Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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issues of the Allied liberation of Italy and the devastating effects of civilization turned to
inhumanity, while war-devastated Berlin provides a contrapuntal image to Rome in the
last film of the trilogy In these films, many aspects of European family life are shown as
utterly forlorn and with little future hope.
Rossellini’s status as a great neorealist really rests on these three films, and yet he
would increasingly abandon the style, evolving in the late 1940s along a parallel pathway
to Antonioni’s somewhat later attempt to explore the cinematic medium itself with an
equal focus on alienation and mental breakdown. La macchina ammazzacattivi (The
Machine that Kills Bad People), made in 1948 but not released until 1952, is about a
camera as a killing machine, while films such as L’amore (Love) (1948), starring Anna
Magnani, tend to explore psychological breakdown, especially in women.
In the 1950s his star vehicle was Ingrid Bergman, with many of the storylines of the
films appearing as attempts to work through aspects of their private lives. The scandal
surrounding Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli) (1950), with its theme of adultery, led to
the film’s being released in a heavily cut version. Subsequently Rossellini and Bergman
married and had a daughter, Isabella, who would later also become a film actor. Although
their next few films were critically acclaimed—indeed the French New Wave directors
and the influential critic, Andrè Bazin, greatly admired Viaggio in Italia (Journey to
Italy) (1954)—the films failed at the box office.
Rossellini attempted to revive his career with several more conventional films such as
Il generate Della Rovere (General Della Rovere) (1959), which starred Vittorio De Sica,
and Anima nera (Black Soul). These proved less than successful, and in the 1960s he
turned to television, abandoning the cinema completely with the single exception of Anno
Uno (Italy Year One) (1974), a biography of the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De
Gasperi (see also DC). Regarded as his most famous production, La Prise du Pouvoir
par Louis XIV (The Rise to Power of Louis XIV) was made atypically for French
television in 1966. This was only one of a long series of historical documentaries
exploring the general unfolding of Western history largely through dramatized
biographies such as Socrate (Socrates) (1970), Blaise Pascal and L’età di Cosimo de’
Medici (The Era of Cosimo de’ Medici), both 1972, and Cartesius (Descartes), made in
1974. Louis XIV marks Rossellini’s continuing interest in the Crocean ricorso
(recurrence), and a constant commitment to a renewal of culture. In this light, Anno Uno
may appear as a continuation of the television productions and his other work rather than
merely as an attempt to revive his cinematic career. Typically, most of these docudramas
were made in association with RAI and had little impact outside Italy, despite
Rossellini’s desire to penetrate international markets and in spite of his legendary status.
At the time of his death he was preparing a television biography of Karl Marx,
tentatively subtitled To Work for Humanity, while a number of agencies were still striving
to tempt him back to making films, even though the subjects, such as a version of
Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, and a RAI commission on Saint Peter, must have
been attractive to him. However, the newer medium appeared to take precedence even if
the treatment of the subject matter and the social commitment was unchanged.
Entries A–Z 731
Further reading
Aprà, A. (ed.) (1987) Rosselliniana, Rome: De Giacomo (most thorough bibliography with
interviews and other writings).
Bondanella, P. (1990) Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum,
2nd revised edn (survey of postwar film placing Rossellini in a national context).
——(1993) The Films of Roberto Rossellini, New York (critical study placing select films in a
national context).
Brunette, P. (1987) Robert Rossellini, New York: Oxford University Press (a thorough biography
and critical study).
Gallagher, T. (1998) The Adventures of Robert Rossellini: His Life and Films, New York: Da Capo
Press (major biography and critical study).
Ranvaud, D. (ed.) (1981) Roberto Rossellini, British Film Institute Dossier no. 8,
London: BFI (basic introductory studies).
JEFF DOYLE
Rossi, Aldo
b. 3 May 1931, Milan; d. 4 September 1997, Milan
Architect
Educator, practitioner and important contributor to Casabella (see architectural and
design magazines), Rossi sought to renew a waning relationship between architecture
and urbanism. For Rossi, architectural work provided something more than a
programmatic function: it also had the capacity to reflect and to perpetuate the history
and culture of the city in which it was sited.
Rossi’s interest in architecture and urbanism furthered the ‘continuity’ of architectural
tenets of prewar Italy that his mentor Rogers had earlier established as editor of
Casabella. Teaching with Quaroni in Arezzo and Aymonino in Venice allowed Rossi to
cultivate further his theories of architectural morphology and urban typology. Rossi
articulated these themes in The Architecture of the City (1966), a hugely influential book
both inside and outside Italy. In it, Rossi argued that although the city is formed by
buildings, it is more a repository for collective memories than a mere collection of
disparate images. Consequently, rather than designing buildings according to functional
requirements, Rossi sought a basis for architectural design in what he called a ‘timeless
typology’. ‘Type’, for Rossi, was not an architectural image to be copied but an
architectural ‘idea’ which results in building forms that may be dissimilar but which,
nevertheless, together, can perpetuate the collective memory of the city.
In projects such as Gallaratese 2 in Milan and the Cemetery of San Cataldo in
Modena, Rossi thus conceived architectural works which were themselves urban forms.
For the Gallaratese 2, a residential complex for a Milanese suburb, Rossi and Aymonino
designed not a repetitive cluster of dwelling units, but a complex of four buildings—a
city itself—shaping and containing all of the richness and associations offered by the city.
The Cemetery in Modena replicates the forms of the Gallaratese 2, this time to create a
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city of the dead. These ‘cities’ of life and death are demonstrations of what Rossi called
an ‘analogous city’, an architectural poetic in which each single work shares formal
elements with other works in an associative play of private and collective memory.
Rossi’s self-reflective design practice and theory was also elaborated in his whimsical
drawings and in a second book, A Scientific Autobiography (1981), which combined his
cultural interest in architecture and the city with his personal, compulsive search for
primary forms. Beginning in the 1960s, in fact, Rossi had sought to combine primary
elements such as the triangle, the cube and the cone in dramatic assemblages. An
enduring and obsessive practice, this seemingly haphazard combination of simple,
familiar elements—the ceaseless transformation of almost ‘nothing’—was meant to
reveal something fundamental about form.
Curiously, the one consistent decorative feature of Rossi’s architectural work is the
mysterious reappearance of the clock set within a triangular pediment, much as in the
paintings of de Chirico. In the Teatrino Scientifico, Rossi’s ‘little scientific theatre’ of
1978, the clock was fixed at five o’clock for the life of the building, to enigmatically
suggest, perhaps, that the time for architecture had passed.
Further reading
Tafuri, M. (1989) History of Italian Architecture, 1944–1985, trans. J.Levine, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
KEITH EVAN GREEN
Rota, Nino
b. 31 December 1911, Milan; d. 10 April 1979, Rome
Composer
Rota was born in Milan into a musical family, and from an early age demonstrated an
extraordinary capacity for composition. At the age of eight, after only one year of formal
tuition, he was composing at will, filling pages upon pages of musical score. He began
his studies at the Milan conservatory at the age of eleven. He later studied in Rome and
went on to study music at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. While well-versed in
twentiethcentury developments in music and a great admirer of Stravinsky, whom he
knew personally, Rota’s own work can be considered more nineteenth century. His music
reflects his philosophy that compositions should be spontaneous, melodious and
rhythmic. Rota’s opus is abundant and encompasses almost every musical genre. He
composed music for theatre productions, lyric operas and ballets, as well as chamber
music. He is most remembered, however, for his many soundtracks for films by Visconti,
Zeffirelli, Coppola (winning an Oscar for Godfather II, 1974) and above all Fellini (Lo
sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), La strada (The Road), La dolce vita, 8½, Amarcord).
Rota died during the troubled filming of Fellini’s City of Women in 1979.
Entries A–Z 733
See also: film composers
BERNADETTE LUCIANO
Rotella, Mimmo (Domenico)
b. 17 October 1918, Catanzaro
Artist
Rotella studied at the Academy of Art, Naples, and at the University of Missouri. His
earliest works were phonetic poems, but from the early 1950s he developed and refined a
collage technique first practised by the cubists and then the French affichistes known as
‘decollage’ (double collage). Rotella stripped posters from walls, reduced them or
decomposed them by further mutilation and then transferred these ‘manifesti lacerati’
(torn posters) to canvas. The resulting compositions were carefully balanced but vibrant,
colourful and dramatic. In the mid-1960s Rotella’s work changed to involve the use of
single newspaper images, reproductions of magazine covers, photographic portraits more
as a form of photo-reportage. These works heralded the new photorealistic school of
painting, and Rotella was invited to join the French Nouveaux Realistes in 1961. He
coined the term ‘mecart’ to encompass both the mechanical nature of the process of his
art and also its connections with mass media.
LAURENCE SIMMONS
Rotunno, Giuseppe
b. 19 March 1923, Rome
Cinematographer
Regarded as Italian cinema’s most authoritative colourist, Giuseppe Rotunno started his
career in 1955 with Dino Risi’s Pane, Amore e … (Bread, Love and…, also known as
Scandal in Sorrento) and has photographed no less than fifty films ranging from Luchino
Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963) to Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. To
Rotunno, establishing the most immediate relation between the audience and the
director’s project is the cinematographer’s responsibility. As a result, cinematography is
an art that reinvents itself with each film, in accordance with the story that is being told.
Such a talent for adaptability and reinvention is certainly exemplified by Rotunno’s
extended collaboration with Federico Fellini, a partnership which continued almost
without interruption between 1968 and 1983. The audacity of Rotunno’s framing and
lighting strategies has been consistently and colourfully attuned to the baroque and
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surreal idiosyncrasies of Fellini’s world, as Fellini Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon) (1969)
and Il Casanova (Casanova) (1976) most masterfully reveal.
DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL.
Roversi, Roberto
b. 28 January 1923, Bologna
Poet and novelist
After beginning as a lyric poet in 1942, Roberto Roversi became more involved in
postwar cultural and political life by not only contributing to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
magazine, Officina in the late 1950s, but also founding in Bologna the Marxistoriented
literary journal Rendiconti (1961–77). Subsequently in his poetry, and in novels like
Dopo Campoformio (After Campoformio) (1962), Materiale ferroso (Ferrous Material)
(1977) and I diecimila cavalli (Ten Thousand Horses) (1976), Roversi sought to
document the degradation of peasant culture by industrialization as well as the explosion
of youth protest in 1968 (see student movement) with its legitimate claims but numerous
contradictions. In order to both criticize and undermine the dominant cultural industry,
Roversi resorted to distributing his poems in cyclostyled copies and performing in cabaret
shows.
FRANCESCA PARMEGGIANI
Rubbia, Carlo
b. 31 March 1934, Gorizia
Nuclear scientist
Later to become Italy’s most celebrated nuclear physicist, Rubbia graduated from the
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1956 and then spent four years in America at
Columbia University. In 1960 he became a full-time researcher in physics at the CERN
(European Organization for Nuclear Research) laboratories in Geneva, and from 1970 to
1988 divided his time between teaching at Harvard University and continuing research at
CERN. In 1984 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Simon van der Meer for the
discovery of the new subatomic particles, the W and Z bosons. Between 1989 and 1993
he served as Director-General of CERN, and subsequently took up appointment as
professor of physics at the University of Pavia while continuing to be a member of many
CERN commissions and other scientific bodies. He has received numerous awards,
including the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and the French Legion of Honour as
well as honorary degrees from a number of prestigious universities.
Entries A–Z 735
GINO MOLITERNO
Rubini, Sergio
b. 21 December 1959, Grumo Appula, Bari
Actor and director
Rubini began his artistic career acting and directing for the stage. He also appeared in
movies, his first big starring role being in Federico Fellini’s Intervista (Interview) (1987).
He acted in several generational films such as Giuseppe Piccioni’s Il grande Blek (The
Great Blek) (1987) and Chiedi la luna (Ask for the Moon) (1991) and, more importantly,
in Giuseppe Tornatore’s extraordinary existential thriller, Una pura formalità (A Mere
Formality) (1994). Rubini made his impressive directorial debut in 1990 with La stazione
(The Station). Although a close adaptation of a play by Umberto Marino with the same
title, La stazione was far from just ‘filmed theatre’, and the film’s greatest originality is in
fact its investigation of original avenues for a reciprocal contamination of filmic and
theatrical discursive strategies. Among his later films are La bionda (The Blonde
Woman) (1992), Prestazione straordinaria (Extraordinary Service) (1994) and Il viaggio
della sposa (The Journey of the Bride) (1997).
MANUELA GIERI
Ruini, Camillo
b. 19 February 1931, Sassuolo (Reggio Emilia)
Cardinal
As the Cardinal Vicar of the Rome diocese and president of the Italian Bishops’
Conference (CEI), Ruini is the second most powerful man in the Italian Church after the
Pope himself. Ruini was born and brought up in the region of Emilia, ‘Don Camillo’
territory, where he also served his first pastoral ministry. He was made secretary of the
CEI in 1985. In January 1991 he was made proVicar of Rome and six months later, Vicar
and cardinal. His absolute authority over the Italian Church was demonstrated by his
orchestration of its decennial gathering at Palermo in 1995. He was also a strong
supporter of the DC and tried to stave off splits in the Catholic party when it refounded
itself as the PPI in January 1995 by persuading the pope to intervene with an open letter
invoking the political unity of Italian Catholics. Since then, accepting the reality of
Catholic political pluralism, he has advocated ‘a Christian cultural project’ to unite the
Catholic political diaspora through its common values and priorities.
JOHN POLLARD
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S
Saba, Umberto
b. 9 March 1883, Trieste; d. 25 August 1957, Gorizia
Poet
The poetry of Umberto Saba (real name Umberto Poli) traverses the first half of the
twentieth century, indifferent to the influence of the various cultural tendencies, literary
fashions and different expressions of the avantgardes and remains instead substantially
faithful and coherent to its own principles and inspiring motifs. It is a poetry of intimacy,
characterized by a traditional metrics and common vocabulary, depicting a series of
melancholic and yet serene daily life experiences.
Saba’s cultural formation was similar to that of other intellectuals (like Svevo or
Slataper) who lived in Trieste between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century. This ‘mitteleuropean’ city was free from provincialism and receptive
to the most diverse international influences. Against this background, however, his life
was marked from its earliest stages by traumatic experiences which profoundly affected
him emotionally and psychologically: his father’s abandonment of the family; the conflict
between the maternal figure and that of his nanny; his ‘different’ Jewish heritage in a
country that was soon to enforce racial laws; his chronic neurosis and his fundamental
need for emancipation and integration. He was helped in coping with this situation in part
by Freud’s psychoanalytical doctrine which, over and above the therapeutic use made of
it by his doctor, E. Weiss, became an integral part of his culture, and in part by the
passionate study of Nietzsche, whom he found especially fascinating because, as he puts
it, ‘parla all’anima e di cose dell’anima’ (he speaks to the soul and about things of the
soul).
Saba’s poetics clearly reflects these cultural stimuli. Poetry materializes, according to
Saba, through the delicate and balanced combination of a child and an adult. It draws
from the past, from that obscure and remote taboo that, for the poet, is the world of
childhood, a world which, through poetry, may redeem itself, become socially acceptable
and sublimate itself in the forms of civilization. Through his poems, then, Saba descends
towards the origins of his human nature. His poetry becomes a search for existential
clarifications and for a cathartic liberation from the unavoidable pain that always
accompanies human life, a goal which he hopes to accomplish through the evocation of,
and the encounter with, those same ‘objects’—the people, the most humble things, the
animals which give shape to his life.
Entries A–Z 737
His Canzoniere (Songbook), from its first edition in 1921 until the posthumous one in
1961, gathers all the twenty-two collections published by the poet in the course of the
years. Its overall interpretation comes from Saba himself in his Storia and cronistoria del
‘Canzoniere’ (History and Development of the Canzoniere) (1948), written in the third
person, which is both a reconstruction of his own poetic and psychological itinerary and a
guide to the most important topics of the book. What emerges from it is the emblematic
story of a man who, from the traumas and the conflicts experienced during his childhood,
to the contradictions and the anxieties of his mature age, is desperately looking for a final
clarification of his own self. The Canzoniere, therefore, becomes a sort of poetic
autobiography in the shape of a psychoanalytical novel. The Versi militari (Military
Verses), Il piccolo Berto (The Young Berto) and Autobiografia (Autobiography), for
example, are all concerned in different ways with his mother’s need for emancipation and
his own attempts to get over his inhibitions and infantile regression. However, the
collection also transcends this psychoanalytical pattern. Many of the poems in Casa e
campagna (Home and Country) and Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman), in
particular, are a celebration of warm domestic values, often centred around the beloved
character of his wife, Lina. It needs to be emphasized that the human warmth and
especially the simplicity that these verses convey, are not synonymous with obviousness
and triviality, but are instead the conquered fruit of an intense research into the depth of
the poet’s soul.
Theoretically independent from European symbolism and the contemporary hermetic
experimentations, Saba has a ‘classical’ measure. He is not interested in experimenting
with forms and structures, or in the creation of new expressive means. He continues to
prefer traditional lyrical forms, regular metre, and almost aulic rhythmical and syntactical
solutions. On the other hand, and in contrast to this, on the lexical level there is the
recurrence of an imagery constituted by humble objects, daily affections, intimate and
modest surroundings, and the universal sorrows shared by men and animals alike.
This, however, does not immediately include Saba in the prosaicism of the so called
crepuscolare (twilight) poetic current. His austere existential meditation and his constant
autobiographism, in fact, mark a profound difference between Il Canzoniere and the
decadent-ironical descriptivism of the ‘twilight poets’. The representation of scenes of
daily life, of common men and women in the background of ‘his’ Trieste, is always
connected to intense personal experiences. The objective world refers to and reflects the
vicissitudes of the self; it only makes visible the poet’s need to find an identification and
an integration in the world.
Saba’s illustrious poetic career was crowned by many literary prizes. In 1946 he
received the Viareggio Prize and in 1951 he was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize by the
Accademia dei Lincei. In 1953 the University of Rome awarded him an honorary degree
in letters, and in 1957 he shared the Marzotto Prize with fellow poet Mario Luzi.
See also: poetry
Further reading:
Aymone, S. (1971) Saba e la psicoanalisi (Saba and Psychoanalysis), Naples: Guida (an attempt to
explore how psychoanalysis affected Saba’s writing).
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Cary, J. (1993) Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press (a general analysis of Saba’s poetry that reaffirms his place in modern Italian
literature).
Gilson, E. (1993) The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba, Riverdale on Hudson, NY:
Sleep-Meadow (a selection of Saba’s poetry and prose translated into English).
Magris, C. (1986) ‘Things Near and Far: Nietzsche and the Great Triestine Generation of the Early
Twentieth Century’, trans. T. Harrison, Stanford Italian Review 6 (1–2), 293–9 (a comparative
study of Saba’s relationship to Nietzsche, Svevo and Slataper).
Saba, U. (1961) Il Canzoniere (complete edition), Turin: Einaudi.
ENRICO CESARETTI
salotti
Salotti (drawing rooms or parlours) are regular private meeting places for select VIPs,
mostly organized by women of aristocratic descent or marriage, mainly found in the two
cities—Milan and Rome—with the densest concentrations of status rivalry among both
hosts and guests. Wielding names, manners and menus, the hosts compete for attendance
by members of the political, economic and cultural elites. Invitations add social prestige
to the professional reputations of guests, who can exhibit and cultivate their connections,
their culture and their culinary knowledge. A genuine, successful salotto demands a
pleasurable and productive encounter between status and power: mere gatherings of men
and women of letters, no matter how well-known or convivial, do not count.
Further reading
Cederna, C. (1984) Vicino e distante: gente, ambienti, salotti, usi, costumi: impressioni sull’Italia
di ieri e di oggi (Near and Far: People, Circles, Salons, Usages, Customs: Impressions of Italy
Yesterday and Today), Milan: Mondadori (insider account by Milanese observer of the
pretensions and abuses of power).
Pardo, D. (1997) ‘Metti un inciucio a cena’ (Imagine a Little Hugger-Mugger at Dinner),
L’Espresso, 28 May: 78–81 (salotti in the 1990s).
DAVID MOSS
Salvatores, Gabriele
b. 20 July 1950, Naples
Theatre and film director
Entries A–Z 739
Winner of the 1992 Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film with Mediterraneo
(Mediterranean), Salvatores had already emerged in the 1980s as one of Italy’s most
promising young directors with his Marrakech Express (1989) and Turné (Tour) (1990).
His popular success continued with Puerto Escondido in 1992 and Sud (South) in 1993.
Born in Naples, Salvatores grew up in Milan where he studied drama and served his
apprenticeship as theatre director. In 1972 he co-founded the Teatro dell’Elfo (The Elf’s
Theatre) producing experimental works such as a musical version of Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, a spectacle which then became his first full-length film in
1983 starring the female rock singer, Gianna Nannini. Using more or less the same cast
in most of his films, Salvatores has painted an autobiography of his post-1968 generation,
in a style often regarded as a contemporary version of the commedia all’Italiana
(comedy Italian style). In all his films, including the 1997 science fiction Nirvana, his
characters are confronted with an exceptional experience which disrupts their ordinary
lives and relaunches the recurrent motif of his desire to escape.
ANTONELLA FRANCINI
Samonà, Giuseppe
b. 8 April 1898, Palermo; d. 1983, Rome
Architect
Equally renowned as practitioner and educator, Samonà was director of the IUAV from
1945–71, where he gathered together the major exponents of Italian architectural culture,
thus making it one of the most important schools in Europe. He emphasized an unbroken
unity between region and building. For Samonà, the city was something to be unravelled
in an open reading where autobiographical and literary passions contended with the
managerial concerns of town planning. His own work was caught in powerful tensions
between antiquity and modernity, form and disintegration, the particular and the
universal, all evident in his INAIL (National Institute of Insurance against Workplace
Injury) Headquarters (1952–6) and further typified by his Bank of Italy building in Padua
(1968–74), a singular construction with strikingly heterogeneous facades, each attuned to
the differing urban situations they face. Also representative are his competition project
for the Chamber of Deputies Building in Rome (1967) and the Public Theatre of Sciacca
(1974–9).
Further reading
Samonà, G. (1985) L’urbanistica e l’avvenire della città (Urban Planning and the Future of the
City), Bari: Laterza (his most important theoretical statement).
ROSS JENNER
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