Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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her Death) in 1976, Montaldo directed the mega-spectacle Marco Polo for Italian
television in 1982. Though continuing to make films for television, in the 1990s he has
worked extensively in opera.
GINO MOLITERNO
Montale, Eugenio
b. 12 October 1896, Genoa; d. 12 September 1981, Milan
Poet
Universally acknowledged as one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century,
Montale spent his childhood in the Ligurian landscape that would be one of the
inspirations of his first collection of poetry, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) (1925). In
1927 he moved to Florence, where he worked as an editor for the Bemporad publishing
company and became the director of Gabinetto Viesseux until 1938, when his refusal to
join the Fascist party led to the loss of that position. During this period he produced his
second major collection of poetry, Le occasioni (The Occasions) (1939). In 1948 he
moved to Milan where he spent the rest of his life, working for the daily newspaper
Corriere delta sera. A long silence followed his third major collection of poetry, La
bufera e altro (1955), which was finally broken with the publication of the new and
innovative collections of Satura (1971), Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Diary of 1971 and
1972) (1974) and Quaderno di quattro anni (Four-Year Notebook) (1977). In 1975 he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Montale’s poetic beginnings are marked by a fertile dialogue with both his
contemporaries and with the canonized Italian tradition. Thus, D’Annunzio’s poetics are
understood and absorbed but ultimately left behind in the search for a new Italian verse,
less eloquent and closer to the ideal of a colloquial poetic voice. In his search, Montale
looks to other Ligurian poets (Sbarbaro above all, but also Ceccardi), and to some of the
so-called crepuscular poets such as Guido Gozzano. However, he also moves outside the
borders of the Italian tradition to devote particular attention to the French and English
fathers of modern poetry, especially Baudelaire and Robert Browning. Nevertheless the
major reference point for a poetics of modernity remains the poetry of Leopardi, of which
Montale is at once a legitimate inheritor and a sophisticated contrapuntal voice.
A stoic attitude, reminiscent of Leopardi, appears in the first collection of Ossi di
seppia, represented in the dry and sharp natural landscape of this region, which in turn
assumes allegorical meanings which recall the classical topoi of the closed garden and
pleasant retreat. However, Montale emphasizes the negativity of existence by assuming
an immanent perspective which is balanced by an agnostic attitude toward the
metaphysical question of the beyond. The escape is possible, but not for the poetic self,
who instead wishes that possibility for the silent interlocutor. The Other—a constant,
although tacit, presence throughout Montale’s poetry—is the only one who may be able
to imitate the flight of birds and thus overcome the wall which encloses the sterile garden
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in which the self feels entrapped and separates it from the open space of which the sea is
the climactic representation.
In Le occasioni, however, the Other acquires more definite features and becomes the
feminine counterpart of the self, the ‘visiting angel’ who may bring salvation, thanks to
her descent to earth. The first section of this collection, ‘Mottetti’, recounts the amorous
relationship between the self and the angelic woman in a narrative where the love motif
develops in a movement reminiscent of the poetics of Dante’s dolce stil novo (sweet new
style). The woman appears in a plurality of forms and names but all recognizable to the
self who has invented them. The crucial episodes of the relationship are quotidian
experiences which acquire the status of ‘occasions’ according to the particular sensibility
of the self, who is able to perceive in the contingency of daily life the obscure reasons for
the apparition of the emblems which carry the mark of the ‘visiting angel’. Therefore,
objects which come into contact with the self are able to create a correlation between the
self and the Other, according to a redeeming interpretation of their presence; all of which
is closer to T.S. Eliot’s poetics of the objective correlative than to any poetics of
alienation.
La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Poems) is a collection whose very title
denounces the tragedy of the Second World War, a tragedy commemorated in many of
the poems and which in hindsight appears foreshadowed by certain of the female
characters of Le occasioni. The Dantean allusion, however, opens no space to
paradisiacal aspirations but rather tends to exalt the infernal certainty of the historical
moment. In some of the poems, the religious question, which had previously received
answers that recalled those of existentialism and negative theology, becomes more
pressing and the angel-like woman is more strikingly represented as either heavenly or
earthly, according to the mask that is evoked to name her.
This constant evolution of Montale’s poetry of experience takes an inward and self-
critical turn in the poems of Satura, many of which reflect on the themes of the previous
collections and sometimes provide illumination of the hermetic enigmas of the early
poems. It is also true, however, that this employment of irony, and indeed of satire as the
title of the fourth collection suggests, leaves only the possibility of an extreme solution:
the final acceptance of immanence, many times desperately expressed in eschatological
terms. The infernal world prevails, full of ghosts that return to populate in vain an
environment in which the self is left now alone to face the quotidian. The last two
collections, Diario del ’71 e del ’72 and Quaderno di quattro anni, reflect this effort to
annotate the detailed facts of personal existence as the only defence against the
overwhelming and invasive presence of the inexplicable, the numinous mystery to which
Montale, to the end, refuses to attribute a specific divine identity. The lifelong coherent
belief that, for humankind, it is impossible to open the gates that lead beyond,
accompanies Montale’s poetry throughout the rich and intense development of its
resigned gnoseological standpoint.
Further reading
Biasin, G.-P. (1989) Montale, Debussy and Modernism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cambon, G. (1982) Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s Presence, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
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Cary, J. (1969) Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, New York: New York
University Press.
Montale, E. (1984) Tutte le poesie, ed. G.Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1984 (a complete collection of
all Montale’s poetry).
——(1982) The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale, ed. and trans. J.Galassi,
New York: Ecco Press.
West, R. (1981) Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ERNESTO LIVORNI
Montanelli, Indro
22 April 1909, Fucecchio, Florence
Journalist and writer
Universally regarded—even by critics and adversaries—as the grand old man of Italian
postwar journalism, Montanelli worked as foreign correspondent and then senior
columnist and political commentator for the Corriere della sera from 1938 to 1972. After
a brief period with La Stampa in 1974, he founded a new daily, Il Giornale Nuovo (from
1983, Il Giornale), for which he was general editor until the paper was taken over by
Silvio Berlusconi’s group in the early 1990s. Personally conservative and regarded
politically as to the right of centre, Montanelli became the target of an armed attack by
the Red Brigades in 1977 but survived relatively unscathed. Recipient of many awards
for his journalism, Montanelli is also a prolific author who has published numerous books
on Italian history as well as several works for the theatre. In the 1990s, in addition to
writing columns in newspapers and weekly magazines, he also appeared regularly on
television as a respected political and social commentator.
GINO MOLITERNO
Montedison
A major industrial group, Montedison faithfully mirrored the changing balance of power
between state-owned and private capitalism in Italy from the 1960s onward, when the
chemical and petrochemical sectors emerged not only as a new frontier of industrial
growth, but also as a favourite battlefield of big business. Montedison’s history is a sort
of Thirty Years War, marked by struggles and ceasefires and a number of scandals which
revealed the sector as a privileged area of political corruption.
Montedison was established in 1966 through a merger of Montecatini, a chemical
group with heavy debts and an ossified management, and Edison, once the most powerful
private electric holdings before the 1962 nationalization. Through this merger
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Mediobanca, which stayed in the background, aimed to create a private giant to compete
with ENI and other major European groups. However unresolved disputes between the
two private partners cleared a path for ENI, then ruled by Eugenio Cefis, to successfully
accomplish a takeover and win a strong position as shareholder of the private group. This
sort of silent nationalization triggered off long-lasting underground battles, which
nevertheless did not prevent Montedison from becoming a giant conglomerate whose
chemical core business was paralleled by a number of unrelated companies in sectors
such as textiles, food, engineering, electronics and even chains of hotels and department
stores. Its political influence also grew stronger due to close relations between Cefis and
the ruling Christian Democratic party (DC), which eventually allowed Montedison to
gain control of the influential newspaper Il Corriere della sera.
However Montedison’s fortunes were to decline. During the 1970s a severe blow was
delivered by both a steep rise in oil prices and high inflation, so that profits turned into
losses and debts began to rise quickly. This was just the beginning of an endless ordeal.
In 1981, ENI abandoned Montedison by selling its shares to Gemina, a financial holding
ruled by Mediobanca and Fiat. Five years later, disputes between Mediobanca and Mario
Schimberni (Montedison’s managing director, who wanted to turn the concern into a
‘public company’) cleared the way for a new owner, the Ferruzzi group, led by Raul
Gardini, a dynamic but reckless entrepreneur whose dream was to reorganize Montedison
and propel it again to a high international standing. In order to reach this goal, he
proposed to amalgamate Montedison and ENI’s chemical activities into a new giant joint
venture, ENIMONT, but the prospective partners proved to be fierce enemies and even
the ruling political parties became deeply involved. After wearisome negotiations,
Montedison finally sold a large part of its chemical activities to ENI, while—as the
Tangentopoli trials were later to prove—the main beneficiaries of ENIMONT ended up
being the political parties themselves, sincè they were paid a gigantic bribe in order to
facilitate a final resolution. In the meantime, enormous amounts of money had been used
up and Ferruzzi was sinking into debt until it was rescued in 1993 by a banking pool led
by Mediobanca. After the failure of a further attempt to amalgamate the chemical
activities of Ferruzzi and Fiat under Gemina in 1995, Montedison was placed under the
control of Compart, a financial holding owned by a large group of banks, and its
chemical and electric power activities were reorganized and divided by creating two new
subholdings named, again, Montecatini and Edison: an ironic ending to a long and
contorted story.
Further reading
Marchi, A. and Marchionatti, R. (1991) Montedison 1966–1989, Milan: Angeli (a well-informed
business history of the chemical group’s strategy, structure and management).
STEFANO BATTILOSSI
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Monti, Adriana
b. 1951, Milan
Video, film and documentary maker
During the 1970s, Monti was deeply involved in the feminist movement and worked
mostly in television and experimental video art. In 1979 she began filming a group of
housewives involved in a mature age education scheme called the ‘150 hours’, a process
that lasted several years and which eventually became the 16mm documentary Scuola
senza fine (School Without End) (1983). In the early 1980s she also worked as assistant
director to Luigi Comencini and directed her first feature, Gentili signore (Kind Ladies),
in 1988. Less well known to the wider public than to other filmmakers, she has
nevertheless provided an important contribution to women’s cinema and to documentary
film-making in Italy.
See also: feminist cinema
Further reading
Bruno, G. and Nadotti, D. (eds) (1988) Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, London: Routledge
(see especially the extended discussion of the 150 hours project and Monti’s own introduction to
the script of Scuola senza fine, pp. 21–107).
GINO MOLITERNO
Morandi, Gianni
b. 11 December 1944, Monghidoro, Bologna
Pop singer and actor
Young, only slightly aggressive and with a cleancut look that could still endear him to
parents, Morandi was able from the beginning to mix the new sound of rock’n’roll with
the Italian melodic tradition. Beginning in 1961 with his first major hit, ‘Fatti mandare
dalla mamma a prendere il latte’ (Ask Your Mother to Let You Bring the Milk), Morandi
has sold over 25 million records in his long career, becoming one of the mainstays of
Italian popular light rock. As well as winning the highly-regarded Canzonissima three
times, he also starred in a number of movies inspired directly by his songs. His fortunes
declined somewhat in 1970s, but Morandi returned to studying cello and preparing his
comeback, which he did as a singer in the 1983 Sanremo Festival and as an actor in a
number of 1980s television films. In 1989 he toured internationally with Lucio Dalla and
at the same time increased his social commitment by founding a national football team of
singers which play twice a year for charity. In 1997, together with Bob Dylan, he sang in
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Bologna before the Pope, and in 1999 hosted his own television variety show on the
RAI’s first channel.
RICCARDO VENTRELLA
Morandi, Giorgio
b. 20 July 1890, Bologna; d. 18 June 1964, Bologna
Artist
Throughout his life Morandi rarely left his native city of Bologna, where he taught print-
making and etching at the Academy of Fine Arts. When he did, it was often only to the
small settlement of Grizzana in the nearby Apennines, which furnished the subjects for
his many landscapes. Between 1918–19, Morandi was influenced by Giorgio de
Chirico’s idea of metaphysical painting, but for the rest of his life he consciously chose
to limit his pictorial vocabulary to still lives and landscapes.
He has been classified, perhaps too neatly, as a simple painter of bottles, a provincial
artist isolated from the mainstream of twentieth-century painting seeking to revive Old
Master traditions. However, Morandi’s small paintings of collections of bottles, jugs and
containers, enveloped in neutral backgrounds and seemingly existing in a vacuum,
rigorously explore a poetics of form and structure, and his work has continued to elicit
widespread interest and discussion. The city of Bologna maintains a major museum
devoted entirely to Morandi’s work.
Further reading
Klepac, L. (1997) Giorgio Morandi: The Dimension of Inner Space, Sydney: Art Gallery of New
South Wales (a number of illuminating essays on Morandi with a good selection of colour
reproductions, a full list of exhibitions and an extensive English language bibliography).
LAURENCE SIMMONS
Morante, Elsa
b. 18 August 1912, Rome; d. 25 November 1985, Rome
Writer
Born in one of the poorer areas of Rome, Morante was completely self-taught but went
on to win two of the most prestigious Italian literary prizes, the Viareggio, with
Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars) (1948) and the Strega with L’isola di Arturo
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(Arturo’s Island) (1957). In her most popular novel, La Storia (History: A Novel) (1974),
as in earlier writings, Morante often portrays intense and traumatic relationships between
parents and children from the point of view of the child. La Storia epitomizes the author’s
attitude towards history. Although the novel has been criticized by some feminists for its
portrayal of women—in particular, the character of the mother has been singled out as
being ahistorical—it is a powerful indictment of history as a brutal process that crushes
the weakest members of society and an intense affirmation of Morante’s broadly
humanistic values. It was eventually made into a film for television in 1985, directed by
Luigi Comencini and starring Claudia Cardinale.
Further reading
Wood, S. (1995) ‘The Deforming Mirror: Histories and Fictions in Elsa Morante’, in S.Wood (ed.),
Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, London: Athlone Press.
PIERA CARROLI
Moravia, Alberto
b. 28 November 1907; d. 26 September 1990, Rome
Writer, critic, journalist and playwright
Alberto Moravia is the pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle. His psychologically realist
novels and short stories address contemporary social problems in a crisp narrative style
stripped of rhetoric. He confronts the themes of alienation and ennui, the degeneration of
the bourgeoisie and the inability of human beings to communicate authentically and
profoundly. Moravia’s early success and prolific output throughout his long career has
made him one of Italy’s foremost twentieth-century writers.
Born into an wealthy family (with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother), Moravia’s
adolescence was marred by chronic tuberculosis of the bone. However, the forced
inactivity of nine years spent in various clinics fostered Moravia’s story-telling skills and
exposed him to European literature as he undertook to read all the classic nineteenth-
century works. His first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference) (1929), proved
a cause célèbre for the twenty-two-year-old author. The novel, which traces the spiritual
collapse of a middle-class family, was greeted warmly by many literary critics, but
harshly criticized by the Fascist regime, which saw in it an anti-family, amoral
perspective.
Many of Moravia’s works are permeated by a strong element of sexuality, as he often
traces the erotic awakening of young men and women. This theme is evident in Agostino
(1945) and La disubbidienza (1948, translated under the title Luca), two novels which
follow sensitive young boys as they emerge from adolescence. Other works which
address sexuality include L’amore coniugale (Conjugal Love) (1949) and Il conformista
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(The Conformist) (1951) a novel later adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci to create what
undoubtedly remains his greatest film.
Moravia’s early but also most critically esteemed works are his short stories set in
Rome, minutely detailing the lives of the working classes. These are collected in
Racconti romani (Roman Tales) (1954) and Nuovi racconti romani (More Roman Tales)
(1959). His novel La ciociara (Two Women) (1957), a powerful and intimate portrayal of
a mother’s misfortunes, set against the horrors of the Second World War, was also highly
acclaimed and in 1960 was adapted by De Sica into an equally powerful film which
starred Sophia Loren in one of her best screen performances.
In later years, Moravia turned to more contemporary issues, writing essays on the
social and political movements of the 1960s. His fiction during this period included
stories about marital infidelity, lesbianism, nuclear proliferation and unconventional
sexual behaviour. Many of these short stories are collected in La Cosa (Exotic Tales)
(1983) and La villa del venerdì (The Friday Villa) (1990).
Moravia also edited and contributed to a number of newspapers and periodicals,
including the literary review Nuovi Argomenti, the weekly L’Espresso and the newspaper
Il Corriere della sera. He also published children’s stories, travel narratives describing
his trips to Africa, and several plays, including Il mondo è quello che è (The World Is
What It Is) (1967), Il dio Kurt (The God Kurt) (1968) and La vita è gioco (Life Is a
Game) (1969). He was married to the author Elsa Morante from 1941 until 1962 when
they separated, and he also had a long-term relationship with feminist writer Dacia
Maraini. In 1985 he married Italo-Hispanic writer Carmen Llera.
Further reading
Capozzi, R. and Mignone, M.B. (eds) (1993) Homage to Moravia, Stony Brook, NY: Forum
Italicum (essays written on the death of Moravia).
Kozma, J. (1993) The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia’s Fiction, Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Dept. of Romance Languages.
Moravia, A. (1966) Man as an End: Literary, Social and Political Essays, New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
Peterson, T.E. (1996) Alberto Moravia, New York: Twayne Publishers.
LAURA A.SALSINI
Moretti, Luigi Walter
b. 2 January 1907, Rome; d. 14 July 1973, Isola di Capraia
Architect, urban planner and editor
Moretti’s activities revolved around his native Rome, where he studied and then practised
extensively. His prewar work as a leading member of Giovinezza Italiana (Italian Youth)
includes the masterplan for the Foro Mussolini (Italico), the outstanding Fencing
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Academy and the Gymnasium for the Duce. His postwar projects include both luxurious
residences (for example, the so-called Sunflower house on Viale Buozzi in Rome and the
Watergate residential quarter in Washington) and low-cost housing such as Case-
Albergo, an extraordinarily vigorous office and apartment complex in Milan.
As director and editor of the review Spazio (1950–6), Moretti openly voiced
disagreement with functionalism and the international style. However, his emphasis on
the emotive potential of form and his preference for sophisticated abstraction and
refinement in composition and surface was not fully appreciated at the time. A
controversial, isolated and difficult figure, particularly as regards his ideology, Moretti
was excluded from serious discussion in postwar architectural culture for over forty
years.
GORDANA KOSTICH
Moretti, Nanni
b. 19 August 1953, Brunico, Bolzano
Film director, actor and producer
Though born in Brunico, Moretti was raised in the middle-class suburbs of Rome, whose
left-wing youth culture would give birth to his onscreen persona, Michele Apicella, and
furnish the subject matter for his eight feature-length films. Beginning with 10 sono un
autarchico (I am Self-Governing) (1976) and followed by the clamorously successful
Ecce bombo (1978), Moretti’s cinema would take the pulse of the post-1968 generation
as it confronted psychological and spiritual crises (La messa è finita (The Mass is Ended),
1985), political disillusionment (Palombella Rossa (Red Lob), 1989), alienation and
mortality (Caro diario (Dear Diary), 1993) and biological paternity and political rebirth
(Aprile, 1998). Autarchia, the subject of Moretti’s first feature, can be seen as the
trademark of an entire career dedicated to artistic independence and alternative film
practice. To help other like-minded directors get a start, Moretti established his own
production company, La Sacher Film, in 1987.
See also: New Italian Cinema
Further reading
De Bernardinis, F. (1993) Nanni Moretti, Pavia: Editrice il Castoro (overview of career and
analyses of individual films through Caro diario).
Marcus, M. (1996) ‘Caro diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti,’ Italica 73 (2):233–47
(an interpretation of the film in the context of his previous production).
MILLICENT MARCUS
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Moro, Aldo
b. 23 September 1916, Maglie, Lecce; d. 9 May 1978, Rome
Politician and academic
One of the central figures of Italian political Catholicism in the postwar period, Moro
held the post of Prime Minister five times between 1964–8 (the crucial years of the
centre-left) and again between 1974–6. Most importantly, he was also secretary of the
Christian Democrat Party (see DC) from 1959–64, a period in which he laid the
foundations of the ‘opening to the Left’ which eventually led to the inclusion of the PSI
in government. He would later be kidnapped, ‘tried’ and ‘executed’ by the Red Brigades,
paradoxically because he was once again opening to the Left and preparing the ground
for the PCI’s entry into government. Intellectually able, meticulous and careful, he was
nevertheless unable to take decisions quickly and was often justly caricatured as a
Hamlet. His political speeches were always long and contorted and sometimes barely
intelligible, although they generally succeeded in galvanizing support. During the
Tambroni crisis of 1960, for example, he suggested in a speech that the DC and PSI
should initiate a ‘parallel convergence’ -impossible in geometry, of course, but quite
practical in politics—and a course which he successfully followed as Prime Minister.
As a young man, Moro was active in Catholic university politics, being amongst the
founders of the DC itself and also close to the charismatic leader Giuseppe Dossetti.
After serving in various ministries, Moro became party secretary and mediated between
Fanfani and the powerful centrist faction, the Dorotei. At the DC’s Eighth Congress in
Naples in 1962, in a speech which lasted six hours, Moro formally launched the idea of a
centre-left government, reassuring the party and the Church of the policy’s ‘novelty in
continuity’. It was more this diplomatic ability to mediate and conciliate rather than any
solid majority support in the party that allowed him to sometimes lead and always
strongly influence the DC from then until his death.
In the mid-1970s after the Christian Democrats had suffered defeat in both the divorce
referendum and the 1975 regional elections, Moro again took over from Fanfani as party
secretary with the intention of initiating what he called ‘the third phase’ of Italian
political life, namely cooperation between Catholics and communists. Together with
Communist Party secretary Enrico Berlinguer, he became the architect of governments
of ‘national solidarity’ between 1976 and 1979, the closest the country came to the
realization of the so-called historic compromise between communist and Catholic
forces. The policy was highly criticized by both the Right of the DC and the USA on the
one side and by the fringes of the Left, who saw it as an adulteration of the PCI.
It was ostensibly because of this that Moro was kidnapped by the extreme left-wing
terrorist group, the Red Brigades, in March 1978. After being held hostage for fifty-five
days and interrogated and tried in a ‘people’s tribunal’, he was killed and his body left in
Via Caetani, symbolically halfway between the DC and PCI headquarters in Rome.
Puzzling aspects of the kidnapping and the staunch refusal of the DC to negotiate with
the Red Brigades for Moro’s release have continued to generate suspicion of at least
implicit conspiracy on the part of others. The various criminal trials and the extensive
parliamentary enquiry into the so-called ‘Moro affair’ have done little to allay public
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