Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Proletaria), established Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation). The new
party maintained the symbols and ideology of Marxism and was dismissed by many as a
‘Stalinist’ fringe with no future, but it won 5.6 per cent of the vote in the 1992 national
elections, and was similarly successful in local elections. Fausto Bertinotti, whose
background was in the trade unions, joined in 1993 and soon became leader. The RC
vote rose to 6.0 per cent in the 1994 elections, and to 8.6 per cent in 1996. With this vote
it held the balance of power in the Chamber of Deputies (see Parliament), but it showed
itself unable to reconcile its instinctive quest for ideological purity with its desire to
support Prodi’s leftist coalition. It briefly brought the government down in October 1997
over a proposed reform of the pension system, then offered support to the reconstituted
government before splitting into two factions in late 1998, one headed by Bertinotti and
keeping the name, the other led by Cossutta and now called simply Comunisti Italiani
(Italian Communists).
JOSEPH FARRELL
Rimanelli, Giose
b. 28 November 1925, Casacalenda
Novelist, poet and literary scholar
Rimanelli is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at State University of New
York at Albany. His first and most successful book, Tiro al piccione (translated as The
Day of the Lion), based on his Second World War experiences, was published in 1953 to
much critical acclaim. Largely due to Cesare Pavese’s favourable interpretation, the book
came to be regarded as a classic of Italian neorealism, while in retrospect it now appears
more as an anthropological analysis of human behaviour, inspired by tragic cultural
circumstances. The original critical misunderstanding of Rimanelli’s literary vein was
partially responsible for his dissatisfaction with the Italian cultural scene, which
prompted his permanent move to the United States. Throughout the years, Rimanelli has
continued to write fiction both in Italian and in his native Molise dialect, and he has also
enriched his literary production with a fresh and idiosyncratic English style, as
exemplified in his novel Benedetta in Guysterland (1993), winner of the 1994 American
Book Award. Amongst his other titles are Moliseide (1990), Detroit Blues (1996) and
Alien cantica (1994).
ANDREA CICCARELLI
Entries A–Z 721
Rinascita
A’journal of politics and culture’, Rinascita (Rebirth) was founded by Palmiro Togliatti
in 1944 with the stated aim of providing ideological direction for the communist
movement. Initially a monthly publication, it became a weekly in 1962. Although owned
by the PCI, and playing a significant part in the education of its cadres, Rinascita was
more than a party organ. It sought, often successfully, to play a significant role in
political and cultural debate within Italy and internationally. It was in Rinascita that
Gramsci’s letters from prison were first published, as well as Togliatti’s Yalta memorial
and Berlinguer’s formulation of the historic compromise. The journal reached its
highest circulation during the period of the party’s greatest success, the mid1970s, with
average sales of 60,000–80,000. Circulation subsequently dropped and publication was
suspended in 1989 due to financial constraints. Relaunched in a new format in 1990,
Rinascita survived another year, closing just after the PCI transformed itself into the
PDS.
CLAIRE KENNEDY
Risi, Dino
b. 23 December 1916, Milan
Film director
Brother of poet Nelo Risi and father of one of the most impressive representatives of the
New Italian Cinema in the 1990s, Marco Risi, Dino Risi graduated in psychiatric
medicine, but soon tired of that profession and at first made a living by contributing to
the satirical journal Bertoldo (founded in Milan in 1937). He then entered the film
industry as assistant to directors Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada. After a period as
film critic, he made his directorial debut with a series of realistic documentaries, one of
which, Buio in sala (Darkness in the Movie Theatre) (1950), was appreciated enough by
film producers to invite him to Rome.
Since the inception of his career, Risi has always been a director with a great feeling
for actuality and contemporary issues, and has incessantly recorded each new
phenomenon in Italian society with promptness and accuracy. In the 1950s he
participated in the so-called neorealismo rosa (pink neorealism) with his Pane, amore e
… (Bread, Love and …), (1955) and Poveri ma belli (Poor But Beautiful) (1956).
Together with Luigi Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Fantasy)
(1953) and Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy) (1954), Risi’s films dealt
with poverty in postwar Italy but in a comic fashion, stretching the boundaries of
neorealism. Tied too closely to the optimism of the 1940s and early 1950s, ‘pink
neorealism’ was soon dismissed as facile and, under the heading of comedy, Italian
directors began producing increasingly pessimistic critiques of contemporary society.
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Thus in the 1960s Risi shifted to impressive yet grim portrayals of Italy in the chroes of
the economic miracle, thereby creating some of the undisputed masterpieces of the so-
called ‘comedy Italian style’ (see commedia all’Italiana, films such as Una vita difficile
(A Difficult Life) (1961), Il sorpasso (The Easy Life) (1962) and I mostri (The Monsters)
(1963) which always to some extent expanded and modified the genre.
With I mostri, Risi also initiated a trend in Italian film production called ‘film a
episodi’ (films in several episodes made by different directors), a fashion which proved
successful at the box office and attracted the participation of directors as diverse as
Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini and even the French director Godard in RoGoPag (1963).
In the 1970s, Risi’s humour darkened as his cinema came to reflect the ever more
difficult times of Italian society. His themes became more utterly and explicitly dramatic:
corruption and speculation in Nel nome del popolo italiano (In The Name of the Italian
People) (1971), illness and suicide in Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman) (1974) and
terrorism in Caro papà (Dear Dad) (1979). Although Risi habitually treated his themes
with detachment and scientific precision, with Profumo di donna and Caro papà his
cinema became coloured with a tenderness that would eventually mark a regression
during the 1980s with films such as Scemo di guerra (War Idiot) (1985).
MANUELA GIERI
Risi, Marco
b. 4 June 1951, Milan
Film director
Son of Dino Risi, one of the masters of the commedia all’Italiana (comedy Italian style),
and nephew of director and poet Nelo Risi, Marco Risi came to the silver screen early in
life as assistant director and scriptwriter. After a lacklustre apprenticeship with
commercial film comedies, from Vado a vivere da solo (I am Going to Live on My Own)
(1982) to Soldati 365 all’alba (Soldiers 365 Days Before Discharge) (1987), Risi’s
cinema found its own voice in a retrieval of neorealism and its ethos of social critique.
His later films also owe much to Francesco Rosi’s ‘cinema of denunciation’ and Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s investigation of the subproletariat, both amply evident in his diptych on
the underground world of Sicilian cities, Mery per sempre (Mery for Ever) (1989) and
Ragazzi fuori (Boys Out) (1990). Among his later films, are Muro di gomma (Rubber
Wall) (1991), Nel continente new (In the Dark Continent) (1992), and Il branco (The
Herd) (1994).
MANUELA GIERI
Entries A–Z 723
Risi, Nelo
b. 21 April 1920, Milan
Poet and film-maker
Originally a medical graduate, Risi has never exercised his profession. In the immediate
postwar period he made a number of documentary films, especially in Africa, and in the
1960s he also produced films for television and continued publishing poetry. Risi’s
poetry is a poetry of content in which political and social issues take centre stage with a
determination which is the cipher of his political and stylistic allegiance. In his numerous
collections, from L’esperienza (Experience) (1948) to Amica mia nemica (My Friend My
Enemy) (1976), the protagonists are often simple workers who are juxtaposed to
unscrupulous capitalists and corrupt politicians, and even the more personal and
autobiographical passages which recall childhood memories are interspersed with social
critique. Notwithstanding the apparent focus on content over form, his poetry is informed
by a poetic tradition which runs from Surrealism to Montale to the Italian avantgarde
movement of the 1960s (see Gruppo 63). While remaining a fully engaged poet and
director—among his more renowned films are Diario di una schizofrenica (Diary of a
Schizophrenic) (1968) and Una stagione all’inferno (A Season in Hell) (1971)—Risi also
acknowledges that literature and art are often inadequate and powerless in the face of
political oppression and injustice.
PAOLO BARTOLONI
Rogers, Ernesto Nathan
b. 16 March 1909, Trieste; d. 7 November 1969, Gardone
Architect, editor and educator
Influential editor of Casabella and partner in Studio BBPR (see BPR), Rogers
recognized a ‘continuity’ between past and present and strong associations between
architectural traditions, the city, the academy and everyday life. For Rogers, even Italian
‘rationalism’ could be continued as a tradition if cleansed of associations with the same
fascism that had taken the life of one of the partners of BBPR itself. In fact, surviving
members of BBPR re-established their architectural practice through the ‘Monument to
the Dead in the Concentration Camps in Germany’ as both a continuation of rationalism
and a memento of fascist terror. Rogers thereafter conceived of a ‘house of man’ that
sought to forge a collective architectural culture, exemplified in his writings for
Casabella and by such ‘historicist’ buildings as BPR’s Torre Velasca.
Further reading
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Ockman, J. (1993) Architecture Culture 1943–1968, New York: Rizzoli.
KEITH EVAN GREEN
Romano, Lalla
b. 11 November 1906, Demonte, Cuneo
Novelist, poet, critic and translator
Romano’s intimate and lyrical narratives perceptively depict the interior lives of her
female protagonists. While bringing realist detail to the social and familial portraits she
creates, Romano also illustrates each character’s internal condition, as in her first novel,
Maria (1953), which convincingly portrays a poor woman’s rich interior life. The
function of memory is also an important motif in her texts, especially in works such as La
penombra che abbiamo attraversato (The Half-Light Through Which We Have Come)
(1964), which describes the author’s upbringing near Cuneo, and Il tetto murato (The
Walled-Up Roof), which draws on Romano’s partisan activities and which earned her the
Pavese Prize in 1957. Her later texts, including Lettura di un’immagine (Reading an
Image) (1975) and Romanzo di figure (A Novel Made of Figures) (1986), intertwine
images and text to create innovative narratives. Romano has also published poetry,
collected in Fiore (A Flower) (1941), Giovane è il tempo (Time is Young) (1974) and Le
lune di Hvar (The Moons of Hvar) (1991). Recipient of many awards and recognition
during her long career, Romano was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1969 for
what is generally regarded as her best novel, Le parole tra noi leggere (Words Light
Between Us).
LAURA A. SALSINI
Romiti, Cesare
b. 24 June 1923, Rome
Industrial manager
Managing director of Fiat from 1976 on, Romiti has been depicted by both supporters
and detractors as a ruthless man with a strong taste for power. Widely regarded as the real
leader of Italian entrepreneurs, he earned his reputation on the industrial battlefield in
1980 by crushing union opposition to his restructuring plan and by his later success in
extricating Fiat from its deep crisis. In the mid-1980s he clashed with Vittorio Ghidella,
another managing director of Fiat, who supported a car-centred strategy. Romiti appeared
the loser in 1987 when Gianni Agnelli (see Agnelli family) publicly invested his brother
Umberto and Ghidella as Fiat’s future leaders, but Romiti ultimately succeeded in
Entries A–Z 725
eliminating his rivals and imposing his own strategy of diversification. With
Mediobanca on his side, he was even admitted to the exclusive circle of Fiat family
shareholders, an unprecedented privilege for an outsider.
In 1993, as Fiat’s managing director, Romiti was implicated in some of the
Tangentopoli inquiries, which eventually led to a conviction for fraudulent accounts and
illegal funding of political parties. In 1999, however, he was finally acquitted of the
charge of bribing public officials regarding contracts for the building of the Rome
underground. Meanwhile, in 1998 he resigned as chairman of Fiat, but immediately
assumed the presidency of the powerful RCS editorial group which controls both the
Rizzoli publishing house and the influential Milan daily, Il Corriere delta sera.
STEFANO BATTILOSSI
Ronconi, Luca
b. 8 March 1933, Sousse, Tunisia
Theatre director
Later to become an acclaimed director of theatre and opera at some of Europe’s most
prestigious theatres, Ronconi’s most important contribution to contemporary Italian
theatre remains some of his earliest productions, most significantly Orlando Furioso
(1969). Throughout his career, his work has been characterized by an emphasis on
spectacularly designed use of non-dedicated theatre spaces, anti-conventional spatial
relationships between actor and audience, and an almost iconoclastic, yet always
revealing, attitude to classical texts.
Ronconi trained and worked as an actor until 1963, when he directed a production of
Goldoni’s La buona moglie (The Good Wife). In 1966 he directed I lunatici, an
adaptation of Middleton’s The Changeling, but it was his 1969 production of
Sanguineti’s adaptation of Ariosto’s Renaissance epic poem, Orlando Furioso, which
marked him as an extraordinarily innovative, inventive and influential figure in the Italian
theatre avantgarde.
The impact of the mid-1960s Italian tour of The Living Theatre was evident in this and
many productions at the time, in terms of style if not in political content. The work of
Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory was also a visible influence. The two most
significant characteristics of this production, which excited not just Italian audiences but
also those of Europe and the United States on its 1970 tour, were its use of non-theatrical
spaces for the performance, and a multifocal and spatially fluid production style. Most
often performed in open spaces such as piazze or town squares, its premise was not the
normally static and highly codified actor-audience relationship of the proscenium arch
theatre. Instead the audience was encouraged, even constrained, to mingle with the actors
in the performance space: the actors performed on large moveable platform stages, and
astride large steel horses and other machines, with action often taking place at a number
of points simultaneously. Sanguineti’s adaptation of Ariosto’s narrative stressed its leaps
from one strand of action to another, and the audience experienced these shifts
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physically, being moved from one place to another to accommodate the changing
requirements of the moveable performance spaces. This was an entirely new and exciting
experience for Italian audiences, since the flexible staging experiments which had
dominated British and North American theatre design in the wake of such visionaries as
Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Tyrone Guthrie had largely bypassed Italy,
with its extensive legacy of traditional proscenium arch theatres. Used to sitting in
orderly rows all looking in the same direction (and interpreting what they saw
synoptically in much the same way), the spectators at Orlando Furioso were forcefully
disrupted from their usual habits and made aware that they were necessarily experiencing
the production in a fragmentary and highly personalized manner, and that their choices as
to where to be and in which direction to look would determine their interactive and
interpretative relationship to the production. Though reminiscent of theatrical techniques
which go back to the Middle Ages, and which have survived in popular theatrical forms
such as the commedia dell’arte, vaudeville or variety theatre (something which did not
escape the attention of the Italian futurists), the hegemony of proscenium arch culture
assured that many audience members would be shocked and even outraged at losing the
illusion (for illusion it is) that everyone was seeing and experiencing the same thing.
Ronconi continued these lines of exploration in later productions. XX used a
labyrinthine series of performance spaces through which the audience moved, and The
Oresteia was produced not in a theatre (though its actor-audience relationship was in fact
quite traditional), but in a huge disused warehouse in Prato, outside Florence. This led to
the setting up in 1976 of Ronconi’s Prato Theatre Laboratory, which explicitly recalled
Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory and the programme of Grotowski’s disciple Eugenio
Barba, at whose Odin Theatre Ronconi taught.
In the 1980s and 1990s Ronconi held positions at the Venice Biennale and with the
Turin resident theatre company. In parallel with his theatre productions he forged an
equally daring and often contested career as opera director, directing nearly fifty
productions in Italy, France and Germany
See also: theatre directors
Further reading
Quadri, F. (1970) ‘Orlando Furioso’, The Drama Review 14:116–24 (description and discussion of
the production).
Milanese, C. (1973) Luca Ronconi e la realtà del teatro, (Luca Ronconi and the Reality of
Theatre), Milan: Feltrinelli (source materials, interviews with Ronconi).
TIM FITZPATRICK
Rosi, Francesco
b. 15 November 1922, Naples
Entries A–Z 727
Film director, scriptwriter and actor
One of Italy’s most socially committed film-makers, Rosi has consistently blended the
aesthetic and the political in films which attempt to uncover the inner workings of power,
both legal and illegal, and to investigate the networks of complicity and intrigue through
which it is exercised.
Growing up under Fascism, Rosi’s earliest artistic experiences were in theatre during
his university days. His first and fortuitous involvement with cinema came in 1948 when
he became assistant director to Visconti for the Sicilian epic, La terra trema (The Earth
Trembles) (1948). He continued his apprenticeship in the next ten years by assisting a
number of established directors, amongst them Luciano Emmer, Mario Monicelli, Ettore
Giannini and the young Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as Visconti again on Bellissima
(1951) and Senso (1956).
In 1957 he directed his first feature film, La sfida (The Challenge), the first of many
films set in southern Italy and dealing with illegal power networks, in this case the
Neapolitan Camorra. In 1961 he established himself definitively as a significant new
director with Salvatore Giuliano, a brilliant and disquieting documentaristic inquest on
the death of the famous Sicilian bandit (see Giuliano). This was the first in a trilogy of
biographical films that would include Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), which explored
the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of the powerful Italian industrialist
(see Mattei) and was awarded the Cannes Grand Prix in 1972, and Lucky Luciano (1973)
which was less a portrait of the notorious gangster himself than of the violent world
which surrounded and imprisoned him. Further investigation of corruption and the links
between legal and illegal power was carried out in Le mani sulla città (Hands Over the
City) (1963), a powerful film which vehemently denounced the criminal evasion of
proper building codes during the so-called ‘economic miracle’, in many cases producing
disastrous and deadly consequences (see also housing policy; urban planning).
Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses) (1976), adapted from a novel by Leonardo
Sciascia and made in a period when the ‘historic compromise’ was in the air, hinted at
levels of complicity between political, legal and illegal power that defied penetration
from even the most committed criminal investigator.
Running parallel to Rosi’s interest in the exercise and morality of power has been his
attention to the problems of the South (see Southern Question), a theme present in many
of the films already mentioned but given its fullest treatment in his moving but
unsentimental adaptation of Carlo Levi’s novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ
Stopped at Eboli) (1979).
Adaptations of the opera Carmen (1983) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987) temporarily lured Rosi away from political cinema
during the 1980s, but he returned to more committed film-making in the 1990s with
Dimenticare Palermo (To Forget Palermo) (1990) and Diario napoletano (Neapolitan
Diary) (1992).
Further reading
Klawans, S. (1995) ‘Illustrious Rosi’, Film Comment, January—February: 60–5 (a concise but
comprehensive assessment of Rosi as auteur, followed by an interview with Rosi himself).
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Michalczyk, J.J. (1986) The Italian Political Filmmakers, London and Toronto: Associated
University Presses (see ch. 1, ‘Francesco Rosi: The Dialectical Cinema’, for a chronological
discussion of Rosi’s major works to the mid-1980s).
Rosi, F. (1984) ‘The Audience Should Not Be Just Passive Spectators’, in G.Georgakas and L.
Rubenstein (eds), Art, Politics, Cinema: The Cineaste Interviews, Chicago: Lake View Press.
Testa, C. (ed.) (1996) Poet of Civic Courage: The Films of Francesco Rosi, Wiltshire: Flicks Books
(an anthology of illuminating essays on Rosi’s work by leading film scholars; includes a
detailed filmography and a comprehensive bibliography of material in English).
GINO MOLITERNO
Rosselli, Alberto
b. 1921, Palermo; d. 1976, Milan
Architect and industrial designer
An important architect and designer of furniture and industrial products in the years of
the postwar reconstruction, Rosselli studied engineering and architecture before
forming Studio PFR with Giò Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli in 1950. Their most notable
design was the 1956 Pirelli tower in Milan. In 1955 Roselli opened his own design office
producing, among other things, furniture for Arflex and Kartell and a range of small
domestic items for Fontana Arte. He founded the journal Stile Industria, which he edited
from 1953 to 1963. One of his best-known designs was the fibreglass ‘Jumbo’ chair for
Saporiti (1970) which became an icon of the 1970s.
See also: interior design
Further reading
Fossati, P. (1972) Il design in Italia (Design in Italy), Turin: Einaudi.
Klaus Koenig, G. et al (1981) Stile Industrial Alberto Rosselli, Parma: Artegrafica Silva.
PENNY SPARKE
Rosselli, Amelia
b. 28 March 1930, Paris; d. 11 February 1996, Rome
Poet, essayist, translator and musician
Daughter of exiled anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, Amelia spent her early years first in
England and then the United States, only returning to Italy in 1946. After studying
musical composition and working as a translator, she published her first collection of
Entries A–Z 729
poems, Variazioni belliche (Variations on War), in 1964. Her innovative prosodic style
and her continual attempts to free words from linguistic conventions makes it difficult to
distinguish between her prose and her poetry. Her style is also characterized by the use of
the lapsus as creative error, a process which, as many critics have pointed out, makes it
impossible to classify Rosselli’s works in any pre-set category. The multilingualism, the
fragmentation and formal experimentation of her writings challenge the order of syntax
and reflect both her lifelong struggle with mental illness and her profound mistrust of
predetermined ideological positions. Recipient of many of Italy’s most prestigious
literary prizes, she is widely regarded as a poet’s poet and is highly esteemed by the
poetic community itself.
ANDREA RICCI
Rossellini, Roberto
b. 8 May 1906, Rome; d. 3 June 1977, Rome
Film director, screenwriter and television producer
Long regarded in international circles as the key figure in the cinema movement known
as neorealism, in Italy Rossellini is almost as famous for his fierce intellectualism, his
famous romances lover of Anna Magnani, husband of Ingrid Bergman—and his bon
vivant lifestyle. Indeed, while his importance for Italian cinema in the 1940s and 1950s is
beyond doubt, this was only one distinct episode of his long career and he is, for
example, also considered to be the godfather of French New Wave cinema as well as a
pioneer of Italian television.
Born in Rome in 1906 to an upper-class family and inheriting a substantial fortune in
his teens, the young Rossellini knew little of the other classes or even of the incipient
fascism throughout the 1920s. His education provided little guide for his future and it was
only his interest in the thought of Benedetto Croce, a major influence in Italy at the time,
that inspired him to critical and mostly anti-theoretical stances. From Croce, Rossellini
learned to value the power of the human will to construct itself within history and the
need for perpetual cultural renewal, notions which would underpin much of Rossellini’s
artistic commitment to a new postwar culture.
A rather frivolous lifestyle gave way in the late 1930s to the making of short films,
scriptwriting and assisting Goffredo Alessandrini on Luciano Serra pilota (The Pilot
Luciano Serra) (1938), a film supervised by Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. This was followed
by three rather conventional war films, amongst which was La nave bianca (The White
Ship) (1941), and some involvement in a few minor features. With the end of the war
came the films that made his reputation, the so-called ‘neorealist trilogy’: Roma città
aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) Paisà (1946) and Germania anno zero (Germany Year
Zero) (1947). Due in part to the economies of wartime shooting, the ‘on location’ style
looked then perhaps more innovative than it now does, masking in the first film a rather
conventional family melodrama, regardless of the desperate setting of an occupied city.
Paisà is perhaps more successful in its blend of location and character used to explore the
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