Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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early age, which accounted for the naturalness and efficiency of his inimitable style.
During his career, he won four Alpine World Cups, four overall World titles (1971–3 and
1975), one Olympic gold medal (men’s giant slalom in 1972) and two silver medals
(men’s slalom in 1972 and 1976). Just one step below Thoeni was Piero Gros, gold
medallist in 1976 in the men’s slalom and overall world champion in 1974. They were
joined, among many others, by Gustavo’s brother Roland, who came in third in the
slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics, by Claudia Giordani, silver medallist in 1976 in the
women’s slalom, and by Herbert Plank, who took the bronze medal for the men’s
downhill in 1976. The successes of the valanga azzurra were also a great vehicle for the
promotion of the ski industry; it was in this period that ski resorts started to expand in
order to cater to an ever increasing number of skiers.
Thoeni and friends were a difficult act to follow, but at the 1980 and 1984 games more
glory was in store for the Italian team. In 1984, Paoletta Magoni prevailed in the slalom,
becoming the first Italian woman to win an Olympic gold medal in alpine skiing. Paul
Hildgartner, already a gold medallist in 1972 in the men’s double luge, won a silver in
1980 and a gold in 1984 in the men’s singles. Combined with the silver medal in men’s
doubles in 1980, this was the start of a series of victories in luge competitions which
continued on to the 1994 games in Lillehammer, Norway. In 1994, Italian lugers, men
and women, won four of the six available medals, including two out of three golds.
The spectacular performance of the lugers in Lillehammer was matched by many other
representatives of the Italian team, which accumulated an astounding twenty medals,
finishing in fourth place overall. In a twelve-day span, Manuela Di Centa performed a
miracle of her own, capturing two gold medals and two silver in the four cross country
individual ski races she entered. She then helped the Italian women’s team to the bronze
medal in the cross-country relay competition. Stefania Belmondo finished third in the 15
kilometre cross-country pursuit. The men’s cross-country team responded with the gold
medal in the 4×10 kilometre relay and two third places in individual races. Manuela Di
Centa was the most decorated athlete of the Lillehammer games, and Italian skiers
obtained a total of nine medals, more than any other nation.
In Alpine skiing, Deborah Compagnoni took first place in the women’s giant slalom
(two years before, at the Albertville Winter games, she had won the Super G), and
teammate Isolde Kostner gained two bronze medals, one for the women’s downhill and
one for the Super G. But the Italian skier everyone expected to perform well was Alberto
Tomba. Tomba established himself as the man to beat in Calgary in 1988, where he won
both the slalom and the giant slalom. Four years later in Albertville, while teammate
Josef Polig triumphed in the alpine combined competition, Tomba won the giant slalom
again. No other skier before him had managed to take the same event in consecutive
Winter Olympics. Tomba, possibly the greatest slalom skier of all time, won another
silver medal in 1994. If his performance at Lillehammer was somewhat disappointing for
his numerous fans, Tomba made it up to them by returning the overall world title to Italy
in 1995, exactly twenty years after the last won by Thoeni, now one of his coaches.
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Further reading
Chamonix to Lillehammer (1994), An Official Publication of the US Olympic Committee, Salt
Lake City: Commemorative Publications (an illustrated volume with a brief overview of all
editions of the Winter Sports until Lillehammer and a complete medal list as appendix).
PAOLO VILLA
women’s writing
Italian women’s writing of the postwar period has employed diverse genres to explore
themes that include women’s subjectivity, disenfranchisement and the female voice in
Italian society. While not all works are feminist in purpose, many within the literary and
theoretical fields give voice to and illuminate women’s marginalized experiences and
investigate themes of creativity, motherhood and female desire. Others explore the
author’s personal and artistic vision, creating a unique perspective within mainstream
literary convention. Together, these writings contribute to the landscape of women’s
expressions and to cultural tradition that dates back centuries.
Women’s writing has flourished in diverse periods of Italian history. In the medieval
and Renaissance periods, for example, poets such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica
Franco produced lyrics of generic and thematic sophistication, dealing with such
concerns as poetic voice and desire. During the nineteenth century, writers such as
Erminia Fuà Fusinato and Vittoria Aganoor Pompili contributed to the Risorgimento and
to the decadent movement, respectively, while authors such as Matilde Serao produced
works documenting women’s socio-cultural conditions. The twentieth century, however,
has witnessed an impressive rise in women’s literary production across all genres.
In the first half of the twentieth century, authors such as Grazia Deledda and Sibilla
Aleramo produced influential accounts of women’s lives. With few exceptions, however
(for example, the writing of Nobel-Prize winning Deledda), these authors’ works were
often considered too personal and, consequently, remained marginalized. With the advent
of the postwar women’s movement, Italian women’s writing achieved both an
international audience and recognition as an invaluable contribution to Italian culture.
Italian women’s writing in the second half of the twentieth century has been greatly
influenced by the feminist inquiry into women’s identity and subjectivity. Feminist
theoreticians such as Carla Lonzi and the members of the Milan Women’s Bookstore
Collective have theorized a project for women’s liberation, which calls for a reversal of
women’s historical marginalization and dispossession. Women’s lives and daily
experiences, they note, have traditionally been shrouded in silence and, consequently,
have not shaped our sense of our historical heritage. These theorists propose, therefore,
the exploration of women’s lives and the recuperation of female subjects in history.
While this can serve immediately to uncover the realities of women’s experiences in
history, it ultimately also creates a cultural legacy for women.
Establishing a legacy of subjectivity represents one of the chief undertakings and
recurring themes of postwar Italian women’s writing. Indeed, numerous works profile
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female subjects in Italian history, among them Anna Banti’s Artemisia, a fictionalized
biography of the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, Elsa Morante’s
novel La storia (History) (1974), about the trials and tribulations of a mother in Second
World War Italy, and Dacia Maraini’s novel La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (translated
as The Silent Duchess) (1990), a reconstruction of the life of an eighteenth-century deaf-
mute woman. In presenting what has been elided in conventional accounts of history,
these works reconstruct a historical framework for women.
While revising their heritage through their writings, Italian women writers in the
postwar period have also maintained a distinctive position vis-à-vis mainstream literary
movements such as postmodernism. While postmodernist theorists question the validity
of the authorial voice and of the referentiality of language, many women authors have felt
compelled to preserve their unique voices and to subjectively recount their experiences as
both women and artists. They have also often, though not exclusively, joined the feminist
tradition of uncovering the realities of women’s lives and constructing the world of their
characters out of lived episodes. In order to achieve this aim, these authors have typically
favoured the autobiography and confessional, represented through diverse literary genres
such as prose, poetry and theatre. Perhaps the most significant work hailed today as a
historical reference point for postwar writers is Sibilla Aleramo’s account of her own
experiences in turn of the century Italy, the novel Una donna (A Woman) (1906). In the
latter half of the twentieth century, this autobiographical tradition makes an important
contribution to the feminist notion that the private is indeed a political and public
concern. The resulting personal or fictionalized accounts often depict previously
obscured elements of the domestic sphere. Serving as metaphors for women’s conditions,
quotidian elements of this sphere are central to such works as Alba de Céspedes novel
Quaderno proibito (Forbidden Notebook) (1952), Armanda Guiducci’s autobiographical
essay La mela e il serpente (The Apple and the Serpent) (1974), Franca Rame’s play
Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (translated as Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo), and
Clara Sereni’s autobiographical novel Casalinghitudine (Houseworkness).
While many authors have employed, and continue to employ, the autobiographical
style to create a space for female voices and to depict women’s experiences in Italian
culture and society, other writers have purposefully adopted more literary styles to
express their visions. The poet Maria Luisa Spaziani, for example, creates an
introspective reflection of the self and of her poetic vision in a highly crafted
conventional form. Meanwhile, the novelist and short story writer Paola Capriolo
fashions fictional works that tackle philosophical issues and feature the fantastic and the
mythical. Other writers still have fashioned a cultural theory that examines women’s
literary productions and their socio-historical contexts. In critical essays, Elisabetta Rasy
and poet Biancamaria Frabotta, for example, explore the way Italian women’s writing
responds to, challenges and/or revises literary tenets to expand the context of its social
and cultural vision. However, regardless of the genres and styles they employ and the
themes and issues they explore, Italian women authors enjoy continued success in their
endeavours to express their visions, to create a space for female voices, and to give shape
to a historical heritage which includes such important postwar novelists as Natalia
Ginzburg and Francesca Duranti, poet Giulia Niccolai, and theorists Adriana Cavarero,
Luisa Muraro, and Silvia Vegetti-Finzi.
See also:
feminism
Entries A–Z 903
Further reading
Blelloch, P. (1991) ‘Postmodernism and Italian Women Writers’, NEMLA 15:183–200.
Lazzaro-Weis, C. (1993) From Margins to Mainstream, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Wood, S. (1995) (ed.) Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, London: Athlone.
VIRGINIA PICCHIETTI
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Z
Zaccagnini, Benigno
b. 17 April 1912, Faenza; d. 5 November 1989, Ravenna
Politician
After being a leader in the Resistance movement, Benigno Zaccagnini was elected for
the DC to the Constituent Assembly and thereafter to successive parliaments.
Associated with the DC-left and a strong supporter of Aldo Moro, he became party
secretary between 1975–80, replacing Amintore Fanfani in the aftermath of the divorce
referendum debacle. Known affectionately as ‘honest Zac’, he rebuilt the youth
movement which Fanfani had dissolved and improved the image of the party, not least in
the Catholic world. The 1976 election saw a substantial influx of new faces into the party
However, although the party’s Left became organizationally dominant for the first time at
the 1976 congress, Zaccagnini was unable to rebuild the party programmatically
Following the end of the national solidarity experiment (1976–8) in which the PCI had
backed DC governments, his pro-PCI line was overturned at the 1980 Congress.
MARK DONOVAN
Zampa, Luigi
b. 2 January 1905; d. 15 August 1991, Rome
Film director
After graduating from the Centre Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1935, Zampa
wrote screenplays for Soldati and Camerini, and began directing in 1941. His 1946 film,
Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace), was considered a neorealist masterpiece (see
neorealism), though Zampa’s burlesque treatment of war themes places this film, like
most of his others, in the realm of the closely observed comedy of manners. More
engaging is the trilogy of films written by Vitaliano Brancati, Anni difficili (Difficult
Years) (1948), Anni facili (Easy Years) (1953) and L’arte di arrangiarsi (The Art of
Survival) (1954), scathing depictions of society under both fascism (see fascism and
Entries A–Z 905
neo-fascism) and Christian Democrat (see DC) rule. The Neapolitan melodrama
Processo all città (The City Stands Trial) (1952) is unique in Zampa’s output for its
seriousness, while Una questione d’onore (A Question of Honour) (1966), about
Sardinian crimes of passion, and the mordant satire on the venality of health service
doctors, Il medico della mutua (The Health Service Doctor) (1968), reveal a similarly
genuine preoccupation with social concerns.
DAVE WATSON
Zanuso, Marco
b. 14 May 1916, Milan
Architect and designer
Zanuso is one of the generation of ‘designer heroes’ whose reputation is linked to that of
the modern Italian design movement that was born in the years after 1945. Marco Zanuso
graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1939. He was a professor at
that institute from 1945–86. In 1945, he also set up his own design studio in Milan. His
experience as an academic and as a practitioner enabled him to become one of the key
spokesmen of his era, and he was involved in Italian design across a wide spectrum of
activities including organizing the Milan Triennale, editing Domus and Casabella, and
designing a range of important furniture pieces and products. He was especially well
known for his ‘Lady’ armchair for Arflex of 1951, in which he used foam rubber in an
innovative way, and for his use of plastic in the design of a child’s stacking chair for
Kartell in 1964. He also worked extensively for Brionvega.
Further reading
Dorfles, G. (1971) Marco Zanuso: Designer, Rome: Editalia.
Fossati, P. (1972) Il design in Italia 1945–1972 (Design in Italy: 1945–1972), Turin: Einaudi.
PENNY SPARKE
Zanussi
Based in Pordenone, the Zanussi company was originally formed in 1916 by Antonio
Zanussi. At that time it was a workshop for repairing stoves but by the interwar years it
was producing cookers, refrigerators and other household appliances in the ‘streamline’
style, heavily influenced by design trends in the USA. In the 1950s the company set up a
design department, headed by Gino Valle, who was responsible for the sophisticated,
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unobtrusive appearance of its products. In the 1980s Zanussi rejected the minimal look in
favour of a more ostentatious ‘postmodern’ approach to design. Seminal designs included
that of the ‘Wizard’ refrigerator, created by Roberto Pezetta, who led the design
department in those years.
Further reading
Issue 2 (1989) London: Design Museum.
PENNY SPARKE
Zanzotto, Andrea
b. 10 October 1921, Pieve di Soligo, Treviso
Poet and essayist
A high school teacher in his hometown, Zanzotto is considered by critics Stefano Agosti
and Gian-franco Contini to be the foremost living Italian poet and an important, albeit
independent, precursor to the literary experimentation of the neoavantgarde (see Gruppo
63). After participating in the Second World War, Zanzotto lived in France and
Switzerland before returning to his birthplace, where he has remained. His early poetry
was influenced by the Florentine hermetic group, by Giuseppe Ungaretti and by the
surrealists’ stream-of-consciousness techniques. Then, with Vocativo (Vocative),
published in 1957, Zanzotto began a series of experiments that juxtapose the poetic
search for an aesthetic, pure language, and the stream-of-consciousness intrusion of
everyday language that forever displaces this search. In the subsequent collections, IX
Ecloghe (IX Eclogues), La beltà (Beauty) and Pasque (Easters), Zanzotto’s excavation of
language, affected by his reading of post-structuralism, deconstruction and Lacan’s
psychoanalytic theory, led to very abstract poems where the language and its formal
constraints commingle and diverge on a variety of registers. Thematically, in these
collections Zanzotto’s wordplay is grafted onto the images and mythological background
of the Veneto region, as it moves from its traditionally agrarian past into the age of mass
media and pop culture.
In 1976, the book Filò signals a new phase in the poet’s development. Written in
Venetian dialect and containing the ballads Zanzotto wrote for Federico Fellini’s film
Casanova, Filò coherently continues the linguistic experimentation of his previous work
and explores the expressive possibilities of dialect to create meaning. This search for
linguistic coherence is explored in Galateo di bosco (A Forest Book of Etiquette) (1978),
the first volume of a trilogy that includes Fosfeni (Phosphenes) (1983) and Idioma
(Idiom) (1986). In Galateo, Zanzotto continues to deconstruct language and the unified
self by juxtaposing linguistic registers that shift from the aulic, codified language of
‘civilized’ society to the vulgar and unruly language of dialect and contemporary
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language. Fosfeni shifts Zanzotto’s search for linguistic coherence to the language of
scientific logic, although the new idiom also fails to impart clarity and unity to the poet’s
world vision. It is only with Idioma, published in 1986, that Zanzotto suggests a possible
return to coherence by using dialect and effacing the poetic self. Here the poems, written
for the most part in dialect, recapture metric structures long abandoned by the poet and
intimate that the integrity which the contemporary world’s fractured language cannot
provide is to be found in one’s roots. Moreover, because the poet’s lyrical self is effaced
to celebrate both local and literary icons, Zanzotto seems to imply that memory and
community can become substitutes in the self’s search for coherence.
Zanzotto is also the author of short stories and essays that further document his
interest in modern language and in contemporary literary theory.
Further reading
Zanzotto, A. (1993) Poems, trans. A. Bennett, Lewes: Allardyce Books.
VALERIO FERME
Zavattini, Cesare
b. 20 September 1902, Luzzara, Reggio Emilia; d. 31 October 1989, Rome
Journalist, critic, scriptwriter, novelist, painter and film-maker
Although often remembered merely as one of the founding fathers of cinematic
neorealism, and mostly for his collaborations with De Sica on such landmark films as
Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946), Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948) and Umberto D
(1952), Zavattini was a genial and polymorphic figure who overflowed with creative
talent in many different fields and took an active and enthusiastic role in all aspects of
Italian culture for over six decades.
After living and teaching in Parma for several years and contributing to several small
provincial magazines, Zavattini moved to Milan in 1930 where he met, among others, the
publisher Valentino Bompiani with whom he began a lifelong friendship. In Milan he
worked at a number jobs with different publishers, contributed to a variety of popular
magazines and founded several new magazines of his own. At the same time he also
published two playful novels permeated by a light, surreal sense of humour, as well as
co-writing the screenplay for Mario Camerini’s immensely successful film, Darò un
milione (I’ll Give a Million) (1935).
In 1940 he moved to Rome and, while continuing to write—and having in the
meantime also taken up painting—he gravitated more towards the cinema, soon
collaborating on the script of Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Walk through the
Clouds) (1942). There followed the beginning of his decisive partnership with De Sica,
with whom he made I bambini ci guardano (The Children are Watching Us) (1943), a
precursor of the classic neorealist films of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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In the postwar period, while continuing his partnership with De Sica and becoming the
most vocal proponent of neorealism, Zavattini also scripted numerous films for other
directors, including Visconti, De Santis, Blasetti, Lattuada, Germi and Castellani. For
the next thirty years he continued to work as a scriptwriter while also painting, publishing
novels and poetry, contributing to popular magazines, conducting talkback radio
programmes and organizing a wide variety of cultural encounters and events.
After having collaborated with other directors on an estimated 120 films, in 1982
Zavattini finally directed himself in his first solo film for television, La Veritàaaa (The
Truthhhh), a gentle pacifist tale which, in its anarchic and slightly demented sense of
humour, perfectly reflected his sunny disposition and summed up his philosophy of life.
Only a year after his death, his wide and varied contribution to European culture was
celebrated in a four-month retrospective at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris. His
literary works, his screenplays and his writings on the cinema have now been extensively
published or republished by Bompiani, and in 1998 all his paintings were also exhibited
in a comprehensive retrospective.
Further reading
Gili, J.A. and Bernardini, A. (eds) (1990) Cesare Zavattini, Paris and Bologna: Centre National
Georges Pompidou/Regione Emilia-Romagna (a number of essays in a lavishly-illustrated
volume ranging over diverse aspects of Zavattini’s creative genius).
Strand, P. and Zavattini, C. (1981) Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village, trans. M. Shore, New
York: Aperture (a portrait of Zavattini’s native village of Luzzara and a fine example of his
artistic collaboration outside the cinema).
Zavattini, C. (1953) ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, Sight and Sound, trans. P.L. Lanza, October: 64–
9 (Zavattini’s passionate manifesto of neorealism).
GINO MOLITERNO
Zeffirelli, Franco
b. 12 February 1923, Florence
Director
With Maria C allas and erstwhile lover Luchino Visconti, Zeffirelli revolutionized opera
production at La Scala during the 1950s. His knowledge of English led to an early
interest in Shakespeare, whose plays he directed both in Italy and in Great Britain. His
second Shakespearean film, Romeo and Juliet (1968), set box office records for
Paramount and launched an international career. Known for spectacularly monumental
productions and a keen attention to realistic detail, Zeffirelli has dedicated virtually his
entire career on both stage and screen to Italian and English works. Entering politics and
marrying, both very late in life, Zeffirelli has become notorious for his reactionary
positions, his Catholic conservatism and his homophobic views.
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Further reading
Watson, W. (1995) ‘Shakespeare, Zeffirelli and the Homosexual Gaze’, in D. Barker and I. Kamps
(eds), Shakespeare and Gender, London: Verso.
Zeffirelli, F. (1986) Zeffirelli: An Autobiography, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
WILLIAM VAN WATSON
Zeri, Federico
b. 12 August 1921, Rome; d. 5 October 1998, Mentana
Art historian
Zeri’s talent for accurate attribution and dating of artworks made him the natural
successor to Roberto Longhi as the leading connoisseur of Italian art following the
Longhi’s death in 1970. Working mainly on art of the past and strongly resistant to
fashionable trends in art theory, Zeri has appeared retrograde to some but, in fact, these
very qualities have made him one of the most influential figures in Italian art. The
monetary value of an artwork derives above all else from its accurate identification,
which is where Zeri excelled. Dealers and collectors relied on his word, while at the same
time certain institutions and sellers were piqued by his refusal to confirm a prestigious
attribution, or by his demotion of a work from the master to the ‘school of.
Zeri’s craft was based on possessing both an excellent eye and an encyclopaedic
knowledge. After having studied ‘hard sciences’, in the form of botany and chemistry, he
turned to philology and came under the influence of Longhi, with whom he collaborated
on the journal Paragone. In the 1950s he worked in Rome, where he reorganized the
collections of local galleries. During the next two decades he worked in the United States,
where he published a highly regarded series of catalogues such as the Census of Italian
Paintings in North American Collections, and descriptions of Italian paintings in the
Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the latter
often considered his masterpiece. At the same time he consulted for major collectors such
as Vittorio Cini, J. Paul Getty, Sr and Kesters. In Italy, Zeri helped to edit the 13-volume
Einaudi Storia dell’arte italiana (History of Italian Art) between 1979 and 1983, and also
wrote for the popular press.
His ideas are set out in Behind the Image, where the work of the art historian is
compared to that of the detective. Zeri highlights the need to balance consideration of
formal qualities with assessment of subject matter, style and quality, all together. He
makes the effort to write clearly, and criticizes the obscurity of much art writing in Italy
which renders it accessible only to initiates and untranslatable into other languages. In his
own very substantial series of studies, Zeri tends to begin with a specific problem and
moves from this to a consideration of more general issues.
Zeri’s labours brought him both recognition and financial success. He lived in a villa
at Mentana with his private library of 70,000 books, and in the 1990s he was appointed
vice-president of the National Council for Cultural and Environmental Heritage. In 1997
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