Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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Squarzina, Luigi

b. 18 February 1922, Livorno

Theatre director

A prominent and influential figure in the postwar Italian theatre through his work as

director (but also as playwright, critic, editor and translator), Squarzina’s familiarity with

contemporary American theatre made him a particularly important cultural conduit (he

had been a Fulbright Fellow at the Yale Drama School in the early 1950s). He introduced

Italian theatregoers to a number of American plays, but was also renowned for his

productions of Brecht, and for reviving the work of Goldoni and of Pirandello (who had

suffered from his identification with fascism in the prewar period).

Squarzina graduated from the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome shortly

after the end of the war, and began by directing contemporary plays. After returning from

America he began a long and distinguished career as director, first at the Teatro Stabile at

Genoa (1962–76) and then at the Teatro di Roma (1976–83), where some of his most

memorable productions, of contemporary and classic texts, were done.

In this period he also directed a number of his own plays, to considerable popular and

critical acclaim. His 1959 play Romagnola (The Woman from Romagna) uses a large cast

in a series of episodes which span the final fifteen years of fascism, and its treatment of

large-scale social movements and use of songs to punctuate the action reveals the

influence of Brecht on its playwright and director. Both his own plays and his other

productions reflect a leftist political viewpoint; he is interested in the dialectical social

forces at play in the historical process, and his characters reflect this in the emphasis

placed on their positioning within the dynamics of historical process rather than on their

individual psychological states and reactions.

Squarzina was also for a considerable period the chief supervizing editor of the

comprehensive and influential Enciclopedia dello spettacolo (Encyclopedia of Theatre),

for which he used to outstanding effect the theatre-historical research methodology he

had been exposed to under Alois Nagler at Yale.

Further reading

Squarzina, L. (1988) Da Dionisio a Brecht (From Dionysius to Brecht), Bologna: Il Mulino

(Squarzina’s view of theatre and its history).

TIM FITZPATRICK

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La Stampa

Founded in Turin in 1867, La Stampa’s history and identity is closely bound up with that

of the regional capital. The sole shareholder is a subsidiary of the Fiat motor company.

While the paper is distributed throughout Italy and abroad, its readership of around

400,000 is concentrated in Piedmont and its attempts to create a more national image for

itself have frequently met with resistance. During the 1950s and 1960s this campanilismo

(provincialism) sometimes took racist forms. However, the politics of La Stampa did

become more enlightened, and in later times it severely criticized both Berlusconi and

the Lega Nord (Northern League). Significantly, later top appointments were to include

former members of the extraparliamentary Left group, Lotta Continua. La Stampa has

also maintained serious coverage of cultural matters, giving ample space to the activities

of the Turin intelligentsia.

Further reading

Klaus Koenig, G. et al (1981) Stile Industria: Alberto Rosselli, Parma: Artegrafica Silva.

PENNY SPARKE

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Storaro, Vittorio

b. 24 June 1940, Rome

C inematographer apher

A 1960 graduate of Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Vittorio Storaro

is one of the most gifted cinematographers of his generation. His career was launched in

1969 when he began collaborating with his former fellow student at the Centro, Bernardo

Bertolucci. Since then, Storaro’s eye has consistently explored new territories, at once

extending and renewing the excellence of his technical expertise and scholarship. Each of

his films focuses on one particular aspect of his medium. The result has been a series of

dazzling concertos: concerto for camera movement in La strategia del ragno (The

Spider’s Strategy) (1969), concerto for enses and angles in Il conformista (The

Conformist) (1970), concerto for colour in Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris)

(1972) and concerto for framing in Novecento (1900) (1976). After his brilliant

contribution to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1976), Storaro was seduced by

the Hollywood sirens and has been working in the United States since 1980. However,

his crew has remained entirely Italian as he attempts to disseminate the Italian aesthetic

tradition at the heart of the Hollywood machine.

DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL.

strategia della tensione

The strategia della tensione (strategy of tension) is a term widely used to indicate the

increased use of violence by extreme Right groups between 1969 and 1975 in an attempt

to reverse the democratization achieved by the student and worker movements of 1967–9.

Since at least the early 1960s right-wing extremism had attracted sympathizers of senior

rank in the armed forces and security services, who claimed that the unrecognized

advance of communism in every institution was undermining Italian society. The right-

wing coup in Greece in 1967 added another authoritarian regime to Italy’s Mediterranean

neighbours (Spain and Portugal), and raised both hopes and fears that Italy might follow.

The main right-wing groups such as Ordine Nuovo (New Order) and Avanguardia

Nazionale (National Avantgarde) were endorsed by the leaders of the MSI who

simultaneously encouraged the extremists’ largely uncoordinated violence as a way of

increasing social tensions and demanded an authoritarian response to the demonstrable

collapse of social order. The most lethal elements of the ‘strategy’ were the bombs placed

in cities and trains across Italy between 1969 and 1974 (see fascism and neo-fascism;

Piazza Fontana; terrorism). Subsequently, most active conspirators used their high-

level protection in Italy and abroad to frustrate judicial investigations and evade

conviction.

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Further reading

Borraccetti, V. (ed) (1986) Eversione di destra, terrorismo, stragi (Right-wing Subversion,

Terrorism, Massacres), Milan: F.Angeli (panoramic account of right-wing groups and their

responsibilities).

Ferraresi, F. (1996) Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press (chaps 3–6 analyse the origins and development of the strategy of

tension).

DAVID MOSS

Strehler, Giorgio

b. 15 August 1921, Barcola, Trieste; d. 25 December 1997, Lugano

Theatre director

The most important theatrical figure to come out of Italy since the Second World War,

Giorgio Strehler is renowned as a director (particularly of Goldoni, Pirandello,

Shakespeare and Brecht) and as the inspiration of the company he founded. In a theatre-

industrial context which had relied for three hundred years on touring companies, limited

rehearsal periods and stock sets, Strehler set up the first teatro stabile or permanent

resident company, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, shortly after the end of the war. The

company accumulated a long and rich history of productions, often reworked and

returned to the repertory after long absences, and over the span of forty years brought a

new level of excellence and professionalism to Italian theatre. Strehler’s productions

were marked by intellectual rigour and a brilliant use of design elements which, despite

their overwhelming visual impact, contributed substantially to—rather than distracted

from -the director’s overarching vision.

Strehler was born into a musical family, and his childhood ambitions lay in the

direction of music, but an interest in theatre led him to train as a drama student in Milan

before the war. His early influences were French (fruit of his wartime exile in

Switzerland), and towards the end of the war he founded a French-inspired company in

Geneva. Returning to Milan after the war, he and Paolo Grassi set up the Piccolo Teatro

di Milano in a disused cinema. He directed the company initially until 1968, insisting on

the need for a permanent company of actors and proper rehearsal periods to achieve

artistic integrity and high production values. He thus succeeded in turning the Piccolo

into one of the most influential companies in Europe, directing a vast range of plays

during this period. Some of his Goldoni, Pirandello, Shakespeare and Brecht productions

justifiably became legendary: Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (Harlequin, Servant of

Two Masters) was premièred in 1947 (and the production was revived and substantially

revised a number of times after); The Tempest was first produced in 1948, Pirandello’s

masterpiece Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) in

1953, and Brecht’s Galileo in 1963.

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Underlying these theatrically stunning and intellectually rigorous productions was a

view of theatre as—in Strehler’s own words—the ‘three Chinese boxes’:

In the first box we approach the play on the level of reality: that is to say

through the story of a family, its life at a particular moment; in the second

we shift to a historical level and in the conflict and struggles of the

individual characters we see reflected the social and political conflicts of

the period; in the third we are operating in the context of universal—let us

call them abstract—values.

(Strehler, Il Corriere della sera, 14 May 1974)

This concern with ordinary human affairs on three levels (as individual, as instances of

wider political and social issues, and as emblematic of more general universal

preoccupations) is the connecting thread which draws together his productions: the

challenge he sets himself—and achieves more often than not—is to realize all three

perspectives in equal depth.

Away from the Piccolo between 1968 and 1972, he founded the Gruppo Teatro e

Azione (Theatre and Action Group), whose name indicates a mission of developing a

more politicized and socially involved theatre. On his return to the Piccolo he produced

his renowned King Lear, which re-examined the Shakespearean text in the light of

Samuel Beckett: a simple, sparse staging centred on a circular enclosure of grey sand.

In 1982 Strehler’s focus shifted to Paris, when he became one of the artistic directors

of the Théâtre de l’Europe. Strehler had already opened the Théâtre in 1978 with a new

production of The Tempest which provided stunning visual effects, but his more

definitive move onto the European ‘stage’ was prompted, at least in part, by the

difficulties he was having at this time persuading the Milanese authorities to contribute to

solving what had become a perennial problem for the successful Piccolo: a permanent

theatre that was big enough to cater for its audiences

A distinguishing feature of Strehler’s career has been his persistent return to direct

new productions of texts already in the repertoire of the Piccolo. The best case in point is

Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters, which has punctuated, even dominated, Strehler’s

theatrical production. It has remained in the repertory of the Piccolo since the original

1947 production, being reworked and developed no less than five times. In 1952 he

developed more systematically the comic lazzi or gags from the commedia dell’arte; in

1956 he added a ‘play outside the play’, simply by having the performers not leave the

stage between their scenes so the audience could witness their ‘offstage’ behaviour. For

an open air production in 1963, this ‘offstage’ reality of the actors was further reinforced,

the stage space being flanked by the two carts of the families who made up the

‘company’. An entirely different fifth production in 1977 was suffused with decadence

and decay, as the tired and ageing members of the ‘company’ performed in a dingy

indoors venue. In the final 1987 production the ‘cast’ was rejuvenated and the action

vivacious, in a simple, sparse setting that has become one of Strehler’s trademarks.

His work on Brechtian texts is of particular interest. Strehler directed half a dozen of

Brecht’s plays, including two Lehrstücke, but of greater significance is the evidence of

the influence of Brecht’s theories of acting in his other productions such as Coriolanus or

King Lear. Brecht’s techniques of epic acting to create a detached intensity in the actor

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are in stark contrast to the emotive and passionate acting style which Strehler and his

actors inherited from the Italian tradition, so the significance of this achievement is not to

be underestimated.

Strehler has also been a prominent director of opera at La Scala; among his numerous

productions (Mozart, Verdi, Wagner), Verdi’s Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra have

been the most favourably received.

Further reading

Hirst, D.L. (1993) Giorgio Strehler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (an overview of

Strehler’s career and significance, with bibliography and list of productions).

Moscati, I. (1985) Strehler, vita e opere di un regista europeo (Strehler: Life and Works of a

European Director), Brescia: Camunia (a biography concentrating on Strehler’s theatrical

career).

Strehler, G. (1974) Per un teatro umano (Towards a Human Theatre), Milan: Feltrinelli (Strehler’s

views on theatre and its function).

TIM FITZPATRICK

student movement

Along with industrial workers, students were among the most crucial actors in the protest

movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The earliest signs of student unrest in

Italian universities became manifest in the mid-1960s. University buildings were

occupied by students in Pisa (1965), Trento (1966) and Turin (1967). Protest activities

also took place on other campuses across the country. These early mobilizations were

largely reform-oriented and restricted to issues such as rises in tuition fees, poor quality

of university estates and forms of student representation on university governing bodies.

Even the organizational forms of the embryonic movement showed a certain similarity to

established political organizations: for example, among the promoters and coordinators of

the protests were many members of UNURI (Unione Nazionale Universitaria

Rappresentativa, or Representative National University Union), a body which united and

represented student organizations of all political persuasions.

It did not take long, however, for the movement to gain momentum and to spread from

the universities to secondary schools. The bureaucratic model of traditional organizations

like UNURI was soon rejected in favour of looser organizational forms. Emphasis was

placed on the individuals’ contribution to the movement and the assembled (general

meeting) came to be regarded as the only structure able to truly reflect students’ will. A

more radical agenda was also adopted, with established academic culture and the

knowledge produced by universities coming under attack as purely functional to the

interests of dominant groups. Decision-making procedures in the universities were

labelled as authoritarian and student involvement was demanded in all decisions,

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including professorial appointments. Access to university was portrayed as class-biased,

and demands were made for substantial ‘rights to education’ in the form of grants, free

accommodation and so on for members of the lower classes.

In a further step, these and related demands became part of a more organic critique of

bourgeois society and of the bourgeois state. Issues of social inequality, and the critique

of the relationship between education and class domination, quickly replaced anti-

authoritarian and countercultural themes as the major focus of the movement’s activities.

Already in late 1968 and early 1969 the dominant language within the movement was the

language of class struggle. Students were regarded as a specific social group, occupying a

subordinate—albeit temporary—position in the social structure. This was held to be

particularly, but not exclusively, true for students from the lower classes.

Consequently, as a result of the dominance of a class perspective within the student

movement, new types of rigid, bureaucratic organizations, many of them close to radical

versions of Marxism, developed and gradually took control of the movement’s activities.

Groups of the extraparliamentary Left—among others, Lotta Continua, Avanguardia

Operaia, Potere Operaio—were largely inspired by a Leninist model of political

organization, even if with varying degrees of rigidity. They increasingly took up

coordination roles, and reduced students’ general meetings to purely ritual exercises.

As a further consequence, exclusive emphasis was placed on the political and public

dimension of student activism. Comparatively, little attention was paid to conflicts and

changes in the private sphere, in striking contrast especially to the US movements, where

the countercultural dimension was particularly strong. Intergenerational conflicts,

relationships between gender groups, attitudes towards sexuality and so on, while central

to the everyday life of movement activists, were largely ignored by New Left

organizations and leaders. Countercultural groups like Re Nudo played some role in

urban areas but their wider impact was limited. This was despite the fact that the student

movement had originated out of a broader trend towards cultural innovation among the

younger generations (as witnessed, for example, by changes in fashion, popular music

and so on); and that major controversial issues had consistently included moral issues like

teenagers’ sexual conduct (a prominent example being the court action taken in 1967

against a few Milanese high school students, who had published an article in their student

magazine addressing precisely that topic).

The student movement was also close to its working-class counterparts in its repertoire

of action. Public gatherings, rallies and marches were all widely used by students. So was

the occupation of schools and universities, once again by analogy with the occupation of

factories by striking workers. However, there were also a number of innovations as, for

example, in the widespread use of sit-ins which Italian students borrowed from the

American civil rights and and-Vietnam war movements. Significantly, although the

degree of disruption and confrontation was high, mass violence was originally not an

explicit tactical option for the movement, though its relative importance grew stronger as

the cycle of protest entered its declining phase and students’ mobilization potential

decreased in 1972–3.

Recourse to violence was fuelled and legitimized in the eyes of many students by the

violent repressive tactics adopted by police at that time. A taste of what was to come in

the following years was the so called ‘Valle Giulia battle’ in March 1968, when students

from Rome University not only successfully withstood a police baton charge but actually

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forced the police to retreat. Another reason for the escalation of violence was the

increasing conflict between left-wing and right-wing organizations, much, if not all,

generated by assaults on student meetings and left-wing activists by neo-fascist groups.

Students’ radicalization was also hastened by growing suspicion about complicities

between sectors of the state—in particular the police, intelligence services, the military

and sometimes even the judiciary—and elements of the extreme right. In particular, the

Milan bombing massacre in December 1969 (see Piazza Fontana) and the state’s

response to it led many activists in the movement to fear for Italian democracy. The

bombings also strengthened activists’ view that a new Resistance struggle, similar to the

one waged against Nazism and fascism by the ‘old’ Italian Left thirty years earlier, was

looming ahead. Concern about state response and neo-fascist activities combined with the

myth of armed struggle and revolutionary violence, popular among significant sectors of

the New Left, caused thousands of former members of the movement to gravitate towards

fully-fledged terrorism by the end of the 1970s.

A peculiarity of the Italian student movement was that it lasted far longer than its

counterparts in other Western countries. This was due, at least in part, to the presence of

extraparliamentary organizations rather than to the intrinsic momentum of the more

informal student mobilizations, which had run out of steam by 1970. It was also due to

the fact that students’ organizations had managed to establish significant, if often

contentious, relationships with working-class organizations and traditional left-wing

parties. Ever since the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, when worker protest rose to unprecedented

levels, student organizations were keen to play a supportive role in industrial action. In

turn, they also tried to bring working-class points of view into university life. There were

particularly intense contacts with, amongst others, the new grassroots working-class

organizations connected to ‘factory councils’, which had developed in those years as a

critical response to the moderatism and bureaucraticism of the traditional unions.

Extraparliamentary groups actually reflected the joint presence of student and working-

class cadres, the latter often having no previous experiences of industrial action in

established trade unions. Ties between the student movement, New Left groups and the

Communist Party were similarly strong, though often unacknowledged. In fact, despite

criticism of the PCI’s alleged moderatism, the students, the New Left and the Communist

Party all shared symbolic codes and fundamental values, as well as the perception of

being part of a common effort to change the structure of Italian society. The debt of the

student movement to the Catholic tradition should also not be overlooked. Many activists

in student and New Left organizations had previously been active in Catholic

organizations, including mainstream ones such as Catholic Action. Attention to the

negative effects of colonial rule over Third World countries, to the persistence of poverty

in areas untouched by the Italian economic miracle and to the role of education in

reproducing social inequalities, was not restricted to left-wing parties and unions. Critical

figures in the Catholic world, from Lorenzo Milani to Ernesto Balducci, contributed to

fusing Catholic ideals and social criticism.

By the mid-1970s, the entire social movement experienced a deep crisis. Most

activists demobilized and turned back to more mundane affairs; in a minority of cases, to

drugs and self-destruction. Most of those who did not lose interest in politics became

institutionalized, joining traditional left-wing parties and unions, or transforming extra-

parliamentary groups into New Left parties, as in the case of Democrazia Proletaria

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(Proletarian Democracy), which went on to contest all national elections between 1976

and 1987. Other militants turned to terrorism, and only a handful remained active in

movement organizations. The last major outburst of student revolt, before the country

entered a different political phase in the 1980s, took place in 1977. Government

proposals to reform higher education spurred a new wave of demonstrations on most

university campuses. Confrontation quickly escalated into open violence and mass

disruption. Students were killed by police during demonstrations in Rome and Bologna;

in the latter case with devastating symbolic consequences, given Bologna’s status as the

capital city of communism ‘Italian style.’

The 1977 movement differed from the post-1968 student mobilizations in a variety of

ways. First of all, there was no linkage to traditional left-wing organizations. Following

its resounding success in local elections in 1975 and national elections in 1976, the

Communist Party was close to taking government and so, keen to avoid any shadow or

suspicion of democratic unaccountability, it sought to sever its ties with the

extraparliamentary Left. The need for such a distance had become ever stronger with the

spread of terrorist activities. The PCI’s support of police repression of the Bologna

movement and its labelling of the whole radical Left as a liability for Italian democracy

were inspired by just such preoccupations.

Even the linkage to traditional values of the Left was thin at best for members of the

1977 movement. For example, in direct contrast to the basic tenets of the workers’

movements, work was dismissed as a source of oppression rather than dignity. Concepts

like party discipline and respect of hierarchy, so crucial to revolutionaries in the orthodox

Left tradition, were similarly disregarded or overturned. While the post-1968 student

movement stressed the role of students as a section of an enlarged—and no matter how

much redefined—working class, the 1977 movement conceived of them as part of the

most marginal social groups. The overlaps between student actions and the activities of

alternative centres in the urban peripheries which organized marginal youth with no

specific educational background bear this out. Even the forms of revolt reflected this

shift. The 1977 movement repertoire, when not explicitly violent and contentious,

consisted mostly of symbolic forms of challenge and irony and satire, and the adoption of

lifestyles regarded as outrageous by the majority of citizens, including those with leftist

sympathies, played a far greater role than in the post-1968 movements. These explicitly

counter-cultural traits, combined with the unfavourable political situation created by the

increase in terrorism and the greater integration of the Communist Party into institutional

politics, prevented the consolidation of the movement along lines similar to those

followed by the student movement of the previous years. The 1977 movement was in

many respects more than a student movement; it was a youth movement with a strong

countercultural component. It was also an opportunity to address themes (such as the

relationship between public engagement and the pursuit of personal happiness; between

private and public identities; between humankind and nature; between work and leisure;

between individuals and organizations) which had been largely sidelined by the

bureaucratic transformation of post-1968 organizations; and which were being elaborated

in the same years by the women’s or the environmental movement, albeit sometimes in

very different ways. This was probably its strongest legacy.