Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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The documentary and autobiographical writings by North African immigrants, in
collaboration with Italian journalists, testify to Italy’s development into a multiethnic
society. Works such as Io, venditore di elefanti (I, Vendor of Elephants) (1990) by Pap
Khouma and Oreste Pivetta, Chiamatemi Alì (Call me Alì) (1991) by Mohammed
Bouchane, Carla De Girolamo and Daniele Miccione, La memoria di A. (Memory of A.)
(1995) by Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti, to mention only a few among
the most successful, have had a strong impact upon the Italians’ perception of their own
identity in an era of economic and political globalization. By telling their stories of
discrimination, exploitation, violence and suffering, these narrators uncover the tensions
arising in the Italian society at the turn of the century, and a sense of general mistrust in
political institutions. At the same time, however, they confirm that a process of social and
cultural integration of diverse ethnic groups has been set in motion and that a new, global
society can perhaps be forged.
See also: immigrant literature
Further reading
Amoia, A. (1996) 20th Century Italian Women Writers: The Feminine Experience, Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Baranski, Z. and Pertile, L. (eds) (1993) The New Italian Novel, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Barilli, R. (1995) La neoavanguardia italiana (The Italian Neoavantgarde), Bologna: Il Mulino
(critical overview of the neoavantgarde movement, its protagonists and literary journals).
Brolli, D. (ed.) (1996) Gioventù cannibale (Young Cannibals), Turin: Einaudi (a collection of
Italian horror stories).
Cannon, J. (1989) Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia,
Malerba, London and Toronto: Associated University Press.
Ceserani, R. (1990) Il romanzo sui pattini (The Novel on Rollerskates), Ancona: Transeuropa
(essay collection on contemporary Italian writers).
Ferretti, G.C. (1974) Introduzione al neorealismo (Introduction to Neorealism), Rome: Editori
Riuniti.
Lucente, G. (1986) Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to
Calvino, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
FRANC ESC A PARMEGGIANI
Natalini, Adolfo
b. 10 May 1941, Pistoia
Architect
In 1966 Natalini graduated from the University of Florence, where he has subsequently
lived, worked and taught in the Faculty of Architecture. In the same year he began to be
involved as a theoretical spokesman for Superstudio, one of the most representative
Entries A–Z 561
groups of the so-called ‘radical architecture’. Since 1979 he has also worked
independently, designing among other things a series of urban projects for historical
cities and some office buildings (Zola Pedrosa in Bologna, Alzate Brianza in Como), all
of which have displayed both his interest in exploring the dialectical relationship between
architectural projects and their specific contexts, and his personal obsession with time,
memory and the traces through which these manifest themselves in places. Heideggerian
phenomenology, Leon Battista Al-berti, Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Stirling, Ungers and
Rossi are some of his admitted points of reference.
MAURO BARACCO
National Alliance
The term ‘National Alliance’ (AN) was hijacked by Gianfranco Fini, leader of the MSI,
in 1993. As the DC disintegrated in the wake of the Tangentopoli investigations, the
MSI, repackaged as the MSI-AN, showed its ability to replace the DC in southern Italy.
In 1994 Fini’s party formed part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government, and in 1995 the MSI
dissolved itself into the AN, leaving a small splinter group, the MS-FT (Social Movement
Tricolour Flame or, more simply, Flame) to contest the party’s fascist heritage (see also
fascism and neo-fascism).
From the time of De Gaulle’s triumph in France, Italy had a Gaullist political current,
but Italian presidentialism had always been illegitimate and condemned as crypto-fascist.
In the 1990s the idea was revived—not least by President Cossiga—and a neo-
conservative presidential project was mooted by political scientist Domenico Fisichella,
who coined the term ‘National Alliance’. The speed of the collapse of the governing
parties in 1993 left conservative voters open to mobilization on a party basis, and this was
ably exploited by Fini. Taking advantage of Berlusconi’s public declaration of support in
the middle of his campaign for the mayorship of Rome, Fini quickly appropriated the
idea of a ‘National Alliance’. The move was backed by Fisichella, but very few non-MSI
figures joined the new movement. Nevertheless, in the 1994 national elections the MSI-
AN all but tripled its vote (to 13.5 per cent) and, most significantly, it went on to
participate in government with five ministers and twelve undersecretaries. The taboo on
government participation was finally broken, even though the coalition did not last, being
brought down by the defection of Bossi’s Lega Nord.
The AN’s founding congress was held at Fiuggi in January 1995, by immediately
following by the MSI’s last congress which saw the old party dissolve itself into the AN:
into, that is, more or less itself. Virtually the entirety of the MSI elite and its membership
transferred into the new party, taking with them the organizational machinery and culture
of the MSI. In many respects, the organizational style of the new party, of which Fini
became president (rather than secretary), was less democratic and more ‘top down’ than
that of the MSI, which meant that, ironically, the new Gaullist conservative orientation of
the leader could be enforced against fascist regurgitations. Nevertheless the real
possibility of the return of the party’s fascist inheritance fuelled both domestic and
international alarm at its growing legitimacy. As if to neutralize such fears, the party
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styled itself as ‘post-fascist’ and its new statutes condemned racism and recognized the
historic value of anti-fascism. This was an advance on oral statements to that effect by the
former MSI leader Giorgio Almirante.
However, what was condemned was not fascism per se, but the statist regime-fascism
which the MSI’s radical founders had condemned from the outset. Thus while many,
even on the Left, accepted the AN’s supplanting of the MSI as signalling the
normalization of Italian politics, many suspended judgement until the party’s personnel
had changed and, more importantly, its culture had been fundamentally transformed.
Further reading
Adler, F.H. (1996) ‘Post-Fascism in Italy: From MSI to AN’, Italian Politics and Society 46:35–43.
Ruzza, C. and Schmidtke, O. (1996) ‘Toward a Modern Right: Alleanza Nazionale and the “Italian
revolution”’, in S. Gundle and S. Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Berlin Wall
to Berlusconi, London: Routledge.
Woods, D. (1998) ‘Looking for a Center of Gravity: The Reconstitution of the Italian Right’, in
F.L. Wilson (ed.), The European Center-Right at the End of the Twentieth Century, New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
MARK DONOVAN
national anthem
The words of the Italian national anthem, variously known as Fratelli d’Italia (Italian
Brothers) or Inno di Mameli (Mameli’s Hymn), were written by a young patriot,
Goffredo Mameli, in 1847 and put to music a few months later by Michele Novara. A
highly rhetorical call to arms set to a rather simple marching tune, it became widely used
during both the movement for unification (the Risorgimento) as well as after unification
in 1860–1, although the official national anthem remained the march of the ruling House
of Savoy. In 1946 the Council of Ministers suggested that Mameli’s Hymn be adopted
‘provisionally’ as the national anthem, but this temporary arrangement became
permanent. In spite of repeated calls which surface regularly in the media and elsewhere
to replace it with something less florid and more modern, Mameli’s Hymn remains the
Italian national anthem.
GINO MOLITERNO
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La Nazione
One of Italy’s leading regional dailies, La Nazione (The Nation) is also one of the oldest,
founded in Florence by Bettino Ricasoli in July 1959. Strongly independent, it voiced
open opposition to fascism in the early years of the Fascist regime before being forcibly
brought to heel. Throughout the postwar years it has maintained a conservative tone and
style and has concentrated its attention on issues affecting Tuscany and the centre-north
of the country, where most of its readership is located. At the end of the 1990s La
Nazione is published by the Poligrafici Editoriale Group, which is owned by the Monti
Rifesser family, and boasts an average daily circulation of 250,000.
GINO MOLITERNO
Nenni, Pietro
b. 9 February 1891, Faenza, Forlì; d. 1 January 1980, Rome
Politician
Pietro Nenni was the most prominent figure in the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) from the
1920s until the 1970s. In the postwar years, he maintained the party’s effective
subordination to the PCI until the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956. He then
launched a policy of cooperation with the DC, which led to the opening to the Left and
his party’s entry into government. These strategic choices provoked two splits: the PSDI
to the right in 1947 and the PSIUP to the left in 1964. As Deputy President of the
Council of Ministers in DC-PSI governments from 1963 to 1968, he bore some
responsibility for their failure to achieve reforms, seemingly more preoccupied with
simply staying in government. As foreign minister, he was an early proponent of
normalization of relations with China and a keen supporter of European integration and
East—West detente.
CLAIRE KENNEDY
neorealism
Neorealism is a label applied to a group of fiction films from the immediate postwar
period featuring socially progressive themes and unadorned documentary techniques.
Since neorealism never constituted a formal movement, with a manifesto and a list of
bylaws to which its adherents actively subscribed, its status as a critical category has
remained open to question. Nonetheless, French critic Georges Sadoul claims that
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neorealism meets all the requirements of a school: masters and disciples, a set of working
rules and clearly delineated geographical and temporal boundaries. Taking Sadoul’s
guidelines as a point of departure, we can assert that the practice of neorealism was
largely confined to Rome in the period extending from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s.
Its masters were Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica; its disciples
were Giuseppe De Santis, Aldo Vergano, Luigi Zampa, Renato included on-location
shooting, non-professional Castellani and Pietro Germi, while its rules actors, lengthy
takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, a predominance of medium and long shots,
respect for the continuity of time and space, use of contemporary, true-to-life subject
matter, rejection of conventional dramatic structure, open-ended plot, working-class
characters, dialogue in the vernacular, active viewer involvement and implied or overt
social criticism.
These attributes, however, are not meant to be understood in a totalizing or
prescriptive way, since the stylistic differences among neorealist directors are often
greater than their conformity to any agreed-upon set of rules. Rossellini, for example, has
more in common with Fascist documentarists than with fellow neorealist De Sica, whose
lyric humanism in turn is a far cry from Visconti’s paradoxical blend of Marxism and
aestheticism. Therefore, when analysing this period of Italian film history, it is perhaps
more accurate to speak of neorealisms, of the way in which directors with very diverse
backgrounds and ideological agendas participated in this common effort to film the story
of Italy in the wake of the Second World War. On the other hand, it would be wrong to
deny the strong sense of shared purpose which animated neorealist directors, for whom
film-making had an urgency that went beyond aesthetics or profit. ‘Sciuscià’, said
Vittorio De Sica of his first postwar film, ‘was a small stone, a very small stone,
contributed to the moral reconstruction of our country’ (Marcus, 1986: xiv).
In making such films as Paisà (Rossellini, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)
(De Sica, 1948) and La terra trema (Visconti, 1948), neorealists were committed not just
to the rebuilding of a film industry discredited by Fascism and dismantled by war, but to
the making of a new national identity based on the historical precedent of the Resistance.
Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma, città aperta (Open City), commonly considered the
inaugural film of neorealism, was a spontaneous attempt to chronicle the recent events of
the Nazi occupation, and took as its subject matter the clandestine activities of an anti-
Fascist priest and a group of Roman children. Neorealism may thus be seen as the
cinematic fulfilment of the Resistance aspiration not only to overthrow the Nazi—Fascist
regime, but to replace it with a new order based on the ideals of social justice and
economic fair play. Hence neorealist cinema’s emphasis on denunciation of social ills:
from the horrors of the juvenile incarceration system of Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946), to
the intractable problem of urban unemployment in Ladri di biciclette, to the workers’
exploitation by capitalist middlemen in La terra trema and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) (De
Santis, 1949), to the social and personal plight of the elderly in Umberto D (De Sica,
1952).
Neorealism, however, did not spring fully-formed in 1945 like Minerva from the head
of Jupiter. The term began its career as a literary designation, coined by Arnaldo Bocelli
to describe the style that would eventually embrace the writings of Alberto Moravia, Elio
Vittorini, Cesare Pavese and Vasco Pratolini amongst others. Umberto Barbaro was the
first to apply ‘neorealism’ to the sphere of the cinema in an article published in 1943, but
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his referent was the French realist production of the 1930s. Prewar Italian cinema,
dominated by historical super-spectacles, bourgeois melodramas and ‘white telephone’
films, featured very few realist works; notable among them were Nino Martoglio’s
Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark) (1914), Alessandro Blasetti s Sole (Sun) (1928) and
1860, as well as Mario Camerini’s Rotaie (Rails) (1929). The theory of neorealism, later
to be formulated by Cesare Zavattini in his famous essay ‘Alcune idee sul cinema’
(Some Ideas on Cinema) (1952) was already being adumbrated in a series of important
editorials by Giuseppe De Santis and Mario Alicata in the journal Cinema as early as
1941. In ‘Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano’ (Truth and Poetry: Verga and the
Italian Cinema), De Santis and Alicata issued a plea for a cinema of realism based on the
model of nineteenth-century writer Giovanni Verga, in which the camera might be
allowed to leave the narrow confines of the film studio and explore the neighbourhoods,
fields and factories that comprise the set locations of everyday life. Visconti, who was to
become the standard-bearer of the Cinema group, made Ossessione (Obsession) in 1942,
based on James Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s 1942 film is
commonly held to be the precursor of neorealism in its focus on working-class characters,
its technique of on-location shooting and its attention to a popular social context.
The reasons for neorealism’s decline in the early 1950s are many and complex. With
Umberto D, the story of a lonely pensioner who has no more reason to live, neorealism
reached terminal purity, fulfilling the movement’s impetus toward uncompromising
social commentary and technical austerity. In denouncing social injustice, neorealist
cinema constituted such a threat to Italian officialdom that de facto censorship was
imposed. Reviling De Sica’s ‘pessimo servizio alla sua Patria’ (wretched service to his
fatherland), Undersecretary of Entertainment Giulio Andreotti instituted policies which
would deny export to films that portrayed Italy in an unflattering light. Without access to
foreign markets, neorealist film-makers could never recover their production costs.
Nevertheless, despite the official demise of the movement in the early 1950s, neorealism
has continued to exert a power-ful influence on all postwar Italian film production, as
proven not only by the affectionate tributes found in Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto
amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much) (1974), Maurizio Nichetti’s Ladri di
saponette (Icicle Thief) (1988), and Carlo Lizzani’s Celluloide (1995), but more
importantly by contemporary film-makers’ insistence on keeping alive the impegno civile
(social commitment) of their neorealist heritage.
Further reading
Armes, R. (1971) Patterns of Realism, New York: Barnes (a good introduction to neorealism,
followed by production histories and analyses of individual films).
Bondanella, P. (1991) Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum (see
ch. 2, ‘The Masters of Neorealism: Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti’, and ch. 3, ‘Exploring the
Boundaries of Neorealism’).
Liehm, M. (1984) Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press (chaps 1–5 chronicle and analyse the neorealist trend
from 1942–53).
Marcus, M. (1986) Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
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Overbey, D. (ed.) (1979) Springtime in Italy: A Reader in Neorealism, Hamden, CN:
Archon (writings by directors and critics of the neorealist period).
MILLICENT MARCUS
Nervi, Pier Luigi
b. 21 June 1891, Sondrio; d. 1979, Rome
Architect and engineer
Nervi had an extraordinary talent for inventing building techniques and poetical
structures. He lectured on technology and techniques at Rome University and formed a
partnership with his sons Antonio, Mario and Vittorio in Studio Nervi in 1960. His
Communal Stadium in Florence (1932) was immediately published by the most
controversial magazines and served as a paradigm for the structural aesthetics of the
modern movement. Studying natural forms (shellfish, insects and flower calixes), he
translated patterns of infinite smallness into large structures. Aiming to make structures
lighter and simultaneously mastering the medium of reinforced concrete, he came to
excel in long-span buildings in the early 1960s, as in the Turin Exhibition Halls and the
Palazzetto dello Sport built for the Rome Olympics. He was often a contractor for his
own design projects, and also worked as a structural engineer for other architects such as
on the UNESCO Building in Paris in 1957 with Brauer and Zehrfuss, and the Pirelli
skyscraper in Milan in 1958 with Ponti. He has received numerous prizes, including
eight honorary doctorates.
GORDANA KOSTICH
New Italian Cinema
The term ‘New Italian Cinema’ came to be used in the 1990s in order to acknowledge
what was widely seen as a resurgence of creative energies in the Italian film industry,
after the period of relative stagnation which had followed the crisis of Italian cinema in
the mid-1970s. Although the expression had been used earlier in a tentative way to
indicate the work of a number of younger film-makers who had made their debut in the
early 1980s, it was the overwhelming success of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema
Paradiso (New Cinema Paradiso) in 1989, in winning both the Grand Jury Prize at
Cannes and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, that appeared to seal the return of
Italian cinema to the world stage. The similar success of Gabriele Salvatores’s
Mediterraneo three years later seemed to definitively confirm that Italy was producing a
new generation of world-class film-makers who were creating, in fact, a new Italian
cinema.
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Although the signs of this renaissance were undeniable, the precise features of the new
cinema proved more difficult to define. The many directors who came to be associated
under its umbrella (Nanni Moretti, Gianni Amelio, Maurizio Nicchetti, Mario Martone,
Daniele Luchetti, Francesca Archibugi, Silvio Soldini and others) were of different ages
and from diverse backgrounds and their films often appeared to have little in common
with each other. Nevertheless, even if manifesting no common ethical or political vision
nor any shared aesthetic project, these films all appeared to be responding in a variety of
ways to the more complicated and fragmented social reality around them where the old
ideologies had crumbled and all previous certainties had disappeared with them. The road
movies of Salvatores, in particular, expressed the profound disillusionment of members
of the post-1968 generation who read Corto Maltese and continued to dream of flight
from that intolerable society which they had long contested but into which they had
ultimately become integrated. Other films such as Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Mery
Forever) (1989), Aurelio Grimaldi’s La Ribelle (The Rebel) (1990) and Vito Capuano’s
remarkable first film, Vito e gli altri (Vito and the Others) (1990) attempted to report in
an honest and almost dispassionate way the institutionalized marginalization and the
social degradation of the big cities, especially as they affected the younger generation,
without, at the same time, being able to propose any solutions. Amelio’s Ladro di
bambini (The Stolen Children) (1992), one of the most accomplished achievements of
this new cinema, successfully renewed the aesthetic paradigm of neorealism whilst
recording the ultimate defeat of its aspirations to social progress through human
solidarity. Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Lackey) (1991), on the other hand, was able to
brilliantly use caricature and comedy to present a clear picture of the corruption and
clientelism institutionalized in Italian politics which the Mani pulite investigations
would soon confirm in all their detail.
Although the New Italian Cinema had no particular centre, Nanni Moretti came to be
one of its major points of reference, not only because of his eccentric and always
independent film-making and his willingness to act in films by other young directors but
also because of his foresight in setting up Sacher, a production company which allowed
him to have complete control over his own films and which was able to finance quite a
number of the first films of other promising young film-makers.
Further reading
Gieri, M. (1995) Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press (see especially Chapter 6, ‘The New Italian Cinema: Restoration or
Subversion’, for an extended discussion of the major directors and their relation to earlier Italian
cinematic tradition).
Sesti, M. (1994) Nuovo Cinema Italiano: Gli autori, i film, le idee (New Italian Cinema: The
Directors, Films and Ideas), Rome-Naples: Theoria (an attempt to characterize the principal
aspects and tendencies of the new cinema; also includes biographies and interviews with many
of the major directors and scriptwriters).
GINO MOLITERNO
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newspapers
The characteristics of the Italian newspaper can be considered under three headings: (1)
types of paper according to geography and ownership; (2) readership profile, and (3)
journalistic tradition.
Newspapers can be divided into categories by area of distribution. There are the
national ones, such as Il Corriere della sera or Il Sole-2 4 Ore, that can be bought at
kiosks in any part of the peninsula and are available abroad. There are pluri-regional and
regional papers, such as Il Resto del Carlino or La Nazione, which are bought largely in
the sizeable cities where they are based and in the surrounding area (Bologna/ Reggio
Emilia for the former). Smaller cities tend to support their own dailies, and often these
have long histories, as with Il Piccolo of Trieste. However, even the national papers are
often associated with a particular region, as is the case with La Stampa and Il Corriere
della sera, and Italy does not have the equivalent of the New York Times or Le Monde.
The local pages are important in the national dailies, reflecting the way Italians identify
strongly with their city or locality. This gravitational pull, moreover, is not offset by a
metropolis comparable to New York or Paris. But while in northern and central Italy
there is a lively press, the South and islands are much more poorly served; Il Mattino of
Naples cannot compete with publications based in Milan or Rome.
The geographical distribution of newsprint is closely related to the economics and
politics of ownership. Interestingly, it is the papers which owe their existence to non-
commercial organizations, such as L’Unità, formerly the organ of the PCI, and
L’Osservatore Romano of the Vatican, that have been most ‘national’ in circulation. By
comparison, dailies founded by entrepreneurs have been more closely tied to their city of
origin. Until the 1970s, commentators referred to the distinction between the commercial
and the party papers as one of the defining features of the Italian press. However, little of
the party press now remains. Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) sustains Il Secolo
d’Italia and the PDS has continued faithfully to fund L’Unità, but continuing financial
losses seem to point inevitably towards either privatization or a complete sale of even this
venerable party organ. The local papers financed by the Church manage to survive
without facing the same market demands thanks to their alternative system of
distribution, but otherwise commercial ownership prevails.
The readership profile of newspapers in Italy testifies to regional imbalances. A survey
in the late 1980s found that the ratio was one paper per 6.6 inhabitants in the North, one
per 7.1 in the centre and one per 16 in the South. If Lombardy is taken in isolation, then
the statistics on readership compare well with those of other European countries. If,
however, the figures for Italy as a whole are used, then the position is nearer to that of
Greece at the bottom of the league table. Ever since the beginning of the century,
anxieties about nationhood have focused on the low consumption of newsprint. It is often
remarked that between 1915 and today the readership of the daily press has remained
fairly constant at around five million. Periodically, the press itself carries reports on what
is called a national scandal. In the past, explanations of this phenomenon centred on high
rates of illiteracy and semiliteracy, on the non-user-friendly language of articles, and on
the fact that the newspapers did not have to have readers because they could rely on state
aid in times of financial difficulty. More recently, attention has turned to the exclusion of
Entries A–Z 569
the female readers and to the displacement of the press as a source of information by
other media, notably television. Certainly the daily press in Italy has failed over the
decades to expand its social base and therefore to broaden the base of its advertising
revenue. No popular mass circulation papers equivalent to the Bild-Zeitung or the Sun
have emerged. Arguably, only the sporting press has occupied a sector of this market. As
a consequence, newspapers have by and large remained the preserve of the university-
educated middle classes.
Traditions of journalism in Italy are related to this readership. Unlike the situation in
English-speaking countries, there is no real tradition of popular newspaper journalism.
Nor is there the equivalent of the muckraker and chequebook journalist. On the contrary,
the journalist has a relatively high social status. In law and in the public eye, he or she is
a member of a profession. To become a journalist, one has to take a number of
examinations under the aegis of the Ordine dei Giornalisti, which is a corporate body that
regulates the profession. Membership brings a number of privileges, including publicly
subsidized travel. Obviously, most journalists work for a local paper rather than for a
prestigious national one, but it is significant nonetheless that the popular image of the
journalist in Italy is that of a famous columnist like Giorgio Bocca.
Paradoxically, journalists enjoy a measure of public respect but themselves often have
a low opinion of journalism as practised in Italy. In particular, it is argued that the press is
not properly independent due to a number of factors: dependence on owners who use it to
pursue their own political agendas; tendency to conflate opinion and information;
vulnerability to business interests, especially in financial reporting; the demise of the
tradition of investigative journalism; and readiness to give priority to entertainment
values under the influence of television. This situation is contrasted with American
journalism, which is said to truly represent freedom of opinion. This perspective,
however, leads the debate into largely spurious comparisons, as the shortcomings
mentioned above are by no means exclusive to Italy. Many Italian journalists can also be
rightly proud of their record in exposing the Piazza Fontana bombing cover-ups and
maintaining democratic debate despite pressure to follow an official line.
Further reading
Castronovo, V. and Tranfaglia, N. (eds) (1994) La stampa italiana nell’età delta to, 1975–94 (The
Italian Press in the Era of Television, 1975–94), Bari: Laterza (a comprehensive and wide-
ranging volume with analyses of different aspects of Italian publishing by a number of specialist
authors).
Lumley, R. (1996) Italian Journalism: A Critical Anthology, Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Parnell, A. (1991) ‘The Press in Postwar Italy’, in A.M. Brasloff and W. Brassloff (eds), European
Insights, New York: Elsevier Science Publishers (a brief but informative survey of the Italian
press up to the early 1990s).
ROBERT LUMLEY
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