholic religious groups living in Italy.

The restrictions imposed on officially tolerated non-Catholic religious cults which were

introduced by Mussolini in the wake of the 1929 Concordat have finally been replaced, in

some cases by ‘mini-concordats’ between individual groups and the Italian state, which

guarantee their rights and property before the law. In addition, there is now something

approaching a spirit of ecumenism between Catholics and the mainstream Protestant

groups, as well as Jews and Muslims. Other Protestant sects remain firmly separatist.

However, it seems that generally the majority of Italians practise no religion at all, even if

for the most part they remain nominally ‘believers’ in some way of the Catholic religion,

rather than openly professing atheism or agnosticism.

See also: church, state and society; Second Vatican Council

Further reading

Riccardi, A. (1994) ‘La vita religiosa’ (The Religious life), in P.Ginsborg (ed), Stato dell’Italia

(State of Italy), Milan: Il Saggiatore (a wideranging, though not completely comprehensive

survey of religion in Italy).

JOHN POLLARD

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Missoni

The first collection by Ottavio and Rosita Missoni was produced for the Rinascente stores

in 1953, but it was the Missoni label, introduced in 1958, which became internationally

famous for imaginatively coloured knitwear. A workshop and factory were established in

1968 at Sumirago. The first boutiques were set up in Milan and New York in 1976, and

the Missoni Uomo and Missoni Sport labels came into existence in 1981. Missoni

achieved popular fame for its Spring 1967 collection in Florence, in which the models

wore no underwear beneath their very fine knit dresses. Missoni’s subsequent association

with Milan helped to establish that city as an international fashion centre, despite the

company’s self-conscious dismissal of the fashion system. While modern technology

remained central to the production of the Missoni knits, it was design, colour,

imagination and, ultimately, practicality that sold them.

Further reading

Bono, P. and Kemp, S. (eds) (1991) ‘Manifesto and Document of the MLD, 1978/1979’, Italian

Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

BERNADETTE LUCIANO

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Modigliani, Franco

b. 18 June 1918, Rome

Economist

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Modigliani was born in Italy

but is an American economist in both education and culture. Widely regarded as one of

the leading macroeconomists of our era, he received the Nobel Prize for Economics in

1985. Originally a Keynesian, in the 1960s–1970s he pursued a theoretical synthesis of

the Keynesian and the neoclassical tradition and constantly focused on the relation

between monetary phenomena and economic activity. Progressively drawn to monetarist

theory, he made seminal contributions to areas ranging from monetary policy to the

inflation—unemployment trade-off. Amongst specialists, he is best known for his so-

called ‘life cycle’ theory of saving and consumption and his study of the firm’s choice in

financing investments (the so-called ModiglianiMiller theorem). He has also often

contributed to debate on economic policy in Italy, supporting the incomes policy and

repeatedly warning of the dangers of inflation and high national debt.

STEFANO BATTILOSSI

Modo

Founded in 1977 in Milan by Alessandro Mendini after his experience with Casabella,

Modo was initially sponsored by product manufacturers such as Alessi, Cedit,

Gentrocappa, Elam, Flos, Poltranova, Stilwood and Zanotta but soon became a

mouthpiece for the entire New Design Movement. In 1982 its editorship passed from

Mendini to Franco Raggi, and subsequently to Andrea Branzi (from 1984) and then to

Cristina Morozzi (from 1987) who brought the magazine closer to the problems of design

production. Originally intended as an alternative to the canonical and official design

culture, Modo’s greatest achievement was to bring Italian design to international notice.

Its editorial policy was to widen the theoretical context of design, connecting it with

issues such as ethnoanthropology and ecology as much as with industrialized processes,

marketing and craftsmanship. It excelled during the debates on the new domesticity,

consumerism, the unavoidability of the ‘age of information’ and the question of

difference.

See also: architectural and design magazines

GORDANA KOSTICH

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Modugno, Domenico

b. 9 January 1928, Polignano a Mare, Bari; d. 6 August 1994, Lampedusa

Singer, film and stage actor

Born in small town on the Adriatic coast, ‘Mr Volare’, as Modugno came to be known

throughout the world, moved to Rome in 1950 and studied acting at the Centre

Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Although he would become best known as a singer,

cinema was his acknowledged first love and even before graduating with honours from

the Centro he had appeared in Eduardo De Filippo’s film version of Filumena Marturano

(1951). He subsequently acted in numerous films, as well as on the stage, and worked

with many of the major Italian directors including Blasetti, Lizzani, Zampa, De Sica,

Bolognini, Comencini and with Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan. In 1963

he directed his one and only film, Tutto è musica (All is Music).

In 1958 Modugno competed in the Sanremo Festival singing ‘Volare, nel blu dipinto

di blu’, a song and an event that would mark a milestone in the history of Italian popular

music and Italian popular culture generally. The song, inspired by a painting by Marc

Chagall and written in collaboration with Franco Migliacci, won first prize and achieved

immediate national and international renown. Selling an unprecedented 800,000 copies in

Italy, it also remained first in the American charts for thirteen weeks, earning Modugno

three Grammy Awards and his nickname ‘Mr Volare’. It would eventually sell more than

22 million copies worldwide, be sung by artists as different as Bobby Rydell, Ella

Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and David Bowie, and become the second best-selling song of

all time, behind Bing Crosby’s classic, ‘White Christmas’.

While continuing his film and stage career, Modugno went on to win the Sanremo

Festival three more times with songs that became classics of the Italian popular

repertoire—‘Piove’ (It’s Raining) (1959), Addio, Addio’ (Goodbye) (1962) and ‘Dio,

come ti amo’ (God, How I Love You) (1966) as well as also coming second three times

and selling more than 60 million records worldwide.

Tragically, in 1984, while still at the height of his acting and singing career, he

suffered a debilitating stroke and was forced to spend the last ten years of his life in

reduced activity. Nevertheless, during this period he was also elected as a deputy for the

Radical Party and recovered well enough to make a brief comeback in the early 1990s,

recording a number of songs with his son, Massimo.

See also: cantautori; pop and rock music

GINO MOLITERNO

Mollino, Carlo

b. 5 May 1905, Turin; d. 27 August 1973, Turin

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Architect, photographer, inventor and educator

Portrayed by Manfredo Tafuri as the enfant terrible of Italian architecture, Mollino was

an eclectic ‘inventor’ from Turin, a city associated with Mollino’s own curious pursuits

of aeronautics and the occult. Like his friend Giò Ponti, Mollino assumed various roles:

first and foremost, architect and photographer, but also inventor, designer, professor at

Turin’s Polytechnic, pilot of stunt planes and racing cars, and author of works on

architecture, photography, art, aesthetics and sport. In all these restless pursuits, the

frenetic Mollino tested the limits of human experience with utmost care and attention for

what he regarded as the most enduring and vital foundation of humanity: the intimate

relationship between individuals and their environments.

Further reading

Brino, G. (1985) Carlo Mollino: Architecture as Biography Milan: Idea Books.

KEITH EVANS GREEN

Momigliano, Arnaldo

b. 5 September 1908, Caraglio, Cuneo; d. 1 September 1987, London

Historian

Arnaldo Momigliano was one of his century’s most distinguished historians of Greece

and Rome. Born into a Piedmontese Jewish family of liberal traditions and intellectual

renown, he was appointed to the Chair of Roman History at the University of Turin in

1936. In 1938, anti-Jewish laws forced his dismissal and departure for England. After

Oxford and Bristol, his academic home became University College London (1951–75),

with lasting affiliations to the Warburg Institute, University of Chicago and the Scuola

Normale Superiore in Pisa. His historical and historiographic studies of antiquity, marked

by vast erudition and encyclopaedic range, defy simple summary. Two of his principal

themes fit, however, with features of his own life. Experience of fascism reinforced a

lifelong concern with liberty, ancient and modern. Likewise, his part-outsider status, as a

Jew in Italy and an Italian in England, illuminates his interest in cultural translation: how

European antiquity understood its neighbours and how later historians (notably Gibbon)

understood that same antiquity. His subject matter was ancient; his preoccupations

remain contemporary.

Further reading

Brown, P. (1988) ‘Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908–87’, Proceedings of the British Academy 74:

404–42.

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Momigliano, A. (1975) Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenisation, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

DAVID MOSS

monarchists

The June 1946 referendum, held simultaneously with the election of the Constituent

Assembly, established a Republic and thus gave birth to a monarchist movement.

Monarchism was strongest in the South, where support for the monarchy in the

referendum reached nearly two-thirds (65.8 per cent) despite being a minority (45.7 per

cent) in the country as a whole. Although the movement was divided into two parties for

most of the 1950s and the parliamentary vote peaked in 1953 at a mere 6.9 per cent, its

concentration in southern Italy gave it local strength and throughout the 1950s the

Catholic Right sought to pressure the DC into coalition with it (and the MSI). The

monarchists appeared to be gaining influence at the end of 1950s, but negative reaction to

the centre-right Tambroni government and the subsequent opening to the Left

marginalized them. Social change and the sheer passage of time rendered them

anachronistic and they disappeared, being absorbed into the MSI in the 1970s.

MARK DONOVAN

Mondadori

Located at Segrate, Milan, Mondadori is one of the biggest and most successful

publishers in Italy. The company began in 1923 when Arnoldo Mondadori founded the

Società Anonima Arnoldo Mondadori, later transformed simply into Mondadori.

Notwithstanding the dubious role that the company and its founder played during

Fascism (for example, publishing the works of Mussolini), the publishing house assumed

great importance in the postwar period. One significant achievement was acquiring the

Italian rights for Micky Mouse (see Topolino) but a bigger breakthrough came with the

inauguration of its paperback series Oscar Mondadori in 1965 which, from then on,

provided a wide range of modern Italian and foreign literary texts at an affordable price.

Another paperback series, the Giallo Mondadori, published weekly with a characteristic

yellow cover, became synonymous with crime and detective novels to the point where

giallo (yellow) became the general term for all crime novels (see detective fiction).

Mondadori played a crucial part in the formation of a critical public by participating in

the founding of the weekly Panorama and the daily La Repubblica. Although the

Mondadori family still retain a strong influence in the company, since 1991 it has been

part of the Berlusconi empire.

JAN KURZ

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Il Mondo

Founded in February 1949 by Mario Pannunzio and a group of liberal democrats, Il

Mondo (The World) achieved, in its short eighteen-year history, the status of a legend as

one of the best examples of intelligent, independent and progressive journalism. With

Pannunzio as chief editor and attracting the collaboration of some of the finest writers

and intellectuals of the time (including Brancati, Moravia and Croce but also publishing

articles by Thomas Mann and Truman Capote), Il Mondo became the committed standard

bearer of Italian civil rights throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, publishing penetrating

and critical analyses of the government and its clientelistic practices, the Catholic Church

and other aspects of Italian culture and society. It closed in 1966 after the death of

Pannunzio. Although relaunched by Arrigo Benedetti three years later, it was unable to

regain ground against competitors like L’Espresso and Panorama, and in 1976 it was

transformed into an economic journal of minor significance.

JAN KURZ

Monicelli, Mario

b. 15 May 1915, Viareggio

Film and theatre director, scriptwriter and critic

Although most commonly celebrated as the father of commedia all’italiana (comedy

Italian style), Monicelli has been a versatile and a prolific director-scriptwriter who has

worked successfully across a wide range of genres. While studying history and

philosophy at the University of Pisa, Monicelli began writing film criticism for a number

of minor journals. In 1934, together with his cousin Alberto Mondadori, he began making

amateur films in 16mm. In 1935, their I ragazzi delta via Paal (The Boys in Paal Street),

a silent short adapted from a novel by Ferenc Molnar and acted by family and friends,

won the first prize in its category at the Venice Festival and opened the doors of the film

industry to the young Monicelli. In the next fifteen years he worked as assistant to many

established directors, including Machaty, Genina, Freda, Mattoli, Camerini and

Bonnard, and wrote or collaborated on some fifty screenplays.

By the late 1940s, having already established a close screenwriting partnership with

Steno (Stefano Vanzina), Monicelli co-directed Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for a

House), the first of eight films he and Steno would write and direct together in the next

six years, four of them starring the inimitable comic, Totò. After several more light

comedies on his own, in 1958 Monicelli directed I soliti ignoti (literally ‘The Usual

Unknowns’, but generally known in English as ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street’), the film

that would make him famous and inaugurate the entire genre of the so-called comedy

Italian style. Recounting a fumbled bank robbery by a motley group of inept small-time

thieves, the film was something of a parody of the American gangster genre but the

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atmosphere reflected all the darker aspects of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ and the

characters, especially those played brilliantly by Vittorio Gassman and Marcello

Mastronianni, were characteristically Italian in their self-centred, if lovable, eternal

adolescence. The film became an overwhelming box office hit both in Italy and abroad,

and received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. This was followed by La

grande guerra (The Great War) (1959), a comic but fierce indictment of Italy’s

participation in the First World War, which sparked much controversy in official circles

but which was ultimately awarded the Golden Lion at Venice, shared with Rossellini’s Il

Generate Della Rovere (General Della Rovere).

Over the next four decades Monicelli continued to make a distinctive contribution to

Italian cinema with works that were often humorous but always sharply alert to the tragic

weaknesses and contradictions of the Italian character. As well as writing or co-writing

the screeplays of his own films, he also collaborated on scripts for other directors and in

the 1980s also ventured into theatre. With four Oscar nominations and a dozen ‘classic’

films to his credit, Monicelli was awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the

Venice Festival of 1991. Ever indefatigable, he thereafter went on to make the caustic

comedy Parenti serpenti (Relatives and Snakes) in 1992 and then in 1999 Panni sporchi

(Dirty Clothes), an outrageous farce that satirized the new entrepreneurial spirit in an

Italy already caught up in globalization.

Further reading

Della Casa, S. (1987) Mario Monicelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia (a comprehensive survey of

Monicelli’s career up to the mid-1980s, together with filmography and a selected bibliography).

GINO MOLITERNO

Montaldo, Giuliano

b. 22 February 1930, Genoa

Actor and film director

Originally a stage actor, Montaldo moved into cinema by playing a partizan in Lizzani’s

Achtung! Banditi! (1951). He then worked as assistant director to Lizzani, Pontecorvo

and Petri while also making a number of short documentaries. His first feature film, an

attempt to analyse fascism entitled Tiro al piccione (Pigeon Shoot) (1961), was not well

received, but Montaldo went on to distinguish himself with more impressive films such

as his critique of the economic miracle, Una bella grinta (Some Pluck) (1965) and his

recreation of the famous trial in America of the two Italian anarchists in Sacco and

Vanzetti (1970). His next attempt to denounce intolerance by recreating the life and

martyrdom of the Renaissance philosopher, Giordano Bruno (1973), was interesting but

ultimately failed to rise above the level of a mediocre biopic. After a competent

adaptation of Viganò’s famous Resistance novel, L’Agnese va a Morire (Agnes Goes to

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