Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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Italiano del Tourismo (ENIT, Italian National Tourism Board) performed poorly. ENIT

promoted Italy by way of images that been in use for more than fifty years, while its

delegates, assimilated with diplomatic personnel, were generally experts in public

relations generally rather than tourism marketing and promotion specifically. The burden

of tourism marketing and promotion was relegated to a network of twenty regional tourist

and promotion boards which discharged those responsibilities with mixed success

(Bonini, 1993).

In an important and recent turnaround in tourism planning and promotion, ENIT has

established foreign partnerships, regularly participates in international travel, trade fairs

and congresses, and has supported a series of interregional projects with diverse cultural

and environmental themes, mainly by way of providing regional authorities with financial

backing. These projects demonstrate a more coordinated approach within and among the

different levels of tourism public sector administration in Italy, and reflect a wider

concern with the broad relations and global dimensions of the tourism industry. Such

developments perhaps have also helped to deflect suggestions that ENIT should be

privatized.

It is also worth noting other negative factors limiting Italy’s ability to attract tourists

from the 1970s to 1990s, amongst them Italy’s lack of quality accommodation and

transport services, negative publicity stemming from natural disasters and pollution (such

as an oil spill off the coast of Liguria), crowding and congestion in major tourist centres,

petty crime and the algae problem in the Adriatic Sea, which discouraged seaside visiting

from the late 1980s. As a result, international travel and visitor bed-nights in Italy

declined considerably throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The 1992 recession and continued stagnation of the Italian economy created inflation

in tourism services and hotel prices, thereby compounding the problems outlined above,

and further threatening the competitive position of Italy’s tourist industry. However, the

devaluation of the lira in September 1992, and the unstable political situations in the

former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Egypt, Turkey and Spain had positive impacts on

international travel to Italy. These factors combined to allow the Italian peninsula to re-

establish itself as a major tourist destination in 1993 and 1994, and led to a significant

rise in international visitor bed-nights. By 1995, Italy was fourth in the list of the world’s

top ten tourist destinations (29.2 million visitors, a 9.2 per cent rise on 1994), and was the

world’s third largest tourism earner, with international tourism receipts rising 13.1 per

cent in 1994–5. In 1994, the main origins of international visitors were European Union

residents (approximately 50 per cent, around half of whom were Germans), followed by

the United States (approximately 10 per cent) and then the Japanese (approximately 5 per

cent). In 1996, approximately 4.5 per cent of Italy’s workforce (1,063,000 people) was

employed directly and indirectly in tourism. ‘These results seem to augur well for the

future of tourism, although Italy is prone to periodic economic, political, social and even

meteorological vagaries which have repercussions on the sector’ (Francescone, 1997:5).

Clearly many domestic and global factors have impacted upon the development of the

Italian tourist industry, and that country’s competitiveness as a tourist destination.

Interestingly, as suggested above, global forces largely beyond the control of the Italian

government and the local tourist industry have contributed to Italy regaining its status as

a leading international tourist destination. Projections to the year 2000 are promising,

indicating that Italy will receive an average annual rise of 5.2 per cent per annum in

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international tourists (Francescone, 1993), with increasing arrivals from Eastern Europe

and Asia. The greatest growth potential in tourist attractions is likely to come from the

cultural, health, rural and sport tourism sectors.

The Italian tourist industry has access, admittedly limited with respect to some cultural

attractions, to an enormous wealth of natural and cultural resources whose tourist

potential has not yet been fully tapped and which far exceeds that of many other nations.

However, the sustainability of the industry will require greater proactive public and

private sector attention if Italy is to successfully compete in the increasingly discerning

and competitive global tourist market. Recent public sector policies and programmes and

the publication of extensive information dealing with many aspects of the Italian tourist

industry by the Department of Tourism, ENIT and several public and private agencies are

a start in the right direction. However, major challenges requiring greater attention from

industry and government are the conservation of heritage and managing visitors at

heritage sites, the coordination of tourism planning, development and promotion, and the

provision of facilities at an appropriate standard.

Further reading

Bonini, A. (1993) ‘Tourism in Italy’, in W.Pompl and P.Lavery (eds), Tourism in Europe:

Structures and Developments, Wallingford, UK: CAB International.

Bosworth, R.V.B. (1996) Italy and the Wider World, London: Routledge (see ch. 8: ‘Visiting Italy:

Tourism and Leisure 1860–1960’).

Bosworth, R.V.B. (1997) ‘Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian

Culture’, Contemporary European History 6 (1): 1–25.

Francescone, P.M. (1997) ‘Italy’, in G.Todd (ed.), International Tourism Reports 1:5–25.

Formica, S. and Uysal, M. (1996) ‘The Revitalisation of Italy as a Tourist Destination’, Tourism

Management 17 (5): 323–31.

JOHN M.JENKINS

trade unions

The so-called ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 is still widely regarded as the principal watershed in

the evolution of postwar Italian trade unionism, since it was only after that troubled

period that the Italian unions became powerful protagonists in both industrial relations

and the political system, and therefore either feared antagonists or respected partners of

firms and governments alike.

Italy’s free trade unionism had been reconstituted by the Pact of Rome, concluded

among the anti-fascist parties in 1944, as a unitary, classoriented, centralized movement.

However, the unitary Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), or Italian

General Confederation of Labour was internally divided into partisan factions. The

breakdown of unity—which stemmed largely from the Cold War climate—came about in

1948–9, when the Christian democratic, reformist socialist and republican factions

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withdrew from the single trade union confederation, largely dominated by communists

and socialists, and formed two further main confederations, the Confederazione Italiana

Sindacati dei Lavoratori (CISL), or Italian Confederation of Worker’s Unions, and the

Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), or Italian United Labour. As well as their division

along ideological lines, a key element of weakness for the trade unions was the

unfavourable situation of the labour market, characterized by major layoffs, high

unemployment and the labour-saving character of capital accumulation.

The situation began to change only in the years straddling the 1950s and 1960s,

mainly due to the more favourable labour market conditions produced by the ‘economic

boom’ (see economic miracle) and to the first cautious political dialogue made possible

by the end of the Cold War. These conditions permitted a certain unity of action by the

unions and acceptance of some company-level bargaining, and also encouraged some

attempts to set up shopfloor organizations in the factories. However, this was too little to

enable the unions to harness the growing discontent of broad sectors of the labour force, a

discontent which bred a period of severe conflict culminating in the ‘hot autumn’ of

1969. In the period 1968 75, the strike volume reached an average rate of 11.55 working

hours lost per employee per year (with a peak of 23 hours in 1969), a significant increase

with respect to the already high rate of 7.26 hours during the period 1959–67.

Furthermore, workers’ mobilization assumed much more radical forms than those

traditionally envisaged by the unions, and the claims advanced—egalitarianism and

rejection of the Taylor—Fordist organization of work—were highly innovative. Most

importantly, the conflict was highly charged with ideology.

Despite the unions’ initial difficulties in controlling the collective mobilization, they

eventually drew considerable benefit from it. They managed to strengthen themselves

organizationally, and they used the mobilization to install themselves as indispensable

participants in negotiations with the employers and the government, thereby increasing

the degree of recognition accorded to them by both. This organizational success meant

that the unions’ principal concern gradually became that of conserving the power that

they had acquired, while they also sought to prevent any harmful macroeconomic

consequences. This concern led to the decision—symbolized by the ‘EUR turning point’

of 1978 (a document which the majority trade union, CGIL, approved at its Congress

held in the EUR Congress Centre in Rome) to moderate wage demands in exchange for

benefits in the political sphere. Consequently, the second half of the 1970s and the early

1980s were characterized by a central importance being assigned to consensual incomes

policies and to tripartite negotiation of economic and social policies more generally.

On the other hand, during the 1980s Italian firms fully recovered the key position that

they had lost in the previous decade. It was on the ability of firms to restructure, in fact,

that the economic adjustment of the entire country depended; and the firm consequently

became the locus of not only technological, but also organizational and social innovation.

The Italian unions responded to these changes in an apparently contradictory manner.

While the central bodies mostly restricted themselves to ritual reaffirmation of

adversarial positions, in the workplaces forms of cooperation arose between management

and local unionists which were based on pragmatic acceptance of the new situation and of

its consequences. These developments concerned the industrial sector and a large part of

the private services sector. In the public services, on the other hand, the 1980s saw

widespread and fragmented conflict, as well as the marked particularization of protest,

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which gave rise to a scattering of representation and a proliferation of small

‘autonomous’ unions or radical rank and file organizations, such as the well-known

Comitati di Base (COBAS), shopfloor committees. However, despite forecasts to the

contrary, this form of sectoral conflict did not spread beyond the public sector.

The deep political crisis of the early 1990s forced the top levels of the trade union

confederations to adopt a more collaborative stance, by engaging again in tripartite

negotiation. The most significant events in this resurgence of political bargaining were

the laws informally negotiated between the government and the unions in 1990 and

1992–3 to bring public sector employment more closely in line with the overall model of

Italian trade union relations; the tripartite agreements on incomes policy and the

collective bargaining structure signed in 1992 and 1993; the negotiated law that in 1995

reformed the Italian pensions system; and the achievement of a tripartite ‘pact for

employment’ in 1996 and of a ‘social pact’ in 1998. In 1993, a major reform of the

representational system was also carried through, which led to the formation of

Rappresentanze Sindacali Unitarie (RSU), or Unified Union Representation, an

institution similar to the German ‘works councils’ elected by all workers, but at the same

time officially recognized by the trade unions as their own organizational level in the

workplaces.

Italian trade unions have, therefore, slowly regained a key role in public policy

formation as well as in collective bargaining and cooperation with employers. Although

they no longer enjoy the prestige and the large following of the 1970s, they maintain an

important position in the economic, political and even cultural spheres of Italian life.

Further reading

Franzosi, R. (1995) The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press (an analysis of strike behaviour, which provides a more general

insight into trade unions’ changing strategies).

Lange, P., Ross, G. and Vannicelli, M. (1982) Unions, Change and Crisis: French and Italian

Union Strategy and the Political Economy 1945–1980, London: Allen & Unwin (the most

detailed account of trade union behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s).

Pizzorno, A., Reyneri, E., Regini, M. and Regalia, I. (1978) Lotte operaie e sindacato: il ciclo

1968–1972 in Italia (Workers’ Struggles and the Unions: The Period 1968–1972 in Italy),

Bologna: Il Mulino (the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of the causes and

consequences of the ‘hot autumn’).

Regalia, I. and Regini, M. (1998) ‘Italy: the Dual Character of Industrial Relations’, in A.Ferner

and R.Hyman (eds), Changing Industrial Relations in Europe, Oxford: Blackwell (an overall

analysis of the evolution of Italian trade unions within the context of changing industrial

relations).

MARINO REGINI

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transavantgarde

The transavantgarde (transavanguardia) was a notional grouping of artists championed

by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva in the 1980s. Bonito Oliva initially identified five:

Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo

Paladino. With Bonito Oliva’s clever promotion—the title itself was a masterstroke,

suggesting a transcendence of modernism the group achieved an enormous success at the

1980 Venice Biennale. Consequently the artists became well-entrenched and are

represented today in art museums around the world.

The term ‘transavantgarde’ plays on the modernist idea of a small, elite group of

‘avantgarde’ artists who boldly precede the conservative majority and, by constant

experimentation and originality, finally drag others with them. Modernism itself is

‘Darwinistic’ in its belief that art evolves and progresses toward a more advanced stage,

and that its newness is the measure of its worth. In Italy, futurism had been the

outstanding avantgarde movement. The futurists joyfully proposed destroy-ing the art of

the past, and with unusual consistency, predicted that their own art would soon become

obsolescent. It was much more common, however, for avantgarde movements to assume

that their own art would somehow be preserved from the general process of change.

Another aspect of modernism was the belief that changes in art run parallel to

transformations in society, and that art can play a positive social role in forging a new

sort of person. This was the belief of the futurists, and it also came to be the motivation of

arte povera and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, when the physical artwork was

reduced to a pretext for political or ideological messages. However, once art was reduced

to a slogan or external meaning, it became dependent on its cause and when, in the late

1970s, popular protest subsided and ideological models lost their appeal, modernism and

conceptual art both declined. According to Bonito Oliva, this was the historic moment

when the myth of progress and the blind worship of novelty were overturned and art

rediscovered subjectivity.

In a densely-worded manifesto in Flash Art in 1979, Bonito Oliva outlined the crisis

in modernity. However, he noted, a few recent artists had gone back to the real process of

picture making, feeling no need to be always new or practising in the latest style but

instead travelling in their own various directions. Their art had broken away from the

need to express social concerns in order to depict an imaginary, artistic world, and it was

a happy ‘catastrophe’, the result of unplanned accidentality. As these artists ‘bypassed’ or

‘crossed’ (the geography is not clear) the avantgarde idea of art as a problematic which

confronts the viewer, Bonito Oliva labelled them the transavantgarde.

There was still an artistic elite. If anything, it was reinforced because technical ability

was revived as a positive value. But this was no longer a unified group dragging art

towards a particular future. Instead, it consisted of individuals: Chia, with his technical

skill and variety of styles; Clemente, who also mixed styles and techniques; Cucchi, with

works bursting with energy; de Maria, with his geometric and organic forms; and

Paladino and his surfaces.

Above all, the transavantgarde did not ignore the history of art but simply refused to

regard it as linear. Artists were free to pick and choose from any style or period. This was

not done, Bonito Oliva hastened to add, as slavish copying. The past is used as a general

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model, not a precise quote, and it is used ironically so the reference is obvious to artist

and viewer.

The transavantgarde was recognized as the first Italian art movement of international

significance since the futurists. However, unlike futurism and despite the success of the

label, it was not a formal movement, with fixed membership or a common declaration of

aims. The theorizing was done by critics and was more polemic than description. Bonito

Oliva initially sought to identify a geographical movement, rooted in Italian culture, but

contemporary art is notoriously trans-national, and genuine local movements are hard to

find. Technically the work of Clemente, Cucchi, and Chia is akin to German neo-

expressionism. Furthermore, it seems clear that these artists would have been produced

their work even without the label that came to be attached to them.

Bonito Oliva does offer a useful explanation for the return of figuration to Italian

painting, arguing that the figures now act as rhetorical devices rather than standing as

literal representations. However, in arguing that the role of the avantgarde has ended, to

be replaced by a sort of ‘after,’ Bonito Oliva does no more than echo the central theme of

postmodernism, that the modern period and style have been replaced by an ‘after-

modern’. Thus, in sociological terms, the ‘discovery’ of the transavantgarde can be seen

as Bonito Oliva’s attempt to carve out his own particular Italian version of

postmodernism.

Further reading

Bonito Oliva, A. (1979) ‘The Italian Transavantgarde’, Flash Art 92/3:17–20.

— (1981) ‘The International Transavantgarde’, Flash Art 104:36–43.

— (1982) Transavantgarde international, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore (the second part deals

with ‘new painting’, with the disclaimer that not all new painting can be identified as

transavantgarde).

MAX STAPLES

Trieste

From the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburgs established the city as an

international port, Trieste provided a harbour for political and religious exiles from

Europe and the Levant. It has since earned a controversial place on the international map

as the site of a series of international boundary disputes.

Before the First World War, Trieste, still under Austrian tutelage, was coveted by Italy

as ‘unredeemed’ Italian territory. Along with the Istrian peninsula, Trieste officially

entered the Italian fold in 1921. By this time it had already earned a reputation as a

regional fascist stronghold. After the Second World War the city was the epicentre of

Cold War tension between Italy and the newlycommunist Yugoslavia. In the period

1945–54 Trieste came under the administration of a BritishAmerican military

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government while it awaited a decision on its future, whether it would be Italian,

Yugoslav or a free territory. When the Western Allies returned Trieste to Italy, the city

continued to be the focus of discontent expressed by Italian nationalists and exiles from

Istria, who regretted the loss of the Istrian peninsula to Yugoslavia.

The transformations of Trieste’s political status have affected its relations with

neighbouring territories, but its linguistically and ethnically diverse population (most

notably its Slovene minority), and its ‘frontier’ identity have continued to make it an

important centre of international culture. In the early twentieth century, Trieste was the

temporary home of James Joyce. One of Joyce’s most admired writers was his Triestine

contemporary, Italo Svevo (a pseudonym emphasizing the writer’s Germanic and Italian

origins and masking his Jewish surname Schmitz). Svevo wrote the Triestine landscape

into a number of novels that were to earn him fame, and popularized the idea of a Central

European culture. It was through Trieste’s Viennese connections that Freudian

psychoanalysis was first disseminated in southern Europe (see psychoanalysis and

psychiatry). This ‘international’ cultural legacy was an inspiration to the postwar

generation of writers such as Ernesto Sestan and Umberto Saba, whose nom de plume

suggested Jewish, Catholic, Slovene, Aus trian and Italian undercurrents. Claudio

Magris’s writing has consolidated Trieste’s ‘cosmopolitan’ or trans-national, as well as

Italian, identities.

In 1963, Italy made Trieste the capital of the new autonomous region of Friuli-

Venezia-Giulia and its minority groups thus gained the right to preserve their cultural

diversity. The 1975 Treaty of Osimo between Italy and Yugoslavia was meant to resolve

Cold War differences over territory between the two states. However, the treaty’s attempt

to create an interregional economy to deal with the links that had been unofficially

maintained across Trieste’s national frontier proved to be ineffectual.

Local politicians and businessmen have attempted to tackle the postwar perception of

Trieste as a dying city with an ageing population by rebuilding Trieste’s international

networks. The creation of Alpe Adria, an economic and cultural unit embracing the

neighbouring frontier towns of Italy, Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Hungary, was

relatively successful in this respect. However, with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992 the

question of the ‘frontier’ resurfaced, and the past of Italian fascism and Yugoslav

communism have been revisited locally as a means of coming to terms with the territorial

and cultural obligations of both Italy and its eastern neighbours.

Further reading

Ara, A. and Magris, C. (1987) Trieste, un’identità di frontiera (Trieste: A Frontier Identity), Turin:

Einaudi.

GLENDA SLUGA

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Trionfo, Aldo

b. 10 February 1921; d. 6 February 1989, Genoa

Theatre director

Following an apprenticeship in acting and mime with Alessandro Fersen, in 1957 Trionfo

founded the cabaret theatre Borsa d’Arlecchino (Harlequin’s Bag) in Genoa, where for

the next three years he staged avantgarde texts. He subsequently alternated between

musical and prose theatre, demonstrating a devastating wit in approaching the classical

texts as well as a talent for discovering minor or unusual works, from Salgari to the

Elizabethan repertoires, from Hubay to Dreyer, from Pavese to Svevo, from Roversi to

Patti. Often original scripts are contextualized more widely, in satirical collages

representative of the bourgeois imaginary His overall strategy is a celebration of

grotesque registers and vaudeville counterpoint, creating vertiginous associations

between high and low culture. Exemplary in this sense are the Festa per la beatificazione

di Margherita Gautier, la Signora delle Camelie, santa seconda categoria (Feast for the

Beatification of Margherita Gautier, Lady of the Camelias and Second-Rate Saint) of

1972 and his Faust-Marlowe-Burlesque of 1976. In spite of his subversiveness and

irreverence, he was appointed head of the Turin State Theatre in 1972 and the Roman

Academy in 1980. His work often crossed paths with the elegant fairy-tale scenography

of Emmanuele Luzzati and the whimsical dramaturgy of Tonino Conte.

Further reading

Groppali, E. (1977) Il teatro di Trionfo, Missiroli, Cobelli (The Theatre of Trionfo, Missiroli,

Corbelli), Venice: Marsilio.

PAOLO PUPPA

Troisi, Massimo

b. 19 February 1954, San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples; d. 4 June 1994, Ostia, Rome

Actor and film director

Troisi made his debut at age fifteen in the theatre of his native town. In 1969 he co-

founded the group La Smorfia (The Grimace), which gained national attention in 1970s

through appearances on popular television shows. He broke box office records as both

leading actor and director of his first feature film, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting From

Three) in 1981. With Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry) (1985), a

medieval fantasy made with Roberto Benigni, and Le vie del Signore sono finite (God’s

Ways Are Finite) (1987), Troisi confirmed a very personal comic style which combined

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elements of traditional commedia dell’arte with uninhibited use of Neapolitan dialect. His

role as a neurotic character afflicted by indolence and uncertainty, reluctant to accept

conventions and social integration, returned in the 1991 Pensavo fosse amore invece era

un calesse (I Thought It Was Love But It Was A Carriage) and in several other comedies

directed by Ettore Scola. Suffering from birth from a serious heart ailment, he died

shortly after the completion of Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman), where he

played the role of the Neapolitan friend of the exiled Pablo Neruda.

ANTONELLA FRANCINI

Trussardi, Nicola

b. 17 June 1942, Bergamo; d. 14 April 1999, Milan

Fashion designer

Trussardi came from a family of designers, inheriting a well-established glove company

from his father in 1970. As a first move in expanding the company, he hired expert

technical staff to help him set up a tannery and to perfect procedures for treating and

refining leather. His research into the treatment of leather led to his development of many

softer leather products. Choosing an elegant and dynamic greyhound as the trademark for

his product, Trussardi began to produce purses, luggage and other small leather goods.

The success of his first collection resulted in further expansion into belts, shoes,

umbrellas, foulards and ties and finally into ready-to-wear leather garments. The first

Trussardi shop opened in Milan in 1976, and today his boutiques are found throughout

Italy and abroad. His look has been labelled classic but innovative. Expanding beyond the

fashion market, Trussardi created the Palatrussardi outside Milan, an arena which has

staged pop and rock concerts featuring international stars including Frank Sinatra, Liza

Minelli and Sammy Davis, Jr. At the time of his death in a car accident, Trussardi was at

work designing a ‘Fashion City’ which would include fashion schools, an area for fashion

shows, a hotel and other features. The project is scheduled to continue,

BERNADETTE LUCIANO

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UDI

The rebirth of Italian feminism after its virtual demise under Fascism came about in

September 1944, only several months after the liberation of Rome, with the foundation of

the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane, or Union of Italian Women). The Union of Italian

Women was initially made up of southern women and partisan women of the North, and

came into being as an autonomous organization within the framework of the political

Left. The impetus for its formation come from PCI leaders, particularly Palmiro

Togliatti who encouraged women within the party to form a national women’s

organization that would unite all existing groups. Members of the original organising

committee of the UDI included Rita Montagnana and Egle Gualdi (PCI), Bastiana Musu

(Partito d’Azione/Action Party), Giuliana Nenni and Maria Romita (PSI) and Marisa

Rodano Cinciari and Luigia Cobau representing the Catholic communists. Although

emerging from grassroots, the UDI developed into an extremely hierarchical organization

with local circles, provincial committees and a national executive with elected officers.

Nevertheless, it was largely responsible for winning the women’s right to vote in 1945

and thereafter campaigned heavily to ensure women’s fundamental needs including

maternity leave for women workers and protective legislation for women working in

factories and on farms. By 1949, the organization had expanded its structure, boasted one

million members and its periodical Noi donne (We Women) had a distribution of

200,000.

By the mid-1950s the UDI initiated a battle for birth control (strongly opposed by the

Catholic Church) and adopted causes such as revising the family law and securing rights

for illegitimate children. In its ongoing struggle to safeguard women in the workforce, it

fought for equal salaries and increased representation in workplace organizations as well

as proposing a salary for housewives. In the 1960s the organization campaigned for

strong laws to prevent the common practice of women being fired from their jobs when

they married thus helping to increase women’s access to careers and public office. The

UDI produced abortion legislation in 1978, while working for women’s health clinics

and attempting to initiate a referendum to change laws relating to sexual violence. At the

same time it continued its interest in humanist as well as feminist issues; having

petitioned for the disarmament of the atomic bomb in 1947, it also participated actively in

the 1986 Chernobyl demonstrations (see environmental movement).

In the turbulent climate of 1968, UDI members split over the ongoing issue of alliance

to the Italian Communist Party. Some members distrusted the larger political machines

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