Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Further reading
David, M. (1982) ‘La psychanalyse en Italie’ (Psychoanalysis in Italy), in R.Jaccard (ed.), Histoire
de la psychanalyse, Paris: Hachette.
Scheper-Hughes, N. and Lovell, A. (1986) ‘Breaking the Circuit of Social Control: Lessons in
Public Psychiatry from Italy and Franco Basaglia’, Social Science and Medicine 23 (2): 159–78.
Trasforini, M. (1988) ‘I silenzi di un mestiere. La professione di psicanalista in Italia’ (The Silences
of an Occupation: The Profession of Psychoanalyst in Italy), Polis 2 (2): 323–55 (the
development of psychoanalysis since 1970).
DAVID MOSS
publishers
Publishing in Italy is a huge industry, with total sales estimated at over 3.5 billion lire per
year. Although many of Italy’s most prestigious and successful publishing firms can
boast a long established tradition, the postwar period witnessed a continual mushrooming
of new publishers, sometimes as many as five per month, so that by 1998 the total
number of registered Italian publishing houses approached 5,000.
Publishing and Italian law
Publishing in postwar Italy was originally regulated by law 47 of 1948 which attempted
to give effect to Article 21 of the constitution, which paradoxically sanctioned freedom of
speech but at the same time prohibited the publication of anything that went against the
common sense of decency (contrario al buon costume). The 1948 law thus required all
publishers to be legally registered, for the names and addresses of editors to be lodged
and for all journalists to belong to the national association and to be registered on the
Journalists Roll (Albo dei giornalisti).
In response to both the multiplication of publishers and an increasing process of
concentration of the press, a new law was proposed in the mid-1970s, although it had a
troubled passage and was not fully approved until August 1981. Known as Legge
dell’editoria (Law on Publishing) it contained specifications regarding press company
structure and levels of acceptable concentration, and prescribed the publication of official
annual reports. A second section of the law also contained regulations for the subsidiaries
of publishing companies and, most importantly, established the position of a ‘guarantor’,
a magistrate who would effectively ‘guarantee’ the proper application and observance of
the law by presenting a report to Parliament every six months. Even after its long period
of gestation in the Parliament or, perhaps because of it—the law proved to still have a
number of fundamental deficiencies which continued to come to light in the following
years, resulting in its being amended several times in the 1980s. Although the law stated
that no publishing group could control more than 20 per cent of the national daily press
and 50 per cent of the press in well-defined regions, the ongoing media concentrations of
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the late 1980s continued to prove the law inadequate, and it was finally abandoned and
superseded in 1990 by the Mammì law. Although the Mammì law has also been
subsequently criticized as deficient, it does include antitrust clauses, and it also extends
the functions of the guarantor to the radio sector, permitting direct intervention as well as
the imposition of sanctions.
Major bodies
As well as the publishing companies themselves, there exist a number of important
national interest and lobby groups. The major and most influential groups are: the
Federazione italiana editori giornali (Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers), which
is the parent organization of all Newspaper publishers; the Associazione italiana editori
(Association of Italian Publishers), a voluntary publishers’ interest group; the Società
italiana degli autori ed editori (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers), the group
concerned with the protection of copyright; the Ordine dei giornalisti, Albo dei giornalisti
(Order and Roll of Journalists), the official national association of all Italian journalists,
and the Associazione Italiana Editori Piccoli (Italian Association of Small Publishers),
the most important independent association of small editors in Italy
Major events
The major events for the publishers are the various book fairs. For Italians, as for most
European publishers, the Frankfurt Book Fair is still the most important occasion to
present one’s products on an international stage. The first genuinely Italian book fair took
place in May 1988 at the Salone di Torino (Turin Fair). Organized by the city of Turin
and the region of Piedmont, it included theatrical performances, recitals, round table
discussions and a range of other cultural activity in various locations throughout the city.
The historical roots of the fair lay in a tradition of Piedmontese printers which went back
to the sixteenth century, and its revival proved to be so successful, both with the
publishers who participated and with the population at large, that the event has continued
to be held throughout the 1990s with the annual participation of over 900 publishers.
Another important event for publishers is the yearly award of the numerous literary
prizes. Companies participate either by direct sponsorship of prizes or, less visibly, by
their presence on the judging panels, a situation which often leads to bitter controversy.
The motivation for most publishers would appear to be less the economic benefits
deriving from higher sales and more the increase in reputation and the opportunity to spot
new talent, although these cannot always be held distinct.
Trends towards concentration
As in other European countries (Hachette in France, Bertelsmann in Germany) in Italy
the trend has been towards a concentration of increasing portions of the media market
under the control of fewer companies. Traditional and well-respected publishers like
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Mondadori, Einaudi, Rizzoli, Bompiani and Sonzogno have now been incorporated into
Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest, which controls, through a complicated system of
interlocking shareholdings, more than ten different publishing houses (Einaudi Editore,
Electa, A.Mondadori Editore, Società Europea di Edizioni, Editrice Penta, FIED,
R.Riccardi Editore, SAGE-Seregni Grafica, SEL-Editrice Lombarda, SGN-Grafica
Novarese, SIES, Sorit-Rotocalcografia Italiano). The RCS group is in second place. It
controls well-known publishers like Rizzoli Libri, Rizzoli Periodici (which includes
prestigious newspapers like Il Corriere della sera and Il Giornale), Fabbri, (including
Bompiani, ETAS Libri, Sonzogno), Fabbri-Rizzoli Edizione Periodiche and De Agostini-
Rizzoli Periodici. Editoriale L’Espresso is in third place, but with its thirteen regional
newspapers, its dominant position in the private radio system, and its control of the
second largest national daily, La Repubblica, as well as the influential weekly
L’Espresso, the company plays a major role in the Italian information system.
Major publishers
The landscape of Italian publishing is thus characterized by a wide variety in the size of
the different companies. The massive presence of huge and influential conglomerates,
like the three mentioned above, leaves little room for newcomers or for traditional
publishers to extend their reach beyond well-defined borders unless they become part of a
larger company. Consequently, traditional and more independent publishers like
G.Ricordi & C. (Milan, 1808), Sansoni Editrice (Florence, 1873), Casa Editrice Leo
S.Olschki (Florence, 1886) or Casa Editrice Felice Le Monnier (Florence, 1837) have
tended to focus more and more on special fields like Dante (LeMonnier), Italian
composers (G.Riccordi & C.), scholarly and university publishing (Olschki) or
dictionaries (Sansoni). Art prints and art in general are the province of several small but
well-known companies. One of the leading publishers for the arts is Umberto Allemandi
& C. (Turin, 1982) with books and journals in both Italian and English (for example, Il
giornale dell’arte (Art Newspaper)). Medium-sized publishers like Feltrinelli continue to
attempt to provide their readers not only with information, but also with fragments of a
collective identity constructed around left-wing traditions.
Further down the scale in terms of size are vestiges of the alternative press which
emerged in the wake of the student movement of 1968 and the counterinformation
movement of the 1970s. Although in reduced form, two important companies have
survived: il manifesto (founded in Rome, 1969) and Stampa alternativa (also founded in
Rome, 1975). Stampa alternativa became famous for its publication of a handbook on
how to cultivate and use soft drugs in an attempt to prevent young people from moving to
harder drugs (see drug culture). Its more recent publications on ecology, alternative
food, the Third World and the well known series Millelire (selections of classic or
contemporary authors for the price of 1,000 Lire)—often used instead of change in
bookshops—have had considerable success. The dire economic straits of il manifesto,
however, demonstrate the constant danger that such small publishers continue to face in
the hostile environment of media concentration.
See also: newspapers
Entries A–Z 683
Further reading
Castronovo, V. and Tranfaglia, N. (1994) La stampa italiana nell età delta tv, 1975–94 (Italian
Publishing in the Era of Television, 1975 1994), Bari: Laterza.
Giglioli, P.P. and Mazzoleni, G. (1991) ‘Concentration Trends in the Media’, in F.Sabetti and R.
Catanzaro (eds), Italian Politics: A Review, London: Pinter.
Parnell, A. (1991) ‘The Press in Postwar Italy’, in A.M.Brassloff and W.Brassloff (eds), European
Insights, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.
Peresson, G. (1990) Passaggio a nord ovest. I cambiamenti della produzione consumo e
distribuzione del libro negli anni ottanta (Northwest Passage: Changes in the Production,
Consumption and Distribution of the Book in the 1980s), Milan: Sogedit.
JAN KURZ
Pucci, Emilio (Marchese di Barsento)
b. 20 November 1914, Naples; d. 1992, Florence
Fashion designer
Pucci has often been described as ‘the first Italian innovator of the postwar years’. After
participating in the 1934 Winter Olympics, he attended college in the USA and realized
that there was an international market for playful, flattering and simple sportswear. He
became famous for his eclectic use of swirling surface pattern and fluid fabrics to create
extraordinary colour combinations such as fucshia, lime and turquoise. His tight ski
pants, loose shirts and dresses were worn by an international elite, from Jackie Kennedy
to Audrey Hepburn. For the rest, there was a wide array of accessories, including the
famous Pucci scarf. The Pucci style enjoyed a fashionable renaissance in 1991, when its
body-hugging lycra and overshirts became immensely popular with a new young
audience.
See also: fashion
NICOLA WHITE
Purini, Franco
b. 1941, Isola del Liri
Architect
In 1971, Purini graduated from the University of Rome, where he is currently living,
teaching in the Faculty of Architecture and working professionally with Laura Thermes.
He has defined himself as a ‘visionary rationalist’. Influenced by elements indirectly
derived from both the futurist and the metaphysical movements, Purini has pursued a line
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of theoretical research which, under the disguise of a kind of surrealistic ‘drawn
architecture’, has sometimes reached a dimension of Piranesian ‘excess’. His projects,
characterized by pure, ‘frozen’ geometrical forms and pervaded by a sense of memory
which evokes a dimension somewhere in between reality and the imaginary, exalt a
complexity entirely composed of simple elements. Among some of his built works are la
Casa del Farmacista (the Pharmacist’s house) and a system of five squares, both in
Gibellina, a Chapel in Poggioreale and apartment housing in Naples-Marianella.
MAURO BARACCO
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Q
Quaderni Piacentini
What would become the most influential and widely-read journal of the New or
extraparliamentary Left and later of the 1968 student movement, Quaderni Piacentini
(Piacenza Notebooks) began life modestly as a cyclostyled magazine in March 1962.
Edited for most of its twenty years by its founders, Piergiorgio Bellocchio and Grazia
Cherchi, at its height it achieved national sales of 12,000 (although its actual readership
was much wider). In its pages it hosted political and cultural writing by some of the best
left-wing intellectuals outside the Communist party (see PCI), providing high-level
sociological and political analyses, reporting on what was happening on the American
campuses and, during the ‘leaden years’ of the 1970s, encouraging wide-ranging debate
on terrorism and political violence. The journal closed in the early 1980s but, as a
testimony to its importance, was extensively reprinted in three anthologies, the first two
published by Gulliver and covering the periods 1962–8 and 1968–72; the third, a more
general anthology titled Prima e dopo il ‘68 (Before and After 1968), was published by
Minimux Fax editions in 1998.
GINO MOLITERNO
Quaderni Rossi
Founded at a time of renewed working-class militancy, Quaderni Rossi became a highly
influential publication for the nascent New Left in Italy. Its contributors, such as Raniero
Panzieri and Vittorio Foa, were mostly ex-members of the Socialist Party who identified
a radical separation between contemporary Marxist theory and practice and the realities
of a Fordist factory system. They proposed a re-reading of Marx and return to a
revolutionary politics based on democracy at the workplace. Capitalism, it was argued,
could no longer be equated with unbridled competition; a changed relationship between
capital and the state had created a planned ‘neo-capitalism’ that attempted to integrate
workers into the system by a policy of welfare and controlled wage increases. However,
differences over the role of trade unions and Panzieri’s premature death meant that the
experience ended in the factionalism that had long characterized the Italian Left.
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ROBERT LUMLEY
Quaroni, Ludovico
b. 28 March 1911, Rome; d. 22 July 1987
Architect, urban planner and educator
In the late 1930s, Quaroni worked on exhibitions, luxurious residential buildings and
designs for the Foro Mussolini. After spending five years in India as a prisoner of war,
his interests shifted towards low-cost housing projects such as his exemplary Tiburtino
quarter, designed in 1950, and the La Martella housing development at Matera from
1952. His churches in La Martella, S. Franco at Francavilla al Mare and the Holy Family
in Genoa are modest in scale but conceptually stunning. His winning collaborative
competition design for the pedestrian passage for the New Termini Railroad Station in
Rome is often considered a turning point for Italian postwar modernism. As one of the
major figures of Roman postwar realism, Quaroni contributed to the intellectual
integration of populist themes and the use of regional materials. In urban planning he
addressed the issues associated with the North—South dichotomy, especially after
joining the Continuità movement in 1956. His last project was a ‘basilical’ completion of
the Opera House in Rome from 1983, which he characterized as ‘post-antique’.
GORDANA KOSTICH
Quasimodo, Salvatore
b. 20 August 1901, Modica, Sicily; d. 14 June 1968, Naples
Poet, translator and critic
The 1959 Nobel poet laureate Salvatore Quasimodo has left a complex, powerfully
evocative poetic corpus that continues to elude any easy definition. Dense, fulminating
compositions such as the famous ‘Ed è subito sera’ (And Suddenly it’s Evening) alternate
with longer poems which, while continuing to weigh every syllable before the spiritually
charged surrounding white space of the page, exude a lyricism that merges with
emblematic natural images. The natural world is filtered through myth, Christian history,
traditional Italian poetic influences (Leopardi, Dante, Pascoli and d’Annunzio, among
others), and the memories of the poet, who sings an enigmatic, ‘submerged’ music from
his place in exile, far from his Edenic native Sicily. His early poetic voice, which has
been rightly described as hermetic in the fullest sense of the term, modulated through
collections more indebted to French symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud and so on) to
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express, after the Second World War, a view of poetry which he shares with others such
as T.S. Eliot, as a consolation for historical reality.
Born in Modica, Sicily, Quasimodo attended technical schools in Palermo and
Messina, where he founded the short-lived monthly Nuovo Giornale Letterario (New
Literary Journal), before transferring to the Polytechnic University of Rome in 1919 to
study engineering. Financial hardship forced him to take various jobs as draftsman, clerk
in a hardware store and employee at the department store La Rinascente, from which he
was fired for organizing the last Italian strike on the day before the adoption of Fascist
legislation banning labour protests. During these difficult years, Quasimodo nonetheless
managed to study Greek and Latin, and married his ‘Emilian lady’, Bice Donetti.
In 1926 Quasimodo was hired by the Ministry of Public Works and transferred to
Reggio Calabria. Three years later he followed his brother-in-law Elio Vittorini to
Florence, where he was introduced into the city’s literary milieu and began collaborating
on the journals Solaria and Letteratura. In 1930 he published his first volume of poetry,
Acque e terre (Waters and Lands), which excited a good deal of critical attention for its
nurtured ‘secret syllables’ that, in essentialized verse, expressed a yearning to return to
mythical origins.
The split of Quasimodo’s life between his government job and his poetry continued
when he was transferred by the Corps of Engineers to Imperia in 1931. He meanwhile
formed friendships with the poets Adriano Grande, Angelo Barile and Camillo Sbarbaro
in Genoa, and contributed to the journal Circoli (Circles). Oboe sommerso (Submerged
Oboe) was published in 1932 and won the Antico Fattore poetry prize. This collection
built on the previous one, stylistically in its continued use of elliptical syntax, allusion
and analogy, and thematically in its tortured, Christological/orphic/existential expression
of the word by syllables that ‘de-flesh’ the poet in search of Virginal roads’ that may lead
him back to his source.
After a short period in Sardinia, Quasimodo’s work in the Corps of Engineers brought
him to Milan and in 1935 his illegitimate daughter Orietta was born. The third collection
of poems, Erato e Apòllion, named after the muse of love poetry and the angel of
destruction in the Apocalypse, appeared in 1936. Two years later Quasimodo definitively
abandoned his government job, opting instead to work in publishing under the author and
film-maker Cesare Zavattini. The first important anthology of Quasimodo’s poems
under the title Poesie (Poems) was published in 1938 with an introduction by Oreste
Macrì, who emphasized Quasimodo’s ‘poetics of the word’. Quasimodo’s translation of
Lirici greci (Greek Lyric Poets), published in 1940, caused an immediate sensation
‘almost unparalleled in the history of translation’ (G. Finzi) as both a poetic success and
academic scandal, in part given its publication by the journal Corrente (Current), which
maintained a critical attitude toward the Fascist regime.
In 1941 Quasimodo was named, due to his ‘great renown’, Professor of Italian
Literature at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music in Milan, where he taught until
his retirement in 1968. While the poet did not take an active role in the partisan
Resistance during the final years of the War, he was nonetheless denounced in the state
media as an anti-fascist and suffered at least one ‘nocturnal incident’, as he himself
described it, with the blackshirt patrols. In the meantime, the definitive edition of Ed è
subito sera was published along with the ‘new poems’ written between 1936 and 1942.
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Quasimodo also translated the Gospel According to John, Catullus’s Songs and excerpts
from Homer’s Odyssey, which were published after the end of the war.
Having joined the Communist Party in 1945, Quasimodo inaugurated a new phase of
more politically oriented verse in a recognizably epic tone with Con il piede straniero
sopra il cuore (With the Foreign Foot over My Heart), later enriched by two poems and
republished under the title Giorno dopo giorno (Day After Day) (1947). La vita non è
sogno (Life is Not a Dream) (1949), 11 falso e vero verde (The True and False Green)
(1956) and La terra impareggiabile (The Incomparable Land) (1958) soon followed.
During these years, Quasimodo was awarded numerous prizes, including the San Babila,
the Etna-Taormina, which he shared with Dylan Thomas, and the Viareggio Prize. After
the death of his first wife, Bice Donetti, in 1948, Quasimodo married the dancer Maria
Cumani, who bore him a son.
Quasimodo suffered a heart attack in 1958 while on a trip to the Soviet Union, and
during the long recovery in Moscow wrote some of the poems included in Dare e avere
(To Give and To Have), his last collection of poems, published in 1966. The conferring
of the 1959 Nobel Prize, supported by letters of recommendation by Francesco Flora and
Carlo Bo, was not, however, without bitter polemics in some literary circles. The poet
also received an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1967. These final years
witnessed a copious production of translations of ancient as well as modern poets
(including Euripides, Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda and e.e. cummings) in addition to
critical articles on literature, art, and theatre.
Further reading
Dutschke, D. (1969) ‘Salvatore Quasimodo’, Italian Quarterly 47–8:91–104 (gives a brief
overview of Quasimodo’s life and works and presents a selection of not previously translated
poems in English).
Loriggio, F. (1994) ‘Modernity and the Ambiguities of Exile: On the Poetry of Salvatore
Quasimodo’, Rivista di Studi Italiani 12 (1):101–20.
Quasimodo, S. (1964) The Poet and the Politician and Other Essays, trans. T. Bergin and S.
Pacifici, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
——(1960) Selected Writings, trans. A. Mandelbaum, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cadahy.
——(1983) Complete Poems, trans. J. Bevan, London: Anvil Press Poetry.
SHERRY ROUSH
Quelli della notte
Broadcast live on the second RAI channel between 11 p.m. and about midnight on
Mondays to Fridays for a period of less than three months in 1985, Quelli della notte
(The Night Crowd) became more than just a cult programme; rather, it marked a
revolution in Italian popular culture.
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Building on some elements of his earlier and extremely successful L’altra domenica
(Another Side of Sunday), musician-presenter Renzo Arbore created a hybrid
programme where late night viewers were invited into his chaotic, kitschy and slightly
arabesque living room, peopled by a circus of odd characters, all affecting different
television styles and talk show stereotypes. These amusing and eccentric figures included
Riccardo Pazzaglia, a Neapolitan philosopher obsessed with the ‘primal soup’, Arbore’s
fictional spinster cousin Marisa Laurito, always frantically awaiting a boyfriend who
never appeared, Nino Frassica, a monk who spoke a peculiar language full of neologisms,
Massimo Catalano, Expert of the Obvious, Harmand, Arbore’s mysterious Arabic
brother, and a host of others, with the New Pathetic Elastic Orchestra providing the
musical numbers, several of which became independent best-selling hits.
Attracting only a modest 800,000 viewers during its first week, the programme soon
became the main point of reference of late-night viewing, and by its seventh week had
gained 51 per cent of total share. Wisely terminated by Arbore at the height of its
popularity and before it began to repeat itself, the programme achieved legendary status
as many of its tics and neologisms became absorbed into Italian popular culture.
RICCARDO VENTRELLA
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