Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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one of whom (Pino Pinelli) fell to his death while in police custody. The conservative

press and politicians united to condemn trade unions and the Left for their encouragement

of radical social conflict. Dogged judicial enquiries, however, revealed that the bomb was

in fact the work of an extreme right-wing group in the Veneto, headed by Franco Freda

and Giovanni Ventura, helped by members of the security services who intended the Left

to be blamed and discredited. The power of highlyplaced sympathizers to obstruct

investigations was sufficient to ensure that, despite thirty years of investigations by

different magistrates and eight trials in various cities, the ultimate responsibilities for the

planning and execution of the massacre still remain obscure. ‘Piazza Fontana’ thus

became shorthand for the unacknowledged links between power and violence in Italy’s

‘First’ Republic.

DAVID MOSS

Piccinato, Luigi

b. 30 October 1899, Legnago, Verona; d. 1984, Rome

Architect and town planner

A graduate of the Scuola Superiore di Architettura of Rome in 1923, Piccinato was to

become one of the most influential town planners and architects of Italy. He was among

those who, from the 1950s onwards, played a significant role in promoting wide

discussion of issues connected with urban planning, and later helped to found modern

Italian town planning as an autonomous discipline.

Piccinato’s interest in modern town planning pays homage to the notion of local

cultural setting, an idea he explored from 1925 onwards and which he presented in

projects for North Africa at the ‘Oltremare’ (Overseas) exhibition in Naples in 1940. He

developed the notion further in projects for cities in Argentina (1948–50), Turkey (1956–

9) and Israel (1960–5). He was also the founder of Metron, a magazine he co-edited with

architect Mario Ridolfi between the years 1948–58.

FASSIL ZEWDOU

Pietrangeli, Paolo

b. 29 April 1945, Rome

Singer, film director and television producer

A militant member of the Communist Party (see PCI), Pietrangeli was active in the 1968

student movement while also working as assistant director to Visconti, Fellini and

Zurlini. His first film, Bianco e new (White and Black), a long and detailed documentary

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on the collusion between neo-fascism and the DC in postwar Italy, was released in 1975,

and in 1977 he filmed an adaptation of Porci con le ali (Pigs with Wings), a notorious

novel set within the student movement, which had became something of a cause célèbre.

In the 1980s, without abandoning his political militancy, he became producer of the

Maurizio Costanzo show, while continuing to tour Italy singing protest songs. In the

national elections of 1996 he stood unsuccessfully for the House of Deputies (see

Parliament) as an independent candidate supported by Rifondazione Comunista. In

spite of his many other considerable achievements, he will probably be most remembered

as the author and singer of Contessa (Countess), a passionate song that became the

anthem of left-wing contestation in the 1970s.

GINO MOLITERNO

Piovene, Guido

b. 27 July 1907, Vicenza; d. 12 November 1974, London, England

Novelist and journalist

Piovene’s fiction is characterized by disparate themes which are linked together by an

overall preoccupation with human psychology and religious faith as in Lettere di una

Novizia (Confession of a Novice) (1941), Gazzetta Nera (Black Gazzette) (1943) and

Pietà contro pietà (Piety Versus Piety) (1946). The latter is a detailed and sometimes

painful documentation/confession of Piovene’s political adherence to fascism (see also

fascism and neo-fascism). While his plots encompass a variety of interests, Piovene’s

style is consistent, obviously influenced by his career as a journalist writing for Il

Corriere delta sera and La Stampa. This translates into a narrative which is

simultaneously necessary and informative, simple and direct. An illustrative example of

Piovene’s condensed and yet highly intriguing narrative is offered by the posthumous

collection of short stories Inverno d’un uomo felice (The Winter of a Happy Man) (1977).

Here, psychological investigation is supported and permeated by an eerie atmosphere

whose masterly construction brings to mind novelists such as Poe, Hawthorne and Henry

James.

PAOLO BARTOLONI

Pirella, Emanuele

b. 1940, Reggio Emilia

Comic strip writer, critic and novelist

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After graduating from university, Pirella moved to Milan where he became the artistic

director of an advertising agency which he had helped to set up. In 1972, he began to

collaborate with Tullio Pericoli with whom he wrote political comic strips published in

the satirical magazine Linus, and he also wrote literary reviews in comic strip form for

the Corriere delta sera. In 1976, after the Left’s failure to defeat the Christian Democrats

(see DC) in national elections, he declared that he would stop creating comic strips

because they obviously lacked persuasive power. Eventually, Pirella and Pericoli did

resume their collaboration and Pirella also published what he called he called ‘a

postGruppo 63’ novel about a young copywriter and ad-man. In the novel, by the use of

heterogeneous linguistic and literary modes, woven into a traditional novelistic structure,

Pirella effects a critique of the relation between contemporary literary discourse and the

reality it attempts to represent.

OLIVIA DAWSON

Pirelli

A leading industrial group of the rubber sector, Pirelli is the oldest of Italian big

businesses, having being founded in Milan by Giovanni Battista Pirelli in 1872. Tyres

and cables have remained its traditional core business, and since the 1920s Pirelli has

made a name for itself as a leader on international markets, becoming one of only a few

Italian multinationals, with a number of foreign branches all around Europe, Asia and

Latin American. The Pirelli family has always retained control of the group, although

only as minority shareholders and thanks to longstanding alliances with other families of

the Italian entrepreneurial elite such as the Agnelli, the Orlando and the strong support of

Mediobanca.

Alberto Pirelli, who ruled the company together with his brother Piero from the

interwar period to the 1960s, was an entrepreneur of high international standing. Having

played a major role in the economic diplomacy of the Fascist regime, he remained a most

influential figure after the war but preferred to relinquish public office in order to remain

in the background. His legacy then passed to his son Leopoldo in 1965, but thirty years

later the family’s entrepreneurial continuity was broken with the appointment of Marco

Tronchetti Provera as an external managing director. Nevertheless, unlike other industrial

dynasties such as the Agnelli, the Pirelli never aroused press curiosity They continued to

maintain a low profile in the public eye, adhering to a tradition of reserve and

understatement; even in private, their style of life always shunned magnificence and

pretence, leading some critics to describe it as calvinistic behaviour.

The mass motorization of 1960s led to a boom in the tyre industry and opened up the

most successful period of Pirelli’s business. However, keen competition in Italy and

abroad in new products—such as radial tyres, where Michelin, a French group, won the

leadership—slowed Pirelli’s growth. In 1971 a strategic alliance with the British group

Dunlop was set up in order to achieve a stronger position on world markets. The

persistence of a competitive and technological gap and difficulties in amalgamating

management made this marriage a total failure, and it was wound up ten years later. This

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was the first of many defeats. In 1988 Pirelli failed to take over Firestone, the third

largest rubber group in the world, in spite of massive financial support from major Swiss

banks. Later on, in 1990–3 the group attempted to wrest control of Continental, a leading

German group, but again was defeated after an exhausting financial struggle.

Pirelli’s setbacks are an emblem of the difficulties confronting Italian big business in

the international arena. Like Agnelli and other entrepreneurial families, the Pirelli are still

facing a difficult dilemma: how to relaunch the group’s fortune which inevitably means

entering a strategic partnership with some international concern in order to prepare for

global competition—while not, at the same time, relinquishing family control.

Further reading

Celant, G. (1989) Pistoletto, New York: Rizzoli (a comprehensive illustrated anthology with details

of exhibitions, performances and a full bibliography).

MAX STAPLES

pizza

The term ‘pizza’ is of uncertain etymology, but in its present form the pizza may be

traced back to the early nineteenth century when Neapolitan pizza came to be the most

celebrated in the Italian tradition. Its fame outside Italy spread increasingly after the

Second World War, making it a symbol of Italian cooking. Official figures suggest that,

in the mid-1990s, Italians were consuming one million pizzas a day throughout the

peninsula, roughly 400 million per year.

In its originally small, round version, pizza was sold on the streets of Naples.

Significantly, it was also called il cibo dei poveri (food of the poor), because its modest

price made it affordable by all. However its size and variety increased as time went by.

The pizza Margherita is said to have been created by an unknown patriotic pizzaiolo

(pizza maker) in honour of the then Queen of Italy and, topped with tomatoes, basil and

mozzarella, it reproduces the red, white and green colours of the Italian flag. Other

renowned Neapolitan varieties are the pizza marinara and pizza quattro stagioni. A food

of humble origin, the original pizza hardly resembles in texture and flavour of its richer,

but perhaps less tastier, counterparts which are now spread all over the world.

Further reading

Serao, M. (1973) Il ventre di Napoli (The Stomach of Naples), Naples: Delfino (see ch. 3: ‘Quello

che mangiano’ (What They Eat)).

MARIELLA TOTARO GENEVOIS

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PLI

Although liberals dominated the Italian state until the crisis of the First World War, they

failed to build a mass party, founding a formal party only in 1922. In the Republican

period, mass political mobilization was dominated by the socialists and communists on

the one hand and the DC on the other. The vote of the PLI (Partito Liberale Italiano, or

Italian Liberal Party) peaked at 7 per cent in 1963. It was saved from irrelevance only by

the DC’s coalition strategy, which generally preferred alliance with one or more of the

lay centre parties (the PLI, PRI and PSDI) than with either the Right (monarchists and

MSI) or the Left (PCI and, before 1963, PSI). A right-liberal party, unlike the left-liberal

PRI, the PLI adopted a ‘free market/ strong state’ orientation prior to the 1970s, and was

very close to the Confindustria, the major business employers’ association. The PLI was

swept away by the turmoil of the early 1990s.

Further reading

Donovan, M. (1996) ‘The Fate of the Secular Centre: The Liberals, Republicans and Social

Democrats’, in S.Gundle and S.Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the

Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London: Routledge (an overview of the nature and role of the PLI

and the two other ‘lay’ parties in the ‘First’ Republic).

MARK DONOVAN

POA

A nationwide, Church-run charitable organization which operated into the 1950s, the

POA (Pontifica Opera di Assistenza, Pontifical Works of Assistance) had been set up

during the Second World War in order to bring relief to populations in or close to the war

zones and in cities affected by the bombing. After the war, the organization turned its

attention increasingly to poor children and teenagers, providing welfare, education

(chiefly nursery schools), and sporting and recreational facilities, especially in the form

of summer holiday camps. In 1952, for example, the POA provided assistance in some

form or another to one and a half million children and young people. Indirectly a political

influence in favour of the DC among the poor, it was controlled from the Vatican by the

allpowerful Cardinals Canali and Galeazzi, both close to Pope Pius XII, and was largely

financed by contributions from American Catholics.

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Further reading

Falconi, F. (1956) La Chiesa e le organizzazioni cattoliche in Italia 1945–1955 (The Church and

Catholic Organizations in Italy 1945–1955) Turin: Einaudi.

JOHN POLLARD

poetry

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian culture was caught up in an intense

debate about the scarcity of realism, both in the literary and figurative arts. This critical

discussion went hand in hand with the development of neorealism, especially in the films

and novels of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Poetry, although almost by definition the

most conservative and least public of the artistic genres, was also engulfed by the

disputes which pressed for a more realistic style reflecting public concerns against the

private lyrical themes prevalent in Italian poetic tradition. In the fascist prewar period,

Italian poetry had been largely but not totally influenced by French symbolism’s search

for the purity of poetic form and its interest in the evocative power of the lyrical word.

The pursuit of music and sound over meaning in the development of twentieth-century

Italian poetry was also partly inspired by the immediate critical success of poets as

diverse as Ungaretti and Montale, whose early works immediately became icons for the

poetic generation of the 1930s.

The poems of Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi (The Happiness of the Shipwrecked)

(1919) and of Montale’s Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) (1925) were far from mere

attempts at pure form but Ungaretti’s intense concern for a lyrical word which could

express the feeling of life and Montale’s more realistic content but consigned to highly

musical texts, served to insert the symbolist experience into Italian culture. This trend

developed within what came to be known as ‘hermeticism’, or the ‘hermetic school’,

according to Francesco Flora’s famous but questionable definition coined in the thirties to

address certain obscure characteristics of the poetry of Ungaretti and Quasimodo. It

would be more accurate, however, to talk about a hermetic current than a school, because

if hermeticism did exist, it was in the works of a varied group of poets only generically

connected by their preference for a refined language and, in a few cases, obscure style.

While Ungaretti’s second book Sentimento del tempo (The Feeling of Time) (1933) and

some of Montale’s poems from Le Occasioni (Occasions) (1939) especially the section

called ‘I Mottetti’ (the Motets), show traces of what are commonly considered stylistic

traits of this period, the hermetic current was most actively represented by poets who

began publishing in the 1930s or early 1940s, such as Luzi, Betocchi and Bigongiari on

one side, and Quasimodo, Gatto and Sinisgalli on one other. The first group operated in

Florence, the second mostly in Milan. With the advent of neorealism, some of the

previously hermetic poets, such as the Nobel laureate Quasimodo, openly and

successfully converted to a realistic, sometimes almost documentary style. Others poets

confronted the cultural crisis caused by the war in a more critical way, filtering the

hermetic and symbolist inheritance toward new existential and anthropological stances.

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Luzi, in particular, was at the centre of the debate between the ex-hermetic current and

the realistic one championed by Pasolini and others in the early 1950s. Luzi, in the

journal La chimera (The Chimaera), and Pasolini, in the pages of Officina (see literary

journals), debated the possible future direction of contemporary Italian poetry. Both

considered the neorealistic inspiration largely exhausted by the early 1950s, but while

Pasolini proposed a new realism to fill the vacuum, as in his mature 1957 collection Le

ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci), Luzi, even if also aware that the hermetic

experience was over, advanced the possibility of building further on it. Moving from the

poetics of early and somewhat neglected twentieth-century authors such as Clemente

Rebora (1885–1957) and Dino Campana (1885–1932) and re-evaluating the Dantean

legacy of the Italian tradition, Luzi admitted that the war represented a watershed which

had changed the course of Italian literary culture, forcing it to confront reality; but he also

cautioned against confusing realism with a simple and facile change of style. Realism for

Luzi meant, above all, to embrace the Dantesque resolve to scrutinize the metamorphic

evolution of life without abandoning the hope and the will to follow its often painful but

inevitable transformations. This position is well embodied in Luzi’s major books after the

war, Onore del vero (To Honor the Truth) (1957) and Nel magma (In the Magma) (1963),

and was retained, with subtle but continuous changes in style, even in his last collections

published in the 1990s.

Most poets who belonged to the hermetic generation or who published their first books

immediately after the war were forced in some way to confront the crisis of hermeticism

and the new interest for neorealism, both debates carrying over well into the 1960s. Yet

beyond the critical exchanges and theoretical positions on poetic matters, it was the

lyrical production of major authors such as Luzi and Pasolini themselves which set the

tone for further developments. First of all, Ungaretti and Montale, preserving their

independent and leading roles within the poetic scene, kept publishing cornerstone books

for the development of Italian poetry, such as Ungaretti’s Il taccuino del vecchio (The

Old Man’s Notebook) (1960) and Montale’s La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other

Things) (1956) and Satura (1971), these two latter volumes being especially influential

on the poets of the 1960s and 1970s.

Other poets either confirmed their steady presence in the 1950s and early 1960s or

emerged in the wake of the critical debate which emancipated Italian poetry from the

postwar literary disputes. Among the first group were Caproni, Bertolucci and Penna,

who had published their first works in the 1930s. Penna’s poems, highly lyrical and

somewhat disconnected from the Italian cultural tissue of his times, occupied an isolated

position, in part because of their homosexual themes, which contributed to making

unique what were already fresh and original texts. Caproni and Bertolucci, two central

poetic figures of the second part of the century, demonstrated some affinities with the

former hermetic poets in their early books. However, they soon established independent

and original positions which were, in the long run, equally distant from hermeticism and

from neorealism, and they both found a balance between a sincere and deep analysis of

reality and their own lyrical interests. Caproni in particular worked at successfully

combining a common idiom with the high style of the Italian tradition, never betraying

his independence and his strenuous commitment to existentialist themes.

Other major poets like Sereni, Fortini and Zanzotto, who had published their first

books during the hermetic period, also followed fruitful, independent directions. Sereni,

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acclaimed as the major poet of what Anceschi defined as the linea lombarda (the

Lombard line), demonstrated a capacity for a genuine and objective exploration of daily

life, projected within a sincere and fresh lyrical world which absorbs and recreates in a

personal way the images perceived from the external world. More ironic, and above all

linguistically more experimental, was Zanzotto’s fundamental stylistic achievement,

especially in his later books, La beltà (Beauty) (1968), Galateo in bosco (Etiquette in the

Forest) (1978) and Fosfeni (1983). Zanzotto’s plurilinguism, including his interest in the

use of the Venetian dialect, embodies a fundamental step forward for both the

experimental and the realistic current of the second part of the century. Fortini’s works,

beginning with his Poesia ed errore (Poetry and Error) (1959), attest instead to the

validity of the realistic trend, especially if emancipated from the cultural polemics

connected with neorealism and re-elaborated into a vivid, personal style.

Some of the new poets of the 1960s surfaced as part of the Neoavanguardia, an

avantgarde cultural movement which intended to renew the entire way of conceiving

literature (see Gruppo 63). Poets such as Porta, Balestrini, Pagliarani, Giuliani and

Sanguineti opposed the neorealistic current and asserted a new interest in lyric language

and experimental forms, even in the shape of visual poetry. What realism entrusted to

content, these poets entrusted to the language itself, regarded as the only corrosive

element which could oppose and modify the lyric tradition. While the artistic value and

poetic weight of these individual authors differ substantially from one another, at least in

their early collections (for example, in the anthology I novissimi) (1961, edited by

Giuliani), these poets showed traces of their common attempt to distance themselves

from any traditional line, be it the hermetic or the realistic one.

On the other side of the poetic spectrum at this time, the traditional current of Italian

poetry continued, inspired mostly by the works of poets like Umberto Saba (with Montale

and Ungaretti, the other influential poet of the generation between the two wars), and

represented by authors from different backgrounds and with diverse poetic goals. Saba’s

preference for a traditional poetic language and his rejection of any form of

experimentation had isolated him during the avantgarde and the hermetic period. Except

on a few occasions (for example Montale’s early praise), Saba’s simple, lyrical and

potent language (or ‘honest’, according to his own definition of what poetry should be),

did not receive due attention until after his death in 1957, but many poets who began

publishing in the late 1950s and early 1960s reappropriated Saba’s style, in some cases

combining it with the more ironic but somewhat compatible Montalian streak.

Some of these poets, although they did not gather in groups or schools and did not

produce aesthetic manifestos like their counterparts in the neoavantgarde, were very

influential in the development of poetry in the 1960s, sometimes through theoretical

writings, but mainly for the validity of their lyrical production. Amongst them were

Giovanni Giudici and Giovanni Raboni. Giudici engaged in an original mediation

between existentialism and his own ironic and realistic expectations, as in La vita in versi

(Life in Verse) (1965) and Autobiologia (Autobiology) (1969), demonstrating a

predilection for the grotesque which exorcises the poet’s existential anxiety. Raboni’s

sober compositions are closer to the realistic stream that led back, from Saba to the

ethical teachings of Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1872) and Giuseppe Parini (1729 99), as

evident in early collections like L’insalubrità dell’aria (The Unhealthiness of the Air)

(1963) and corroborated by later publications such as Cadenza d’inganno

(Deceiving

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Cadence) (1975). The works of Maria Luisa Spaziani are characterized by a strong lyric

vein which makes her one of the most distinct voices of the second part of the century.

Spaziani’s poetic production stretches from the 1950s to the present, and her poems are

highly recognizable for their elegant language and defined form. Another poet who can

be considered at the crossroads between the traditional, the realistic and the experimental

lines, all three unified within a complex spiritual and poetic search, is Giovanni Testori.

The postwar period also witnessed a continuation and a development of poetry written

in dialect (see literature in dialect). The poetic use of the dialects often aims at very

different aesthetic goals: sometimes to establish a sociological connotation (mostly with a

realistic intent), and sometimes to express a specific culture which would lose its original

freshness if adapted into Italian, for instance, Pasolini’s highly lyrical La meglio gioventù

(The Best Youth) (1956), devoted to the Friuli region and people. On other occasions,

writers experiment with dialect to increase their stylistic and aesthetic repertoire (for

example, Zanzotto). There are also authors who choose their own dialect as their main, or

only, linguistic code, amongst them Biagio Marin (1891–1985) writing in the dialect of

his hometown of Grado (near Trieste), Franco Loi (b. 1930), writing realistic and

innovative poems in Milanese, often set against a dramatic city background, and Albino

Pierro (1916–96), whose mature collections are in the dialect of his hometown Tursi in

Basilicata. Each of these poets, in choosing his respective dialect, reaches back to an

abandoned and neglected cultural world, which is recovered and presented to the reader

in new and powerful poetic images.

The events of 1968 (see student movement) interrupted poetic debate until the late

1970s when, thanks to a series of editorial enterprises, old and new poets were brought

back to public attention. As in the early 1960s, so too in the 1970s the new poetic projects

were presented through a number of anthologies, most notably Il pubblico delta poesia

(The Public of Poetry) (1975), edited by Alfonso Berardinelli and Franco Cordelli, and

La parola innamorata (The Word in Love) (1978), edited by Enzo di Mauro and

Giancarlo Pontiggia, which presented a number of new poets, amongst them Milo De

Angelis, Maurizio Cucchi and Dario Bellezza. The entire decade was also represented in

a broad collection edited by Antonio Porta, Poesia degli anni settanta (Poetry of the

Seventies) (1979).

Besides new and strong poetic voices such as that of Valerio Magrelli, whose poetry

is suspended between a highly metaphoric structure and a more discursive style, the last

two decades have seen the confirmation of authors now regarded as classics of twentieth-

century Italian poetry, from Luzi to Zanzotto, from Bertolucci to Sanguineti. They have

also witnessed a spectacular increase in women poets, who, up to the late 1970s, were

represented almost only by Spaziani and Amelia Rosselli, whose stylistic and linguistic

solutions carved out an original space within the experimental current. Amongst the most

active and recognized women poets who began publishing in the late 1960s and in the

1970s are Biancamaria Frabotta, Patrizia Cavalli, Patrizia Valduga and Annalisa Cima.

While it was inevitable that at the beginning of their careers some of these poets

presented themselves as part of a cultural movement (see Frabotta’s anthology Donne in

poesia (Women in Poetry)), most of them are today considered amongst the best and

most original contemporary poetic voices. Their lyrical works span both the experimental

and the formalistic current, and while sometimes they seem comfortably inserted within

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