Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Théâtre National Populair in France, was Vito Pandolfi. He envisaged the creation of new
theatres subsidized by the state and based in every town with more than 100,000
inhabitants (Richards, 1991:281). The main advantage of such a publicly funded theatre
network would have been to make performances accessible to a wider audience, and the
fostering of more experimentation. Pandolfi’s ideas appeared to be realized in 1947,
when Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi founded the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. This was
the first of the state-subsidized theatres, later called stabili. The aims of the Piccolo
Teatro and of the stabili were mainly to foster the participation of people from every
social class, moving away from elite traditions and embracing a commitment to
contemporary social issues. The Piccolo, under the direction of Strehler, became a great
success and established a high reputation for itself, both in Italy and abroad. One of its
greatest contributions to the development of Italian contemporary theatre was the
introduction of works by foreign authors, notably those of Bertold Brecht who, together
with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter, became the major influences on
new Italian drama.
In the decade after the establishment of the Piccolo Teatro, another ten stabili were
created. Despite the good intentions that motivated the foundation of these theatres, and
although a few of them, such as the Teatro Stabile di Torino and Teatro Stabile di
Genova, achieved an international status, the majority led troubled lives and failed to
achieve their main aims. Their distinguishing characteristic, namely that of being
subsidized by the state, also worked against them since funds and support often derived
from political rather than artistic considerations (Cairns, 1992:112–13). In this way the
state was able to control productions, minimizing or even eliminating opportunities for
ideological opposition and expansion of social awareness of particular issues, which the
then conservative Christian Democrat governments wanted to avoid. Their conservative
nature also tolerated a firm system of censorship, which had been introduced by the
fascists but continued to operate until 1962. These factors explain the ultimate failure of
the stabili in the 1950s, as well as the small number of plays related to contemporary
controversial social issues and minimal experimentation with new forms and language for
the theatre.
Nevertheless, by the end of the 1950s Italian theatre had moved forward compared to
the situation fifteen years earlier: it had opened up to important foreign influences, and
had revised its repertoire almost entirely. It had also seen the development of new
directors and authors, some of whom would eventually become internationally renowned,
including Strehler and Diego Fabbri, Gianfranco De Bosio, Luigi Squarzina, Silvio
Bompiani and Vitaliano Brancati. Among the major plays of this period were Fabbri’s
Processo a Gesù (The Trial of Christ) and Il seduttore (The Seducer), and Tre quarti di
luna (Three Quarters of the Moon) and Romagnola (Romagnese) by Luigi Squarzina.
Vitaliano Brancati’s La governante (The Governess) explored the controversial issues of
homosexuality and became one of the most famous cases of censorship. But perhaps the
greatest name in Italian theatre during the 1950s was Eduardo De Filippo, who
represented a unique case with his combination of a strong Neapolitan tradition, the still
pervasive influence of commedia dell’arte and, from 1945 onward, of more
contemporary social issues. His most famous plays, Napoli Milionaria (Millionaire from
Naples) and Filumena Marturano, present the reality of postwar Italy in a style clearly
influenced by neorealist cinema (see neorealism). However, at the end of the 1950s
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Italian theatre was still not regarded as a real art form and, above all, had not attracted
wider and more differentiated audiences as intended.
During the 1960s, the social and political climate of the country moved from a phase
of relative optimism, deriving from the economic boom of the late 1950s (see economic
miracle), to a real social revolution during 1968–9 (see student movement). The social
unrest and political battles had a common denominator, which was the social demands of
the working class. Theatre, too, lived the 1960s in a state of crisis. The introduction of
plays of the absurd was enlightening for many Italian intellectuals: the language
responsible for the lack of communication in the plays of the absurd was equally accused
of being responsible for the crisis of theatre in Italy. Writers like Pier Paolo Pasolini
denounced the language adopted by mainstream theatre for being academic, artificial and
distant from the language as commonly spoken (Richards, 1991:284). This was also
believed to be a reason for the increasing popularity of plays written in dialects during
these years, such as the very successful plays of De Filippo. Plays written in dialects
rather than in standard Italian were not new in the panorama of theatre and had been
flourishing for centuries in the peninsula, where language unification only became a
reality after the introduction of national television in 1954 (see Italian language). Thus
the use of standard Italian on the stage, at a time when it was still relatively little spoken
in everyday situations, easily attracted the charge of artificiality. The problem of
language was also linked to a second factor, highlighted in extensive discussions in
theatre journals like Sipario, namely the lack of a real interest on the part of people who
were unfamiliar with the theatre and therefore unable to understand the many forms of
experimentation that started to appear in the second half of the 1960s.
Once again, these experimentations emerged under foreign influences, especially the
American Living Theatre and the new British drama. The strong impact that the Living
Theatre in particular had on Italian drama is witnessed by the number of small, mainly
self-financed groups that made experimentation their main aim. These new groups
worked in direct opposition to the stabili: they often lacked financial and political
support, but their productions were extremely innovative in both content and form. Their
experiments often involved the text itself, which was modified on an ad hoc basis during
performances. These companies, calling themselves collettivi (collectives), adopted an
entirely collective approach to all aspects of theatrical production, rejecting the traditional
star system under which the leading actors exercised primary control and aiming
specifically at expanding the social and political commitment of the theatre. It is true that
most of their productions proved ephemeral, but they made an important contribution to
Italian theatre, especially in opening the way for figures such as Carmelo Bene, Dario Fo
and Luca Ronconi, who in different ways introduced new concepts and artistic forms.
The common denominator became the rejection of the literary dimension which had been
such a strong characteristic of previous Italian theatre. Bene’s Pinocchio, for instance, is
the director’s own interpretation of the story and started a practice whereby fixed roles
and traditional aesthetic conventions were caricatured and often overturned. Ronconi’s
first major production, Orlando Furioso, was innovative in its use of five different stages
on which the same story was performed but from different perspectives, as well as in its
greater use of the figurative arts and puppets. Dario Fo, on the other hand, revived the
older tradition of commedia dell’arte but used it to criticize and satirize most venerated
institutions, including the Pope and the Vatican, as in Mistero buffo.
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The proliferation of different forms of this avantgarde theatre would eventually lead,
during the 1970s, to a public recognition of this new artistic expression which came to be
known as ‘alternative theatre’ because it chose a different circuit for its performances,
distinct from that of the established public and private theatres. Instrumental in the
promotion of this alternative theatre were the communist recreational associations such as
ARCI, which provided the various collettivi with the alternative venues and helped to
bringing theatre to the masses. The alternative circuit was more effective than the
established theatre in at least one aspect, in that it had a more widespread presence in the
national territory. This led the stabili themselves to tour some of their productions outside
the city centres in order to reach peripheral areas and population, where there was now a
greater interest in theatre. A second major achievement of the alternative theatre was the
creation of new audiences, witnessed by the doubling of theatre attendance between 1970
and 1990 to twelve million.
During the 1970s the frequently postponed legislation on regional devolution was
finally passed and it affected the funding system for theatre. Regions were now supposed
to allocate funding for cultural activities, but their functions were not clearly defined, and
indeed local authorities had no legal requirement to provide funding, although many did.
The procedures for applying for public funds were also very bureaucratic and time
consuming, making state funding not easily accessible.
By the end of the 1970s, feminist issues started to be recognized in theatre as artistic
expression of a movement that had grown during the decade. Among exponents of this
feminist group were Dacia Maraini, Franca Rame and Natalia Ginzburg. Dacia Maraini
set up her own theatre company, La compagnia blu (The Blue Company), later called
Teatroggi, which was linked to the ARCI circuit, and the theatre workshop Teatro della
Maddalena, for women writers, which was closed in 1990 due to lack of public
sponsorship (Wood, 1995:90). Franca Rame, working with Dario Fo, gave voice to
women’s issues in monologues like those in Parti Femminili (Female Parts), such as
Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (All Home, Bed and Church) and Una donna sola (A Woman
Alone). Natalia Ginzburg, better known as a novelist, explored in her plays the lost
communication between people, focusing most of her plays on the character of the
‘Mother’.
After the turmoil of the 1970s, the new decade started with newfound optimism in the
wake of greater economic prosperity. In the arts, the 1980s will be remembered for law
163 in 1985, which regulated funding to the performing arts. Among other features, this
law promoted private investment and tax concessions. What did not change was touring
With the main theatre companies located in major cities and with only eleven permanent
regional theatres, the issue of decentralization, so important for Italian theatre, was partly
solved by the touring of many and varied companies throughout the country.
The many experimental groups of the 1970s gradually disappeared and Italian theatre
during the 1980s became more interested in the quality of the plays rather than in the
quantity of the productions. One important director who first appeared in the 1970s but
who made his career during the 1980s was Gabriele Lavia, who was interested in textual
research and in a neonaturalistic approach to classic works.
The Italian theatre of the 1990s has focused again on the use of language. The Odin
Theatre of Eugenio Barba, based in Oslo, with its concentration on performance as an
event disconnected from the outside world, has exercised an important influence
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especially on the way in which language is used in theatre. Artistic and linguistic aspects
of performance have become more important than any realistic meaning the play may
project. In the same vein, Mario Ricci, has created a new ‘Theatre of Images’, where
every aspect of the theatrical experience, from lighting to scenography to actors, is
carefully integrated in order to highlight the spectator’s own perceptions of the
experience itself (Vallauri, 1994:525). It is this ‘Theatre of Images’ which has emerged
as a major influence on Italian theatre at the very end of the twentieth century.
See also: avantgarde theatre; theatre actors; theatre directors
Further reading
Allen, J. (1981) Theatre in Europe, Eastbourne: John Offord Publications.
Bernard, E. (ed.) (1991) Attori e drammaturgi. Enciclopedia del teatro italiano. Il dopoguerra
(1950–1990) (Actors and Playwrights: Encyclopedia of Italian Theatre: Postwar Period 1950–
1990), Rome.
Cairns, C. (1992) ‘Italy’, in R.Yarrow (ed.), European Theatre 1960–1990: Cross-Cultural
Perspective, London: Routledge.
Cowan, S. (1977) ‘Theatre, Politics and Social Change in Italy since the Second World War’,
Theatre Quarterly 29:7–27.
Richards, L. (1991), ‘Drama, Politics and Society in Postwar Italy: Theatre in Search of a role’, in
A.M.Brassloff and W.Brassloff (eds), European Insight: Postwar Politics, Society, Culture,
Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publisher.
Tessari, R. (1988) ‘Actor training in Italy’, trans. S. Bassnett, New Theatre Quarterly, 4 (14): 181–
92.
Vallauri, C. (1994) ‘Italy’, trans. D. Santerano and R. Buranello, in D. Rubin (ed.), The World
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, vol. 1, London: Routledge.
Wood, S. (1995), ‘Women and Theatre in Italy: Natalia Ginzburg, Franca Rame and Dacia
Maraini’, in E.Woodrough (ed.), Women in European Theatre, London: Intellect Books.
FEDERICA STURANI
theatre actors
In the wake of the traditional role of the capocomico first established within the
commedia dell’arte during the sixteenth century, actors in Italy have always had an
important, and sometimes overwhelming, influence on the style of theatre productions.
However, despite their importance, Italian actors traditionally did not receive professional
training but merely followed the acting style of the main actor or actors in the company,
which thus tended to limit the possibilities for personal and artistic development.
At the end of Second World War in Italy, there existed only one state school for actor
training, the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica in Rome, established in 1935 by
the critic Silvio D’Amico. It was to remain the only facility for producing professional
actors until after the events of 1968, when the turmoil among students and workers
spread (see student movement), to unsettle old practices and tradition in almost every
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sector of social and public life. A younger generation of actors with an interest in
investigating new styles in theatre emerged, giving rise to new demands for more and
diverse schools for actor training.
The Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica, renamed after Silvio D’Amico when
he died in 1957, tried to maintain its detachment from particular trends, but in later years,
and particularly after the appointment of Aldo Trionfo as its director in 1980, moved
towards a greater diversification of its training, attempting to avoid directing its students
into one particular mode.
Following the increasing demand for qualifications in drama, in the early 1960s some
statesubsidized theatres set up acting schools attached to their repertory companies. The
most successful examples are the school linked to the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (see
Strehler) and that of the Teatro Stabile in Genoa. Both schools have a similar focus on
the development of the actor, which is obtained through various acting activities
including mime and dance and re-evaluating the body as an essential instrument of
expression.
From the end of the 1980s the issues related to actor training have acquired an ever
more central position in the panorama of Italian theatre. There has also been a flourishing
of small, often occasional, private courses which itself is proof of the strong demand for
such training, rarely met by public institutions, particularly the universities. Other
important schools for actor training are those which were founded by several prominent
theatre actors at the end of the 1970s: Gigi Proietti’s Rome Performance Laboratory and
Vittorio Gassman’s Florence Theatre Workshop mirror the different views that the two
actors have of theatre: the actor’s versatility of expression is fully explored in Proietti’s
school, while Gassman’s workshop tends to develop more specific skills.
Despite these new initiatives for a full professional training for actors, detached from
any particular style, the old tradition of the great actor, the so-called
‘
mattatore
’
, has
survived in Italian theatre, largely through major figures like Carmelo Bene and Dario
Fo. Both have developed a very distinct style which makes each of their productions
unique but always strongly dominated by the personality of the artist. Bene’s approach
has been ruthlessly iconoclastic. Moving away from conventional aesthetic taste, his
theatre has attempted to overturn all traditional relationships between text and
performance by relying on his own extraordinary acting ability to bend traditional roles
like Hamlet to his own purposes. Fo, on the other hand, has created a theatre which is a
blend of clownesque improvization and social satire but, in spite of strongly-marked
social and political concerns, the work’s success is predicated largely on Fo’s own highly
personal style.
Thus, although highly original artists, Bene and Fo have perpetuated the actor star-
system which has long dominated Italian theatre and characterized theatrical productions.
Amongst the most famous and influential actors of the immediate postwar years were
Ruggero Ruggeri, who specialized in roles from Pirandello’s plays, and Gino Cervi, who
preferred to interpret classic authors from Sophocles and Shakespeare and who
consolidated his reputation by also working in cinema and television. Anna Magnani,
Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman also achieved their first great successes on
the stage, although later they all also moved to cinema and, of the three, only Gassman
has regularly returned to performing in the theatre.
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Other prominent Italian actors who achieved fame on the stage before also, often,
moving to film and television are Romolo Valli, Rossella Falk, Anna Proclemer, Valeria
Moriconi, Mario Scaccia and Mariangela Melato, while the actor who was instrumental
in bringing Strehler’s Arlecchino, servo di due padroni (Harlequin servant of two
masters) to international success was Marcello Moretti. Many of these actors are still an
important presence in contemporary theatre, whilst younger actors such as Monica
Guerritore, Gabriele Lavia and Elena Sofia Ricci have also earned a respectable
reputation on the theatrical scene.
Further reading
Tessari, R. (1988) ‘Actor training in Italy’, trans. S. Bassnett, New Theatre Quarterly, 4, 14:181–
92.
FEDERICA STURANI
theatre directors
The director made a late and much resisted entry into Italian theatre in the 1920s and
1930s, long after the role had been undisputably recognized in other European theatres.
As late as 1945, the critic Silvio D’Amico had to resist the view that the director was a
creature of Fascism, and should be jettisoned with the regime. Fortunately, developments
in the postwar years consolidated the director’s position. The growth in popularity of
cinema, where the director had been the lynchpin from the outset, helped to increase
prestige, while the establishment of the teatri stabili (state-subsidized theatres) in all the
principal cities—the real revolution in Italian theatre in the postwar period—gave the
director crucial control over programming and casting. These developments marked the
end of the traditional actor-centred theatre, and gave the director the right to impose his
or her own critical vision on the script and to make actorial flair secondary to the
realization of that vision.
The aims and tendencies of the new Italian directors became clearer with a number of
epochmaking productions in the immediate postwar period, most notably the 1945
Roman production of Jean Cocteau’s Les parents terribles by Luchino Visconti and
Giorgio Strehler’s 1947 production in Milan of Gorky’s The Inn of the Poor.
Visconti—as was to be true of many Italian directors—was equally at home in theatre
and cinema. His ‘style’ has been the subject of much analysis, since he combined in
varying measures a professional rigour, a languid, aristocratic taste for decadence and
aestheticism, a cult of the image, a taste for verismo and a torrid eroticism. He was
equally at ease with the domestic dramas of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, where
families were torn apart by internal dissension, as with such classical tragedies as
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida or Alfieri’s Oreste.
Strehler’s biography is inseparable from that of the Piccolo Teatro (Little Theatre) in
Milan, which he co-founded in 1947 and directed until his death in 1997, with a brief
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 826
break in 1968. His desire to recreate the original style lay behind his use of commedia
dell’arte techniques and routines in his celebrated production of Goldoni’s Harlequin,
Servant of Two Masters. Pirandello and Brecht were, together with Goldoni, the authors
he staged most frequently. His productions of Goldoni’s Villeggiatura (Holiday) Trilogy
concentrated on the social background, unlike his more openly poetic Campiello, while
with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, staged with the assistance of the author, he revealed the
more radical aspect of his beliefs and pointed the way to a political theatre founded on
song, word and choral movement. Strehler’s Pirandello, by contrast, was pre-eminently
the metaphysical Pirandello of the myths, as evidenced by his several productions of The
Mountain Giants.
Although he employed various assistant directors at the Piccolo, there was no Strehler
school, whereas Franco Zeffirelli and Giorgio De Lullo can be regarded as disciples of
Visconti. Zeffirelli directed in English as well as Italian, producing De Filippo at the
National Theatre in London, as well as a Life of Saint Francis and a Romeo and Juliet for
the cinema. His Italian stage version of the same play had a youthful freshness and
sensuality, as did his Hamlet with Giorgio Albertazzi in the title role. Zeffirelli brought
Edward Albee to the Italian stage, while De Lullo can claim credit for introducing
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, several of whose plays he produced.
Rarely, however, have Italian directors seen it as incumbent on them to encourage and
foster new playwrights, or to make the staging of new plays an integral part of their
professional duty. In consequence, Italian playwriting has largely languished in the
postwar period. The director’s role was viewed as being primarily concerned with
reshaping, rereading, reassessing the script in accordance with his own vision. This
convention gave many second-rate directors licence to present versions of plays which
were unrecognizable but which could be justified in the name of experimentation,
although with the very best directors this led to some highly applauded, insightful
productions.
Few directors produced more visually stimulating productions than Gianfranco de
Bosio, director of the Turin stabile, who worked with Dario Fo on Fo’s Comica finale
(Happy Ending), and who, with a series of scrupulously researched and theatrically
invigorating versions of Ruzante’s work, reintroduced the Venetian Renaissance
playwright to the Italian stage. Luigi Squarzina was director at the stabile in Genoa and
later in Rome, and perhaps more than any other similar director, was able to take
advantage of his position to assemble a quality company with an identifiable style.
Squarzina may have lacked the purity of vision of Strehler and Visconti, but he was the
consummate professional, combining social realism and pure theatricality in his
production of a trilogy of works by Goldoni, and allowing individuals like Alberto
Lionello to excel in Shaw’s Man and Superman.
The 1960s produced new names like Giancarlo Cobelli, Mario Missiroli, Aldo
Trionfo and Massimo Castri. Some were self-conscious exponents of the avantgarde,
but all were new iconoclasts, determined to break with the past and sweep away the
tradition of the ‘well made’ production. The director was undisputed king, his aim to
identify a ‘subtext’ which might have been unknown to the author, now relegated to a
subsidiary position. Cobelli produced a controversial Anthony and Cleopatra almost in
the style of a farce, while Castri produced a version of Pirandello’s Right You Are If You
Think So, in which the raisonneur Laudisi remains wordlessly playing a piano at the back
Entries A–Z 827
of the stage throughout. Their contemporary, Luca Ronconi, carved his own path. After
early productions of some Jacobean authors, he astonished Italy with a large-scale,
promenade production of Orlando Furioso. Later, as director of the stabile in Turin, he
produced a similar scale version of Karl Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind in a disused steel
plant.
Eduardo De Filippo and Dario Fo continued to represent the more traditional strain of
Italian theatre, being actor-author-directors with their own company. The 1968 movement
brought a rebellion against the power of the director, which found its expression in the
founding of theatrical co-operatives. La nuova scena (The New Scene), with which Fo
was involved between 1968–70, and the Cooperativa di Parma were the most productive,
but their impact was short-lived. The director was now firmly established as the ruling
figure in Italian theatre.
JOSEPH FARRELL
Thermes, Laura
b. 1943, Rome
Architect
A leading figure in contemporary Italian architecture, Thermes has maintained both a
personal and professional partnership with Franco Purini since 1966 and they have
collaborated extensively. Her innovative designs, ranging from small houses to large-
scale urban projects, were featured at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1980, at the
Architectural Association, London, in 1984 and at the Milan Triennale in 1987.
Thermes’s works are renowned for their high level of architectural sophistication, in
particular for their capacity to interiorize the social drama of architecture, achieved
through the analogous relationship of construction details to the building as a whole. She
expressed her views and the intellectual dimension of her work in numerous professional
journals, among them Controspazio, for which she also served on the editorial board. She
has been a Visiting Professor at the Syracuse University of New York, and is a standing
faculty member of Rome’s Scuola Superiore di Architettura where she teaches and
conducts research on the history of architecture.
FASSIL ZEWDOU
Third Italy
The term ‘Third Italy’ was coined by the sociologist Bagnasco in 1977 to identify the
socioeconomic distinctiveness of central and northeast Italy (mainly Emilia-Romagna,
Tuscany, Marche and the Veneto), by contrast with the ‘First Italy’ (the industrial triangle
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 828
between Milan—Turin—Genoa, dominated by large, early leader firms such as Fiat,
Pirelli and Olivetti), and the ‘Second Italy’ (the South, with its economy heavily
dependent on state subsidies).
The originality of the ‘Third Italy’—which contains some of Italy’s richest
provinces—rests on the concentration in ‘industrial districts’ of technologically
advanced, innovative production in small and medium-sized firms. Work organization is
distinguished by three kinds of close relations (1) between firms and clients to produce
short runs of customized goods, (2) between employers and workers, so that workers
have the opportunity to learn the skills to establish their own artisan businesses, and (3)
between local firms themselves, which are often linked by alternating relations of
collaboration and competition. Today’s market rival is tomorrow’s ally; today’s fellow
worker is tomorrow’s employer. The Third Italy produces mainly high-quality
consumption goods, notably textiles, footwear, ceramics and furniture but may also
include sophisticated light engineering products such as machine tools and motor-bikes.
In the 1970s, the export success of these stylish products established a market niche for
the ‘made in Italy’ label.
The combination of economic success, ability to respond rapidly to new demands and
egalitarian work organization on a human scale has made the Third Italy seem a highly
desirable model for the future of industrial organization. But is it the product of a unique
concatenation of local, historical and social factors, or can policy-makers deliberately
engineer its reproduction elsewhere? Theorists have disagreed. Some identify regional
historical factors as decisive: traditions of sharecropping (see agriculture) which
encouraged entrepreneurial skills and family collaboration; the influence of long-standing
urban craft traditions and training institutions; and the dominance of a single political
culture (Catholicism in the Veneto, replaced in the 1990s by the Lega Nord;
Communism in Emilia and Tuscany), which glues together political and economic
institutions and ensures the trust necessary to sustain simultaneously competition and
collaboration. Others emphasize the consequences of the decentralization of production
by large firms in the 1970s to escape the union militancy of the Hot Autumn (see student
movement), the existence of a large pool of female and young employees available for
flexible work commitments, and the active support of town and regional governments.
The enthusiasm for detecting breakthroughs in industrial organization should not,
however, disguise the diversity within the Third Italy nor the role of gender and worker
exploitation in making some parts economically viable.
Further reading
Bagnasco, A. (1977) Le tre Italie (The Three Italics), Bologna: Il Mulino (basic sketch of the
distinctiveness of the ‘Third Italy’).
Goodman, E. and Bamford, J. (eds) (1989) Small Firms and Industrial Districts in Italy, London:
Routledge.
Leonardi, R. and Nanetti, R. (eds) (1994) Regional Development in a Modern European Economy:
The Case of Tuscany, London: Pinter (see especially Part II: ‘The Tuscan Economy and its
Industrial Structure’).
Pyke, F. and Sengenberger, W. (eds) (1992) Industrial Districts and Local Economic Regeneration,
Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies.
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DAVID MOSS
Tiezzi, Federico
b. 13 December 1951, Lucignano, Arezzo
Theatre actor and director
Together with Sandro Lombardi and Marion D’Amburgo, Tiezzi founded Il Carrozzone
(The Big Cart) which, beginning in 1972, created a number of highly refined spectacles
characterized by languorous atmospheres mixing dream imagery and art nouveau. In
1980, having become Magazzini Criminal!, the group turned towards darker themes,
leading to a production of Beckett’s Comment c’est, for which the theatrical critic Franco
Quadri acted as dramaturge. A tendency to fragmentation and dreamlike images
enveloped by a musical saraband, as with the obsessive and allembracing rhythms in
Sulla Strada (On the Road), adapted from the Kerouac novel in 1984, explicitly recalled
the American neoavantgarde of Bob Wilson and Richard Foreman as well as neo-dada
conceptualism. Both direction and performance often succumbed to the temptation to
shock the audience through violent gestures such as symbolic mutilations or the actual
slaughter of a horse in Genet a Tangeri (Genet in Tangiers) in 1984. As such youthful
radicalism waned, Tiezzi turned between 1989 to 1991 towards more traditional material
such as Manzoni and Dante, further reappropriating the primacy of language in texts of
Eduardo Sanguineti, Mario Luzi and Giovanni Giudici.
Further reading
Mango, L. (1994) Teatro di poesia. Saggio su Federigo Tiezzi (Theatre of Poetry: Essay on
Federigo Tiezzi), Rome: Bulzoni.
PAOLO PUPPA
Tobino, Mario
b. 16 January 1910, Viareggio; d. 11 December 1991, Agrigento
Novelist and psychiatrist
A prolific and successful writer as well as a practising psychiatrist, Tobino has won both
the prestigious Strega and the Campiello prizes (see literary prizes). Tobino’s writing is
often permeated by strong autobiographical elements. In his novels Le libere donne di
Magliano (The Women of Magliano) (1953) and Per le antiche scale (Up the Old Stairs)
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