Double-Edged Comforts: Domestic Life in Modern Italian Art and Visual Culture 9780228013730

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Double-eDgeD ComfortS

Silvia Bottinelli

Double-eDgeD Comforts Domestic Life in Modern Italian Art and Visual Culture

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN 978-0-2280-0410-3 (cloth) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of grants from the Italian Art Society and from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Double-edged comforts : domestic life in modern Italian art and visual culture / Silvia Bottinelli. Names: Bottinelli, Silvia, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200333917 | ISBN 9780228004103 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Home in art. | LCSH: Families in art. | LCSH: Art, Italian—20th century. Classification: LCC N8217.H66 B68 2021 | DDC 700/.455094509045—dc23 Book designed by pata macedo Set in Minion Pro 11.5/15 and Fira Sans

To my family

Contents acknowledgments

ix 3

introduction

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chapter 1 Depicting the Italian Home: History of an Idea and an Experience from the 1940s to the 1970s

79

chapter 2 Bed Stories: Sleep, Eros, and Violence in the Domestic Space

129

chapter 3 Purifying, Beautifying, and Intimidating: Visual Interpretations of Domestic Bathing and Body Care

165

chapter 4 The Home as a Site of Labour: Housekeeping in Italian Art and Visual Culture

201

chapter 5 Cooking, Feeding, and Dining: Weaving Relationships around the Table

243

chapter 6 Representations of the Television at Home: Voices from the Outside

273

conclusion Looking Forward

notes

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index

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Acknowledgments

This study would have not been possible without the support of the Center for Italian Modern Art, the American Philosophical Society, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, and the Italian Art Society. I am grateful to all the wonderful individuals within these institutions who believed in my project. Many thanks to the staff of libraries and archives who offered me expert advice: Darin Murphy, Ashley Peterson, Lauren Kimball-Brown, and Chao Chen at the Tufts Libraries; Duccio Dogheria (Archivi del ’900, MART Museum, Rovereto); Francesca Tramma (Archivio Storico Corriere della Sera); Tommaso Tofanetti (Archivio Storico Triennale); Giovanna Lipari (Rai Teche, Rome); Giancarlo Gonizzi (Biblioteca Gastronomica Academia Barilla, Parma); Marco Farano (Archivio Pistoletto, Biella); Luisa Borio (Archivio Merz, Turin); Paolo Simoni and Chiara Petrucci (Home Movies, Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna); Antonella Sanfilippo, Francesco Impellizzeri, Paola Bonani (Archivio Carla Accardi); Giancarla Melis and Maria Teresa Munaro (Women’s Library, Bologna); Adriana Camarlinghi (Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence); Abi Sweeney (Massachusetts College of Art and Design); and all the staff at the Istituto Germanico of Florence. I am also thankful for the generosity of collectors Marvin Sackner (Sackner Archive of Visual Poetry, Miami); Carlo Palli (Archivio Carlo Palli); and Giorgio Spanu, Nancy Olnick and Vittorio Calabrese, who welcomed me into the Magazzino Arte Italiana spaces to conduct my studies. At Magazzino, I am also grateful to Tenley Bick and Melissa Dunn for generously sharing information with me. This book benefits from passionate discussions with students in the various iterations of my courses titled Home Life? and Art and the Home since 1900. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation with them. My dialogues with artists and their families have

also been invaluable. Many thanks to Tomaso Binga, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Ugo La Pietra, Adolfo Natalini, Gianni Pettena, Lamberto Pignotti, Maria Previtali, Jeannie Simms, Gaia Lisa Tacchi, Michelangelo Vasta, Gilberto Zorio, and Grazia Toderi. I am indebted to the staff at the Galleria de’ Foscherari in Bologna for the enlightening exchange of ideas, and for keeping Zorio’s Bed on display one extra day so that I could see it. I extend my thanks also to curators Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Daniela Ferrari, Marco Scotini, and Alessandra Tiddia, who offered me important insights into the collections that they oversee. During the seven years that I dedicated to this project, it has been an honour to be in dialogue with a number of talented scholars whose feedback has enriched this book. Among them, I would like to mention Cristelle Baskins, Tenley Bick, Emily Braun, Cristina Carusi, Lara Conte, Margherita d’Ayala Valva, Lara Demori, Adrian Duran, Jacopo Galimberti, Giorgia Gastaldon, Elisa Giomi, Vivien Greene, Francesco Guzzetti, Sharon Hecker, Laura Iamurri, Teresa Kittler, Valerie Moon, Daniela Lancioni, Raffaella Perna, Lara Pucci, Elisabetta Rattalino, Martina Tanga, and Denis Viva. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this book manuscript for the time and attention that they devoted to viewing my work and sharing their perspectives. Their feedback has made this a better book. In addition, Jane McWhinney’s copyediting suggestions helped refine the manuscript’s style and make the reader’s experience more pleasurable. Finally, I am truly grateful to Jonathan Crago, Kathleen Fraser, and the wonderful McGill-Queen’s University Press team for their enthusiasm and dedication. When I started researching this book, I was taking care of my newborn in a house in Boston, away from my extended family and distant from their experiences of home and motherhood in Italy. Studying the domestic art histories of my country of origin made me feel more connected to the personal and social stories at the root of my own home life. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Diego, Giulia, Arianna, Gina, Claudio, Giacomo, Sibilla, Livadia, Mario, Olga, Don, and Maya for being there for me every step of the way.

x

Acknowledgments

Double-eDgeD ComfortS

Introduction

Double-Edged Comforts paints a multifaceted portrait of the Italian home by focusing on the everyday activities that were sheltered by domestic environments in the period from the 1940s through the 1970s. Although the book is temporally and geographically specific, its subject – the representation of home cultures – has meaning for individuals and societies around the world. Many associate the home with a physical and personal space – a nest that shields from external influence. The idea that the domestic realm is ideally a place devoted to privacy and intimacy was explored most eminently by the French poet and philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his influential book The Poetics of Space (1958).1 Bachelard reflects on the phenomenology of intimacy: he considers the home a source of inspiration because it contains the sedimentation of actions that accumulate through time and form profound memories.2 According to Bachelard, “the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.”3 To him, this process of sedimentation constitutes a phenomenological way of learning whereby our souls and minds are shaped through experience in space. This knowledge is not passed on by a group but takes place within individuals and defines their identity. Bachelard is interested in “how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world.’”4 The home is separate from the public sphere, says Bachelard, and a centripetal attraction draws us to this place in which we find shelter, introspection, and the comfort of daydreaming.5 Bachelard’s vision of home as a separate and intimate space of bliss that nourishes creativity and imagination may sound poetic and powerful. However, his idea of home as a place of well-being does not always translate into a long-lasting and stable reality. The walls of a home can evoke difficult and fearful memories as well as joyful ones. People can lose their homes for reasons they cannot control; furthermore, in many cases the home is a shared space rather than a private one. Home is more demonstrably an ephemeral site that may be experienced in a multitude of ways in both private and public spheres. As an idea, an emotion, a space, or a set of habits, the concept of home has historically been complex, and the specifics of its complexity morph according to age, class, context, gender, race, and religion. Scholars have widely debated the existence of boundaries between private and public spaces, between what happens inside a home and what its residents experience outside it. 6 The perceived separation of the two spheres became a topos in Europe and Northern America with the development of industrial societies. Before then, 4

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for example during medieval and early modern times in Europe, farming and artisanal production took place in spaces that were contiguous if not coincident with the living space, which was multifunctional.7 As urbanism professor and architect Witold Rybczynski reminds us, an exception may have occurred in the realm of the so-called Netherlandish Golden Age (1609–70s), when a strong appreciation of domesticity resulted in a celebration of privacy through painting.8 Media and cultural studies scholar Joanne Hollows argues that the idea of the home as a retreat from the public sphere went hand in hand with the incipit of modernity, during which time work became increasingly linked to factories and offices away from the domestic environment.9 Hollows maintains that, despite the supposed separation of private and public spheres, especially since the nineteenth century, their actual distinction was blurred by many factors, including the fact that, for women and servants, home was also a workplace and a site for technological innovation.10 Nonetheless, as argued by design historian Penny Sparke, women were particularly tied to the domestic environment even throughout the twentieth century.11 For this reason, Double-Edged Comforts pays particular attention to the perspectives of women, by giving specific consideration to the work of female artists and by looking at women as iconographical subjects as well as producers of verbal sources, whether oral or written. While taking into account the contributions of authors from various disciplines, my point of view remains that of an art historian and visual studies scholar. Rather than look at domestic cultures from an exclusively sociological point of view, I have chosen to examine artistic interpretations of the home in comparison with mainstream depictions constructed by the mass media. This text covers a multiplicity of artists and image creators, in an effort to present a diverse range of visual interpretations. Together, the wealth of examples shows overall cultural traits that encompass subjective variations. The selection of case studies reflects my intention to include nonunivocal voices; accomplished artists and image-makers share the pages with less-acknowledged ones who nevertheless deserve critical attention for their in-depth reflections on contemporary life. This inclusivity applies especially to women artists, who were often marginalized by the Italian art system in the years of the book’s focus. Most existing accounts that are based on chronological criteria, or which examine the production of certain groups and trends, end up focusing on a limited number of personalities and even artworks. By contrast, in this study I intend to disturb the sedimented canons by giving serious attention to artists who have remained at the periphery of

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the art market and of criticism. Thanks to the choice of a thematic lens, the book includes a selection of artworks that in many cases have fallen through the cracks of established art historical narratives. Thus, this book fosters the rediscovery of a mosaic of exceptional contributions, which may have been under-examined in previous literature. In addition, my thematic approach casts a new light on well-known works that have historically been critiqued on the basis of formal and linguistic criteria rather than as interpretations of contemporaneous discourses. Using the theoretical tools of art history and visual studies, I consider images (such as artworks, illustrations and photographs in popular magazines, advertisements, posters, product packaging, films, documentaries, home movies, and more) for the meanings that they construct and their power to shape identities and values. My arguments are grounded in comparisons that highlight how “our visual experiences do not take place in isolation; they are enriched by practices, understandings, memories, and images from many different aspects of our lives.”12 In mid-twentieth-century Italy, images of popular culture tended to produce standardized depictions of home life, seen as the realm of white, Catholic, middle-class families grounded in heterosexual marriages for which gender role separation was the norm. However, certain artists tended to question such fixed standards through their work. To document departures from perceived norms, this book compares widely distributed images with fine artworks in a variety of mediums. Such artworks were usually accessed by a limited and select public, and thus had a more limited impact on the construction of mass identity; yet, they contributed to shaping subjectivities and present a more diversified and critical range of interpretations. Through a comparison of popularly distributed images and fine art pieces, I aim to show that the arts can play a significant role in deconstructing social and cultural assumptions. Artistic representations are both influenced by and critical of mass communication. During the fascist years and the postwar period, popular culture became increasingly pervasive, to the point that it conveyed hegemonic behavioural models. The term “hegemony,” borrowed from the vocabulary of Italian politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci, defines cultural constructions that become so ingrained as to be perceived as irrefutable truths. In his Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks), written while he was in jail as a political prisoner during the fascist régime, Gramsci points to two meanings of “hegemony”: on the one hand, the term has an activist nuance and is used to prompt the urban and rural working classes to unite and gain hegemony, 6

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that is dominance, over the upper classes.13 On the other hand, the term also indicates the pervasive system of beliefs and knowledge that informs the individual and collective behaviours of workers and farmers even if it is not formally codified in studies written by intellectuals. The second interpretation is inspired by Lenin’s Marxist views: Referring to the particular contribution brought by Lenin in the structuring of the concept of hegemony, Gramsci considered that Lenin’s great merit was that he captured the extraordinary and decisive value of cultural and ideal struggle in the promotion of subordinate classes and the assessment of a new economic and social system. This is why Lenin’s concept of hegemony, such as it was interpreted by Gramsci, should not be seen as the expression of domination but mostly as the affirmation of a superior capacity to interpret history and to provide solutions to the issues at hand.14 Within Prison Notebooks, in a 1932 essay that traces the history of intellectuals in Italy, Gramsci argues that intellectuals form organically within dominant classes and tend to respond to the needs – both technical and theoretical – of dominant groups.15 Their work expresses the values and priorities of the group within which they are educated. Under fascism, traditional Italian intellectuals often kept themselves distant from non-dominant social groups, unable to understand their culture and profound needs. Gramsci is critical of such intellectuals because of their entrenched isolation, which he sees as perpetuating the power of the state. Gramsci’s perspective contrasts with the theories of Benedetto Croce, in particular Croce’s claim that the highest expressions of art and poetry speak a universal language, detached from contextual influence.16 Gramsci maintains, rather, that specific value systems and beliefs are intrinsic to specific social groups, and he sees folklore as the expression of the rural working class. To dismiss folklore as naïve, he says, is a mistake often made by intellectuals; folklore should rather be studied and analyzed to understand the systems of knowledge of the lower classes. Farmers, particularly in the Italian south, regard intellectuals – the clergy, lawyers, and town officials, for instance – with a degree of envy and aspire to their level of social prestige. For this reason, Gramsci says, intellectuals have the potential to influence them. But such influence can only happen if intellectuals learn, appreciate, and give voice to the values of the rural working class. It was Gramsci’s view that intellectuals had an obligation

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to exercise their influence in order to help the rural working class organize together with urban workers and gain power – or hegemony. Gramsci’s definition of the intellectual is very broad and includes different levels and types. He classifies artists among the highest level of intellectuals, on a par with philosophers and scientists.17 Artists are imbued with a particular conception of the world, both intellectually and morally, but can also initiate new ways of thinking. According to Gramsci, their role, like that of other intellectuals, is to fully and practically participate in the life of the nation, rather than remain removed from the broader public.18 Through their work, artists should become able to portray the worldview of non-dominant classes, rather than concentrate on beauty (art for art’s sake).19 Gramsci sees artists as being well positioned to critique dominant hegemonic values such as those communicated by the mass media, and to express more genuine viewpoints that represent alternative and under-represented ideas. In line with Gramsci’s thought, my methodological approach involves seeking out, within specific artworks, elements of subversion of dominant values. While Gramsci proposes that such deviations and critiques of dominant culture should be directed only toward the collective needs of non-dominant social groups, my analysis also considers critiques intended to express subjective and individual points of view. My approach is indebted also to French scholar Pierre Bourdieu’s central notion of habitus, as developed in his 1990 book The Logic of Practice. Artists, like anyone else, carry with them the embodiment of the conditions and structures that they have internalized through the practices of daily life. Bourdieu writes: Through the economic and social necessity that they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous world of the domestic economy and the family relations, or more precisely through the specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (forms of the division of labor between sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent-child relations, etc.), the structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures of the habitus, which in their turn are the basis of the perception and the appreciation of all subsequent experiences.20 According to Bourdieu, the home is the space where habitus, rather than being formed, is passed along by family members and social groups. Thus, 8

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the home is a space where self-expression is mediated by societal rules that are ingrained in everyday practices, a dynamic he calls “regulated improvisation.”21 Gestures repeated from childhood form habitus – a sedimented set of unspoken rules learned experientially from family members – which will find an echo in any future practice within and beyond the private sphere. Bourdieu recognizes that there is some variation in the ways that different individuals respond to habitus, but he argues that, overall, social groups reproduce habitus uncritically, as subjects within a group are not necessarily aware that habitus is the expression of a particular social setting. It becomes second nature, and individuals cannot therefore take the necessary distance to position themselves critically toward it. Habitus differs on the basis of class, place of origin, and other social traits; thus, it allows members of a social group to identify somebody as an insider or outsider of such a group. For example, habitus is manifest in the way one might perform quotidian gestures, such as sitting on a chair, consuming drinks and foods, talking to guests, and more. When there is a change of context, because of travel, for instance, a person’s habitus might be promptly noticed, signalling a nonbelonging to the new context. As a concept, Bourdieu’s habitus is not unrelated to Gramsci’s idea of hegemony. However, while for Gramsci the recognition of hegemonic structures allows individuals and groups to critically deconstruct such structures, Bourdieu does not believe in the complete autonomy of a subject’s responses. This book analyzes artworks in which habitus and critical thinking are balanced to varying degrees, and often highlights the strength of independent interpretations against habitus. While Bourdieu finds that the home is a space that is infiltrated by social and political forms of control through the reproduction of habitus, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues that it is in the personal space of the home that we can be the most disconnected from outside control, and that for this reason it should be a model for behaviour in the public sphere as well. In his book The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre comprehensively discusses the transition between mental space, material space, and social space, all of which had been studied as separate realms by varying disciplines such as psychology, literature, physics, architecture, and the social sciences.22 Lefebvre considers the mid-twentieth century as a time when most social spaces became dominated and defined by the state through controlling regulations and urban planning. Presented as absolute and rational, such spaces were designed to suppress forms of resistance and individual interpretations.

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Lefebvre advocates, rather, for the “production of space,” a process achieved at the physical level through a continuative experience, and at the psychological level by the attribution of symbolic meanings. He writes: Private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space. In the best of circumstances, the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated. A situation of this kind exemplifies a social practice which, though still immediate, is close, in concrete terms, to the work of art. Whence the charm, the enduring ability to enchant us, of houses of this kind. It should be noted that appropriation is not effected by an immobile group, be it a family, a village, or a town; time plays a part in the process, and indeed appropriation cannot be understood apart from the rhythms of time and of life.23 “The best of circumstances” mentioned by Lefebvre do not include dictatorial regimes in which the government makes an active effort to infiltrate the private sphere. In the case of Italian fascism, architects and home-economics advocates contributed to propaganda efforts to educate women about their domestic role, which was seen as an extension of fascist ideology. According to interior design historian Imma Forino, for example, the fascists promoted an ideal of the kitchen space (her 2019 book is titled La Cucina), where women were meant to live most of their lives, while remaining subjugated to male authority.24 Governmental infiltration of that sort puts Lefebvre’s concept of the autonomy of the private sphere to the test; yet it must be pointed out that the main object of Lefebvre’s sociological analysis was the postwar period in which he lived. Even at such a time, one should ponder the role of the media in providing standards of domestic life that intersect with and attempt to control private behaviors. Notwithstanding external pressures, according to Lefebvre, a subject can make a space their own or, to use his own term, appropriate the space, when they are free to perform the same activities, curated by themselves, interacting over and over again with an environment. Appropriation is more likely to take place in the home than outside it. Lefevbre acknowledges the role of both inhabitants and artists who model ways of appropriating existing spaces through their imagination. He speaks of spaces that are imaginatively formed in this way as representational space, which he defines as: “space as directly lived through its associated images and

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symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. It is the dominated … space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.”25 He quotes from Paul Klee to argue that “artists – painters, sculptors or architects – do not show space, they create it.”26 Lefebvre’s interest in artistic practice as a form of appropriation of space is particularly useful to the theoretical structure of this book, as it helps position the artworks I analyze as non-passive interpretations that reinvent given domestic spaces in creative and diverse ways. There is a dialectic between external forces and subjective experience in all the above-mentioned theories. Structures such as hegemony (Gramsci), habitus (Bourdieu), the state (Lefebvre), and the urban and modern space (Bachelard) are framed in opposition to various forms of autonomy – of the individual or the group – that find differing expressions in each thinker’s philosophy. While Bourdieu finds that external structures are dominant over individual initiative, Gramsci, Bachelard, and Lefebvre find subjective and collective resistance possible. For Bachelard and Lefebvre, the domestic sphere is precisely where such forms of critical autonomy and imagination can be nurtured. The visual analyses in this book are imbued with a similar dialectic between external structures (often conveyed by the mass media), and subjective responses (often shown in artworks). That said, there is no constant rigid separation between external values and subjective expression: sometimes widely circulating popular images propose subtle yet subversive messages; and sometimes individual artworks become unintentional expressions of habitus and hegemony. From a disciplinary and methodological perspective, art history, being concerned with decoding subjective expressions in context, is well equipped to investigate a variety of forms of appropriation of domestic spaces valuing such diversity of expressions, while also considering the impact that societal values may have had on personal interpretations. To account for a broad variety of subjective positions, I have chosen to include a broad selection of artists, as mentioned above. This methodological choice allows me to reconstruct a multifaceted idea of the home creating a choral effect composed by the harmony, or sometimes even the dissonance, of individual voices. Bachelard, Bourdieu, and Lefebvre agree that repeated domestic actions play a crucial role in defining individual as well as social identity in both

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the private and the public spheres. For all three of them, practice and phenomenology have pivotal relevance in determining the relationship between subjects, groups, and home environments. While the physical space and the objects that inhabit it are of clear importance when speaking of domestic cultures, repeated actions can be considered even more defining. Through iterated movements, the body acquires knowledge and possibly reshapes it by forming memories that sediment through time, cementing individual as well as group habits. Informed by Bachelard, Bourdieu, and Lefebvre, the structure of this volume is based on domestic activities and their interpretation in Italian art and visual culture. Its focus on domestic practices is what differentiates this book from other publications that examine home cultures on the basis of a house’s architectonic division into rooms such as the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom.27 Looking at the Italian home as a juxtaposition of separate spaces with distinctive characteristics would result in a fragmented and partial analysis: in the period discussed by this study – from the 1940s to the 1970s – residents, guests, and objects shifted from one room to another in flexible ways in the small and multifunctional apartments where the majority of Italians lived. ..::.. : ..::.. : ..::.. : ..::.. The importance of private life in twentieth-century Italy has been highlighted by historians Paul Ginsborg28 and John Foot,29 both of whom analyze the continuity between fascist and post-fascist experiences. In order to stress such continuity, the timeline of Double-Edged Comforts puts into question the common historiographic separation between pre- and postwar periods. In regard to art historical narratives, the book’s structure encourages readers to examine the connections between 1960s and 1970s art – a popular subject in Italy in recent years – and art created in the previous decades. From a discursive perspective, the volume’s narrative allows us to compare and contrast different generations’ relationship to ideas of privacy and family, as exemplified by the themes of communal living and nomadism. Such experiences were forced upon the adults who went through World War II, were rejected right afterward in the context of the economic growth of the 1950s, and then were ironically embraced by their children, who cycled back to communal living as a form of counterculture in the late 1960s and 1970s. A circular structure of this nature allows my timeline to begin and end with ideas that echo one

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another. The book’s narrative also casts light on the interconnection between the traumatic loss of the home due to the war and the subsequent clinging to private life in the 1950s, which itself contributed to the rise of feminist and countercultural reactions in the 1970s. The first chapter functions as an overview of domestic representations that responded to the changing contexts of the war and postwar periods. The historical narrative starts with the destruction of homes during the bombings of World War II, examines the phenomenon of the rapid reconstruction of residential buildings after the war, and looks at the postwar attachment to the home, which was represented as a secure haven for the family. It then examines the feminist critique of traditional domestic cultures as well as the countercultural deconstruction of sedentary living during the late 1960s and early 1970s by studying the ways in which art and visual culture represented and processed these historical situations. The ensuing chapters follow the same trajectory, addressing specific domestic activities, rather than the home as an idea and an environment in itself. The second chapter focuses on sleeping, love-making, and domestic violence. Artists such as Felice Casorati and Fausto Melotti use the loss of control during sleep as a metaphor for the Italian condition under fascism. In the 1950s, in a manner symptomatic of the more hopeful atmosphere of the postwar decades, design magazines such as Domus and women’s magazines such as Grazia portray sleeping as a healthy habit. During the economic miracle, pop artist Cesare Tacchi critiques mass consumption by highlighting the way it infiltrates even the privacy of the bedroom. Natural patterns on upholstery are the only index of nature in an environment crowded with plastic materials. Arte povera artists Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis explore the combination of artificial and natural materials in new homes, while Pierpaolo Calzolari focuses on the intimacy of the mattress as a metonym for the body. The bed signifies a profound sense of personal identity in Ketty La Rocca’s performance Je, where she lies in bed with the letter J, which is pronounced Je (that is “I”) in French. The reference to autoerotism points to the bedroom as a site of self-discovery. The sincerity and authenticity of sleep and love put the subject in a position of vulnerability, which is explored by artists like Giosetta Fioroni and Valerio Adami, who address domestic violence in their practice. Chapter 3 surveys other private domestic practices such as bathing and body care. Magazines from the 1940s illustrate these activities as being necessary

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to a healthy and modern society at a time in which few households in Italy enjoyed running water in their homes. With the improvement of general economic conditions in the postwar era, advertisers aimed to sell bathroom fixtures by emphasizing the erotic potential of clean female bodies. Artist Antonietta Raphaël Mafai looks instead at bathing as a way of expressing maternal care through bodily contact, which is expressed by the tactile nature of her sculptures. Other artists, like Elio Marchegiani and La Rocca, mock the language of advertisements to show how the association of body care and sex results in an objectification of women’s bodies. Domenico Gnoli and Michelangelo Pistoletto perceive the bathtub and bathing as a source of surreal and imaginative stories that engage with childhood fantasies. Finally, countercultural ideas emerge in Ugo La Pietra’s performances, where the artist shaves in the middle of the street in an anonymous periphery. La Pietra claims that public space should feel as comfortable as the private sphere to residents of all classes. The ideal of the home as a comfortable and private environment is questioned by chapter 4, which discusses the house as a site of labour, especially for women. Both Christian Democrats and Communists envisioned a return to traditional family structures after the resistance, thus encouraging women’s role as housekeepers. Widely distributed magazines, advertisements – and later television – reinforced this ideal. Artist Renato Guttuso, who supported the official Communist agenda, depicted women’s work in the house by portraying their efforts as manual fatigue; housework was represented as a means of participating in the class struggle. By contrast, female artist Fillide Levasti painted women’s chores as being unaffected by the transition from fascism to democracy and presented women’s rhythmic body movements as forms of resigned habitus. Visual poets like Lamberto Pignotti and Mirella Bentivoglio were more outspoken, and used irony to show the flaws of fixed patriarchal structures. To Luciano Fabro, who was part of the arte povera movement for a few years, housework felt intriguing both because of its variations within repetitive patterns and because of the fact that it required constant maintenance. His works Floor Tautology and Three Ways of Arranging Sheets also show an association between domestic chores and personal memories. One of the ways of performing labour in the home is cooking, and chapter 5 is dedicated to that activity. Much of the debate related to this subject revolved around the dialectic between tradition and modernity. Some artists,

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like Renato Guttuso and Maria Lai, represented traditional ways of processing foods. In their images, tomato sauce and bread are made by hand. In Lai’s case, bread also becomes the very matter of sculpture. Lucia Marcucci, Piero Manzoni, Mimmo Rotella, and Luciano Ori explore the effects of industrial foods like canned meat and baby biscuits on centuries-old Italian food cultures that are connected to rural routines. Marcucci also highlights how mass consumerism and processed ingredients diminish women’s power in the kitchen. In the 1970s, some artists like Gianfranco Baruchello and Global Tools returned to rural activities in an effort to test the possibility of self-sufficiency outside the market system, while being aware of the practical limits of their experiments. The final chapter looks at the invasion of private space brought about by television. As seen in postwar home movies and described by oral sources, television gained increasing centrality in domestic routines starting in the late 1950s. This chapter analyzes the tv set and the practice of watching television at home in Italian art of this period. Fabio Mauri referred to or interacted with the tv screen to prompt viewers’ imagination through painting and happenings. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mario Schifano analyzed how iconic and ever-flowing television images could affect individual subjectivities and domestic habits. Despite their different conceptual standpoints, both Mauri and Schifano negotiated between the personal realm of subjectivity and the public dimension of television. Reflecting on the public sources of television programming, Gianni Pettena cast a generally negative judgment on audiences’ lack of critical response. His sculptural and performative piece Applausi (Applause, 1968) inferred that the public became dependent on television’s perceived authority. Looking at the impact of television on domestic relations, Mirella Bentivoglio’s Azione Anti-TV (1978) acknowledges that television programs replaced human interactions in the home realm. Her work frames the perspective of a child, who is quickly put to bed in the evening so that the parents can sit down in front of their favourite show. The mass media penetrate the private sphere with uncontrollable consequences. Overall, Double-Edged Comforts pans outward from the most intimate to the most public activities performed in the domestic space. It begins by discussing more secluded aspects of home life such as bedroom and bathroom practices, which, due to their invisibility to the public eye, may be as dangerous as enjoyable. The central chapters look at activities like housework and cooking, which maintain the domestic space as a haven for some and

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a site of labour for others. Finally, the last chapter discusses the television as a perceived connection with the world beyond the home. While in Italy some claimed that the advent of television allowed participation in the public sphere from the comfort of the private space, selected artworks illustrate the disrupting effects of its pervasiveness on domestic life. Each of the activities discussed in individual chapters can facilitate introspection, space appropriation, and identity construction within the home; yet each also harbours the potential for violence and subjugation. Thus, the comforts of the domestic sphere reveal themselves as double-edged, capable of both nurture and harm.

CHAPTER 1

Depicting the Italian Home History of an Idea and an experience from the 1940s to the 1970s

1.1 Aerial view of rome, published in “the bombing of rome,” Life Magazine, 9 August 1943, 16–17. © Italian Air Force.

Physical and Emotional Destruction: Representations of the Home during World War II Comparing Life Magazine photographs and Luigi Comencini’s film Tutti a Casa! (Everybody Go Home! 1960)

Despite initial hopes that World War II would have little impact on civilians in Italy, a sudden change took place in 1942. Turin-based writer Natalia Ginzburg, in her novel Family Sayings, describes the moment when the living conditions of the Italian population were catastrophically altered: We supposed that the war would overwhelm us and turn our lives upside-down. On the contrary many people remained unaffected in their houses, living as they had always done. When, however, everyone was thinking that they had got away with it at little cost, and that there would be no upheavals of any sort, no destruction of homes, neither flights nor persecutions, all of a sudden bombs and mines exploded everywhere; houses collapsed, and the streets were full of ruins, soldiers and fugitives. There was not a single person left who could pretend that it was nothing, shut his eyes, or stop his ears, or hide his head under the pillows, there was not one. The war was like that in Italy.1 The abrupt explosion of violence toward both the populace and the domestic environment generated a deep collective trauma, the effects of which continued to reverberate for at least thirty years after the end of the war. It was with the so-called area bombings, consisting of targeting densely populated areas, that the destruction of everyday routines began. The Allies – British and American air forces in particular – started adopting such a strategy in 1942. Their purpose was to instill fear among civilians and trigger rebellion against Benito Mussolini’s fascist government, which had ruled the country for about twenty years.2 Representations of the attacks published by the American press, such as the photograph in the 1943 Life Magazine article “The Bombing of Rome,” show cities from a bird’s eye perspective. From that perspective, residential centres look almost like abstract and lifeless targets.3 But for those who experienced the airstrikes on the ground – their bodies and belongings being at risk, or actually harmed – a whole way of life was to change.

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1.2 and 1.3 Luigi Comencini, Tutti a Casa! 1960. Film stills. Courtesy Tisch Library, Tufts University.   

Among the abundant Italian depictions of the ruins caused by the area bombings, the interpretation in Luigi Comencini’s 1960 film Tutti a Casa! (Everybody Go Home!), produced several years after war’s end, stands out for the light it sheds on a repertory of domestic milieux. Comencini, an Italian film director who had emerged in the late 1940s, was associated primarily with the commedia all’italiana genre, which mixed tragedy and irony to comment on social issues.4 As a non-contemporaneous account on the experience of war, the film cannot be considered a primary source. That said, the relative chronological distance from the facts that Comencini describes gives him a psychological distance as well, and this allows a more comprehensive and even cynical view of the tragic subject matter. Everybody Go Home! is indicative of the persistence of World War II in the Italian collective memory, and the film’s popularity suggests that the public found in it a relatable story that helped them process the enduring trauma associated with the loss of their domestic spaces during the war. The movie tells the story of Lieutenant Alberto Innocenzi – played by Alberto Sordi – and his soldiers as they try to find their way back home after the signing of an important armistice by Marshal Pietro Badoglio on 8 September 1943. Before that day, Italian forces were allied with the German army, which was based in part on Italian territory, to fight against the Allies. Just as the armistice was signed, Italy suddenly changed sides, officially backing the Allies against the Nazis, who nevertheless still had a strong presence in the country. Italian soldiers who had previously collaborated with German platoons were now attacked by them, and sometimes had to flee their military bases to find safety. During their chaotic march, each of the main characters of Everybody Go Home! thinks of the home as an ideal place of peace and affection to aspire to but which, in the film, materializes only temporarily into reality. As they wander in groups or alone through several Italian regions (from Veneto to Emilia, Lazio, and Campania), Innocenzi and his companions come across a range of domestic scenarios or lack thereof, given that in many cases houses were destroyed and the people who lived in them displaced. There is the country house where they can freshen up and get clean clothes; the roof under which they find the comfort of sexual encounters; and the shelter where they can sleep, share a meal with their hosts and, in one instance, with an American soldier hidden by a local family in a gesture of solidarity.

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For some, the home is a place of danger rather than a safe harbour. The group meets, for example, a young Jewish woman (played by Carla Gravina) who must escape her wealthy residence after her family is captured. In Everybody Go Home! the portrayals of home are complex, imbued with conflict and loss, power struggles, and sometimes lack of basic necessities – all of which are intertwined with gestures of love and expressions of personal identity. In contrast with Gaston Bachelard’s theories,5 which were published just two years before Everybody Go Home! was first screened in Italy, Comencini does not represent the home as a private space. Rather, the sequence of homes that the soldiers witness on their travels feel like communal experiences through which extended family, friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers hope to find refuge from violence. Communality is at times imposed on the residents, who are forced to share their rooms with characters ranging from members of the military (as in the case of Innocenzi’s father, played by Eduardo De Filippo) to prisoners or refugees. Comencini shows how the violence of war entered domestic walls. Bombs, house searches, and various offenses turn bricks into fragile membranes that fail to protect. The war made the infiltration of the public realm into the home more blatant than any fascist propaganda and mass-media influences that Italy had seen in the previous two decades. The violence of the bombings was fully exposed, no longer cloaked in the insidious and deceiving qualities of hegemony – the concept described by politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci (see the Introduction). The set of Everybody Go Home! makes no effort to conceal the invasive nature of the war. The film shows ruined buildings reduced to mere skeletons that serve as a backdrop for groups and individuals performing everyday actions, obliged to rely on makeshift shelters fashioned of debris and holes in the ground. Everyday resistance in the illustrations for La Domenica del Corriere

Some situations and sites that Everybody Go Home! represents with the disillusion permitted by historical distance find a parallel in more emotional wartime illustrations published in the popular magazine La Domenica del Corriere. The magazine was a Sunday publication of the widely distributed daily paper Il Corriere della Sera, based in Milan. During the fascist régime, the editorial perspective was aligned with the government – a position that is

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reflected in the La Domenica del Corriere’s stories of the early to mid–1940s. In the captions accompanying the illustrations of Achille Beltrame, Walter Molino, Sante Albertarelli, and other artists for the magazine covers,6 the Allies are portrayed as the enemy that inhumanely targets the civil population and condemns it to extreme living conditions. The captions add politicized meaning to the images, though Beltrame, in particular, was reluctant to depict the Nazis in a positive light and eventually resigned in 1944.7 The war illustrations by Beltrame and his peers often recount narratives of people who continue trying to accomplish basic, everyday tasks despite their meagre means. For example, the cover image, titled “Sicilia Eroica” (“Heroic Sicily”) by the editor and printed on 27 June 1943, shows a group of figures who share a small underground shelter to keep themselves safe during the Allies’ offense. Diverse in age, gender, and class, the group needs to coexist in the same restricted environment while individuals continue with chores or entertain themselves with small diversions. At the centre of the composition is a man intently repairing shoes, with a woman beside him seemingly mending clothes, while children play on the floor nearby. Seated on beds, another man reads a newspaper and a woman hugs a child. The rhetoric of the caption, which uses terms like “heroic,” “brave,” and “fearless” to describe the locals’ reaction to the incursion of the enemy, seems to belie the ordinary character of the visual representation. Despite the scene’s apparent passivity, it illustrates how resilience and resistance went hand in hand with attempts to continue everyday life. Historian Anna Bravo has highlighted that this was an effort undertaken mainly by women engaged in forms of civil resistance to the violence of war, no matter the identity of the perpetrator (whether Allies, Nazis, or even partisans). For many, there was a constant negotiation of mezzi e fini – means and goals, risk and basic needs.8 A similar form of negotiation can be seen in other illustrations of La Domenica del Corriere describing specific episodes that occurred during the area bombings. One of them is Beltrame’s “Notte di Fuoco a La Spezia” (“Night of Fire in La Spezia”), published right after Badoglio’s armistice in September 1943. The image shows how life needs to go on even under dramatic circumstances. Here Beltrame depicts the real story of a midwife who helped a Ligurian woman give birth during an airstrike, with bombs exploding right outside the window. The composition recalls Renaissance representations of the Birth of the Virgin, with the topos of Mary half-seated in bed – supported by her forearms, upper body in a slight twist – and a female figure standing

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1.4 Achille beltrame, “Sicilia eroica,”

La Domenica del Corriere, 27 June 1943; cover. Courtesy Corriere della Sera Foundation, materials from the Archivio Storico.

1.5 Achille beltrame, “Notte di fuoco a la Spezia,” La Domenica del Corriere, 19 September 1943; cover. Courtesy Corriere della Sera Foundation, materials from the Archivio Storico.

1.6 Walter molino, “Nelle Zone Devastate di milano,” La Domenica del Corriere, 5 September 1943; cover. Courtesy Corriere della Sera Foundation, materials from the Archivio Storico.

at her bedside.9 Despite the compositional similarities, Beltrame’s illustration portrays distress and dramatic emotional reactions that are generally not seen in Renaissance iconographies of the Birth of the Virgin. Even with the imminent risk outside the home and the visibly unsettling effect on the protagonists, who appear frozen in surprise as objects tilt and fall all around them, Beltrame portrays the successful delivery of the child. Models of resilience, the women in the illustration emanate a sense of strength and accomplishment that encourages viewers to carry on and resist in the face of the most unliveable conditions. Ancient and modern ruins: Walter Molino’s “In the Devastated Areas of Milan” (1943)

Much like other illustrations for La Domenica del Corriere, “Nelle Zone Devastate di Milano” (“In the Devastated Areas of Milan”), a cover image published on 5 September 1943 and signed by Walter Molino, depicts the effort to survive and maintain home life after area bombings. Here, however, the caption avoids the use of heroic terms, giving a simple description of the scene: “In the Devastated Areas of Milan (A Group of Victims, Roughly Encamped, Improvise a Bivouac among the Ruins).” Rather than capture a climactic event or tragedy such as a bombing in progress, the illustration pictures the aftermath of an attack. The temporality of the image seems slow and quotidian. The violence is over, yet it is a fresh and painful memory, and the orderly past evidenced by fragments of the ruins is very close: it is a past that has been torn away in the traumatic flash of a moment. A short digression on the meaning of ruins in Italian visual culture helps us to more fully interpret Molino’s illustration. For the Italian public, and certainly for La Domenica del Corriere’s artist, modern ruins inevitably recalled the ancient and medieval ones that were part of urban landscapes. Painterly interpretations of ruins – from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century and into late 1910s with Metaphysical art (metafisica) – elicit a sense of fascination, whether inspired by admiration for classical culture, pre-Romantic nostalgia, or a sense of mystery and enigma. No such fascination is detectable in wartime illustrations, in particular in Molino’s “In the Devastated Areas of Milan.” In this illustration, there is no awe-inspiring rediscovery of ruins after centuries of dust deposits, and no piecing together of mysterious and ancient narratives. The memory of everyday life within

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1.7 mario mafai, Demolizione dei Borghi, 1939. Oil on canvas, 49 × 62 cm. © Centro Studi Mafai Raphaël.

the freshly destroyed residential buildings is all too familiar. The sedimented identities that slowly accumulate in the domestic corners that are described by Bachelard are wiped out in an abrupt moment,10 and the new condition of homelessness requires a random adaptation that only underscores the magnitude of the loss. According to Brian Dillon, the temporality elicited by ruins is multifaceted. The remaining fragment is an index of the whole, and as such it functions as a reminder of a past that has slipped away. At the same time, a ground zero opens up future possibilities11 – a notion that becomes the main concern of postwar architects and designers during the period of the Reconstruction. Nonetheless, Molino’s illustration includes little suggestion of a possible future. In the immediate aftermath of the destruction, the characters look rueful and resigned, as if they had just experienced the end of the world. In addition to alluding to classical ruins, the wartime destruction of the urban fabric renewed memories of the fascist demolitions of the 1930s such as those that took place in Rome. Mussolini ordered the demolition of entire residential areas to allow for scenic views of symbolic Roman monuments, and visual artists depicted the destruction in painterly representations. Rome-based Mario Mafai, a member of the anti-fascist Scuola Romana or Scuola di Via Cavour – a loose group of artists named for the street of the apartment where they met, also the studio of Mafai and his wife Antonietta Raphaël – turned his attention to such radical urban-planning policies through a series of paintings titled Demolizioni (Demolitions) created between 1936 and 1939.12 Mafai omits any reference to the specific historical circumstances in the works. The images seem suspended in time, as if depicting universal feelings of desolation, and the nearly abstract appeal of the composition emphasizes the absence of context-specific information. The interior walls of the apartments form a sort of collage of juxtaposed geometries, harmonized by the tonal palette. No human presence interferes with the loneliness of the urban landscapes, yet, in some paintings, signs of everyday life emerge in the corners of the buildings: clothes hang from window drying racks and non-functioning interior doors lean on walls. Art historian Cesare Brandi analyzes Mafai’s Demolitions in 1939 by highlighting their intimate nature: [For] Mafai the Demolitions were the [Roman] ruins, not the noble aqueducts or groups of sulphur-colored columns, but poor, gutted

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1.8 Achille beltrame, “tutto Serve,” La Domenica del Corriere, 17 october 1943, cover. Courtesy Corriere della Sera Foundation, materials from the Archivio Storico.

middle-class rooms, the map of France torn to shreds, the coneshaped clouds of smoke rising from the chimneys, the shattered yet still warm cells of the homes, so that it seemed like a delicacy to look at the gutted interiors from the outside.13 In Mafai’s 1939 Demolizione dei Borghi (Demolition of the Villages), the structured grid of walls and floors contrasts with the accumulation of inert materials that pile up as an effect of the demolition. These flaking and unstructured mounds are prevalent in artist Afro Basaldella’s Demolizioni (Demolitions, 1939), to the point of visually translating the ruins in nearly abstract forms with a more explicitly dramatic quality than Mafai’s paintings. During the interwar period, Afro was close to the Scuola Romana, and he devoted his postwar career to energetic abstract paintings based on explosions of colour.14 The desolate and disruptive scenarios evoked by Mafai and Afro imply a political critique of the fascist régime that ordered the demolitions. Mussolini intended to replace the uneventful flow of lower middle-class lives, indicated by the old buildings surrounding key historical monuments, with the rhetorical celebration of imperial vestiges along the Via Fori Imperiali and elsewhere. In fact, it was part of the ideology of the régime to devalue the simple everyday life taking place within Rome’s unmonumental domestic spaces. Ironically, the same régime ended up denouncing the violence of the Allies who destroyed residential buildings with area bombings, and generated ruins that, because of the displacement that they caused as well as their visual similarities, closely recalled those of the fascist demolitions. Collective living and the situation of the refugees

Because of the devastation that left them homeless, or in an effort to escape the bombings before they were affected, numerous urban dwellers fled the cities, which were more frequently targeted by airstrikes. The caption of Achille Beltrame’s illustration titled Tutto Serve (Anything Will Do), which appeared in La Domenica del Corriere on 17 October 1943, aptly describes the magnitude of the phenomenon: “Anything is useful … rivers of sfollati pour, every morning, out of Milan’s central station. Anything will do to avoid going on foot and get away quickly. Even the old, neglected pedicabs become appreciated and prized means of transportation.”15 In Beltrame’s representation, the monumental train station still stands tall, with dignity, as if observing

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1.9 “un gruppo di sfollati delle zone bombardate mangia e riposa seduto accanto al colonnato del chiostro di San lorenzo,” rome, 19 July 1943. Courtesy Istituto Luce. 

the chaos before it. Families, individuals, men and women of all ages hurry away, carrying bags and luggage. From their clothing and means of travel, it is clear that all classes were affected by the war. Ladies with elegant hats share the road with humbly dressed, working-class families. For them, fleeing becomes a collective experience, as collective as their living experience would become in the subsequent months and years. The sfollati – the displaced – found shelter either in rural encampments or in public buildings converted into improvised residences. Schools and churches were transformed into refugee camps, as documented by a series of photographs collected by the Archivio Storico Luce. We see, for example, families in line to register and groups of children cheering when volunteers welcome them with a few toys at the Scuola E. Pistelli in Rome in 1943;16 at the Roman Church of San Lorenzo, people eat in the cloisters, which become shared dining spaces.17 A Film Luce dated 24 June 1944 documents life in a refugee village near the northern city of Aosta and shows how any activity, from construction to cooking and playing, was carried out together with other members of the community.18 Private spaces were minimal and life was forcibly communal in the camps. Working-class refugees might have found elements of continuity between camp lifestyle and their earlier living conditions, considering that even in pre-war times they lived in crowded, domestic environments; many used public spaces for activities such as baking, doing laundry, playing, and even bathing. Upper-class city dwellers were equally affected by the indiscriminate targeting of the bombings; yet in their case the contrast between their pre-war lifestyle and the refugee experience was more dramatic, as they were accustomed to more sophisticated commodities and had enjoyed a sense of privacy before escaping their homes. Their habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, had not trained them to navigate frugality and a scarcity of resources.19 From 1944 to 1950, even a section of Cinecittà, the movie production centre near Rome, was used as a refugee camp. Cinecittà housed the sfollati, and also Jews or people who returned to Italy from the Italian colonies. Artist Mario Schifano lived there during his childhood after returning from Libya, where he was born. In January 1945 Paola Masino, a reporter for the crime weekly Crimen, graphically described the living situation at Cinecittà:

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These men and women, these damned souls, are crammed by the thousands within the sound stages, grouped by families in narrow uncovered boxes with straw divisions the height of a man or a bit more. On the floor, a mattress, a makeshift table, some clothes hanging on a nail, a cord with a few rags drying, and all around the sounds of others, coughing, crying, laughing, talking, and the smells of others, and the suspicions of others, the curiosity of others, the filth of others. The boxes in long parallel lines demarcate lanes within the blind belly of the edifice that rises above the thousand habitations to give them a single remote ceiling, crisscrossed by bridges, ladders, cables … Consider their night: in mid-air, the foggy breath makes the ceiling ever more remote; hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of eyes fixed on it, seeking sleep. Consider most of all the wide eyes of children who, without memories, are looking for life.20 Noa Steimatsky and Marco Bertozzi21 discuss the genesis of the Cinecittà camp and the ways it was remembered in official documents and oral histories. They maintain that, by removing the sfollati from urban schools and churches in an effort to concentrate them in peripheral or rural camps, administrators detached the refugees from the changing reality of the late 1940s. Their disconnected state allowed authorities an easier control over their destiny. The consequence was that, within the camp, a separate set of social norms – or habitus – developed, which was recognized and eyed with suspicion outside the camp boundaries. Having lived at Cinecittà meant undergoing increased discrimination and isolation, especially for women during the 1950s, because their moral values were automatically questioned. The very idea of communal living seemed too promiscuous and corrupt, a perception that continued into the immediate postwar period, as I later discuss. When communal living re-emerged in the 1960s, however, it was not as a forced condition but as a way of life considered desirable. The generation of those who grew up in the privacy of 1950s homes with access to the comforts of modern apartments ended up developing a renewed interest in the perceived authenticity of shared domestic spaces. Ironically, the children of those who had dismissed communal living as immoral ended up regarding it as an ethical alternative to the restrictive social rules imparted by their parents.

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From the Reconstruction to the Economic Miracle The QT8 neighbourhood and the demise of the collective house

The experience of World War II inevitably left its mark on the Italian population. Once the fighting was over in 1945, Italy was left in ruins both physically and psychologically. The survivors had to face an overwhelming ground zero; the built environment was unrecognizable, public facilities and private spaces had been destroyed, and personal memories were obscured by the traces of extreme violence that marked familiar places. Yet there was an urgent need to adjust quickly to the new social and political context. Italy had to regain trust in human values, in the possibility of establishing a civil society, and in the ability to create an efficient economic and political system. Furthermore, the physical reconstruction of destroyed cities had to be orchestrated promptly. Architects and designers too perceived reconstruction as an important priority, as demonstrated by the theme of the Milan Triennale (or T8) in 1947. The preparations for the eighth edition of the architecture exhibition had begun during the war, although they had been postponed. They were restarted in 1945 under the direction of architect Piero Bottoni,22 a champion of modernist architecture, who was the Italian delegate at the International Congress of Modern Architecture (ciam) from 1929 to 1949. Bottoni also authored articles for magazines such as Quadrante (and later Metron and Urbanistica). In the T8 exhibition program, it was argued that “The only subject will then be the home, the most real subject, the most heartfelt, the most tragic and perceived by millions of Europeans as filled with angst, desire, and hope.”23 In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, then, the loss of safe domestic spaces seemed to affect the general population more than anything else. Acknowledging this need, and also jumping at the opportunity to systematically redesign entire buildings and even urban areas, Bottoni and a whole team of Italian architects took advantage of the Reconstruction as a springboard for practical experimentation and theoretical reflection about modern dwelling. The T8 exhibition included an entire neighbourhood called Quartiere T8, or qt8. This initiative was intended to offer new housing solutions that were carefully programmed – from the single building to the overall urban plan.

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1.10 Tipi di Casette Realizzate al QT8 dal Ministero Assistenza Post-bellica (milan: g. Colombi & C., 1947); cover. Triennale Milano – Archivio Storico. Series Raccolta Grafica TRN_08_RG_007. Courtesy of the Triennale Archivio Storico.  1.11 Tipi di Casette Realizzate al QT8 dal Ministero Assistenza Post-bellica (milan: g. Colombi & C., 1947); interior page with planimetry. Triennale Milano – Archivio Storico. Series Raccolta Grafica TRN_08_TG_007. Courtesy of the Triennale Archivio Storico. 

Bottoni and his peers reconfigured the principles of the Italian city’s traditional structure. Rather than design buildings that line city streets all leading to the main piazza, the qt8 was based on solar orientation and allowed views of parks and lawns. The neighbourhood, which is still in use, was well served by public transportation and included a variety of residential properties, from apartment blocks to townhouses and single-family homes. The goal of the qt8 planners was to build a cohesive yet diverse community that could gather around public spaces such as a church, piazzas (unfortunately never realized), and play areas; also, services like schools, grocery stores, and small business were intended to be within walking distance of each habitation.24 Sanitation as well as functionality were taken into great account; all the buildings had modern plumbing and heating systems, which had not been a given in pre-war homes. Among the various types of residential solutions, the Triennale organizers considered the possibility of a casa collettiva, or collective house. The very interest in such a residence was triggered by the experience of shared housing for refugees. Communal living was more than a memory. Some of the camps were still operating at the time of the T8 in 1947, because the process of the Reconstruction was long and complex, and its development took longer than a decade. The Triennale officers were interested in normalizing communal housing by reinventing it according to modernist principles of efficiency. However, the fact that the casa collettiva was never realized demonstrates that it was a problematic model. The controversial reception of the collective house is evidenced in the numerous responses to the Concorso di Idee per la Casa Collettiva, a public inquiry that Bottoni initiated for brainstorming purposes.25 The Triennale put out two public calls for ideas for the design of a shared dwelling, and many individuals responded, proposing detailed projects. Men and women, both educated and uneducated, took up the challenge, suggesting complex scenarios. In all cases, the projects encompassed some shared services yet also emphasized the need for privacy. Some proposals limited private space in favour of common areas and collective services, in particular to outsource cooking, laundry, and childcare. According to engineer Antonio Fornaroli and architect Renato Angeli, externalizing such services would allow all adults to work outside the home. During the war, women had to cover roles that were traditionally men’s responsibilities in the public sphere and had clearly demonstrated professional abilities that were not immediately undermined after the war. Nonetheless, Fornaroli and Angeli, along with several others who

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responded to Bottoni’s call, were concerned about another challenge related to shared dwellings: the potential loss of the unity of the nuclear family and the consequent incurring of moral and “hygienic” problems. Most respondents expressed the opinion that postwar families needed privacy more than community. For example, Eugenia Bossi and Rosita Ancona argued that all that women aspired to was the ability to look after their loved ones in a caring environment, especially if they had to spend most of the day out at work. Women needed to rest from the fatigue of the war years and process the trauma associated with such a tense situation. Ancona, for one, unequivocally supported the need for privacy: The idea of a collective house does not seem to respond to the aspirations of those who need a home today. The communal home imposes a sort of compulsory living together, even if only relative to cooking needs and general services, and with the refugee exodus (sfollamento) everybody has understood the number of inconveniences that derive from communal dwellings. In order to live collectively, there needs to be respect for the habits and necessities of others, good manners, and civic sense, which, let’s say it frankly, are not really developed in the Italian population.26 The reference to refugee camps shows how strongly the idea of communal living was associated with the trauma of the war and remained an intolerable standard for those who had survived; they now desired the reassurance of the perceived order of the nuclear family and the support of close relatives. There was an aspiration to privacy that recalls the poetic interpretation of the domestic space invoked by Bachelard.27 The model of the nuclear family was rooted in Catholic tradition and remained successful both before and after the war. Paul Ginzburg argues that, despite the efforts of fascist thinkers and authorities, the Church was the main point of reference in family matters in the 1920s and 1930s;28 and Penelope Morris adds that the Church continued to have a seminal role in defining family values from the 1940s to the 1970s.29 In the model promoted by Pope Pius XII, women had a special responsibility for ensuring the success of the family. Mothers were urged to follow the example of the Virgin Mary and encouraged to value their husbands and children as their main priority.30 The popular magazine Famiglia Cristiana, a widely read Catholic publication,

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reinforced similar ideas of self-sacrifice through articles and images.31 La Domenica del Corriere also fostered the ideal of the traditional family, which it represented as protective and peaceful. In cover images from 1951, 1955, and 1958, for example, Walter Molino illustrated what he described in the caption of the 28 December 1958 issue as “the changes of the Italian family in the intimacy of their home.” In Molino’s illustrations, mother, father and two children typically gather around a table to feast, dine, or even to figure out how to complete tax forms. The domestic spaces around them look simple but comfortable, and echo the characters’ supposed tranquility and solidarity. The ideal of the perfect and orderly family, as depicted by authoritative voices, did not, however, always convey the reality of private relationships and identities, which were much more complex than implied by magazines, preachers, and politicians. I will turn to aspects such as the increased isolation of women in the postwar home, their ambiguous reception of mass communication, and the excessive rigidity of family hierarchies with resulting domestic violence, in order to discuss the denial of the nuclear family’s validity starting in the 1960s. Before delving into such an analysis, however, we need to spend a few more pages on the genesis of the obsession for the home. Chronicling the visual representation of the Reconstruction and the subsequent phase of exponential growth called the Economic Miracle (1957–64) will help us reach a deeper understanding of the emotional and social value assigned to the postwar home by institutions, the media, and to a certain extent the residents. Visual representations of the Italian Reconstruction: Materiality, productivity, and urban desolation

The realm of the home had a strong political connotation in the context of the Italian Reconstruction. The building of new homes not only lifted the spirits of prospective residents but it also created employment opportunities for the masses of veterans who had survived the war. In addition, funding for such employment came mostly from American sources and the Marshall Plan, thus establishing a link between Italian regeneration and American political and economic support.32 Reconstruction policies prioritized residential rather than public buildings in order to address the issue of homelessness affecting much of the population – an approach evidenced by the institution of ina-Casa (National Insurance Institute – Home).33 A program initiated

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by the ruling Christian Democrats, ina-Casa helped cast a positive light on the party. In fact, it was Labour Minister Amilcare Fanfani who devised the ina-Casa plan, primarily to address the needs of the working class and lower-middle class, including many refugees and migrants. The mission of the plan was to improve conditions for a large portion of the population by addressing not only the housing problem caused by the bombings but also the conditions pre-existing the tragic destructions of war. The 1951 Italian census revealed that, although poor living conditions were experienced throughout the country, they were particularly extreme in the south, where 20 percent of the population lived in overcrowded homes; on average, six people shared one room. Hygiene was insufficient, considering that more than a million dwellings, two thirds of which were located in the south, had no access to potable water or bathrooms. Around 200,000 families lived in improper spaces like shacks, basements, and even caves. In order to meet the national demand, ina-Casa needed to build around ten million rooms. The ina-Casa plan was successfully implemented thanks to two cycles of funding, from 1949 to 1956 and from 1956 to 1963, and was welcomed with enthusiasm by designers and architects who hoped to apply new theoretical principles to the Reconstruction project. During these periods, the plan sponsored the construction of 1,920,000 rooms in 355,000 apartments. As the government felt pressure to address the urgent situation, the focus shifted from building well to building fast, and some architects became critical of the superficial ways that design and construction were executed.34 Despite the impressive scale of the ina-Casa project, its buildings were only 10 percent of the total houses rebuilt after the war. Especially in the urban peripheries, new apartment blocks popped up at a steady rate. Visual artists responded to this systematic transformation of the Italian urban landscape through their work in a variety of ways. Giuseppe Uncini, for example, incorporated the common building material of reinforced concrete into his sculptures starting in 1957.35 Since Uncini’s work first appeared on the Italian art scene in 1960 – in the context of a show at the Salita Gallery in Rome, where he exhibited alongside Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio, and Mario Schifano – it was positioned in contrast with the thenprevailing aesthetics of arte informale. Rather than project the self and the subconscious on the canvas through dramatic gestures, the artist presented appropriated materials, which he valued for the concepts that they indexed.36 As the Italian critic and curator Marco Meneguzzo maintains about Uncini:

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1.12 giuseppe uncini, Primo Cementarmato, 1958. Iron and reinforced concrete. Courtesy Archivio Giuseppe Uncini. 

One can claim for his work a certain formal priority with regard to American Minimalism, but his interpretation of the world is quite different; the human element is fully present and superior to any concept of monumentality or immanence of form. In every “Reinforced Concrete Piece” one hypothesizes a human presence, since this simple, ubiquitous construction material immediately evokes humble labor.37 Meneguzzo compares Uncini’s sculptures with Italian urban landscapes in the aftermath of World War II, such as those portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films set in the Roman periphery, where the working class became relocated in big, modern, and isolated buildings surrounded by uncultivated nature. “Giuseppe Uncini, just over thirty years old, was developing a personal poetics that in many aspects paralleled Pasolini’s, using bare, rough, unadorned reinforced concrete as the symbol of a new aesthetic, a modernity that had to be reckoned with, for better or worse.”38  Uncini’s choice of concrete was a means of adapting to the immediate postwar conditions; he experimented with the materials that formed the fabric of the urban landscape at the time, in ways that exemplify Henri Lefebvre’s argument that artists can reimagine the spaces of daily life.39 As critic Filiberto Menna elaborates: “Uncini appropriated the use of material which characterized the environmental scene, such as reinforced concrete, whose rough surfaces he then combined in rigorous structures.”40 Uncini’s limited economic possibilities at the start of his artistic career were another reason for his employment of non-traditional materials. In his Primo Cementarmato (First Reinforced Concrete, 1958), he used leftover cement and metals that he found at a construction site in his hometown of Fabriano, Umbria. This particular object was part of the series of sculptures that Uncini continued to produce until the late 1960s. In First Reinforced Concrete, the iron grid forms a structure trapped within the concrete. Strings of metal emerge from the top and bottom, expanding the space of the artwork in irregular ways. One could say that the materiality of the piece becomes the protagonist. Usually invisible and buried behind the polished surface of house walls, reinforced concrete gains full recognition in Unicini’s Cementi (Reinforced Concrete) series in general. By decontextualizing construction technologies, the artist exposes the very texture of the Reconstruction and reveals the insides of the new buildings. Modern prefabricated materials – the skeleton of standardized postwar houses – become means of creative expression when presented

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as works of art. The rough surface of the concrete functions as an abstract sculpture, as viewers can appreciate the folds of shade and the areas of light embedded within the confines of the artwork. The metonymic Cementi series points to the ubiquitous Reconstruction sites by making viewers focus on the materiality of the buildings themselves. Other artists found inspiration in different aspects of the Reconstruction such as the process of building and the bodily gestures of the construction workers. Florentine female artist Fillide Levasti,41 in particular, depicted postwar construction labourers in a group of five paintings and drawings created between 1949 and 1961.42 She structured multi-planar compositions whose geometric volumes recall medieval representations of towers and castles. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco Gli Effetti del Buon Governo (The Effects of Good Governance) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena was a specific reference.43 Levasti embraced Lorenzetti’s implication that good government was evidenced by investments in housing. In 1949, the year that Levasti produced most of her depictions of construction workers, she joined other intellectuals in a sense of relief and even enthusiasm at the beginning of the planned Reconstruction program within the newly democratic Republic of Italy.44 The visual parallel between Levasti’s construction workers and the Sienese frescoes suggests her renewed hope for a brighter future. The fascist and war periods had been harsh for Levasti, whose own apartment had been bombed; she was deeply affected by the loss of many of her pre-war paintings.45 Levasti welcomed being a witness to the Reconstruction of houses in her neighbourhood and imbued her pictorial representations of the process with a sense of energy. The poses of the male figures that inhabit her compositions portray them engaged in an array of tasks. They climb precarious ladders and balance on thin beams with their bodies curved over bricks and cement, faces never in sight thanks to their focus on their work. A sense of simple yet productive activity pervades the space and there is no hint of monumentality. Levasti observed the workers from the window of her home in the immediate periphery of Florence; their actions paralleled those that she carried out within her own walls, accompanying her everyday experience with reassuring repetition. For Levasti, the rhythms of postwar domesticity mended the trauma of the abrupt loss of home, despite the fact that urban landscapes were changing so quickly. Florence had been heavily damaged by the bombings and was then in a period of rapid rebuilding. The centrality of discourse about the home was

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1.13 fillide levasti, Muratori, 1949. Drawing on paper, 63 × 47.5 cm. Courtesy Maria Previtali. 1.14 Ambrogio lorenzetti, Gli Effetti del Buon Governo, 1338–39. Fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. Creative Commons.

signalled by two important exhibitions at the Strozzi Palace, in 1948 and 1949. La Casa Italiana Nei Secoli (The Italian Home over the Centuries) and Lorenzo il Magnifico e le Arti (Lorenzo the Magnificent and the Arts) were curated by art history professor, writer, and curator Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and his wife, art historian, author, translator, and curator Licia Collobi. In both exhibitions, decorative artifacts, cassoni paintings, and home furnishings were on display. The goal was to prompt an understanding of everyday life across centuries, with a focus on the Florentine Renaissance in the case of the Lorenzo the Magnificent exhibition.46 In both shows, the curators drew parallels between past and present; as with Levasti’s art-historical reference to Lorenzetti, they demonstrated that home life had always had a political dimension. Indeed, a political dimension of this nature pervaded the private sphere in the postwar period. In the news, a rhetoric of success and efficiency accompanied the growth of modern urban areas. At the same time, some artists, photographers, and filmmakers criticized the overpowering presence of huge structures around which everyday life had to be reinvented. Individuals lost relevance in the context of new satellite cities detached from the historical centres. Nearly deserted peripheral streets are the protagonists of Roman artist Renzo Vespignani’s body of work. Vespignani was influenced by painters active in Rome in the previous decades, such as Mario Mafai, Franco Gentilini, Renato Guttuso, and Alberto Ziveri, yet by the mid-1940s he was ready to define his own language and iconographic preferences.47 Vespignani considered himself a realist, not because he mechanically represented what he saw but rather because he conveyed his existential reaction to experience through figurative art. Vespignani was interested in portraying the harsh violence of life. Painting was a tool for communicating, among other things, the sense of urgency and intensity that he felt while wandering around the streets of Rome during the war and in subsequent decades. He represented construction sites and half-finished residential areas as if they were ghost towns that were ultimately alienating to citizens. Their scale and height looked overwhelming, their emptiness intimidating. The painting Periferia con Gasometro (Periphery with Gas Station, 1946)48 is occupied mostly by the scaffolds of a partially built edifice that resembles a fragile framework in precarious balance. Ten years afterward, Vespignani continued to render the ongoing growth of the urban body in paintings like

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Periferia (Periphery, 1956)49 and Palazzo in Costruzione (Residence under Construction, 1957),50 using colour and muted tones rather than defined lines to convey a vivid impression of reality. The theme of the periphery was rooted in Vespignani’s explorations of the areas surrounding his childhood home. In 1950 he wrote in his Diaries: “I lived in a house that, despite having been built a few months before, had already become old in comparison to the giants that stood in front of it.”51 He measured the fast pace of the Reconstruction by looking at the rapid obsolescence of his own dwelling in relation to the constantly emerging new ones. Residents who struggled economically after the war continued to experience inadequate and crumbling accommodations. Photographer Franco Pinna portrayed the difficulties of Italians who remained in old buildings, unblessed by the marvels of new technologies. For example, a 1956 photograph of the Mandrione neighbourhood along the Acquedotto Felice in Rome resembles a scene of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century capriccio, with contemporary characters in humble clothing pictured next to ruins of ancient buildings.52 In the immediate postwar period and until the 1970s, those who lived the baracche (shacks) of the Acquedotto Felice were marginalized immigrants. As noted by David Forgacs, most of this population experienced malnutrition, domestic violence, underemployment, and illiteracy.53 People at the margins of society, often living in peripheral areas, are also the subjects of the novels and films of intellectual, writer, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It was not by chance that Pasolini, admiring Vespignani’s work, wrote a text for the painter’s 1956 exhibition at the Obelisco Gallery in Rome.54 Both were attracted to the periphery of Rome and its sudden transformation during the Reconstruction. A traditional way of life that had been passed down through generations was being replaced by the imposing structures of new buildings and a wave of consumeristic role models. Pasolini’s sociological concern for the loss of an underground culture was mixed with a detailed investigation of specific stories, situations, and urban zones such as Centocelle, Rebibbia, and Borgata Gordiani.55 Class difference typically meant a difference in the experience of postwar dwelling. Although the residences appeared to be more comfortable for the middle class than for the working class, the subjective perception of the residents varied. By referring to official records as well as oral histories, the scholarly book Storie di Case (Stories of Houses) illustrates post–World War II home life in a selection of apartment blocks built in the context of the

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1.15 renzo Vespignani, Palazzo in Costruzione, 1957. Oil on canvas. Reproduced from Valerio Rivosecchi, Bruno Zino, and Ilaria Falconi. Renzo Vespignani: catalogo ragionato dei dipinti, 1943–2001. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2011. © 2020 The Estate of Lorenzo Vespignani / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. 

Reconstruction and the “Boom.”56 The selection presented by the study gives us a glimpse of a spectrum of the domestic lives of middle- to higher-income families. The testimonies often recount the feeling of improvement and social mobility evoked by the opportunity to live in brand new apartments equipped with commodities such as electricity, plumbing, and appliances. Yet, some residents felt less enthusiastic, and conflicts within the family or with neighbours coloured their memories of the newly acquired private sphere. For many, the contrast between the golden image of modernity portrayed by the media and the actuality of their dwelling experiences, as well as their own subjective aspirations, contributed to a sense of dissatisfaction. Consumerism and women’s isolation in the domestic sphere during the Economic Miracle

During the Economic Miracle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, consumerism and economic growth sometimes increased social isolation, and home economics manuals reinforced the message that women’s aspirations should remain limited to home life.57 Advertisements emphasized the appeal of modern lifestyles by targeting women in particular. In an effort to sell cleaning products, industrial foods, and appliances, advertisements also sold an ideal of privacy and gender role separation.58 In the upcoming chapters dedicated to cooking and housekeeping, I discuss many examples of mid-twentiethcentury visual culture that evidence this phenomenon, which is also echoed by later narratives staged in the postwar period. Novelist Elena Ferrante, for instance, offers insight into the social and psychological effects of the increased isolation that came with newly acquired comfort in her Neapolitan Novels.59 In an attempt to reconcile old neighbourhood rivalries, in the late 1950s Lila Cerullo, a remarkably intelligent woman from the periphery of Naples, finds herself married to Stefano Carracci, a delicatessen owner. Through this union, Lila’s economic status suddenly improves – as demonstrated by the modern apartment to which she moves with her husband.60 Despite the new domestic space and the abundance of “things,” Lila’s life is characterized as being more lonely than when she lived in old buildings where domestic chores were intertwined with participation in the lives of the neighbours. Through the voice of Lila’s friend Elena, Ferrante describes the compromises attached to new housing dynamics:

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She had retreated. Where? To make dinner, to clean the house, to watch television with the volume low in order not to disturb me, to look at the tracks, the traffic, the fleeting outline of Vesuvius, the streets of the new neighborhood, still without trees and without shops, the rare car traffic, the women with their shopping bags, small children attached to their skirt. Occasionally, and only on Stefano’s orders, or because he asked her to go with him, she went out of the place … I soon realized that, being married, she was more alone than before.61 If increasing social isolation was a pattern in postwar Italy, there were of course variations in the habits and culture of different classes and regions. Northern and central areas were typically more open-minded and progressive, while areas in the south tended to be more conservative and traditional. Working-class women had to contribute to their family’s earnings and could not afford to stay home; for better or worse, this condition allowed them more direct access to the public sphere. Wealthier women were often educated and sometimes had respected careers, even though their professional success was limited by the expectation that they also oversee domestic matters. Though middle-class women were frequently isolated in the domestic environment, they often had neighbours and family members within walking distance, if not in the same building, because the urban structure of Italian cities remained thickly settled. Many also had the chance to go out to enjoy not only religious gatherings but also more secular activities such as movie screenings.62 As Joanne Hollows has argued (see the Introduction), there was some fluidity between the private and public spheres. Nevertheless, women were expected to prioritize activities centred around caring for the home. Advertisements, magazines, and television programming encouraged women’s retreat into the private sphere by promoting the idea that taking care of home and family coincided with acquiring a plethora of products and commodities. The message was that owning new things would foster genuine happiness. Italian new realist and pop artists were aware of the growing influence of consumer culture, and incorporated references to advertisements and the home in their artwork. For example, the work of Mimmo Rotella – an Italian artist who was an active member of the French new realist group – constantly critiques the superficiality of mass communication and the pretense that new products bring joy. This is well exemplified by his 1963 art piece titled

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1.16 mimmo rotella, Arachidina, 1963. Décollage on canvas, 138 × 95.3 cm. © 2020 The Estate of Mimmo Rotella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Arachidina, in which the face of a smiling and neatly groomed woman is surrounded by supposedly inviting foods, from a dish of assorted seafoods to cans of processed food and peanut oil. The products, together with advertising slogans and glued-on sheets of paper, partially overlap with and deface the figure, compromising her integrity in literal and metaphorical ways.63 Beginning in the late 1950s, Rotella roamed the Italian capital and other cities such as Paris and New York, tearing off sections of posters that papered the public sphere. He would then glue the fragments onto a new support, leaving visible the holes and tears; through this disfiguring process, Rotella’s images disrupted the slick messages of pleasurable consumption that graphic designers intended to communicate. What remained was a palimpsest of obsolete layers of paper whose fragmentation challenged the supposed complacency of the contemporary experience. Called décollages by the artist, these works pointed to the inadequate and false nature of the mass media and advertising, which attempted to control the private sphere by constructing a new form of hegemony, to apply Gramsci’s term. To illustrate this intrusion, items such as body care products, processed foods, and cleaning supplies frequently take up large portions of the composition, cutting into the space occupied by the figures of Rotella’s pieces. As well as revealing how insistently advertisers targeted the domestic sphere as a site of modernization and consumerism, the abundance of home-life imagery in Rotella’s work also indicates his skeptical attitude toward the message of optimism imparted by mass communication strategies. Adopting a critical distance, he deconstructed the flaws of advertising patterns that were designed to awe consumers and soothe them with promises of comfort. Rotella recognized the potentially dangerous and double-edged nature of such comfort. His goal was not to galvanize the masses toward a subversion of existing powers, however, so his position is not akin to that of Gramsci’s intellectual. Nonetheless, his process strips away layers of oversimplified if tempting mass media imagery in ways that prompt viewers’ awareness of hegemonic structures and offer them the option to react. Among the artists who addressed the domestic sphere during the Economic Miracle was Tano Festa – a member of the Roman School of Piazza del Popolo and considered one of the founders of Italian pop art. Festa’s early 1960s interest lay in domestic imagery, though not as it was portrayed by advertising campaigns. He looked at the physicality of the home environment as an embodiment of the everyday.64 He was fascinated by the durable components of interiors, objects that function as thresholds, for example, such as shutters,

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wardrobe doors, windows, and mirrors. For Festa, domestic objects are part of the private experience and are thus in constant contact with the residents. Objects bear witness to the inhabitants’ most spontaneous gestures, and even outlive them, as their temporality is often less ephemeral than the span of a human life. Festa sees the domestic as an ambiguous realm: dull yet enduring, indifferent, and impenetrable. Focusing on the materiality of everyday things, he rebuilds them as high reliefs emerging from the canvas structure, thereby creating hybrid pieces across painting and sculpture. Rather than incorporate ready-made objects in a dadaist manner, Festa recreates them in such a way that they lose their functionality. His shutters cannot be opened; nor do his mirrors reflect. Ultimately, they are ambiguous objects.65 Similarly to Festa, Cesare Tacchi includes references to furniture and the home in his 1960s work. Tacchi emerged in the same Roman pop climate as Festa, and works like Poltrona Gialla (Yellow Sofa Chair, 1964), Sedia Marilyn (Marilyn Chair, 1966), and Renato e Poltrona (Renato and Sofa Chair, 1965) show an analogous sensitivity to the domestic realm. Sofas, beds, and armchairs are Tacchi’s preferred subjects. Because of their cushiony nature, these types of furniture allowed the artist to experiment by inserting soft materials into the rigid structure of the canvas or other hard supports. He actually upholstered parts of his works to elicit a sense of exuberant comfort. The three-dimensionality of the texture contrasts with the flatness of the base, which makes it impossible to experience the furniture in its functionality. Tacchi represents actual figures – such as portraits of friends and profiles of popular icons – by painting them over the upholstered fabric. They enact scenes of private life through their interaction with objects. Tacchi’s colours are vibrant and the visual effect is dense, with decorative patterns inspired by designs that crowd the compositions so tightly that they recall the overwhelming presence of commodities in postwar Italian homes. Describing the interiors of the upper-class neighbourhood of Parioli in Rome, Bruno Bonomo writes: The modernization of the architectural style was not matched by an analogous modernization of the living room furnishings. Similar indications can be found in the oral history interviews conducted for this research. The rooms described by Francesca Socrate – with their “valances, drapes, curtain covers, boiserie, tassels, heavy velvet couches, carpets and Chinese vases from I don’t know what

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1.17 tano festa, La Camera Rossa, 1963. Mixed media on panel, 81 × 100 cm. Private Collection. © 2020 The Estate of Tano Festa / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

1.18 Cesare tacchi, Renato e Poltrona, 1965. Painting on padded printed fabric. Photo Salvatore Piermarini. Private Collection. © Archivio Cesare Tacchi. 

dynasty” – recall the nineteenth century salotti, filled with furniture and decorations; while Paolo Piperno summarizes the furnishings in his parents’ living room as follows: “To be honest, there was never anything modern in our home. That was not a kind of furniture that my parents liked.”66 As one can see in Tacchi’s works, the uninspiring abundance that inhabited upper-class Italian apartments during the Economic Miracle had the power to anaesthetize and confuse to the point of normalizing both consumerist values and the resulting societal hierarchies. As argued by Witold Rybczynski, comfort is what makes homes appealing and defines the modern concept of “home,” even in the absence of modernist furniture.67 It was comfort that diminished residents’ ability to react and take theoretically critical positions, even when certain artists revealed the hidden power structures nestled within the allure of that comfort. Such was the case in Italy, for at least a decade or so after the war.

A New Refusal of Domesticity: Feminism and Counterculture Women artists’ critique of mass culture and gender stereotypes

During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, women and young people raised questions about the legitimacy of their social standing. The rigidity of cultural norms both within and beyond domestic boundaries triggered a reaction on the part of groups who were most affected by the power hierarchies that took hold of Italian society. The home, seen as a quintessential metaphor of order and safety during and after fascism, became a target of great symbolic significance for women. As argued by Lucia Re,68 societal achievements – such as the 1970 divorce law (later confirmed in a 1974 referendum) and the 1971 law that legalized abortion – were only the most visible outcomes of an increasing critical attitude that prompted a reconsideration of gender roles and rights. Women became more sensitive toward feminist thought, thanks to the rediscovery of international theory and interwar literature by female writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Anna Banti.

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In Italy this new attitude was represented in art as well. As Barbara Casavecchia states, “a peculiarity of the Italian context is that some crucial voices of the twentieth-century feminist movements – like that of Lonzi,69 for instance – had strong links with contemporary art.”70 Carla Lonzi was an art critic and feminist activist. She studied art history with Roberto Longhi in Florence and soon began to practise as a critic of contemporary art. Lonzi’s interests focused mainly on avant-garde art; she wrote about abstract art, American new dada and arte povera, for instance. Her critique of the hierarchical position of the critic over the artist led to her writing Autoritratto (Self-Portrait, 1969),71 a collage of interviews with a number of artist friends. The book attempted to erase the authority of the critic by reproducing the dialogue with the interviewees literally. In the early 1970s, Lonzi stopped writing about art, and devoted all her efforts to feminism. She was one of the founders of the feminist group Rivolta Femminile with artist Carla Accardi and journalist Elvira Banotti. As art historian Giovanna Zapperi states, Lonzi firmly opposed the idea that women could find liberation through art.72 Lonzi argued that patriarchal structures imbued the art realm to the extent that women could not engage with art unless they remained subjected to inherited forms of male dominance. Zapperi sees Lonzi’s refusal to recognize the connections between art and feminism as “a sort of ‘original sin’ that blocked the development, in Italy, of feminist critique in the artistic ambit.”73 Zapperi writes: In effect, it is necessary to put aside any form of regret for that which might have been, in order to open up an interpretative space that makes it possible to follow the traces of an unceasing, even if fragmentary and non-systematic, reflection and the dismantling of the foundations of culture and art’s patriarchal edifice.74 As shown by recent studies and exhibitions, the feminist discourse was indeed lively in 1970s Italy and benefitted from the activity of artistic collectives as well as individual personalities of different generations.75 Even when they did not formally embrace feminism or the idea of combining artistic practice and feminist militancy, female artists such as Ketty La Rocca, Giosetta Fioroni, Tomaso Binga, and Carla Accardi participated in Zapperi’s proposed “dismantling of the foundations of culture and art’s patriarchal edifice” by explicitly revisiting the association of womanhood and the domestic since the 1960s.

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Ketty La Rocca was a visual poet who used an art language that combined image and text. A member of the avant-garde collective Gruppo 70, La Rocca was interested in the ways in which verbal and non-verbal language had been transformed in the age of mass communication. At the International Conference “Arte e Comunicazione” – the first festival organized by Gruppo 70 at the Forte Belvedere in Florence from 24 to 26 May 1963 – participating artists and poets formulated a definition of visual poetry: a form of expression where words and images appropriated from advertisements and magazines were combined to construct disruptive and ironic messages. Rather than express emotions, their works were disenchanted commentaries on the dry and succinct vocabulary of a new technological era. In La Rocca’s early 1960s work, she indeed borrows fragments of images and words from mass media sources and collages them into new compositions. By means of this strategy, she alters the original meaning of her sources. The contrast between the established meaning and the new context is both ironic and enlightening, through its exposure of the often-conservative assumptions hidden within the outwardly innocuous messages of the original source.76 Women’s diminished role and the expectation that they remain content within the confines of the patriarchal society of Italy were frequent thematic objectives of La Rocca’s witty artworks. A good example is Trazione Anteriore (Front Wheel Drive, 1965), which frames the cut-out of a female model’s face, taken from a magazine, against a black background. Make-up products such as nail polish, blush, and lipstick are pictured floating over her head. Despite the visual absence of a domestic environment, housework is explicitly referenced by the texts, which are also cut-outs from newspapers collaged onto a new support: “Dopo i piatti, dopo il bucato, dopo i lavori domestici … Sono felice” (“After the dishes, after the laundry, after the domestic chores … I am happy”). The words of the title, Trazione Anteriore, also appear in the composition. The whole poem casts light on gender stereotypes: women should be efficient with their chores in order to have time to set aside for themselves. Their happiness comes after their home duties, which can supposedly be carried out quickly thanks to the new products advertised in glossy magazines. Such magazines also portray happiness as being linked to bodily appeal. Thus, women were pressured to focus on just two things: their home and their beauty. La Rocca’s concept echoes the ideas expressed by Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which Woolf discusses the theme of

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1.19 Ketty la rocca, Trazione Anteriore, 1965. Collage on cardboard, 45 × 30 cm. Courtesy Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto / Archivio Tullia Denza.

women and literature by addressing the financial and social impediments that limit women’s creative development. In her words: “Intellectual freedom depends on material things … And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time … This is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”77 A room of one’s own is, then, a space where the writer can find privacy and concentration to create uninterrupted, rather than being a place of forced confinement. One’s own room becomes a metaphor for independence in terms of both economic status and time-management. To Woolf, supporting women’s expression is about recognizing that the perspective of women can broaden the scope of literature and knowledge: “Women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity.”78 Yet if women’s expectations remain limited to domestic chores, reproductive functions, and male sexual satisfaction, this expansion cannot be achieved. In several passages, Woolf addresses the issue of Benito Mussolini’s dislike of women. When she was writing, the dictator was in power and his party worked actively to define women’s role according to fascist ideology. As extensively analyzed by Victoria de Grazia, during the interwar period ideas of femininity swung inconsistently between two opposing models: the rural massaia (housewife) and the modern urban woman. Yet both had to be devoted to improving the domestic sphere and childrearing.79 Decades later, Italian women still felt the legacy of fascism, to the point that La Rocca unveils the ironic mechanisms whereby women’s subjectivity internalizes patriarchal values – another form of hegemony – as women continued to accept traditional roles as vehicles of personal happiness. La Rocca’s visual strategy allows viewers to connect the dots and read between the lines, thus conveying how the normalized image of women as beautiful objects and domestic angels can be tragically reductive and simplistic. According to Paola Mattioli’s 1978 essay “La Frase dello Specchio” (“The Phrase of the Mirror”),80 internalizing the patriarchal perspective – especially on women’s bodies – was a common psychological mechanism among women; as a way toward eventually deconstructing the validity of that viewpoint and defining a feminine interpretation, women should begin by acknowledging men’s point of view. By avoiding the body as a subject, some women artists ended up censoring it and ultimately silencing themselves. The real issue was finding the courage to recognize that they sometimes absorbed the violence of men’s gaze.

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Giosetta Fioroni’s Spia Ottica (Peephole, 1968) can be interpreted as another portrayal of women’s position between domestic confinement and male voyeurism. The performance and installation, on view at the Galleria della Tartaruga in Rome during the group show Teatro delle Mostre (Theatre of the Exhibitions), invites viewers to look through a peephole; inside, they can see a reconstruction of Fioroni’s own bedroom inhabited by the popular actress Giuliana Calandra. In Achille Bonito Oliva’s words, Calandra “performs the acts of an ordinary day.”81 When reviewing Fioroni’s Spia Ottica, male critics often reapply the interpretive categories that informed their analysis of “Gli Argenti,” the artist’s series of aluminum enamel paintings mostly from the 1960s; her Teatrini (Little Theatres), which were begun in the late 1960s; and her 16mm films, which she started creating in 1967.82 Some reviewers focused on the optical qualities of the peephole mechanism, which returns a shrunken version of reality83 and reduces the spatial three-dimensionality of performance to a flat photographic perception.84 Beyond such formal and technical observations, paired with discussions of happenings as a medium,85 critics commented on the erotic potential of the scene86 as well as its triggering of childhood memories as it plays with the idea of the doll house and the fairy tale.87 More recent readings by Claire Gilman and Romy Golan consider the work’s reference to contemporary film and the role of theatricality in its structure.88 It is noticeable that most critics ignore the domestic subject of Peephole altogether. I argue that the subject matter of the work has importance. Giuliana Calandra’s body, trapped within a domestic frame, may reference women’s general condition in 1960s Italian society. Given that Calandra is observed by the spectators and has no control over who looks at her and when, her body is treated as an object for the satisfaction of someone else’s curiosity. Privacy and personal space are denied, much as they were denied to Italian women, who were often subjected to surveillance by family members and neighbours.89 Maybe not by chance, Fioroni chooses to include the term spia in her title. Spia means more than “light” and “hole” in Italian; it also means “spy.” Fioroni stages a situation that was habitual in postwar Italy – it was a form of habitus in the sense attributed to the term by Bourdieu (see the Introduction): spying and commenting on women’s lives was a practice that was perceived as natural and accepted as unavoidable. Not only does Fioroni illustrate this practice; she magnifies it by using a theatrical device. The viewers become voyeurs, while the woman behind the wall is inevitably passive and

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1.20 giosetta fioroni, La Spia Ottica, 1968. Performance at the event Teatro delle Mostre. Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome. Reproduced from Chiara Costa. TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli Guarda la RAI. Milan: Prada Arte, 2017. © 2020 Giosetta Fioroni / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

1.21 and 1.22 tomaso binga, Oggi Spose, 1977. Black and white photographs, diptych, 19 × 13 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. 

her passivity is linked to the domestic environment. In a preparatory drawing for the performance, Fioroni represented a woman’s figure lying in bed with her eyes and lips slightly tilted down in a frown. The character looked bored, sad, and lonely.90 It is telling that the male-dominated art world was blind to the gendered nuances of Fioroni’s work. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony can be applied to Peephole as well, as spying on women was not only habitual, but it also underscored patterns of subalternity and power dynamics that were so ingrained as to be seen as commonplace. Until now, viewers and critics have not acknowledged Peephole’s unveiling of the status quo. The invisibility of women’s struggles in relation to domesticity is also a theme of Tomaso Binga’s installation and performance Casa Malangone: Carta da Parato (The Malangone Home: Wallpaper, 1976), subsequently reperformed as Carta da Parato (Wallpaper). The name Tomaso Binga, used for the alter ego of Bianca Menna, alludes to the artist’s intentionally ambiguous gender identity.91 Bianca Menna is a prolific visual poet who often addresses women’s rights and their role in society. Born Bianca Pucciarelli, she acquired the last name Menna upon marrying the critic Filiberto Menna in 1959. She started signing her work as Tomaso Binga in 1971, and in 1977 the “wedding” between Bianca and Tomaso was staged in a performance titled Oggi Spose (Just Married) at the gallery Campo D in Rome. In an interview with me, the artist spoke of reclaiming her sense of completeness through Just Married: as a woman she did not need to rely on a man separate from herself to be able to define her identity.92 The title Oggi Spose, in which spose is feminine plural, underlines the femininity embodied by both Bianca and Tomaso.93 Thus, the title can be viewed as a nod to ideas of gender fluidity that, as with non-heterosexual relations, were taboo in mainstream Italian culture, if occasionally challenged by select artworks. For example, feminist artist Libera Mazzoleni’s photographic series Il Bacio (The Kiss), created like Just Married in 1977, portrays lesbian kisses between female friends to reflect on women’s sexuality, touch, and body awareness in relationships other than heterosexual.94 When Binga’s Just Married opened, visitors who ventured into the Campo D gallery space after having received an official invitation to the wedding found only a diptych with two photographs as witnesses of the ceremony. One portrays Bianca wearing a traditional wedding gown and holding a bouquet. This was an original photograph from the artist’s actual wedding with Filiberto Menna.95 In the picture, the artist wears a white dress and poses in front of a car, a symbol of her new departure through marriage as well as a

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reference to the custom of arriving at the church and leaving in a decorated car. Framed by the car, Bianca smiles coyly to mark what is supposed to be a woman’s happiest day. Her life seems contained by symbolic references to marriage, and the photograph helps visualize common expectations that were nonetheless contested in the 1970s. The second picture shows Tomaso, or Bianca in drag, wearing a formal suit and holding sheets of paper as he stands in front of a typewriter. According to the artist, this photograph was staged in 1977 and shot in a photographer’s home. The clothes worn by Tomaso belonged to the artist’s husband, Filiberto Menna, and objects in the portrait suggest Tomaso’s practice as a writer.96 Framed paintings in the background form an abstract landscape that parallels the natural one in the background of Bianca’s picture. The artworks on the walls also recall Tomaso’s artistic creativity, which Bianca seemed to have had access to and be recognized for only through her male alter ego. Perhaps this can be seen as an embodiment of Carla Lonzi’s views regarding the impossibility of women finding full expression in art independently from patriarchal structures (see above).97 The artworks, rather than being visual poems and collages similar to Tomaso Binga’s own production, are in the style of Pittura Analitica, the tendency championed by Filiberto Menna, Tomaso’s (or rather Bianca’s) husband.98 Details of the composition suggest that Tomaso borrowed his identity in part from Bianca’s real-life companion. Displayed in an elaborate frame, the diptych resembles wedding photographs showcased in family homes to preserve the memories of a wedding day, often pictured as the founding moment of the family itself. The year before Just Married, Tomaso Binga had occupied the domestic space more literally with the installation Casa Malangone: Carta da Parato (The Malangone Home: Wallpaper, 1976), created in an apartment in the elegant Roman neighbourhood of Parioli. In The Malangone Home, the domestic environment not only is referenced but becomes the very material of the work. According to the artist, a young man who was renting the apartment allowed her to occupy his domestic space with her piece.99 For weeks the artist spent her evenings and Sundays on site, gluing wall paper rolls on the walls, writing between the paper’s vertical patterns, and hanging frames and furniture to complete the scene. She had purchased the wallpaper at low cost, as wallpapers were common home décor features that came in a range of prices.100 The act of purchasing the product emphasizes women’s expected role as consumers, yet Binga questioned that role by also taking on

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the stereotypically more masculine components of home decoration, such as applying the paper on the walls with glue and paint rollers, the part usually taken care of by male workers. The installation process underlines the fluidity of Binga’s persona, navigating the space between male and female. For the wallpaper, Binga’s priority was to find patterns that evoked the parallel lines of a school notebook, allowing her to write along the lines as a schoolgirl would do. Tomaso’s writing was hard to decrypt: the artist defined it as scrittura desemantizzata (writing outside of semantics). Nonetheless, the loose writing signified actual phrases, like tu stai zitta, meaning “you shut up,” which the artist recalls as typically pronounced by men when little girls or even adult women tried to express their opinions on complex matters. In Binga’s The Malangone Home, the wallpaper seemed to trap the voices of women who talked to themselves when alone at home. The vertical stripes are like bars, with words tangled between them. Such bars also evoke the idea of women’s entrapment in the domestic space. However, Binga includes details that indicate a sense of hope. For example, small frames enclose fragments of the same wallpaper, yet the stripes have become horizontal. The pattern remains open on the sides, signalling a way out. Photographs of the installation were shot during the creation process as well as during the opening, when a group of friends and supporters experienced Binga’s environment. Invitations to reinstall the work followed, and with each reinstallation, titled Carta da Parato (Wallpaper), the artist added variations. For example, in 1977 in Rieti she created a gown with the same wallpaper as the one that lined the wall and read a poem while wearing it. That same year, she did so again in Bologna at the Galleria d’arte moderna, where she had a two-wall space to recreate the Roman installation. At the Galleria d’arte moderna in 1978, Wallpaper was installed again during the show La Metafisica del Quotidiano (The Metaphysics of the Everyday), where Binga redecorated a three-wall space with her signature wallpaper and added frames shaped like ears to indicate that the walls listened to women’s voices.101 Regarding the poem recited by Binga in Rieti and Bologna, Barbara Casavecchia writes: The artist wore a camouflage dress made of the same wallpaper, so that by standing still she would merge with the surroundings and become invisible. After reading a poem aloud, Binga freed herself of the dress and left it behind, hanging from a rocking chair. The poem went:

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1.23 tomaso binga, Carta da Parato, 1977. Photographic documentation of performance, Riolo Terme. Courtesy of the artist.

I am a tissue paper I am a folded paper I am a blotting paper I am a wallpaper I am a sandpaper I am a stationery paper A brown paper I am a cartridge It has to be shot Boom. She had come out, with an ironic bang.102 By inserting words within the patterns of the wallpaper, and through the whole installation process, Binga echoes Henri Lefebvre’s argument that the production of space is linked to language and the definition of a system of codes.103 As well as showing how women’s voices had been silenced and ignored by society, Binga also shows that such language had come to codify the domestic space and, contemporaneously, women’s own identity in relation to it. Binga’s concern with women’s experience and their disappearing into the background seems intuitive, yet contemporaneous critics who have commented on her works, such as Gillo Dorfles and Elvenio Maurizi, bypassed the feminist claim and focused mostly on formal analysis in their reviews of The Malangone Home.104 There is certainly an innovative component to the concept of hiding one’s writing within the folds of wallpaper sheets, which caught the attention of many critics. Binga intended to reinvent the ways in which we communicate through a dialogue of text and image. Yet once again, the subject matter of the home – the realm of idealized family values inscribed in messages of commercial advertising and Catholic sermons alike – deserves special attention when addressed by an artist such as Binga, who declared the following: My masculine name plays with irony and a sense of sudden surprise; it is intended to expose the male chauvinist privilege that dominates also the art field; it is an acknowledgement, through paradox, of a superstructure that we have inherited and which, as women, we want to destroy.105

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From Feminism to Nomadism: Embracing Adaptation and Conflict in the Relationship between the Private and the Public Environment Rome-based artist Carla Accardi also explored feminist ideas, although, unlike Binga, she mostly considered them as separate from her artistic intentions. She was a member of the group Forma 1 (1947–51) and was recognized by peer artists and critics as one of the protagonists of postwar abstraction. In 1970 Accardi co-founded Rivolta Femminile with Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti but left soon thereafter because of her desire to focus exclusively on art matters. She also co-founded the Cooperativa Beato Angelico in Rome (1976–78). There she participated in the organization of women artists’ exhibitions and events, yet never acknowledged the presence of feminist meanings in her creative work.106 Nonetheless, scholars Leslie Cozzi and Teresa Kittler interpret Accardi’s Tents through the lens of feminist theory.107 Accardi created Tenda (Tent, 1966) and Triplice Tenda (Triple Tent, 1969), both three-dimensional works that reinvent the idea of the domestic space by contrasting the value of sedentary living with the model of nomadism. In Tent, walls of a clear plastic material called sicofoil protect a light structure of transparent membranes painted with pink and green signs. The roof is a symmetrical prism and the walls slightly slant, opening to the outside. The tent is tall enough for an adult to stand inside. To the artist, who often stressed the formal inspiration of her works,108 Tent is above all an investigation of transparency and fluidity. In addition to contemplating the possibility of relating a space to the body, Accardi experiments with the effects of paint on a transparent support, and acknowledges the projection of the shadows cast by the painted signs, whose physicality is revealed by the passage of light. In her chromatic choices, Accardi refers to flesh by extensively using light pink, which is also the colour of the sunset from her balcony.109 The green indicates the grass, and the transparency of the sicofoil alludes to the air. The work, then, intertwines allusions to the body, nature, and architecture. Through the creation of a habitat, the tent projects an immersive experience into Accardi’s painting by pointing to the discourse of modern nomadism.110 The phenomenological appeal of Tent, given by the possibility of actually moving around and inside the structure, is amplified in Triple Tent. Here, the viewer is invited to enter a concentric layering of three environments.

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1.24 Carla Accardi, Tenda, 1965–66. Painted sicofoil. Courtesy Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo.

1.25 Carla Accardi, Triplice Tenda, 1969. Painted sicofoil. Courtesy Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo. 

The use of sicofoil allows one to see through the walls and intuitively understand the boundary of the space, but the limits are confused by patterns painted on the surfaces. Upon entering the external tent, one needs to walk around the middle layer to find its entrance, and then again around the inner circle to find the way inside. Experiencing Triple Tent entails a sense of discovery. Inhabiting the intimate heart of the tent makes the viewer feel protected yet connected to the outside, still visible through the holes in the transparent walls. Regarding Triple Tent, Accardi states: “When I created Triple Tent I thought about people fighting wars and traveling, but living a very sophisticated life in the tents they used.”111 She was inspired by images of Turkish military tents. More abstractly, the artist addressed the notion of conflict, which also concerns the ability to continue engaging in rich and even joyful everyday life even in times of pressure. Accardi viewed the tent as a symbol of a life lived in close contact with the outside and the ability to adapt to different conditions while coping with violence. More or less contemporaneously, a comparable revision of the home was embraced by several artists who were emerging in the mid-1960s in the context of arte povera, the term that has been used to label a loose groups of artists who often exhibited together in shows and events organized by curator and critic Germano Celant. Their work – which was in dialogue with that of international artists sometimes labelled as post-minimalist – embraced process and phenomenology, challenged notions of authorship by enlisting public participation, valued the materiality and symbolic meanings of objects, and juxtaposed natural and artificial materials to index the complex landscape of postwar Italy.112 The work of individual artists involved with arte povera, sometimes called poveristi, is unique and diverse, yet there are some recurring themes and subjects in their production. For example, the iconography of the nomadic dwelling appears in pieces by Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, and Emilio Prini, among others. This interest can be linked to a refusal of sedentary living and the static social values that it represented. Consumerism and gender role separation were closely connected to the possibility of filling a private space with new objects – a task assigned especially to women who were expected to be housewives and mothers. The concept of modern nomadism – the idea of being unattached to a specific site and roaming the world with only essential belongings – hijacked the possibility of indulging in

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consumeristic behaviour as much as it erased the obsession with the family and its power structure. In her article “La maison dans l’Arte povera,” Carolyn Christov Bakargiev113 argues that the arte povera generation was drawn toward an exploration of the home as a habitat. Bakargiev analyzes a number of artworks by artists such as Mario Merz, Piero Gilardi, and Luciano Fabro. In the works of these artists, the domestic realm is seen as a repository of personal memories. Also, frequent references to nomadic dwellings point to a sense of permeability in the exchange between inside and outside – the body and nature – thus prompting an ecological sensitivity. Similar concerns fuelled the activity of radical designers114 such as Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra,115 as well as the collectives Superstudio116 and Archizoom, all of whom referenced the iconography of the tent. At a time of economic uncertainty, when housing rights were reclaimed through systematic protests that led to the approval of the 1978 law on fair rent known as equo canone,117 these architects explored alternative ways of dwelling through a critique of consumerist values. A case in point is the “fotoromanzo” Struggle for Housing (1972) by the Gruppo Strum, a collective formed in Milan by Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Carlo Gianmarco, Riccardo Rosso, and Maurizio Vogliazzo in 1963.118 A fotoromanzo, or photo-cartoon, was a popular form of storytelling in postwar Italy, especially among women, and included sequential photographs accompanied by speech bubbles and captions to showcase a narrative.119 The Gruppo Strum used this format to address the problem of the lack of affordable housing in Italy, particularly for immigrants from the south who moved to northern cities to work on assembly lines. The characters of Struggle for Housing considered a number of housing options, from small apartments to shared housing and train station benches – that is homelessness – given that their rent consumed most of their meagre salaries. Accompanying texts include detailed information with statistics and data from several Italian cities to support each character’s story and demonstrate that it was not unique. Black and white photographs are layered with bright green and pink highlights that emphasize specific images, figures, and phrases and connect them to form almost abstract mind maps. Struggle for Housing was published as an insert in the Italian architectural magazine Casabella120 and was also included in the exhibition Italy: A New Domestic Landscape in New York City in 1972. During the exhibition, it was distributed on the streets together with other similar pamphlets. The

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1.26 mario merz, Igloo con Albero, 1968–69. Iron tubes, glass, plaster, branch; igloo, 110 × ø 230 cm., branch, h 247 cm. Collection Margherita Stein, Property Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT on loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Turin. Photo Paolo Pellion. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

1.27 Superstudio, Gli Atti Fondamentali, Vita (Supersuperficie): L’Accampamento, 1971–73. Photomontage. Courtesy Gian Piero Frassinelli. 

landmark show included the innovative work of a number of Italian designers and artists, whom critic Germano Celant defined in the catalogue as “radical architects.”121 In a press release regarding the exhibit, which can be found in the moma Archives, Gruppo Strum states that they intended their intervention as a tool to express what they felt urgently needed to be said about the Italian domestic landscape, in a straightforward manner, to a public not limited to upper-class museum-goers and design experts. One paragraph of their statements concerns “the struggle for a home”: Many people in Italy do not have a decent home to live in, and some have no home at all. If they are not given one – and for the time being no one is likely to give it to them, they must get homes for themselves by organizing themselves into a political movement capable of overturning the trend of the current system in which their fringe existence and exploitation are functional.122 Gruppo Strum, with its openly anti-capitalist approach and call for direct political organizing, mirrors Gramsci’s model of the engaged intellectual who voices the concerns of the working class to subvert existing hegemonic structures. Other groups experimented with the idea of utopic communities independent of the capitalist system. For example, the aim of Global Tools (1973–75), a collective of radical architects and artists, was to regain familiarity with traditional equipment that had lost relevance in industrial society. Global Tools held a series of didactic workshops in Florence, Milan, and Naples. Learning from farmers and artisans, the group exposed participants to old and forgotten lifestyles that were perceived as more natural, authentic, and worthy than the ideals of progress and rationality championed by modernist design. The tools referred to were as metaphorical as they were material, and the group members aimed to acquire practical knowledge that would allow adaptation to non-urban environments. Their experiments were imbued with fears aroused by the Cold War, which made the spectre of post-atomic and post-apocalyptic landscapes feel tangible. Global Tools proposed a critique of institutional education systems and fostered a model of learning that valued dialogue and experimentation. One of their workshops focused on “survival” – a concept that clashed with the idea of domestic comfort enabled by mass production. Activities included

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topics such as “agriculture, hydroponics, exploration, camping, gastronomy, meditation, contemplation, astronomy,”123 most of which consider the outer environment as inevitably intertwined with the domestic sphere and human dwellings. One of the “survival” workshops took place in the hills around Florence, away from the fixed structure of the urban body. In November 1974, Roberto Magris opened his home in rural Sambuca. In that site, the members of Superstudio and 9999 engaged in forms of group therapy as a way of exchanging in-depth ideas gathered through personal experience. The goal was to explore the human relationship to a de-culturalized habitat and to develop survival skills beyond the boundaries of consumer societies.124 The interest in nomadism and slow living, expressed by the poveristi as well as by radical architects, echoed the phenomenon of youths fleeing family apartments to live in communes or tent-cities during the 1960s and 1970s. [Italian teenagers] traveled via hitchhiking, away from their families and the conformism that their families represented. Beyond the temporary camps emerging at festivals, destinations included Morocco, India, and Afghanistan. Within Italy, hippies stopped at local communes, which were groups of occupied or rented houses in rural or peripheral areas. Alternatively, they carried sleeping bags and sometimes tents to set up where they intended to stay.125 Anxious parents condemned such behaviour, in part because of emotions linked to loss and separation, and also because of an inability to comprehend their children’s refusal of an affluent lifestyle. The clash between generations was strong. Having experienced and turned away from communal living during World War II, and having aspired to an orderly way of life, parents were puzzled by the completely opposite aspirations of their children. Yet the attraction to nomadic life and survival in rural environments during the 1960s and 1970s was destined to be short-lived. As stated by Paolo, one of the protagonists of the documentary film La Rivoluzione non è una Cosa Seria (Revolution Is Nothing Serious): “family, which should be avoided, ends up not being avoided because life is even worse for those who remain outside of it.”126 By the 1980s, the countercultural connotation of nomadism seemed to weaken, and ironically the term ended up applying to tourism, business trips, and wild networking agendas.

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Conclusion This journey through a few decades of mid-twentieth-century Italian history has allowed us to survey a range of cultural values associated with the home. During the war, home was mostly an aspiration that rarely materialized into actual comfort. At that time, survival depended on the ability to recreate everyday patterns by using available spaces and materials. Anything would do – any space, from the very ruins of area bombings to the rooms of schools, churches, and movie studios, could be turned into a communal shelter. Artists depicted such harsh realities despite their limited means in a challenging time. It is mostly through photographs, illustrations, and film that viewers picture the range of emotions that molded subjective experiences in the mid-twentieth century. Images expose us to the urgency of escaping urban war zones, the desolation and resilience of living among the ruins of residential buildings, and the determination of those who resisted by continuing to perform day-to-day labour. In the postwar years, a new enthusiasm for the possibility of reconstructing the country was realized through projects like Milan’s Quartiere Triennale 8. Yet painters, sculptors, and filmmakers also produced critiques of the transforming urban environment. Modernity seemed to erase traditional forms of knowledge and social interactions. The postwar home, crowded with objects made desirable by advertisements, was as confining and anaesthetizing as it was comfortable and beautiful. The artists linked to new realism and the Roman Scuola di Piazza del Popolo portrayed the realm of the home as a space invaded by attractive products that behaved like intrusive guests. They occupied too much space and ultimately crowded out possibilities for personal growth and social interaction. Visual poets also critiqued the role of advertisements and consumer culture as they infiltrated the private sphere. They deconstructed the language of technological communication to highlight its fixed and stereotypical assumptions about society. It was especially starting in the late 1960s and 1970s that a systematic deconstruction of sedentary living took place. Modern forms of domesticity were put into question for their association with urbanity and industrialism, and for their normalization of hierarchical family relationships. Female artists expressed concern over the identification of women with the home and the family, which resulted in subordination and objectification. Both arte

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povera artists and radical architects pushed reflections on the home to the point of imagining new forms of habitat that adapted to a morphing environment and envisioned survival through the re-use of artificial and natural materials. This complex narrative is reflected in the visual representations of distinct home activities, each carrying specific weight in the construction of subjectivity and in triggering broader societal dynamics. The following chapters analyze select visual interpretations of such activities, starting from the intimacy of the bedroom.

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CHAPTER 2

bed Stories Sleep, Eros, and Violence in the Domestic Space

2.1 felice Casorati, Ragazza sul Letto, 1942. Collection Alberto della Ragione, Museo del Novecento, Florence, Italy. Courtesy William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Boston.

Threats from the Outside and the Inside: Representing Sleep in the 1940s and 1950s To sleep is to lower one’s guard. Sleep is about absolute abandonment – giving up control. All living beings try to find a place of shelter to fall asleep, whenever possible. The home functions as a protection against external dangers when we are at our most vulnerable. During sleep, the body relaxes into its own rhythm of breathing and heartbeats, while the mind roams among the absurd connections orchestrated by our dreams. Physical relaxedness and the wandering of the subconscious make anyone who is asleep look inert and fragile, but also in contact with their profound desires. Paradoxically, inner desires that arise during the dream state of sleep may have as much destructive power as potential external threats. During the 1940s and the 1950s, Italian artists Felice Casorati, Fausto Pirandello, and Fausto Melotti chose the theme of sleep to explore the dichotomy between relaxedness and danger. The works of these artists, particularly those that were created during World War II or within the framework of fascism, all depict sleep as a momentary pause in the midst of the destructive events dominating Italy at the time. Felice Casorati was an accomplished painter known primarily for the geometrical composition and cerebral tone of his work. After formative years spent in the Veneto region where he was in contact with Ca’ Pesaro – a group of artists who exhibited in the Venetian palace of Ca’ Pesaro and were inspired by Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Secessions, among other visual sources – Casorati moved to Turin.1 There, he participated in the cultural and political climate stirred up by Piero Gobetti and mentored young artists, including the “Sei di Torino,” six artists united by their interest in the French avant-garde and their antifascist stance. Throughout his career, from the 1910s to the mid-1960s, Casorati painted subjects like still lifes and interior scenes, including a series of resting female figures. His formal inspirations and contextual choices for this group of paintings are diverse, as they represent various phases of his artistic path. Among this body of work was his Ragazza sul Letto (Girl on the Bed, 1942), through which he communicates a feeling of vulnerability; the young woman lying on a recliner – her head slightly tilted – hugs her torso in a pose that suggests an instinctive attempt to protect her body. The scene feels silent and intimate, as if the protagonist were recharging in deep connection with her own self. Casorati applies a range of whites to render the values in the folds of the linens, the young woman’s dress, and the canvases in the space behind her.

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If white is associated with innocence, three areas of red – a shirt under her feet, a detail of the model’s clothing, and the rectangle of a picture against a wall – communicate a sense of warning and imminent sacrifice. The contrasting colour scheme and geometric construction of the background space can also be interpreted as references to the French avant-garde. This reference is further evidenced by the style of the sketches in the canvases behind the bed. Giorgina Bertolino expands on earlier observations of Giuseppe Marchiori and Guido Hess by arguing that the visual sources for this painting are likely Picasso and Matisse, as indicated by the strong lines and bold colours that dominate the formal vocabulary.2 Despite such international visual references, the palette points to a national context – green, white, and red being the colours of the Italian flag. Readings of Casorati’s work are often apolitical, and most critics see his paintings as expressions of formal interest and depictions of private subject matter; yet reviews of the 2018 exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943, curated by Germano Celant at the Prada Foundation in Milan, started to highlight the ambiguity of Casorati’s position as an artist who participated in exhibitions supported by fascist officials while also being close to antifascist collectors, artists, and intellectuals.3 Here, I propose a political interpretation of Girl on the Bed that reflects on the subtlety of Casorati’s antifascist stance.4 At a time when openly antifascist statements resulted in fierce repression, Casorati seemed to rely on muted formal choices to construct political meaning. The sleeping protagonist in this painting could be interpreted as a hidden allegory of the Italian population – a clue embedded in the red, white, and green palette – pausing in resilient stillness while new directions (indexed by the references to international art) unfold around her. To further support such an interpretation, it is important to note that, in a 1942 article that appeared in the widely distributed illustrated magazine Emporium, the painting was reproduced with the title Convalescente (Convalescent), suggesting the idea of a person temporarily ill but hopeful for its future, like Italy as a nation.5 Through Girl on the Bed, Casorati may have been prompting his country to deny autarchic values and remain open to transnational models. Through metaphorical uses of colour and visual references, Casorati links the private interior space to the public sphere, perhaps intimating that the private space remained the only stage for expressing dissident ideas in the years of the dictatorship. In this sense, one can apply to this painting Henri Lefebvre’s argument that the private

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sphere allows one to be fully oneself and produce one’s own space, even at a time when dictatorial governments attempted systematic infiltrations into domestic cultures through propaganda and surveillance. As with Casorati, Fausto Pirandello, a Rome-based artist of Sicilian origin, nurtured anti-fascist ideas. The son of Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in literature, Fausto had entered the Roman art scene in the 1930s by participating in the Scuola Romana – with the earlier-mentioned Mario Mafai, Antonietta Raphaël, and Afro among others – experimenting with tonal painting in highly symbolic scenes. Pirandello had previously spent time in Paris and Vienna, where he was exposed to cubism and surrealism.6 In 1942 he took a stand against critic Antonio Maraini, who encouraged contemporary artists to chronicle the history of the present – that is, create a fascist history.7 Instead, Pirandello’s work intentionally represented everyday scenes imbued with iconic twists. The artist was keenly aware of the doubleedged intricacies of everyday life. As argued by Fabrizio D’Amico,8 some of Pirandello’s paintings infuse the apparent banality of domestic scenes with a ritualistic dimension that makes them nearly mythical. La Dormiente (The Sleeping Woman, ca 1944), painted during the war on a small canvas, represents a deeply sleeping nude female figure.9 The painting was likely created while Pirandello was living as a squatter in the Villa Medici in Rome, in an effort to remain safe during the last phases of the war.10 While Pirandello worked productively in that environment, his stylistic choices remained relatively uninfluenced by the frescoes by Jacopo Zucchi (1576–77) that decorated the villa’s rooms. Zucchi’s paintings represented the construction of the villa, mythical subjects, and “grottesche,” that is motifs in which animals, vegetation, and putti are intertwined against white backgrounds;11 Zucchi’s figures look idealized and hyper-muscular, their skin tone almost metallic; they stand out against the background and are often surrounded by colourful frames. The defined colours of Zucchi’s palette provide a sharp contrast with the neutral tones of Pirandello’s Sleeping Woman, whose body’s boundaries almost merge with the background. Here, the figure appears unadorned and sincerely human. The subject looks exhausted as she rests on the collapsing support of the bed, one arm opened toward a grey wall, her body ungracefully positioned on a bare mattress. The tonal nuances make the image earthy and concrete. The woman’s nudity strikes a slightly sensual note, suggested by the close and slightly raised point of view that positions the viewer as a

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2.2 fausto Pirandello, La Dormiente, ca 1944. Oil on canvas, 50 × 67 cm. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

potential intruder standing at the foot of the bed. Yet Pirandello once stated that there was no erotic gratification in his paintings; rather, he intended to adopt a distanced and intellectual gaze.12 Distancing of this sort may be what allows an unapologetic depiction such as that of Sleeping Woman, in which the subject’s body is portrayed, foreshortened from the vantage point of the viewer, having abandoned all control during an intimate moment of relaxation. While Pirandello’s sleeping figure is not idealized and maintains specific physiognomic traits, sculptor Fausto Melotti’s representations of similar subjects became nearly abstract. For example, the ceramic piece Il Sonno di Wotan (Wotan’s Sleep, 1958) – one of his Teatrini (Little Theatres) – includes a rectangular structure that boxes in the body of the protagonist. The Little Theatres embody the interest in ceramics that Melotti had begun expressing more systematically since 1940. In the previous decade, he had been studying traditional art at the academies of Milan and Turin while also being exposed to avant-garde art in his home town of Rovereto through Fortunato Depero and Carlo Belli.13 Thanks to these opposing formative influences, Melotti had engaged with figuration, abstraction, and the relation of the two by embracing simple structures and paced rhythms in his 1930s works. In 1943 the experience of seeing his Milan studio destroyed by the bombings jeopardized his motivation as a sculptor of rarified forms. In the postwar years, Little Theatres employed ceramics in a way that negotiated between painting and sculpture. As Jole da Sanna put it: “Melotti’s ‘Teatrini’ are Metaphysical stage sets, modeled in clay, that take off from the example of Martini’s works in the ’30s, with the notable addition of colour. The representation of the ‘real’ and the modeling resemble crêche-scene narratives: summary yet descriptive.”14 Arturo Martini, an artist who had employed sculpture and clay specifically to embrace a return to order and figuration during the fascist ventennio, subsequently denied the possibility of sculpture to speak to the postwar condition.15 Wotan’s Sleep well exemplifies Melotti’s interest in revisiting clay as a nonfunctional material, while adding paint and colour to his modelled scenes. The lower area of Wotan’s Sleep holds the body of Wotan, fashioned out of lumps of clay, horizontally juxtaposed so as to resemble the shape of a reclining figure. The background is loosely painted with dark colours reminiscent of the walls of a room at night. The upper area includes vertical metallic elements that evoke the skyline of a modern city. The palette incorporates shades of brown and red, like the sky at dawn. The work as a whole interprets

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2.3 fausto melotti, Il Sonno di Wotan, 1958. Painted terracotta and brass, 52.8 × 39.2 × 11 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Fausto Melotti.

an episode from Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, corresponding both with Melotti’s passion for music and with his reference to theatrical spaces. One of the scenes from Wagner’s opera shows the sleep of the god Wotan (Odin), who dreams of a powerful future. In his dream, the city of Valhalla rises up from the ground. At dawn, when Wotan’s wife, Fricka, awakens him, he realizes that the city is more than a dream, and that it has taken the shape of a real citadel. Valhalla has materialized thanks to the giants who, in exchange for their favour, request Fricka’s sister, the goddess of youth, as a gift. Wotan’s ambitions come at the price of renouncing moral values and will eventually cause the god’s demise. Melotti’s sculptural reading of the story allows the dream (and the city) to seem physically present.16 The artist omits reference to specific plot details, yet he conveys its tragic tone through his dark and contrasting colour palette. Just as Wagner’s opera incorporates a range of artistic disciplines such as music, set and costume design, and storytelling, Melotti crosses the boundaries of artistic media by incorporating elements of sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts in Wotan’s Sleep. Letizia Modena identifies a connection between Melotti’s Little Theatres – Wotan’s Sleep in particular – and Armilla, a city in Italo Calvino’s novel from 1972, Invisible Cities. In both instances, home environments are framed like theatre stages, the absence of one wall allowing the viewer to intrude into the personal space of the inhabitants. The separation of the construction into multiple levels is as much physical as it is metaphorical, in that it refers to the oneiric space of desire and memory.17 The use of terracotta, a medium typically associated with everyday functionality, indicates Melotti’s exploration of subjects that, although domestic, are nonetheless elevated to imply ethical meanings. According to Eva Fabbri, in Wotan’s Sleep there is a parallel between Wotan’s trajectory and Mussolini’s own thirst for power and subsequent defeat. For Melotti, retreating to the representation of privacy in scenes symbolic of broader truths seemed like a remedy against the pompous and artificial values promoted by the fascist régime.18 While Wotan’s Sleep was created in the late 1950s, Melotti had started the Little Theatres in earlier decades, when he used ceramics to make non-functional work in addition to creating several series of bowls and vases.19 His postwar production in clay was in some way a response to interwar experiences that left on him an indelible mark.

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Magazines, Advertisements, and Product Design: More Efficiency and Less Intimacy The works of Casorati, Pirandello, and Melotti strike a balance between the personal and the political, the intimate and the mythical. Their approaches emerge even more clearly when compared to the ways in which sleeping was addressed in contemporaneous visual culture. Most references to sleep in women’s and design magazines are straightforward and functional. In such contexts, the concern is space layout and efficiency, as well as health matters, rather than the psychological or even political nuances of resting at a time of public turbulence. For example, readers are prompted to choose appropriate mattresses to enable them to sleep through the night. Publications recommend that bedrooms be furnished according to specific criteria; the small spaces of the typical Italian apartment demanded smart solutions for space organization. This functional lens is consistently applied throughout the postwar period, a time when readers sought behavioural models among the pages of widely distributed magazines. These publications became authorities for modern living, encouraging women in particular to comply with the new societal expectations. In the 1950 article “Le Funzioni della Casa: Dormire” (“The Functions of the Home: Sleeping”), published in the women’s magazine Grazia, Franco Berlauda discusses the importance of sleep for a family’s happiness.20 He warns that lack of sleep may result in nervousness and anxiety. Berlauda gives a wealth of practical advice: the bedroom should be situated in a quiet area of the home, for example; the colours of the walls and furniture should be relaxing; three sides of the beds should be free from the walls and not be placed between a window and the door, so as to avoid drafts; and transom windows are recommended. Because many people enjoy reading before going to sleep, soft lights should be placed on the nightstands. Furthermore, it is important that housewives refresh the air in the rooms frequently and keep the humidity level high enough to allow for healthy breathing. To top it off, Berlauda suggests that a sink be installed in the bedroom, especially for large families that share one bathroom. The following year, Grazia published another article imparting advice about sleep. In that context, Manca di Villahermosa advises that the bed should be comfortable, rather than beautiful.21 She also recommends avoiding trendy new beds that mimic antique styles, and suggests simple models such as upholstered headboards and bed structures, or even bunk beds. 88

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2.4 “Per le bimbe la Camera letto-Studio-gioco,” Arianna (July 1957), 95. Courtesy Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, Bologna. 

2.5 Ada Ardessi, Abitacolo di Bruno Munari, 1971. Photograph. © Ada Ardessi, courtesy Isisuf – Istituto internazionale di Studi sul Futurismo, Milan. © Ada Ardessi © Bruno Munari, Maurizio Corraini s.r.l. 

A 1957 article from the magazine Arianna, which targeted young women and newlyweds, proposes an analogous approach to home-furnishing.22 The text, paired with interior design drawings, discusses the display of a bedroom for girls, presenting it as a multi-functional space where children can rest, study, and play. Highlighting again this trend for multi-functionality, a 1963 article for Amica – another popular magazine targeting a female public – ran an advertisement for Nova, a brand that designed multi-functional furniture.23 It recommended a product that could easily be transformed to function as a bed during the night and a desk with a bookshelf during the day. Arianna, Grazia, and Amica show that Italian dwelling cultures considered the domestic space as adaptable. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of designers applied a similar concern for economy of space to new objects and modular environments. Bruno Munari’s Abitacolo (1971) exemplifies flexibility. Munari was a versatile artist working in graphic and industrial design as well as sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. He had been at the forefront of the Italian art scene since the late 1920s and was part of the Movimento Arte Concreta (m.a.c.), founded in 1948.24 His 1971 Abitacolo consists of a light and adaptable metallic structure that incorporates a child’s bed, a desk, four shelves, and four ladders. Many custom accessories are also available. Munari structures the child’s room to accommodate a range of practical needs, reflecting the attitude seen in women’s magazines. Abitacolo extends the logic of the modernist credo. Not only does it allow for logistical flexibility but it also fosters flexibility in terms of user participation and imagination, in ways that encourage personal appropriation of the domestic space, as described by Lefebvre’s theories.25 The product’s neutral colour and its use of negative space facilitate young users’ personalization of Abitacolo’s grid; children are invited to add their own objects and images to make the space feel like their own. Abitacolo is an affordable frame that becomes meaningful and comfortable as it adjusts to the needs of individuals. In a short article for Domus, photographs of Abitacolo on one page make it look like a minimalist sculpture; yet an additional photo of the product on the following page redefines its formal qualities, highlighting round and irregular elements that interact with the geometric structure. The photograph is one of a series of pictures by Ada Ardessi that show Abitacolo being inhabited by a number of untidy objects and demonstrate how the piece may be transformed by personal use.26 The items point to the activities that a child engages with, from soft toys, books, and a typewriter to a bicycle hanging from the frame

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2.6 Cesare tacchi, Il Letto (Pensando a un Prato...!), 1966. Painting on padded printed fabric, 250 x 150 cm. Private Collection. © Archivio Cesare Tacchi. 

of the raised bed. A child is shown climbing the structure and reaching to grab objects, interacting with Abitacolo as if it were a playground. Picking up on the idea that children usually lacked their own privacy in postwar Italian homes, Munari’s design offers children some independence. Because of its intended reinvention of traditional hierarchies among family members as well as between the architect and the dweller, Abitacolo was included by curator Emilio Ambasz in the “Contestatory” section of the exhibition Italy: A New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see chapter 1).27 In the context of the event, the goals and ambitions of architecture were wholly reconsidered so as to foster the architect’s sociological engagement and disrupt the power structures enabled by the cult of consumerism. Yet, in the case of Munari, the creation of products was dependent on collaboration with industrial partners, a symbiosis that ironically perpetuated the presence of standardized objects in the home environment.

An Overwhelming Abundance of Stuff: Pop Art’s Mattresses, Beds, and Covers By the 1960s, consumerism – boosted by popular magazines, advertisements, and tv commercials – had definitely reshaped the appearance of middle-class Italian apartments. The new objects that kept popping up had changed not only the domestic environment but also the ways in which residents interacted with the physical and psychological space of the home. Comfortable, alluring, and stuffed with things considered unobtainable just a few years earlier, the middle-class home was now a place of wonder where dwellers displayed evidence of the country’s sudden economic progress. A group of Italian artists frequently labelled “pop” described the experience as both hypnotizing and confusing. For some of these artists, the domestic bed most aptly illustrated the extent to which consumerist culture permeated every corner of the home, at any moment of the day and night. Cesare Tacchi’s Il Letto (Pensando a un Prato...!), which means The Bed (Thinking of a Lawn…!), from 1966), portrays this metaphor to great effect. Tacchi had entered the Roman art scene in the 1950s, when he reflected on the materiality of Alberto Burri’s canvases and considered the gestural abstraction of Franz Kline as seen in the painting Figura (Figure), exhibited in a collective exhibition alongside Renato Mambor

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2.7 Alberto Savinio, I Miei Genitori, 1945. Lithograph 22/33 from Alberto Savinio, I Miei Genitori: Disegni e Storie di Alberto Savinio (Rome: Concilium Lithographicum, n.3), 33.5 × 50.5 cm. Courtesy Center for Italian Modern Art. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

and Mario Schifano at the Galleria Appia Antica in 1959.28 In the first half of the 1960s, Tacchi’s compositions were organized in clear monochromatic areas that evoked Mondrian, although decorative and figurative elements appeared as well.29 His choice of subjects was inspired by modern industrial products such as cars. Tacchi experimented with sculpture and eventually questioned the independence of painting as a medium. Starting in 1965, his paintings incorporated bas-relief, and paint shared space with other materials such as fabric, which referenced domestic environments. As expressed by Walter Guadagnini: Cesare Tacchi also works on the rhetoric and imagery of the bourgeois interior, turning the characteristics of this environment – the armchair and sofa fabric – into the very substance of which the people and things are made. The environment in which the scene unfolds thus becomes the essence of the scene itself; the backdrop on which the action takes place in turn becomes the action, the main protagonist of this mise-en-scène.30 Tacchi’s visual strategy recalls Alberto Savinio’s portraits of his own parents, which well exemplify settings becoming “the essence of the scene itself.” Savinio, the brother of Giorgio de Chirico, had participated in the Metaphysical art movement in the late 1910s and later continued to juxtapose unlikely objects to form mysterious scenarios. His colourful paintings, for instance, often feature toys, furniture, and mythical figures as the geological strata of distant islands.31 In Savinio’s representations of his parents, they are represented as human-furniture hybrids to show their self-annihilating attachment to the home and the bourgeois values for which it stands. In Tacchi’s work, upper-class characters are immersed in the comfort of home objects in similarly self-annihilating ways. According to Daniela Lancioni, the inert figures of his art pieces recall the bored and nauseated protagonists of novels such as Alberto Moravia’s Time of Indifference (1929), Jean Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).32 Untouched by the traumatic memory of the war, Tacchi’s figures are lost in a world of privilege that they take for granted. In The Bed (Thinking of a Lawn…!), Tacchi divides the composition into three foldable rectangular panels, each lined with padded fabrics. A flowery pattern covers the bottom section, vertical stripes decorate the middle band,

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2.8 Domenico gnoli, Interno, 1967. Oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

and a combination of stripes formed by flowers adorn the upper area. On top of the overly saturated background, the artist sews the profile of a bed board, which occupies the upper portion of the piece to index the domestic realm. The middle and lower portions accommodate two reclining figures, which are painted over the fabric, their profiles appropriated from contemporaneous advertising.33 Though the figures appear to be copies of each other, they differ slightly. The middle rectangle is occupied by a fully dressed character holding a daisy, a comic-like speech bubble connected to her head illustrating her dream about a lawn strewn with yellow flowers; in the bottom area the figure is nude with nothing in her hands, and yet she lies on the same lawn (printed on the background fabric) that the upper figure dreams of. Guadagnini’s interpretation highlights the overlapping of people and domestic objects in The Bed (Thinking of a Lawn…!), a reading that aligns with my own point that Tacchi (as well as other artists) perceived the new abundance of consumer goods as annihilating of the self. This point is further demonstrated by the artist’s choice to create two different iterations of the woman’s body, as if it were a manufactured object produced in series. Finally, the woman dreams of an unattainable natural environment (the flowered lawn), but there is no escape, as her only possible contact with nature is artificial – reduced to the patterns of a piece of fabric. Like Tacchi, Domenico Gnoli conveys the loss of personal identity among the objects that filled the home. The son of art historian Umberto Gnoli and ceramist Anne de Garrou, Domenico Gnoli grew up in the 1930s and started working as a scene-set designer in the late 1940s, after which he practised as a painter, scenographer, and illustrator in Italy, France, and the United States. His work incorporated fantastical subjects and detailed renderings of fragments of everyday objects and figures.34 In his drawing Interno (Interior, 1967),35 the point of view is close, as always in Gnoli’s representations from the mid-1960s. The artist analyzes the realm of the home in detail, each little element depicted with the same level of precision.36 Interior represents two bodies, possibly a couple, lying side by side on a bed. Their identity obscured, they are completely covered by sheets and a bed cover. With the exception of the fingers of one of the characters holding the sheets, we can discern the shapes of the bodies only from their form under the covers. The artist alludes to a secret intimacy that cannot be interrupted; despite the close point of view, observers remain outside the picture. In this work, the home evokes the ideals of privacy and containment praised by Gaston Bachelard as a necessary refuge from the hustle of the modern public sphere.37

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2.9 ettore Innocente, Il Riposo del Guerriero, 1964. Enamel on mattress, 161 × 194 cm. Photo by the artist. Courtesy Archivio Ettore Innocente.

The association of reclining figures not only with intimacy and sleeping but also with the erotic is evident in Il Riposo del Guerriero (Warrior’s Rest, 1964) by Ettore Innocente, an artist based in Rome who participated in the city’s pop discourse in the late 1950s and early 1960s.38 The title Il Riposo del Guerriero recalls Nietzsche’s misogynistic aphorism: “Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.”39 Il Riposo del Guerriero is also the Italian title of a 1958 novel by French feminist writer Christiane Rochefort and a 1962 film starring Brigitte Bardot. Both twist the implications of Nietzsche’s words to allow a female perspective on the passive role that the philosopher assigned to women. Despite some plot differences, the novel and the film both tell the story of a young woman who dissuades a male intellectual from committing suicide; the resulting love affair is oppressive for the female character due to the cynical behaviour of her partner. Embodying the “recreation of the warrior” appears to be neither pleasant nor fulfilling. The filmic reference to recreation, which was likely the most relevant to Innocente, evokes the erotic dimension of his Il Riposo del Guerriero; simultaneously, through his visual choices, the artist evokes the act of sleeping. First, the Italian term riposo means “rest,” rather than “recreation,” which is used in English translations of Nietzsche’s passage. Also, the artwork has the same dimensions as a bed “a due piazze” (similar to a queen bed), and the piece incorporates two padded objects that recall white mattresses with pillows. Finally, on the soft surface, Innocente paints the profiles of a male and a female body. The female figure reproduces the outline of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (ca 1510), while the male figure mirrors Michelangelo’s statue of Dusk on the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence (1524–33). Both point to the act of sleeping, while also conveying a sensual allure. Innocente plays with references to various genres of representation: the filmic, the painterly, and the sculptural. And with his palette, he indexes the surface of living bodies; the peach colour that fills the characters’ outlines recalls the tone of Caucasian skin. Tangible materials (the mattresses and the paint on their surface) replace mediated images that circulate through mass culture, including those published in tourist guides, postcards, magazines, books, and films. Innocente thus suggests that his contemporary Italians see everyday life through the filter of mass media models, which go beyond divas and pop stars to include the trite reproductions of art historical masterpieces that are fed to the growing public of mass tourism. The overlap of intimacy and external structures points to the difficulty of untangling subjectivity and hegemony in postwar Italy.

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Visual Poetry: Deconstructing Mass Communication and Undermining Established Family Values in the Bedroom The rampant consumerism and media dominance of the 1960s triggered slightly different responses among visual poets than they had among pop artists. As discussed in chapter 1, visual poets tended to deconstruct the technological language of advertisements and mass publications to dismantle the values they represented. Artists such as Stelio Maria Martini and Luciano Ori, involved with visual poetry circles in Naples and Florence respectively, aimed to subvert rigid interpretations of gender relations, heterosexual family structures, and the intervention of Church and State in private matters.40 Stelio Maria Martini’s book Neurosentimental (1963)41 uses a hybrid language combining words and photography in a full-length novel. In line with Martini’s interest in destabilizing the principles of Western literature and its assumptions of logical order, his stories shuffle chronological timelines and mix subjective impressions with perceptions of the external world. Visual artists like Gianni Bertini and Enrico Baj42 were an important influence on his work. In addition, Martini participated in the avant-garde discourses of the 1960s and 1970s through the co-founding of countercultural magazines like Documento Sud and Linea Sud.43 His placement of appropriated mass media images adjacent to an abundance of printed and handwritten words generates multiple meanings. As noted by Matteo D’Ambrosio, in Neurosentimental the everyday is interlaced with the fantastic.44 The book mocks the language of popular romantic photo-novels, which targeted a female public. The characters of such mass publications behave according to gender stereotypes and usually embody the roles of the macho and the objectified woman, the hero and the victim. Neurosentimental, by contrast, stages alienated figures who find no satisfaction in normative romance and look for forms of escape. The novel upturns established moral values by randomly presenting the thoughts of the protagonist, Iorio – an actor by profession and also a father and husband. Disillusioned by marriage, Iorio engages in multiple erotic relationships outside its structure, receiving occasional advice from his queer acquaintance Mirella.45 He is unable to empathize with his wife, Barbo, and her nostalgia for the initial romantic phase of their marriage. She often spends time at her mother’s, seeking help with the care of their newborn, and during her absences, Iorio’s apartment is frequented by his lovers, such 100

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2.10 Stelio maria martini, Neurosentimental, 1963, p. 45. Naples: Morra, 1983. Special Collections, the University of Iowa Libraries. The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, on Loan from Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner and the Sackner Family Partnership. 

as the attractive bisexual woman Annie and the fascinating Vera. The narrative is elusive, and the reader must reconstruct the plot by piecing together the protagonist’s stream of consciousness. Iorio takes the reader from one place to another – almost always around Naples – with no apparent logical explanation. Many scenes are set in the domestic realm, the bedroom in particular. One page, for example, consists of a photograph of a bedroom furnished with modern items and textiles decorated with geometric patterns. A disproportionately large hand holding the upper part of what looks to be a guitar emerges from the bottom of the bed frame. The verbal component of the image, typed in above the photo-collage, alludes to the mix of bodily sounds, intimate chats, and visceral love that inhabits the domestic space during sleepless nights. From the third page of the novel, we learn about the irritating sounds of noisy neighbours which preclude any possibility of relaxation – kids stomping around and high-heeled shoes clicking from room to room. Further along, we find the image of another bed, untidy and unmade.46 The head of a male figure, whose face is hardly visible, occupies the bottom right corner of the composition, seemingly about to get up from lying on the bed. The words that accompany this page describe a married couple’s difficulties, including their meaningless and unfulfilling routines. In Neurosentimental, the domestic bedroom is associated with a lack of enthusiasm for traditional family dynamics, while at the same time suggesting the erotic excitement aroused by illicit relationships. Iorio is locked into the role of the husband and father, a role that he considers artificial and empty. Eroticism becomes his way of feeling real and experiencing life through the senses – a way of interrupting the flow of habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, and of distancing himself from inherited middle-class moral values inscribed in family behavioural standards. Significantly, in 1963 – the year in which Martini composed his photonovel – divorce was not legal in Italy. It was only with the 1970 law known as “Fortuna-Basilini,” which was approved by popular ballot (referendum) in 1974, that Italians gained the legal right to divorce and reverse the course of their personal lives. Before then, unhappy married couples had no choice but to stay together. It is in this context that Iorio feels trapped by the pressure to act according to societal expectations. One reason for the late legalization of divorce in Italy was the dominance of Catholic values over the private sphere (see chapter 1). The Church, which was extremely influential in the 1960s, promoted the ideal of the traditional family as the only ethical option

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for building a fair society. Nevertheless, that model protected the interests of some over those of others, and the resulting individual dissatisfactions may have caused disruptions to family dynamics. Criticism of the political stance of the Catholic Church intersperses the work of various visual poets, among them Luciano Ori. His technological story (racconto tecnologico) Io C’era (I Was There, 1966–67), a sequence of collages also available as a book, points to the Church’s inability to provide practical help when it was most needed. Ori was a protagonist of the Florentine art scene and had participated in the visual poetry group Gruppo 70 (see chapter 1) since 1964. He defined his work as “technological painting”: his compositions were entirely appropriated and collaged from magazines and advertisements produced with industrial processes.47 Io C’era is a timely reaction to the famous flood that paralyzed Florence in the fall of 1966. As argued by Lucilla Saccà,48 Ori’s response was dark and sarcastic, as the book denounced the lack of commitment on the part of politicians and clergy alike, both before and after the natural catastrophe. Through a combination of visuals and text, Ori argues that residents of Florence were left to their own devices, dependent on the mutual support of fellow citizens, as the media downplayed the gravity of their situation. One image of the book shows a couple rescuing some of their belongings along a muddy Florentine street. The male figure carries a rolled-up mattress on his shoulders, perhaps as a metaphor for people’s need to take care of their own fate. Speech bubbles show the dialogue between the two characters: she wonders if she asks too much of him, while he encourages her to ask for anything she wants – as if she could have it under the circumstances. A note clarifies that mud is still being removed from the streets. On Ori’s page, the couple is forced out of a condition of intimacy – often the premise of a love relationship. Intimacy is indexed by the mattress, yet flood refugees are being denied the intimate space they need; there is a complete lack of privacy. The state of emergency violently collapses the private and public spheres beyond the fluid interrelationship that, according to Joanne Hollows, has regulated the two realms in the modern era (see the Introduction). In this image, the couple’s personal life now overlaps with public matters, as the two are forced into the streets. This sarcastic scene recalls Achille Beltrame’s dramatic cover illustration of refugees that was published by La Domenica del Corriere on 17 October 1943 (see chapter 1). The parallel between the condition of the displaced contemporary alluvionati and the war sfollati highlights the tragic impact of the flood on the Florentine population.

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2.11 luciano ori, Chiedo troppo? plate n.16 of the technological story (racconto tecnologico) “Io C’era,” 1966–67. Collage on cardboard, cm 50 × 35. Courtesy Archivio Luciano Ori, Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Florence.

Arte Povera: Body Memory Embedded in Mattresses and Bed Frames Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s essay “La maison dans l’Arte povera”49 (see chapter 1) argues that several of the poveristi addressed domesticity to convey their interest in the personal realm. Rather than reinforce the power hierarchy between public and private spheres, arte povera gave relevance to direct perception and fluid process that depend on our experience of the space and the materials around us through our own body. Despite individual differences, it is within this framework that one may read examples of works that include bed frames and mattresses by three artists in particular: Pier Paolo Calzolari, born in Bologna and raised in Venice, whose light, materiality, and art history inspired the artist’s poetics; Gilberto Zorio, based in Turin and engaged with ideas of fluidity, process, and chemical transformation; and Jannis Kounellis, Greek-born but later based in Rome, who was fascinated with the everyday dimension of history, the physical triggers of memory, and the dialectic between energy and containment. A close analysis of select artworks will allow an understanding of the individual sensitivities of these artists. Curator and critic Massimiliano Gioni highlights a poignant aspect of Calzolari’s vocabulary: nocturnal: Calzolari’s work has a penchant [for] dark colors, nocturnal moods, and the texts that the artist inscribes on many of them seem like the stream of unconsciousness we experience at the edge of sleep. Home and the domestic sphere are a recurrent element in the artist’s work: his “ideal home” is a monastic cell where one hears “no rumblings but my own,” as we read on the mattress hung on the wall in Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1971.50 The piece mentioned by Gioni – one of a series that incorporates mattresses and neon-tube texts, first created in 1970 and 1971 – is known as Senza Titolo [Senz’altri rumori che i miei] (Untitled [With No Sounds Except My Own]) and presents a melton cloth mattress hanging on the wall like a painting. The whiteness of the object stands against the whiteness of the gallery wall behind it; the white thread seams draw delicate lines over the fabric background;51 the frost that forms around the lead strings that tie the mattress is glistening white. In this context, immaculate whiteness becomes symbolic of purity and spirituality, while lead indexes heaviness and grounding; yet

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2.12 Pier Paolo Calzolari, Senza Titolo [Senz’altri rumori che i miei], 1971–94. Melton fabric, copper structure, blue fluorescent pipes, refrigerator unit, transformer, dimmer box, lead, 232 × 287.5 × 50 cm. Property Fondo Calzolari. Photo Paolo Semprucci. Courtesy Fondazione Calzolari. 

this is complicated by the fact that lead was traditionally used to create white paint, known as “lead white.” Lightness and heaviness co-exist and overlap in the piece, which pairs a reference to the absolute “unconsciousness that we experience at the edge of sleep” with an awareness of the body and its intimate physicality. The neon writing that runs across the piece states: Senzaaltri rumori cheimiei (sic), that is “with no sounds except my own.” The word rumori, or sounds, prompts an engagement of hearing in addition to the sight usually linked to painting. Actual sound is produced by the motor that causes the frosting of the lead. Calzolari is looking for a form of multi-sensoriality, which is also evoked by the very use of frost, with its chilling effect, in contrast to the assumed warmth of the mattress. By evoking contrasting physical sensations, Calzolari activates in the viewer an intense response to everyday objects. According to the artist, the reality of things must be experienced through the senses in order to fully expand one’s knowledge beyond the limits of rationality. In a seminal text from 1968 titled “The Ideal Home,” Calzolari states: “I can imagine a home where I can live elemental and inventive ... a home where I can find reality.”52 Calzolari’s words highlight the subjective and intimate dimension of the home. For example, the neon text that stretches across the mattress of Untitled suggests that the bed is a personal space that becomes infused with a person’s bodily essence: “no sounds but my own” inhabit the private space at a time of sleep. The cursive neon writing reproduces the spontaneity of handwriting rather than the more standardized fonts usually associated with neon lights in the urban scenario. The artist twists this visual reference to the public sphere by bringing it into the most private space with a mechanism of détournement. Also, neon light is created by the movement of luminous gas, it embodies energy – an energy that simulates the body’s dynamism, a continuity that does not stop during sleep. Thus, the mattress becomes permeated with the memory of the body’s movements and sounds; the everyday object keeps the secret of uncontrolled and private motions. The connection between the interior of the home (and the self) and the external urban landscape links Calzolari’s Untitled (1971) with Gilberto Zorio’s sculpture titled Letto (Bed, 1966). The fluidity between private and public realms that Hollows discusses extensively emerges through these works.53 Zorio’s piece nonetheless has its own characteristics. Bed is a 170 cm-squared structure made of tubi dalmine, special pipes that construction companies used for scaffolding and other functions. Strings form a net that stretches across the structure. Over the net, a sheet of lead partially hangs towards

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2.13 gilberto Zorio, Letto, 1966. Scaffolding tubes and clamps, black rubber rods, lead sheet, 50 × 170 × 170 cm. Collection of the artist, installation view Castello di Rivoli, 2017. Photo Antonio Maniscalco. Courtesy of the artist. 

the floor. The piece’s components point to both the natural and the humanmade. The strings are actually electrical cords – natural rubber coating a copper core – and recall the materiality of modern buildings. Similarly, lead was heavily employed for water pipes, insulation, and wall paints. Zorio also included tubi dalmine; as he indicates in an interview with Germano Celant, he was impressed by their simple technology, based on which clamps and bolts mimic the hold of a human hand.54 The artist discovered them while visiting building sites overseen by his father, a contractor who moved to Turin from a rural area of Molise in the 1950s during the peak of the Reconstruction process. The incorporation of tubi dalmine is thus associated with Zorio’s personal history as well as the country’s public history. In addition, the pipes index the skeleton of residential buildings, yet Zorio uses them to sculpt a bed, an object in the interior of a home. Through this shifting association, Zorio connects the outer with the inner, the container with the contained. It must be noted that, although Bed is a structure in and of itself, the piece lacks any functional possibility. In fact, the plane formed by interlaced natural rubber strings, which are held up by the rigid tubi dalmine, is tilted. The bottom legs of the bed are shorter than the top legs, thus the surface that connects the two sides is bent. On top of the rubber grid, Zorio positions a sheet of lead, a material that also fascinated Calzolari and Kounellis among other poveristi. The lead sheet in Zorio’s Letto recalls the placement of a blanket on top of a bed. Lead is metal that retains the memory of the objects it touches; it is a material that is both malleable and strong, protective and dangerous.55 The sheet of lead slowly changes under its own weight and adapts to the structure of the bed beneath it, just as a body leaves traces of its shape on the bed on which it rests. Not by chance, when the work was first exhibited, viewers could lie down on the structure, which thereby functioned as a prop for a performative situation activated by the public. Zorio’s Bed elicits tension, embedded in the cultural meaning and physical behaviour of materials such as lead (which both shields and moves) and construction pipes (here associated with both the outside and the inside). Tension also arises from the symbolic denial of the expected comfort of the bed as presented in popular magazines of the time. Zorio expresses his rationale for bringing together a four-legged structure, a rubber grid, and a lead plane in Bed: “I see them as the encounter between a four-legged animal, a plant-based element, and a dull metal that, like a body, crashes and adapts.”56 He employs terms that came to define Germano Celant’s interpretation of arte povera in 1967, a year after Bed was

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2.14 Jannis Kounellis, Letto, 1969. Metal bed frame, wool, 15 3/4 × 74 13/16 × 31 1/2 in. Collection Margherita Stein. Property Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT on loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

created. The incorporation of animals, plants, metals, and references to the body becomes a way of reconnecting with a perception of the natural world that avoids the complications of mainstream culture, the overbearing legacy of Italian history, and the perceived intrusion of the mass media. Jannis Kounellis, a peer poverista of Calzolari and Zorio, also used references to the bed in his work. The incorporation of bed frames topped with a plethora of living or inert materials was a pattern over the many years of his career. In an interview with Germano Celant,57 Kounellis recalled creating twelve pieces with bed frames in 1969 alone, many of them dispersed after an exhibition at the Iolas Gallery in New York.58 Visual documentation of the series appears in photographs of the artist’s studio (1969)59 as well as images of an exhibition at the Galleria l’Attico, owned by Fabio Sargentini. The bed frame evokes the size of the body and functions as a metaphor for the body. Rather than build a structure that indexes the bed frame, as Zorio does, Kounellis appropriates existing objects in readymade artworks. By combining the bed frame with select materials, the artist triggers contrasting emotions. One piece includes a bar of lead over a bed frame, thus pointing to Zorio’s work from a few years before. There are several pieces in which the frames sustain raw wool, like the Untitled sculpture (1969) currently at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin,60 which appears comfortable and warm. The wool mattress was commonly used and elicited familiar experiences for the 1960s visitor. Yet, Kounellis’s work is complicated by multifaceted references. For example, the loose materiality of the wool resembles the strokes of paint on a canvas and the wool indexes the body of the sheep imbued with energy and capable of conveying warmth. Some of Kounellis’s bed frames are activated by more daring elements. For example, one frame supports a grid of iron tiles on which the artist placed ignited metaldehyde tablets. Fire is dynamic and releases energy; however, the metaldehyde tablets are contained by a geometrical structure that visually compresses the fire. Another bed frame supports a horizontal cage in which white rats roam alive. Here too, live energy is contained and controlled, yet it pulses within the structure. For Kounellis the rats symbolize dreams and memories and refer to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which the protagonist is freed by rats who chew away his bonds. Thus, although Kounellis’s white rats may trigger an emotion of disgust, they are linked to a possibility of redemption. Kounellis had employed live animals in his work since 1966.61 One notable example is his Twelve Horses at the Attico

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(1969), where he exhibited real horses in the gallery space, referencing the equestrian statues that viewers could view in many Roman public squares.62 Kounellis substituted public histories with personal histories and ancient traditions that are still in process. His main interests were experience and multi-sensoriality, rather than representation. His pieces sometimes involved the presence of human beings through installation and performance, as is the case with a 1970 artwork in which a woman wrapped in a dark blanket lies on top of an iron base. Her right foot is tied to a manifold that is connected to a gas tank. The end of the manifold emits fire. The combination of these various elements evokes a torture scene and puts the viewer in a position of tension and fear. Kounellis argues that, since the medieval period, fire has been perceived as purifying and cleansing, while the submissive female body, wrapped in a chaste textile and bound by potentially dangerous tubes, makes one think of martyrdom.63 In this piece, the incorporation of beds and reclining figures becomes associated with violence, rather than comfort. As I discuss in the following section, the linking of sleep (or lack thereof), eroticism, and violence was a frequent phenomenon in Italian post–World War II culture.

Violence in the Bedroom The plot of Elsa Morante’s best-seller novel La Storia (History, 1974)64 begins with an episode of rape in the domestic context. By the time she published La Storia, Morante (1912–1985) was an acclaimed writer who was appreciated for her interplay of realism and mythopoeia. For her, the role of the poet is to capture symbolic truths that emerge through storytelling. Storia means both “history” and “story,” and Morante plays with the double meaning of the term to suggest the intertwining of major historical events and personal narratives. She revisits the personal histories of the war period, both her own and those of others who experienced terror under the fascist regime.65 Morante was receptive to the countercultural ideas of the 1960s evident in arte povera as well. Her focus on the dramatic and complex dynamics of individual lives puts into question the value of political and military histories of the past. In Morante’s novel, although public histories affect private stories, not much changes for the marginalized; they are subject to constant violence despite historical transitions. Because of its fictional, if realistic, nature and the historical distance that separates Morante from the story that she weaves 112

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together, the novel cannot be used as a primary source for mid-1940s private narratives. That said, as pointed out by Patrizia Sambuco: Literary and artistic revisitations, and indeed any revisitation of the past involves an interplay of past and present and of truth and fiction that is in fact not only pertinent to memory but also to history … In the contemporary period, the move from macrohistory to microhistory, with its emphasis on oral history and the disenfranchised, has reshaped many hitherto concepts of history.66 Morante’s writing is useful to the discussion of domestic violence during World War II because it helps us appreciate the persistence of its memory. It fosters an emotional understanding of sexual violence from the point of view of both the victim and the perpetrator, allowing the reader a more profound connection with traumatic life events that were not uncommon during the war, as pointed out by David W. Ellwood.67 La Storia is set in Rome from 1943 to 1947, from the final years of the war to the early postwar period. The protagonist is an epileptic elementary school teacher named Ida, a thirtyseven-year-old Catholic woman whose mother was Jewish. The story begins when Ida is raped by a young and ultimately naïve German soldier, in her own apartment in the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo, Rome. The soldier was looking for affection and misunderstood Ida’s body language, as he interpreted the movements of an epileptic crisis as signs of desire. Morante describes the episode of violence in the home as an invasion of the private sphere, but also as an equivocal misunderstanding between Ida’s fear that her Jewish origins be discovered and the German soldier’s need for a peaceful place to rest. After the fact, his sense of gratitude is contrasted with Ida’s sense of disgust, which is subsequently triggered over and over again by the domestic environment that contained and thus witnessed the violence. The home – with its familiar furniture displayed into enclosed rooms – absorbs memories of the traumatic event. The memories feel real and concrete, making past actions ever-present. Unlike Bachelard, for whom, as described in The Poetics of Space, the positive memories embedded in the home offer relief from the burdens of the public sphere, for Morante’s character Ida the nooks and hidden spaces of her apartment secrete difficult and paralyzing memories.68 By casting light on personal tragedies associated with the disruption of the war, Morante links the physical destruction with the ruin of subjective identities. Postwar Italian artists reflected on similar forms of annihilation

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that had generated a moral ground zero. Some chose to express the loss of any rational coherence through gestural, material, and abstract artworks, which are sometimes labelled as arte informale. In addition, an interest in materiality and abstraction appears in the work of Alberto Burri, an artist whose production evades art historical labels. Trained as a medical doctor, he served in the Italian army during World War II and was captured by the Allies in North Africa. While interned in a prisoners’ camp in Texas, he started painting on available materials, including burlap sacks used for food storage. Once back in Italy, he became a professional artist based in Rome. His interest in experimenting with found materials transformed through gestural processes continued throughout his career. Burri intended his own work exclusively as formal and visual research, an approach common to many Italian artists of the time.69 Italian scholars have identified relationships between his abstract compositions and the work of Renaissance artists, including Piero della Francesca, while American scholars such as Emily Braun and Jaimey Hamilton Faris have interpreted his work in the light of his traumatic life experiences during the World War II period.70 In the catalogue of a major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Braun analyzes Grande Bianco (Large White, 1956)71 as a work that exemplifies the coexistence of intimacy and violence in postwar Italian art. Braun maintains that Burri’s Bianchi series culminated in Grande bianco (Large White, 1956, plate 20), which the artist kept for his museum. He tore open, splayed, and stitched a finely woven, medium-weight nightgown (biancheria also refers to lingerie and nightgowns) and then fashioned it into a picture with an economy of means. Using a heavy thread, Burri sewed the garment pieces to a linen canvas. The nightgown’s embroidered neckline and ruched bodice ruffle the otherwise pristine surface, while exposed seams with prominent whipstitching draw a line in bold relief across the picture plane … The artist violated the virginal garment only to reclaim its virtue by recasting it as a painting.72 Braun’s terms “violated” and “virginal” emphasize how the nightgown was associated with a chaste and intimate female body. I would add that, by roughly dismembering the gown and piecing it together with an extraneous material, Burri tortures the feminine item to conform it to a shape determined 114

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by the male artist. The whole body is evoked by its fragments, and the scars are still visible. One could view Large White as a beautification of violence, which is ultimately painful, especially to the female viewer, because of the destruction of a familiar garment typically used for comforting experiences like rest and sleep. As argued by Elisabeth Bronfen73 and more recently by Elisa Giomi and Sveva Magaraggia,74 the beautification of violence over the female body is a dangerous pattern in modern art, as well as in contemporaneous cinema; this phenomenon continues in present mass media representations and results in the normalization and tolerance of aggressive behaviour toward women. The frequency of domestic violence, even beyond the context of war, is denounced by Elena Ferrante’s previously mentioned series of Neapolitan novels, which were published in the 2010s. Ferrante’s books show how recent representations of the postwar period continue to stress violence as a common experience for women of that time. The author tells the story of a lifelong friendship between the two female protagonists, Lila and Elena. In an episode from Storia del Nuovo Cognome (The Story of a New Name), Lila confesses to Elena that her husband, Stefano, tries to control her with corporal punishment. He also rapes her regularly and violently, since she refuses to willingly have sex with him. In an episode set in 1958, Ferrante pictures the exchange between the two young women: “But at least when you sleep together, isn’t it nice?” She made a grimace of discomfort, became serious. She began to speak of her husband with a sort of loathing acceptance. It wasn’t hostility, it wasn’t a need for retaliation, it wasn’t even disgust, but a placid disdain, a contempt that invested Stefano’s entire person like polluted water in the ground … Our mothers, after they were slapped by their husbands, did not have that expression of calm disdain. They despaired, they wept, they confronted their man sullenly, they criticized him behind his back, and yet, more or less, they continued to respect him.75 Ferrante’s words give us a glimpse into a social scenario in which, in the Italian south, women seemed to accept men’s violence as natural and inevitable in the context of the bedroom. The bedroom as a domestic space becomes a setting for the visual staging of violence in Valerio Adami’s Scena in Camera da Letto (Bedroom Scene) from

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2.15 Valerio Adami, Scena in una Camera da Letto, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 198 x 147 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 

1970. Adami’s depiction was not explicitly linked to a specific Italian region; also, it was created at a time that is distant both from the episode described in Ferrante’s story and from the years when she composed the novels. That said, his representation, like Ferrante’s narrative, assumes that the privacy of the bedroom can shield violence. Adami’s visual language at the incipit of the 1970s was imbued with pop references that the artist had embraced after an initial phase influenced by Francis Bacon and a subsequent period of dialogue with existential painting.76 In Bedroom Scene, Adami represents a bedroom, complete with queen bed, pillows, and nightstand. His formal language uses flat colours and thick lines, similar to those seen in popular comic books. The artist’s style also pays homage to historical avant-garde masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wifredo Lam, and Giorgio de Chirico. These diverse references collapsed the high/low distinction between fine arts and kitsch.77 Cubism taught Adami the lesson of deconstruction, which he infused with new conceptual meanings. Rather than aim to understand space in its three-dimensionality, Adami deconstructed his characters’ bodies as a way of showing how individual identities were unrecognizable in an era of multiplicity and seriality. In Bedroom Scene, the composition revolves around the seat of a kneeling woman; her face is invisible, as if she were sucked in by the very folds of the background. The body is fragmented to suggest a sadistic mutilation, which nonetheless appears to be aestheticized by the colourful palette. The representation of violence toward women is linked to a desire for erotic submission and Adami’s artwork makes a connection between eros and domestic violence. The connection between eros and thanatos is also addressed by female artist Giosetta Fioroni, who frequented the same pop circles as Adami in Rome, with Foto da un atlante di medicina legale (Photo from an Atlas of Legal Medicine, 1975).78 This body of work appropriates images from the forensic medicine manual Atlas der Gerichtlichen Medizin by Waldemar Weimann and Otto Prokop, printed in Berlin in 1930.79 The manual includes photos of faces and bodies that were considered pathological cases in Austria during the period between the world wars. By placing images appropriated from the manual in the context of an artwork, Fioroni makes inaccessible stories public. She chooses images that incorporate familiar items tainted by the horrific signs of the crime (like a domestic wardrobe that hides the corpse of a child), triggering a process of identification that provokes repulsion in the viewer. Fioroni’s aesthetics are aligned with the arguments of feminist

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critic Lea Vergine. In 1969 Vergine curated an exhibition titled Irritarte at the Galleria Milano. The show displayed examples of recent art where the staging of violence coincided with creative expression. Vergine coined the term irritarte to define art that disfigures the comfortable image of the everyday with violent associations. The exhibition pointedly included a graphic installation by Gerardo di Fiore, in which viewers experienced a post-suicide bedroom setting. According to Vergine, it is exactly through repulsion that art can convey the deepest essence of humanity, connecting people to their deepest instincts and fears.80

Women Artists’ Point of View: Carol Rama, Marisa Merz, Ketty La Rocca, and Carla Accardi As a critic, Lea Vergine has shown long-lasting support for Carol Rama, whose work has enjoyed widespread if late recognition in recent years.81 Born in Turin in 1918, Rama was a self-taught artist who channelled her thoughts and passions into beautifully bold paintings. Her work often explored women’s desire without filters, smashing the barriers of social restrictions. She painted friends and family members, whose bodies are revealed without veils. Rama’s characters engage in erotic fantasies; they masturbate and fornicate, their mouths open and their tongues sticking out. According to the artist, she first observed such open mouths in the patients of a psychiatric hospital when she was twelve. Rama had a traumatic adolescence, during which her mother was interned in a psychiatric unit and her father committed suicide. She described art as a form of therapy that allowed her to frame her personal and social transgressions. In her words: “I paint for instinct and I paint for passion. And because of rage and because of violence and because of sadness.”82 For Rama, domestic objects and furnishings come to life as unexpected tools of pleasure, sometimes at the verge of sadism. For example, in her 1940 watercolour Appassionata (Passionate), she depicts an almost naked female figure wearing only black shoes and a large tiara. The character lies on a bed that is equipped with black straps; next to the bed, more straps and belts hang from a nearby structure. No action is portrayed, but the scene is set in such a way as to evoke the viewers’ fantasies. For Rama, the intimacy of the bed is connected to violence and overlaps with pleasure. The public has had strong reactions to Rama’s work since it was first exhibited at the Faber Gallery in Turin in 1945.83 Her exhibitions have sometimes been censored, 118

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2.16 Carol rama, Appassionata, 1940. Watercolour and pencil on paper. Courtesy Archivio Carol Rama, Turin.

sometimes ignored, and have remained on the margins of the mainstream art historical discourse for many decades. The artist herself remained separate from groups of fellow artists like the poveristi, in Turin and beyond, and continued on her own path with a sense of pride and independence. With the notable exception of Rama’s work, women’s art during the Italian postwar context mostly escapes the association of violence, eros, and sleep. That said, like Rama, others have been interested in exploring the realm of the bed to address personal relationships and the intersection of art and life. Marisa Merz, like Rama, was based in Turin. Unlike Rama, though, Merz did participate in the discourse of arte povera, engaging with the objects available in her domestic environment to construct sculptural installations or performative props. Because Merz perceived art and life as intertwined, flowing through time seamlessly, she did not date her work and for a large part of her career was reluctant to show it in the context of exhibitions.84 The objects that she incorporated in her practice were present in her daily life and activated by the artist’s own actions or those of her loved ones. Among other items, she used blankets that she rolled up and secured with copper thread or scotch tape. Blankets cover, protect, and keep us warm. In Merz’s hands, such mundane items retain all these associations, while becoming transformed into warm, soft, and elongated forms. In 1970 Marisa’s husband, Mario Merz, carried the blankets and placed them on the beach of Fregene; the same objects were then displayed in the context of Marisa’s solo exhibition at Fabio Sargentini’s L’Attico gallery in Rome.85 Claudio Abate photographed the action, making a record of the collaboration between the spouses. The blankets are an index of the couple’s intimate bed, which is then made into a work of art and brought outside the privacy of the bedroom. Both Marisa and Mario contribute to this extension beyond the home; Marisa makes the piece and Mario carries it. Placed horizontally on the Fregene shore, the blankets were touched by the ever-moving waves. Seawater and sand entered the folds in the fabric to become part of the work, which adapted to its new life outside domestic walls like an organic form. The encounter with the public space was poetic rather than violent. If the blanket indexes the warmth and the ties of a relationship for Marisa Merz, Ketty La Rocca (whose visual poetry piece titled Trazione Anteriore was analyzed in chapter 1) used the reference to bedding and bed frames to express the potential of a relationship with herself. While her previous work often centred around the empty messages of advertisements and their pretense to dictate societal standards, her series Le Presenze Alfabetiche (Alphabetical 120

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2.17 Ketty la rocca, J, 1970. From the photographic series Presenze Alfabetiche. Courtesy The Ketty La Rocca Estate, managed by the artist’s son Michelangelo Vasta.

Presences, 1970) reflects on the body and its inner language. Compared to Cesare Tacchi’s use of lying figures to elicit boredom and excessive material abundance, La Rocca’s lying in bed signifies introspection. In one of the photographs from Alphabetical Presences, La Rocca lies in her bed with a body-sized, three dimensional, typewritten “J”, topped by a dot that rests on the pillow next to her recalling the shape of a human figure. She poses for the camera while many shots of her interaction with a “J” are taken. In French, the pronunciation of “J” sounds like je, meaning “I.” Remarkably, sometimes La Rocca chooses the letter “I” for her Alphabetical Presences, another letter that indexes the self. Thus, La Rocca performs an action in which she lies in bed with a letter that stands for herself. She expresses herself through a linguistic sign and this puts her in direct, even physical contact with her inner being. As noticed by Leslie Cozzi, the series “points to La Rocca’s stake in her own project, and her desire to approach the artistic enterprise as a mode of self-documentation.”86 The work also engages the viewers, as they use the singular first-person pronoun, too. Scholars have frequently focused on the semantics of La Rocca’s work – the materiality of language,87 the system of signs that govern communication among human beings,88 and the proposal to simplify such signs in response to life experiences.89 I would like to add some observations about the bedroom, which La Rocca chooses for a specific picture of J. For this photograph, as the artist’s son Michelangelo Vasta mentioned to me, the artist decided to stage the photoshoot in the bedroom of her own home in the Florentine Oltrarno.90 Here, she is covered by white sheets on a letto matrimoniale or letto a due piazze (similar to a queen bed). This kind of bed is a piece of furniture that, to a contemporaneous public, evoked a couple’s intimacy. The bed, which is meant for two, is occupied by La Rocca and the “J”, her alter ego, to show that she shares an intimate space with her own self. It is in the most private room of the home that La Rocca can look for a relationship with herself. It looks as if, in this removed room, the artist could find the comfort to experiment with a new form of expression enabled by intimacy. By applying Lefebvre’s lens (see the Introduction), one could argue that it is through the repetition of an intimate action that identity is formed in relation to the domestic space. Shortly after La Rocca created Alphabetical Presences in Florence, Carla Accardi (whose involvement with feminism and interest in nomadism were discussed in chapter 1) started painting on bed sheets in her Roman apartment. Made in about forty versions from 1971 to 2000, the Lenzuoli (Bed Sheets) were nonetheless for the most part painted in the span of two years, from 1973 to 1975.91 Seven of them were exhibited as a group at the Galleria Editalia in 122

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2.18 Carla Accardi, Lenzuolo, 1974. Series of about forty artworks, created mostly from 1973 to 1975. Courtesy Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo. 

2.19 Carla Accardi, Lenzuoli, 1972. Series of about forty artworks, created mostly from 1973 to 1975. Courtesy Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo. 

Piazza del Popolo, steps away from the artist’s home, in 1974. In the small but elegant catalogue that accompanied the show, Maurizio Fagiolo commented on the formal qualities of Accardi’s abstract painting. To Fagiolo, Accardi’s work was simple but not simplistic, and digested the experience of the recent art of the poveristi without copying it in literal ways. His comment might be a reference to Luciano Fabro’s work Tre Modi di Mettere le Lenzuola (Three Ways of Arranging Sheets, 1968),92 in which the Milan-based artist displayed white bed sheets held up in a variety of arrangements by nails in the wall (see chapter 4). Fabro’s sheets remained white and unpainted but took on sculptural forms thanks to their folds and turns. Accardi’s Bed Sheets, by contrast, were painted with colourful abstract patterns and were displayed like flat paintings at the Galleria Editalia. In commenting on her pieces, Fagiolo downplayed the role of the sheets as domestic materials, and only underlined the transition of the support from canvas to “thing.”93 He was interested in the objecthood of the new work, and even more so in the fact that the sheets hanging from the gallery walls provided a contrast between roughness and smoothness. Yet Accardi’s Bed Sheets were not only displayed on gallery walls; they usually occupied domestic settings, whether in her home or in her collectors’ homes. Francesco Impellizzeri, who serves on the scientific committee of the Carla Accardi Archives, argues that the artist and some collectors at times used the sheets as covers for sofas or beds.94 What’s more, two illustrated magazine articles visually document the use of Bed Sheets in the artist’s apartmentstudio.95 The images show that Accardi hung some of her Bed Sheets on the bedroom wall over her bed, and also used them as a curtain – a separation – between two environments. According to Impellizzeri, in Accardi’s hands the bed sheets function as painting supports and also reference the home in broad terms.96 The linens become versatile, taking on meaning beyond the bedroom and the activities associated with it. They also serve new functions in different areas of the home, thus metaphorically connecting the more private and more accessible spaces within it. The mobility and flexibility of the Bed Sheets allow them to adapt to a variety of spaces. The fact that Accardi paints on the sheets frees them up from expectations of intimacy and allows them to play multiple roles with ease. In some way, this is what painting did for Accardi; it made her feel comfortable and proud as she embodied many roles beyond those assigned to women by gender stereotypes. Accardi saw herself, with no hesitation, as an abstract painter. She chose that path in 1947 when she co-founded the group Forma 1, and she continued

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2.20 “Avantgarde aus dem Penthouse,” Architektur & Wohnen 2 (September 1983): 152–5. Magazine clip showing the display of the Lenzuoli in Carla Accardi’s home. Courtesy Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo.

to believe in the power of that choice throughout her life. To her, abstraction was an unconditioned form of individual expression that placed her at the same level as her male peers in the art world. Yet the process of painting was personal to her, and took place in her sun-filled home, which was also her studio. She surrounded herself with her own art as she created new pieces, and the Bed Sheets contributed to defining such environments. For Rama, Merz, La Rocca, and Accardi, the bed – with its accessories and its narratives – becomes connected with personal identity. It celebrates the body and the right to fulfill one’s sexuality. It evokes relationships with loved ones and with oneself. It speaks to independence, self-sufficiency, and the pride of being an artist.

Conclusion During the fascist dictatorship and the war, fear of violence from outside the home limited any opportunity for relaxation. Artists like Casorati, Pirandello, and Melotti investigated sleep as a psychological and political condition; later popular and design magazines insisted that sleeping well was a necessary bodily function. With the end to the world conflict, the Marshall Plan promoted the rebirth of a new economy modelled after the American way of life. Consumerism entered even the most private areas of the home, such as the bedroom. Artists like Cesare Tacchi, Domenico Gnoli, and Ettore Innocente depicted characters that became one with their domestic objects. Their subjects became identified with new goods, thus losing the sense of their own identity. Artists associated with visual poetry like Stelio Maria Martini and Luciano Ori dismantled the mass media (as well as Catholic) myth that happiness is grounded in the nuclear family by appropriating and displacing images of domestic abundance. Rather than relating to domestic items as status symbols, arte povera artists like Pier Paolo Calzolari, Gilberto Zorio, and Jannis Kounellis looked at beds and bed frames as associated with physical and sensorial experience. Within the arte povera realm, Marisa and Mario Merz looked at blankets as signifiers of relationships and intimacy. Conversely, Ketty La Rocca and Carla Accardi referenced domestic privacy to affirm their independence and creative autonomy as women and artists. Artists as diverse as Alberto Burri, Valerio Adami, Giosetta Fioroni, and Carol Rama explored the connection between the privacy of the bedroom,

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sexuality, and violence. For them, harm was embedded in the private sphere rather than being caused by political threats, as elicited by the work of artists from the previous generation. As we shall see in the next chapter, a similarly strident pairing of vulnerability and intimacy, self-care and bodily objectification finds expression in select artworks that address body care in the period under study.

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CHAPTER 3

Purifying, beautifying, and Intimidating Visual Interpretations of Domestic bathing and body Care

Changing Habits: Personal Hygiene in Mid-Twentieth-Century Italy An oral account by Gina Corvino – a high-school teacher who grew up in a Tuscan town in the immediate postwar period – reminds us of the varying perceptions of body-washing in the mid-twentieth century: My mother, Fedora Silvestri, was obsessed with bathing. I grew up in the small town of Grosseto in the Forties and Fifties, and my family had limited resources. We had no bathtub or shower at home, but mom took me to the public baths once a week. It was not everybody’s common practice, but it was a priority to her.1 At both the societal and subjective levels, people value body care in diverse ways. The habit of showering daily reflects a mentality, social norm, and set of beliefs that are specific to our times. According to Martin Schmidt, in early modern Europe bathing was considered dangerous, because immersion in water was thought to open up skin pores and facilitate the cutaneous absorption of diseases.2 It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a modern idea of efficiency, paired with the scientific discovery that disease is spread through germs, changed the attitude toward cleansing the body with water. Higher-class individuals then started bathing regularly. In the aforementioned novel Family Sayings, which is set in early to mid-twentieth-century Turin (see chapter 1), Natalia Ginzburg recalls that her parents’ morning ritual began with a cold shower. Her father was a scientist and appreciated modern medicine, so he made body-washing part of his everyday routine. For a time in the 1920s, the Ginzburg family lived on a street called Pallamaglio in Turin. The windows of their apartment overlooked the public baths. In Family Sayings, Natalia smiles about her mother’s concern at seeing men enter the space with only a towel under their arm.3 The passage shows that during fascism many residences lacked access to private bathrooms. Despite the intentions of modernist architects, who designed homes with bathrooms in an effort to make personal hygiene accessible and widespread,4 tubs and showers still remained a luxury in midtwentieth-century Italy. Luisa Tasca reports the following: The Inquiry on Poverty in Italy, compiled by the Italian Parliament in 1951–1952, revealed that 869,000 families – of which 744,000 were in

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the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy) – had never eaten meat or sugar. The same inquiry revealed that only 76 percent of these same households were equipped with a kitchen, 52 percent with running water, 27 percent with a bathroom, and only 7 percent had telephones.5 This source indicates that, in the period of the immediate post–World War II Reconstruction, frequent bathing was still unusual. Thus, residents might have raised eyebrows at the sight of new buildings, where bathtubs took up much of the small apartment space. Some might have used the tub in alternative and creative ways. Emanuela Scarpellini mentions the prejudice in northern cities toward southern immigrants, who were said to use their bathtubs as raised beds for basil and tomatoes during the economic miracle years.6 Nonetheless, many perceived the presence of domestic bathrooms as a welcome luxury that made way for relaxing private rituals. Such perceptions resurface in later fictional accounts that tell the private story of the postwar years from a feminine perspective. In the following passage, for example, Elena Greco, a major protagonist in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, describes her friend Lila’s new home: Every space, every thing was new and clean, but especially the bathroom, which had a sink, a bidet, a bathtub. One afternoon when I felt particularly lazy I asked Lila if I could have a bath, I who still washed under the tap or in a copper tub. She said I could do what I wanted and went to bring me towels. The water came out hot from the tap and I let it run. I undressed, I sank in up to my neck. That warmth was an unexpected pleasure. After a while I tried out the numerous little bottles that crowded the corners of the tub: a steamy foam arose, as if from my body, and almost overflowed. Ah, how many wonderful things Lila possessed. It was no longer just a matter of a clean body, it was play, it was abandon. I discovered the lipsticks, the makeup, the wide mirror that reflected an image without deformities, the hair dryer. Afterward, my skin was smoother than I had ever felt it, and my hair was full, luminous, blonder. Maybe the wealth we wanted as children is this, I thought: not strongboxes full of diamonds and gold coins, but a bathtub, to immerse yourself like this every day.7

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3.1 D. [?], “Casistica del bagno,” Domus 20.172 (April 1942): 156–7.

To Elena, bathing at home was an indicator of class distinction. Lila had improved her economic status through her marriage, thereby gaining access to previously unavailable comforts. Despite the relatively simple and aseptic appearance of bathroom furnishings in the Economic Miracle years,8 bathrooms were still associated with luxury. As modernization progressively brought bathrooms into most homes during the 1960s and into the 1970s, bathing was less perceived as a privilege, and average hygienic conditions improved radically. Being clean and washing the body regularly became a fundamental social need, the absence of which could even indicate physical, social, or psychological problems. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the ways in which a selection of Italian artists and image creators interpreted bathing in relation to the domestic space. Body care, for them, was imbued with cultural meanings and affected by subjective sensitivities, while sometimes incorporated reference to idealized models proposed by magazines and the media.

Domus and the Bathroom: Elegant Functionality In Italy’s postwar period, trend-setting designs were illustrated in the pages of widely distributed publications, such as the influential architecture and art magazine Domus, which was founded by Gio’ Ponti in 1928 and is still ongoing. Domus envisaged a model of the Italian home that incorporated Mediterranean airiness, high-quality materials, and modernist functionalism.9 From the 1940s to the 1970s, Domus articles and advertisements increasingly linked body care with a variety of cultural meanings: hygiene as a modern scientific recommendation, cleanliness as a marker of status, the understanding of body care as gender-specific, and the connection of body care with female objectification and eroticism. In 1942, a time of war during which many people were being displaced and could not afford the luxuries of toilets and running water, Domus published the article “Casistica del Bagno,” which offered a series of examples of designer bathrooms.10 Most of the magazine’s readers could only fantasize about such commodities. The very presence of an article about bathrooms at that time highlighted the contrast between Domus’s ideal home and the lived experience of most Italians; it also posited that a constantly clean body was an indicator of wealth.

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According to the author of “Casistica del Bagno,” not only did having a bathroom allow one to keep one’s body clean; it also meant that the bathroom itself had to be kept clean, as scientists and physicians argued. Dusty brica-brac had no place there; washable materials were essential to bathroom design. The bathroom was a dream for the modernist architect who valued functionality over décor. The article also recognized that designers had to be inventive while planning particular environments because, despite the need to apply a common set of principles, each space required specifically tailored solutions. For this reason, Domus included photographic documentation of a range of bathrooms designed by Ignazio Gardella, Franco Albini, Melchiorre Bega, Mario Palanti, and Richard Neutra – all accompanied by descriptive captions that highlighted the specificity of each environment. The intent was to provide examples that combined efficiency and elegance. In the immediate postwar period and during the Reconstruction, Domus started including advertisements of bathroom accessories and bathroom fixtures.11 The increasing inclusion of bathrooms in newly designed homes made them more popular as rooms. Thus, brands such as Richard Ginori and Manifattura Pozzi lured consumers with advertisements of bathroom-related items. In order to make such products desirable, graphic designers created an association between body care and the supposed aspirations of their public. Examples from 1952 show how Domus continued to emphasize the beauty, elegance, and functionality of the bathroom, in alignment with the 1942 stance of “Casistica del Bagno”; however, in 1952 the message was conveyed more by advertisements than through articles. This difference indicates that, by then, consumers were expected to actually purchase bathroom products, rather than simply dream of them. The beautiful potential of bathroom fixtures could be expressed through imaginative visual strategies. In one advertisement, for instance, Ceramica Pozzi presented a bathroom that recalled a marine landscape, with sand-coloured ceramic tiles decorated with images of shells; the bathtub was enclosed in a small environment whose walls depicted an underwater scene. Bathers would find a relaxing oasis in the home, where they could reconnect with idealized versions of nature through the care of the body. Another strategy, extensively used by Richard Ginori in the 1950s and 1960s, juxtaposed bathroom profiles with abstract patterns, thus creating an association between high-end design and avant-garde arts. The advertisements communicated a core point of the modernist credo: sophisticated creations could become affordable through manufacturing and elevate the

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3.2 Ideal Standard advertisement, published in Domus 388 (march 1962), European edition. 

3.3 Plexiglas advertisement, published in Domus 510 (may 1972), European edition.  

daily experience of a wide public: design could become a means of democratization. In 1962 Domus published an Ideal Standard advertisement that chose a classical visual source to highlight the beauty of bathing. The words “Style, Elegance, Harmony” accompany the image of a round bathroom sink, which shares the page with a photograph of the Ludovisi Throne,12 a famous artifact in the collections of the National Museum of Palazzo Altemps in Rome. Dating from the fifth century bce, this marble sculpture illustrates Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, rising from the sea. The reference to Venus presented washing as a means of embellishing the body – specifically the female body – in order to attract the male gaze. This subtle message is more explicitly conveyed by a 1972 advertisement for Plexiglas. While the text describes the futuristic qualities of the plastic material – it is brightly coloured, creatively shaped, and easy to clean – the emphasis of the image lies elsewhere. A smiling woman is immersed in foaming water in the bathtub, as a man sits nearby, wearing a robe and sipping a drink while watching her, enjoying the sensual spectacle of the woman’s bath. This representation stages the male gaze and imagines a male public,13 reinforcing an idea of privacy as sexualized spectacle that is part of the long if controversial tradition that I discuss further in the following sections.

Eroticism or Maternal Affection? Donna che Pettina (1943–59) by Antonietta Raphaël Mafai Female artist Antonietta Raphaël Mafai created a series of paintings and sculptures devoted to the theme of body care. As mentioned in chapter 1, Raphaël Mafai was a member of what art historian and critic Roberto Longhi called the Scuola di Via Cavour, a group of artists whose work challenged fascist-supported classicism in Rome in the interwar years. Born in Lithuania, Raphaël Mafai was the daughter of a rabbi and fled to London as a child to escape mounting anti-Semitism. She spent time in Paris and Nice in 1923–24 before travelling to Rome, where she met painter Mario Mafai and formed a family.14 Emily Braun interprets Raphaël’s grooming scenes as more conventional than others explored by the artist, because they reflect the traditional expectation that women make themselves appealing for men’s gaze. Braun states:

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The self-adulating figures, viewed in the privacy of their toilette, allude to the societal pressures brought to bear on women to be beautiful and seductive. The dressing table and the ritual of the bath symbolize the intimate landscape, in short, the sexuality of the female, as depicted over centuries by male artists.15 A well-known example of this genre is Edward Degas’s body of work that includes about two hundred pieces (pastels, drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures) representing women at their toilette. Raphaël was almost certainly aware of this oeuvre, having visited Paris extensively at a time when the Impressionists were being positively received. Degas’s work was likely part of her visual archive. Degas pictures his female subjects as if seen through a keyhole. His intention was to capture their spontaneous movements, and to expand the repertoire of poses that characterized the academic genre of the nude in mid-nineteenth-century France. As noted by Martina Padberg, “what interested him here specifically was movement in space.”16 The mention of the keyhole is also an acknowledgment of an element of voyeurism; the artist observes his unclothed models, who are seemingly unaware of his presence.17 Degas seems little concerned about interfering with his models’ privacy to the point that his representations of them are exhibited in the public venue of the Salon. In 1877 a critic wrote: “Monsieur Degas … shows us ‘naked women’ in the bath or in the intimate sphere of the washroom; they’re not beautiful, they haven’t been painted well, they haven’t a beautiful complexion, but at least we can consider them quite clean.”18 By protesting the subjects’ appearance, the critic confirms the expectation that women be beautiful – and beautifully represented – for the pleasure of the male eye. Similar stereotypes continued to be widespread several decades later, if in 1949 the women’s magazine Grazia published this observation in a column by Oriele (a pseudonym): “A man wants a woman to be a gracious thing pleasing to his eye and senses; he wants a woman who knows how to flatter him with her attentions; and women tried to conform to these desires.”19 Oriele highlights the extent to which women had come to internalize men’s expectations and behave as men wish them to, rather than according to their own individual ideals. In 1952 Domus published two revealing advertisements of bathroom ceramics by Manifattura Ceramica Pozzi. One represents a seminaked woman combing her hair in a glamorously decorated bathroom. Her body reflects the beauty standards of the 1950s – the blond and rounded female

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3.4 Ceramica Pozzi advertisement, published in Domus 273 (September 1952), European edition. 

3.5 Antonietta raphaël mafai, Donna che Pettina, 1943–59. Walnut wood, 124 x 46 x 76 cm. Reproduced from Giuseppe Appella and Bruna Fontana. Antonietta Raphaël: Catalogo Generale della Scultura. Turin: Allemandi, 2016. Courtesy Centro Studi Mafai Raphaël.

figure recalls an American pin-up as seen in popular culture. The following words accompany the image: “A modern woman demands a beautiful house, a beautiful house demands an elegant bathroom.” Male readers, the targeted audience, will subliminally associate a modern bathroom with a sensual woman – one that has everything she needs to get ready for her man. The second advertisement by Manifattura Ceramica Pozzi is less explicit, but still emphasizes the function of the bathroom as a site for women’s beautification. It features three women at different life stages – possibly a schoolgirl, a young wife, and a mature lady – with the message: “three ages, three styles.” There is no mention of the quality or technical characteristics of the ceramics. The advertiser aims to attract consumers of all ages by showing the bathroom’s potential to improve their appearance, or, to be precise, that of their female family members. These or similar examples of contemporaneous visual culture were likely known by Antonietta Raphaël Mafai, and yet she proposes interpretations of bathing and body care that do not simplistically reinforce trite stereotypes. In the article mentioned above, Braun maintains that Raphaël Mafai’s images “present a blatant twist on that same venerable tradition: a woman exploring the image of female sexuality developed in response to male desire.”20 Furthermore, the artist investigates the theme of bathing beyond its associations with sexuality and beauty to explore the complexities of self-care as well as maternal affection. This emerges, for instance, in the wooden sculpture Donna che Pettina (Woman Combing, 1943–59), which represents the interaction of two female figures, one taller than the other and combing the other’s hair. The piece likely portrays the artist and one of her three daughters.21 Simona Mafai, one of Raphaël Mafai’s daughters, writes about her mother by recalling her smells – a mixture of wet clay, cheese risotto, tea, body creams, and [soaps], which during the war she handmade, placing them in line on top of the bathroom shelves. She entered the bathroom as if it were a sacrarium, in order to perform ablutions and purificatory washing, hair-combing and scalp massage (frizione), with the solemnity of a ritual. She had an exemplary respect for herself and her body.22 Bathing and body care are here seen as intimate rituals that put one in touch with oneself and, when two characters are involved, with loved ones.

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3.6 Untitled (Woman Washing a Baby), no date. Stills from film. AMARE HD-mov for productions, min 5:42,05. Fondo Petrucci Francesco, reel 15, 8mm. Courtesy of Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna.

Even in home movies, some of which are collected at the Home Movies Archive in Bologna, bathing was recorded as an occasion of intimacy and care. A 1960 film shows a smiling mother tenderly washing a baby in the bathroom sink, with body products placed nearby.23 The cleansing process is treasured as a special moment by the amateur filmmaker (cineamatore) who decided to document this scene. The fact that cineamatori had to be very selective because of the cost and effort of recording helps appreciate the affective and personal value of the experiences that they chose to film. Raphaël Mafai must have attributed a similar value to grooming rituals. Many works by Raphaël Mafai explore her relationship with her daughters.24 According to Miriam Mafai,25 Simona’s sister, their mother expressed parental affection through her art more than in any lived interactions, and Woman Combing can be seen as a monument to the intensity of the mother-daughter relationship. The piece includes nothing but two figures. The complete focus on the characters differentiates it from the detailed representations of bathroom environments in popular culture depictions of body care. In Woman Combing, the smaller figure sits in front of the standing one, who leans over the body in an action of protection, at the same time needing support. The two are inextricably connected and their gestures are enclosed within the mutually bonding relationship. The compact volumes recall the sacrality of Romanesque wooden statues, with their fixed expressions and contained movements. Raphaël’s choice of wood as a sculptural material may be a reference to the medieval tradition of wooden sculpture (scultura lignea) that portrayed religious themes. The oversized feet and abundant drapery of Raphaël’s standing figure recall medieval representations of Christian saints, such as those included in the 1949 exhibition of Scultura Lignea, curated by Enzo Carli at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.26 Even though Raphaël was not Christian, the formal reference to sacred sculpture might indicate her perception of body care as a ritual, as highlighted by her daughter Simona. The act of body care also conveys the sacredness of familial love, and how affection may be expressed through a gesture. Furthermore, the poses portrayed in Woman Combing communicate strength; the scene renders the pulling and the resistance that come with combing. Such push and pull communicate yet another component of the mother-daughter relationship: the constant and sometimes painful negotiations between independence and parental control.

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Bathing Is Dangerous: Renzo Vespignani’s Nudo in Bagno (1962), Renato Guttuso’s Donna nella Vasca da Bagno (1967), and Contemporaneous Visual Culture Hygiene, eroticism, and maternal affection can all be linked to the representation of body care in the private sphere. In post–World War II Italy, bathing was associated with a range of pleasures and health benefits. For this reason, this domestic activity was generally perceived as rejuvenating, reassuring, and soothing. In reaction to the perceived hegemony of such positive associations some artists wielded the violation of domestic bathing as a tool to express dramatic statements. Such visual strategies prove shocking and memorable, as anyone who has watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and its notorious murder scene, which takes place in the shower, would confirm. With the invasion of personal space, the victim is vulnerable and the expectation that one may relax while washing the body is suddenly reversed, causing the viewer’s distress. In 1962 Renzo Vespignani (the Roman artist whose works about the city’s residential buildings were discussed in chapter 1) illustrated a similar mechanism to convey a sense of existentialist drama. His painting Nudo in Bagno (Nude in the Bathroom) avoids the actual representation of a violent act in fieri, but gives a violent connotation to the bathing scene through deliberate formal choices. A naked figure is seen from above in a domestic bathtub, as if the viewer’s eye were positioned on the ceiling. The unlikely point of view transforms the common experience of a bath into an exceptional situation. The bather’s body fills the entire space of the tub, which looks confining and compressed. There is no clear indication of the bather’s sex, in contrast with the insistence on sexual connotations in contemporaneous advertisements as well as in some artistic depictions, such as Renato Guttuso’s Donna nella Vasca Da Bagno (Woman in the Bathtub, 1967). Sicilian-born Guttuso was based in Rome; having been a well-known member of the artistic community since the 1930s, he later became a promoter of social realism and the tenets of the Communist Party. In 1966 he chaired the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and, in the years leading to the 1968 protests, he engaged in dialogue with his students and supported their unrest despite the party’s official condemnation of the youth movements.27 In addition to his continuous dedication to political art, Guttuso also depicted more private

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3.7 renzo Vespignani, Nudo in Bagno, 1962. Reproduced from Valerio Rivosecchi, Bruno Zino, and Ilaria Falconi. Renzo Vespignani: catalogo ragionato dei dipinti, 1943-2001. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2011. © 2020 The Estate of Lorenzo Vespignani / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. 

3.8 renato guttuso, Donna nella Vasca da Bagno, 1967. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

and sensual subjects, of which Woman in the Bathtub is an example. Guttuso’s canvas has some elements in common with Vespignani’s Nude in the Bathroom; they are both figurative, illustrating a nude inside a tub; and, from a formal perspective, they both play with the sharp contrasts of dark and light to create a sense of drama. However, Guttuso’s piece reveals intimate curves of the woman’s figure, one leg raised so that she can reach the calves with a sponge. The artist represents the character’s movement in such a way that he puts the viewer in the position of the voyeur. The sensual charge of the scene is intensified by the woman’s reclined head and semi-closed eyes, which suggest erotic pleasure. In Vespignani’s work, on the other hand, intimate details are not visible and the naked body becomes a metaphor for the individual’s lack of protection. Nudity is stripped of any sexual potential, to convey instead the unsettling perception of an emotional crisis. The dark colour palette indicates opposition to the ideal of the clean and airy bathroom envisioned by designers and hygienists. Vespignani was torn by tragic memories of the war which were not eradicated by the postwar Reconstruction. As discussed in chapter 1, he was critical of the sudden growth of the Roman periphery, where isolated residential buildings felt inhuman and alienating. Nude in the Bathroom indicates that even the convenience of a bathroom could not compensate for the lack of meaningful social interaction that characterized the new lifestyle. A similar statement is made by Walter Molino in his cover illustration Un Bambino di Giudizio (A Wise Child), published in La Domenica del Corriere on 28 January 1962. While Vespignani’s representation casts light on the psychological danger of increased isolation, the episode recounted by Molino indicates external and practical danger – in this case, a gas leak. The image refers to the story of a nine-year-old child who saves his mother from the fatal effects of gas inhalation. Damage to the water heater has caused her to be injured while preparing herself a bath. Molino shows the female figure as an abandoned body, half-supported by the tub. The child, by contrast, is depicted in active response; hammer in hand and having smashed the bathroom door, he is in the process of turning the key. The mother’s search for seclusion and privacy (the door was locked) leads to a dangerous outcome. The fact that the rescuer is a child signals the likely absence of any other adults in the apartment, a situation that would have been improbable in a pre–Economic Miracle context, when many residents shared the same home. As family units became smaller in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the lack of adult support in case of a domestic accident became more probable.

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3.9 Walter molino, “un bambino di giudizio,” La Domenica del Corriere, 28 January 1962; cover. Courtesy Corriere della Sera Foundation, materials from the Archivio Storico.

3.10 Isomix advertisement, published in Domus 387 (february 1962), European edition. 

The underlying moral of the illustration is that modernization and perceived lifestyle improvements ultimately fostered isolation, thus compromising safety in certain scenarios. Molino’s illustration also reverses the expectation that mothers care for the well-being of their children, and not vice-versa. Such an expectation is echoed by an Isomix advertisement included in the February 1962 issue of Domus, published just a few days after La Domenica del Corriere’s number with A Wise Child. Isomix was a tool that kept the temperature of shower water constant. Advertisers chose to associate the product with the image of a caring mother wanting to provide a safe and comfortable showering experience for her son. Mother and son occupy the space between the sink and the tub in a sparkling clean domestic bathroom. The female character is elegantly dressed with perfectly styled hair – an enviable look for anyone surviving the task of washing a pre-schooler! The child is himself nicely groomed and, despite the recent shower, almost fully clothed – although the mother is shown drying his face to indicate her active caring for him. The home movie that was previously discussed (fig. 3.6), in comparison, shows a messier, informal environment in which the act of washing the child, although loving, looks physically demanding. In the Isomix advertisement, both characters seem relaxed, smiling sweetly as the mother looks straight into the camera and the son looks admiringly at her. They represent idealized social norms and family interactions which, far from enacting habitus – a value defined by Pierre Bourdieu as the lasting effect of everyday actions inscribed in the subject’s consciousness – were imposed on consumers through the mass media in the attempt to control their behaviour and exercise hegemony – in Gramsci’s sense of socio-political power of one group over another (see Introduction).28 In the case of Isomix, it is upper-class male advertisers who perpetuate the myth of a stereotypical woman acting as an easily pleased consumer.

Demystifying Cosmetic Products: Elio Marchegiani and Ketty La Rocca As clearly seen in the above analyses, advertisers attempted to define a domesticated portrait of women; in body care and bathroom furniture advertisements, female figures either wore the hat of the loving mother or the eroticized, objectified Other. Some fine artists critiqued this perspective through their work, activating criticality through imagination and 150

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the creation of representational spaces, as envisioned by Henri Lefebvre.29 Effective examples are provided by Body Milk (1964) – a readymade by Elio Marchegiani – and “Una Buona Idea” (“A Good Idea”), a poem written by Ketty La Rocca and first published in the literary magazine Letteratura in 1966.30 Both artists were involved with the visual poetry group Gruppo 70 in the mid-1960s (see chapter 1), but in subsequent periods experimented with a variety of artistic languages. Elio Marchegiani was born in Sicily but spent his formative years between Livorno and Pisa, where he was introduced to the art world by Mario Nigro and Gianni Bertini. He left the Tuscan coast to develop his practice in Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Rome, as well as Paris. His inquiry into the connections of art, science, and technology brought him close to the technological painting and poetry of Gruppo 70.31 He was also interested in the interaction of word and image, as seen in Body Milk. This piece is framed like a painting, but it collages two-dimensional cut-outs of magazine photos and slogans as well as found objects such as the oval frame of a mirror, a gilded plaster putto, gold trimming, and ribbons. All point to stereotypical women’s activities – browsing magazine pages for beauty advice, gazing at one’s own reflection, sewing, devoting time to home décor. Marchegiani’s choice of light pink emphasizes the allusions to the feminine sphere, which is signalled also by the iconographic choice: above and on either side of the mirror, cut-outs of magazine photos represent nude female models. On closer inspection, the apparently calming and delicate image reveals its pointed tone. Irony is triggered by two elements, one visual and the other textual. First, any reflection of the viewers’ body is negated by the fact that the mirror’s surface is painted black. With no actual reflection, it is as if the process of identification between the public and the magazine models was ultimately impossible. The contrast between the usual function of a mirror and its non-functioning here generates an ironic effect, which is amplified by the written text. Viewers’ attention is caught by the word Riflettete (“Reflect!”) placed right at eye-level in the upper area of the composition. In a play on words, it prompts viewers to reflect not by using the mirror, given that such a possibility is denied here, but rather to reflect in the sense of thinking. With this strategy the artist encourages the viewer’s participation, which becomes a key element of his work in subsequent years.32 According to Marchegiani, the slogan riflettete was placed on the desks of Olivetti clerks in Ivrea, in order to encourage brainstorming.33 The artist repeats the tactic as if it were possible to simply command others to think. Nonetheless, Marchegiani’s command to reflect did perhaps trigger his public

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3.11 elio marchegiani, Body Milk, 1964. Collage, 126 × 106 cm. Courtesy Archivio Elio Marchegiani. 

to do so, engaging them in critical thinking about industrial body products and how advertisers capitalize on the exploitation of women’s bodies. Similar observations are implied by Ketty La Rocca’s mid-1960s works. Michelangelo Vasta, La Rocca’s son and owner of her archive, remembers that the artist enjoyed makeup; for example, she loved a cosmetics store in London and spent long hours there every time she visited.34 Nevertheless, she was ironically critical of the flat representation of women in the context of makeup advertisements. In Trazione Anteriore (Front Wheel Drive) (see chapter 1) La Rocca highlights the superficial media depiction of women as happy consumers of body products. Her 1966 poem “Una Buona Idea” develops the same subject into a humorous denouncement of the advertising machine. La Rocca’s words play with the mass media attitude that women’s problems can be summed up by needing to improve their looks. In “A Good Idea,” she exaggerates such assumptions, succeeding in making them sound ridiculous. The poem alternates between a list of problems and the mantra: “I’ll certainly have a good idea.” Yet the list of issues to be solved, such as having dehydrated skin, boils down to beauty care alone, and the “good ideas” are all related to the use of specific cosmetics. La Rocca’s use of colloquial language and brand names make the verses sound realistic. Even without the help of images, La Rocca juxtaposes bits and pieces of actual advertisements and reveals their absurdity by taking them out of context.

A Monster in the Bathroom: Domenico Gnoli’s Surreal Domesticity While some advertisements presented domesticity as the reassuring realm of banality in a stereotypical way, Domenico Gnoli (see also chapter 2) suggested that banality can be complicated by subjective feelings and emotions. An admirer of realism, as exemplified by his appreciation of Renzo Vespignani as well as the American Ben Shahn, Gnoli soon developed his own language by defining a form of figurative art that included imaginative aspects. As mentioned earlier, he was an acclaimed illustrator for international clients and the son of an accomplished art historian. His visual archive was highly diverse, but the theme of his art tended to be very focused. His oeuvre, especially in the years before his premature death at thirty-seven in 1970, explored the intricacies of the mundane and gave a central position to details that often go unseen. Gnoli represented the domestic in such detail that familiar objects became

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unrecognizable. With the exaggeration of certain elements, proportions are often lost, and the banal becomes monstrous. Luigi Carluccio maintains that Human figures in Gnoli’s paintings are always in stasis, caught at that precise moment of action that is a perfectly still point of time: men on boats, bricklayers on scaffolding, a man in a bath or lying on the grass during siesta. They are “absent” figures or simply distracted. They do not do anything. Their gestures are frozen, mere appendices to stylistic necessity. They are objects, things, that merely form the composition.35 In Gnoli’s depiction of the bathtub, as in Bagnarola (1966) and What Is a Monster? Woman Sole in Bath Tub (1967), no human characters inhabit the scene. In Bagnarola the protagonist is the tub itself, which takes up most of the compositional space. The room is empty, and shadows are cast over the whiteness of the tub, evoking a metaphysical atmosphere that points to Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio – or, as argued by Walter Guadagnini, to the Italian incarnation of Magical Realism.36 What Is a Monster? Woman Sole in Bath Tub (1967) echoes the composition of Bagnarola. There is a living presence in the room, yet this addition makes the environment even more surreal. The Woman-Sole waits at the bottom of the bathtub. She looks up at the viewer, as if it were perfectly normal that she was occupying that domestic space. The tap is turned on and the water is flowing, as if it will do so forever, causing no spill. Time appears fixed in a constant present. Gnoli’s interest in the home and its daily rhythms has often been associated with the work of the Roman pop artists, although his interpretation of the domestic looks quieter and emptier. More than anything, his representations make little reference to the explosion of consumerism that characterized the 1960s and attracted the critical eyes of artists like Cesare Tacchi, Mario Schifano, and others whom I discuss in this book. Gnoli’s images are suspended in a pre–Economic Miracle era, which he revisits with nostalgic tones. He himself thought about the series What Is a Monster? as his own bestiary, an invention that continues the Medieval tradition of fantastic beings.37 Gnoli visualized them being at ease in the apparently unremarkable Italian apartments, and highlighted how the subjective experience of the home might lead to unusual thoughts.

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3.12 Domenico gnoli, What Is a Monster? Woman Sole in Bath Tub, 1967. India ink, tempera, and acrylic on cardboard. 44 × 35.5 cm. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

3.13 michelangelo Pistoletto, Vasca da Bagno, 1965–66. Fibreglass, 60 × 200 × 100 cm. Collection Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella. Photo Paolo Bressano. Courtesy Archivio Pistoletto.  3.14 michelangelo Pistoletto, Bagno Barca, 1966–68. Fibreglass, steel, rags, light-bulbs, water, and bathing salts, 100 × 200 × 100 cm. Collection Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella. Photo Paolo Bressano. Courtesy Archivio Pistoletto. 

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Minus Objects: From Commodification to Imaginative Nomadism The transformation of an everyday object into a fantastic invention can be appreciated in two pieces by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Pistoletto, based in Turin and connected with the international scene from Paris to New York, was associated with arte povera while developing his unique artistic exploration of viewer participation through reflection and theatricality.38 In 1965, before the first arte povera show held in 1967, he developed the series Oggetti in Meno (Minus Objects), which included the works Vasca da Bagno (Bathtub, 1965–66) and Bagno Barca (Bathtub Boat, 1966–68), reframing the tub as a sculpture. In Bruno Corà’s words, Bathtub is “obtained through the employment of rigid polyurethane sheets, covered with stabilized polyester resin; it has the inner shape of a human figure and, later on, in 1967, it becomes Bathtub Boat, which is made with rags, steel, light-bulbs, water, and scented, blue bathing salts.”39 Bathtub Boat imaginatively builds on Bathtub to transform it into a boat, complete with sails. As theorized by Lefebvre (see Introduction), here imagination allows the artist to appropriate the quotidian object to form a representational space that does not conform to norms shaped by others. As a group, the Minus Objects are widely diverse pieces, all inspired by the domestic realm. A table, a bed, and a whole house are among the many variations on the subject of the home. From a formal point of view, each piece looks different. According to Pistoletto: I had the idea of doing a show in which I could not be recognized as the protagonist, as an individual, as a typical figure. I thought that the most beautiful thing would be doing a show that looked like a collective, in which one could not identify a (specific) personality, as it would have been a double of my reality in that way, yet my reality had to remain unique and autonomous, and the rest had to function according to my will, that was the only reality. I did this show, looking for a system to use so that each object would be different from the other.40 Such intentional diversity is a statement against the perceived need to define for marketing purposes a specific style that characterizes an artist’s work. With Minus Objects, Pistoletto intended to affirm that each piece was the product of a specific act of creation, and as such it may be completely unlike

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any other work realized by the same artist. Subjectivities change with time and may be polyhedral; thus, artists should feel free to express themselves in many ways. Pistoletto’s open challenge to the art market can be understood only by discussing the Minus Objects as a group. For this reason, with notable exceptions, it is rare to find discussions of individual artworks that are part of the series.41 Nevertheless, to follow up on Pistoletto’s own idea, it is important that each piece be analyzed as a particular act of creation. In looking at Bathtub and Bathtub Boat as individual pieces, it is clear that they are artworks that resemble real, functional objects like those in our everyday space: the artist seems to extract the tub from domestic reality. Nevertheless, neither piece is a readymade in the Duchampian sense; the objects are both artisanal and custom-made. In Bathtub, rather than appropriate an existing bathroom fixture, Pistoletto constructs the object by layering fibreglass sheets. The atypical shape of the tub presents a geography of steps that echo the form of the body, at the same time recalling the relief map of a lake or a sea. Viewers can recognize a domestic element, a human reference, and a geological association all in the same image, as if the realms of the habitat and the inhabitant had conflated. The artificial and the natural are evoked simultaneously, and we perceive an association between the domestic and a scaled-down wilderness that is domesticated and controlled by the user. Similarly, Bathtub Boat asks viewers to free their imagination by creating an association between the domestic and the fantastic. Patchworked rags become sails that screen part of the tub, transforming it into an imaginary means of travel or an oversized toy. The warped sense of reality is enhanced by the inner sides of the “sails,” which are made of mirroring steel that distorts the reflections of the tub. While the blue water is placed inside the bathtub, we can fantasize about it spilling all around it to form a sea of sorts. The tactile and olfactory components, such as the scents of the bath salts and the roughness of the fabric, activate several senses at once, making the work truly immersive. As mentioned, Pistoletto sees each Minus Object as a peculiar incarnation of a specific idea: “I called them Oggetti in Meno because in my opinion every action that one makes is a liberation from a necessity. In this sense, everything that one does is one less thing to do, considering it energy that is spent, gone, consumed.”42 Pistoletto releases ideas through the creation of each Minus Object. In the case of the bathtub, he lets go of the association with comfort and wealth that the bathtub symbolized. He transforms that association by evoking something playful. The tub becomes a boat, something 158

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that epitomizes nomadic life. A symbol of modern and sedentary living is reshaped into a symbol of adventure and mobility.

Shifting Sites: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Ugo La Pietra Transforming an object into something else is a recurring element of Pistoletto’s practice. He used his works in such ways that their meanings shifted, sometimes to become closer to everyday experience. In the film Buongiorno Michelangelo (Good Morning, Michelangelo, 1968–69),43 for instance, Ugo Nespolo shows Pistoletto shaving in front of one of his Mirror Paintings before starting his day, which consists of taking another work, Sphere of Newspapers, on a trip across Turin by car and on foot. Since the act of shaving is a personal routine usually performed in a bathroom, the change of location or related objects can provide a sense of détournement. For Pistoletto, it is about challenging the aura of the work of art and enhancing its role in one’s daily life. Others may find no intended meaning in shaving outside of a bathroom, apart from a need to utilize given resources efficiently. For example, a 1960 home movie from the Home Movies Archive in Bologna shows a man shaving in the kitchen; the environment is rural and simple. The man is a member of the Tomesani family in Lavinio di Mezzo.44 The Cialoni family, including the amateur filmmaker who shot this scene, arrived on a visit and interrupted this act of personal grooming. It is possible that functional reasons, such as the running water in the kitchen, motivated this choice of site. Nonetheless, as shaving was performed in an accessible part of the house, the man likely perceived this action as a non-private practice that did not need a secluded space. The Milan-based architect and artist Ugo La Pietra explored the potential meanings of shifting the site of shaving in his film La Riappropriazione della Città (The Reappropriation of the City, 1977). Engaging with radical architecture groups in Italy and internationally since the mid-1960s, La Pietra was concerned about the hegemonic potential of design and sought to disrupt it by activating the public through a variety of mediums, from sculpture to social practice, performance and film.45 In The Reappropriation of the City, he enacts an idea that was dear to him throughout the 1960s and 1970s: that the city should be a place where its residents feel at home. Home is seen as a space of comfort and spontaneity, rather than a space that could generate conflict and threats. To La Pietra, public space should not be the theatre of

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3.15 michelangelo Pistoletto shaves in front of one of his Mirror Paintings in: ugo Nespolo, buongiorno michelangelo, 1968–69. Film, b/w, 16 mm, sound, 10’35”. Courtesy Ugo Nespolo.

3.16 Cialoni, Pavana e Casa zia Amelia, August 1962. Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 11, Pavana e casa zia Amelia agosto 1962, 1962, 8mm. Courtesy of Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna.

3.17 ugo la Pietra, “Abitare è essere ovunque a Casa Propria.” Still from film La Riappropriazione della Città (Paris: Ed. Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977). Courtesy Archivio Ugo La Pietra, Milan.

power hierarchies, embellished with urban structures and buildings that do not serve the inner needs of the population. In order to symbolically envision the possibility of a genuine and free urban space, he turns to the periphery, and especially the areas in the outskirts of Milan where immigrants had built shelters and homes using intuitive construction skills rather than theoretical architectural knowledge. In The Reappropriation of the City, La Pietra looks at examples of spontaneous architecture, meeting with builders and residents of peripheral corners. The film opens with him shaving in front of an unhinged door in an abandoned lot. He shouts the phrase: “Abitare è essere ovunque a casa propria,” “To inhabit means to feel at home everywhere.” As I discuss elsewhere,46 the act of shaving signifies a moment of care that can represent the appropriation of a given space. The repetition of a routine makes one feel in control: placing the shaving cream in the same corner of the sink, repeating the gestures of rinsing the razor under the water, turning the tap on and off, and so on. Performing such routine actions in a public space means that one can feel in control rather than being dominated. La Pietra’s action in The Reappropriation of the City clearly conveys theoretical meanings that align with Lefebvre’s contemporaneous ideas (see Introduction), with the intention of subverting the rigid social expectations that regulated urban space in 1970s society.

Conclusion Body care took on a variety of meanings in postwar Italy. Promoted in the 1940s by design and popular magazines for hygiene purposes, as of the 1950s bodily care became a matter of sexual appeal in advertisements. Grooming was seen as especially necessary for women, whose bodies had to satisfy men’s desires according to cultural stereotypes. Alternatively, magazines and illustrations represented women as caregivers whose role was to groom other family members. Artists often challenged such stereotypes, for example showing the complexity of mother-child relationships (Raphaël Mafai) or the simplistic absurdity of beauty product advertisements (Marchegiani and La Rocca). A more imaginative take on bathing activities appears in the work of Gnoli and Pistoletto, who transformed bathing into surreal and fantastic adventures. La Pietra brought the practice of shaving into the open of the urban space, reminding us that we should feel at home wherever we dwell.

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In the countercultural climate of the 1970s, La Pietra’s reflections on the right to inhabit public spaces with ease put into question the idea of an enclosed family space. While in the immediate aftermath of World War II designers were preoccupied with issues of hygiene and class distinction, the following generation focused on lowering social barriers. Then, reference to the private sphere served as a tool to advocate for equality in the public realm. The concept of social equality as being rooted in domestic behaviour strongly emerges in the discourse on housework, a topic that is the subject of the coming chapter.

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CHAPTER 4

the Home as a Site of labour Housekeeping in Italian Art and Visual Culture

A Brief History of Housework in Italy (1940s–1970s) As far back as the late nineteenth century marketers had begun describing the home as a restful haven, nestled away from the chaos of the public sphere.1 Yet the domestic environment was and continued to be a space of labour. In the Italy of the 1940s to 1970s, the home was a worksite for two different groups of women: housekeepers, who were employed outside their homes to perform domestic cleaning; and housewives, who took care of their own homes. The ways in which these two categories interacted with the home and with each other varied according to class and cultural context. In the late fascist period, different models of femininity were proposed to rural women and bourgeois women. Luisa Tasca maintains that the régime encouraged countryside massaie to embrace traditional farm work practices in addition to housework: Beginning in 1934, the Fascist régime organized groups of rural farmwives in an attempt to valorize the life of the countryside, help the rural farmwives in the pursuit of their domestic duties, reinforce the unity of the family, and contain the exodus from the countryside, which interested women more than men. In addition to preparing the meals, cleaning the house and the laundry, sewing, and darning, rural farmwives also took care of the domestic animals and the silkworms, cultivated the garden, and produced such small objects as baskets for the market … this housewife model buttressed ideological and social control, which was found in Fascism’s policy toward the peasants.2 Educated upper-class women in the cities, on the other hand, were exposed to ideals of efficiency and labour-saving techniques. According to Victoria de Grazia, during the interwar period, these women embraced Taylorist principles of efficient home organization, following them to manage the domestics. In the fascist period, working as domestic help was extremely fatiguing and socially degrading: “Domestic work was so ill-reputed for its harshness, isolation and humiliations that few went into service if they could do other work.”3 To some extent, upper-class women made an effort to teach labour-saving techniques to working-class and rural women. To that end, congresses, magazines, women’s groups, and radio programs functioned as vehicles of communication. De Grazia writes that Maria Diez Gasca introduced 166

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ideas of scientific home management at the Congress of Home Economics in Rome in 1927, and the monthly magazine Casa e Lavoro sought to popularize these strategies. The Fasci femminili also tried to export Taylorist home management to rural areas in the mid-1930s. Rural housewives’ organizations facilitated the task.4 During World War II, however, housework took on a different cultural value. Within the realm of home care, focus on cleanliness was reduced and more attention was paid to taking care of others as a form of patriotic service. The visual representation of home care practices indicates a blend of political ideology and practical necessity. An issue of the magazine La Donna Fascista published on 15 July 1942,5 for instance, included photographs of female university students who helped with childcare and chores in community centres for young war victims. By casting light on episodes of mutual support, the authors of this article underscored how tightly knit fascist society was. The same issue of La Donna Fascista also shared basic guidelines for everyday survival in the altered conditions of war. Advice about laundry, for example, appeared in a short article on the last page,6 offering tips that indicated the unavailability of industrial products and mechanized methods. Vinegar or salt water were recommended for removing stains from fabric, and sunlight was proposed as a means of intensifying the effect. Despite the existence of laundry-specific products such as Vela and Oxil-Banfi, the article suggested repurposing basic pantry supplies that were more readily available.7 Living conditions were particularly difficult during the bombings (see chapter 1); since late 1942 and even more acutely as of late 1943, people had either remained at home with limited access to consumer goods, or were literally on the run. In several cases, those who had lost their homes to area bombings were accommodated in communal spaces inside schools, churches, cinema studios, and isolated villages. The 1944 film Aosta, La Vita in un Villaggio per Sfollati (Aosta: Life in a Refugee Village), produced by Film Luce, shows the activities of a refugee camp in the northern town of Aosta (see chapter 1).8 In such a shared space, people performed cleaning and housekeeping routines together, and everybody, including children, took part. As the war wound down, the collective memory of communal living remained and the population tried to evaluate its possible benefits along with its disadvantages. According to the responses to the 1947 call for ideas organized by the Milan Triennale,9 some considered the potential of sharing housekeeping in the context of a multi-unit block defined as Casa Collettiva (see chapter 1). Giulia Porro argued, for instance, that within one building

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domestic chores could be centralized and run by specialized domestic workers. She emphasized that domestic labour should be well paid, and workers trained in professional schools. Architect Enrico Bruscalupi also envisioned the positive impact of shared cleaning services, which would allow investment in some level of mechanization. In addition, Bruscalupi proposed the idea of a communal laundry and drying-rack room. He mentioned that bathtubs were often improperly used to wash clothes in private apartments, a practice that would be discouraged if common areas with specifically designed equipment were available. Other expert respondents, such as Daniele Parvia of the Institute for Hygiene at the University of Milan and physician Luca Crispin from Bergamo, agreed. Despite such enthusiasm for the potential efficiency of shared services and spaces, representations of housekeeping moved in the opposite direction in postwar Italy. While traditional practices based on mutual help persisted until the early 1960s, advertising, magazines, and manuals directed women toward an increasing privatization of housework. This development was channelled by a deliberate political plan that viewed the separation of gender roles as a necessary premise of a stable society. As Tasca writes: The day after the fall of fascism, when Italian women’s rights as citizens were recognized because they won the right to work for the first time (1948), the conceptualization of domestic work as a feminine duty was reinforced by a substantial political consensus. Sociologist Dino Origlia drove home the idea that there was a necessary division of roles in marriage and household at the XIV International Congress of Sociology. Furthermore, Socialist physician Gaetano Pieraccini, the first post-liberation mayor of Florence, reached a point of theorizing that there should be a “state ordinance for the removal of wives from extra-domestic labour,” and for the realization of a total division of duties, “the man to work, the woman at home, the children to school, and the elderly in retirement.”10 Neither the Communist nor the Christian Democratic parties – the most influential political groups in the 1950s and 1960s – put much effort into promoting women’s quality of life. Leftist militants saw social services (such as preschools and childcare) as the solution for alleviating women’s burden, and acknowledged housework as a form of unregulated labour only formally, as a token for preserving women’s trust. Catholic politicians acted more directly 168

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in support of women’s rights within the home, though they did not question gender role separation. The vision of the mother as the angel of the hearth who takes care of other family members with sacrifice was predominant in post–World War II culture. This trend continued in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the number of stay-at-home women was on the rise and, in contrast with social patterns in other European countries, the hiring of paid domestic help became less common. Despite the availability of appliances, the time devoted to housework increased. Magazines and homemaking manuals raised expectations by representing cleaning and washing as part of a cyclical daily routine. This was less a matter of hygiene than a strategy to take up time and fill women’s lives with never-ending tasks that would keep them away from the public sphere.11 Theorist and activist Silvia Federici spent decades decoding the systems of oppression that enabled patriarchy to control women by linking their responsibilities to the domestic sphere.12 Federici, among other notable endeavours, co-organized the International Feminist Collective in Padua in 1972, wrote the book Wages against Housework in 1975,13 and co-led the movement Wages for Housework in the United States starting in the mid-1970s. She points out that women’s domestic labour was one of the forms of unpaid labour that capitalist societies relied upon in order to let men perform paid labour outside the home. Childrearing and housekeeping guaranteed the formation of responsible subjects who would play their part in society, and thus carried obvious social impact; but such work was nevertheless under-recognized. In her recent volume Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and the Feminist Struggle, Federici reflects on the Italian situation in the years of her upbringing: There is no doubt that among women of my generation, the refusal of housework as women’s natural destiny was a widespread phenomenon in the post-World War II period. This was especially true in Italy, the country where I was born and raised, that in the 1950s was still permeated by a patriarchal culture consolidated under fascism, and was already experiencing a “gender crisis” partially caused by the war, and partially by the requirements of postwar reindustrialization. The lesson of independence that our mothers learned during the war and communicated to us made the prospect of a life dedicated to housework, family, and reproduction unfeasible for most, and

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for some intolerable. When I wrote in “Wages against Housework” (1975) that becoming a housewife seemed “a fate worse than death,” I expressed my own attitude towards this work. And, indeed, I did all I could to escape it.14 While in the 1970s women raised their voices against social expectations of them, during the 1950s most women had not yet found the determination to express concern for their condition publicly. This was in part because of the personal necessity to retreat into the private sphere to cope with the trauma of war, and in part because of the constant exposure to representations that depicted women as being fulfilled in their family roles. Political parties, religious groups, and the media all aligned to convince women of their place as caregivers in the home. A systematic plan of this nature was effected partly through education; girls had to take domestic economy classes in public schools, and there were also schools dedicated specifically to training new wives.15 A crucial role was played by representations of women’s identities in the media, including film, tv programs (after 1954), advertisements, women’s magazines, and illustrated periodicals. Visual sources shaped hegemonic expectations so that they were perceived as inevitable and almost natural by both men and women, who internalized housework practices as forms of habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term (see the Introduction). In this chapter, I draw attention to examples of visual culture that communicated a conservative societal model, which hoped to confine women within the domestic realm. At the same time, I also illuminate alternative ideas of women’s role in society, developed in contrast to the ideal of an isolated housewife immersed in domestic chores and child-rearing. My purpose is to examine the dialectic between the standards established by widespread visual culture and the work of artists who, at times, assumed critical positions toward gender division.

Renato Guttuso’s Lavandaia (1947): Communist Ideology and Women’s Chores Bent over a washboard, a woman grasps a white cloth tightly in the 1947 painting Lavandaia (Washerwoman, 1947) by Renato Guttuso.16 The figure’s body weight flows onto the fabric as she vigorously rubs the cloth over the scrubbing board. Her dark skin indicates her frequent exposure to sunlight; she is 170

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4.1 renato guttuso, Lavandaia, 1947. oil on canvas, 50 × 75 cm. Reproduced from Luciano Caramel, Realismi: Arti figurative, letteratura e cinema in Italia dal 1943 al 1953 (Milano: Electa, 2001), 150. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

a working-class woman who is used to performing manual labour outdoors. The contrast between the dark colour of the laundress’s arms and the light tones of the cloth is so striking that it draws the viewer’s full attention to the lower area of the canvas, which is the core of the composition. This part of the painting also attracts the eye of the viewer thanks to the clash of the horizontal grooves on the scrubbing board and the diagonal and sinuous lines defined by the arms and the cloth. Viewers focus less on the specific physiognomic features of the female character than on the impression of energy communicated by her hands. Guttuso devises such formal strategies – unrecognizable facial features and strong focus on the figure’s hands – as a way of emphasizing the character’s fatigue and making a statement about the conditions of the working class. Guttuso strongly believed that art played a political role. As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev writes: “Thinking of art as social service in the case of Guttuso meant representing the labor of those who worked in the fields, factories, sulphur mines and markets. It meant serving the powerless, using his power as an artist-activist capable of depicting and denouncing, to support their revolutionary drive.”17 Guttuso was aligned with the values of the Italian Communist Party (pci) and was known to remain faithful to its doctrine throughout his life, to the point of being dismissed as an orthodox by peer intellectuals in some phases of his long career.18 Washerwoman was created prior to pci’s leader Palmiro Togliatti’s condemnation of abstract art in 1948,19 and this shows in Guttuso’s artwork (see chapters 3 and 5). In fact, the artist is not hesitant to flirt with abstraction in this painting, as well as in others produced in the 1940s.20 The fragmentation of the human body into multiple planes nods to the formal choices of Picasso in Guernica (1937), a painting admired by leftist Italian artists and critics for its clear political engagement as well as for its innovative stylistic choices. Guttuso merges Picasso’s compositional structures with the adoption of strong and contrasting colours that make his picture dramatic, trigger the emotional response of the public, and invite empathy toward the character. The title of the painting – Washerwoman – indicates that its protagonist is a working-class person who is employed outside the home. Perhaps, the artwork can be interpreted more broadly as a reference to domestic labour in general, and as a way to reflect on the condition of housewives, as well. Togliatti and his pci entourage thought that women had the potential to cement family relations, thus securing continuity of political affiliation generation

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after generation. As a consequence, after having played an active part in the Resistance, communist women were pushed back into the domestic sphere – although, in order to maintain their trust, the party understood that it had to actively involve the wives of its male members by showing them some form of respect. In 1947, at the Second Congress of the Italian Women’s Union, the Communist Party intended to demonstrate solidarity with housewives, who were defined as workers in the domestic context. This made them, at least ideologically, part of the class struggle by virtue of their efforts at home, although they did not receive wages.21 Guttuso’s Washerwoman meets this description; it revolves around the female character’s labour, at the same time showing her involvement with traditional chores. The viewer is asked to appreciate her effort and understand it as part of the Marxist discourse.

Resilient Interactions: Fillide Levasti’s Portrayal of Laundry Not all the Italian artists who chose realism as a means of expression adhered to the stance of the Communist Party on women’s role in society. The female artist Fillide Levasti (whose paintings of construction workers were discussed in chapter 1) depicted housekeeping scenes in the periphery of Florence in a series of works spanning decades before and after the régime. Levasti offers an interpretation imbued with personal narratives rather than a representation compliant with an established ideology. She was peculiarly interested in telling the stories of groups of women, and for this reason was often overlooked by her male colleagues despite her education under a revered master like Giovanni Fattori and her sophisticated elaboration on French art sources such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau’s paintings. Levasti’s work is unique because of the collective dimension elicited by her subjects. Her perspective is that of an insider who paints the lives of women living at the margins (see chapter 1). In the canvas titled Giorno del Bucato in una Casa Popolare (Laundry Day in a Housing Project, 1950) – included in the artist’s retrospective at the Accademia Gallery in Florence in 1959 and documented by the art magazine sele arte22 – a number of women of varied ages, some with young children sitting or standing next to them, do their household chores in the shared

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4.2 fillide levasti, Giorno del Bucato in una Casa Popolare, 1950. Oil on Canvas. © Maria Previtali. 

yard of a housing project, a casa popolare. 23 Colourful fabrics hang from the verandas, hiding the interiors. A similar choral scene can be observed in the charcoal on paper piece Laundresses, from 1962. In this representation, a group of female characters gather around a public fountain; they bend close to each other, sometimes looking at their peers or touching their neighbour. Even though Levasti’s figures appear introverted, they coexist in the same space and interact occasionally. The women in Laundresses are not represented as distant from other peers, as are the female protagonists of most advertisements for laundry and cleaning products that proliferated in the pages of women’s magazines. Oral histories reveal that considerable collaborative interaction took place among women. Balconies and courtyards constituted opportunities to establish informal friendships and feel part of the local community. For example, in a description of a postwar apartment block in Milan based on the residents’ memory as well as archival resources, Elena Demartini observes: Each apartment had a long and narrow balcony over the internal yard, overlooked by all the secondary facades of the same block: a hidden side mostly frequented by domestic help and children, who could talk across the railings … This area of the house, in general … allowed for a series of more informal activities that might have not been permitted in other areas.24 Mutual help alleviated the burden of certain housekeeping tasks, and Fillide Levasti’s depictions in the postwar period represent the kind of space in which women could interact without conforming to the ideals of privacy promoted by the popular media.

Isolation in the Home: Representations of Housekeeping in Manuals and the Popular Media Modernity went hand in hand with industrialization and the development of a consumerist culture. Advertisers, magazines, and housekeeping manuals urged Italian housewives to use supposedly modern products rather than rely on peer support and informal exchange of knowledge. A 1951 advertisement for a kop Mira Lanza detergent illustrates this phenomenon: an elegantly

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dressed middle-aged woman talks with her daughter, a young housewife who, as we can infer from her white apron, is doing her housework. The mother says: “Here is your mom, who has come to give you a hand.” “Thank you,” answers the daughter, “but now I can do it by myself, because I’ve discovered … magic kop, which saves me two hours a day and a lot of hard work. With kop I wash the dishes, glasses, windows, bathrooms – the whole house! – and it makes my hands prettier!” The daughter has become independent from earlier generations of women and relies on modern products rather than collaboration and shared advice. It is important to mention that this attitude was already present in the early 1950s, when appliances were not yet common in Italy, but growth in the availability of cleaning products was already taking place. Young women in advertising campaigns were represented as being open to trying new items; their attitude showed their autonomy and openness to innovation. Advertisements for laundry detergents in women’s magazines such as Grazia and Amica, and in weekly news magazines like Oggi, mostly show individual housewives. For example, the 1954 commercial for the detergent Lauril shows a woman standing next to a bucket of foamy water, handwashing a white towel. Behind her, shirts, tablecloths, and pants hang from a clothesline. Still in 1954, Vel promotes a multipurpose soap by illustrating a housewife washing a woman’s undergarment in the bathroom sink. This image assumes the presence of a bathroom in a typical apartment as well as its use, rather than public facilities, for laundry. The message that these commercials convey suggests that modern women carry on their daily work in the privacy of their homes. The idea of isolation also appears in the popular news stories and illustrations of La Domenica del Corriere. The private sphere took the spotlight in Walter Molino’s cover illustration of 11 February 1962 because of a dramatic event that had been reported in a home setting. The illustration warns against the potential dangers of housekeeping on one’s own. Bruna Vivarelli, the Tuscan woman portrayed, received an electric shock while ironing. Her experience becomes a tragic admonition against the risks of modernization and highlights the isolation of this housewife, who was fortunate to have her pet save her life by unplugging the new appliance. Modern life, with all its comforts, sometimes led to an absence of social interaction that made life not only less fulfilling but also less safe.

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Evoking Childhood, Refiguring the Commonplace: Housework and Memory in Luciano Fabro’s Pavimento Tautologia (1967) and Tre Modi di Mettere le Lenzuola (1968) Sheets of newspaper are layered on the floor, forming a grey rectangle that visitors are invited to walk on. The pages are part of Luciano Fabro’s piece Pavimento (Tautologia), that is Floor (Tautology), which was displayed at the exhibition Arte povera – im spazio curated by Germano Celant at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa in September 1967.25 (For a comparison of Fabro and Carla Accardi, see chapter 2.) The show was the first to use the label arte povera to define the work of a group of Italian artists interested in unconventional materials, everyday behaviours, and daring experimentations across mediums. Fabro’s inclusion in arte povera does not exhaust the complexity of his poetics, as we see in the diversity of his practice before and after the group’s dissolution in 1972. In his Floor (Tautology), the newspaper on the floor makes a childhood memory visible: when the artist was a child, wet floors were covered with newspaper sheets. The transformation of a familiar environment through a simple juxtaposition of materials must have felt like a playful game; one can imagine a young Fabro skipping from one room to another over wet floor areas. Floor (Tautology) gives value to an everyday act that concerns cleaning and caring for one’s own environment. It also gives visibility to the housewife’s work, which often remains unnoticed because of its cycle of being done and undone. As Carolyn Christov Bakargiev reminds us: Referring to the traditional practice from his hometown of covering a floor after it has been cleaned, Fabro focuses attention on the value and care of work. “It is respectful of the hard, ephemeral work of women in the home. Every day, we have the experience of seeing our labor destroyed.”26 In the words quoted by Bakargiev, Carla Lonzi, an acute critic about to become a militant feminist, and a good friend of Fabro, elicits an aspect of Floor (Tautology) that had been overlooked by other critics – the fact that the newspaper in Fabro’s piece covered an area of the floor that was mopped and polished regularly during the exhibition itself. This was part of the

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4.3 luciano fabro, Pavimento (Tautologia), 1967. Photo Luciano Fabro. © Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, Milan.

performative script defined by the artist. Such repetitive elements may be the reason for the work’s title. In fact, as a rhetorical figure, “tautology” indicates the redundant iteration of a concept. Lonzi reads the repetitive gesture as a reference to the issue of domestic labour. Her words reflect her commitment to feminism, which indeed would become her only focus as of 1970,27 shortly after she published her analysis of Floor (Tautology). Fabro puts the gallery staff in the position of maintaining his piece as well as the space of the gallery, a publicly accessible site that takes on aspects of a domestic space through the work. The fact that Fabro puts the gallery staff in the shoes of the housewife and equates the gallery and the home makes some aspects of the piece contradict the term “tautology” as defined in logic. The work is by no means a tautology in the philosophical sense, considering that for Wittgenstein (who was a point of reference in the art discourse of the 1960s), the term indicates that something is equal to itself (A=A). Components of Floor (Tautology), rather, look like a contradiction, because Fabro associates agents and situations that are socially differentiated: he proposes that the public space coincide with the private space; and the gallery worker with the housewife or the domestic, in contrast with the habitus of the separation of spheres. Regarding “tautology” in Fabro’s work, Celant observes that pieces bearing such titles are “habitual to our being with and in space, plastic ‘repetitions’ of real and obvious events.”28 For Celant, tautological iteration is connected with phenomenological experience in Fabro’s work. The artist’s interest in activating the viewer’s direct experience of an object in space is also underscored by critics such as Jole de Sanna and Adachiara Zevi.29 Fabro complicates the philosophical meaning of the term “tautology” and expands its definition. The choice of newspaper sheets for Floor (Tautology) encourages an interpretation of the piece as a critique of language. The newspaper describes a mediated reality, and its mode of communication relies on written text, whose very ability to convey meaning the artist questions. Learning by reading the news is remote from experiential learning, which according to Fabro is the essential way of gathering information. In an introduction to the artist’s solo show at the Galleria Notizie in Turin in 1968, Marisa Volpi and Saverio Vertone report his words on the matter of language: “I would like to bring the user to read experience, things … it is about reading things, not our thoughts.”30 Thus his choice to include newspaper in Floor (Tautology) is a way of pointing to and then challenging the notion that we can be truly informed about the world through the media. By asking the public to walk over the paper,

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4.4 Luciano Fabro, Tre Modi di Mettere le Lenzuola, 1968. Photo Andrea Toniutti. © Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro.

he negates the possibility of using the paper in the most expected way, that is by reading. Rather, the viewers experience the paper’s materiality by feeling the object with their body as they walk on it. They also trample on it in a metaphorical way. In Christian religious iconography, stepping on something represents control and victory, as in the case of angels and saints who place their feet over devils and monsters. Fabro’s artwork seems to suggest that bodily experience can win against mediated information. In a 1968 statement, Fabro maintains: To avoid ridiculous interpretations, to make things easy to read, I make tautologies. The result was that the more I packed the object with the space of its attributes, the more I increased its ontological space and consequently its interpretative space. That way I worked on the ontological. I took familiar forms that served equally familiar meanings, and tripped them up. Italy, abnormally hung; sheets, three ways of putting sheets: laundry drapery and accompanying seal.31 One of the artworks that Fabro refers to in this quotation is titled Tre Modi di Mettere le Lenzuola (Three Ways of Arranging Sheets, 1968) and is part of the artist’s Tautologie (Tautologies) series. It consists of three white bedsheets, folded according to different criteria and hanging from a wall (or walls, depending on the characteristics of the space where the work is installed). Viewers of Fabro’s piece would have spent several hours a night enveloped by bedsheets, which had the potential to evoke intimate and private moments. Also, for some, especially women, sheets likely recalled domestic duties such as washing, folding, and ironing bed linens and making beds. Fabro addresses that particular audience by alluding to the experience of folding the linens rather than the experience of sleeping in bed. He points to familiar situations and then “trips them up” in order to shift our perception of the essence of everyday objects. First, he changes the environment in which the sheets are hung, as the private gesture is staged in the public sphere. Second, he hangs them on the wall, as if they were artworks (canvases indeed) rather than functional objects. His installation choice also allows for the fabric to fall heavily toward the floor, weighed down by gravity like a postminimalist sculpture. Furthermore, the folds of the white fabric resemble the drapery of a marble statue. The bed sheets are now presented as works of art instead of being dismissed as insignificant accessories in the home setting. Finally, the artist proposes a number of variations of folding techniques.

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Those who remember Italy in the 1960s and 1970s would know that many a housewife had her own method of folding linens and, to her, that method was the only – and non-negotiable – way to effectively perform that task. By displaying more than one way of hanging linens, Fabro presents a repertoire of possibilities that put axiomatic housekeeping approaches into question. Iterations of similar situations are ultimately another reference to the idea of tautology; the process becomes akin to a puzzle, or a logical problem that calls us to contemplate a number of (nearly identical) variations. Fabro’s Tautologies value the role of variation within repetition, which is a characteristic of housework. Gestural patterns of domestic labour become abstracted to the level of logical and mathematical thinking, as opposed to being undermined as banal, uninteresting, and commonplace.

Lamberto Pignotti and the Duality of Women’s Representation as Either Housewives or Sex Objects Lamberto Pignotti addressed housework by adopting the arguments of many feminist activists. He recognized that women had limited options when it came to defining their path, because the models of femininity offered by society – and visual culture more specifically – boiled down to two. Women could be either housewives/mothers or sex objects. A scholar, writer, and visual poet, Lamberto Pignotti was a core member and prolific theorist of Gruppo 70 (see chapters 1, 2, and 3). According to Pignotti, visual poetry’s mechanism of detaching selected signs from their context and inserting them into a new context had an awakening effect. This effect used irony to draw attention to important social issues. In the case of a small-sized work titled Sarò casalinga (I Will Be a Housewife, ca 1971), the issue addressed was women’s condition. The piece uses references to a range of semantic systems in order to highlight ironic contrapositions in representations of women’s roles and identity. The composition pieces together two elements. At the bottom left, Pignotti placed a stamp, which reproduces a Modigliani painting titled Nude Resting. Born in the Tuscan port city of Livorno, Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani moved to Paris, where he participated in the avant-garde scene of Montmartre with peers such as Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi, who were deconstructing the assumptions of naturalism in art.32 The stamp, on the other hand, was issued by the town of Manama, a rural 182

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4.5 lamberto Pignotti, Sarò casalinga, ca 1971. Stamp and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. 

centre in Ajman – the smallest of the United Arab Emirates. In the 1960s and early 1970s an American entrepreneur established a business in Manama overseeing the design and print of exclusive stamps that were sought after by Western philatelic collectors. The iconography of many of these stamps appealed to the Western public for their reference to modern art and their erotic subject matter. Modigliani’s nude in Pignotti’s stamp is a fine example. The contrast between the reproduction of an avant-garde painting – created by an Italian artist in Paris – and the rural identity of the town issuing the stamp is strong, yet it is possible that the collectors who purchased the stamps were uneducated about Manama’s actual economy and society. They most likely simplistically associated the stamp’s Arabic text with exotic orientalism, which, as Edward Said would extensively demonstrate a few years after Manama’s stamp was printed,33 had itself been associated with erotic mystery by artists and travellers. The sensual image of Modigliani’s model was perceived as even more erotic because it was framed as the Other. The stamp might be read as an (unintentional) visual poem in and of itself, given its decontextualized mix of image and text – even more stark considering Modigliani’s Jewish origins and the Arabic context of the stamp. Pignotti further complicates the stamp’s meaning by pairing it with a second element within I Will Be a Housewife’s composition: a bubble from a comic strip. The bubble reads: “Io sarò casalinga e mi darò da fare con i lavori domestici! Sarò donna!” meaning “I will be a housewife and will put a lot of effort into my household chores! I will be woman!” Such words are not what one might have expected to hear from the femme fatale pictured in Modigliani’s painting. By pairing text and image, Pignotti juxtaposes the two sides of a woman’s supposed identity, as constructed by visual culture. In the preface to Pignotti’s scholarly volume titled Marchio e Femmina34 – which means “brand and female” and is a pun on the phrase “maschio e femmina,” that is “male and female” – Carla Ravioli highlights how advertisements, in particular, shaped women’s dual identity as sexual objects or housewives obsessed with hygiene and family care – two sides of the same coin that do not easily coexist. In I Will Be a Housewife, Pignotti brings the two expectations onto the same page in order to demonstrate the absurdity of their pairing. As a man who supports the feminist cause – a rare case in 1970s Italy, as argued by Emily Braun35 – Pignotti also shows how straitjacketing it was for women to be confined to these two models rather than having access to manifold possibilities. Visual sources failed to represent the variety of role models that individuals could aspire to. The cover of Marchio e Femmina, 184

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which displays a German advertisement with a naked young woman awkwardly squeezed into a wooden box too small for her body, further clarifies Pignotti’s critical position on women being caged in by society. The artist’s source for the cartoon speech bubble in I Will Be a Housewife is also significant. It is, in fact, a cut-out from a Peanuts comic strip; the words express the aspiration of Lucy, a cynical little girl who lives in suburban Northern America and dreams of marrying her peer Schroeder, who aspires to be a pianist. The American housewife, a role model that circulated through women’s magazines in the United States as in in Italy,36 finds its way into Pignotti’s composition via a comic strip character. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was meant to provoke laughter by painting a delicate and disenchanted portrait of the suburban middle class in the 1950s. In the original comic strip, Lucy’s declaration is meant to be ironic. The register was popular and lowkey. In its decontextualized position in Pignotti’s visual poem, the Peanuts bubble contrasts with the institutional tone of an art museum, indicated by the reference to Modigliani. The elaborate and costly stamp occupies the same space as the mass-produced comic strip, which was published in Italy in Paese Sera, a daily newspaper that Pignotti collaborated with.37 The artist plays with opposites – the highbrow and lowbrow, the widely distributed and the exclusive – to highlight not only the contrast between the two faces of women’s identity, but also the ways that representation involves issues of class. Again in Marchio e Femmina, the artist maintains that different advertising venues represented women according to different standards: housekeeping role models mostly occupied less expensive women’s magazines while the model of the sophisticated femme fatale appeared more frequently in fashion magazines that targeted more affluent readers.38 In I Will Be a Housewife, Pignotti brings together visual sources that are meant for different viewers and reveals the ways in which both models of femininity end up affecting women’s ability to fully experience the world according to their own interests and strengths.

The Double-Edged Appeal of Appliances in Ketty La Rocca and Mirella Bentivoglio’s Work As of the 1950s, magazines and mainstream advertisements promoted electrical appliances by claiming they gave middle-class women lots of free time. Zoppas, for example, advertised its economical kitchens in 1959 by showing

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4.6 Ketty la rocca, Elettro ... addomesticati, 1965. Collage, 29.7 × 44.7 cm. Courtesy Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto / Archivio Tullia Denza. 

a woman surrounded by its latest marvels. The descriptive text is enticing: “For the elegant lady who wants to save time; for the housewife who wants to save time, a rapid and perfect kitchen, a paradise of splendour and brightness, with Zoppas kitchens.”39 Such messages may have been effective in boosting sales, but they were not without their critics. Through a selection of their artworks, women artists Ketty La Rocca and Mirella Bentivoglio reflect the double-edged reception of housekeeping appliances. On the one hand, both artists acknowledge the allure of offloading tedious labour to machines. On the other, they use irony to point out that appliances only help with logistical tasks and cannot bring about improvements in civil rights and social recognition. In the modus operandi characteristic of much visual poetry, La Rocca refers to specific magazines in order to reconfigure their message in acute and sarcastic ways. Her collage Elettro … addomesticati, created in 1965, foregrounds the faces of two beautiful models, one appearing complicit, the other gagged and seemingly worried. They both look the viewer straight in the eye. A slogan towers over them, as if to suggest that even wildly self-confident women can be domesticated by men who give them appliances. In the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of anaesthetizing housewives with consumer goods was reinforced by several advertisements that showed generous husbands and wishful wives mesmerized by the prospect of a new fridge, washing machine, and the like. In La Rocca’s piece, this concept is indicated by the neologism Elettro … addomesticati, which plays with the words elettrodomestico, meaning “appliance,” and addomesticate, meaning domesticated. However, the phrase se ne parla, that is, “under discussion,” at the bottom of the composition challenges the initial assumption. La Rocca intends to show how, by the mid-1960s, women’s passivity was in the process of being reframed because women were less easily hypnotized by men’s apparent generosity (see chapter 1). In Elettro … addomesticati, La Rocca deconstructs gender stereotypes by decontextualizing the images of advertisements. She refers to campaigns that the general public was familiar with, but she subverts the meaning by excerpting a fragment of the message and changing its context. In fact, in the original series of San Giorgio advertisements, for which the word Elettro…addomesticati was invented, the concept was that the appliances should be domesticated by the women who control them. 40 In one of the ads, published in 1968, a female figure promises she will be able to spend more time caring for her family (and even have a little time for herself), because she could take charge of San Giorgio’s dishwashers and other elettrodomestici such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners.

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4.7 San giorgio advertisement, published in Casabella (November 1968).

By pairing the San Giorgio slogan with photos of women – but without including the appliances in her composition – La Rocca’s image flips the meaning of the advertisement to suggest that, in reality, appliances were meant to domesticate women, and not the other way around. Through the text “Se ne parla” (“under discussion”) the artist suggests that women are now reassessing their position. A strong believer in gender equality, La Rocca understood her identity as a wife and mother as multi-layered. Michelangelo Vasta recalls the artist’s behaviour in her own home as having been nuanced. Unlike some feminist activists, La Rocca continued using makeup and wearing feminine clothes. She did manage the household chores and in 1972, when her family moved to a new apartment in Florence, she was excited about purchasing a dishwasher, looking forward to improving her quality of life by having some personal time freed up. However, she questioned the mass media’s oversimplification of women’s identity.41 A comparable attitude toward consumerism can be found in the feminist journal Noi Donne, as exemplified by Giuliana Dal Pozzo’s piece Parliamone Insieme (“Let’s talk about it together”).42 In 1972, the same year in which La Rocca purchased a dishwasher, Dal Pozzo responded to a reader’s letter in a text titled “Lavastoviglie e Consumismo” (“The Dishwasher and Consumerism”). The reader had defended the choices of working-class consumers who indulged in purchasing new things by spending their welldeserved money after lives of sacrifice. The rejection of consumerism, the reader said, was something that only upper-class people could afford, because they had never experienced the discomfort of living on a limited budget. Dal Pozzo responds with kind words, yet reinforces that consumer appliances should be considered tools that alleviate manual labour rather than life goals in themselves, the achievement of which ironically depends on intensive labour. Labouring to obtain labour-saving products appeared useless. To Dal Pozzo, comfort was desirable only when it effectively allowed one to devote time to personal and social development. A similarly two-sided approach to women’s labour and consumerism can be found in Mirella Bentivoglio’s 1974 art piece Lapide alla Casalinga. Elemento di Lavastoviglie (Gravestone for a Housewife: Part of a Dishwasher). An artist, curator, and critic, Bentivoglio collaborated with the feminist collective of Via Cherubini in Milan and exhibited in the collective’s Libreria delle Donne (Women’s Bookstore).43 She was in dialogue with a broad international network of women artists and in 1978 curated a section of the Venice Biennale devoted to women’s work, titled La Materializzazione del Linguaggio (The

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4.8 mirella bentivoglio, Lapide alla Casalinga. Elemento di Lavastoviglie, 1974. Readymade reproduced in exhibition brochure. Special Collections, the University of Iowa Libraries. The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, on Loan from Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner and the Sackner Family Partnership. © Archivio Mirella Bentivoglio.

Materialization of Language).44 At first glance, Bentivoglio’s Gravestone for a Housewife seems to affirm the idea that appliances liberate women from their domestic role. The piece is a readymade composed of a dishwasher part (the cross) and a pedestal akin to those used to display modernist sculptures (the gravestone). One could think of the Gravestone as an ode to the dishwasher, which reduces a woman’s work to the point of erasing and burying the very role of the housewife. However, a second look allows a subtler interpretation. The piece is created through a deconstruction of the dishwasher, which becomes non-functional once its rotating fan is removed to become a makeshift cross. Bentivoglio takes out the heart of the appliance, rendering it useless. The death of the housewife can be only achieved if the dishwasher (together with all it represents) is also dead, because it is the very assumption that household chores are a woman’s duty that creates the myth of the housewife. Dishwasher or not, it still seemed that washing dishes was a woman’s job, with some exceptions. Among several home movies that illustrate women’s work in the home, one film in the collections of the Home Movies Archive in Bologna shows a woman and a man collaborating at the kitchen sink. This film was shot in 1960 in the home of amateur filmmaker Carlo Cialoni in Via Ferrarese, Bologna. Carlo’s wife, Iole, is seen washing the dishes while Carlo’s uncle, Antonio, dries them. Carlo had been hosted by his uncle in Rome and had worked in his mechanic shop, later starting his own auto-repair business in Bologna. As newlyweds, Iole and Carlo had lived with Antonio, who continued visiting with the family frequently even after they moved back to Bologna.45 In the home movie, both Iole and Antonio seem content and grin at the camera while performing this household task together. Such forms of collaboration generated alternative models of behaviour in the private sphere. As for Bentivoglio, she advocated for the death of the housewife and actually made such a death materialize through her sculpture. The housewife’s symbolic passing, then, coincides with the birth of a well-rounded woman, who is not limited to an identity as a domestic creature.

Housework and the Intersections of Public and Private Spheres in Gianni Pettena’s Laundry (1969) In the climate of contestation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mirella Bentivoglio was not alone in questioning domestic habits and promoting more radical engagement with the public sphere. Laundry, a performative

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4.9 Cialoni, Untitled min 2:25,12, no date (attributed to 1960). Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 31, Ns/ prima pellicola – casa Ferrovieri, Palazz. (zia Giovanna) nonno, 8mm. Courtesy of Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. 

piece by Gianni Pettena, affirms the idea of blending private and public in a particularly strong way, due to its choice of site and its participatory element. Gianni Pettena was based in Florence and was educated as an architect, participating in the discourse of radical architecture. Though he never joined related groups and collectives, he was part of a network of artists and designers who deconstructed the protocols and goals of their disciplines. A temporary happening, Laundry was displayed at Campo Urbano in Como,46 an event organized by critic and art historian Luciano Caramel, photographer Ugo Mulas, and artist-designer Bruno Munari in 1969. Campo Urbano was intended as an ephemeral public exhibition with site-specific works scattered around the city centre. Pettena was negatively impressed by the fact that most participants had chosen the monumental main square for their interventions. In the idiomatic language that distinguished his 1973 book L’Anarchitetto, almost resembling the transcription of a spoken and informal monologue, Pettena maintained: Yet campo urbano [sic] … renewed my unhoped-for fucking condition of rage, so in short how could it be that we had a city, I say, being allowed to do whatever we wanted with it, and no, just exhibiting little statues in the main square of the village … Oh there was the city behind it’s true we had the city and, no way, like well-mannered and condescending people we chose the piazza, the cleanest, most ennobling place that makes your shyness feel more self-confident and gives prestige to your poop.47 Being trained as an architect, Pettena understood the ways in which buildings could convey symbolic meaning. In his view, the piazza in Como was designed to express the city’s vertical power structure. The broletto (the medieval government building) and the cathedral (the local church headquarters) were both situated in the main square and both represented a hierarchical order in society. Pettena’s concept reflects the theories of Henri Lefebvre (see the Introduction), who viewed public space as being organized according to the priorities and value systems of the dominant classes. Given that the built environment remains unchanged for extended periods of time, people become used to interacting with it, forming habits that interiorize power systems. Thus, the status quo is perceived as inevitable and natural. For Pettena, Italian city centres crystallized the historical stratifications of political power, or hegemony to use Gramsci’s term (also see the Introduction).

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4.10 gianni Pettena, Laundry, 1969. Performance for Campo Urbano, Como. Photo Ugo Mulas. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettena. 

In a dialogue with his American contemporary Robert Smithson, Pettena observed: “Every town, downtown, has nice, clean, rich buildings which are an expression of power and make you feel secure. But in the meantime, you have to remember that this is generally a visualization of power.”48 For his happening in Como, Pettena hung laundry in the main piazza, a gesture that was intentionally inappropriate. In an interview with me, he clarified: It was extemporaneous. I was in Milan with La Pietra the day before Campo Urbano and I joined him in Como. I rang the bells of the apartments in the back streets of the centro storico and robbed the washing machines. I bought what was missing (bras, underwear) at the Upim, a department store nearby. I ruined the monumental flair that the other artists were looking for. I wanted to disrupt the “tuxedo effect,” in order to create a short circuit.49 Pettena hoped to demonstrate that the formality of the piazza – and the events that took place there – signified class distinctions. He perceived hanging laundry as more authentic than the rigid conventions associated with public spaces. However, he did not consider how housework signified hierarchies in the home context. There was a difference between hanging clothes in the festive atmosphere of an art event with help from passersby, which was Pettena’s experience, and devoting hours to invisible work that was not valued as a professional achievement, which was the everyday experience of housewives and domestics. Nevertheless, Pettena believed that injecting an element of domesticity into the space of officialdom and public manners could reinstate a more genuine relationship between the residents and the city. To him, the home allowed a spontaneous rituality that he perceived as positive. By repeating everyday gestures over and over in the same environment – by appropriating it – individuals from any class could feel at home.50 Thus, the displacement of everyday activities (such as hanging laundry) into the piazza was a tool to encourage the expression of a sense of belonging. Ironically, though, Pettena paired the “robbing” of washing machines from private apartments with the purchase of items at the Upim department store. This might have been an on-the-spot decision determined by the lack of sufficient items to hang. Nevertheless, it introduced an element of consumerism into the installation of Laundry, as if to acknowledge that participation in the public sphere came at a cost. The do-it-yourself idea

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4.11 Superstudio, Gli Atti Fondamentali, Vita (Supersuperficie): Pulizie di Primavera, 1971–73. Lithograph. Courtesy Gian Piero Frassinelli.

behind later actions performed by Pettena, for example with the collective Global Tools, was less dominant in Como. The artist’s purchase of new items – rather than hand-making, borrowing, or doing without them – also normalized consumerism. Furthermore, his collection of laundry from washing machines demonstrated that these appliances – perceived as problematic commodities by some – were seen as neutral by Pettena. In effect, through Laundry Pettena unintentionally juxtaposed consumer culture with domestic culture and replaced the hegemony of historical urban/power structures with the hegemony of contemporary consumerism.

An (Idealized) Form of Nomadism: Superstudio’s “Life Without Objects” A girl stands on a rectangle of ground inscribed in a grid of reflective tiles. She looks back as she sweeps the floor, with the wind blowing through her hair and dress. Just a few worn-out objects surround her, punctuating a flat and simple landscape. The scene, pictured in the collage Pulizie di Primavera (Spring Cleaning) by the radical architecture collective Superstudio, gains meaning in the context of the 1971 Gli Atti Fondamentali, Vita (Supersuperficie), that is Fundamental Acts, Life (Supersurface). Superstudio, founded in 1966, included Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and later Gian Piero Frassinelli, Roberto and Alessandro Magris, and Alessandro Poli.51 Life (Supersurface) is a film created by sequencing a series of photomontages, accompanied by a background voice. The work tells the story of a hyper-technological future, in which the world will be covered by a grid of energy. Users will be able to connect to the grid by plugging into special nodes. When properly activated, the nodes create bubbles of ideal temperature contained by air walls. People will move freely from one node to another, and there will be no need to carry heavy luggage, as the nodes provide shelter. The girl described in this section’s opening is one of the many characters who inhabit Supersurface’s futuristic utopia. Her neighbours are families and groups of travellers who practise simple forms of domesticity in the space of their temporary node. Some sleep on the floor, others consume a frugal meal, others – perhaps more ambitiously – iron mounds of clothes. Life (Supersurface) envisions a nomadic and collective form of living that draws inspiration from hippie communes. In a statement published in 1972, Superstudio members wrote:

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4.12 Campo Sfollati di Aosta, 1944. Still frame from Cinegiornale Luce C0401. Courtesy Istituto Luce.

Concentrations such as the Isle of Wight or Woodstock indicate the possibility of an urban life without the emergence of threedimensional structures as a basis … Free gathering and dispersal, permanent nomadism, the choice of interpersonal relationships beyond any pre-established hierarchy, are characteristics that become increasingly evident in a work-free society … Bidonvilles, drop-out cities, camping sites, slums, tendopoles, or geodetic [sic] domes are all different expressions of an analogous desire to attempt to control the environment by the most economical means.52 Thus, the modest living spaces of Life (Supersurface) point to the possibility of a “life without objects.” Such principled refusal of consumption is meant to minimize labour and symbolize more authentic lifestyles. The relationship between labour and commodities, addressed by artists like Pignotti and Bentivoglio, comes again into the foreground. Superstudio questions the very need for manufactured objects, because their production depends on alienating forms of work that are typical of capitalist societies.53 It is ironic that one generation’s aspiration to wealth and privacy pivoted toward the rejection of such ideals by the following generation. To discuss this point in greater depth, I return to the image showing a young female figure with a broom. The girl’s pose corresponds with the sweeping gesture of a girl who appears in the 1944 Film Luce documentary about a refugee camp near Aosta (see chapter 1 as well as the beginning of this chapter).54 The film portrays everyday life in a village that hosted sfollati who had lost their homes to area bombings. In some ways, the experience crafted by the hippies who occupied rural and sometimes urban houses in the 1960s and 1970s was similar to the communal living of war refugees. Such similarities are highlighted by Superstudio’s iconography, which suggests connections between the girl in the Life (Supersurface) lithograph and the girl portrayed by the 1944 Film Luce – or, for that matter, any other child living in a camp during World War II. The difference, however, was in the residents’ intentionality. For the war refugees of the 1940s, shared dwelling was an involuntary situation born of violence, loss, and separation. For the hippies of the 1970s, collective living and nomadism embodied the dream of a better future, in which genuine values and anarchic freedom could be experienced. Ironically, the critique of hierarchical family structures that was constructed by 1970s’ youth was based on an optimistic reconsideration of living models that had been traumatic for their parents’ generation.

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Conclusion The perception of housekeeping in postwar Italy varied according to specific historical and political contexts. In the war period, taking care of the domestic environment was a necessity and a challenge, given the limited access to market goods and products. Cleaning and doing laundry were social activities that were undertaken by multigenerational groups. At the end of the world conflict, visual culture emphasized people’s need to recover from past collective traumas in the reassuring space of the home. Advertisers capitalized on the aspiration to domestic privacy to promote cleaning products and appliances. Also, both Communist and Christian Democrat politicians promoted a separation of gender roles in order to exert influence on the lives and the political opinions of women. Communist artist Renato Guttuso highlighted the harshness and indignity of domestic labour, encouraging the inclusion of women in the class struggle. Some artists were directly critical of the political and mass media messages that pushed women to the margins. Lamberto Pignotti, Ketty La Rocca, and Mirella Bentivoglio subverted the semantics of advertisements to uncover their superficiality. Luciano Fabro engaged with the personal meanings of housekeeping that triggered memories of care and created opportunities for participation. Gianni Pettena intended to show the political value of the domestic sphere, which he saw as more spontaneous than the order established in urban spaces. Finally, Superstudio theorized the possibility of life outside the capitalist system through the design of utopian structures in which there was neither space for objects nor any need to keep them clean. In the countercultural response to consumer society that was conceptualized by Superstudio, intensive housework would no longer be necessary. Similar reinventions of social expectations can be observed in contemporaneous visual interpretations of cooking and dining. However, representations of these activities show some peculiarities. In fascist visual culture, food is imbued with references to African colonies and aspirations to autarchy. Furthermore, starting in the 1960s, the exploration of new media, including performance and installation, resulted in experiments in edible art that fostered bodily participation. Chapter 5 analyzes a range of images and artworks that engage with food preparation and dining to convey diverse personal as well as political meanings.

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CHAPTER 5

Cooking, feeding, and Dining Weaving relationships around the table

Feeding Fascist Values In 1942 the women’s magazine Donna Fascista published the photograph of a young female college student feeding an injured child in bed.1 The image projects many possible meanings. The young woman’s clean outfit alludes to the angelic purity symbolically needed to heal the wounds of a violent war. The palette is dominated by whiteness; we see white linens, a white uniform, white sleepwear, white bandages. In a climate of colonial aspirations, the colour scheme plays with ideas of race and implicitly promotes racist models of white supremacy. White was the skin colour that fascism associated with Italian identity, which propaganda messages in turn presented as strong and powerful. The Donna Fascista photograph, which accompanied a story on war orphans, also shared the page with an article about colonial living. The latter’s perspective fails to acknowledge the challenge of the black Africans whose lands the fascists colonized, and instead rhetorically exaggerates the supposedly rough experience of the white colonizer. Through its page layout, Donna Fascista suggests that fascism, in its various forms, required character and strength. The photograph itself alludes to an Italian people so powerful as to be able to withstand even very difficult circumstances such as those experienced by children who lost their homes, families, and health. The picture reminded its viewers that fascism was resilient, and educated them about the caring response of the fascist system, presenting it as a sound structure within which members of the community looked after others in need. The magazine’s parochial perspective framed simple everyday activities like feeding and caring in terms of fascist and racist propaganda. Its message aligned with the politics of the ventennio, when women of all classes and levels of education were encouraged to fulfill fascist ideals by acting like angels of the hearth and accepting their alleged position of biological inferiority.2 That said, the experience lived by the child in the Donna Fascista photograph was objectively challenging. As a victim of area bombings, she had found refuge in a hospital. Recovery does not take place in her home (likely damaged itself), and thus she now lives in the shared space of a clinic, another form of collective living. In this case a female university student serves as a maternal figure for a possibly orphaned child, and in so doing, also serves her country. Despite her advanced education, her domestic role is presented as being of greater value than any intellectual contribution she might make. Donna Fascista seems to assume that women’s power to effect change is ultimately limited to the realm of domestic care. 202

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5.1 “una Visita delle universitarie negli ospedali agli Infortunati delle Incursioni Aeree,” La Donna Fascista 18 (15 July 1942), 7. Courtesy Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, Bologna.

The values communicated in the photograph are in line with those crafted by the régime in previous years. In discussing the politics of breastfeeding in interwar Italy, for instance, Diana Garvin observes how fascism strove to balance an appreciation of women’s role in the private sphere with centralized services such as public preschools and children’s summer camps.3 Such services were framed as tools of modernization and education, yet they also functioned as tools of control and surveillance. By offering childrearing support, the regime created the opportunity to make women loyal. Also, addressing children outside the family context allowed early indoctrination and exposure to fascist ideology. Since the mid-1930s, fascism had tried to promote autarchy by restricting trade in food supplies to Italy and the Italian colonies. Autarchy impacted foodways and changed habits. For example, chicory substituted for coffee, which had become a rare commodity.4 Carol Helstosky describes some of the more pernicious effects of this policy: Instead of worrying about balancing consumer interests with available resources, fascism denied the possibility of a more diverse and nutritious diet, opting instead to bring consumer habits more in line with its goal of economic self-sufficiency. Mussolini’s government accomplished this directly (through propaganda campaigns, the manipulation of scientific data, and public spectacles promoting austere consumer practice), and indirectly (decisions involving foreign policy, agriculture, and trade).5 The impact on everyday consumption drew the public’s attention to the politics of expansionism, embraced by the dictatorship since 1936. Design objects and even kitchen furniture referenced colonial conquests, continually reminding families about the expansionist efforts of the fascist dictatorship.6 For example, Elettra Radi (coincidentally my great-grandmother) owned a kitchen cabinet with decorative glass windows; palm trees and stereotypical North African houses adorned each panel. Many times a day, as she took cups and dishes out of the cabinet or put them away, Elettra was reminded of Mussolini’s colonial policies. Despite the fact that she and her husband were socialists and anti-fascist, official narratives intruded into their everyday life. Propaganda messages also gave out the misinformation that eating less promoted health. Yet eating less was mostly a matter of necessity, as food became scarce – and increasingly so in the war years. As Helstosky explains: 204

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During the war, the Italian population suffered terrible privations as the regime failed to live up to its image of benevolent provider and grossly mismanaged wartime food policies. Italians received one of the lowest food rations (measured in caloric value) in Europe, while up to 70 percent of consumer food purchases during wartime were made on the black market.7 The quantities of food provided by war rations were clearly insufficient. It was such everyday deprivation that challenged the fascist political consensus more than anything else.8 Only wealthy consumers had access to the wider range of foods on the black market – at exorbitant prices. The state of emergency was such that, starting in 1941, war gardens (orti di guerra) became ubiquitous.9 Local fascist governors (podestà) encouraged residents to plant edible varieties on any available land, from the main piazza to the backyard. Milan’s Piazza del Duomo and Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore, for example, were used as wheat fields. Certain kinds of vegetables and crops, such as cauliflower and wheat, were selected for their nutritional value. Along with the fascist attempt to control everyday life by manipulating eating habits as well as habitus (behavioural patterns which, as argued by Pierre Bourdieu, could leave a trace in people’s class and subjective identity), women in the interwar period were prompted to welcome modernity by trusting the emerging food industry.10 Advertisements for industrially made jam, bouillon cubes, and packaged milk filled the pages of recipe books such as Cirio per la casa (1939). Brands such as Cirio, Bertolini, Dante, and Carli, which were founded in the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century, grew in appeal during the interwar period, and became established by the postwar years.

Cooking as a Private Matter: The Kitchen and the Dining Room in Postwar Visual Culture from the 1940s to the 1950s Unfortunately, at war’s end the hoped-for abundance of food did not materialize immediately. Nevertheless, people aspired to wealthier lifestyles, and a brighter future was on the horizon. On 3 January 1948, the cover illustration of the women’s magazine Grand Hôtel (likely by Walter Molino, who also created several covers for the Domenica del Corriere; see chapters 1 and 3)

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5.2 Walter molino, “Dolce Sorpresa,” Grand Hôtel, 80.3 (3 January 1948). Cover. Courtesy Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, Bologna.

shows a couple in the dining room of an upper-middle-class home. The interaction between the characters harks back to the aforementioned image of a female university student feeding a child in Donna Fascista back in 1942. In the 1948 Grand Hôtel illustration, a beautiful, perfectly groomed woman serves a seated figure – this time an adult man. Here, the female character holds a pose reminiscent of the position of the student in the Donna Fascista photograph: arms bent to sustain the weight of the food offered, head slightly tilted as a sign of humility, dark hair falling in an orderly fashion on the shoulders. Both women are portrayed as caring and generous characters who take pleasure in serving others. There is a continuity in the representation of women’s role as nurturers; yet there are of course notable differences. The environment in the Grand Hôtel cover is not a hospital but an elegantly furnished home, and the recipient is a well-satisfied husband (a caption, barely visible, reads “Dolce Sorpresa” – that is “Sweet Surprise”). The domestic setting of the late 1940s suggests a regained possibility of family life, based on fixed gender roles in heterosexual couples. But the desire to tidy up the confusion of the war years by imagining orderly scenes often omitted consideration of the compromises and sacrifices that accompany any return to order. After fatiguing years of displacement and harshness, traditional domestic settings and family relations were idealized as dreams of respite. A family’s well-being was presented as linked to its members’ coming together around the table for daily meals, and the unity of the family was considered essential to re-establishing a healthy and morally strong society. This association between family dining habits and societal ethics was evident in the responses to the Milan Triennale’s call for ideas on the possibility of communal housing in 1946–47 (see chapters 1 and 4).11 Many respondents expressed the view that a communal kitchen would be unacceptable because it would inhibit individual family members’ ability to properly care for each other. The abundance illustrated by the cake and the fruit on the table of the Grand Hôtel cover was a mirage for most people. In reality, the 1940s were characterized by poverty and food scarcity, while the country tried to reorganize its economic and political structure in the aftermath of the war. That said, access to fresh food varied according to class and region. In Mimmetta Lo Monte’s culinary diary and recipe book, which recounts stories from her mid-twentieth-century upbringing in an aristocratic family in Sicily, for instance, we read about Palermo in 1943:

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At least for us in Sicily, the war nightmare is over … There is uncertainty in the air, but in spite of it people are hopeful. There is a carefree joy in the way they walk in the streets. The bombed buildings, sometimes huge hips of debris, sometimes empty shells, already belong to the past. We have come back to town from our country hideout. Not many goods are available, but nobody seems to mind too much. The only thing I hear complaints about is the lack of decent bread and decent pasta. Proper ladies of that time did not make bread and pasta, but mother had decided to do so rather than hear father complaining. After all the maid has strong wrists and she does all the kneading. Broomsticks are propped across the backs of kitchen chairs, and pasta hangs there to dry … One way to feel things are back to normal is to have good food. Coffee and sugar have been long missed, but now they are occasionally available again.12 In Lo Monte’s household, sources of nutritious and flavourful food ranged widely, from American soldiers to political connections in Rome. Despite general scarcity, upper-class families could find prized ingredients even in the first half of the 1940s. They could also rely on the help for the more fatiguing tasks. Food preparation was mostly considered women’s duty, yet Lo Monte’s book refers to male family members who proudly engaged with cooking, although they did not take on domestic chores, considering them less creative. According to Dacia Maraini’s memoir, Bagheria, mid-twentiethcentury aristocratic women, impoverished or not, were just as reluctant to take care of their own housekeeping. Eating abundantly, on the other hand, was considered a matter of social prestige and pride.13 Free markets and Marshall Plan funding slowly led to improved lifestyles in the 1950s, and not only for the upper classes. The rhetoric and materiality of the Economic Miracle, with its celebrated abundance of consumer goods, entered the lives of Italian residents in earnest around 1957. Advertisements, commercials, and illustrated magazines from the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate increasing attempts at marketing modernity, as signified by appliances and processed foods such as boxed pasta or canned vegetables and meat. Such marketing efforts proposed middle and upper-class lifestyles as models that people of all classes and regions should emulate. In November 1957, the women’s magazine Arianna published a special on kitchen renovations.14 Labour-saving interior designs for all budgets are presented in detailed

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texts, complemented by blueprints and photographs. The dossier also features an overview of modern pots and pans, including pressure cookers of many different sizes. Most of the space, however, is devoted to automation in the kitchen; appliances like the fridge, the electric oven, and the grill are praised for saving women time and improving outcomes. The photograph that illustrates this concept stages a scene that repeats the pattern observed in Donna Fascista and Grand Hôtel. A female figure carries a tray of food with a typically bent elbow, while another character – again a male figure – waits to be served. The new element in the composition is an electric toaster oven – complete with a golden chicken roasting in it – which dominates the foreground. It is there to convince Arianna’s female readers that modern appliances will help them become more efficient homemakers, make amazing food, and please their men. Industrial progress seemed to promise even more than time-saving tools through the marketing of processed foods, prepared by somebody else. This is exemplified by a commercial for a canned tomato sauce by Cirio that was screened in the legendary program Carosello in 1957.15 Featuring Diana Dei and Paolo Ferrari, the scene takes place in a home kitchen. At the centre of the room sits a round table – the protagonist. A big garlanded tv set and a white fridge adorned with a flower vase on top of it are against two different walls. Dei plays the role of an unskilled housewife who is trying to learn how to cook by watching a tv program. The program’s conductor, a.k.a. Ferrari, interacts with the housewife in a tight dialogue that is filled with sexual puns, along the lines of: “Is the water boiling?”; “Oh yes, it is very hot!” The conclusion is explosive: Dei’s recipe turns out to be a disaster, and she invites the tv showman to become her husband, asking if he can also do the laundry and ironing in addition to the cooking. Ferrari accepts the offer, as long as Dei serves Cirio tomato sauce every day, as he confesses that he likes the product more than his own culinary creations. The hilarious confusion between real life and the television world underlines other improbable components of the storyline. The female character is empowered enough to ask for the male character’s hand, and the latter seems to be fine with the idea of performing housework, a dynamic that flips common social habits in postwar Italy. Beyond the intended irony of the switched gender roles, the commercial presents the supposedly desirable prospect that modern women spend less – if any – time cooking in the kitchen, thanks to industrially prepared products like Cirio sauce.

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5.3 giovanna Polo Pericoli, marta latis, luisa De ruggieri, Dario baldi, and giorgio berti, “trasformiamo la Nostra Cucina,” Arianna 8.1 (November 1957), 34. Courtesy Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, Bologna.

Despite marketing efforts by food brands, many Italian housewives were resistant to industrial foods for a number of reasons peculiar to Italian culture.16 From a personal point of view, women feared that processed foods would replace them in the kitchen. Since much of women’s value in society was linked to their homemaking abilities, the use of purchasable precooked goods risked the unintended consequence of compromising the appreciation of women and diminishing their already limited power. There was a political reason as well: both the Communists and the Christian Democrats condemned consumerism and stressed women’s domestic role; women whose views aligned with any of these parties felt encouraged to continue traditional home-cooking practices. Furthermore, the Catholic Church insistently promoted the ideal of a compliant woman who dedicated her life to her family, enduring related sacrifices such as intense labour in the kitchen and beyond; “real” women often felt it was their duty to match such expectations. Finally, with the exception of a few big cities, Italy was still mostly a rural country, and most people had relatively easy access to fresh produce and farm products to cook with after the war. Companies and advertisers tried to use visual language to convince consumers of the possibility of balancing modernity and tradition, but their efforts were not always successful. As Helstosky further explains: Italian consumers chose to eat more of the foods they had always consumed … Initially Italians experimented with their newfound consumer freedoms. Cocktails, thick steaks and complicated desserts were all the rage in Italian restaurants throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Consumption habits flexed to incorporate this new prosperity but ultimately, they changed little in terms of the kinds of foods consumed and food habits. Cookbooks still advised housewives that a simple and hearty minestra satisfied the family and provided maximum nutrition. The Italian food industry reinforced existing habits by concentrating on producing and marketing the foods characteristic of the Mediterranean diet: pasta, olive oil, tomatoes, wine and bread. Despite the dramatic economic transformation for the nation, the general contours of Italian cuisine changed little.17 Italian diets remained faithful to pre-war patterns. People ate more, but did not introduce significantly different foods. Regional cuisines remained

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5.4 renato guttuso, Donne che Lavorano la Conserva di Pomodoro in Sicilia, 1948. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

prominent, and so did cooking rituals that continued to be linked to local traditions. The following paragraphs discuss the constant negotiation of tradition and modernity, and the frequent dichotomy of country and city that characterized the discourse of food preparation and eating practices in postwar Italian art.

Tomato Sauce and Women Farmers in Sicily: Renato Guttuso’s Donne che Lavorano la Conserva di Pomodoro in Sicilia (1948) Today’s cooking blog reader will easily find recipes for homemade tomato sauce, often paired with evocative stories of childhood summers in southern Italy. Many recall the smell of fresh tomatoes that pervaded their homes when women in their families united forces to prepare the conserva – cooked tomato sauce preserved in glass jars for the winter. Women cut the tomatoes and sprinkled them with coarse salt, allowing them to lose some of their liquid overnight. The pulp would then be distributed on wide tables to be crushed by hand, and the resulting mixture would be cooked the next day. Renato Guttuso’s Donne che Lavorano la Conserva di Pomodoro in Sicilia (Women Preparing Tomato Sauce in Sicily, 1948) portrays a phase of just that process. A group of five women work together at long tables casually positioned in a wide room. The figures are shown enacting a mode of food-processing that was valued among Sicilian women of all classes; according to Mimmetta Lo Monte, her grandmother Adelina, who could afford a cook’s salary, found cooking interesting only when it was a social activity to be shared with her sister-in-law and cousins in preparation for special meals.18 Guttuso’s art is less concerned with aristocratic family habits than with the collaborative activity of working-class women (see chapter 4). In Women Preparing Tomato Sauce in Sicily, the figures’ heads are covered by hats or kerchiefs, an indication of their daily work in the fields. The character at the centre of the composition holds a bowl with red content, likely tomatoes, and the table surfaces are also red. The fact that the most prominent colour within the painting’s scheme is red may simply be related to Guttuso’s choice of subject, as ripe San Marzano tomatoes are undoubtedly red. However, the colour is also associated with communism and the pci specifically, thus hinting at a political meaning. As observed in chapter 4, Guttuso was particularly supportive of that party’s

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positions. He embraced a “realist and immediately readable art for everybody; an art that expresses new, contemporary and edifying contents and, because of that, connects with our great figurative national tradition,” and added, “We defend continuity and development in art, and put it in relationship with social development.”19 To Guttuso, the choice of rural subjects conformed with his ideological beliefs as well as his personal experience. A Sicilian himself, he chronicled the political activism of Sicilian farmers who occupied land in the 1940s. He also painted everyday scenes of rural life to illustrate the conditions of his co-regionals and co-nationals.20 In his intention to create an art that people could identify with, Guttuso chose not to picture industrially processed canned tomatoes, but to show the traditional and time-consuming method that many continued to use. As David Gentilcore writes: “A report for the Constituent Assembly in 1947 commented on the decline of the tomatocanning industry ‘in the last few years.’ The report linked the drop to the limited availability of fresh tomatoes, as well as the fact that more and more Italians were preserving their own.”21 Guttuso’s focus is on the women’s activity and expertise as they prepare the tomatoes. Machines and assembly lines are nowhere to be seen. Interestingly, a later photograph of Cirio factories (1958), which produced canned sauce among other processed foods, emphasized the large size of the machines more than the bodies of the workers, despite Cirio’s intention to showcase the good working conditions of its employees. Published in a free recipe book that advertised Cirio products, the photograph was meant to give the housewife-consumer a sense of the efficiency and modernity of the brand.22 Guttuso’s paintings from ten years earlier, by contrast, sought to represent the rural working-class experience. In 1948, when Guttuso created Women Preparing Tomato Sauce in Sicily, there was an increase in the number of women who worked in agriculture in the south as men started emigrating toward northern cities to find job opportunities. Women farmers and braccianti, who received hourly wages for their labour in the agricultural sector, had traditionally worked and contributed to the family’s finances and even survival. Women workers had to endure hard labour conditions both within and outside the domestic setting. It was within the family structure that they had to engage in their most difficult battle to achieve equal rights as men.23 The Communist Party failed to support the particular challenges of these women in tangible ways,

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as acknowledged by communist women during conferences and meetings, as well as by party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, himself.24 Yet there was an understanding of the difficult situation of both men and women peasants. It was this situation that Guttuso was mostly committed to describing through his politically engaged art.

Pandora’s Vase: What’s Hidden in a Can? Manzoni, Rotella, Marcucci Attesting to the uneasy transition from homemade to industrially produced foods in postwar Italy, a number of artworks refer to cans in ambivalent ways.25 Undoubtedly the most famous of such pieces is Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista (Artist’s Shit, 1961). Manzoni, based in Milan (Lombardy) and Albisola (Liguria), was the co-founder, with Enrico Castellani, of the neo-avant-garde magazine Azimuth and the Milanese gallery Azimut in 1959. He was considered the enfant terrible of the Italian art scene, as he often used paradox and irony to tackle uncomfortable subjects in his work. Manzoni included conceptual, ready-made and participatory components in his groundbreaking practice.26 Artist’s Shit consists of sealed tin cans wrapped in tan-coloured paper that presents text in several languages, giving the name of the artist (Piero Manzoni) and the contents – the artist’s feces. It also spells out information about weight (30 gr), mode of conservation (naturally preserved), and date of production and canning (May 1961). The cost of the artwork is determined by its weight: Artist’s Shit would be sold at the daily price of gold. Critics and art historians often read Manzoni’s artwork as a way of ironically exaggerating the aura of artists and the fetishistic attitude toward anything they produce. By pricing his most bodily creation at the rate of gold, Manzoni not only emphasizes the unjustified veneration of artistic creativity, but also highlights the art market mechanisms that reduce art to a consumer product.27 Thus, Manzoni critiques the art world with sarcasm. What is most relevant to this study is that he does so by mocking the industrial material culture that emerged in the postwar years and infiltrated the domestic environment. The text on Artist’s Shit cans resembles the labels on the food packaging that inhabited the first Milanese supermarket shelves and consequently many home pantries.28 Some scholars have argued that Manzoni’s

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5.5 Piero manzoni, Merda d’Artista, 1961. Tin can, printed paper, 4.8 × ø 6.4 cm (each one). Photo Bruno Bani © Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milano.

piece alludes to a famous brand of canned meat, Manzotin. The name could be broken down into two parts: Manzo- (the beginning of “Manzoni”) and -tin (the material of the can): Manzoni’s can.29 The artist’s poke at the new food industry suggests that, despite the aseptic appearance and pretense at hyper-hygienic labels and packaging, what they contain is of dubious appeal. Artist’s Shit generated much speculation regarding its contents. Did the artist really defecate inside the containers? After many decades, the question still remains open. But it is peripheral to our line of inquiry, which focuses rather on Manzoni’s reference to the realm of industrial food production and its connection to the domestic sphere. To this end, it is important to note that Artist’s Shit was produced in a series of ninety objects. As with any consumer product, each individual piece is not literally unique despite its authenticity.30 The choice to produce a series of three-dimensional objects that resemble – or perhaps even are – ready-made food cans31 references modern kitchen paraphernalia particularly familiar to the postwar public. Also, the textual reference to the product’s natural processing methods sounds like a parody of the language of postwar advertisers, who would consistently describe their products as “natural.” As argued by Nicola Martino,32 the packaging of processed food evoked the myth of nature as something pure and healthful, and suggested an equivalence between nature and agriculture, rather than a dialogue of culture and nature. This message was based on the assumption that the natural realm triggered strong and positive emotional reactions on the part of consumers, and was thus widely employed by the industry even when the products that were promoted were arguably the very opposite of natural. For example, the meat in a Manzotin can – or a similar brand – bore no visual resemblance with the actual animals it came from. Dismembered and fragmented, the sanitized version of meat that one could find in a can was more abstract than meat could ever have been in a pre-industrial context. Indeed, the actual contents of a food can were mysterious, not unlike the alleged contents of Manzoni’s piece. A similar skepticism toward canned meat can be found in the work of Italian artist Mimmo Rotella, who was involved with the French new realism group and was known for roaming around large cities to tear away parts of posters mounted in the public sphere (see chapter 1). Pasted over old city walls to promote new products and entertainment, such posters reinvented the semantics of postwar European cities. Commercial signs were superimposed on the urban fabric, changing meanings that had been deposited over the

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centuries.33 Rotella responded to the sudden changes in the urban landscape by removing pieces of the posters and appropriating them. Rotella’s artwork Carne Buona (Good Meat, 1962) is created with a similar process. The protagonist here is Simmenthal, another brand of canned meat that was very popular in Italy. In this work, Rotella tears away a billboard advertisement of Simmenthal meat, leaving shreds of another poster on top of the product’s image. The fragments include text, but unlike Manzoni’s, Rotella’s words are not easily legible. They are so minced up that it is impossible to figure out what they were; similarly, Simmenthal meat is ground and processed to the point that its true nature is unrecognizable. The title Carne Buona uncovers the pretense of the advertisement and at the same time sheds a sarcastic light on the product, whose contents Rotella finds neither high-quality nor appetizing. An increased awareness of the deceiving messages of advertising campaigns is evidenced by Roland Barthes’s Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption, first published in 1961.34 According to Barthes: [T]he development of advertising has enabled the economists to become quite conscious of the ideal nature of consumer goods; by now everyone knows that the product as bought – that is, experienced – by the consumer is by no means the real product; between the former and the latter there is a considerable production of false perceptions and values.35 The discrepancy between the product and the associations elicited by its marketing is exactly what select postwar artists pictured, sometimes also critiquing the social costs and cultural losses caused by the industrialization of food systems. Lucia Marcucci is another such artist. Associated with Gruppo 70 in Florence, Marcucci engaged with the strategies of visual poetry and brought a woman’s perspective to the critique of mass communication constructed by the group. Her work explored the potential of paper collage, although she was also interested in film reel montage as a way to cut and paste scenes and narratives to give them unintended meanings.36 Through her visual poetry piece L’Appetito Vien Mangiando (Appetite Comes with Eating, 1963), Marcucci pieces together images and text to point out the contrast between traditional agriculture and modern foods like canned meat and packaged cheese. The material sources of her collage are books and magazines, which were usually

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read in private and domestic settings. Rather than remove advertisements from public urban walls, Marcucci cuts out fragments of published pages, and the aesthetic of the fragment helps reveal the hidden psychological violence that mass communication tried to impose. Marcucci’s small collage is crammed with various elements. The image of a Simmethal can immediately catches our eyes because of its colourful appearance and its central position. Taken from the same source – an advertisement designed by the Armando Testa studio – curled lemon rinds and olives frame the can. On the right, a cut-out of another advertisement – this time for the children’s cheese Bebè Galbani – lines the page. Various slogans appropriated from the two advertisements accompany the images. Simmenthal is “the best and most modern kitchen in Italy,” and Galbani is good for “the little ones and the big ones,” because such cheese makes kids “happy and healthy.” The texts included in the original ads also point to the science behind the creation of the products; thanks to the method of processing, the foods are rich in vitamins and proteins. Yet, they are presented as fresh and simple, as if prepared at home. In her visual poem Marcucci emphasizes the way the advertisements target mothers, especially through the fragment of the Bebè Galbani image. The original advertisment includes the photograph of a young woman looking lovingly at her children while they eat. At the bottom of the page, we read a message “per voi mamme,” that is “for you, the moms.” The message is ostensibly written by an authoritative female doctor, who praises the quality of Galbani cheese and its importance for children’s growth. Stressing existing societal pressures, the advertisement attributes to mothers the major responsibility of offering nutritious foods to their children. Marcucci offers a counterpoint to the modern products in Appetite Comes with Eating. The advertisement cut-outs are glued to pages of historical agricultural texts, such as Sidney Sonnino’s La Mezzeria in Toscana, published in Florence in 1875. The sentences on the pages chosen by Marcucci carefully describe farmers’ markets and village feasts. Articulate and descriptive, such texts do not look as visually captivating as the ads. Nevertheless, they offer a much more in-depth discussion of food production in rural contexts by describing the traditional farming practices that modern foods were aiming to replace. To believe the advertisements chosen by the artist, foods like canned meats and cheese spreads would make one’s cooking modern and keep one’s children

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5.6 lucia marcucci, L’Appetito Vien Mangiando, 1963. Collage on paper, 31 × 22 cm. Courtesy Carlo Palli.  5.7 bebè galbani advertising, 1961. 

happy. Yet Marcucci’s composition questions such a narrative. Her collage makes it clear that new products aggressively cover up important histories of food production, exemplified by the excerpt from La Mezzeria. The stark contrast between traditional foodways and new trends becomes evident. The comparison reveals the artificiality of industrial foods, and evokes a sense of nostalgia toward an agricultural past that was fading away too abruptly.

Everyday Gestures Become Forms of Creative Expression: Marisa Merz By the mid-1960s, despite the critical resistance of some Italian consumers, industrial products had become part of everyday life, connecting the private sphere with the world of modern production. In addition to canned foods, the home kitchen was populated by entirely new categories of objects, among which were disposable items used for food conservation and storage. Aluminum foil was one prominent example. Although it is the most common metal in the earth’s crust, aluminum was too difficult to isolate and too expensive for commercial use until the turn of the twentieth century. Industrial rolling of aluminum foil had begun by 1910 in Switzerland and in the 1950s, after the metal rationing of World War II, production and consumption of aluminum exploded. Like plastic, aluminum has revolutionized both industry and daily life.37 People started to wrap leftovers in aluminum foil to preserve them in the refrigerator. Thanks to the availability of such products, there was an apparent improvement in the efficiency of the kitchen. At the time, the public was unaware of the toxicity of aluminum and pvc wraps that were placed in direct contact with food, and had not yet made a strong connection between disposable products and environmental pollution. The acts of folding, lining, and wrapping foods with thin sheets of metal became part of the modern kitchen’s semiotics. These gestures contributed to redefining everyday habitus and rituals, hammering into the minds of postwar Italians that modernity was part of their new identity. As Domietta Torlasco points out in her filmic essay Philosophy in the Kitchen (2014),38 which is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the

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cinema,39 housework reshapes the concept of time. In the context of housework, time becomes unhinged from movement; it is duration, as repetitive actions in the kitchen are never-ending and always the same. Commenting on the actions of the women that inhabit domestic environments in a selection of neorealist films, Torlasco argues: “These women are not tired, they are exhausted.”40 And she means that through repetitive actions they exhaust all possibilities and cover all variations. Yet, it is sometimes possible to break the pattern and tweak such repetitive actions to make space for creative possibilities. Artist Marisa Merz (see also chapter 2) did exactly this. She spent hours in the small kitchen of her apartment in Turin, making art with the materials that surrounded her while caring for her then school-aged child. In 1967 she created the short film La Conta (Counting), which showed her opening a can of peas and counting the peas inside as a way to measure time. In the film, Merz is seated at a kitchen table surrounded by kitchen articles, as she places peas on a plate. One of her aluminum foil sculptures – which she first created in 1966 – can be seen in the background. When [my daughter] Bea was little I’d stay home with her. In those days I was doing works with sheets of aluminum. I would cut and sew these things (they fold by themselves, you know, you don’t have to force them, they have their potential and their limits). There was a rhythm in this, and time, lots of time. So there was Bea, a little girl. She’d ask me things, I’d get up and I’d do them. Everything was on the same level, Bea and the things I was sewing. I was equally open to all these things. But it became a bit automatic, so I just stopped.41 Merz’s ability to stop when the creative act was no longer functioning as a break from everyday routine is a testimony to her ability to remain selfaware. Nonetheless, for some time art allowed her to reinvent the repertoire of gestures that inhabited the kitchen. For two years, Merz seemed to bend time to incorporate actions that are usually perceived as belonging to two different spheres: rearing children and making art. In her words, these acts existed in parallel and complemented each other. The artworks that Merz created were curved structures of aluminum foil that took on organic forms resembling shells, coils, and waves of water. The foils overlapped and connected to build objects that looked heavy, while

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5.8 marisa merz with Living Sculptures, turin, 1966–67. Photo Renato Rinaldi. Courtesy Fondazione Merz.

being light and mobile. Sometimes called Living Sculptures, these pieces seemed to breathe as they responded to the movement around them. Not only were they made in the domestic space, but they also resided there for extended periods. As art historian Teresa Kittler maintains, the home was the primary exhibition space and studio for Marisa Merz in the mid-1960s.42 Her aluminum works occupied the empty space above the stove and the sink, dangled over the tv set, and surrounded every corner of her family’s apartment. Kittler reads this installation choice as ambivalent: “It points to an experience of claustrophobia and suffocation as much as it registers the time devoted to child care.”43 Kittler challenges the frequently romanticized reading of Merz’s statement about being able to keep “everything on the same level,” even though the artist resists the idea that her work takes on explicitly feminist tones.44 A third interpretive possibility is offered by an analysis of Merz’s choice of material. Loaded with conflicting histories, aluminum was embraced during fascism for its potential to boost autarchic economies. Its possible use in construction made it an alluring symbol of modernity. In the postwar years, aluminum became increasingly popular because of its application to the car industry, in addition to becoming commercialized as aluminum foil, the food packaging and conservation product that quickly infiltrated the everyday space of millions of consumers.45 To the contemporaneous Italian public, Merz’s works with aluminum foil pointed simultaneously to the domestic space of food preparation and the public environment of industrial production. In this sense, their materiality linked the personal and the political.  Albeit unintentionally, the incorporation of metallic sheets into Merz’s artwork references the fast pace of industrialization in Turin specifically.46 In fact, aluminum foil was manufactured close to Merz’s home in Turin. comital, the company that went on to dominate the aluminum foil market in Italy, opened in the Volpino area in the early 1960s.47 It registered the brand Cuki, a name now iconic in Italy to the point of being synonymous with aluminum foil, in 1968. Merz’s process with aluminum foil allows for a slow-paced digestion of the accelerated phenomenon of modernization in her city. Such a reading places her in line with the work of her arte povera fellows – who explored similar dichotomies of traditional and modern, artificial and organic – and gives particular relevance to the multifaceted meanings indexed by materials. The dialogue between the private and the public sphere is facilitated by

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Merz’s choice of aluminum foils, which are not only a reference to linear ideas of progress in the apparently timeless space of the kitchen, but are also site-specific, in that they embody the particular history of industrialization that characterized mid-twentieth century Italy and Turin in particular.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadro da Pranzo (1965) and the Culture of Conviviality in Italian Homes Like Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto was based in Turin and was one of the protagonists of the arte povera movement (see chapter 3). Even before the first arte povera exhibition in 1967, Pistoletto was catching the attention of dealers and critics. In 1965, in reaction to Leo Castelli’s invitation to move to New York and be represented by his gallery, Pistoletto started producing a series of objects titled Oggetti in Meno (Minus Objects). Since Castelli asked him to continue producing his well-received Mirror Paintings and to avoid experimentation, Pistoletto responded by remaining in Italy and, as Anthony White argues, developing his work in the very opposite direction.48 Pistoletto created a series of artworks that were so different from one another that they seemed to be made by numerous artists. The point was to demonstrate that individuals can express themselves in a variety of ways. Pistoletto did not intend to be trapped by market dynamics; on the contrary, he tried to challenge and even control them. As noted earlier (chapter 3), an analysis of individual pieces within the Minus Objects series can offer valuable historical insights.49 One notable example is Pistoletto’s Quadro da Pranzo (Lunch Painting, 1965), which consists of a self-supporting, squared wooden structure that frames two seats on opposite sides of a simple table. The piece is built on a human scale and viewers can fit inside the structure. As indicated by the title, the work can function as a space where meals are consumed and, given that it was first installed in the artist’s studio/apartment, one can imagine that it was actually used for this purpose in the domestic environment. This work is relational in essence, because it offers an opportunity for interaction. It can be activated through the performative gestures of the participants, stressing the role of actions and process in appropriating the domestic space, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre (see the Introduction). It is significant that, as Pistoletto invited viewers to sit and talk within the frame of his work, he chose lunch as a reference. The cultural association between eating meals

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5.9 michelangelo Pistoletto, Quadro da pranzo, 1965. Wood, 200 × 200 × 50 cm. Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo: Paolo Pellion. Courtesy Archivio Pistoletto.

and conviviality is especially strong in Italy, and lunch – typically the main meal in the 1960s – was often consumed at home. This applied both to the everyday and even more so to celebrations and festivities. Tellingly, the collection of the Home Movies Archive in Bologna includes a great selection of films that document meals with family and friends, especially during religious holidays. At a time when filming was costly and time-consuming, non-professional filmmakers took out their equipment to only record memorable scenes in their lives, and these were often connected to the sharing of food. For example, in the Cialoni Fonds (see chapters 3 and 4), a 1962 film of the Cialoni family documents their visit with their aunt Amelia in Pavana with their close friends, the Tchengs, a family of Chinese and Indochinese origin that had immigrated to Bologna in the 1950s.50 The climax of this trip to the countryside was indeed lunch. The film shows happy faces around a table filled with abundant dishes. Vittorio Tcheng and his wife, Maria Zina Dakow, are seated at the head of the table, the place of honour. This is one of many other convivial moments that are captured by the Cialoni and other fonds at the Home Movies Archive. Such collections of personal memories offer a special insight into the domestic activities of the postwar years (and beyond), and show how the home was not only a theatre of private gestures, but could sometimes function as a stage for meaningful social and cultural exchange, often facilitated by food and dining.

Maria Lai: Bread-Making and the Persistence of Local Traditions The sudden change from a rural to an industrial society was not experienced everywhere in the country. Certain areas remained more linked to rural lifestyles well into the 1950s and 1960s. This adherence to traditional ways was exemplified by the work of Maria Lai, who depicted food preparation and women’s work in her hometown of Ulassai in Sardinia. In the early 1940s, Lai began at the Accademia (art school) in Rome and visited with family members who were sfollati (refugees) in Verona. During her stay, with the war making it impossible to return to Rome, her relatives enrolled her in the Accademia in Venice. A pupil of sculptor Arturo Martini there, Lai treasured his instruction to model clay from within, as if it were bread rising.51 Some of Lai’s early drawings (1952–58) represent phases of bread-making, from

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sifting the flour to kneading the dough. These actions are accomplished by hand without the aid of processors or mechanical tools. The kitchen space is indicated by the occasional table, if not completely absent. Lai focuses on the women’s gestures, their rounded arms and bodies forming circles echoing the shapes of bowls and loaves of bread. She taught herself how to draw using her whole arm, rather than the wrist, a process that allowed her to create neat yet spontaneous lines.52 Her 1950s ink drawings give the impression that the women’s bodies are one with the food they make. Baking, like cooking, entails the repetition and the mastering of gestures that end up defining us – as Lefebvre argued about domestic actions (see the Introduction) – to the point that we cannot distinguish between the food we prepare and our own selves. The same could be said about art-making. According to Lai, “The creativity of the everyday reveals its feminine character: the loom or the bread, which has the shape of birds, flowers, and jewels on holy days.”53 Bread itself holds important archetypal meanings, linked to local folklore as much as to Christian symbolism. As highlighted by Marisa Dalai, making sculptural bread to evoke local festivities and stories is an important Sardinian tradition, and was documented in anthropological studies.54 In the 1970s, as a way of reconnecting with and exploring such traditions experienced during childhood, Lai started sculpting with bread rather than depicting its creation, and she continued to engage with bread-making in sculpture and performance in later phases of her career. Her early memories inspired her; as a child, she had helped women make bread for festive occasions. As noted by Elena Pontiggia: She alluded to the traditional Sardinian loaves of bread prepared for anniversaries, marriages, and births; pani e sposos, coccoi pintau, pillose, simbule, semolina focaccia, and bread shaped like a toy; all masterfully engraved with knives and scissors in decorative triumph.55 Her Sculture di Pane (Bread Sculptures) were less decorative and often focused on reoccurring subjects, among which those of the foetus and of the baby. As maintained by Emanuela De Cecco, Lai’s bread sculptures resemble the appearance of newborns. The artist looked for an alternative to the traditional sculpture materials that she had worked with under Martini’s guidance in Venice. She was interested in bread because it is a warm material, and one that grows and morphs through the rising process like a living organism, as Martini himself had observed.56 Lai’s Pani were first exhibited at the Galleria

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5.10 maria lai, Pupo di Pane, 1977; wood and bread, 52 × 37 × 8 cm. Photo G. Dettori, Archivio Maria Lai by Siae 2020.

Del Centro in Imola (January 1977) and then at the Libreria del Brandale in Savona (November 1977). Mirella Bentivoglio discusses the iconographic choices of the artist in her critical text in the Brandale exhibition catalogue.57 Bentivoglio argues that Lai’s bread artworks question the traditional public role of sculpture by fostering its return to the domestic space. A female artist who makes a baby out of bread evokes women’s fertility as well as women’s expectation to express maternal love through food. Nonetheless, Bentivoglio also notices the implicit violence embedded in baby-shaped bread, commenting that the edible sculptures metaphorically reference anthropophagia. In European modern art, the concept of anthropophagia is linked to colonial prejudice and has been read as an attempt at appropriating the Other, who was pictured as reckless and irrational. As Thorsten Schüller writes: The act of eating human flesh as a symbol has made an immense journey: it was discovered by Europeans in South America as a real phenomenon; in Europe, it took on a different significance as a phantom, a sign symbolizing transgression of the norms; in Brazil the image was reappropriated as a symbol of national identity; in translation theory is has been used as a fruitful model of intercultural communication.58 In Maria Lai’s Pani (Breads) this reading is complicated by contextual aspects. The works question the expectation that a woman fulfill her potential through motherhood, because the artist simultaneously provides and denies the child’s existence. This becomes particularly clear in an artwork titled Children’s Cemetery, where a group of bread sculptures representing children are glued onto a wooden panel, eliciting the potential sacrifice of defenceless bodies. The implicit violence arouses a reaction of disgust in the viewer. Lai’s work plays with the ambivalent combination of the iconography of the newborn with the materiality of bread. In her words: “The first sacred breads were made for the dead. The sense of life is always linked to the sense of death. There is life and death in bread, which is death and resurrection.”59 Among the Sardinian legends that were collected by her beloved teacher, the poet Salvatore Cambosu, and which were evoked by Lai consistently throughout her practice, the story of Maria Pietra provides further insight into the complex meanings of bread.60 Maria Pietra was a mother who made a forbidden drawing to make forest animals appear. She hoped the animals would trigger her gravely ill baby’s smile, but both the baby and the animals died. Maria Pietra could not

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stop crying. She mixed her tears with flour and kneaded bread dough into the shape of a baby, accepting to turn her body into stone to infuse her baby with new life.61 As in Maria Pietra’s story, Maria Lai’s bread sculptures elicit a sense of creativity and generosity, as well as sacrifice and destruction.

Food and Violence: Stelio Maria Martini, Luciano Ori, Nanni Balestrini, and Gianfranco Baruchello Violence is inextricably linked with the process of food preparation and consumption. Much of what we find on our plate was once alive, from animals to plants. In order to make ingredients ready to eat, we need to use dangerous tools, from sharp and pointed utensils to the heat of the stove. Food-processing implies the potential of self-harm and harm to others. As Roberta Roberts points out: In lived experience, the modern kitchen is often a far cry from the visions of architects, designers, manufacturers, and advertisers. It is a place of mess and mishap, socialization and sensuality. It evokes a gamut of emotions, fostering creativity and genuine pleasure as well as anxiety.62 The contrasting emotions that are embedded in the kitchen space are expressed in one of the pages of Neurosentimental, the visual novel created by Stelio Maria Martini in 1963 (see chapter 2).63 The protagonist, Iorio, feels trapped by traditional family dynamics and tries to escape his responsibilities as a husband and father by engaging in multiple extramarital encounters. On the page in question, Iorio describes his response to the presence of Vera (one of his lovers) in his home kitchen, where the two meet when his wife is away. Visually, an image of the kitchen space is cut into fragments and opens onto the background of an urban landscape at night. The unity of the home and the family that the kitchen indexes is shattered to reveal an exciting world of possibilities. From Iorio’s perspective, destruction also means rebirth. The accompanying text points out that there is nothing but tension in the small kitchen, which seems to warp around Vera’s hips, much to her discomfort. She feels as if she doesn’t belong there, and she is tempted to voice her uncertainty. The narrative of Neurosentimental is non-linear, intentionally

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loose, and reflects the main character’s stream of consciousness. We do not know how the events unfold for Vera and Iorio in this tense kitchen scene. Some male artists use more explicit language than Stelio Maria Martini, indulging in parallels between women’s bodies and meat. This can be seen in Io C’era (1967) – the book written by artist Luciano Ori on the occasion of the 1966 flood in Florence (see chapter 2). The volume showcases a series of collaged visual poems, including Per la Carne Avete già Deciso? (Have You Chosen a Meat Course Yet?). The collaged text is a phrase typically asked by waiters, or by commensals trying to select among options on a menu. Ori fantasizes about the unlikely luxury of a restaurant meal during the flood crisis, when food shortages left many residents starving. The text is paired with two images: one of them represents a large cut of uncooked beef with a masculine hand plunging a carving knife into it; the beef is placed in front of a Simmenthal can. This image is appropriated from an actual advertisement published in 1962, which tries to persuade the viewer that the fresh cut of beef will eventually make its way into the industrially processed product. The second image is a magazine photograph that represents a woman’s hips and abdomen, covered by underwear. The cut-out of the woman’s core area is detached from the rest of her body. The hiding of a female figure’s head and the aesthetic of the fragment in the portraiture of the female body can be connected to pornographic imagery, which typically dehumanizes the woman subject to show her as an object of pleasure. The combination of the text and the two images leaves ample space for interpretation. Ori clearly refers to the shortage of food during the Florentine flood when the only available provisions were perhaps the canned products hidden away in private pantries. However, how to explain the presence of the woman in underwear behind the meat? Is it a coincidence that the knife points right toward the woman’s sex organs? Is Ori referring to sadistic imagery that circulated among the Italian visual poets? Is he trying to portray the circumstances of the Florentinians in exaggerated tones, implying that the only kind of meat available was human flesh? The meanings of this piece remain open, but one aspect is certain: canned meat is associated with eroticism, masculinity, and violence. In other examples, artists develop a connection between violence against women and sadistic pleasure in the realm of food preparation, to the point that women’s bodies are sometimes portrayed as dishes. Such associations go back to the first chapter of the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1932), where Marinetti and Fillia tell the story of “A Meal that Prevented a Suicide.”64 The artists reconstruct the body of a friend’s lover, who had died in New York a 232

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5.11 luciano ori, Per la Carne Avete già Deciso? plate n.12 of the technological story (racconto tecnologico) “Io C’era,” 1966–67. Collage on cardboard, 35 × 50 cm. Courtesy Archivio Luciano Ori, Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Florence.

few days earlier, out of edible materials; subsequently, they invite their friend to consume the woman’s body as a way of consoling himself. Writer, artist, and leftist political activist Nanni Balestrini – who was associated with the movement Autonomia along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and many others – echoed this scene with a ballad that describes the possible uses of “Miss Richmond.”65 In the fictional realm of Balestrini’s poetry, Miss Richmond is a bird-woman and the protagonist of a series of poems that were written between 1974 and 1977 and illustrated by Gianfranco Baruchello. A visual artist, Baruchello has been inspired by the legacy of Marcel Duchamp since 1958. His fascination with Duchamp is expressed by the exploration of both the readymade and the conceptual dimension of art through a many-sided approach to practice.66 One passage of Balestrini’s ballad reads as follows: Instructions for the practical use of Miss Richmond. Clean her, peel her, stuff her belly With scented herbs, secure her on the skewer With a thin metal thread or a wet Twine grill her on the hot charcoal.67 The text uses the language of recipe books to describe the macabre dismembering of the character’s body and its preparation for roasting. According to Renato Barilli, Miss Richmond is a metaphor for none other than Balestrini himself, as someone who navigated the contested waters of Italian politics, always adopting critical and independent positions. Despite receiving threats of horrible consequences, he managed to survive and thrive.68 Umberto Eco uses this poem as an example of Balestrini’s poetic technique, which, he says, boils down to recycling signifiers and ultimately also changing the signified.69 Eco finds that the conflation of sadistic associations and a recipe makes us rethink our actions in the kitchen, as they are often cruel when we cook animals. I would add that there is a feminist reading of the poem, which makes the reader see, perhaps critically, that women are often treated like food to be hunted, processed, and devoured without consideration of feelings or pain. Baruchello’s illustration for this specific poem shows parts of Miss Richmond’s body as they are being processed. Among the utensils and chicken parts, he

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portrays stitched up lips and vagina and similarly treated buttocks, leaving no doubt about Miss Richmond’s identity: the poem is not about cooking a female bird, but about cooking a person. Art has unfortunately contributed to the normalization and aestheticization of violence against women throughout centuries, often linking acts of violence to domestic gestures like cooking, body care, or sleeping (see also chapters 2 and 3). Reversing the expectation of comfort and safety that one associates with the home, artists can trigger deep anxieties and repulsion through their images. In the same span of years in which Baruchello illustrated Balestrini’s poems, he also created artworks that incorporated foods and drawings to address public issues. His work used sarcasm and violent imagery, among other things, to condemn international conflicts. For example, A Soft Substance between the Skin and the Bone (1975) takes the form of an assemblage box that is filled with a collection of everyday objects, drawings, pictures, and handwritten text. The words of the title describe the muscle tissue, but the artist remains intentionally unclear about the provenance of that fleshy substance. One side of the composition includes a can of boiled beef, while the other side shows an image of soldiers fighting in Vietnam. This pairing suggests that the soft substance between the skin and the bone is that of human beings sacrificed in the name of war. Baruchello thus uses the industrial food reference to create a juxtaposition between the carnage in Vietnam and carne da macello, literally meaning “slaughterhouse meat,” but metaphorically indicating “cannon fodder.”

The Myth of Rural Life versus the Artificiality of Industrial Societies Baruchello believed that war was one of the many effects of humankind’s loss of direction. In the book How to Imagine, the artist’s thought is expressed by the captivating writing of African American, Italy-based critic Henry Martin: That would be the real revolution, learning not to have any more wars, having enough for everybody to eat, intelligent ways of planetwide birth control, and planning the use of natural resources; but instead of all of this, they’re doing these other incredible things like going off into space and turning it into a military staging ground.70

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5.12 gianfranco baruchello, illustration for Nanni balestrini, Ballate della Signorina Richmond. Primo Libro, 21. Rome: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1977. © 2020 Gianfranco Baruchello / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Martin expresses the dichotomy between modern mirages of progress and conquest and a more grounded appreciation of life. Baruchello claims that humans should seek the fulfillment of basic corporeal experiences, from eating to making love. He turned such a proposition into practice, moving to the Roman countryside with his partner Agnese Naldoni in 1973. They founded the enterprise Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., a rural farm where they grew wheat, corn, barley, and more. Baruchello framed Agricola Cornelia as a work of art, intended both as a long-term performance and as the source of inspiration for paintings, films, and sculptures. Through this enterprise, he proposed a new approach to revolutionary living. Rather than follow the increasingly extreme and violent wave of mostly city-based leftist groups, he chose a radically different form of political engagement. He preferred a return to a direct experience of the earth that bypassed the perceived necessity of consumerism. The model of economic self-sufficiency embodied by Agricola Cornelia questioned the supposed inevitability of a capitalist system. Naldoni and Baruchello’s model recalled countercultural trends at the beginning of the 1970s. As Sara Catenacci observes: In those years, many people were escaping the cities and founding rural communes in the countryside. Italian countercultural magazines were publishing D.I.Y. handbooks and catalogs of survival strategies, teaching readers how to make farming tools or bake bread. Likewise, Italian designers and architects were attracted by the kaleidoscope of hippie implements illustrated in the Californian Whole Earth Catalog, especially during the oil crisis caused by the Yom Kippur War. Moving to the countryside, Baruchello, too, was linking small farming with a personal idea of autarkic life.71 There were guides and publications about starting rural communes. A special issue of the magazine Controcultura, for instance, was titled Comune Agricola and illustrated survival strategies in the countryside merging traditional knowledge, practical advice, and D.I.Y. technology.72 Some of the participants in the 1968 protests, disillusioned about the possibility of subverting established hegemony, to use Antonio Gramsci’s term (see the Introduction), decided to experience the revolution they sought by redesigning everyday habitus in their own circles and founding separate communities that functioned according to communist principles. The documentary film La Rivoluzione non è una Cosa Seria (Revolution Is Nothing Serious) by Marilena Moretti73 offers

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a frank analysis of her experience in a rural commune in Ponte a Egola, near Pisa (see chapter 1). The director and her peers rented out an old farmhouse and survived by foraging in nearby fields, as well as by selling small crafts and sometimes committing petty crime, which paid for sustenance and psychedelic drugs. Some of the residents travelled from commune to commune adopting a nomadic lifestyle, while others remained sedentary in Ponte a Egola. They produced ideological pamphlets that circulated in leftist extra-parliamentary groups in the 1970s, asserting the need to renounce consumeristic aspirations and avoid paid labour. Rather, the members of the group sought total liberation and pleasure. They followed the principles of communism, or rather “comontism,” a term of their invention that indicated a form of shared essence and of being together. Everything, from the home space to clothing and food, was equally distributed. According to Moretti, the experience was initially fulfilling, but became difficult to sustain in the long term because of the poor hygienic conditions and the scarcity of resources available to the members. The art collective Global Tools elaborated upon similar ideas of communal living. It brought together radical architects from across Italy to reflect on the future of architecture, including the possibility of survival in rural environments outside the market system. One of the first meetings of the group took place in 1973 in the Chianti village of Sambuca, where Superstudio member Roberto Magris had just purchased a house. According to Gian Piero Frassinelli,74 another member of group Superstudio (see chapters 1 and 4), the building was so run down that it was the perfect site for an open forum like the one they were organizing. Sambuca offered the space to host many casual participants and, given the dilapidated state of the house, it would have been difficult to ruin it even more. Responding to an open invitation to join the seminar, fellow architects as well as about thirty youths who were interested in countercultural discourse attended. The participants slept on the floor in sleeping bags and meals were prepared and shared collectively. Some complained that too much of the conversation concerned food and the most frequent questions were about organizing labour around meal preparation: who could drive to the grocery store, cook, or help wash dishes? The quality of the meals was questionable, consisting of basic pasta dishes. Frassinelli pointed out that this was due to the number of mouths to feed and not to the lack of cooking skills. Many of the Superstudio members were good home cooks and, when not involved in the Global Tools experiment, often competed around the stove, inviting one another over for hearty dinners. They were

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often together, enjoying a continuum of private life and collective work that involved their spouses and children as well. This model was reinventing the societal hierarchies that the members’ parents had put in place in the aftermath of World War II. The isolated node of the nuclear family felt reassuring and protective after the forced experience of collective living and scarcity of resources during the war, but it was now perceived as limiting and inhibiting. Superstudio experienced a “closed communal lifestyle,” meaning that all members were trusted and had specific goals to be accomplished together. The 1973 meeting at Sambuca was, instead, an “open commune,” with people outside familiar circles invited to join. Because of this format, the experience was planned to last just a few days. The logistics of organizing resources for a large number of people would have been unattainable in the long term. While many theoretical conversations about the need to remain independent from the market system took place informally during food preparation, the food itself could not embody that ideal. The group depended on such system for survival and acknowledged that it was impossible for them to live from foraging and farming alone. One of the ideas that emerged during the 1973 Sambuca event was that life outside capitalism requires complete dedication, a lot of time, and the mastering of sophisticated skills that were becoming obsolete. For this reason, Global Tools started researching material culture, learning from farmers and artisans with knowledge of non-industrial tools. They later set up workshops grouped according to fields of investigation, such as the body, communication, construction, theory, and survival.75 The Survival group, which included Superstudio and Gruppo 9999, organized a three-day experiment in Magris’s house in Sambuca once again, from 1 to 4 November 1974. This group therapy, a true collective session of auto-anthropology, included real-time actions of organization of transportation and communication, cooking and coexistence, as well as other manual activities like renovation and work with the earth, in parallel with discussions and debates.76 The group was interested in learning about pre-industrial tools as channels for creativity, rather than as viable alternatives to industrial design. Even after Global Tools, Superstudio continued such investigations, which converged in university courses about extra-urban material culture and a years-long

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study of the farmer Zeno Fiaschi, who had always lived a life of sustenance by making everything he needed on his own, including food, shelter, and clothing. His technical solutions were as fascinating as his philosophy of life, inspiring Superstudio’s book and installation La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), on view at the Venice Biennale in 1978.77 The return to the rural, with all its anthropological connotations, was ultimately a theoretical exercise that today illustrates the changing culture of the 1970s. The domestic rituals of growing, cooking, and eating food gained symbolic meanings in relation to the ideal of collective living and independence from the industrial system of capitalism. Yet the practical burden of this ideal was hard to carry for those who, like Frassinelli and his peers, came from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. For Superstudio and Global Tools, the takeaway was eye-opening yet abstract. It boiled down to the awareness that art extends beyond university classrooms and gallery spaces, and is also practised by those who, like the farmer Zeno, spend their life adapting to their environment in creative and ingenious ways, embodying Lefebvre’s idea that people can be at home anywhere if they can imaginatively appropriate the spaces that surround them (see the Introduction).

Conclusion From being considered a public matter linked to colonialism and autarchy in the fascist period, the preparation and provision of food became linked more closely to the private sphere of the home in the immediate postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, advertisements presented processed foods and appliances as status symbols. Middle-class women, being considered primarily responsible for feeding their families, were particularly targeted by the food industry. They often resisted the messages imparted by the media to continue valuing traditional cooking methods. Artists like Lucia Marcucci, Mimmo Rotella, and Piero Manzoni ironically addressed the contrast between modernity and tradition that characterized the Economic Miracle. Others, like Pistoletto, emphasized the role played by dining together in everyday life, while Marisa Merz and Maria Lai explored the connection between creativity and food preparation, especially in the daily experience as women. In some cases, women were seen as objects rather than subjects, as can be noted in the work of artists like Ori and Baruchello, who used food and

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kitchen imagery to represent violent behaviour against female characters. Other artists, for instance Lai and again Baruchello, depicted or alluded to the violence embedded in eating: something dies to keep something else alive. The dialectic between tradition and modernity continued to structure the discourse around food until the 1970s, when the members of Global Tools, among other artists, designers, and architects, reflected theoretically on the possibility of survival outside the industrial system. As I examine more specifically in the following chapter, the industrial apparatus relied upon the system of the mass media – and television in particular – to penetrate the private space, with the intention of targeting consumers when they were the most off-guard, in the perceived comfort and relaxation of the home.

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CHAPTER 6

representations of the television at Home Voices from the outside

Lucio Fontana’s Televisual Aspirations and the Early Optimism of Italian Artists and Critics Because of its specifically domestic consumption, television played an important role in postwar home life in Italy, altering habitual behaviours and subjectivities. This chapter looks at the ways in which art and visual culture interpreted the act of watching television in the home and addressed the actual tv set as a domestic object. Entering the landscape of the Italian mass media in the 1950s, television became broadly available during the postwar economic miracle and contributed to processes of national standardization as well as consumer culture formation.1 Recognizing its power to infiltrate domestic habitus, many visual artists made television (and the tv set) the subject and sometimes the medium of their work. The broad response to television by fine artists is not paralleled by responses to other media – the radio for example – perhaps because of the dominant visual component in the construction of televised communication. Even before it became popular, television caught the attention of Lucio Fontana, who conceptualized artworks designed for the new medium in the early 1950s. Fontana was an Argentinian-born and Milan-based artist. In the interwar period he studied under Adolfo Wildt at the Brera Academy, where he engaged with a variety of formal languages and techniques. In 1940, he moved to Buenos Aires, returning to Milan in 1947. Starting in the 1940s, Fontana experimented with abstractionism, materiality, space, and phenomenology.2 His creative explorations of television can be considered an expression of his interest in viewers’ participation, as well as in the use of light to convey abstract forms. A bright light beams from behind a punctured canvas, projections land on a wall. Bearing Fontana’s signature, these light lines are reproduced in a 1952 issue of the magazine Spazio, accompanied by a short commentary by Luigi Moretti.3 According to Moretti, the work was filmed and screened on television on 17 May 1952, although for lack of sufficient evidence art historian Anthony White argues that the art piece may never have been broadcast.4 Even if this were the case, Moretti’s article speaks of the hopes that intellectuals projected onto the new medium. Moretti maintains that television could offer a rainbow of possibilities, especially for artists, thanks to their familiarity with visual languages. The art historian and critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti echoed Moretti’s ideas in a number of writings that

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6.1 luigi moretti, “Arte e televisione,” Spazio 7 (1952–53): 74. 

spanned decades starting in 1952. Ragghianti appreciated television’s ability to communicate visually and highlighted the medium’s pedagogical potential to reach a broad audience in the context of the new Italian democracy.5 This concept was an extension of the hopes that academics had attached to radio in postwar years. That said, television was even more promising than radio for artists and art historians, because radio’s exclusively auditory nature could not allow reproduction of visual artworks. Nevertheless, rai’s Third Channel aired cultural programs on the radio starting in 1950, and local stations such as Radio Firenze produced educational programs such as L’Approdo, which featured art historians and critics like Adriano Seroni, Roberto Longhi, and Carla Lonzi.6 Such efforts were meant to develop a more sophisticated public in the aftermath of fascism, with the idea that political subjects needed exposure to a range of ideas to be properly prepared to participate in the newly formed democracy. The reality check was not all positive. Statistics published by rai’s Servizio Opinioni show that cultural programming only reinforced class and gender gaps, as it was followed mainly by educated males.7 While the radio had developed as a technically challenging piece of equipment that appealed mostly to adult males secretly looking for alternative news during World War II, in the 1950s, consumers who could afford a tv set perceived it as a more relatable and accessible appliance, especially in the domestic sphere. Nonetheless, at its advent, the new medium predominantly reached the middle and upper classes of the north, leaving southern farmers and workers at the margins of the process of modernization.8 Ideally, if not in practice, the new technology could defy the limits of space and time to unite viewers. It was this aspect that ignited Lucio Fontana’s imagination the most. As he argued in the Manifesto Spaziale per la Televisione in 1952, and as he had begun formulating in previous manifestos starting in 1946,9 television would provide a way to merge multiple dimensions and create a dynamic and participatory environment for the viewer. In comparing television with the cinema, theorists have considered the former the more pervasive and intrusive. Welsh cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams has observed that television entered people’s homes to reshape their habits.10 In Williams’s book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, which expanded on the author’s articles published between 1968 and 1972, Williams argued that the technology of television was developed with the goal of entering domestic spaces to influence society at a time when political crises called for further centralized control over the population.11 The

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intent of his research was to undermine the popular idea that technological innovation follows technical rules that are disconnected from a given sociopolitical context, although they unintentionally effect social change. Williams maintained that the technology of television could have been developed in ways that reiterated the public dimension of other mass media; instead, the tv set was intentionally designed as a domestic object for specific political needs: We have now become used to a situation in which broadcasting is a major social institution, about which there is always controversy but which, in its familiar form, seems to have been predestined by technology. This predestination, however, when closely examined, proves to be no more than a set of particular social decisions, in particular circumstances, which were then so widely if imperfectly ratified that is now difficult to see them as decisions rather than as (retrospectively) inevitable results. Thus, if only in hindsight, broadcasting can be diagnosed as a new and powerful form of social integration and control. Many of its main uses can be seen as socially, commercially, and at times politically manipulative.12 In the Italian context, television became available at the time of the country’s political and economic reinvention after fascism, offering the tools to construct new shared values. Before the widespread distribution of television, artists like Lucio Fontana appreciated the medium’s ability to address broad audiences, but had not thoroughly anticipated the potential of the technology to control public opinion. In reality, leading political parties in Italy feared that television would become a vehicle of Americanization and consequently sought the opportunity to influence the programming of public broadcasters.13 Programs subtly modelled party ideologies, exposing viewers to political messages when they least expected to receive them. According to Henri Lefebvre (see the Introduction), the mass media, and television in particular, were a form of leisure that counted on the viewer’s passivity once they were away from the public sphere. He argues: Thus, leisure and work and “private life” make up a dialectical system, a global structure. Through this global structure we can reconstruct a historically real picture of man and the human at a certain

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step in their development, a certain stage of alienation and disalienation. Examples? … Radio and, even more so, television, the sudden violent intrusion of the whole world into the family and “private” life, “presentified” in a way which directly captures the immediate moment, which offers truth and participation, or at least appears to do so.14 The dangers of television as a medium resided exactly in its innocuous and entertaining appearance, which lulled viewers into trusting the message and ultimately becoming controlled by it. To Lefebvre, one could react and be critical toward such messages, although to do so depended on a viewer making an active effort of resistance. Critical thinking was not cultivated by the medium itself. In his influential book Understanding Media,15 Canadian literature scholar and thinker Marshall McLuhan discussed the immersive power of television in comparison to other media: “Radio will serve as a background sound or as a noise-level control, as when the ingenious teenager employs it as a means of privacy. tv will not work as a background. It engages you. You have to be with it … With tv, the viewer is the screen.”16 Thus, the television viewer becomes involved at the bodily and imaginative level, becoming one with the medium to the point that critical distance is intrinsically removed from its consumption and requires, going back to Lefebvre, an active effort to retrieve. Interestingly enough, Italian writers and artists who discussed television in its early days seemed optimistic; they did not examine the mass medium as a possible tool of control but rather predicted that it would improve people’s education and participation in public discourse. The screen was originally seen as a window into the public sphere and a tool for connecting the inside of the home with the outside world.

An Object of Desire that Makes a Family Complete “A home isn’t complete without a Philco,” declares Nino Manfredi in an advertising spot co-starring Franca Tamantini. The spot was screened during the popular evening program Carosello in 1963.17 Carosello compiled short theatrical skits, often inspired by Italian Style comedy, which culminated in advertisements for new consumer products.18 Of course, one such product

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was the tv set itself, like the Philco model that Manfredi advertised. In the commercial, the actor plays the role of a family man who tries to rob a passerby to get enough cash and purchase a new tv set. Manfredi’s character is inspired by the actor’s role in Mario Monicelli’s film I Soliti Ignoti (A Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958).19 In the Carosello spot, Manfredi’s wife and son agree with the plan to steal a tv set, because it is presented as indispensable for carrying on a proper family life. As Andrea Bini argues: The Philco spot epitomizes the usual strategy of Carosello in which consumerist desires are introduced and legitimated because they reinforce family values. The goal is to make the superfluous (the product) appear necessary for the family’s social status and consequently for its leader (the husband/father).20 The stress on family values is a consequence of the strict control that the leading Christian Democratic Party exercised on public broadcasting in the 1950s. Consumer products were acceptable only if they aligned with Catholic sensitivities. Philco’s advertising managed to comply with established religious and cultural expectations while still crafting new desires, targeting primarily the middle classes. If programmers defined the public’s aspirations and also responded to public opinion to adjust their message in a constantly shifting dialectical process,21 then the Philco spot for Carosello tells us something about the widespread public desire to have a tv at home in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While initial access to the medium was available mostly in public sites, such as bars or community spaces owned by the Church or affiliated with political parties, private families progressively acquired their own sets to “keep up with the Joneses.”22 This meant that neighbours showed up at the time of a favourite program, often bringing along their own chair.23 In some ways, early tvs made homes even more open to friends and family than before. Television allowed access to information that brought the outside world into the domestic space, but it also fostered changes in relational dynamics with people outside (and inside) the family sphere. According to Cecilia Penati, family rules were formed around the experience of watching tv at home: for example, viewers were supposed to sit comfortably, keeping a reasonable distance from the screen, as watching the screen up close was considered unhealthy for the eyes. To allow space for a small crowd, Italian

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popular magazines and publications gave lifestyle advice about placing the tv set correctly in the house. Because wives and mothers were considered responsible for placing and regulating the use of this appliance, women’s magazines and parenting books in particular often published related articles.24 As an object invested with economic and symbolic meaning, the tv set was often positioned in the living room, usually the largest and most public room in any apartment or home. It would be adorned with lace and flower vases to coordinate it with a usually traditional furniture style, as can be seen in many home movies in the collections of the Home Movies Archive in Bologna. Segments of such films are also indicative of the relational interactions that defined television consumption. In many cases, we observe groups of viewers in front of the tv, often ignoring it to engage in conversation or even focus on other activities such as reading.25 As much as television might have influenced public opinion and changed the perception of the domestic sphere, in its early days of the 1950s it could also foster exchange and trigger new group dynamics. However, fast forward a decade or so, sociologist Franco Ferrarotti quantitatively researched the effects of television on family life and concluded that in the 1960s the new appliance generally created a distance between co-residents, who felt isolated while watching the programs despite their physical proximity in front of the screen.26

Activating the Viewer’s Imagination: Fabio Mauri’s Schermi (Screens) Fabio Mauri created his first Schermo (Screen) in 1957, two years after his first solo show at the Galleria L’Aureliana in Rome.27 The exhibition was curated by writer, filmmaker, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had studied art history under Roberto Longhi at the University of Bologna. A friend of Mauri’s, Pasolini was actively involved with the artist’s practice. The high point of their collaboration was the performance Intellettuale – Vangelo secondo Matteo di/su Pier Paolo Pasolini (Intellectual – The Gospel According to St. Matthew by/on Pier Paolo Pasolini) at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Bologna in 1975 shortly before Pasolini’s premature and violent death. In this piece by Mauri, Pasolini sits in the gallery space and his own film, Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) is projected on his clothes, reaffirming the centrality of the body in his poetics.28

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Mauri’s own work was concerned with representation, ideology, and their effects on subjectivity and physicality. Just three years after the beginning of national broadcasting in 1954, through his aforementioned 1957 work Screen, Mauri expressed his preoccupation with the risk of standardization caused by watching television in the home. This concern positioned him as a relative outsider in the contemporary discourse on the social impact of television in Italy (see the beginning of this chapter). It can be argued that Mauri saw the medium as a tool for hegemony – in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of top-down power that constructs consensus through the shaping of everyday spaces and minds.29 It is during fascism, a period often evoked by Mauri’s visual strategies, that Gramsci formulated his theories about hegemony and did so in opposition to the régime. In the postwar years, the memory of fascism was still alive and for Mauri it functioned as a filter that helped understand contemporary power structures. In the 1950s, a million viewers were exposed to the same programming every day;30 there was only one rai channel available and no further choice for consumers. From north to south, viewers who spoke different dialects, favoured different foods, and responded to different social values tuned into the same channel every single day. The diversity of Italian pre–Economic Miracle days had its source in the multifaceted histories that had divided the peninsula for centuries before its unification in 1861. Also, the boot’s elongated geographical shape, with its spine of Apennine mountains extending the length of the country, made communications and transportation slow, hindering opportunities for exchange. Pasolini argued that it was television that introduced a unified culture and a standard Italian language that connected Italians all over the country, but also started to flatten local characteristics.31 Mauri was similarly concerned by the possible loss of cultural diversity and the process of homogenization triggered by television. He was even more worried about the passive receptivity to the tv message. Fabio Mauri’s Schermi (Screens) are artworks that question such passivity by creating almost monochrome canvases onto which viewers can project their own fantasies. Mauri critiques the perceived flattening of Italian culture brought about by television programming, and activates the viewers’ own ability to create mental images and tell stories.32 For example, Schermo-Disegno (Screen-Drawing, 1957) shows a completely white field lined by a black border that is curved around the corners. The shape of the white rectangle, with its rounded angles, recalls that of early tv screens. In some cases, as in Schermo

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6.2 fabio mauri, Schermo Carta Rotto, 1958–89. Wood, paper, chalk and glass, 96 × 65 × 8 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth.

(Screen, 1958), the canvas becomes more sculptural and juts out of the frame, alluding to the curvy three-dimensionality of early tv sets. Other Italian artists, such as Enrico Castellani, Salvatore Scarpitta, and later Pino Pascali, used the canvas to create volumetric forms. For Mauri, the materiality of the screen sometimes became evident through its very destruction. In Schermo Carta Rotto (Screen Paper Broken, 1958), the surface of the piece is made of paper that is stretched and then slashed through in a performative gesture. The action, which recalls contemporaneous works by the Japanese Gutai group and Lucio Fontana, rebels against the impenetrable technology of the tv. Mauri goes beyond the screen looking for a new dimension – one that can be specific and personal. Such active steps can be seen as a way of appropriating the mass media through imagination, in ways that align with Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of the artist’s role in creating representational space. The reaction of the public in front of Mauri’s empty screens is ripe with possibility. Viewers might feel puzzled and confused, unable to realize that the open space is for them to reinvent. Mauri’s reference to tv screens is about the viewer’s response, the experience of watching tv, and the effects such a process has on individual subjectivity and on society at large. A few artworks from the Screens series include the word Fine or “The End,” at the centre of the composition. As argued by curator and scholar Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,33 one can see the text as a reference to the end of individual freedom and personal criticality. Similar warnings were expressed by contemporaneous thinkers such as McLuhan and the American journalist and social critic Vance Packard, who maintained that advertisers exercise a subtly calculated influence over consumers, thus compromising their full ability to choose. Mauri returned to the question of viewers’ participation in the age of the mass media over time. I will continue to discuss his perspective toward the end of this chapter, in analyzing the experience of watching television in Italian homes in the 1970s. The next paragraphs bring our attention first to visual representations from the 1960s.

Pop Interpretations: The TV Set as an Object in Mario Ceroli and Gianni Ruffi’s Work Beyond the fact that television carried meanings through programming, the tv set also carried meanings as a new object in the domestic space. With its

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vibrant colours and plastic elements, the new appliance reminded residents that they lived in a modern era. Nevertheless, its entry into the domestic sphere did not come without a process of negotiation. Efforts to camouflage tv sets behind embroidered fabrics, wooden furniture, and hand-sewn curtains signalled a discomfort with their plainly high-tech appearance. Modernity may have been an aspiration, but it was also hard to reconcile it with the traditional feel of most domestic interiors. A tv set often seemed out of place, like a sculpture plopped into a public square where it does not belong. Artists Mario Ceroli and Gianni Ruffi both played with the contrast between the modernity of television and the traditional look and values of Italian homes. Mario Ceroli was a sculptor who gravitated toward the arte povera milieu, while maintaining a level of independence from the group. By means of his visual language, he built objects and spaces that created environments sometimes akin to scene set designs. He also crafted actual sets for programs produced in the rai studios in Rome.34 As an artist who understood how television programs were set up, he maintained a critical distance from the medium. In his hands, the tv set was not like a magic lantern whose workings remained inexplicable, but a concrete object with its own physicality. Ceroli’s Eurovision (1964) is a painted wood sculpture that measures roughly one metre square. On one side, it represents the map of Europe in bas-relief with individual countries coloured in different hues. On the other, it shows a geometrical pattern – similar to the test pattern that viewers could see before Eurovision broadcasting began – framed by a rounded rectangle evocative of a tv screen. Not by chance, the size and imagery of the piece recall a tv, yet the images are static and take on a physicality that contrasts with the evanescent nature of televisual signals. The artificiality of the tv set is also countered by the choice of a natural material like wood. Early television models were often covered in wood-like or wooden panels, but these were just ways of hiding the plastic and metal heart of the appliance. By contrast, Ceroli’s piece is entirely made of wood. It is coherent and predictable from a materials perspective, but it also shows how nature (like a tree and its wood) must adapt to geometrical and rigid forms in the context of a technological society.35 The title Eurovision is a pun: the term indicates programs that were transmitted across European countries, supposedly unifying viewers in a range of locations. The piece pairs a representation of Eurovision’s logo with a more familiar “vision of Europe”: a map. Ceroli reverts symbols back to their

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basic meaning to remind viewers of the concrete specificity and physicality of lands, and even of pre-television technologies – such as, in fact, maps. The Tuscan artist Gianni Ruffi’s piece Intervallo (Intermission, 1965) has some elements in common with Eurovision (1964). Both artworks are sculptural representations of a tv set that use pop palettes to evoke the spectacular language of mass media, in contrast with the duller appearance of the everyday. Yet Ruffi’s interpretation is more literal than Ceroli’s. His tv set stands on a base that resembles home furniture more than the pedestal of a modernist monument, thus indexing the domestic setting of the object. Its volumetric values are also more pronounced and trigger a direct association with the shape of actual tv sets. The decoration of the case is, however, much bolder than could be found in most living rooms and can be associated with the formal proposals that were contemporaneously advanced by the design and architecture collective Superstudio. Umberto Buscioni, Roberto Barni, and Ruffi, along with Superstudio’s Adolfo Natalini, were part of what Cesare Vivaldi defined as the Scuola di Pistoia.36 This group of pop painters had a groundbreaking exhibition in the Tuscan town of Pistoia in 1966, the same year and in the same town as the first exhibition (Superarchitettura) of the radical architecture groups Archizoom and Superstudio.37 The young members of these groups were in conversation, reflecting on and reacting to the visual excess of the mass media, which infiltrated the home – making it at the same time more entertaining and more alienating. That said, individual artists had particular sensibilities and, in the case of Ruffi, it was a fascination with natural elements that coexisted with mass media references.38 The image on the screen of Intervallo adopts strong contrasts and bright colours, a palette that viewers could not enjoy on their home screens, as transmission was still black and white in the mid-1960s. Art exaggerated and surpassed the visual possibilities of television. The image painted on the screen pictures a classical landscape – a Doric temple with the sea in the background. The word Intervallo occupies the centre of the composition to reveal Ruffi’s subject: the images of Italian monuments that were broadcast on viewers’ screens when programming was off. By choosing this moment of emptiness, the artist points to the many alternatives to tv watching that were still offered to Italian viewers. With this iconographical choice, he also shows how the image of an archeological site surrounded by a natural landscape, supposedly the source of national pride, had been reduced to a popular and mass media icon with little depth or context.

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6.3 gianni ruffi, Intervallo, 1965. Vinyl on wood and iron. Photo Aurelio Amendola. Courtesy Gianni Ruffi.

Pop Iterations: Television as Ever-Changing Image in Mario Schifano’s Production Mario Schifano was a resident of the Cinecittà refugee camp as a child, and later became associated with the Roman pop art scene of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo (see chapter 1).39 Many visitors to his studio in Rome remember the same detail. Schifano worked with the tv constantly on in the background, getting lost in its programs. He interrupted his painting process only to follow the moving images on the screen, and then went back to work. His tv was always turned on at home, too. Watching was part of his routine, day and night. The constant flow of images had become part of his work on a variety of levels. It was a visual source that filtered automatically into his pictures, and a subject matter that generated critical reflections. Schifano can be seen as an interpreter of home life in the age of television. According to Roberto Ostensi: He enjoyed this uninterrupted flow of images, he liked the strength of the images of reality, with the disasters, the wars, the bombardments ... To him, it seemed difficult to compete with its designs and colors at the emotional level. For this reason, he said “painting is over.”40 Painting, as conceived by the art informel artists of the previous generation as a gestural and abstract projection of dramatic emotions on the canvas, could not compete with the flickering, bright and hypnotizing movement of televised images, according to Schifano. Starting in the early 1960s, his fascination with television infiltrated his art. His early work included monochrome paintings about perception and the viewer’s response to colour and texture. As Claire Gilman argues, “Vision is not given once-and-for-all in Schifano’s universe. Rather it is ordered and determined by the culture in which it operates, and the individuals that construct and inhabit that culture.”41 In the modern times of the cathodic tube, then, even the modernist monochrome looks uneven and almost glittering. Small dots of unpainted canvas peek between brush strokes, giving Schifano’s early pieces the impression of a dynamic surface. Sometimes, such uneven fields of paint are framed by rounded rectangles that reference the tv set even more literally. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Schifano referred to television by addressing issues not only of perception but also of image selection. Martina

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6.4 mario Schifano, Tempo Moderno, 1962. Enamel, paper on canvas, 180 × 180 cm. The Sonnaband Collection and Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem. Reproduced from Antonio Homem and Philip Rylands, Ileana Sonnabend: An Italian Portrait. Venice: Peggy Guggenheim, 2011. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Corgnati discusses his Paesaggi TV (TV Landscapes), mostly from the beginning of the 1970s, by describing his process: Alberto Boatto tells us how, one fine day in 1970, Schifano brought various television sets, all identical, and installed one in each room of his home, all tuned in to different channels. “From that day on, the windows of the apartment stayed closed … with the blinds and shutters barred, while the televisions were turned on twenty-four hours out of twenty-four.”42 Detached yet obsessive, with a Polaroid camera Schifano captured fragment over fragment of the tangle of images.43 For Schifano the screen is more than a source of flickering light and colour; it is also a repository of images that replace experience. Thus, for him there was no need to keep the windows open if the television was on. The artist exaggerated the common metaphor – often used by advertisements and illustrated magazines – of the tv screen as a window into the world, which one could see in great detail from the comfort of one’s own sofa.44 Supposedly, the most relevant information was conveyed by the tv screen rather than by the street, overlooked by the windows of the home. Schifano recognized that the medium was the message. More than individual programs and images, it was the fact of their collective accessibility and ever-flowing nature that mattered to him. According to Corgnati, TV Landscapes were meant to be exhibited as a group, to reflect the collective relevance of televised images and the medium that produced them. Cased in plexiglass, they explicitly mimicked the tv set.45 The process of creating TV Landscapes was as constant as the act of watching the programs. The artist made canvas after canvas without interruption. Individual shots were not as relevant as the perception of their continuous flow. Schifano’s method recalls that of Claude Monet’s late nineteenth-century series (from Haystacks to the Rouen Cathedral), in which he captured the changing play of light over the same landscape, attempting to indicate duration by representing a sequence of moments over multiple canvases.46 Similarly, Schifano captured individual images from the tv and displayed them collectively, highlighting the passage of time over everyday lives. Ironically, the landscapes presented in TV Landscapes are all different but all the same, in that they are collectively continuous and ever-present.

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Schifano’s work internalizes the production of American artists like Andy Warhol – whom Schifano met with in his Factory in New York – and Robert Rauschenberg, a member of the Rome art scene in the 1950s and an important if controversial point of reference for the Italian artworld after his award at the Venice Biennale in 1964.47 Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous artworks, Retroactive II (1963), for instance, juxtaposed mass media references with silkscreens of photographed images on the canvas, which was subsequently painted. In the early 1970s, Schifano’s method had some elements in common with Rauschenberg’s, while being distinct: as noted by Christopher Bennett, Italian pop did not merely copy American styles; it responded to the context of postwar Italy, where American influence was intermixed with particular histories.48 Schifano created TV Landscapes by photographing turned-on tv screens. He transferred the photographic images onto emulsified canvas, then added industrial colours to intensify the psychedelic and hypnotic effect of the cathodic tube. For the artist, this was a form of abstraction different from his monochromes of ten years earlier. Even though one could recognize figures and shapes on the canvas, such figures and shapes were representations of signs that existed independently of reality. The televised image, as it appears in TV Landscapes, was an abstract sign in and of itself. As French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard later maintained: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal … It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.49 For Baudrillard, mass media images were becoming simulacra with no actual connection to reality; yet they were perceived as more real and relevant to human life than physical signs experienced directly by individual subjects. It was by incorporating mass media signs into his artworks in literal ways that Schifano triggered critical reflections on their meaning for 1960s and 1970s subjects. He showed how television infiltrated the private space of the home and the everyday pace of its inhabitants. Schifano’s work demonstrates that the medium changed people’s perception of time and reality by exposing them to a multitude of images. Television reconfigured their desires and made them dependent on a stream of programs that ended up overlapping 260

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6.5 mario Schifano, Paesaggio TV, ca 1970. Enamel on emulsified canvas, 80.5 × 110.5 cm. Reproduced from Chiara Costa. TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli Guarda la RAI. Milan: Prada Arte, 2017. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

6.6 robert rauschenberg, Retroactive II, 1963. Combine painting. Creative commons. 

in their stream of consciousness. The domestic space, where comfort makes viewers less on guard and ultimately more vulnerable, was the theatre where such profound subjective and collective changes were initiated.

About TV Audiences: Gianni Pettena’s Critique of Uncritical Viewers By the late 1960s, the public’s response to television programming was at the centre of an intellectual and artistic debate in Italy. Some considered television numbing – even annihilating – while others stressed the possibility of an active response on the part of viewers. The radical architect Gianni Pettena (see analysis of Laundry, chapter 4), was aware of the television-based work of artists like Schifano and once experimented with appropriations of rai images himself in the short film The Pig. Carosello Italiano (The Pig: Italian Carousel, 1967–68). This work juxtaposed visual documentation of consumerist lifestyles with images of war explosions and political violence through a fast-paced montage.50 More than illustrating the watching habits of the artist himself, this piece critiqued the perception of the mass media as an unfiltered window over the world. The Pig recycled reel that had been cut off by the rai studios in Florence. Pettena wrote that at the end of the day, right before the evening news broadcast, “I bought the film directly from the rai operators, who sold me what was left of the spool practically for free.”51 By making otherwise inaccessible fragments of reality visible, Pettena showed that available television programs did not coincide with reality. They were just carefully edited versions that embodied the vision and intentions of the most powerful classes. Television projected the (questionable, according to Pettena) authority of the Christian Democrats and “a rigorous, conservative pci, for whom only Guttuso existed.”52 Pettena disliked television because it represented hierarchies that he did not identify with. He was also critical of those who, unlike him, employed television as a source of knowledge with no independent attitude. He considered such viewers to be generally incompetent: “a non-thinking audience to whom you had to explain who the artist is.”53 With these words, Pettena commented on his 1968 art piece titled Applausi (Applause). Invited by Vittorio Gelmetti to an international electronic and environmental music festival in Palermo, Pettena arrived with a quickly assembled scene set in

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a wooden case. A gift for Gelmetti, who had previously complained about his non-existent budget for the scenography of his own post-pop opera La Descrittione del Gran Paese (Description of the Great Country). The case contained labels for the performers: “vocalist,” “cello,” “maestro,” and so on. At the end of the opera, two light boxes flashed out the word applausi, instructing the audience of the live performance when to clap, as done with recorded tv programs, which needed similar props. It was a paradoxical and ironic situation, a détournement in the Situationist sense, because Pettena treated the sophisticated festival audience like the unsophisticated (in his view) home tv watchers. The impression that the general tv audience was incapable of thoroughly understanding programs without proper guidance was an indicator of the distance between those who designed shows and those who watched them. This distance recalls Antonio Gramsci’s observations on interwar Italy: the philosopher criticized the insular position of intellectuals and their dismissive attitude toward the culture of the rural classes, as expressed by folklore.54 Umberto Eco addressed the distance between message producer and receiver by looking at the media (and tv in particular) as a system of communication, while also valuing the new forms of culture that emerged through interpretations of the mass media. In an unpublished document,55 Eco argued that program editors created messages that used the codes of the dominant group – made up of individuals that likely came from upperclass families, went to the same universities, and/or were exposed to similar stimuli throughout their lives. A message sent by anyone from such a milieu could be received by those within the same milieu without much distortion. However, if the decoder of the message had very different life experiences and family habitus – in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense (see throughout, and especially Introduction) – they would probably use their own peculiar frame of reference to decode the message, thus understanding it in different terms than those intended. Underground cultures could emerge from such readings. Different audiences could thus receive television programs in widely diverse ways, which were hard to keep track of by means of the quantitative and statistical research methods used by rai. The perceived inability of audiences to understand the messages sent by programmers was not so much about the former’s incompetence as it was about the disconnect between rai and the general audience that the broadcaster tried to please.

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6.7 gianni Pettena, Applausi, 1968. Set prop, wooden case, glass, electric circuits. 80 × 40 × 33 cm. Courtesy Archivio Gianni Pettena.

6.8 fabio mauri, Il Televisore che Piange, 1972. Happening, RAI TV2, Rome. Courtesy the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth.

Appealing to the Audience’s Emotions: Fabio Mauri’s Il Televisore che Piange (The Crying TV Set, 1972) For twelve seconds, Italian viewers heard their tv sets cry. First the countdown (6, 5, 4, 3, 2), then the name fabio mauri appears on the screen, followed by the phrase il televisore che piange. To follow, only a white and empty screen accompanies a seemingly long wail. Then, the writing “the end” comes into focus to signal that the crying is over. The camera zooms out to show a man (the artist) next to a canvas – white background dominated by the bold writing, “the end,” a text that had been front and centre on the screen only seconds before. For the remainder of the program, which lasted two minutes in total, Mauri discussed his own happening in professorial terms. He assumed the aura that, in the early 1970s, academics adopted on screen when they conducted educational programs. The segment, titled Il Televisore che Piange (The Crying TV Set), was broadcast in 1972, in the context of a program titled Happening. Thus, Mauri’s work exemplifies the happening medium and tries to break it down for the audience, using simple language but comprehensive arguments. His happening, Mauri observes, breaks the habitual flow of images to show nothing else but the tv itself. Also, the piece introduces a symbolical element, which is recurrent in happenings. Finally, the artist is there all the time though he remains unseen by the audience. Mauri does not make this explicit, but his presence behind the scene reveals that television is fiction and the screen hides those who construct the programming. What one sees on screen is only a partial representation of reality. The fictional nature of the television was intuitively clear to the audience, since viewers were caught off guard by The Crying TV Set’s opening, with its insinuation that the tv set was real and alive. The piece triggered the reaction of the audience: why is the tv set crying? Has it become almost human, as in a sci-fi drama where the machine develops emotions? Or is the screen concealing an actual tragedy that is happening as the audience is connected telematically, though powerless because of their physical absence from the scene? Introducing a surprising confusion that subverted the expected behaviour of the tv, Mauri hoped to generate unexpected responses in his viewers. He explains:

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The part of the happening that we cannot record, that is anyway more collective and more resounding, is your own. [The part played by] you, who are a few centimetres away from the screen, and all of your gestures and phrases as you turn the television on and … not seeing … not being able to produce images, these are part of the happening.56 With a technique that recalls the happenings of John Cage,57 Mauri intended to activate the audience by catching them by surprise, decontextualizing familiar routines, and subverting passive viewing. How can one lie on the sofa, half-following the tv programs and maybe half-sleeping, if the tv itself behaves so dramatically? The crying in Mauri’s happening sounded like an emergency. If fact, it managed to worry many, to the point that rai received several alarmed phone calls from its audience.58 It is also worth noting that the piece was meant for a young public, as part of the educational efforts of rai tv.59 The meta-theatre component of The Crying TV Set was designed to appeal to an audience of teenagers who were likely more open to understanding the workings of new media. The crying appliance triggered a reaction not only because of its elements of surprise, including the unexpected reflection on television itself, but also because it spoke an emotional language. The emotions of the tv set were transferred to the viewers. Renouncing the usual visual and verbal components, the happening relied on pre-verbal sounds that could be universally understood. Beyond that, they were alarming and communicated a sense of urgency. Yet, the tv screen remained white like a canvas onto which individual viewers could project their own fears. Mauri repeated the mechanism of his Screens, now using the tv set instead of a stretched painting as a support. It is likely that the cries triggered audience reaction more effectively than the professorial explanation that followed it. In fact, the concepts that Mauri fed the viewers were familiar to the art world but completely unfamiliar to the general public that had learned a traditional approach to the visual arts through institutions like public schools and churches. Eco’s points regarding television as a communication system based on the codes of an educated group resonate here. Mauri’s experiment, as innovative and groundbreaking as it was, partially borrowed communication strategies that had proved ineffective in earlier years.

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Azione AntiTV (1978): Mirella Bentivoglio, Children, and Television’s Impact on Family Dynamics In 1978 artist, writer, and curator Mirella Bentivoglio had a solo exhibition titled Azione AntiTV at the Galleria Il Brandale in Savona. The space often exhibited work by women artists, such as Maria Lai’s I Pani (see chapter 5), which was accompanied by Bentivoglio’s critical text in 1977. In her own show Azione AntiTV, Bentivoglio included two sections. One exhibited an ex voto, as the artist defined it, from 1973.60 The artwork is a perspex box containing three sheets of paper: a poem by a four-year-old child that had been published in a parochial magazine, a figure of a child in prayer, and the image of a television. The sequence was complemented by the words Preghiera esaudita, or “Answered prayer.” All the components are found objects, and the way in which Bentivoglio brings them together speaks of her skeptical attitude toward the role of television in people’s lives and homes. The poem reads: Lord, Make me become a television set So Mom and Dad Will Watch me at Night.61 In Bentivoglio’s piece, the three papers are encased within a transparent plastic screen, a frame reminiscent of a tv screen. The tv embodies the child’s dreams and ends up becoming one with the child; the prayer is answered and the child does become the tv. Bentivoglio helps us visualize the transformation: the praying child now gives way to the bright image of a tv set, which is the only element in colour in the ex voto’s composition. Imbued with mass media images, the child is at risk of actually becoming a mere copy of televised models. Perhaps more tragically, television had become so desirable in 1970s society that parents preferred to spend time watching it to paying attention to their close family members during their evening at home. This, at least, was the perception of the young poet. Parenting manuals sometimes tried to coach adult family members with practical advice about screen exposure. For example, the Italian translation of Nicole Sauvage’s book Televisione e Famiglia (1973), which was released in

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the same year that Bentivoglio created her ex voto, includes guidelines on a number of logistical aspects. One full chapter is about keeping television from infiltrating other crucial home activities, like sleeping. Dramatic sounds and voices, which might have come from the television programs that the adults watched in other parts of a family’s apartment, could make children’s sleep less peaceful. Sauvage warns: No television in the immediate vicinity of children who are sleeping. If the children’s room is next to the room where the tv set is and the wall is thin, the sounds of the program will disturb them and prevent them from falling asleep. They will try to guess how things develop in the program or film, badly imagining the images that they cannot see.62 Sauvage dispensed advice to parents and, most specifically, to mothers, who were still considered mainly responsible for screen time regulations in the domestic context, mostly because of the assumption that childrearing was their primary responsibility.63 Women continued to be expected to perform traditional roles in the domestic sphere, despite the development of feminism and changes in programming. In the 1970s, programs had become less heteronormative, portraying successful and self-confident performers like Raffaella Carrà, Mina, and the Kessler twins. The schedules included more serious programs such as Processo per Stupro (Trial for Rape, 1979) directed by Loredana Dordi, and Si Dice Donna. Fatti, Ricerche, Domande sul Ruolo Femminile (It Means Woman. Facts, Research, Questions on Women’s Role, 1977–81), directed by Tilde Capomazza, a program that discussed women’s condition in contemporary society.64 About Si Dice Donna, visual arts historian Raffaella Perna writes: The issues addressed in the first series covered, respectively, sexuality, motherhood, domestic work versus work outside the home, education, and politics … A cross-section of the complicated reality of Italian women emerged in the very first episode: the women interviewed described the violence they suffered in the family, their fear of getting pregnant, and the still greater fear of disobeying their husbands.65

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In addition to casting light on women’s strengths and challenges, 1970s mainstream programs started to introduce non-binary or androgynouslooking performers, presenters, and singers like Renato Zero, Amanda Lear, and Grace Jones, but their visibility did not immediately break down the prejudice – grounded in Catholic mentality – against non-heterosexual family relations. The changes in tv programming may have contributed to slowly improving the condition of women and lgbtq people in real life, but there was (and is) still much work to be done. In the 1970s, television remained one of the main protagonists of the home. It continued to function as a desirable commodity whose purpose was mainly to make other products desirable. The injection of new hopes and consumerist models was a phenomenon that had by then been noted by Italian critics: “Now, the television that introduces an urban dimension in the farmhouse of a peasant or in the meeting house of a Southern village creates the ‘need’ that is at the basis of mass culture: private happiness to be reached in the present.”66 Bentivoglio notices that such irrational desire was not limited to the Italian context. The second component of her exhibition at Il Brandale included delicate paper sculptures that she brought back from a trip to Singapore. In that occasion, she found out about a particularly poetic mourning practice. Artisans built paper sculptures, which represented the things dear to those who had passed. The sculptures were then burned to signify that objects and desires disappear with the defunct. At the time of her visit, television sets were a popular subject for such paper sculptures. Bentivoglio looked at this phenomenon with sadness, thinking of the invasion of technology in developing countries as a form of imperialism that abruptly erased traditional lifestyles.

Conclusion At the time of its much-anticipated entry into Italian domestic rooms in the 1950s, television was celebrated by artists and art critics for its creative potential. Intellectuals imagined it would be a tool for the expression of artistic visions and a platform for the education of a broad audience. Forming a critically aware political basis was the goal and the hope of artists and academics who had survived fascism and its dangerous propaganda use of the mass media. In reality, rai – the Italian public broadcasting company – was controlled by

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the leading parties, and in particular by the Christian Democrats (dc), in the 1950s and 1960s. The dc made sure that programming transmitted Catholicoriented values even while proposing consumerist desires. Commercials presented new consumer products as necessary to proper family life, as seen in Philco’s Carosello segment starring Nino Manfredi in 1963. Artists often looked at the screen in critical terms. Fabio Mauri, for instance, continued to prompt the public to react instead of passively swallowing televised images. His Screens and his tv happening The Crying TV Set activated the audience’s participation, asking them to imagine things beyond what was framed by the screen. Mario Schifano was actively inspired by the continuous flow of images that appeared on television, and his works decode the ways in which the tv had transformed home life and subjectivity. Others, like Mario Ceroli and Gianni Ruffi, reminded viewers of television’s nature as a physical thing, helping them to demystify it as an unquestioned authority. Such faith in television as a producer of knowledge puzzled Gianni Pettena, whose piece Applause highlighted the passivity of the television audience, which he depicted as an uncritical mass in need of constant guidelines. More concerned with the effects that television could have on family dynamics and consequently society as a whole, in Italy and abroad, Mirella Bentivoglio explored television as an object of desire that generated new desires by erasing traditions. Disillusioned in the hope that television could be a tool for collective education or a way to bring families together, as many intellectuals had envisioned in the 1950s, artists subsequently questioned the multifaceted effects of television – a mass medium that infiltrated the private space of the home with major effects in the public sphere.

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CONCLUSION

looking forward

C.1 Jeannie Simms with mola Drammeh and Karamo barrow, Under the Sun 2018, 2018. Public practice, art workshops. Photo Laura Sammarco. Courtesy of Jeannie Simms.

Since antiquity, philosophers and historians have debated the idea of historical recurrence.1 Opposing models of history as cyclical and history as linear have been constructed and sometimes commingled by different civilizations and cultures. Some have argued that the myriad details that come together to define complex circumstances make each moment in time unique. Others have examined recurring patterns and classified forms of returns to the past.2 Does history repeat itself and, if not, why does studying history matter? Can we learn from the past to build our future? Such broad questions are the point of departure for this book’s conclusion. In comparing the context examined in Double-Edged Comforts with contemporary domestic landscapes, one can certainly find many differences. In contemporary societies, the concept of home has acquired a number of overlapping meanings. Today, people may link the term to the main page of a website as much as to the space where they live. A sense of home and belonging can be associated with a person’s social media account, their email inbox, or their smartphone, all of which host records of memories and personal opinions. In these virtual contexts, external pressures engage in a constant dance with subjective positions, in ways reminiscent of theories about domestic spaces proposed by thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre, mentioned frequently in this book. Historical conversations about the intrusive presence of the media discussed in chapter 6 are echoed by discourses of our day regarding the various screens that surround us – from smartphones to smart-tvs, tablets, and laptops – and the ways in which they replace in-person relationships in private and professional settings. Since access to the internet has made working from home a widespread option in economically developed countries, domestic spaces have increasingly become sites of labour for more than housewives and domestic workers: the home can also be an office for employees of companies based elsewhere.3 The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically accelerated this process: to limit the spread of covid-19, in the spring of 2020, the Italian government ordered a weeks-long lockdown that kept millions of people at home.4 An estimated eight million workers (among thirteen million employees) suddenly had to begin to work remotely, and Italian companies are evaluating the possibility of embracing “smart working” in the long term.5 The porosity of the boundaries between private and public sphere is also evidenced by the increasingly domestic feel of non-domestic sites:

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contemporary marketing strategies are such that the comfort of the home is intentionally reproduced in non-private places, from coffee shops to offices, from furniture stores to hospitals. As argued by Joanne Hollows, the savvy mimicking of home environments in spaces outside the home creates the paradox that we might feel more at home ⎼ at ease and spontaneous ⎼ outside the house than within it.6 With the recent surge of Airbnbs and other temporary home rental services, the illusion of being at home outside one’s own home has become much more concrete than before. This perhaps pleasing confusion comes with consequences for long-term housing availability, as the short-term rental market causes gentrification and exacerbates inequality. Urban planning scholars David Wachsmuth and Alexander Weisler are concerned: Either in the short term with actual evictions, or over a slightly longer timescale as long-term rental housing is “organically” converted to short-term rentals, the result will be the displacement of an existing, lower-income population and the arrival of higherincome newcomers. … By creating higher potential returns to property through the possibility of short-term rentals, Airbnb produces rent gaps, and thereby should be expected to drive gentrification and displacement. But the “opportunity” Airbnb offers to landlords and tenants is highly uneven, because it directly depends on the magnitude of tourist demand for short-term accommodation.7 The improved efficiency of transportation boosts mobility and contributes to reshaping the concept of home in the context of globalization; yet, this form of modern nomadism is often restricted to an elite and may depend on class, race, nationality, and level of education. All the above factors contribute to blurring today’s boundaries between public and private spheres, boundaries that were stronger, even though not absolute, in the decades analyzed in Double-Edged Comforts. In recent years a keener understanding of gender fluidity has complicated the idea of the home as a gendered space in scholarly discourse and increasingly in public opinion. By questioning the concept of separate male and female identities, recent studies on queer domesticity challenge the notion that the domestic space and housework are particularly tied to women’s lives.

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Rather, research unveils how gendered ideas of the home cause unease and feelings of non-belonging for non-binary subjects.8 Issues of equality and liberation in the home realm are now re-evaluated to include the experience of queer subjects and not only cisgender women, who were often portrayed at the heart (and hearth) of domesticity by Italian art and visual culture from the 1940s to the 1970s. The differences between today’s culture and the culture of the midtwentieth century that I have sketched so far in this volume support the paradigm that history does not repeat itself. That said, it is my view that some values and collective ideas remain in place across decades, if sometimes latent, to re-emerge in the present. Studying the recent past can then help raise awareness of such ideas through forms of “archeology” or “genealogy” of domestic life. To borrow Michel Foucault’s terms, by “archeology” and “genealogy” I mean the excavation of stratifications of knowledge – in the case of this book embodied by experiences and representations – that are at the root of present mentalities.9 Aspects of the interpretations of World War II and postwar domestic life analyzed in this book are resurfacing in present-day Italy. One of the patterns observed throughout the chapters is the frequent association of violence and the home in visual representations; such representations depict realities that are unfortunately still in place today, especially for women, youth, and minorities. According to studies published in 2019, in Italy more than six million women are victims of domestic violence, which is perpetrated by a partner or family member 80 percent of the times; the violence often happens in the presence of children, who are more likely to internalize and repeat the behaviours they have witnessed.10 The Italian term femminicidio (femicide) – that is, the killing of women because they are women – has become part of Italian public discourse in the media as well as the legal realm since 2005. Giovanna Parmigiani recently examined the coexistence of vulnerability and a sense of collective strength experienced by women who organize against femminicidio through critical reflection and activism. According to Parmigiani, feminist groups in the Apulian area of Salento – where she conducted field work – point to patriarchy and notions of honour and shame as the historical and social roots of femminicidio.11 The visual sources examined in Double-Edged Comforts show similar long-held notions which, if not uncontested, pervaded the interpretation of domestic spaces and gestures in Italy in the mid-twentieth century.

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While the idea of gender role separation has been challenged in many ways since the 1970s, there remains today a fundamental gap between males and females (as assigned at birth) in terms of career opportunities outside the home. According to statistical data published in November 2019, more than two million Italian women are forced to accept part-time positions due to presumed family responsibilities, despite the fact that women have higher education levels than men and believe that, as women, they should be free to develop a professional life. According to these recent numbers, which place Italy at the bottom of European rankings of women’s social conditions, Italian women continue to be deemed responsible for the domestic sphere even though they no longer shape their identity exclusively in relation to it.12 Extreme right groups contribute to revitalizing ideas of gender role separation, sometimes by repurposing twentieth-century painting in new contexts. This is the case with a poster that appeared on Roman streets as well as on social media in 2018: the poster includes a crop of Maternity by Gino Severini (1916) – an Italian artist who was involved with futurism and subsequently embraced classicism, and who participated in international art dialogues in Paris as one of the Italiens de Paris.13 Signed by the neofascist party Forza Nuova, the poster accompanies the image with slogans against queers and immigrants, claiming that Italy needs to increase its numbers of white Italian children. The poster is linked to Forza Nuova’s campaign to assign regular salaries to white mothers, on the basis of arguments that “a high birth rate for immigrants is a serious threat to the survival of the Italian people” and “thus the family, hinge of society, must be supported and prioritized, women’s work within the domestic walls [must be] incentivized.”14 In the poster, the pairing of similar racist and sexist statements with the image of a nursing mother cropped from Severini’s classicist representation aspires to validate fascist sentiments such as those exemplified by popular visual sources from the 1930s and the early 1940s discussed in this book. That said, ironically, since Severini’s Maternity was created before fascism took hold of Italy and during the artist’s stay in France, Forza Nuova’s intended association of the painting with nationalist values is compromised by historiographic factchecking. Severini painted Maternity as a reaction to the violence of World War I, proposing a nourishing and caring alternative to the interventionism of futurist artists through his subject matter as well as his balanced geometry and soothing palette.15 Public opinion on women’s domestic role as well as other topics connected to domestic life remains divided in Italy today. Activists and scholars often push 278

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back against the idea of women having an exclusive domestic function. For example, feminist art history and visual studies are flourishing in unprecedented ways in Italy, as shown by several references interwoven throughout this book’s chapters. Occasionally, studies maintain that the well-intended but too rigid victimization of women, especially in the media, intensifies gender stereotypes, risking to flatten the complexity of specific cases.16 Artists active today have engaged with the nuances of family and home dynamics by showing the push and pull of personal relationships. While not uncommon, such conflicts may have been exacerbated by the involuntary experiences of domesticity that most Italians endured during the coronavirus-induced lockdown in 2020. Social media posts and newspaper articles compared daily life in quarantine to life during World War II: sheltering in place was perceived as unpleasant, confining, and psychologically trying, especially because of disagreements with family members.17 The resilience of the country was measured by people’s creative attempts at being together while keeping physical distance; famously, such attempts included neighbourhood sing-alongs and dinner parties in which residents took part from their own balconies.18 Everyday conflicts and the negotiation of individual identities are major themes in the work of Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini, as observed by curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. In his book Italia in Opera, in a chapter titled “Lessico Familiare,” Pietromarchi discusses selected works by a range of artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Marcello Maloberti, and Bruna Esposito, who address family and interpersonal relations.19 In the same volume, Pietromarchi threads together the theme of domesticity and that of immigration, which Italy had started to experience as a wider phenomenon in the late 1990s.20 The flow of asylum seekers who arrive on the peninsula from Eastern Europe and through the Mediterranean Sea is again a divisive topic in Italian (and international) public discourse. Jeannie Simms – a multimedia artist from the United States who has created work about the migrant crisis, among other pressing issues, combining photography and participatory practice – has devoted attention to the interpersonal relationships that can be established between citizens and immigrants. In a recent project, Simms collaborated with a physician specializing in refugee and immigrant healthcare, the mayor, residents, and migrants of Sant’Alessio in Aspromonte, Calabria. Sant’Alessio lost most of its population through the years, as many emigrated to northern Italian and foreign cities to find work – a circumstance that is not uncommon in peripheral Italian towns

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and which, as analyzed in this book, finds its roots in migration patterns that started in the postwar period. Now a small village of about 330 inhabitants, Sant’Alessio opened its doors to Kurdish Iraqis, Afghans and immigrants from African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, and Gambia through the System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees – a network that is part of a broader reception system that provides support to about 176,000 migrants.21 Sant’Alessio mayor Stefano Ioli Calabrò saw in the immigrant population the possibility of keeping the town alive and its economy healthy, and hoped to fill the void left by emigration with a new wave of immigration. This has been seen as a prototype of positive reception that benefits locals as well as newcomers. Physical and mental health and social services, supervised by Dr Luigi De Filippis, are offered to the migrants; selected programs allow them opportunities to learn Italian and Italian ways. Through her ongoing interventions, Simms reversed a system according to which immigrants learn from locals, to highlight that locals have much to learn from immigrants too. In 2018, Simms facilitated the offering of workshops on tie dye and batik art by Gambian artist Mola Modoulamin Drammeh, and workshops on proverbs and euphemisms – which made evident that common sayings have parallels in diverse cultures – by poet Karamo Barrow (Under the Sun 2018).22 Simms spent extensive periods of time in Aspromonte over two years, meeting and speaking with recent immigrants and long-term residents. During her stay, she realized that the two groups remained isolated and rarely interacted: for example, it was infrequent for immigrants to be invited to the homes of local families. So, Simms brought people together through collaborative art-making. During an early project titled Under the Sun (2017), which was inspired by a poem by Barrow, Sant’Alessio’s children initiated the exploration of apartments that had been abandoned by former residents, who had migrated away from the village to find fortune elsewhere. In the empty homes, participants gathered everyday objects such as pans, chairs, and old telephones. For the more recent immigrants among them, these objects were reminders of the homes they had left behind. The items were placed, as the title of the piece makes clear, under the sun. Using the photographic technique of cyanotype, Simms laid large photo-sensitive cloths on the central piazza of Sant’Alessio, and participants arranged the found objects on top of the fabric, suggesting an overlap between the private and public realms. Through long-term exposure to sunlight, the “negative” parts of the solution-treated photosensitive cloth that were covered by objects

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remained white, and the “positive” portions that were exposed to direct sun turned an intense deep-sea blue. Once the objects were removed, their silhouettes seemed to float against the monochromatic blue background, a possible visual reference to the Mediterranean Sea crossed by migrants who embark on overcrowded boats, hoping to reach the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. The undefined outlines of the objects in the cyanotypes of Under the Sun make them look like evanescent memories and dreams. Being easily folded and transported from place to place, the cloths themselves are mobile, showing that we carry memories with us as elusive as they might be. The fabric banners literally travelled to Boston for an exhibition at City Hall, a choice of site that reminds policymakers of positive approaches to immigration that could be considered in the United States as well.23 Through the layering of visual references, and thanks to participatory strategies, Under the Sun helps position the immigrant as a subject rather than a number. The piece elicits a sense of in-betweenness, a concept elaborated by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha.24 For Bhabha, postcolonial identities are “hybrid,” as the production of self is suspended between the acquisition of new cultural traits and the underlying trace left by the culture of origin. “In-betweenness” indicates an interstitial space where identity can morph and adapt in an ongoing process. In Simms’s Under the Sun, the traces left by the objects on the fabric can be seen as a materialization of cultural traces that coexist with the present and may be representing a liminal space where new identities can form through time. The interactive format of the work casts light on the ways in which collaboration makes space for open-ended and ever-changing understandings of the self. Expressing in-betweenness through creative writing, Italian writer of Somali origin Igiaba Scego draws a map of her dual identity in personal narratives that bring the reader’s attention to the atrocities of Italian colonialism in Africa, unfortunately often neglected in school curricula and official histories. Her 2010 novel La Mia Casa è Dove Sono (My Home Is Where I Am)25 describes the frugal living conditions experienced by her family in Rome, where they lived as political refugees, amid episodes of open racism and memories of lost relatives. Scego describes the routine of peer Somali refugees who since the 1970s had established a meeting point in Rome’s Termini train station. For a community that could not return to their home country due to war and dictatorship, the station was almost a home outside their uncomfortable apartment spaces.26

conclusIon

281

In Italy and beyond, migration is often a necessity imposed by pressing political circumstances, the violence of war zones, and climate change. Through their work, contemporary artists have addressed forms of forced nomadism that unsettle immigrants, who can be caught between the wish of a safer life away from their culture of origin and nostalgic memories of past homes that no longer offer protection.27 Many individuals and communities move frequently within and outside of their country, often making their physical home a temporary place and not a permanent base. In more and more instances, home is a desire and not a reality. We can trace, once again, important differences between the experience of contemporary immigrants, especially when complicated by colonial dynamics, and the trauma of the World War II sfollati that is portrayed by some of the visual sources in this book. That said, by highlighting the marginalization as well as the imaginative forms of adaptation of wartime everyday life, Double-Edged Comforts may foster empathy toward contemporary experiences of migration. The multilayered meanings of present domestic life in Italy are intertwined with those constructed in the war and postwar years, which were defining moments for the country’s democracy, cultural identity, and modern economy. The hope of this book is to help the reader reflect not only on who we were, but also on who we are and who we want to be, by finding ways to appropriate the spaces we inhabit through creativity and criticality.

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NoteS

Introduction 1 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958); English edition: The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 2 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 8. 3 Ibid., 14. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Ibid., 217. 6 An effective summary of this debate can be found in Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel, “Negotiating the Boundaries of the Home: The Making and Breaking of Lived and Imagined Walls,” Home Cultures 14.1 (2017): 1–5. 7 Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), 1–13. 8 Ibid., 15–49. 9 Joanne Hollows, Domestic Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 15–33. 10 Ibid., 115–34. 11 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995). 12 Marita Sturken, “Visual culture,” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed 16 November 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/ gao/9781884446054.article.T2093950. 13 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere Vol. I (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 14 Ioana Dragulin Cristea, “The Evolution of the Concept of Hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s Works,” Cogito 5.3 (2013): 76–86; 25. 15 Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere Vol. III, 1514–51; 1521. 16 Ibid., 2118–19. 17 Ibid., 1519. 18 Ibid., 1551.

19 Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere Vol. I, 89. See also Joseph Buttigieg, “Gramsci, Antonio,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, accessed 16 November 2016, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/ 9780195113075.001.0001/acref-9780195113075-e-0240?rskey=eaOsmj&result=2. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 54; original French edition: Pierre Bourdieu, Le Sens Pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980); see also Paul Mattick and Loïc Wacquant, “Bourdieu, Pierre,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oxford University Press. 21 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 57. 22 Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974). English edition: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Malden: Blackwell, 1991). On Lefebvre’s ideas of space, see also Kanishka Goonewardena, Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2008). 23 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 166. 24 Imma Forino, La Cucina (Turin: Einaudi, 2019), III.13. 25 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. 26 Ibid., 124. 27 See, for example: Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Georgina Downey, Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 28 Paul Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 29 John Foot, “Micro-history of a House: Memory and Place in a Milanese Neighbourhood, 1890–2000,” Urban History 34 (2007): 431–53; Ringhiera: Story of a House, Documentary film, UK, 2014.(Endnotes)

Chapter One 1 Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings, trans. D.M. Low (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967), 151. 2 Dino Messina, “La Seconda Guerra Mondiale e i Bombardamenti che Distrussero Milano,” Il Corriere della Sera, 25 November 2015, accessed 7 January 2017, goo.gl/Fi6gSh. 3 “The Bombing of Rome,” Life Magazine, 9 August 1943, 16–17. 4 Jean Gili, Luigi Comencini (Rome: Gremese, 2003), 5–12. 5 See Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace, discussed in the Introduction. 6 Giovanna Ginex, “L’arte dell’illustrazione nelle pagine de La Domenica del Corriere,” in La Domenica del Corriere. Il Novecento Illustrato, ed. Giovanna Ginex (Milan: Skira, 2007): 17–81.

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7 Ibid., 42, 52. 8 Anna Bravo, “La Resistenza Civile delle Donne,” in Le Radici della Resistenza. Donne in Guerra, Donne e Guerra, ed. Francesca Pelini (Pisa: Pisa University Press Plus, 2004): 29–38; Anna Bravo, “Armed and Unarmed: Struggles without Weapons in Europe and Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10.4 (2016): 468–84. 9 Some examples of such composition for the scene of The Birth of the Virgin are: an oil on canvas by Vittore Carpaccio, now at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (ca 1465); Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco for the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence (ca 1485–90); and Andrea del Sarto’s fresco for the Church of S.S. Annunziata in Florence (ca 1513–15 ). 10 Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace, 8. 11 Brian Dillon, “A Short History of Decay,” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge: mit Press, 2011): 10–19. 12 In Mario Mafai’s case, the ruins are those of two areas in Rome: the Augusteo, close to San Pietro, demolished to open the Via della Conciliazione; and the streets near the Colosseum, demolished to allow the creation of Via dei Fori Imperiali, with monumental views of the Forum and background perspectives of the Altare della Patria; in the intention of the régime, this was meant to foster an immediate parallel between the fascist present and the imperial past of the Italian capital. Mafai’s home in what is now Largo Corrado Ricci was also torn down as a consequence of the fascist urban plans. On the Scuola di Via Cavour, see Fabrizio D’Amico and Marco Goldin, Casa Mafai. Da via Cavour a Parigi (1925–1933) (Conegliano: Linea d’ombra Libri, 2004); and Emily Braun, “Scuola Romana: Fact or Fiction?” Art in America 76 (March 1988): 128–36. 13 Antonello Negri, Silvia Bignami, Paolo Rusconi, and Giorgio Zanchetti, The Thirties: The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism (Florence: Giunti, 2012), 136. 14 Lionello Venturi, Afro (Rome: De Luca, 1954); James Johnson Sweeney, Afro (Rome: Arte Moderna, 1961); Philip Rylands, Afro (Florence: Forma, 2018). 15 The etymology of the Italian term sfollato deserves some clarification: the prefix “s-” corresponds to the English “un,” and indicates the reversal of something; the term folla means “crowd.” Thus sfollato literally means “the one who leaves the crowd,” or “the one who gets away, evacuates.” Sfollato is often translated as “refugee”; however, in the context of the Italian World War II experience, the term “refugee” fails to highlight the idea of escaping from densely populated areas and puts the stress on the aftermath of the escape, that is the moment of finding refuge. 16 Film Luce, Archivio Storico. Photograph numbers: A00150725, A00150709, accessed 9 December 2016 http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/#n. 17 Film Luce, Archivio Storico. Photograph numbers: A00150932, A00150931, accessed 9 December 2016 http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/#n. 18 Aosta, La Vita in un Villaggio per Sfollati, Film Luce, 24 June 1944, accessed 9 December 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlo4Gxf6Oxw.

notes to pAges 23–33

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19 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 57. 20 Crimen: documentario settimanale di criminologia 1.1 (26 January 1945), 45. Quoted in Noa Steimatsky, “The Cinecittà refugee camp (1944–50),” October 128 (2009): 23–50; 40. 21 Steimatsky, “The Cinecittà,” 23–50. See also Profughi di Cinecittà, documentary film directed by Marco Bertozzi, screenplay by Marco Bertozzi and Noa Steimatsky (Rome: VivoFilm Cinecittà Luce, 2012). 22 See “Short Biography,” Archivio Piero Bottoni, accessed 15 December 2016, http:// www.archiviobottoni.polimi.it/fr_pbprofilo.htm. 23 Tipi di casette realizzate al QT8 dal Ministero dell’Assistenza Post-bellica, pamphlet (Milan: G. Colombi & C., 1947), 4. Triennale Milano – Archivio Storico. Series Raccolta Grafica TRN_08_RG_007. 24 Piero Bottoni, Ottava Triennale di Milano. Relazione del Commissario 1945–49 (Milan: G. Colombi & C., 1949). Folder “relazione del Commissario – gestione 1945-1949” – Milan Triennale – Archivio Storico. Serie Raccolta Grafica (TRN_08_RG_008). 25 The responses to the Concorso di Idee per la Casa Collettiva that are mentioned in subsequent pages were viewed at the Archivio Storico of the Milan Triennale: Unità Archivistica “concorso di idee per la casa collettiva,” Serie Documenti e Carteggi (TRN_08_DT_048_V). 26 Ibid. 27 For a more detailed discussion of Bachelard’s theory, see this book’s Introduction. 28 Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Family Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 224–5. 29 Penelope Morris, Women in Italy: An Interdisciplinary Study (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5. 30 Ibid. 31 Niamh Cullen, “Morals, Modern Identities and the Catholic Woman: Fashion in Famiglia Cristiana,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 18.1 (2013): 33–52. 32 Charles Poor Kindleberger, Marshall Plan Days, Routledge Revival Series (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 33 Paola Di Biagi, “La ‘Città Pubblica’ e L’ina-Casa,” in La Grande Ricostruzione. Il Piano Ina-Casa e L’Italia degli anni Cinquanta, ed. Paola Di Biagi (Rome: Donzelli, 2010), 20. 34 Di Biagi, “La Città Pubblica,” 17–19. See also Fanfani e La Casa, ed. Gabriele De Rosa (Rome: Rubettino, 2002), 186–7. 35 Margherita de Pilati, “Biography,” in Giuseppe Uncini. Scultore 1928–2008, ed. Gabriella Belli, Christa Steinle, and Peter Weibel (Milan: Skira, 2008), 127. See also Giuseppe Uncini. L’immaginaria misura, ed. Bruno Corà (Prato: Gli Ori, 2000). 36 Giuseppe Uncini, “Tecniche e Materiali,” Marcatré, May 1963, quoted in Giuseppe Uncini. Opere dal 1959 ad oggi (Turin: Christian Stein, 1968), 6. 37 Marco Meneguzzo, “Giuseppe Uncini,” Artforum International 2 (2003): 146. 38 Ibid.

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notes to pAges 33–4 2

39 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. See also this book’s Introduction. 40 Filiberto Menna, “The Flat Surface,” in Giuseppe Uncini. Opere dal 1959 al 1973 (Milan: Studio Marconi, 1973), 6–9; 7. 41 On Fillide Levasti, see Silvia Bottinelli, “Liminality and In-Betweeness: the ‘Domestic Pieces’ of Fillide Levasti,” Modernism/modernity 24.2 (2017): 283–309; and Valeria Masini, Adriana Camarlinghi, and Susanna Ragionieri, Fillide Levasti, 1883–1966 (Florence: spes, 1988). 42 Reproductions of Fillide Levasti’s paintings and drawings that represent construction workers are available in Masini, Camarlinghi, and Ragionieri, Fillide Levasti. See in particular: Muratori (Construction Workers), drawing, 1949 [ibid., number 193]; Muratori (Construction Workers), drawing, 1949 [ibid., number 194]; Muratori (Construction Workers), 1949 [ibid., number 195]; Case con Operai (Houses with Construction Workers), 1956 [ibid., number 233]; Torre e Lavoro (Tower and Work), 1961 [ibid., number 260]. 43 For a more detailed comparison between Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo and Fillide Levasti’s work, see Bottinelli, “Liminality and In-Betweeness,” 300–1. 44 Maristella Casciato, “L’Invenzione della Realtà: Realismo e Neorealismo nell’Italia degli Anni Cinquanta,” in Di Biagi, La Grande Ricostruzione, 205–21. 45 Fillide Levasti’s home in Viale Milton had been demolished by the bombings in 1944; Piero Calamandrei, friend of the artist and her husband, reports in his Diario on 17 March: “Last night in Castello we spoke with a Florentine arriving from Florence. He gave us news of the bombings: the train rail between Santa Maria Novella and Rifredi was affected; and the streets on the right, from the Fortezza da Basso to Ponte all’Asse. I think of Bartolini, Ronchi, the Levastis, Lorenzoni.” A few months later, on 2 September, still during the liberation of Florence, Calamandrei visited Levasti’s apartment. This is what he witnessed: “I get to Levasti’s home and find it ruined. Viale Milton has been a battleground for a long time.” The artist was deeply affected by the devastation of the apartment and her belongings. On 12 August the artist wrote to her friend Oriana Previtali: “Among many painful episodes, I understand that the loss of my paintings is a little thing; in fact I think about the others more than myself: however, after thinking of the others’ unbearable sufferings, I feel profoundly disappointed about the loss of so many years of work.” Quotes from: Piero Calamandrei and Giorgio Agosti, Diario 1939– 1945 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982), 371. Translations by the author. 46 For more detailed information on both exhibitions, see Cristelle Baskins and Silvia Bottinelli, “La Casa Va Con la Città. Lorenzo the Magnificent and the Arts, 1949,” California Italian Studies 7.1 (2017): 1–30, accessed 21 August 2018, https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/8c2450sx#main. 47 Valerio Rivosecchi, Renzo Vespignani. Catalogo Ragionato (Milan: Silviana, 2011), 30–42. 48 Rivosecchi, Renzo Vespignani, cat. 19. 49 Ibid., cat. 66.

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50 Ibid., cat. 86. 51 Ibid., cat. 26. 52 Franco Pinna’s photograph of the Mandrione (1956) is reproduced in David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 65. The artwork is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 53 Forgacs, Italy’s Margins, 62. See also: Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context (1950s–Present) (Milan: Charta, 2012); and Liliana Cavani, Inchiesta sulla Casa, documentary film (Italy: rai, 1965). 54 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Presentazione alla Mostra di Renzo Vespignani (Rome: Obelisco Gallery, 1956), 2–6. 55 Lorenzo Canova, “Per i Quartieri Sparsi di Luce e Miseria. Pier Paolo Pasolini e Roma tra Pittura, Cinema, Scrittura e Fotografia,” Storia dell’Arte 107 (2004): 135–51. 56 Storie di Case, ed. Filippo De Pieri, Bruno Bonomo, Gaia Caramellino and Federico Zanfi (Rome: Donzelli, 2013). 57 Luisa Tasca, “The Average Housewife in Post-World War II Italy,” Journal of Women’s History 16. 2 (2004): 92–115. 58 Barbara Casavecchia, “Taci, Anzi Parla,” Documenta 14 7.2 (2014), accessed 24 January 2017, http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/463_taci_anzi_parla. 59 Elena Ferrante, Storia del Nuovo Cognome (Rome: edizioni c/o, 2012). 60 Ibid., 55. 61 Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), Story of a New Name (San Francisco: Gale, 2016), 81. 62 Giovanna Grignaffini, “Female Identity and Italian Cinema in the 1950s,” in Off Screen. Women and Film in Italy, ed. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 111, 123. 63 Pierre Restany, Rotella. Dal decollage alla nuova immagine (Milan: Apollinaire, 1963). 64 Andrea Tugnoli, La scuola di piazza del Popolo (Firenze: Maschietto editore, 2016). 65 Tano Festa, “Letter to Arturo Schwarz, 1966,” in Tano Festa. Catalogo Generale. Tomo I, ed. Francesco Soligo (Turin: Canale Arte, 1997), 51–2. 66 Bruno Bonomo, “Dwelling space and social identities: the Roman bourgeoisie, c. 1950–80,” Urban History 38. 2 (2011): 276–300, 297. As made clear by Bonomo, Francesca Socrate is the daughter of Communist party leaders who lived in the Parioli neighbourhood in the postwar period. 67 Rybczynski, Home: A Short History, 196–216. 68 Lucia Re, “The Mark on the Wall. Marisa Merz and a History of Women in Postwar Italy,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Place (Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2017), 37–75. 69 See Martina Corgnati, “Carla Lonzi. Da Autoritratto alla Gibigianna e oltre,” in Artiste della Critica, ed. Maura Pozzati (Mantova: Corraini, 2015), 93–107. 70 Casavecchia, “Taci.” 71 Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Bari: De Donato, 1969); see also Giovanna Zapperi,

288

notes to pAges 46–56

72

73 74 75

76

77 78 79 80

81

82

83

“Self-Portrait of a Woman: Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto,” in Laptop Radio. La radio siamo noi, eds. Laurent Schmid et al. (Geneva: head–Link editions, 2019), 47–80. Giovanna Zapperi, “Carla Lonzi: An Art of Life,” in The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy, eds. Marco Scotini and Raffaella Perna (Milan: Flash Art, 2019), 18–19. See also Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi, Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Laura Iamurri, Un Margine che Sfugge. Carla Lonzi e l’Arte in Italia, 1955–1970 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016); and Lara Conte and Laura Iamurri, Carla Lonzi. Scritti sull’Arte (Milan: Et al. Edizioni, 2012). Zapperi, “Carla Lonzi,” 18. Ibid. See, for example, Raffaella Perna and Donata Pizzi, L’Altro Sguardo. Fotografie Italiane 1965–2015 (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2016). Marco Scotini and Raffaella Perna, eds., The Unexpected Subject; and “‘Yet Who Is the Genius?’: Women’s Art and Criticism in Postwar Italy,” eds. Silvia Bottinelli and Giorgia Gastaldon, Palinsesti 8–9 (2019–20). On the theory of Visual Poetry, see Lamberto Pignotti, Identikit di un’Idea: dalla Poesia Tecnologica e Visiva all’Arte Multimediale e Sinestetica, 1962–2002 (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2003). On Gruppo 70, see Giuliana Pieri and Emanuela Patti, “Technological Poetry: Interconnections between Impegno, Media and Gender in Gruppo 70 (1963–1968),” Italian Studies 72.3 (2017): 323–37. On La Rocca, see Francesca Gallo and Raffaella Perna, eds. Ketty La Rocca. Nuovi Studi (Milan: Postmedia, 2015). Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt Inc., 2005), 106–7. First edition 1929. Ibid., 82. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). Paola Mattioli, La Frase dello Specchio (Milan: Mazzotta, 1978), 22, republished in Addio anni 70. Arte a Milano 1969–1980, ed. Paola Nicolin and Francesco Bonami (Milan: Mousse, 2012), 363. Achille Bonito Oliva, quoted in Giosetta Fioroni (Ferrara: Palazzo dei Diamanti, 1972), 18. Translation by the author, original text: “Compie gli atti di una comune giornata.” See for example Giosetta Fioroni, La Solitidine Femminile (1967), 16 mm film, b/w, silent, 7'; Fioroni, Gioco (1967), 16 mm film, b/w, silent, 3'55"; Fioroni, Coppie (1967–69), 16 mm film, b/w, silent, 6'20"; Fioroni, Goffredo (1967–69), 16 mm film, b/w, silent 4'15". The aforementioned films are available in the video library of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin. Enzo Siciliano, “L’arte di Giosetta Fioroni. Pittrice d’argento,” La Stampa, 5 June 1976, republished in Vanja Strukelj, Giosetta Fioroni (Parma: csac Dipartimento Arte, 1984), 73.

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84 See, for example, Enzo Golino, Giosetta Fioroni con Enzo Golino (Emilio Mazzoli, 1982), republished in Strukelj, Giosetta Fioroni, 84–5. 85 Maurizio Calvesi, Arte e Tempo, in “Teatro delle Mostre” (Rome: La Tartaruga, 1968), republished in Giosetta Fioroni. Roma Anni ’60, eds. Marco Meneguzzo et al. (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016), 249; Achille Bonito Oliva, “Il Teatro delle Mostre,” in Il Sipario 267 (July 1976), republished in Meneguzzo, Giosetta Fioroni, 250; Tommaso Trini, “Le Notti della Tartaruga,” Domus 465 (August 1968), republished in Meneguzzo, Giosetta Fioroni, 251. 86 Maurizio Calvesi, “Giosetta e Cupido,” in Giosetta Fioroni (Macerata: Ed. Il Foglio, 1976), republished in Strukelj, Giosetta Fioroni, 67–71. 87 Briganti, “Il Tuo Cuore è una Capanna,” Bolaffi Arte 83 (1978), republished in Strukelj, Giosetta Fioroni, 75–6. 88 Claire Gilman and Romy Golan, Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento (New York: Drawing Center, 2013). 89 David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 68. 90 Meneguzzo, Giosetta Fioroni, 252–3. 91 Maria Francesca Zeuli, “Diario di un Matrimonio: Conoscendo Bianca e/o Tomaso,” in Tomaso Binga. Autoritratto di un Matrimonio, ed. Simonetta Lux and Maria Francesca Zeuli (Rome: Gangemi, 2005), 29–39. 92 Bianca Menna, phone interview with author, 27 November 2019. 93 Zeuli, “Diario…,” 34. 94 Scotini and Perna, The Unexpected Subject, 106, 190. 95 Menna, interview with author. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Filiberto Menna, La linea analitica dell’arte moderna. Le figure e le icone (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975). 99 Menna, interview with author. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. See also La Metafisica del Quotidiano, ed. Franco Solmi (Bologna: Gam, 1978). 102 Casavecchia, “Taci.” 103 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 16–17. 104 Gillo Dorfles and Elverio Maurizi, Tomaso Binga, il corpo della scrittura (Macerata: Copiedit, 1981), 2–10. 105 Tomaso Binga, “Il mio nome maschile,” in Dorfles and Maurizi, Tomaso Binga, 11. The original Italian text reads: “Il mio nome maschile gioca sull’ironia e lo spiazzamento; vuole mettere allo scoperto il privilegio maschilista che impera anche nel campo dell’arte, è una contestazione per via di paradosso di una sovrastruttura che abbiamo ereditato e che come donne vogliamo distruggere.” Author’s translation. 106 See Maria Grazia Messina, Anna Maria Montaldo, and Giorgia Gastaldon, Carla Accardi. Contesti (Milan: Electa, 2020).

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107 Leslie Cozzi, “Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi’s environments and the rise of Italian feminism,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21.1 (2011): 72; Teresa Kittler “Living Differently, Seeing Differently: Carla Accardi’s Temporary Structures (1965–1972),” Oxford Art Journal 40.1 (2017): 87–107. 108 Stefano Chiodi, “A Conversation with Carla Accardi,” in Carla Accardi, eds. Isabella Del Frate Rayburn and Gian Enzo Sperone (New York: Sperone Westwater and New York University, 2004), 3; Luca Massimo Barbero, Carla Accardi: Sign and Transparency (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 24–45. Claudio Cerritelli, “Carla Accardi. Le infinite Risorse del Segno,” in Carla Accardi. Opere 1947–1997, ed. Claudio Cerritelli (Milan: Charta, 1998), 20. 109 Laura Cherubini, “Conversazione con Carla Accardi,” in Carla Accardi, ed. Cerritelli, 35. 110 Silvia Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s,” Art Journal 75.1 (summer 2015): 62–80. 111 Laura Cherubini, “Conversazione con Carla Accardi,” in Architettura del Sublime. La Chiesa del Santo Volto di Gesù a Roma, ed. Achille Bonito Oliva (Milan: Electa, 2007), 34. Another visual source that inspired the Triple Tent is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, where Accardi was impressed by the continuum of painting through space. See Germano Celant, Carla Accardi: The Life of Form (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 58–61. See also Laura Iamurri, “Una Cosa Ovvia,” L’Uomo Nero 13 (2016): 160–3. 112 Among the many studies on arte povera, see: Germano Celant, Arte povera: storia e storie. (Milan: Electa, 2011); Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History 36.2 (2013): 418–41; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 2014). To frame arte povera within an international context, see Lara Conte, Materia, corpo, azione. Ricerche artistiche processuali tra Europa e Stati Uniti. 1966–1970 (Milan: Electa, 2010). 113 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “La maison dans l’Arte povera,” in La Maison, ed. Marie Ange Brayer (Orléans: Editions hyx, 1997), 154–71. 114 Avanguardia e architettura radicale: abc 1924–1928, ed. Jacques Gubler (Milan: Electa, 1994). 115 Silvia Bottinelli, “Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra: Crossing the Boundaries between Theory and Practice,” in Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying the Knot, Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan eds. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 53–71. 116 Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism.” 117 Elisabetta Rattalino, “Ugo La Pietra and the Dematerialisation of ‘Home’ in 1970s Italy,” paper presented at the symposium Narrating Home in Visual Arts Through an East West Divide (Stockholm, Moderna Museet, January 2018). For the text of the 1978 law on equo canone, see: Legge 27 luglio 1978, n. 392, Equo Canone. Disciplina delle locazioni di immobili urbani, Pubblicata nella Gazzetta Ufficiale del 29 luglio 1978, n. 211; accessed 11 January 2020, https://st.ilsole24ore.com/art/ SoleOnLine4/Speciali/2006/guida_professionisti/16febbraio%202006/L_392_1978. pdf?cmd%3Dart.

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118  Cindi Strauss, Germano Celant, and J. Taylor Kubala, Radical: Italian Design 1965–1985. The Dennis Freedman Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 207. See also Alex Coles and Catharine Rossi, eds., The Italian AvantGarde: 1968–1976 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). 119 Anna Bravo, Il fotoromanzo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). 120 Gruppo Strum, “Struggle for Housing,” Casabella 367 (1972): insert. 121 Germano Celant, “Radical Design,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 380–7. 122 The Museum of Modern Art, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Release n. 45, Statement by Gruppo Strum,” 26 May 1972. MoMA Archives, accessed 3 January 2020, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/4823/ releases/MOMA_1972_0052_45X.pdf. 123 Global Tools, Program, published in Global Tools 1973–1975, eds. Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini (Milan: salt, 2015), 60. 124 Ibid., 26. For a more detailed discussion of Global Tools, see chapter 5. 125 Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism,” 78. 126 La Rivoluzione Non è una Cosa Seria, directed by Marilena Moretti, was released in 2006. For further discussion of this documentary film, see chapter 5. I would like to thank Moretti as well as Jacopo Galimberti for generously sharing information about this film and the experience of the Comontisti with me. Email exchange between Jacopo Galimberti, Marilena Moretti, and the author, 1–4 August 2017.

Chapter Two 1 Gli artisti di Ca’ Pesaro e le esposizioni del 1919 e del 1920, ed. Stefania Portinari (Venice: Ca’ Foscari, 2018), accessed 15 November 2019, https://edizionicafoscari. unive.it/media/pdf/books/978-88-6969-200-0/978-88-6969-200-0_jZeKn4r.pdf. 2 Giorgina Bertolino, “Ragazza che Dorme o Ragazza sul Letto o Convalescente [1934–45],” in Felice Casorati. Collezioni e Mostre tra Europa e Americhe, ed. Giorgina Bertolino (Milan: Silvana, 2014), 186. In this article, the author proposes that the painting’s execution date be 1934–45, despite the traditionally accepted date of 1942. 3 Jackie Wullschlager, “Fearlessly Face to Face with History; Italy. A powerful Show of Fascist-era Art at Milan’s Prada Foundation Intrigues,” Financial Times, 17 February 2018, 1; Rosalind McKever, “Displays of Power,” Apollo 187.663 (2018): 92–3. 4 See, for example: Luigi Carluccio, Casorati (Turin: Galleria civica d’arte moderna, 1964); and Giorgina Bertolino and Francesco Poli, Felice Casorati dagli Anni Venti agli Anni Quaranta (Milano: Electa, 1996). 5 Guido Hess, “Artisti Contemporanei. Il Pittore Felice Casorati,” Emporium XCV.566 (Februrary 1942): 36.

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6 Flavia Matitti, “Fausto Pirandello (Roma, 1899–1975),” associazione Fausto Pirandello, accessed 27 November 2019, http://www. associazionefaustopirandello.it/sito/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/biografia.pdf. 7 Fausto Pirandello, Riflessioni sull’Arte, eds. Claudia Gian Ferrari and Flavia Matitti (Milan: Ascondita, 2008), 42–54. 8 Fabrizio D’Amico, “Fausto Pirandello. Il Tempo della Guerra,” in Fausto Pirandello. Il Tempo della Guerra, eds. Fabrizio D’Amico and Paola Bonani (Milan: Silvana, 2013), 13–21. 9 Claudia Gian Ferrari, Fausto Pirandello. Catalogo Generale (Milan, Electa: 2009), 144. 10 Paola Bonani, “Fausto Pirandello. La Vita, Le Opere, La Fortuna Critica,” in Pirandello, ed. Fabrizio d’Amico (Treviso: Linea d’Ombra, 2007), 135. Bonani writes that Pirandello and his family squatted in Villa Medici until July of 1944, to then spend a few months in the village of Anticoli Corrado; they returned to Rome in October of that year. In Pirandello’s letter to his sister quoted by Bonani, the artist states that he worked productively during the first part of the year during the time at Villa Medici. 11 Glenn M. Andres, “The Villa Medici in Rome: The Projects of 1576,” Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 19.2 (1975): 277–302. 12 Fausto Pirandello quoted in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Fausto Pirandello. La Vita Attuale e La Favola Eterna (Milan: Charta, 1999), 163. 13 Jole de Sanna, “Enchanted Lyricist,” in Fausto Melotti: Anti-Sculpture, ed. Paolo Baldacci (Milan and New York: Baldacci Gallery, 1994), 9–27. 14 De Sanna, “Enchanted Lyricist,” 10. 15 Arturo Martini, La Scultura Lingua Morta (1945) (Milan: Abscondita, 2001). 16 On the relationship of dreams and materiality in Melotti’s sculpture see Gabriella Drudi, Melotti Fedele Al Fantasma (Rome-Milan: Ascanio-Scheiwiller, 1979), 10. 17 Letizia Modena, “La Scultura di Fausto Melotti nelle Città Invisibili di Calvino,” Letteratura e Arte 2 (2004): 236–7. 18 Eva Fabbri, “He Has Changed Neither Worlds not Manners,” in Fausto Melotti. L’incertezza, ed. Barbara Casavecchia (Milan: Mousse, 2015), 36. 19 Antonella Commellato and Marta Melotti. Fausto Melotti. L’Opera in Ceramica (Milano: Skira, 2003). 20 Franco Berlauda, “Le Funzioni nella Casa: Dormire,” Grazia 507 (11 November 1950), 20–1. 21 M.C. Manca di Villahermosa, “Dormire, Ecco il Problema,” Grazia 550, 8 September 1951, 24–5. 22 “Per le Bimbe La Camera Letto-Studio-Gioco,” Arianna (July 1957), 95. 23 Nova (advertisement), in Amica 18 (May 3, 1963), 19. 24 Aldo Tanchis, L’Arte Anomala di Bruno Munari (Bari: Laterza, 1981); Beppe Finessi and Marco Meneguzzo, Bruno Munari (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2007). 25 See this book’s Introduction. 26 Bruno Munari, “Che Cos’è un Abitacolo,” Domus 496 (1971): 33–4.

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27 Alexandra Brown, “Everything but the Orgy Truck: Shopping for Radical Architecture at moma, 1972,” in On Discomfort: Moments in a Modern History of Architectural Culture, eds. David Alex Ellison and Andrew Leach (New York, London: Routledge, 2017), 80–97; 84. 28 Daniela Lancioni, “Cesare Tacchi. Dagli Esordi alla Cancellazione d’Artista,” in Cesare Tacchi. Una Retrospettiva, eds. Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi (Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2018), 15–46; 17–18. 29 Ibid., 22. 30 Walter Guadagnini, “Just What It Is That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” in Pop Art Italia 1958–1968, ed. Walter Guadagnini (Milan: Silvana, 2005), 128. 31 Filippo Secchieri, Dove comincia la realtà e dove finisce. Studi su Alberto Savinio (Florence: Le Lettere, 1999); Keala Jane Jewell, The Art of Enigma: The De Chirico Brothers and the Politics of Modernism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Alberto Savinio (New York: Center for Italian Modern Art, 2017). 32 Lancioni, “Cesare Tacchi,” 36–7. 33 Ibid., 35. 34 Giuseppe Appella and Mario Quesada, Gnoli (Milan: Electa, 1985); Cecilia Alemani, Domenico Gnoli: Detail of a Detail (New York: Luxembourg & Dayan, 2018). 35 Luigi Carluccio, Domenico Gnoli (New York: Overlook Press, 1973). 36 Renato Barilli, Domenico Gnoli (Bologna: Galleria De’ Foscherari, 1968). 37 For a more detailed discussion of Bachelard’s theory, see this book’s Introduction. 38 Silvia Pegoraro, Il Mito del Pop. Percorsi italiani (Poderdenone: Comune di Pordenone Editore, 2017), 42–54; 94–101. 39 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 11, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 75. 40 It must be noted that Stelio Maria Martini disliked the label poesia visiva. Coming from the literary world, he found the term “poetry” to be too generic; also, since the visual component of his work was exclusively photography, the term “visual” was not as specific as it could have been if one were to define Martini’s work as separate from the production of others. In general, poesia visiva, like all labels, did not capture the regional and individual diversity of the experiments across art and literature that developed in postwar Italy. See Stella Santacatterina, “Decolonizing Literature: Stelio M. Martini and the Writing of the Images,” Third Text 27.6 (2013): 790. 41 In a letter from Martini to Roberto Antolini (23 September 2005), Martini clarifies that Neurosentimental was created and concluded in 1963; part of it (more or less ten pages) appeared in the magazine Linea Sud in April 1965 (issue 2). The entire book was then published by Continuum in 1974; finally, the

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42 43

44 45

46 47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56

Neapolitan publisher Morra republished Neurosentimental in 1983. I am grateful to Doccio Dogheria and the Mart Archives, Rovereto, for giving me access to the Fondo Martini, which includes the aforementioned document (smm.2.2.35.1). Lara Demori, “Organicize disintegration: from Nuclear Aesthetics to Interplanetary Art,” Predella 7 (2018): 27–43. Santacatterina, “Decolonizing Literature: Stelio M. Martini,” 786–94; Giorgio Bacci, “Non una Rivista ma un Documento: Documento Sud (1959–1961) tra Avanguardia Artistica e Testimonianza Socioculturale,” Palinsesti 1.5 (2016): 1–16. Matteo D’Ambrosio, “La Diversità degli Elementi e l’Unità del Libro,” Lotta Poetica 23–4 (1984): 7. Neurosentimental includes a remarkable table (pages 66–7) titled Soluzione Spaziale di Un Appartamento, which confirms what the reader would otherwise hardly infer from the loose structure of the narrative, that is that Iorio is married and has a child; the page also clarifies that the character Mirella is homosexual. The original text is: “Iorio fu contento di ricevere dalla sensibilità esasperata ed esurbescente dell’invertito Mirella la constatazione che la sua ricerca e la sua rivolta, come quelle partenti da una situazione sociale compiuta e normale (Iorio era sposato e aveva un bambino) ricevessero una convalida proprio da ciò.” Stelio Maria Martini, Neurosentimental (Naples: Morra, 1983), 133. Lara Vinca Masini, Luciano Ori (Prato: Farsetti Arte, 1995); Nicola Micieli, Eugenio Miccini, and Lamberto Pignotti, Poesia visiva. Di/Versi e Racconti Mediterrenei (Pontedera: Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 2000). Lucilla Saccà, Luciano Ori. Cronaca di un’Alluvione (Florence: Regione Toscana, 2016). Christov-Bakargiev, “La maison dans l’Arte povera,” 154–71. Massimiliano Gioni, “Pier Paolo Calzolari. Glossary/Glossolalia,” in Gioni, Germano Celant, and Pier Paolo Calzolari, Pier Paolo Calzolari vol. 3 (New York: Harry Abrams, 2012), 3. Bruno Corà, “Epifanie e Visioni dell’Assoluto,” in Pier Paolo Calzolari, ed. Ida Gianelli (Milan: Charta, 1994), 29. Pier Paolo Calzolari, La Casa Ideale, 1968, published in Gioni et al., Pier Paolo Calzolari (vol. 1), 1. See this book’s Introduction. Germano Celant and Gilberto Zorio, “Saggiointervista,” in Gilberto Zorio, ed. Germano Celant, Rudi Fuchs, and Mario Bertoni (Turin: Hopefulmonster, 1988), 11. See also Ada Masoero, “Zorio, Radici,” in Gilberto Zorio, ed. Klaus Wolbert (Darmstadt: Institute Mathildenhöhe, 2005), 48. On Zorio’s use of lead, see Elizabeth Mangini, “Lead in the Lexicon of Gilberto Zorio’s Sculpture,” in Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art, eds. Silvia Bottinelli and Sharon Hecker (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021). Celant and Zorio, “Saggiointervista,” 13.

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57 Germano Celant, Jannis Kounellis (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), 78–81. 58 Stephen Bann, Jannis Kounellis (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 25–30; 84–91. 59 Eduardo Cicelyn and Mario Codognato, Kounellis (Milan: Electa, 2006), 48–50; 112–3; 166. 60 Ida Gianelli, Arte Povera in Collezione (Milan: Charta, 2000), 166–7. 61 For a recent discussion of live animals in Kounellis’s work, see: Chris Bennett, Salt and Copper: Stratified Questions and Replies from an Interview with Jannis Kounellis. Paper presented at Magazzino Italian Art, 2 May 2020. Q&A available online, https://www.magazzino.art/blog/qa-chris-bennett-and-tenley-bick. 62 Denis Viva, “Parallasse per una Foto: i Dodici Cavalli Vivi di Jannis Kounellis su Cartabianca,” Palinsesti 1.6 (2017): 57–76. 63 Celant, Jannis Kounellis, 79. 64 Elsa Morante, La Storia (Milan: Einaudi, 1974). 65 Gabrielle Elissa Popoff, “Once Upon a Time There Was an S.S. Officer: The Holocaust between History and Fiction in Elsa Morante’s La Storia,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11.1 (2012): 25–38. 66 Patrizia Sambuco, ed., Transmissions of Memory. Echoes, Traumas, and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture (Vancouver: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), x. 67 David W. Ellwood, “The Trauma of Liberation. Rape, Love, and Violence in Wartime Italy,” in Sambuco, ed., Transmissions of Memory, 125–142. See also Alessia d’Innocenzo, “Lo Stupro come Arma dei Nazisti e degli Alleati. La Violenza Sessuale in Tempo di Guerra,” Prospettiva Donna 92 (2015): 55–8. 68 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 10. 69 Bruno Corà, ed., Materia forma e spazio nella pittura di Alberto Burri (Città di Castello: Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, 2016); Stefano Zorzi, ed., Parola di Burri. I Pensieri di una Vita (Milan: Electa, 2016). 70 Luca Acquarelli, “Sotto Forma di Forza. ‘Materiologia’ di Alberto Burri,” paper presented at the symposium Lo spazio delle immagini. Arte e cultura visiva in Italia, 1960–1975 (Rome: Villa Medici, June 2019); Bruno Corà, ed., Rivisitazione. Burri Incontra Piero della Francesca (Sansepolcro: Museo Civivo, 2015). Jaimey Hamilton, “Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri’s Sacchi,” October 124 (2008): 31–52. 71 Emily Braun, Megan M. Fontanella, and Carol Stringari, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2015), 138; 154–5; pl. 20. 72 Braun, Alberto Burri: The Trauma, 138. 73 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2010). See also Niamh Cullen, Love, Honour, and Jealousy: An Intimate History of the Italian Economic Miracle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 92–128. 74 Elisa Giomi and Sveva Magaraggia, Relazioni brutali: genere e violenza nella cultura mediale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017). 75 Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name, trans. Ann Goldstein (Farmington

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Hills-San Francisco: Gale, 2016), 73–4. 76 Luca Pietro Nicoletti, “Il Primo Adami,” Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte 39 (2015): 121–55. 77 Dore Ashton, “Searching High and Low,” in Valerio Adami (Poggibonsi: Carlo Cambi Editore, 2010), 49–59. 78 Federica Di Castro, ed., Giosetta Fioroni. Opere su Carta (Milan: Electa, 1990), 114–15; 131. 79 Alberto Boatto, critical text in Giosetta Fioroni. Foto da un atlante di medicina legale (Rome: Libreria e Galleria Pan, May 1976); see also Alberto Boatto, Ghenos, Eros, Thanatos (Bologna, Galleria de’ Foscherari, 1974), cited by Germano Celant, Giosetta Fioroni (Milan: Skira, 2009), 231. 80 Paola Nicolin and Francesco Bonami, eds. Addio anni 70. Arte a Milano 1969– 1980 (Milan: Mousse, 2012), 34–41. 81 Carol Rama’s work has received more consistent attention since 2003, when she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, the New Museum in New York organized a seminal retrospective of her work. See Helga Christoffersen, Massimiliano Gioni, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lea Vergine, and Danh Vo, Carol Rama: Antibodies (New York: New Museum, 2017). See also Lea Vergine, Carol Rama (Milan: Mazzotta, 1985). 82 Carol Rama, Artist Statement. Quoted in Teresa Grandas, “The Rest Can Go to Hell: Other Possible Tales of Carol Rama and Turin,” in Paul B. Preciado, Teresa Grandas, and Anne Dressen, eds., The Passion According to Carol Rama (Barcelona: Macba, 2015), 54. 83 Teresa Grandas, “The Rest Can Go to Hell,” 50. 84 The work of Marisa Merz has been critically re-evaluated in the past two decades. See, for example, among many other contributions: Richard Flood, ed., Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 263–6; Dieter Schwarz, “The Irony of Marisa Merz,” October 124 (spring 2008), 157–68. Ian Altveer, Connie Butler, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Leslie Cozzi, Teresa Kittler, Cloé Perrone, Lucia Re, Tommaso Trini, and Marisa Merz, Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017); Marisa Merz, The Production of Self, exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2019–2020. 85 Carlo Madasani, “L’Arte in Movimento negli Scatti di Claudio Abate,” Artslife (2016), accessed on 25 June 2020, https://artslife.com/2016/07/14/ larte-in-movimento-negli-scatti-di-claudio-abate/. 86 Leslie Cozzi, “Notes on the Index, Continued: Italian Feminism and the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and Ketty La Rocca,” Cahiers d’études italiennes 16 (2013): 220. 87 Mirella Bentivoglio, Et In Principio Erat (Florence: Centro Di, 1971), 11. 88 Elena Del Becaro, Intermedialità al Femminile. L’Opera di Ketty La Rocca (Milan: Electa, 2015), 133. 89 Lucilla Saccà, La Parola come Immagine e Come Segno. Firenze. Storia di Una

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Rivoluzione Colta (Pisa: Pacini, 1999), 49. 90 Michelangelo Vasta, unpublished email message to author, 23 June 2018. 91 For more detail, see Germano Celant, Carla Accardi. Catalogo Ragionato (Milan: Silvana, 2011). Volume 1, 340; 347–50; 356–7; Volume 2, 363–71. 92 For an analysis of Luciano Fabro’s Tre Modi di Mettere le Lenzuola, see chapter 4. 93 Maurizio Fagiolo, Sette Lenzuoli (Galleria Editalia: Rome, 1974). 94 I am grateful to Francesco Impellizzeri at the Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo for the information that he generously shared with me on the Lenzuoli during a conversation in the artist’s former home and studio in via del Babuino 164, Rome, 21 September 2016. 95 “Avantgarde aus dem Penthouse,” Architektur & Wohnen 2 (September 1983): 152–5; Fiamma Arditi, “In casa di … Carla Accardi. Ritratto di Donna nel suo Rifugio Privato,” date unknown, Folder “Ritagli di Giornale.” Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, Rome. 96 Francesco Impellizzeri, conversation with author, Rome, 21 September 2016.

Chapter Three 1 Oral account by Gina Corvino (b. 1943), the author’s mother. Gina’s own mother, Fedora Silvestri (1910–1986), was a former itinerant theatre actress who raised her child as a single mother in the peripheral Tuscan town of Grosseto in the postwar period. 2 Martin Schmidt, “Between Hygiene, Intimacy and the ‘Pink Cheeks’ of Bourgeois Virtue: A Cultural History of Bathing,” in Intimacy! Baden in Der Kunst (Intimacy! Bathing in Art), ed. Leismann Burkhard and Martina Padberg (Köln: Wienand, 2010): 11–33. 3 Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico Famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), 90. 4 Schmidt, “Between Hygiene, Intimacy,” 11. 5 Luisa Tasca, “The Average Housewife in Post-World War II Italy,” Journal of Women’s History 16.2 (2004), 107. 6 Emanuela Scarpellini, A Tavola! Gli Italiani in Sette Pranzi (Bari: Laterza, 2012), ebook edition, 158. 7 Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name, trans. Ann Goldstein (Farmington Hills, San Francisco: Gale, 2016), 77–8. 8 Oscar Colli, Prefazione, in “La Storia del Rubinetto. Una Breve Storia di Alfabetizzazione Igienico-Sanitaria,” eds. Davide Crippa and Barbara Di Prete, accessed 5 April 2017, https://www.academia.edu/13168754/La_storia_del_rubinetto. 9 Simona Storchi, “La Casa all’Italiana: Domus and the Ideology of the Domestic Interior in 1930s Italy,” in Storchi, ed., Beyond the Piazza: Public and Private Spaces in Modern Italian Culture (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013), 57–75. 10 D. [?], “Casistica del Bagno,” Domus 20.172 (April 1942): 156–62. 11 Advertisements in the Italian and International editions varied. The version of

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12 13 14

15

16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27

28 29

Domus that circulated outside Europe in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s includes a different set of advertisements than those analyzed in this paragraph. The authenticity of the Ludovisi Throne has been debated by scholars. On the phrase “male gaze” in the context of feminist theory, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16.3 (1 October 1975): 6–18. Roberto Longhi, “Clima e opere degli irrealisti,” L’Italia Letteraria, 14 April 1929, 4. See also Fabrizio D’Amico and Marco Goldin, eds., Casa Mafai. Da via Cavour a Parigi (Brescia: Museo di Santa Giulia, 2005). Emily Braun, “Antonietta Raphaël: Artist, Woman, Foreigner, Jew, Wife, Mother, Muse, and Anti-Fascist,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 190. Martina Pudberg, “Spotlights,” in Burkhard and Padberg, ed., Intimacy, 44. On the representation of bathing and voyeurism in late nineteenth-century French art, see Linda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2006). Quoted in Pudberg, “Spotlights,” 44. Oriele, “Parliamo male di noi,” Grazia 12.446 (10 September 1949), 2. Translation by the author. The original text is: “L’uomo vuole che la donna sia una cosa graziosa che accontenti il suo occhio e tutti i suoi sensi, vuole che sappia lusingarlo con i suoi vezzi e la donna ha cercato di uniformarsi a questi desideri.” Braun, “Antonietta Raphaël,” 190. Giuseppe Appella, Antonietta Raphaël. Catalogo Generale della Scultura (Turin: Allemandi, 2016), 9–16, 89. Simona Mafai, “Tra le Braccia di Mia Madre,” in Antonietta Raphaël. ScultureDipinti-Disegni, ed. Franco Marcoaldi (Bergamo: Lubrina Editore, 2003), 17. Fonds Alberto Bianchi, reel 2, Bologna 1961, 1961, 8mm. amare-hd-mov per produzioni min 5:42,05. Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. Fabrizio D’Amico, “La Seconda Stagione della Scultura di Raphaël,” in Antonietta Raphaël, eds. Giuseppe Appella, Fabrizio D’Amico, and Netta Vespignani (Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 2003), 15. Miriam Mafai, “Una Madre in Fuga,” in Antonietta Raphaël. Sculture-DipintiDisegni, 13–16. Enzo Carli, “La Mostra dell’Antica Scultura Lignea Senese,” Emporium 110.657 (1949): 99–116. Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, “Living and Active Matter,” in Renato Guttuso: Revolutionary Art: Fifty Years from 1968, eds. Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Elena Volpato (Milan: Silvana, 2018): 14–33; 27. For a more detailed discussion of Bourdieu and Gramsci, see this book’s Introduction. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39.

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30 Ketty La Rocca’s poem “Una Bella Idea” was first published in Letteratura 82/83 (1966): 143–5; it was republished in Lucilla Saccà, Ketty La Rocca. I Suoi Scritti (Turin: Martano, 2005), 25–9. 31 Marco Meneguzzo ed., Elio Marchegiani. Homemade Future (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2013), 82–7. 32 Carla Lonzi, Tommaso Trini, and Marisa Volpi, “Elio Marchegiani,” in “Tecniche e Materiali,” special issue of Marcatrè (1968), 71. 33 Elio Marchegiani. Linee di produzione 1957–2007, eds. Carola Pandolfo Marchegiani and Sergio Troisi (Rome: Carte segrete, 2007), 195. 34 Michelangelo Vasta, conversation with author, Florence (Italy), 30 March 2017. 35 Luigi Carluccio, Domenico Gnoli (New York: Overlook Press, 1973), 9. Translation by Berenice Hoffman. 36 Walter Guadagnini, Domenico Gnoli (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2001), 19. I owe much of my interpretation of Gnoli’s work to Guadagnini’s reading. On metaphysical painting, see also: Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Classicismo Pittorico. Metafisica, Valori Plastici, Realismo Magico e “900” (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1991). 37 Bruno Mantura, Domenico Gnoli (1933–70) (Rome: De Luca, 1987), 45. 38 Claire Gilman, “Pistoletto’s staged subjects,” October 124 (spring 2008): 53–74; Carlos Basualdo, ed., Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 39 Bruno Corà, Michelangelo Pistoletto (Ravenna: Essegi, 1986), 78. Translation by the author. Original text: “La Vasca da Bagno, ricavata da fogli di poliuretano rigido, ricoperti di fibroresina, ha la forma interna sagomata a strati secondo la figura umana e in un secondo tempo, nel 1967, essa diviene Bagno-Barca realizzata con stracci, acciaio, lampadine, acqua e sali da bagno blu profumati.” 40 Germano Celant, Interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto (Genoa, 1971), quoted in Germano Celant, Pistoletto (Milan: Fabbri, 1992), 18. Translation by the author. Original text: “Allora mi è venuta l’idea di fare una mostra in cui non mi si riconoscesse come protagonista, come individuo, come figura tipica. Ho pensato che la cosa più bella fosse fare una mostra che avesse l’aspetto di una collettiva, dove non si identificasse una personalità, che in quella maniera sarebbe stata un doppione della mia realtà, ma la mia realtà doveva rimanere unica ed autonoma, ed il resto doveva funzionare secondo la mia volontà, che era l’unica realtà. Ho fatto questa mostra, cercando un sistema da usare affinché ogni oggetto fosse diverso dall’altro.” 41 One notable and recent exception is Anthony George White, “Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Minus Objects,” in The Minus Objects, 1965–66 (Munich, London, New York: Luhring Augustine, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2018), 83–111. 42 Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in Corà, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 76. Translation by the author. Original text: “Li ho chiamati Oggetti in Meno perché secondo me ogni azione che uno fa è una liberazione da una necessità. In questo senso una cosa fatta è una cosa in meno, considerandola energia spesa, uscita, consumata.”

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43 Ugo Nespolo, Buongiorno Michelangelo (1968/9), accessed 5 July 2018, http://www. nespolo.com/eng/cinema-dettaglio.php?id=43. 44 Cialoni, min. 4:57,29. Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 2, Pasqua (?) casa 1961, 1961, 8mm. Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. 45 On Ugo La Pietra see, among others: Martina Tanga, Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art (New York: Routledge, 2019); and Ugo La Pietra, Abitare La Città (Turin: Allemandi, 2011). 46 Bottinelli, “Gianni Pettena and Ugo La Pietra.”

Chapter Four In this chapter, the term “Housekeeping” denotes home-cleaning and laundry. The representation of cooking is examined in chapter 5. 1 Joanne Hollows, Domestic Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 15–33. 2 Luisa Tasca, “The Average Housewife in Post–World War II Italy,” Journal of Women’s History 16.2 (2004), 95. 3 Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 102. 4 De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 98–115. 5 La Donna Fascista 12, 7 July 1942, accessed 9 May 2017, http://www. bibliotecadigitaledelledonne.it/cgi/view?eprintid=452&docid=10099&pos=11. 6 Ibid. 7 Advertisements in La Domenica del Corriere: Vela (29 August 1943); Oxil-Banfi (23 May 1943). 8 Aosta, La Vita in un Villaggio per Sfollati, Film Luce, 24 June 1944, accessed 9 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlo4Gxf6Oxw. 9 Concorso di Idee per la Casa Collettiva, Archivio Storico of the Milan Triennale, (48.5. TRN_08_DT_048_CM). For more detail on this call for ideas, see chapter 1. 10 Tasca, “The Average Housewife,” 96. 11 Ibid., 101. 12 Silvia Federici and Jill Richards, “Every Woman Is a Working Woman,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, 18 December 2018, http://bostonreview.net/print-issues-gender-sexuality/ silvia-federici-jill-richards-every-woman-working-woman. 13 Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective jointly with Falling Wall Press, 1975). 14 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, California: pm Press, 2012), 1. 15 La Scuola Delle Mogli, film, La Settimana Incom, 7 April 1951, accessed 10 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwxgin_yACk. See also Marta Boneschi, Poveri ma Belli. I nostri anni Cinquanta (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 27.

notes to pAges 159–70

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16 In 1947 Guttuso created another painting similar to Lavandaia in composition, colour palette, and style: Renato Guttuso, La grande lavandaia, 1947. Oil on canvas, 102×61.5 cm, accessed 7 January 2020, https://martebenicult.wordpress. com/2019/03/13/nuova-linfa-per-guttuso-allartefiera-di-bologna-2019/. 17 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Introduction,” in Renato Guttuso: Revolutionary Art: Fifty Years from 1968, eds. Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Elena Volpato (Milan: Silvana, 2018), 12. 18 Luciano Caramel, Arte in Italia 1945–60 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1994), 112–15. 19 Adrian Duran, Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2014), 99–118. 20 See, for example, Renato Guttuso, Seamstress, 1947, which is analyzed in Duran, Painting, Politics, 113–14. See also Fabio Carapezza Guttuso and Dora Favatella Lo Cascio, Renato Guttuso. Dal Fronte Nuovo all’autobiografia, 1946–1966 (Bagheria: Falcone, 2003), Figs. 4–20. 21 Maria Casalini, “The Family, Sexual Morality and Gender Identity in the Communist Tradition in Italy (1921–1956),” Modern Italy 18.3 (2013): 229–44. 22 “Arte Contemporanea,” sele arte 6.42 (1959): 28. 23 On this specific painting, see also Bottinelli, “Liminality and In-Betweeness,” 283– 309. Excerpts of the article are included in this chapter. 24 Elena Demartini, “Pratiche Abitative in una Casa Signorile ‘Ma Non di Lusso,’” in Storie di Case, ed. Filippo De Pieri, Bruno Bonomo, Gaia Caramellino, and Federico Zanfi (Rome: Donzelli, 2013), 23–43; 32. 25 According to Jole de Sanna, Fabro displayed Pavimento Tautologia at the Galleria Notizie in Turin in June 1967, a few months before Arte povera – im spazio (1967). See Jole de Sanna, Luciano Fabro, Biografia (Udine: Campanotto, 1996), 36. 26 Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, quoting Carla Lonzi, “Processi di Pensiero Visualizzati,” 1970, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 2005), 101. 27 Martina Corgnati, “Carla Lonzi,” in Artiste della Critica, ed. Maura Pozzati (Mantova: Corraini, 2015), 93–107. 28 Germano Celant, The Knot: Arte Povera at ps1 (New York and Turin: psi and Allemandi, 1985), 33. 29 De Sanna, Luciano Fabro, 36. Adachiara Zevi, Peripezie del Dopoguerra nell’Arte Italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), 290. 30 Marisa Volpi and Saverio Bertone, critical text in de Sanna, Luciano Fabro, 44. 31 Germano Celant, Arte Povera = Art Povera (Milan: Electa, 1985), 141. 32 Among many publications on Modigliani, see Simonetta Fraquelli, Nancy Ireson, Annette King, Sophie Krebs, Cathy Corbett, Emma Lewis, Vincent Gille, Kenneth Wayne, and Marian Cousijn, Modigliani (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2017). 33 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 34 Carla Ravioli, “Prefazione,” in Marchio e Femmina. La Donna inventata dalla Pubblicità, ed. Lamberto Pignotti (Florence: Vallecchi, 1978), 9–20. 35 See Emily Braun, “Men without Women: The Transavanguardia Revisited,” paper

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47

48

49 50

presented at the symposium Post-It: Reconsidering the Post-Modern in Italian Art and Performance (New York: Center for Italian Modern Art, 14 February 2017). Paolo Scrivano, Building Transatlantic Italy Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Lamberto Pignotti, email message to the author, 7 June 2017. On class differences and women’s representation in the media see also Pignotti, Marchio e Femmina, 29. Advertisement of Zoppas appliances published in Domus (1956), reprinted in Kitchens and Invaders, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Electa, 2015), 6. Paul Watzlawick and Lucia Cornalba, Il linguaggio del Cambiamento. Elementi di Comunicazione Terapeutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013), 58. Michelangelo Vasta, conversation with author, Florence (Italy), 30 March 2017. Giuliana Dal Pozzo, Parliamone Insieme. Quindici Anni di Colloqui con le Lettrici di Noi Donne (Rome: Riuniti 1973), 196–7. Casavecchia, “Taci.” Mirella Bentivoglio, ed., Materializzazione del Linguaggio (Venice: La Biennale, 1978). Fonds Carlo Cialoni, bobina 31, Ns/ prima pellicola - casa Ferrovieri, Palazz. (zia Giovanna) nonno, 8mm. Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. Luciano Caramel, Ugo Mulas, and Bruno Munari, Campo urbano. interventi estetici nella dimensione collettiva urbana: Como, 21 settembre 1969 (Como: Nani, 1969); Silvia Bignami, Luciano Caramel, and Enrico Crispolti. Fuori! Arte e spazio urbano, 1968–1976 (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2011); Romy Golan, “Campo Urbano, Como, 1969,” in Exhibiting Architecture. A Paradox? ed. by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Carson Chan, and David Andrew Tasman (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2015), 47–56. Gianni Pettena, L’Anarchitetto: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Architect (Rimini: Guaraldi, 1973), 35–6. Translation by the author. Original text: “Ma campo urbano … mi fece ritrovare una condizione di rabbia insperata incazzata ma insomma come si poteva avere una città dico e farci quello che si vuole no si esponevano le sculturine nella piazza principale del paesello.” While the original text uses no punctuation, I have added some to the translation for clarity. Gianni Pettena and Robert Smithson, “A conversation in Salt Lake City,” Domus 516 (25 January, 1972): 53–4; republished in Emanuele Piccardo and Amit Wolf, Beyond Environment (New York: Actar, 2014), 74. Gianni Pettena, conversation with the author, Fiesole, Florence, 8 July 2014. Contemporaneously with Pettena, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre constructed an analysis of the urban environment grounded in concepts that are very similar to the points expressed by Pettena, even though the two were not aware of each other’s work at the time. I further examine this parallel in Bottinelli, “Crossing the Boundaries of Theory and Practice,” 53–71.

notes to pAges 185–95

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51 Among many recent publications on Superstudio, see: Gabriele Mastrigli and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Superstudio: opere, 1966–1978 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016); Andrew Blauvelt, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2016); Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena, Alberto Salvadori, eds., Radical Utopias: Archizoom, Remo Buti, 9999, Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, ufo, Zziggurat (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017). 52 “Superstudio,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 244. For a more extensive discussion of Superstudio’s films, see Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism.” 53 Martina Tanga, “Artists Refusing to Work: Aesthetic Practices in 1970s Italy,” Palinsesti 1.4 (2015): 35–49. Tanga frames such a refusal within the theory of Autonomia. 54 Aosta, La Vita in un Villaggio per Sfollati, Film Luce, 24 June 1944, accessed 5 June 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlo4Gxf6Oxw.

Chapter Five 1 “La Visita delle Universitarie negli Ospedali agli Infortunati delle Incursioni Aeree,” La Donna Fascista 18 (15 July 1942): 7, accessed 9 June 2017, http://www. bibliotecadigitaledelledonne.it/cgi/view?eprintid=452&docid=10099&pos=6. 2 Forino, La Cucina, 3.13. 3 Diana Garvin, “Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy,” Critical Inquiry 41.3 (2015), 655–74. 4 Biblioteca Salaborsa, “L’autarchia e i surrogati,” accessed 9 June 2017, http://www. bibliotecasalaborsa.it/cronologia/bologna/1936/3734. 5 Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), 4. 6 Diana Garvin, “Autarchic by Design: Aesthetics and Politics of Kitchenware,” in Food and Material Culture, ed. Marc McWilliams (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2014), 11–19. 7 Helstosky, Garlic and Oil, 4. 8 Carol Helstosky, “Fascist Food Politics: Mussolini’s Policy of Alimentary Sovereignty,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9.1 (2004), 16. 9 Sonja Dümpelmann, “La battaglia del fiore: Gardens, Parks and the City in Fascist Italy,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 25.1 (2005), 46. 10 For a more detailed discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, see the Introduction. 11 Various reports for the Concorso Casa Collettiva (1946 and 1947) in preparation for the 8th Triennale in Milan. See, for example, the response of Dr Luca Crispin from Bergamo (48.5. trn_08_dt_048_cm). See also chapter 1.

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12 Mimmetta Lo Monte, Classic Sicilian Cookbook (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 26. I am grateful to Vivien Greene for recommending this book. 13 Dacia Maraini, Bagheria (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993). 14 Giovanna Polo Pericoli, Marta Latis, Luisa De Ruggieri, Dario Baldi, and Giorgio Berti, “Trasformiamo la Nostra Cucina,” Arianna 8.1 (November 1957), 32–43. 15 Diana Dei and Paolo Ferrari, starring in a Cirio tomato sauce advertisement screened during the evening program Carosello (directed by A. Misu, 1957), accessed online 24 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=u0N2k7D-aTg. 16 For a more detailed analysis of Industrial foods and their visual representation postwar Italy, see: Silvia Bottinelli, “Tradition and Modernity: Industrial Food, Women, and Visual Culture in 1950s and 1960s Italy,” Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1.5 (2014): 1–17. 17 Helstosky, “Fascist Food Politics,” 18–19. 18 Lo Monte, Classic Sicilian Cookbook, 191. 19 Renato Guttuso, “Artist Statement,” 1950, quoted in Juan José Gómez Gutiérrez, The pci Artists: Antifascism and Communism in Italian Art, 1944–1951 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), 187. 20 Lara Pucci, “History, Myth, and the Everyday: Luchino Visconti, Renato Guttuso, and the Fishing Communities of the Italian South,” Oxford Art Journal 36.3 (2013): 417–36; Lara Pucci, “Terra Italia: The Peasant Subject as Site of National and Socialist Identities in the Work of Renato Guttuso and Giuseppe De Santis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 71.1 (2008): 315–34. 21 David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 174–5. 22 Cirio: Per la Casa, cookbook (Milan: Domus, 1957). Table IV. 23 Nadia Spano and Fiamma Camarlinghi, La Questione Femminile nella Politica del pci, 1921–1963 (Rome: Ed. Donne e Politica, 1972), 158. 24 Spano and Camarlinghi, La Questione Femminile, 148. 25 While the technology for canning was developed in Paris in 1809, it was not until the aftermath of World War II that canned foods became widely available to Italian consumers. See Simone Cinotto, “The History and Culture of Nutrition from Pre-Industrial Society to the Mechanization of the Modern Era,” in Arts and Foods, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Electa, 2015), 62–76. 26 Among numerous studies and exhibition catalogues on Manzoni, see the recent publication: Flaminio Gualdoni, Peter Benson Miller, and Marguerite Shore, Piero Manzoni: An Artist’s Life (New York: Gagosian, 2019). 27 The critical approach of Manzoni’s work is highlighted by Germano Celant, among others: Germano Celant, ed., Piero Manzoni (Prearo: Milan, 1975), 21. 28 On the supermarket experience after the opening of the first Esselunga in Milan in 1957, see Emanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer’s History of

notes to pAges 208–15

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Modern Italy (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209–22. 29 Jennifer Coffani, “Iconografie del Cibo. Piero Manzoni e la Pubblicità del suo Tempo,” Palinsesti 1.5 (2016), 48, accessed 29 May 2018, http://www.palinsesti.net/ index.php/Palinsesti/article/view/84. 30 On multiples in the Milanese context and in Manzoni’s work specifically, see Jacopo Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne,” Oxford Art Journal 35.1 (2012), 84–5. 31 Angela Vettese, “Piero Manzoni and the Peculiar Origins of Italian Conceptual Art,” in Piero Manzoni: Line Drawings, ed. Alma Ruiz and Angela Vettese (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 33–45; 40. Dario Biagi, Il ribelle gentile. La vera storia di Piero Manzoni (Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa Nuovi Equilibri, 2013), 125. 32 Nicola Martino, Dal Ramo al Piatto. I Miti dell’Ideologia Alimentare (Marcerata: La Nuova Foglio Editrice, 1973), 76–7. I am grateful to Marvin Sackner for sharing this publication with me. 33 Lamberto Pignotti, Omar Calabrese, and Egidio Mucci, Pubbli Città (Florence: clusf Cooperativa Editrice Universitaria, 1974). 34 Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2018), 23–30. 35 Ibid., 24. 36 Lucia Marcucci, Memorie e incanti. Extraitinerario autobiografico (Pasian di Prato, Udine: Campanotto, 2005). See also: Lucilla Saccà, Lucia Marcucci. Poesie Visive 1963–2003 (Florence: Spaziotempo, 2006); Carlo Frittelli, Francesco Galluzzi, and Enrico Ghezzi, Marcucci. Supervisiva (Florence: Frittelli, 2010); Carlo Palli and Laura Monaldi, Catalogo Generale delle Opere di Lucia Marcucci (Verona: Parise, 2013). 37 Rebecca Roberts ed., Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (New York: MoMA, 2010), 62. 38 Domietta Torlasco, Philosophy in the Kitchen, 2014, video accessed 5 June 2018 http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_11/Torlasco_11.html. Torlasco argues that the cyclical and repetitive experience of time in the kitchen is reflected in neorealist film, which does not merely represent time; rather it embodies time. Similar theoretical positions are discussed by Cesare Casarino, “Images for Housework: On the Time of Domestic Labor in Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of the Cinema,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28.3 (2017): 67–92. 39 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). 40 Torlasco, Philosophy in the Kitchen, 04:30. 41 Marisa Merz, “Arist’s statements [1975],” in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999), 255. First published in Anne Marie Sauzeau, “Lo Specchio Ardente,” trans. Gilda Williams, Data 18 (September–October 1975): 50–5.

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42 Teresa Kittler, “Outgrowing the Kitchen; Marisa Merz’s Living Sculpture,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, ed. Connie Butler et al., 229–45. 43 Ibid., 234. 44 Lucia Re, “The Mark on the Wall,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, 37–45. 45 Hugues Wilquin, Atlante dell’alluminio (Turin: utet, 2003). 46 According to the Archivio Merz in Turin, there are no documents that demonstrate Marisa Merz’s interest in comital specifically. Luisa Borio, email messages to the author, 5–6 June 2018. 47 Sergio Conti et al., Le Componenti Strutturali del Sistema Produttivo Canavesano, 70, accessed 5 June 2018, http://www.provincia.torino.gov.it/sviluppolocale/ file-storage/download/pdf/prog_real/politiche/marketing/Rapporto_Canavese_ per_Provincia.pdf. 48 White, “Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Minus Objects,” 86. 49 Ibid., 92. 50 Cialoni, Pavana e Casa Zia Amelia, August 1962. Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 11, Pavana e Casa Zia Amelia agosto 1962, 1962, 8mm. Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. 51 Maria Lai, “Intervista di Francesco Vincitorio a Maria Lai (1987),” in Maria Lai. Olio al Pane e alla Terra il Sogno, Marisa Dalai and Sveva Di Martino, eds. (Milan: Skira, 2019), 157–61; 162. 52 Maria Lai, “Maria Lai Incontra Marisa Dalai all’Università di Roma Tre,” in Dalai and Di Martino, eds., Maria Lai. Olio al Pane, 187–93; 187. 53 Wall text of Maria Lai, Bread Encyclopedia (2008), 57th Venice Biennale. 54 Maria Dalai, “L’Arte Diventa Pane, Olio, Parole,” in Dalai and Di Martino, eds., Maria Lai. Olio al Pane, 49–66; 50. 55 Elena Pontiggia, Maria Lai: Art and Connection (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2017), 127. 56 Emanuela De Cecco, Maria Lai. Da Vicino, Vicinissimo, Da Lontano, in Assenza (Milan: Postmedia, 2015), 23. 57 Mirella Bentivoglio, I Pani di Maria Lai (Savona: Il Brandale, 1977), 1–6. 58 Thorsten Schüller, “An Interplay Game of Otherness and Identity: The Ghost of Cannibalism in the European and Brazilian Avant-Gardes,” in Celant, ed., Arts and Foods, 386–94; 394. 59 Maria Lai, quoted in Pontiggia, Maria Lai, 135. 60 Dalai, “L’Arte Diventa Pane,” 57–8. 61 Ibid. 62 Roberts, Counter Space, 77. 63 See chapter 2. 64 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia, Manifesto della Cucina Futurista, 1932. Testo Restaurato (Milan: Sonsogno, 2018), 12–13. 65 “Nanni Balestrini,” Artforum, 20 May 2019, accessed 9 January 2020, https://www. artforum.com/news/nanni-balestrini-1935-2019-79864. On Autonomia, see Patrick Cuninghame, “Autonomia in the 1970s: The Refusal of Work, the Party and Power,”

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Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 77–94. 66 The diverse and sometimes cryptic body of work of Gianfranco Baruchello eludes summary; however, a recent retrospective exhibition has offered an overview of his poetics and practice: Gianfranco Maraniello, Gianfranco Baruchello (Rovereto: Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2018). 67 Nanni Balestrini, Ballate della Signorina Richmond. Primo Libro. Commento Visivo di Gianfranco Baruchello (Rome: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1977), 20. The original Italian text reads: Istruzioni per l’uso pratico della signorina Richmond / Nettatela squamatela infilatele nel ventre / Le erbe odorose fissatela alla spiedo / Con un sottile filo metallico o con uno spago / Umido grigliatela alla carbonella accesa. Translation by the author. 68 Renato Barilli, “Povera, Indifesa Signorina Richmond. Dal Corriere della Sera,” accessed 6 June 2018, http://www.nannibalestrini.info/dai-giornali/barilli/. 69 Umberto Eco, “Stele per Balestrini,” in Paolo Fabbri et al., Nanni Balestrini. Con gli occhi del linguaggio (Milan: Fondazione Mudima 2006), 32–3. 70 Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin, How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art, Agriculture and Creativity (New York: Bantam New Age Books, 1985), 12. 71 Sara Catenacci, “Recipes for Solo Sailors: Gianfranco Baruchello and the Agricola Cornelia S.P.A., 1973–81,” Public Art Dialogue 8.1 (2018): 72–97; 75–6. 72 “Comune Agricola,” Controcultura 24 (1978). 73 La Rivoluzione Non è una Cosa Seria, directed by Marilena Moretti, was released in 2006. 74 Gian Piero Frassinelli, conversation with author, Peretola (Florence), 22 July 2018. 75 Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo, Global Tools 1973–75 (Salt: Istanbul, 2015), 24. 76 Franceschini and Borgonuovo, Global Tools, 26. 77 Gabriele Mastrigli, Superstudio. Opere 1966–1978 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016), 564–74. The title La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience) mirrored the title of Italian author Italo Svevo’s novel first published in 1923.

Chapter Six 1 Franco Monteleone, Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 2003). 2 Among numerous scholarly studies and curatorial publications on Lucio Fontana, see: Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (Cambridge: mit Press, 2014), and Enrico Crispolti, Barbara Ferriani, Vicente Todolí, and Marina Pugliese, Lucio Fontana. Ambienti/Environments (Milan: Mousse, 2018). 3 Luigi Moretti, “Arte e Televisione,” Spazio 7 (1952), 74. Reproduced in Anthony White, “tv or Not tv: Lucio Fontana’s Luminous Images in Movement,” Grey Room 34 (2008): 6–27. See also Giorgio Zanchetti, “‘Un futuro c’è stato…’: Anacronismo e suggestioni iconografiche,” in Fontana, L’Uomo Nero 1 (2003): 95–6. 4 White, “tv or Not tv,” 8.

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notes to pAges 234–4 4

5 Valentina La Salvia, “L’Esercizio della Cultura come Responsabilità Sociale,” Predella 28 (2010), accessed 8 August 2018, http://www.predella.it/archivio/indexc3c1. html?option=com_content&view=article&id=112&catid=60&Itemid=88. 6 Andrea Mugnai, L’Approdo: la grande cultura alla radio (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996). 7 For more detail, see my presentation titled “Cultivating Italian Public and Counterpublic Spheres after Fascism: Art Journals and Radio Programs” (Manchester: Association of Art Historians Conference, 2010). 8 Damiano Garofalo, Political Audiences: A Reception History of Early Italian Television (Milan: Italian Frame Mimesis International, 2016). 9 Silvia Bordini, Videoarte e Arte. Tracce per una Storia (Rome: Lythos, 1995), 1–4. 10 Cecilia Penati, Il Focolare Elettronico. Televisione Italiana delle Origini e Culture di Visione (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2013), 5–7. 11 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books 1975), 19–31. 12 Williams, Television, 23. 13 Eduardo Novelli, Dalla TV di Partito al Partito della TV. Televisione e politica in Italia, 1960–1995 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995), 224–37. 14 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life [1958], trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 42. 15 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Italian edition: Marshall McLuhan, Gli Strumenti del Comunicare (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1967). 16 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, introduction by Lewis Laphan (Cambridge: mit Press, 1994), 312–13. 17 “L’Audace Colpo del Solito Ignoto,” Il Mito di Carosello, accessed 8 August 2018, https://carosello.tv/serie/laudace-colpo-del-solito-ignoto/il-sordo/. 18 Andrea Bini, Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film: Comedy Italian Style (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 99. 19 Marco Giusti, Il Grande Libro di Carosello … e Adesso Tutti a Nanna (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 1995), 432. The episode discussed here is part of a series directed by Nanni Loy to advertise Philco Products. The commercials were broadcast between 1963 and 1965. 20 Bini, Male Anxiety, 99. Bini’s commentary refers to a refrigerator advertisement, part of Loy’s series for Philco. 21 Penati, Il Focolare Elettronico, 32. 22 Elena Demartini, “Una Casa Signorile ma Non Di Lusso,” in Storie di Case. Abitare l’Italia del Boom, ed. Filippo de Pieri et al. (Rome: Donzelli, 2013), 36. 23 This narrative is repeated by countless novels, films, photographs, documentaries, and oral sources. Among them, I can include my own family’s stories told by Lidia Radi, Alfredo Bottinelli, Claudio Bottinelli, Gina Corvino, Livadia Penzo, and Mario Puppin.

notes to pAges 246–9

309

24 Penati, Il Focolare Elettronico, 129. 25 See for example: Cialoni, min. 5.57,25, Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 2, Pasqua casa 1961, 1961, 8mm; Cialoni, min. 30:37,02, Fonds Carlo Cialoni, reel 24, 1963 8 Settembre Autunno e mare 1963, 1963, 8mm; 08_VARIE-mov per produzioni min. 01:05,15, Fonds Donà Enno, reel 3, La mia famiglia a colori, no date, 8mm; 08_ VARIE-mov per produzioni min. 4:30,03, Fonds Donà Enno, reel 20, Senza Titolo, no date, 8mm; 08_VARIE-mov per produzioni min. 8:48,21, Fonds Maria Tiopia, reel 2, 2° Settembre 1970 – Svizzera – Germania – Olanda – Belgio – Italia, 1970, super8; Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna. 26 Franco Ferrarotti, TV e Costume in Italia (Rome: Eri, 1968), 153. 27 Francesco Galluzzi, Pasolini e la Pittura (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 119. 28 Luca Caminati, “Filming Decolonization: Pasolini’s Geopolitical Afterlife,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Framed and Unframed, eds. Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 63–77; 73. On Mauri’s 1970s performance, see also Valérie Da Costa, Fabio Mauri: The Past in Acts (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2018). 29 For a more detailed discussion of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, see the Introduction. 30 Martin Herzer, The Media, European Integration and the Rise of Euro-Journalism, 1950s–1970s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 120. “There were one million televisions in Italy by 1958, and by 1965 half of Italian families owned a television.” 31 Francesca Cadel, Il Linguaggio dei Desideri. Il Dialetto Secondo Pasolini (Lecce: Manni, 2002), 163. 32 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Nello Schermo. Insonnia per diverse forme contrarie di universo,” in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni 1954–1994, eds. Christov Bakargiev and Marcella Cossu (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 19–31; 20. 33 Ibid., 21. 34 Chiara Mari, “L’Arte Contemporanea in Televisione. Lo Schermo Rai tra ‘Spazio Astratto’ e ‘Spazio Simbolico,’” in Nascita di una Nazione. Tra Guttuso, Fontana e Schifano, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero (Venice: Marsilio, 2018), 109–19. 35 Achille Bonito Oliva, “Ceroli Archipittore,” in Ceroli, eds. Adele Aloisi, Loreto Soro, and Antonio Calbi (Milan: Fabbri 1994): 7–16; 13. 36 Mauro Pratesi and Giovanni Uzzani, La Toscana (Marsilio: Venice, 1991), 280. 37 Ibid., 303. 38 Giovanna Uzzani, “Contemporaneamente. Le Arti Visive nella Seconda Metà del Novecento,” in Motivi e Figure dell’Arte Toscana del XX secolo, ed. Carlo Sisi (Pisa: Pacini, 2000), 274–318; 279. 39 For a detailed historiography of Schifano’s early career, see Giorgia Gastaldon, “La pittura di Mario Schifano (1958–1964)” (doctoral dissertation, Università degli Studi di Udine, 2014). 40 Roberto Ostensi quoted in Luca Ronchi, Mario Schifano. Una Biografia (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2012), 139, 141. 41 Claire Gilman, “Mario Schifano Beyond the Monochrome,” in Mario Schifano 1960–67 (New York: Luxembourg & Dayan, 2014), 5–9.

310

notes to pAges 250–7

42 Alberto Boatto, “In Clausura,” in Mario Schifano, Tutto (Rome: macro, 2001), 188–90. Cited by Martina Corgnati, “Mario Schifano Live,” trans. Michael Haggerty in Mario Schifano in Diretta, ed. Eduardo Secci (Milan: Skira, 2010): 11–15; 11. 43 Ibid. 44 Penati, Il Focolare Elettronico, 107–31. 45 Corgnati, “Mario Schifano Live,” 13. 46 Fabrizio D’Amico, Oltre l’Impressionismo. Le Radici del Moderno (Conegliano: Linea d’ombra libri, 2001), 90. 47 Among numerous analyses of Rauschenberg’s reception at the Venice Biennale, see Christopher Bennett, “Gleaning Italian Pop, 1960–66: The 1964 Venice Biennale, Renato Mambor’s ‘Thread’, and Pop as a Global Phenomenon,” in Postwar Italian Art History, eds. Hecker and Sullivan, 113–33. See also Silvia Bottinelli, “Pragmatic, Pioneering, and Excessive: The Reception of American Art in Italy,” in Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, eds. Claudia Hopkins and Iain Boyd Whyte (London– New York: Routledge, 2020), 129–51. 48 Bennett, “Gleaning Italian Pop,” 114. 49 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1, 2. 50 Silvia Lucchesi, Cinema d’artista: Toscana: 1964–1980 (Prato: Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 2005), 53. Gianni Pettena’s The Pig. Carosello Italiano is available online: https://vimeo.com/119439243. 51 Gianni Pettena and Chiara Costa, “Applause, the Curtains are Raised,” in TV70. Vezzoli Guarda la TV, ed. Chiara Costa (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2017): 165–78; 176. 52 Pettena and Costa, “Applause,” 175. 53 Ibid., 175. 54 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni Del Carcere Vol. III, 2118–19. Folklore is a theme addressed throughout the Prison Notebooks and is discussed in greater detail in the Introduction. 55 Umberto Eco, Il Pubblico fa Male alla Televisione? (typescript document). I am grateful to Giovanna Lipari who allowed me to view this file at the Biblioteca Rai Teulada, Comunicazioni di Massa, Rome, 28 March 2017. 56 Fabio Mauri in “Il Televisore che Piange,” screened during the rai tv program Happening, by Pasquito del Bosco and Enrico Rossetti, accessed 16 August 2018, https://vimeo.com/58984747. Translation by the author. Original text: “La parte dell’happening che non possiamo registrar ma più collettiva e più clamorosa è la vostra, di voi che siete a pochi centimetric dallo schermo, e tutti i vostri gesti e le vostre frasi nell’accendere un televisore…non vedere…non riuscendo a produrre immagini, queste fanno parte dell’happening.” See also: Carolyn Christov Bakargiev and Marcella Cossu, Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni 1954–1994 (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 136–7.

notes to pAges 259–68

311

57 Cage had participated in the infamous program Lascia o Raddoppia in 1959. See Stefano Pocci, “John Cage at Lascia o Raddoppia? (Milan, 1959),” John Cage in Italy, accessed 16 August 2018, http://www.johncage.it/en/1959-lascia-oraddoppia.html. 58 Marco Senaldi, “Television and Art,” in Costa, TV70, 263–8; 68. 59 Chiara Mari, “Arte e Televisione negli anni Settanta. Un esempio di intervento negli Spazi di Innovazione Scolastica della Rai. L’Happening di Fabio Mauri Il Televisore che Piange,” in Arte Fuori dall’Arte. Incontri e Scambi tra TV e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia, 2017), 251–9. 60 Mirella Bentivoglio, Azione AntiTV, critical text published in the exhibition flyer (Savona: Galleria il Brandale, 2–15 December 1978). I viewed this document in the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami in July 2016; the archive has been recently acquired by the Univeristy of Iowa Libraries. Many thanks to Marvin Sackner for giving me access to his collections. 61 The original poem reads: “Signore / Fammi diventare un televisore / Così Mamma e Papà mi Guardano la Sera.” Translation by the author. 62 Nicole Sauvage, Televisione e Famiglia (Rome: Armando Editore, 1973), 15–16. Translation by the author. Original text: “Niente televisore neanche nelle immediate vicinanze dei bambini che stanno dormendo. Se la camera dei bambini è attigua alla stanza dov’è il televisore e la parete è sottile, il rumore della trasmissione li disturberà, impedirà loro di addormentarsi. Cercheranno di indovinare lo svolgimento della trasmissione o del film, immaginando malamente le immagini che on possono vedere.” 63 Chiara Saraceno, Anatomia della Famiglia. Strutture Sociali e Forme Familiari (Bari: De Donato, 1976), 113–37. 64 Raffaella Perna, “Si Dice Donna: Italian Feminism in 1970s Art and Television,” in TV70, ed. Costa, 351–66. See also Loredana Cornero, La Tigre e il Violino: “Si dice donna”: un Programma di Tilde Capomazza (Rai Eri, 2012). 65 Ibid., 364. Translation by the author. Original text: “Ora, la televisione che introduce ‘una dimensione cittadina nel casolare di un contadino o nel circolo di un villaggio nel Meridione, crea il ‘bisogno,’ quel bisogno che è alla base della cultura di massa: la felicità privata da raggiungere nel presente.” 66 Ferrarotti, TV e Costume in Italia, 151–2.

Conclusion 1 Greek historian Thucydides (ca 460–ca 400 bce) was the first Western thinker to see the study of history as a tool for navigating returns of past scenarios, returns which, for Thucydides, were made possible by the supposed consistent essence of human nature. In modern times, Gianbattista Vico (1668–1744) understood human nature as multiform and believed that different societies had

312

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2

3 4

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

different goals and questions, and that history thus did not repeat itself in rigid ways. I am grateful to historian Cristina Carusi for her advice on this topic. See for example G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Hollows, Domestic Cultures, 95–114. Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, “Italy Orders Total Lockdown Over Coronavirus. Measures First Implemented in the North Extended to Whole Country,” Politico, 10 March 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/ italy-orders-total-lockdown-over-coronavirus/. Emanuela Barbiroglio, “Italy Working Remotely During Lockdown Gets a Preview of the Future of Energy,” Forbes, 27 March 2020, https://www.forbes. com/sites/emanuelabarbiroglio/2020/03/27/italy-working-remotely-duringlockdown-get-a-preview-of-the-future-of-energy/#2bc1925f21a9. Ibid. David Wachsmuth and Alexander Weisler, “Airbnb and the Rent Gap: Gentrification through the Sharing Economy,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50.6 (2018): 1147–70; 1154. Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in TwentiethCentury London (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Andrew Gorman Murray and Matt Cook eds., Queering the Interior (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). ansa Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata, “Violenza sulle Donne. In Italia Vittime Almeno 1 Volta Nella Vita Sono Oltre 6 Milioni,” 23 November 2019, accessed 6 January 2020http://www.ansa.it/canale_lifestyle/notizie/ societa_diritti/2019/11/22/violenza-sulle-donne-in-italia-vittime-almeno-1-voltanella-vita-sono-oltre-6-milioni_b3a3545a-4149-4450-85de-2154291179ff.html. Giovanna Parmigiani, Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy: “We Are Witnesses, Not Victims” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 9–17. Censis Centro Studi Investimenti Sociali, “Donne: lontane dagli uomini e lontane dall’Europa, il gender gap nel lavoro,” 21 November 2019, accessed 6 January 2020, http://www.censis.it/sicurezza-e-cittadinanza/donne-lontanedagli-uomini-e-lontane-dall%E2%80%99europa-il-gender-gap-nel-lavoro. See, among many publications on Severini: Simonetta Fraquelli and Christopher Green, Gino Severini: From Futurism to Classicism (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999). Recent studies of Severini’s Maternity coincided with an exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Florence: Lino Mannocci and Sergio Risaliti, Solo: Gino Severini (Florence: Polistampa, 2019). “Reddito alle Madri,” Forza Nuova, accessed 6 January 2020, http://www.

notes to pAges 275–8

313

15

16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

forzanuova.eu/reddito-alle-madri/. Translation by the author. Original text: “l’alto tasso di natalità degli immigrati costituisce una seria minaccia alla stessa sopravvivenza del popolo italiano … La famiglia, elemento primo e cardine della società, va quindi sostenuta e privilegiata, il lavoro della donna entro le mura domestiche incentivato.” Davenne Essif, “La Mère Moderne: Representations of Motherhood in French Visual Culture, 1910–1940” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018), 46. Proquest. Daniela Bandelli, Femicide, Gender and Violence: Discourses and Counterdiscourses in Italy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Roberta Pasquetto, “La Grande guerra, la spagnola... mamma, ce la faremo anche stavolta,” Il Corriere della Sera, 30 March 2020, https://www.corriere. it/noi-stiamo-casa-contributi-lettori-in-quarantena-coronavirus/notizie/ grande-guerra-spagnola-mamma-ce-faremo-anche-stavolta-b897b720-71a2-11eab6ca-dd4d8a93db33.shtml?refresh_ce-cp; see also Maria Martello, “Coronavirus, quarantena in famiglia: tempo e voglia di litigare? Sembra di sì,” Affari Italiani, 8 April 2020, https://www.affaritaliani.it/costume/tempo-voglia-di-litigare-infamiglia-sembra-di-si-664894.html. Vanessa Thorpe, “Balcony Singing in Solidarity Spreads across Italy during Lockdown: More Apartment Building Residents Sing or Play Instruments to Boost Morale,” The Guardian, 14 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ mar/14/solidarity-balcony-singing-spreads-across-italy-during-lockdown. Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, L’Italia in Opera (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2011), 38. Ibid., 43. “Refugees bring Italian village back to life,” Deutsche Welle, accessed 8 January 2020, https://m.dw.com/en/refugees-bring-italian-village-back-to-life/g-38586050. On Sant’Alessio’s experiment, see also: Giorgio Neri, “Il Paese in Calabria che si Ripopola Grazie ai Migranti,” ansa, 19 April 2017, accessed 6 January 2020, http://www.ansa.it/calabria/notizie/2017/04/18/paese-si-ripopola-grazie-migranti_ b8494a6c-6159-4e89-a769-88600e04aa8a.html. Laura Ferguson, “Crossing Borders with Art,” Tufts Now, 27 September 2018, accessed 9 January 2020, https://now.tufts.edu/articles/crossing-borders-art. Jeannie Simms, Under the Sun, curated by Martina Tanga (Boston City Hall, 20 August–5 October 2018). See also Jeannie Simms, “Under the Sun,” accessed 6 January 2020, https://jeanniesimms.com/2019/04/10/under-the-sun/. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London New York: Routledge, 2004). Igiaba Scego, La Mia Casa è Dove Sono (Milan: rcs Libri, 2010). Ibid., 96–103. See, for example, Ruth Erickson and Eva Respini, eds., When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019).

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notes to pAges 278–82

INDeX

Abate, Claudio, 120 abstract art, 56, 114, 172; abstraction, 68, 85, 93, 114, 127, 172, 260; abstractionism, 244 Accardi, Carla, 56, 68–71, 118, 122–7, 298n91 Adami, Valerio, 13, 115–17, 127 Afghan, 280 Afro, 31, 83 Albertarelli, Sante, 23 Albini, Franco, 134 anthropophagia, 230 appliances, 48, 169, 176, 185–9, 191, 197, 200, 208–9, 240 Apulia, 277. See also southern Italy Archizoom, 72, 255, 304n51 Ardessi, Ada, 90–1 area bombings, 19, 21, 23, 27, 31, 77, 167, 199, 202; ruins, 19, 21, 27, 29, 31, 35, 46, 77, 238, 285n12 arte informale, 40, 114; art informel, 257 arte povera, 13–14, 56, 71–2, 105, 109, 112, 120–7, 157, 177, 224–5, 254, 291n112, 297n84, 302n25 autarchy, 200–4, 240 Autonomia, 234, 304n53, 307n65 Bachelard, Gaston, 4, 11–12, 29, 38, 97, 113 Bacon, Francis, 117

Baj, Enrico, 100 Balestrini, Nanni, 231, 234, 235, 308n67 Banotti, Elvira, 56, 68 Banti, Anna, 55 Bardot, Brigitte, 99 Barilli, Renato, 234 Barrow, Karamo, 280 Barthes, Roland, 218 Baruchello, Gianfranco, 15, 234–7, 240, 308n66 Basaldella, Afro. See Afro bathroom, 13–15, 88, 131, 133–4, 137–41, 143, 147, 150, 159, 176; bathing, 13–14, 33, 130–3, 141–4, 163; body care, 13–14, 51, 128, 130–7, 141–4, 150, 163, 235 Baudrillard, Jean, 260 bed, 13, 63, 82–5, 88, 91, 93–103, 105–11, 117–22, 125–7, 157, 181; bedroom, 12–15, 60, 78, 88, 91, 102, 112–18, 120–7 Bega, Melchiorre, 134 Belli, Carlo, 85 Beltrame, Achille, 23–7 Bentivoglio, Mirella, 14, 15, 187, 189–91, 199–200, 230, 269–72, 312n60 Bertini, Gianni, 100, 151 Bertolino, Giorgina, 81, 292n2 Bertozzi, Marco, 34, 286n21 Bhabha, Homi, 281 Binga, Tomaso, 56, 63–7, 68

Bologna, 65, 105, 143, 151, 159, 191, 227, 250. See also gallery Bonito Oliva, Achille, 60 boom. See economic boom Bourdieu, Pierre, 8–12, 60, 150, 205, 275; habitus, 8, 9, 11, 14, 33–4, 60, 102, 150, 170, 179, 205, 221, 237, 244, 264 Braun, Emily, 114, 137, 141 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 115 Buenos Aires, 244 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 99 Burri, Alberto, 93, 114, 127 Calabria, 279, 314n21; Aspromonte, 279–80. See also southern Italy Calandra, Giovanna, 60–3 Calzolari, Pier Paolo, 13, 105–9 Cambosu, Salvatore, 230 Campania. See Naples Ca’ Pesaro, 81 Capomazza, Tilde, 270, 312n64 Caramel, Luciano, 193 Carluccio, Luigi, 154 Carosello, 209, 248–9, 263, 272, 305n15, 309nn17, 19 Carrà, Raffaella, 270 Casavecchia, Barbara, 56, 65 Casorati, Felice, 13, 81–3, 88, 127, 292n2 Castellani, Enrico, 215, 253 Castelli, Leo, 225 Cattelan, Maurizio, 279 Celant, Germano, 71, 75, 82, 109, 177–9 Ceroli, Mario, 253–4, 272 Cézanne, Paul, 173 children, 12, 23, 33, 34, 38, 39, 49, 76, 91, 93, 131, 150, 167, 168, 173, 175, 202, 204, 219, 222, 230, 239, 269, 270, 277, 278, 280; childhood, 9, 14, 33, 46, 60, 177, 213, 228 Christian Democrats, 14, 40, 211, 249, 263, 272

316

Inde x

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 72, 105, 172, 177, 253 church buildings, 33–4, 37, 64, 77, 167, 193; the Catholic Church, 38, 100, 102, 167, 211, 249 Cinecittà, 33, 34, 257, 286n21 Cinegiornale Luce, 196 Collobi Ragghianti, Licia, 246 colonialism, 240, 281 Comedy Italian Style (Commedia all’Italiana), 248 Comencini, Luigi, 21–2 commune, 238–9 communism, 213, 238. See also Italian Communist Party Comontism, 238 conviviality, 227 Corà, Bruno, 157 Corgnati, Martina, 259 counterculture, 12, 55; countercultural, 76, 112, 164, 200, 237–8. See also hippie Cozzi, Leslie, 68, 122 Cubism, 83, 117 D’Amico, Fabrizio, 83 dc Democrazia Cristiana. See Christian Democrats de Beauvoir, Simone, 55 de Chirico, Giorgio, 95, 117 Degas, Edward, 138 de Grazia, Victoria, 166 Dei, Diana, 209 Deleuze, Gilles, 221 Depero, Fortunato, 85 de Sanna, Jole, 85, 179 détournement, 107, 159, 264 di Fiore, Gerardo, 118 dining room, 12, 205–7; kitchen, 10, 12, 15, 131, 159, 185, 187–91, 204–9, 211, 217–19, 221–5, 228, 231–4, 241 divorce, 55, 102; Fortuna Basilini Law, 102

Dordi, Loredana, 270 Dorfles, Gillo, 67 Drammeh, Mola Modoulamin, 280 Duchamp, Marcel, 158, 234 Eco, Umberto, 234, 264 economic boom, 48; economic miracle, 13, 39, 51, 55, 131, 133, 147, 154, 208, 240, 244, 251 emigration. See migration Emilia Romagna. See Bologna eros, 117, 120 Esposito, Bruna, 279 existential, 45, 117; existentialist, 144 Fabro, Luciano, 14, 72, 177–82, 200 Fagiolo, Maurizio, 125, 293n12, 300n36 family, 8–9, 12–14, 22, 37–9, 48–9, 60, 64, 67, 72, 76–7, 93, 100–3, 118, 127, 130, 141, 147, 150, 159, 163–4, 166, 169–72, 184, 187, 191, 199, 204, 207–11, 213, 214, 227, 231, 239, 248–50, 264, 269–72, 277–81, 309n23 Fanfani, Amilcare, 40, 286n34 Fattori, Giovanni, 173 Federici, Silvia, 169, 301n12 feminism, 55–6, 122, 179, 270 femminicidio, 277 Ferrante, Elena, 48, 115 Ferrari, Paolo, 209 Festa, Tano 40, 51–2. See also Scuola di Piazza del Popolo figurative art, 45, 95, 147, 153, 214; figuration, 85 Fillia (Luigi Colombo), 232 Film Luce, 33, 167, 199 Fioroni, Giosetta, 13, 56, 60–3, 117, 127 Fontana, Lucio, 244–7, 253, 308n2, 310n2 food, 9, 15, 48, 51, 114, 200, 204–19, 221, 224, 227–8, 230–2, 235, 238–41, 251, 304n, 305n, 306n, 307n; barley, 237;

bread, 15, 208, 211, 227–31, 237; cake, 207; canned foods, 15, 208–9, 214, 215–21, 232; cheese, 141, 218–19; corn, 237; meat, 15, 131, 208, 217–18, 232, 235; pasta, 208, 211, 238; peas, 222; soup, 214; tomato, 15, 209, 213; wheat, 205, 237 fotoromanzo, 72 France, 31, 97, 138, 278, 283n; Paris, 51, 83, 137, 138, 151, 157, 182, 184, 278 Friedan, Betty, 55 futurism, 278, 313n13 gallery, 40, 46, 63, 105, 111, 118, 120, 125, 173, 179, 215, 225, 230, 240, 250; Azimut, 215; Cooperativa Beato Angelico (Rome), 68, 236; exhibition space, 224; Galleria Appia Antica, 95; Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna (Bologna), 250; Galleria Del Centro (Imola), 230; Galleria Editalia, 122–5; Galleria Faber (Turin), 118; Il Brandale (Savona), 269, 271; La Bertesca (Genoa), 117; L’Attico (Rome), 111, 120; L’Aureliana (Rome), 250; La Salita (Rome), 40; Libreria delle Donne (Milan), 189; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 114, 258; Sonnabend (Paris), 256 Gambia, 280 Gardella, Ignazio, 134 Garvin, Diana, 204 Gelmetti, Vittorio, 263, 264 Gentilini, Franco, 45 Ghana, 280 Gilman, Claire, 60, 257 Ginzburg, Natalia, 19, 38, 130 Giorgione, 99 Giorni, Massimiliano, 105 Global Tools, 15, 75, 197, 238, 239, 240, 241

Inde x

317

Gnoli, Domenico, 14, 96–7, 127, 153–5, 163 Gobetti, Piero, 81 Golan, Romy, 60 Gramsci, Antonio, 6–8, 11, 22, 251; hegemony, 6–9, 11 Gruppo 70, 57, 103, 151, 182, 218, 289n76. See also poesia visiva Gruppo 9999 (Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi and Paolo Galli), 239 Gruppo Strum (Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Carlo Gianmarco, Riccardo Rosso, and Maurizio Vogliazzo), 72, 75 Guadagnini, Walter, 95, 154 Gutai Group, 253 Guttuso, Renato, 14, 15, 45, 144–6, 170–2, 200, 213–15, 263, 302n16 hegemony, 6–9, 11. See also Gramsci, Antonio Helstosky, Carol, 204, 211 Hess, Guido, 82 hippie, 76, 197, 199, 237 Hollows, Joanne, 5, 49, 103, 107, 276 homeless, 31; homelessness, 29, 39, 72 home movies, 6, 15, 143, 159, 191, 227, 250, 310n25 housewife, 59, 166, 170, 176, 179, 182–5, 187, 191, 209, 214 housework (cleaning; cleaning products; cooking; dishwashing; folding sheets; laundry), 14, 15, 57, 164, 165–70, 176, 182, 195, 200, 209, 222, 276, 306n38 immigration. See migration ina-Casa, 39–40 India, 76, 155 Innocente, Ettore, 98, 99, 127 Italian Communist Party, 14, 144, 168, 170–3, 200, 213–15, 237, 263

318

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Italiens de Paris, 278 Jones, Grace, 271 Kessler twins, 270 kitchen. See dining room Kittler, Teresa, 68, 224 Klimt, Gustav, 81 Kline, Franz, 93 Kounellis, Jannis, 13, 105, 109–12, 127 Kurdish Iraqi, 280 Lai, Maria, 15, 227–30, 240–1 Lam, Wifredo, 117 Lancioni, Daniela, 95 La Pietra, Ugo, 72, 159, 162–3, 195 La Rocca, Ketty, 56–9, 118, 120–2, 127, 150–3, 163, 185–9, 200, 289n76 Lear, Amanda, 271 Lefebvre, Henri, 9–12, 151, 157, 193, 225, 228, 247–8, 275; appropriation, 10–11, 16, 91, 162 Levasti, Fillide, 14, 43–4, 173, 287nn42, 45 Libya, 33 Liguria, 215; Albisola, 215; Genoa, 177; Savona 230, 269. See also gallery Lo Monte, Mimmetta, 213 Longhi, Roberto, 56, 137, 246, 250 Lonzi, Carla, 56, 68, 177, 179, 246, 289n72 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 43–5 Lo Savio, Francesco, 40 Mabor, Renato, 93 Mafai, Mario, 28–9, 31, 45, 83, 137 magazines, 6, 13, 14, 35, 39, 49, 57, 88, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103, 109, 127, 133, 163, 166–70, 175, 176, 185, 187, 208, 218, 237, 250, 259; Amica, 91, 176; Arianna, 89, 91, 208, 210; Casabella, 188; Casa e Lavoro, 167; Documento Sud, 100; Domus, 13, 91, 133–6, 138, 149, 150;

Famiglia Cristiana, 38, n286; Fasci Femminili, 167; Grand Hôtel, 205–7, 209; Grazia, 13, 88, 91, 138, 176, 299n31; La Domenica del Corriere, 22–6, 27, 30, 31, 39, 103, 147, 148, 176; La Donna Fascista, 167, 203; L’Approdo, 246; Letteratura, 151, 171; Linea Sud, 100, 294n41; Metron, 35; Noi Donne, 189; Oggi, 176; Quadrante, 35; sele arte, 173; Spazio, 177, 244, 245, 308n3; Urbanistica, 35 magical realism (realismo magico), 154 make-up, 57, 150–3, 189 Mali, 280 Maloberti, Marcello, 279 Manfredi, Nino, 248–9, 272 Manifattura Pozzi, 134, 138, 141 Manzoni, Piero, 15, 215–17, 240, 305nn26–8, 306nn30–1 Maraini, Antonio, 83 Maraini, Dacia, 208 Marchegiani, Elio, 14, 150–2, 163 Marchiori, Giuseppe, 82 Marcucci, Lucia, 15, 215, 218–20, 240 Marinetti, Tommaso, 232 Martini, Arturo, 85, 227–8 Marshall Plan, 39, 127, 208 Martin, Henry, 235 Martini, Arturo, 85, 227, 228 Martini, Stelio Maria, 100, 101, 127, 231–2, 294n40 Martino, Nicola, 217 Matisse, Henri, 82, 117, 182 Mattioli, Paola, 59 Mauri, Fabio, 15, 250–3, 266–8, 272, 311n56 Maurizi, Elvenio, 67 Mazzoleni, Libera, 63 McLuhan, Marshall, 248, 253 Melotti, Fausto, 13, 81, 85–7, 88, 127 memory/memories, 4, 6, 12, 14, 21, 27,

29, 34, 35, 37, 48, 60, 64, 72, 87, 95, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 147, 167, 175, 177, 200, 227, 228, 251, 275, 281, 282 Meneguzzo, Marco, 40, 42 Menna, Bianca. See Binga, Tomaso Menna, Filiberto, 42, 63, 64 Merz, Mario, 71–3 Merz, Marisa, 118, 120, 127, 221–4, 225, 240, 297n84 metafisica, 27, 65; metaphysics, 65 Michelangelo. See Buonarroti, Michelangelo migration, 280, 282; emigration, 280; immigration, 279, 280, 281 Milan, 22, 27, 35, 72, 75, 82, 85, 151, 159, 163, 167, 168, 175, 189, 195, 207, 215, 244 Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini), 270 Mocellin, Ottonella, 279 modernity, 5, 14, 42, 48, 77, 175, 205, 208, 211, 213, 214, 221, 224, 240, 254; modern, 11, 14, 27, 34, 35, 37, 42, 45, 48, 55, 59, 68, 71, 77, 85, 88, 95, 97, 102, 103, 109, 130, 133, 141, 159, 175, 176, 184, 209, 217, 218, 219, 221, 224, 231, 237, 254, 257, 276, 282 Modigliani, Amedeo, 182–5 Molino, Walter, 23, 26–9, 39, 147–8, 150, 176, 205–6 Mondrian, Piet, 93 Monet, Claude, 259 Monicelli, Mario, 249 Morante, Elsa, 112–13 Moravia, Alberto, 95 Moretti, Luigi, 238, 244–5 Moretti, Marilena, 237, 292n106 Morocco, 76 Mulas, Ugo, 193 Munari, Bruno, 91–3, 193 Naldoni, Agnese, 237 Naples, 48, 75, 100, 102. See also southern Italy

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Natalini, Adolfo, 197, 255 nature, 9, 12, 13, 14, 22, 29, 42, 45, 51, 52, 68, 72, 97, 112, 134, 170, 217, 218, 246, 254, 259 267, 272 Negri, Antonio, 234 neorealism (new realism), 77, 217; neorealist film, 222 Neutra, Richard, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 99 Nigeria, 280 Nigro, Mario, 151 northern Italy, 33, 49, 72, 131, 167, 214, 279; north, 114, 204, 246, 251, 313n4 Ori, Luciano, 15, 100, 103–4, 127, 231–3, 240 Origlia, Dino, 168 Packard, Vance, 253 Palanti, Mario, 134 Pascali, Pino, 253 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 46, 250–1, 288n55, 310n28 pci Partito Comunista Italiano. See Communism; Italian Communist Party Pellegrini, Nicola, 279 Perna, Raffaella, 270 Pettena, Gianni, 15, 72, 193–7, 200, 263– 4, 272, 303n47, 311n50 photo-cartoon. See fotoromanzo Picasso, Pablo, 82, 117, 172, 182 Piedmont. See Turin Pieraccini, Gaetano, 168 Pietromarchi, Bartolomeo, 279 Pignotti, Lamberto, 14, 182–5, 199, 200, 289n76 Pinna, Franco, 46 Pirandello, Fausto, 81, 83–5, 88, 127, 293n10 Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 14, 157–9, 163,

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225, 240, 300nn39–40, 300n42 Poe, Edgar Allan, 111 poesia visiva, 294n40, 295n47; visual poetry, 57, 100, 103, 120, 127, 151, 187, 218, 294n40 Ponti, Gio’, 133 pop art, 51, 257; Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, 77, 257; Scuola di Pistoia, 255 postcolonialism, 281–2 Pucciarelli, Bianca. See Binga, Tomaso radio, 166, 244, 246, 248 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, 45, 244, 246 Rama, Carol, 118–20, 127, 297n81 Raphaël Mafai, Antonietta, 14, 29, 83, 137–8, 141, 143, 163 Rauschenberg, Robert, 260, 262 Re, Lucia, 55, 218 realism, 77, 112, 144, 153, 154, 173, 217 reconstruction, 13, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48, 60, 109, 131, 134, 147; inaCasa, 39–40. See also Marshall Plan refugees. See sfollati Richard Ginori (brand), 87, 134 Rochefort, Christiane, 99 Rome, 18, 19, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40, 45–6, 60, 62, 68, 83, 99, 105, 113, 114, 120, 137, 144, 167, 227, 254, 285n12. See also gallery Rotella, Mimmo, 15, 49, 217, 240 Rousseau, Henri, 173 Ruffi, Gianni, 254, 255, 272 Rybczynski, Witold, 5, 55 Saccà, Lucilla, 103 Said, Edward, 184 Salinger, J.D., 95 Sardinia, 227–30 Sargentini, Fabio. See gallery: L’Attico Sartre, Jean Paul, 95 Sauvage, Nicole, 269–70, 312n62 Savinio, Alberto, 94, 95, 154, 294n31

Scarpellini, Emanuela, 131, 305n28 Scarpitta, Salvatore, 253 Scego, Igiaba, 281 Schifano, Mario, 15, 33, 40, 95, 154, 257–61, 263, 272, 310n39 Scuola di Piazza del Popolo. See pop art Scuola di Pistoia. See pop art Scuola Romana, 29, 31, 83, n285; Scuola di Via Cavour, 29, 137, 285n12 Sei di Torino. See Casorati, Felice Senegal, 280 Seroni, Adriano, 246 Severini, Gino, 278, 313n13 sfollati, 31, 33, 34, 103, 167, 198, 199, 227, 282; refugees, 22, 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 103, 199, 227, 280, 281, 314n21 Shahn, Ben, 153 Sicily 23, 151, 207, 213, 214; Bagheria, 208; Palermo, 207, 263. See also southern Italy Simms, Jeannie, 279–80, 314n23 Singapore, 271 sleeping, 13, 76, 82, 83, 85, 88, 99, 127, 181, 235, 238, 268, 270 Smithson, Robert, 195 sofa, 95, 259, 268; sofa chair, 52 Somalia, 281 southern Italy, 131, 213; south, 7, 40, 49, 72, 115, 214, 230, 251 Steimatsky, Noa, 34, 286n21 supermarket, 215, 305n28; grocery store, 238 Superstudio, 74, 76, 196–200, 238–40, 255, 304n52, 308n77; Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, 197; Gian Piero Frassinelli, 197, 238, 240; Roberto Magris, 76, 238; Alessandro Magris, 197; Adolfo Natalini (also Scuola di Pistoia), 197, 255; Alessandro Poli, 197 surrealism, 83; surreal 14, 153, 154, 163

table, 34, 138, 157, 207, 209, 213, 222, 225, 227, 228; desk, 91, 151 Tacchi, Cesare, 13, 52, 93, 95, 122, 127, 154 Tamantini, Franca, 248 Tasca, Luisa, 130, 166–8 Taylorism, 166, 167, n304; labour-saving housekeeping, 166, 189, 208 television, 14, 15, 16, 49, 209, 241, 244, 246–51, 253, 254, 255, 257–63, 264, 267, 268, 269–72; tv, 15, 93, 170, 209, 224, 244, 246–51, 253–5, 257, 259–60, 264, 267–9, 270, 271, 272 Testa, Armando, 219 Togliatti, Palmiro, 172, 215 Torlasco, Domietta, 221, 222, 306n38 Triennale di Milano, 35, 37, 77, 167; Concorso di Idee per la Casa Collettiva, 37; Piero Bottoni, 35, 37; T8, 35, 37; qt8, 37 Turin (Piedmont), 19, 81, 85, 105, 109, 111, 118, 120, 130, 157, 159, 179, 222, 224, 225 Tuscany: Grosseto, 130, 298n1; Florence, 43, 56, 57, 75, 76, 99, 100, 103, 122, 151, 168, 173, 189, 193, 218, 219, 232, 263, 287n45; Livorno, 151, 182; Pisa, 151, 238; Ponte a Egola, 238; Sambuca (Chianti), 76, 238, 239 Umbria, 42; Fabriano, 42 Uncini, Giuseppe, 40, 42, 286n35 United Arab Emirates, 183–5 United States, 97, 169, 185, 279, 281; Boston, 281; New York, 51, 72, 93, 111, 114, 157, 225, 232, 260; Texas, 114 Veneto, 21, 81; Venice, 105, 189, 227, 228 (see also gallery); Venice Biennale, 240, 260; Verona, 227 Vergine, Lea, 118 Vespignani, Renzo, 45, 144, 147, 153 Vienna, 83

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violence, 13, 16, 19, 22, 23, 27, 31, 35, 39, 45, 46, 59, 71, 112–18, 120, 127, 128, 199, 219, 230, 231, 232, 235, 241, 263, 270, 277, 278, 282, 296n67 Virno, Paolo, 234 visual culture, 12, 13, 27, 48, 88, 141, 144, 170, 182, 184, 200, 205, 244, 277 visual poetry. See poesia visiva Vivaldi, Cesare, 255 Volpi, Marisa, 179 Wages for Housework. See Federici, Silvia Wagner, Richard, 87 Warhol, Andy, 260; The Factory, 260

322

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White, Anthony, 225, 244 Wildt, Adolfo, 244 Williams, Raymond, 246 Woolf, Virginia, 57, 59 World War II, 12, 13, 19, 21, 35, 42, 46, 76, 81, 112–14, 117, 131, 144, 164, 167, 169, 199, 221, 239, 246, 277–9, 282 Zapperi, Giovanna, 56 Zero, Renato, 271 Zevi, Adachiara, 179 Ziveri, Alberto, 45 Zorio, Gilberto, 13, 71, 105, 109, 111, 127, 295n54