Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History 9781487535575

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ITALIAN NEOREALISM A Cultural History

Italian Neorealism A Cultural History

CHARLES L. LEAVITT IV

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2020 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0710-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3558-2 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3557-5 (PDF) Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Italian neorealism : a cultural history / Charles L. Leavitt IV. Names: Leavitt, Charles L., IV, author. Series: Toronto Italian studies. Description: Series statement: Toronto Italian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200169033 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200169114 | ISBN 9781487507107 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487535582 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487535575 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures – Italy – History. | LCSH: Realism in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I88 L43 2020 | DDC 791.430945 – dc23 This book has been published with the assistance of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

For Brynn, always.

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction 3 1  What Was Neorealism?  14 2  “Renewal through Conservation”: Neorealism after Fascism  49 3  “Chronicle and Tragedy”: The Neorealist Representation of History  85 4 “From I to We ”: Neorealism’s Choral Politics  128 Conclusion 171 Notes  179 Bibliography  249 Index  303

Acknowledgments

This book begins with an imagined conversation, but it was born from the actual conversations that, over the more than ten years it has taken to bring this project to its completion, I have had the good fortune to carry on with my friends, colleagues, and mentors. To all those who have kindly shared with me their questions and curiosity, their comments and criticisms, their encouragement and enthusiasm, I extend my heartfelt thanks. I would like to thank in particular those scholars and editors who were generous enough to read and to critique this work while it was still in progress. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Robert Gordon, Brendan Hennessey, Alan O’Leary, John Welle, Demetrio Yocum, and the anonymous readers at the University of Toronto Press commented on earlier drafts with precision and care, and their insightful reflections and probing queries helped me to expand my thinking, refine my argument, and clarify my writing. I am grateful, as well, to Mark Thompson, Robin Studniberg, Anne Laughlin, and Breanna Muir at the University of Toronto Press, who helped me to revise and enhance my manuscript throughout its path to publication. All along that path, I have been fortunate to receive the support of a number of institutions, whose generosity allowed me to research, to write, and eventually to publish this book. I would like to thank the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, whose Annese Fellowship permitted me to expand the scope of my project and to cultivate my research at an early stage. I would like to thank the University of Reading for the research travel grants that enabled me to present my work as it developed. And I would like to thank the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, whose travel grant helped me to finalize my research, and whose publication grant allowed me to realize my goal of bringing that research to press. At Notre Dame I have had the opportunity, and the pleasure, first to study under and now to work alongside a remarkable number of distinguished

x Acknowledgments

scholars and teachers, among whom are my fellow ­Italianists Ted Cachey, Sabrina Ferri, and Christian Moevs. Together they have done much more than help me to develop my scholarship; they have helped me to discover my scholarly vocation. Among the many others who played a crucial role in that discovery, I want especially to thank Gina Psaki at the University of Oregon, Luca Bonomi at the Società Dante Alighieri in Siena, and Paolo Squillacioti at the Opera Del Vocabolario Italiano in Florence, who first taught me, respectively, to love Italian culture, to savour the Italian language, and to esteem Italian philology. It is my great honour to have been entrusted to impart some of these same lessons to the students of the University of Notre Dame, and before them those of the University of Reading, where I had the good fortune to serve for six years as lecturer. I want to thank Federico Faloppa, Daniela La Penna, Paola Nasti, Lisa Sampson, and Enza Siciliano-Verruccio, who shared with me so many of the satisfactions as well as the struggles of Italian studies in Reading. This book is largely a product of our time together, and I hope it reflects not only something of the wealth of Italian culture and civilization, as one of our number once described our remit, but also the common sense, transparency, and irony he valued in the context in which we worked. While in Reading, I had the opportunity to serve as co-editor of the Italianist film issue, and I would like to thank Catherine O’Rawe and Dana Renga, who shared that role with me; I continue to learn from their scrupulous example, and from their generous devotion to the field. Among the many friends whose encouragement, intellectual as well as personal, has helped me to see this project through to its completion, I want to be sure to thank Maggie Barański, Damiano Benvegnù, Eleonora Buonocore, Jacopo Di Giovanni, Marisa Escolar, Francesca Iacoponi, James Kriesel, Anne Leone, David Lummus, Ugo Marsili, Vittorio Montemaggi, Sam Tilsen, and Sara Troyani. I would above all like to thank my family – Janet, Charlie, Andrew, Amy, Cernie, and Sam, as well as a vibrant and growing extended family – without whose support and patience I could never have completed this project. And I would never have enjoyed its completion so much were it not for my son Nathaniel, who was born the same day I finished my first draft. He was early, I was late. Now I have the joy of sharing with him, and with the others I love, this labour of love. Several of the conversations that sustained me in crucial stages of this project were cut short before its conclusion, and my joy in completing this book is tinged with the sadness of losing some of the friends and mentors who played important roles in making that happen. I wish to remember Joe Buttigieg, whose formidable knowledge of European

Acknowledgments xi

cultural history helped me to situate my discoveries, and whose fervent positivity emboldened me to pursue those discoveries to their conclusion; Laurence Hooper, who inspired me with his sincere devotion to serious scholarship, as well as his sardonic appraisals of work that fell short of his ideal; and Chris Wagstaff, who was always prepared to fight unyieldingly for what he believed, and who took the time to debate with me, generously but forcefully, about Italian neorealism, and much else as well, over countless long lunches that, I am privileged to say, sometimes stretched well into the evening. I wish so much that these esteemed scholars and cherished friends were still with me, and I hope that, in some small way, this book can serve as a tribute to their memory. I hope, finally, that my book stands to the credit of the two people who did more than any others to make it a reality: Zyg Barański, who shared with me not only his incomparable expertise and invaluable advice but also his home, where most of this book was written; and Brynn Leavitt, with whom I have shared a life for nearly twenty years, and without whom this book would never have been possible. Thank you.

ITALIAN NEOREALISM A Cultural History

Introduction

This book was inspired by a conversation that never took place. I do not mean to imply that conversations about Italian neorealism are somehow lacking. To this day scholars and critics continually remind us how, in the decade following the end of the Second World War, the innovations of Italian cinema were met not only with global admiration but also with widespread imitation, permanently reshaping how films were made and understood worldwide.1 These commentators stress, as well, how related developments transformed Italian painting and photography,2 architecture and design,3 music and literature,4 with lasting repercussions for all forms of creative expression. Citing diverse examples from disparate contexts, they describe the distinctive ways in which the international community drew inspiration from Italian writers, artists, and especially filmmakers, helping to make Italian neorealism one of the most influential cultural currents of the modern age.5 It was not this ongoing critical conversation, however, but rather an imagined discussion that first attracted my notice. Asked by an interviewer to reflect on the rise of Italian neorealism, the director Vittorio De Sica, who deserved as much credit as anyone for this development, invoked an originary silence at its birth. “Non è che un giorno ci siamo seduti a un tavolino di via Veneto, Rossellini, Visconti, io e gli altri, e ci siamo detti: adesso facciamo il neorealismo [It isn’t the case that one day Rossellini, Visconti, the other directors, and I sat down at a table in the Via Veneto and said: now let’s make neorealism],” De Sica told his interviewer. “Ognuno viveva per conto suo, pensava e sperava per conto suo. E tuttavia il cinema neorealista stava nascendo come un vasto movimento collettivo, di tutti [We were each living our own lives, with our own thoughts and our own hopes. And yet neorealist cinema was beginning to take shape as a vast, collective movement, of all of us].”6 De Sica sought to make clear that, if their films had revolutionized cinema, if they had helped to birth a

4

Italian Neorealism

neorealist movement, it was not because these three celebrated directors had devised a plan to achieve some shared ambition. There was no plan, there was no shared ambition, and there had been no conversation. Many critics have seized on admissions like De Sica’s to emphasize the difficulty, if not in fact the very impossibility, of defining this complex cultural tendency. Neorealism, they maintain, was inevitably “malleabile, elastica, cangiante, caleidoscopica [malleable, elastic, changing, kaleidoscopic],” “un coacervo di posizioni e di linee ideologiche tangenti [a  jumble of tangential ideological lines and positions],” “equivoca e intimamente contraddittoria [confused and thoroughly contradictory],” with an “assenza di qualsiasi coesione interna [absence of any internal coherence whatsoever].”7 Stressing the absence of a neorealist program or manifesto, they argue that the movement lacked any well-defined conceptual boundaries.8 They often conclude that neorealism cannot be considered a movement or a school at all.9 Little wonder, then, that few can agree on which works rightly fall within the neorealist orbit. Some purists argue that there were only five neorealist films.10 Other critics take a more inclusive approach, broadening the canon to encompass twenty-one,11 forty,12 sixty to eighty,13 or possibly eighty to ninety works.14 There is a similar dispute regarding neorealism’s periodization. Some date its emergence to the end of the Second World War, locating its conclusion sometime between 1948 and 1951.15 Others think it lasted longer, persisting well into the 1950s, and perhaps as late as 1960.16 There are those, as well, who argue that the origin of neorealism needs to be pushed back before the end of the war, to 1943, the year of Benito Mussolini’s dismissal and arrest.17 Others extend the dating further still, locating neorealism’s origins in the 1930s.18 The questions of definition and periodization become all the more acute when one looks beyond cinema. Whether references to neorealist art, architecture, and literature derive from a cinematic designation or instead denote specific and perhaps even separate creative tendencies remains very much an open question.19 Differing responses, and with them differing conceptions of neorealism, have led to the formation of opposing canons, each headed by authors and artists the other excludes by definition.20 It is never entirely apparent, therefore, what is meant when notions of neorealism are invoked. Indeed, while neorealism retains its place of prominence in modern cultural history, there remains little agreement regarding what neorealism is, and even some disagreement about whether neorealism can be said to exist at all. De Sica’s remarks offer a way out of this apparent impasse. If it is true that he denied the existence of a neorealist manifesto, after all, it is also true that he affirmed the existence of a neorealist moment,

Introduction 5

and with it a neorealist movement: “a vast, collective movement, of all of us.”21 In his telling, as in the accounts of several of his contemporaries and colleagues, neorealism cohered not because it was born from a common program but because it emerged in response to a common climate.22 Italian artists and intellectuals may have held opposing beliefs, pursued divergent objectives, and offered contrasting and even conflicting proposals, but they did so inspired by common concerns and shared challenges. De Sica’s statement thus suggests the possibility of an underlying unity to the neorealists’ apparent disunity, what Pierre Bourdieu would call a “consensus in dissensus,” which is to say a connection founded upon “the accepted questions on which they are opposed.”23 One might even conjecture that such questions comprised the core of neorealism itself. This is the provocative implication of a comment by the screenwriter and critic Tullio Kezich, who recalled that, even as neorealist films began to attract global acclaim, in Italy “[l]’accento cadeva sui dibattiti. Erano essi, più che i film, l’apice della nostra attività. I film si sarebbero potuti anche non vedere [our emphasis was on the debates. These, more than the films, represented the height of our activity. You didn’t even have to see the films].”24 Kezich took the point rather too far, perhaps, but in his exaggeration he revealed something of the truth. If Italian neorealism was “a vast, collective movement,” as De Sica argued, this was because it was the scene of significant discussions and debates, because it was the subject of a cultural conversation. That statement is admittedly paradoxical, since De Sica sought to defend neorealism’s existence despite what he saw as the absence of a neorealist conversation. The great Italian directors, he insisted, had never met to discuss and coordinate their film projects. Cinephiles may regret that such a conversation never took place. What might De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti have discussed in Rome in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War? What plans might have emerged, what new ideas might have taken shape, from their exchanges across a café table in the Via Veneto? In truth, however, there is little need for such speculative questions because, as Kezich’s remark reveals, a conversation did in fact take place – a conversation that was far more inclusive, far more extensive, and far more combative than the one imagined by De Sica. It was a conversation carried out in the cafés of Rome, and in those of every other Italian city as well, but also in the cultural pages of the daily newspapers; in film journals and literary reviews; in editorial offices and case del popolo; at artists’ exhibitions and on film sets; in novels, short stories, poems, and memoirs; in theatres and at the cinema; in lecture halls and radio broadcasts; even in the houses of Parliament. That

6

Italian Neorealism

conversation was Italian neorealism. “La storia del neorealismo è  [...] la storia di un dialogo [The history of neorealism is (...) the history of a dialogue],” explained the film critic Gian Luigi Rondi; neorealism was “un insieme di voci [many voices combined],” declared the novelist Italo Calvino.25 This study is an attempt to listen to those voices, to describe their dialogue, to understand their conversation. “A Confusion of Language” Scholarship on neorealism has often taken the opposite tack, aspiring not to study the conversation but rather to silence it. There have been frequent exhortations, in fact, to do away with the commentary that has always surrounded neorealism and to “start from the texts,” considering the neorealist canon unburdened by the cultural and historical discourse to which it has given rise.26 Let the artwork speak for itself, it is argued, so that the essence of neorealism can emerge through the attentive, unmediated analysis of neorealist artefacts. More than thirty years ago, in an essay entitled “Neorealismo senza” (Neorealism without), Leonardo Quaresima offered what remains the most compelling call to separate the texts from the accumulated prejudices of previous generations, exhorting his readers in the following terms: Proviamo a isolare la nozione [del neorealismo] sottraendola alle incrostazioni del discorso critico purista e essenzialista. Proviamo a vedere che cos’è il neorealismo senza l’ideologia del neorealismo, l’ideologia che ne fa ­espressione ufficiale della nascita da un punto zero, l’ideologia che stabilisce questo collegamento sulla base della purezza di cuore del movimento [...].27 Let us try to isolate the notion [of neorealism] by removing from it the ­incrustations of purist and essentialist critical discourse. Let us try to see what neorealism is without the ideology of neorealism, the ideology that makes it into an official expression of [post-war Italy’s] birth from zero, and the ideology that establishes this connection [between neorealism and nation] on the basis of the movement’s purity of heart [...].

There is something admirable in Quaresima’s stance, in his refusal indiscrimately to adopt the conventional wisdom, in his desire to look carefully, analytically, at works of art whose cultural status has often seemed to preclude critical reconsideration. Yet there is something deeply problematic as well. Put simply, there is no way to approach neorealism free of critical cant, no neutral position to which one can appeal. Quaresima and other

Introduction 7

like-minded scholars say “start from the texts,” to which one must invariably ask, “which texts?” The five neorealist films acknowledged by the purists or the ninety that more ecumenical critics would countenance? Shall we consider only those films released between 1945 and 1949, or shall we expand the selection to include those from the 1930s to the 1960s? Shall we include poems, novels, songs, paintings, sculptures, and perhaps even buildings and neighbourhoods as well, and if so which ones? Any choice on these matters entails precisely the kind of ideological intervention Quaresima wished to avoid. This is true even of the small set of films believed – but believed by whom? – to be the most canonical exemplars of Italian neorealism. In the interview cited above, for example, Vittorio De Sica invoked by name two of his most respected neorealist contemporaries, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. In so doing, he may have wished to offer a kind of common ground, a neorealist core comprising a pair of cinematic luminaries with an established corpus of films firmly ensconced in the neorealist firmament. Yet even the most influential films of these eminent directors have had their neorealist credentials questioned. It has been said that Visconti “invent[ed] neorealism in his first film, Ossessione,” but also that Ossessione, released in 1943, “cannot be called, without qualification, a work of neorealism.”28 It has likewise been argued that 1948’s La terra trema, Visconti’s next film, represents “il vertice poetico di tutta l’esperienza neorealista [the poetic peak of the entire neorealist experience],” yet serious doubt is cast on such claims by those who maintain that the film “si colloca al di fuori del neorealismo [is positioned outside of neorealism].”29 Rossellini’s status seems no less debatable. Although it has been claimed that “[l]a nascita del neorealismo in Italia avviene soltanto con Roma città aperta [the birth of neorealism in Italy happened only with Roma città aperta],” Rossellini’s first post-war feature, it has also been asserted, with equal force, that “Roma città aperta doesn’t really fit the definition of neorealism.”30 To this latter judgment one can only respond with a question: Whose definition of neorealism? It is a question that cannot be answered satisfactorily through a close reading of the texts, however detailed the analysis and however large the corpus. If neorealism was a cultural climate, if it was a cultural conversation, then it will not be possible to make definitive claims about the neorealism of Roma città aperta, or of any other contemporary text, without concomitantly analysing the neorealist context. It may not even be possible to declare with any degree of certainty what constitutes the text and what the context. Such a priori distinctions, which are implied in every call to “start from the texts,” necessarily restrict neorealism, often confining it to only one form of invention, one mode of expression.31 In truth, the refusal to accept those restrictions, the refusal to acknowledge the barriers between

8

Italian Neorealism

different forms of expression, different modes of discourse, or different spheres of influence, was one of the defining characteristics of the neorealist moment in Italian culture. The novelist and editor Natalia Ginzburg recalled that moment in the following illuminating terms: Era, il dopoguerra, un tempo in cui tutti pensavano d’essere dei poeti, e tutti pensavano d’essere dei politici; tutti s’immaginavano che si potesse e si dovesse anzi far poesia di tutto, dopo tanti anni in cui era sembrato che il mondo fosse ammutolito e pietrificato e la realtà era stata guardata come di là da un vetro, in una vitrea, cristallina e muta immobilità. [...] Ora c’erano di nuovo molte parole in circolazione, e la realtà di nuovo appariva a portata di mano; perciò quegli antichi digiunatori si diedero a vendemmiarvi con delizia. E la vendemmia fu generale, perché tutti ebbero l’idea di prendervi parte; e si determinò una confusione di linguaggio fra poesia e politica, le quali erano apparse mescolate insieme.32 The post-war period was a time in which we all believed ourselves to be poets and we all believed ourselves to be politicians. We all imagined that we could – and in fact we should – take everything as the subject for our poetry, after many years in which it seemed that the world was muted and petrified, as if we were seeing reality behind glass, in a vitreous, crystalline, and muffled stasis. [...] Now there were many words in circulation again, and reality again appeared to be close to hand. Those of us who had been fasting for a long time therefore took to the harvest with delight. And the harvest was communal, because everyone wished to take part. And there was a confusion of language between poetry and politics, which seemed to have been mixed together.

In Ginzburg’s telling, post-war Italy was reshaped by the interaction – some would say the contamination – of previously distinct discourses.33 As politics and the arts rapidly opened themselves up to new concerns and new contestants, there arose a kind of festive tumult, a moment when everything seemed possible and everything felt connected. Rather than working to isolate neorealism from the post-war confusion, this study attempts to interpret neorealism as a function of the many connections that constituted the post-war cultural conversation. I thus refrain from the kinds of artistic and intellectual taxonomy that have tended to limit neorealism to one strand of that discourse or one voice in that conversation. Despite the frequent acknowledgments of its aesthetic hybridity and even its inherent obscurity – despite the declarations that it is “conceptually nebulous,” “indefinibile e sfuggente [indefinable and elusive],” characterized by “una discreta dose di equivoci [a

Introduction 9

fair amount of misunderstanding]” – there have been repeated attempts to distil a singular stylistic or theoretical essence that can define Italian neorealism.34 Often such efforts take the form of a list of supposedly identifying traits, such as the one put forward by Alberto Farassino: Considereremo quindi per ora come “opera neorealista” un tipo di film che comprende ampiamente le principali e ben note istanze neorealiste, dalle riprese in esterni, o comunque fuori dagli studi, all’uso di attori non professionisti, dalla contemporaneità del soggetto all’attenzione del reale alla disinvoltura nei confronti delle regole convenzionali di messinscena, recitazione e linguaggio, dalle esigenze morali calate nel racconto e nel lavoro cinematografico e quelle autoriali di espressione e interpretazione del mondo.35 Let us describe as a “neorealist work” a film that largely takes up the primary and best-known neorealist traits, from shooting on location, or otherwise outside the studios, to the use of non-professional actors, from the treatment of contemporary themes to an emphasis on the real and indifference towards conventional rules of staging, acting, and language, from the moral demands that are placed upon the story and the cinematography to the authorial demands of expression and interpretation.

Tellingly, while such lists are sometimes treated authoritatively, as if they could indeed claim to define their intended subject, Farassino prefaced his with significant caveats. After all, he was one of the more outspoken opponents of what he called the “concezione purista e ‘operista’ del neorealismo [purist and ‘text-based’ conception of neorealism],” which would seek rigidly to adopt such a catalogue of creative choices as a means of definition.36 In its place, he called for a more comprehensive accounting, one founded on the belief that la definizione più adeguata [del neorealismo] sarebbe quella tautologica e paradossale che suonerebbe così: “Il cinema neorealista è il cinema italiano dell’epoca del neorealismo.” In altri termini, forse più accettabile: il neorealismo appare oggi non una tendenza limitata e elitaria collocata nel mondo del pensiero, del sapere, del fare estetico e del discutere ideologico ma un affare di vita quotidiana, qualcosa che (e che sia questo il realismo del neorealismo?) riguardava la vita di tutti e che dai film passava alla realtà e viceversa, senza subire sostanziali trasformazioni.37 the most appropriate definition [of neorealism] would be tautological and paradoxical, and would go like this: “Neorealist cinema is the Italian cinema

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Italian Neorealism

of the era of neorealism.” In other words, and perhaps more acceptably: neorealism today appears to be not a limited and elitist tendency belonging to the world of thought, of knowledge, of aesthetic practice, and of ideological discussion, but rather a quotidian affair, something that concerns the lives of all people (and might this be the realism of neorealism?) and that passes from film to reality, and vice versa, without undergoing substantial changes.

By this standard, neorealism was something both more significant and less determinate than an amalgamation of formal touchstones. For Farassino it was a “fenomeno complessivo [totalising phenomenon],” a way of inhabiting, understanding, and representing the world in its entirety, just as for other like-minded critics it has seemed a “quadro ­culturale [cultural framework],” “una ‘civiltà’ [a ‘civilization’],” “uno stato d’animo [a state of mind].”38 These descriptions suggest, as the more restrictive definitions do not, the inclusivity, the plurivocality, the universality of the neorealist conversation. This book will seek to expand on, and to extend, the insights they have made possible. “A Vast, Collective Movement, of All of Us” In the chapters that follow I attempt to provide the most expansive description yet compiled of the neorealist conversation. I do so with the conviction that neorealism is best approached not through any one medium, any one form of artistic realization, but rather through the dialogue in which all of those diverse forms of expression took part. I thus attempt to chart the network of representations that, throughout the age of neorealism, linked all forms of creative production in a generative exchange. My investigation explores the shared discourse with which Italian artists and intellectuals collectively engaged, the horizon of expectations under which they pursued their various creative and critical activities, and the common conceptual structures with which they articulated and evaluated their variegated cultural projects. It is a central tenet of this book that the cultural conversation necessarily includes all of the films, novels, poems, plays, paintings, sculptures, songs, essays, reviews, and debates which together shaped and reflected their historical moment. Unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, by normative definitions, or by critical conventions, this study thus aims to redescribe that historical moment by reinterpreting its expansive cultural discourse, whose distinctive voices and characteristic statements I take together to constitute Italian neorealism. I begin in the first chapter by analysing neorealism’s conceptual history, conceived in its most extensive sense as stretching from the 1890s



Introduction 11

through the 1950s. Employing a critical semantics, I follow the development of neorealism as a cultural category by tracking the spread of the term neorealismo and its cognates through the diverse fields of Italian creative enterprise, accentuating the terms’ changing linguistic purchase over time. What emerges is an enduring cultural discourse, diffuse and syncretic, which spanned decades and traversed all forms of creative expression. I have chosen in this initial chapter to adopt as case studies two works – Elio Vittorini’s 1945 novel Uomini e no and Luchino Visconti’s 1948 film La terra trema – whose textual operation and critical reception reveal with particular clarity symptomatic aspects of neorealism’s emergent cultural operation. Together, then, these two texts serve to exemplify the specific developments that characterize the expansive description of neorealism that I develop in chapter 1, and that provides the basis for the three chapters to follow. In each of those subsequent chapters, moreover, I follow the methodological pattern set in the first, identifying two indicative works to illustrate the dynamic processes I seek to highlight within neorealist discourse. In each instance, these exemplary texts have been chosen as case studies because they can be understood to express with particular clarity the issues under discussion. To put this another way, they can be recognized as active participants in the neorealist conversation, and it is in this sense that they are analysed. I seek to describe how these texts were shaped by the major issues that occupied Italian culture and society, and how they took up, reflected, and performed the conditions of their own creation, not just at the level of narrative content, but also in their form, in their language, in their structure. Yet I do not wish to imply that the texts I have chosen are somehow unique, or uniquely privileged, in their neorealist status. Visconti’s La terra trema may have been called a “summa” of Italian neorealism, but so too was Luigi Zampa’s 1947 Vivere in pace, released one year before Visconti’s film; Vittorini may have explored notions of neorealism in his critical essays of the 1930s, only to see the term applied to his own creative output of the 1940s, but the same is true of Francesco Jovine.39 There is no inherent reason why one set of exemplars is to be preferred to the other, and I might just as readily have explored the themes of my first chapter with reference to Zampa and Jovine, or indeed to any number of potential case studies, including but by no means limited to those I examine in the chapters to follow. To the extent I am correct to identify each chapter’s themes as representative of neorealism, these should be – and I argue they are – identifiable across Italian culture. I have tried through my chosen exemplars to suggest something of the breadth of that culture, drawing not only on some of the most canonical neorealist films but also on others that have received

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Italian Neorealism

comparatively little critical or scholarly attention, and examining those films alongside two novels, a play, and a poem, all of which, I maintain, contributed substantially to the neorealist conversation. Since my analysis addresses itself to that conversation, I hope it can be of interest even to those readers unacquainted with one or more of the texts I have chosen as case studies. At the same time, I hope these case studies will be seen as not only informative but also innovative by readers long familiar with the texts I have analysed. In the second chapter, I bring together analyses of Giuseppe De Santis’s 1947 feature film Caccia tragica and Italo Calvino’s 1947 partisan novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno in order to address the vexed question of neorealism’s periodization. Although in the first chapter I identify an extensive neorealist genealogy dating back to the nineteenth century, and locate neorealism’s conceptual crystallization in the 1930s, in those that follow I adopt a more limited chronology, for reasons I set out in chapter 2. It is a chronology shaped by post-war Italy’s complicated relationship to the Fascist ventennio, the period from 1922 to 1943, when Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party governed Italian society and when neorealism emerged in Italian culture. The central question addressed in the second chapter, then, regards how to relate pre-war and post-war articulations of Italian neorealism, and, more to the point, how to recognize the distinctiveness of the latter without denying the relevance of the former. Chapter 3 takes up the related issue of neorealism’s characteristic portrayal of the historical crises of post-war and post-Fascist Italy. As its name reveals, neorealism denotes a determined claim to represent reality – a reality that, in the period of neorealism’s greatest cultural prominence, was shaped by the Second World War and its aftermath. The cultural conversation that attended Italy’s challenging post-war recovery understandably gave rise to an ample critical vocabulary with which to scrutinize and theorize the representation of a complex historical reality. This chapter focuses on that theoretical vocabulary, which was used to express a series of intricate strategies for structuring the depiction of recent history. Drawing on a substantial critical debate, and exploring the implications of that debate as it was reflected in two key texts  – Leopoldo Trieste’s 1946 play Cronaca and Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Ladri di b­iciclette  – I investigate the conceptual tools with which neorealism sought to give historical meaning to the portrayal of individual experience. In the fourth and final chapter I seek to draw out the implications of neorealism’s distinctive representation of history. That representation, I argue, reveals a key tenet of neorealist faith, the abiding belief that art could facilitate not just historical reconciliation but also national redemption. This belief animated the post-war Italian cultural conversation and



Introduction 13

reshaped Italian cultural politics in its image. Reconsidering the political significance of that belief, I examine two of its most powerful expressions, Alfonso Gatto’s 1944 poem “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto” and Aldo Vergano’s 1946 film Il sole sorge ancora, in order to make the case for a more ambitious description of neorealism’s professed social function, one that emphasizes its defining aspiration to address and even to counteract a cultural crisis. To the extent that it was communicated beyond cinema, beyond the arts, beyond politics – to the extent, in other words, that it was the explicit or implicit subject of the neorealist conversation – it was this aspiration that made neorealism, as De Sica put it, “a vast, collective movement, of all of us.”

1 What Was Neorealism?

Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema begins with an evocative rolling text that has often been interpreted as a kind of “manifesto” of Italian neorealism:1 I fatti rappresentati in questo film accadono in Italia e precisamente in ­Sicilia, nel paese di Acitrezza, che si trova sul Mare Ionio a poca distanza da Catania. La storia che il film racconta è la stessa che nel mondo si rinnova da anni in tutti quei paesi dove uomini sfruttano altri uomini. Le case, le strade, le barche, il mare, sono quelli di Acitrezza. Tutti gli attori del film sono stati scelti tra gli abitanti del paese: pescatori, ragazze, braccianti, ­muratori, grossisti di pesce. Essi non conoscono lingua diversa dal siciliano per esprimere ribellioni, dolori, speranze. La lingua italiana non è in Sicilia la lingua dei poveri. The events depicted in this film take place in Italy, or in Sicily, to be more precise, in the town of Acitrezza, which is located near the Ionian Sea, not far from Catania. The story the film tells is the same all over the world and is repeated every year everywhere that men exploit other men. The houses, the streets, the boats, the sea are those of Acitrezza. All the actors have been chosen from among the inhabitants of this town: fishermen, girls, labourers, bricklayers, wholesalers. These people know no other language than Sicilian in which to express their rebellions, pains, and hopes. Italian is not the language of the poor in Sicily.2

Through a series of declarative statements, the text makes evident the formal, stylistic, and ideological foundations of Visconti’s film, which combines factual narration, geographical specificity, political commitment, on location shooting, non-professional actors, and linguistic authenticity – the standard criteria, it is claimed, of neorealist filmmaking. Foregrounding its poetics in this way, La terra trema is said by critics



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to be “confezionato secondo il più rigoroso dettato neorealistico [manufactured according to the strictest neorealist dictates]” and to adhere to the “ortodossia neorealista rigorosa [strict neorealist orthodoxy].”3 Visconti, however, caustically rejected critics’ attempts to define a neorealist orthodoxy, insisting that their pronouncements had no purchase over his work. As early as 1948, in fact, only a few months after La terra trema debuted at the Venice Film Festival, he asked: che cosa vuol dire neorealismo? In cinema è servito a definire i concetti ispirativi della recente “scuola italiana.” Ha raccolto coloro (uomini, artisti) che credevano che la poesia nascesse dalla realtà. Era un punto di partenza. Comincia a diventare, a me sembra, una assurda etichetta che ci si è appiccicata addosso come un tatuaggio, e, invece di significare un metodo, un momento, si fa addirittura confine, legge. Abbiamo già bisogno di confini?4 what does neorealism mean? In cinema the term has been used to define the concepts that have inspired the recent “Italian school.” It has gathered together all those (men, artists) who believe that poetry is born from reality. It was a starting point. It seems to me it is starting to become an absurd label, stuck to us like a tattoo, and instead of identifying a method, a moment, it is becoming a boundary, a law. Do we already need boundaries?

It seems difficult to reconcile Visconti’s declaration and his critical canonization. Celebrated in terms he disputed and made to epitomize dictates he wished to transgress, the director would appear to have been badly served by his critics. How could La terra trema offer the “ricetta del neorealismo cinematografico [formula of cinematic neorealism],” as an early review of the film announced, when Visconti questioned the need to adhere to neorealism’s supposed formulae?5 Surely some explanation is necessary if the film is to be considered the “epicentro del neorealismo [epicentre of neorealism],” the “opera più esemplare e più alta del cinema neorealista [most exemplary and highest work of neorealist cinema],” “il vertice poetico di tutta l’esperienza neorealista [the poetic peak of the entire neorealist experience],” “the masterpiece of neorealism,” “a summa of the movement.”6 The apparent discrepancy announces a disquieting fact: more than seventy years after the release of La terra trema, the question Visconti posed to his critics – “what does neorealism mean?” – remains effectively unresolved. If anything, the question has become more difficult to answer with time. Visconti was querying a still-vital concept in order to raise doubts about the status of his films as he prepared them. Today, more than half a century later, that situation no longer obtains. Neorealism

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Italian Neorealism

has become a historical category, indeed a milestone in the history of cinema. If Visconti’s question is to admit an answer, therefore, the grammar of analysis must shift. Today one is bound to ask: what was neorealism? Historicized in this way, the enquiry can open up to the eventualities of change over time, allowing the evolving contexts and consequences of neorealism’s development to come to the fore. Visconti’s single question can thus become a series of historical problems to investigate. What was neorealism in 1948, for instance, when La terra trema was greeted as a neorealist masterpiece, and when its director was led to voice his displeasure with what he called this “absurd label”? Did it convey the same meaning, did it impose the same conditions, as it had in 1936, when he first began working in the film industry? How far had notions of neorealism progressed by 1942, when Visconti directed Ossessione, which has been called a “proto-neorealist film”?7 And how had the terms of debate shifted by 1947, when Visconti began work on the project that would become La terra trema? Had neorealism developed in the intervening years? Had it transformed still further, one year later, when Visconti’s film was first presented to an international audience? And how has the understanding of neorealism changed in the decades since the film’s debut? Visconti proposed a question of definition – What is neorealism? – which would seek to fix the term’s essence in a stable conceptual framework. I propose a question of historicization – What was ­neorealism? – which, at least in its ambition, invites a dynamic, contextual, and diachronic investigation of a cultural concept. This chapter is an attempt to carry out that investigation. Instead of cataloguing the stylistic or ideological features of neorealist films, therefore, I propose to trace a neorealist genealogy, ranging widely across the arts and drawing on a cultural conversation that spanned more than half a century of Italian history. Instead of determining whether La terra trema followed a theoretical inventory of neorealist principles, I propose to demonstrate the film’s observable participation in a neorealist discourse. The notions of n ­ eorealism that emerge from this discourse resist rigid categorization, but they cohere historically if not always ideologically or aesthetically, revealing an expansive conversation in which much of modern Italian literature, art, and cinema, including Visconti’s film, can be seen to participate. Neorealism as Modernism With Italy’s post-war cinema attracting increased international attention, in October 1950 the Italian broadcasting company RAI invited the literary critic Carlo Bo to host an Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Investigation of neorealism), a series of radio interviews with many of the country’s leading



What Was Neorealism?

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artists and intellectuals, participants who sought, in their responses to Bo’s queries, to comprehend and to contextualize the latest developments in Italian culture after the war. Of all Bo’s accomplished interlocutors, it may have been the journalist and critic Goffredo Bellonci who offered the most compelling account of neorealist mimesis. Identifying what he believed to be the defining characteristics of this much-discussed movement, Bellonci insisted that bisogni definirlo, questo neorealismo, diverso come mostra il prefisso “neo” dal realismo dell’Ottocento. Che il realismo si sia manifestato nei tempi scorsi, prossimi o remoti, in forme di grande arte non si può disconoscere.  [...] Ma è realismo di espressione che rappresenta le cose, i personaggi, le vicende direttamente con parole che in sé riassumono le cose nella loro qualità e magari nel loro mistero: con una potenza che talvolta è vera e propria potenza di reazione di una nuova realtà: di un nuovo mondo. Pensate ad ogni modo che nella narrativa sono realisti un De Foe e uno Stendhal. Il neorealismo di oggi è del tutto diverso da questo stesso realismo perché viene dopo la letteratura suggestiva che evocava le cose piuttosto che rappresentarle: le evocava dal subcosciente, dalla memoria che resta in noi senza che ne abbiamo la consapevolezza. Gli ottocentisti credevano all’esistenza di un mondo oggettivo e cercavano di conoscerlo, di descriverlo e di rappresentarlo, mentre i novecentisti sembrano piuttosto credere che un mondo oggettivo possa crearlo l’artista disponendo in un certo ordine, con negligenza da cronisti, le immagini della vita rimaste nella sua memoria o nei suoi occhi: immagini, fatti, nei quali si risolva o si rapprenda il subcosciente. Pensate appunto di un De Foe che avesse scritto con l’esperienza di un Proust o di un Joyce.8 neorealism needs to be distinguished from the realism of the nineteenth century, as the prefix “neo” shows. We must recognize that realism, here and elsewhere, has given rise, in the recent past, to forms of great art. [...] But this has been a realism of expression, which represents objects, characters, and events directly, with words that capture the quality and perhaps the mystery of the things represented, doing so with a power that at times offers a genuine response to the power of a new reality, a new world. Think of the narrative realism of a Defoe or a Stendhal. Today’s neorealism is quite different from this earlier realism because it follows upon the impressionistic literature that evoked things rather than representing them, a literature that evoked things from the subconscious, from the memories that remain in us without our being aware of them. The nineteenth-century ­realists ­believed in the existence of an objective world and tried to understand it, to describe it, and to represent it, while the twentieth-century

18

Italian Neorealism

writers seem rather to believe that they themselves can create an objective world by ­ignoring the accounts of the chroniclers and instead arranging in a particular order the images of life that remain in their memory or in their vision: images, events, that reveal or capture the subconscious. Think of a Defoe who writes with the experience of a Proust or a Joyce.

Bellonci was making a robust case for a radically original form of artistic creation. Neorealism could have been, and in fact often has been, interpreted to signify a return to the realism of the nineteenth century. Bellonci forcefully rejected this interpretation, identifying in neorealism a fundamentally new mode of representation, the transformation or evolution of realism, its intensification and amplification. In so doing, he provided the critical armature on which to fashion a cogent, if not entirely conventional, definition of neorealism. Bellonci believed that recent Italian artists had developed a kind of hypertrophic realism, enlarging the dominion of reality available for representation. According to this theory, the nineteenth-century ­realists  – invoked, rather curiously, in the person of the eighteenthcentury English novelist Daniel Defoe – sought to represent an external, objective reality. Breaking with this approach, the writers of the twentieth century – exemplified for Bellonci by Marcel Proust and James Joyce – had sought to represent subjectivity, the individual consciousness, which processes and refracts the perception of reality. The neorealists, in Bellonci’s scheme, were the inheritors of both traditions, which they sought to bring together, conjoining objectivity and subjectivity, appearance and experience, in an attempt to represent reality holistically. Depicting the impression of reality realistically, that is to say, the neorealists strove to integrate and to intensify earlier modes of realism, significantly expanding their representative potential by harmonizing their distinctive innovations. In short, Bellonci believed that neorealism fused the preceding forms of representation, and completed them, in order to represent the whole of reality. Neorealism entailed not a restoration of traditional realism, therefore, but a resolutely new realism, a total realism, amplified expressively by virtue of its modernist inflection. As Bellonci well knew, that modernist inflection inheres in the notion of “neorealism” itself, which originated as a term to identify the European cultural currents that had supplanted naturalism with aspects of subjectivity and relativity. From the start, neorealism was understood to be “new” because, coming after the age of realism, it sought to displace rather than to restore customary notions of representation.9 Indeed, the first Italian critics to trace neorealism’s semantic history made clear that, as they employed it, the term had originated with the eclipse of naturalism, and



What Was Neorealism?

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in particular with the French post-naturalists, whom the critic Jules Hûret had categorized as néo-réalistes in his 1891 Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire.10 These writers rejected the conventions of literary naturalism, looking to the innovations of the Symbolists and the Impressionists and adopting new techniques such as collage and pastiche. In so doing, they created new forms of realism – forms that struck both Carlo Bo, host of the Inchiesta, and Giuseppe Ferrara, author of an influential early book on post-war Italian cinema, as prefigurations of Italian neorealism.11 The same was true of the Russian literary neorealists described by the scholar Ettore Lo Gatto in his 1928 study Letteratura soviettista, the first major critical work in Italian to employ the term “­ neorealism” in a literary context. Like Hûret’s néo-réalistes, the writers Lo Gatto discussed in his chapter on Soviet literature during the period stretching “[d]al futurismo al n ­ eo-realismo [from futurism to neorealism]” drew on experimental techniques – in this case, those of the Russian Futurist avant-garde – in order to refresh the shopworn practices of literary realism.12 When it entered the Italian critical vocabulary, as when it first emerged in a French context, neorealism was a term for new modes of realist representation that followed from and were shaped by the latest and most innovative artistic tendencies. In the years that followed the publication of Lo Gatto’s study, Italian commentators began to identify a similar fusion of realism and experimentalism throughout the arts, and throughout Europe. The philosopher and painter Julius Evola traced a current of “neorealismo” in Soviet poetry; the critic and filmmaker Libero Solaroli identified a “neo-realismo formale [formal neorealism]” in Soviet cinema; the Futurist photographer, filmmaker, and playwright Anton Giulio Bragaglia analysed a neorealist current in German, Austrian, Russian, and Czech theatre; and the journalist and critic Giovanni Titta Rosa, in the most far-reaching of these early analyses, described what he saw as the “neo-realismo descrittivistico di tanta parte della letteratura narrativa europea [descriptive neorealism of a great deal of European narrative literature].”13 The various expressions of European neorealism quickly came to occupy a position of relative prominence in the Italian cultural landscape, especially in the work of the literary critic and film theorist Umberto Barbaro.14 Between November 1930 and January 1931, Barbaro published a series of articles that encapsulated the European tendency towards neorealism, referring together to il Simbolismo, il Futurismo e il Neo-realismo, che pur rifacendosi alla letteratura dell’Ottocento non può dirsi un vero e proprio ritorno, ma invece ha i caratteri di novità, se non di avanguardia, con qualche analogia con il neo-realismo tedesco di Dôblin in letteratura, e dei Dix in pittura più che con quello del nostro Moravia e che col ‘realismo magico di Bontempelli.15

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Italian Neorealism

Symbolism, futurism, and neorealism, which despite referring back to nineteenth-century literature cannot be called a true return, instead demonstrating originality, if not avant-garde tendencies, more akin to the German neorealism of Dôblin in literature, and of Dix in painting than to the realism of Moravia or the “magical realism” of Bontempelli.

Here Barbaro’s “neorealism,” in essence, is an Italian rendering of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a post-Expressionist form of realism that flourished in art, architecture, film, theatre, and literature in the years between the world wars.16 This is the way Giovanni Necco employed the term in his 1933 analysis of “l’indirizzo letterario che si è imposto col nome di ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (nuova obiettività, neorealismo) [the literary tendency that has been labelled ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (new objectivity, neorealism)]”.17 Many have argued that all references to inter-war “neorealism” in Italy should be understood in the same light. Yet the trend Barbaro was describing appears to be broader than such an account would suggest. Indeed, in a 1931 essay on Soviet literature, Barbaro referred to the “qualifica di realismo o anche di neo-realismo, con cui si suole caratterizzare la nuova letteratura russa e coll’ausilio di Proust, Joyce, la nuova e più viva letteratura europea [term realism or even neorealism, with which we tend to characterize the new Russian literature and, with the advent of Proust and Joyce, the new and most vibrant European literature].”18 Elaborating on the same point one year later, Barbaro examined the diffusion of this pan-European tendency, explaining that “tra realismo, neorealismo, realismo magico, Proust, Joyce, Neue Sachlichkeit e magari surrealismo, ci sono relazioni abbastanza strette [between realism, neorealism, magic realism, Proust, Joyce, Neue Sachlichkeit, and maybe surrealism as well, there is quite a close relationship].”19 Barbaro was far from alone in identifying the spread of neorealism at this time. Arnaldo Bocelli, too, said of those whom “si sogliono chiamare ‘neorealisti’[we tend to call ‘neorealists’]” that “Freud, Joyce, Proust, Svevo, i romanzieri e commediografi russi contemporanei e anche Pirandello e i pirandelliani sono i loro padri spirituali [Freud, Joyce, Proust, Svevo, and the contemporary Russian novelists and playwrights, as well as Pirandello and his followers, are their spiritual fathers].”20 A 1931 article entitled “Neorealismo” in the journal L’Ambrosiano drew similar comparisons between the latest developments in German and French literature, which were said together to represent a “corrente neorealistica [neorealistic current]” and those in Italy where, it was argued, “un romanzo almeno, per non dirne altri, si meritò l’appellativo [...]: Gli indifferenti [di Alberto Moravia] [at least one



What Was Neorealism?

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novel, and perhaps others as well, deserved that title (...): Gli indifferenti (by Alberto Moravia)].”21 A capacious category integrating many of the most advanced tendencies in European art, neorealism included, but was not limited to, the Neue Sachlichkeit. Over the next decade, in fact, neorealism would continually expand its critical coverage, eventually coming to include many of the most innovative artists and movements in inter-war Europe. In the critical discourse of the 1930s, as in Bellonci’s response to the 1951 Inchiesta, neorealism served in particular to identify several of the artistic tendencies that are today more commonly known as European modernism.22 Barbaro’s “new and most vibrant European literature” and Bellonci’s “impressionistic literature that evoked things rather than representing them” were both invocations of modernism avant la lettre, as evidenced by the critics’ repeated references to Joyce and Proust, then as now the epigones of modernist literature. This argument can be taken too far, however, and it would be a mistake to conflate neorealism entirely with the current Anglo-American conception of modernism. Although it is now commonly employed in critical accounts of the arts, the historical and aesthetic category of modernism was codified only recently, and remains conceptually nebulous.23 It proves particularly problematic in Italy, where “the category of ‘modernism’ has never been really at home,” as Paolo Valesio puts it, and where the classification of twentieth-century artists and movements has tended in practice not to conform to international models.24 It would thus be anachronistic, even wildly inaccurate, to suggest that the neorealists were the Italian representatives of all the hybrid and heterogeneous tendencies that critics outside of Italy today retrospectively group under the heading of modernism. To recognize that the term “neorealism” was used in Italy to refer to writers and artists we now call modernists is not to say that all of those now considered modernists were neorealists.25 It would be better to say instead that some of the European artists whom critics today classify as modernists were singled out in a previous era for their innovative or experimental realism, and in mid-century Italy the term for this experimental realism was neorealism. Modernism as Neorealism It is significant, in this regard, that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the Italian critical reception of modernist authors, Joyce and Proust most prominently, tended to interpret them as realists, or rather hyper-naturalists, practitioners of a form of representation at once introspective in its focus and exhaustive in its scope. In one of the first reviews

22

Italian Neorealism

that Joyce’s work would receive in Italy, in fact, his style was described as “verismo impressionista, [...] verismo sintetico e profondo [impressionist verismo, (...) integral and profound verismo],” judgments that placed it in direct relationship with the Italian naturalist movement.26 In this review, and in many that followed, Joyce was credited with developing a realism of the psyche, an encyclopedic if not an exaggerated realism, one that captured psychological as well as physical reality at a granular level. Critics stressed not only his “realismo [realism],” therefore, but his “realismo [...] assoluto [absolute (...) realism].”27 They called him “passivamente analitica [passively analytic]” and insisted that his work was “troppo legata alla nostra esistenza empirica [too closely tied to our empirical existence].”28 The Italian reception of Proust was similar; in the eyes of many critics, the French author was seen to investigate social facts and personal responses with an almost scientific approach, and thus to have produced a “studio di costumi [study of customs]” rather than a true “creazione estetica [aesthetic creation].”29 Together, Joyce and Proust were classified as “scrittori analitici [analytical writers],” as the purveyors of a “nuovo naturalismo [new naturalism].”30 They were understood to have taken to its logical extreme naturalism’s fastidiously detailed representational aesthetic, and to have trained on the i­ ndividual human mind the same clinical thoroughness with which earlier generations of naturalists had approached the intricacies of social relations. As a result, in their work, as well as in that of their Italian followers, ­critics tended to identify the rise of a “verismo interiore [interior verismo],” one whose primary contribution to the world of letters was to “darci una visione nuova della realtà [give us a new vision of reality].”31 Between the wars, many of Italy’s cultural traditionalists, often operating under the influence of Benedetto Croce, condemned such modernist hyper-naturalism as fundamentally antipoetic.32 The distinguished critic Giovanni Battista Angioletti, for instance, attacked Joyce and his Italian acolytes for what he saw as their fixation on the crudest and least redeemable forms of realism that the novel would allow. Con Joyce si chiude il ciclo della prosa narrativa veristica, del romanzo naturalistico; con Ulisse si è giunti all’estrema, congestionata decadenza dello psicologismo; la concezione materialistica dell’Ottocento muore nella ­colossale, spaventevole apoteosi joyciana.33 Joyce marks the close of the cycle of veristic narrative prose, of the naturalistic novel. With Ulysses we have reached the extreme, congested decadence of psychologism. Nineteenth-century materialism expires in its colossal, dreadful apotheosis.



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Joyce’s analytic and realistic approach would signal not just the death of materialism but also that of the novel, Angioletti insisted, and would perhaps even bring about the death of literature itself, unless writers rejected his example and returned to the roots of their art. For literature to survive, Angioletti argued, writers had to leave behind the description of base material existence and to create “una nuova aura poetica [a new poetic aura].” As he put it, “[d]opo Joyce non c’è salvezza che nella ­poesia [after Joyce the only salvation lies in poetry].”34 Among the literary intellectuals affiliated with the pioneering Florentine cosmopolitan cultural journal Solaria, however, the realism of Joyce, Proust, and the other modernists became a kind of a rallying point.35 Replying to Angioletti and affirming Solaria’s position, Giansiro Ferrata argued in a 1929 essay that the distinction between analysis and poiesis was flawed, that realism, even in its most extreme forms, could be art. He maintained that there was a “doppia alleanza fra l’atmosfera d’analisi e l’atmosfera, che Angioletti chiama di poesia [twofold alliance between the sphere of analysis and the sphere of what Angioletti calls poetry]” – an alliance that was evident in the work of writers such as Joyce and Proust.36 Ferrata did not deny Angioletti’s characterization of these authors and their modernist contemporaries as hyper-realists, but insisted instead that it was through such hyper-­realism that a new form of poetry would be achieved. As Alberto Moravia put it several years later in a 1940 “Omaggio a Joyce” (Homage to Joyce), “sforzando il verismo con i mezzi stessi che gli sono propri, e cioè con la più minuziosa e integrale trascrizione di tutta la verità, per vie impensate, Joyce raggiunse una zona metafisica, fantastica, poetica [pushing the limits of realism in his characteristic way, with the most meticulous and complete transcription of the truth in its entirety, a transcription conducted in unimaginable ways, Joyce arrived at something that was metaphysical, fantastic, poetic].”37 In this reading – the neorealist reading – Joyce’s extension and expansion of realism constituted the source of his greatest literary innovation; it was his original interpretation of realism, then, that made Joyce the pinnacle of modernism, or rather neorealism. The suggestive link between modernism and realism may surprise readers grown accustomed to the conventional opposition of modernists to realists in the manner of the Brecht–Lukács debates.38 It should be remembered, however, that artists and critics both in the era of High Modernism and in more recent times have seen in the arts in early twentieth-century Europe a tendency towards “another form of realism,” one characterized by its manifest subjectivity, to be sure, but one that nevertheless conformed to recognizable notions of realist representation.39

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Joyce’s contemporary Wyndham Lewis, for instance, identified in Ulysses a “doctrinaire naturalism,” an attempt to extend, or rather to escalate, the artistic innovations of the nineteenth-century novel.40 In reaching this judgment, he was joined not only by Ezra Pound, who pronounced Ulysses to be “un roman réaliste par excellence [a realist novel par excellence],” but also by Joyce himself, who declared that “from it you may date a new orientation in literature – the new realism.”41 From Joyce’s “new realism” to Barbaro’s “neorealism, with which we tend to characterize the new Russian literature and, with the advent of Proust and Joyce, the new and most vibrant European literature,” the path is much straighter and shorter than some previous accounts would suggest. Indeed, it is evident that for Barbaro, Bocelli, and Bellonci, as well as for many of their contemporaries, neorealism was nothing less than the new modernist realism.42 Neorealism and Verismo What neorealism was not, as Bellonci vigorously asserted in his response to the Inchiesta, was a return to nineteenth-century realism. On this point, as we have seen, he could not have been clearer, maintaining that “neorealism needs to be distinguished from the realism of the nineteenth century, as the prefix ‘neo’ shows.” His contemporaries tended to argue similarly, insisting that neorealism was “[d]iverso e quasi opposto al realismo dell’ottocento [different from, almost the opposite of, the r­ ealism of the nineteenth century].”43 “Dalla parola ‘realismo’ bisogna  [...] allontanare qualsiasi interpretazione in senso veristico o naturalistico [It  is necessary (...) to divorce the world ‘realism’ from any veristic or naturalistic interpretation],” said the art critic Mario De Micheli in his 1946 manifesto “Realismo e poesia” (Realism and poetry).44 “Il neorealismo non ha [...] niente in comune [...] con il realismo del grande Ottocento [Neorealism has (...) nothing in common with the realism of the nineteenth century],” the philosopher Arturo Massolo argued in the 1951 Inchiesta.45 The screenwriter, director, and critic Luigi Chiarini made the point even more forcefully in the same year in his influential “Discorso sul neorealismo” (Discourse on neorealism): “Neorealismo non è verismo [Neorealism is not verismo].”46 Such strong and inflexible distinctions would seem to complicate, if not actually negate, a relationship that has come to define Italian neorealism in certain sectors. Giovanni Verga, the pioneer and paragon of Italian verismo, has frequently been seen as the progenitor of and inspiration for Italian neorealism.47 Undoubtedly, there is some truth to this claim. In the 1940s and throughout the age of neorealism, many sought



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to emphasize the nineteenth-century provenance of Italy’s post-war cinematic and literary innovations, suggesting that “il cinema italiano ha trovato la via buona ispirandosi al verismo [Italian cinema has found the right path by taking up the inspiration of verismo],” and even referring to neorealism as ­neo-verismo.48 Yet the evidence suggests that Verga’s influence on post-war Italian culture has been somewhat overstated, while the true nature of Verga’s undeniable importance for neorealism has been misunderstood.49 Rather than a “return to Verga,” as has sometimes been argued, neorealism is better understood as a revisionary rereading of this nineteenthcentury precedent. From the 1920s onwards, Verga became the object of sporadic critical conflict, his legacy contested by competing camps in a series of literary and ideological skirmishes that provoked repeated reappraisals of his poetic project. Downgraded both by the advocates of prosa d’arte and by the anti-positivist and anti-naturalist acolytes of Benedetto Croce, Verga was instead promoted by many of the Solariani, as well as by many future neorealists, who reinterpreted his work as the vital link between naturalism and symbolism, an Italian precursor of the new, modernist realism.50 Frequently, therefore, if far from unanimously, Verga was reclassified, placed within the same lineage as Joyce and Proust, who, as we have seen, were linked in turn to the Sicilian writer and his followers by virtue of what Italian critics interpreted as their “interior verismo” or “impressionist verismo.”51 Championing Verga by no means suggested a desire to reprise nineteenth-century realism. Such an effort would have struck intellectuals at the time as all but impossible because, in Italy as elsewhere, Joyce and Proust were understood to have marked a watershed moment in the history of representation, from which there was no going back. Alberto Moravia offered a persuasive account of this watershed in his “Omaggio a Joyce,” arguing that “il libro di Joyce chiude un’epoca intera, quella del naturalismo, e ne apre un’altra [Joyce’s book closed an entire epoch, that of naturalism, and opened another].”52 Joyce and Proust, he went on to explain in another essay the following year, were thus “gli affossatori del romanzo ottocentesco e al tempo stesso gli iniziatori del nuovo romanzo [the gravediggers of the nineteenth-century novel and at the same time the inventors of the new novel].”53 As Enrico Emanuelli explained in his 1945 essay “Romanzi fra due tempi” (Novels between two ages), artists and critics after the war saw themselves standing between two representational epochs: “quello conchiuso con Proust e con Joyce e quello che si apre davanti a noi [the one that concluded with Proust and Joyce and the one that is opening up before us].”54 A vast and potentially unbridgeable gulf thus separated Verga from those who

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are often alleged ingenuously to have returned to his notions of realism after the war. Recognizing this gulf, the neorealists sought not to revert to verismo but rather to rehabilitate Verga by rereading his work in a new, modernist, light. As the poet and critic Eurialo De Michelis put it in a 1948 essay, using terms that prefigure those of Bellonci three years later in the Inchiesta, neorealism offered “un Verga riscoperto dopo Joyce e dopo gli americani moderni [a Verga rediscovered after Joyce and after the modern American writers].”55 The neorealist rereading of Verga, a bid for modernism and not a lapse into received notions of verismo, was most prominently the work of the artists and intellectuals affiliated with the journal Cinema in the late 1930s and early 1940s. An incubator for many of the talents who would help to shape Italian neorealism, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Guido Aristarco, Carlo Lizzani, Luchino Visconti, and Cesare Zavattini, Cinema stood at the vanguard of Italian film theory between the wars.56 The watchword that signalled and sustained that vanguard was Verga. “Verga era un po’ la nostra bandiera [Verga was kind of our emblem],” one of the group’s members, Gianni Puccini, would later recall.57 In two essays the journal published in 1941, “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano” (Truth and poetry: Verga and Italian cinema) and “Ancora di Verga e del cinema italiano” (More on Verga and Italian cinema), the fledgling director Giuseppe De Santis and the editor and critic Mario Alicata argued for Verga’s crucial importance for the renewal of Italian cinema.58 De Santis himself would insist in later years that the two essays represented “un vero e proprio manifesto del neorealismo [a veritable manifesto of neorealism],” which they did, in two distinct senses.59 The first sense was resolutely political. Invoking Verga, Alicata and De Santis signalled their emphasis on the struggles of Italy’s poorest citizens, making verismo a virtual synecdoche for the radical attack on social injustice, the “arte rivoluzionaria ispirata ad un’umanità che soffre e spera [revolutionary art inspired by those who suffer and hope],” with which the young intellectuals sought to remake Italian film culture under Fascism.60 Cinema’s renewal of Verga had a second and no less significant ambition, however, which was to modernize the substance and style of cinematic realism. For Alicata and De Santis, Verga exemplified realism on a human scale, a form of representation shaped by individual and communal subjectivity even as it aspired to embrace the breadth of social and physical reality: “il realismo, non come passivo ossequio ad una statica verità obbiettiva, ma come forza creatrice, nella fantasia, d’una ‘storia’ di eventi e di persone [realism not as passive obedience to a static, objective truth, but as a creative, imaginative force, shaping the ‘history’ of events and people].”61 They found in Verga a model for forms of realism that



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went beyond indexicality, capturing but also supplementing fact and detail. For this reason, they attracted a significant backlash from prominent advocates of documentary cinema, who were convinced that filmmakers had the revolutionary potential to capture reality directly, freed from the interference of subjectivity and without literary mediation.62 Responding to the accusation that by looking to Verga they were subordinating cinema to literature, Alicata and De Santis called into question their accusers’ rigid distinction between the image-capture of the film camera and the imagination of the artist. On the one hand, therefore, they reiterated their commitment to realist reportage: “[a]nche noi [...] vogliamo portare la nostra macchina da presa nelle strade, nei campi, nei porti, nelle fabbriche del nostro paese [we too (...) want to bring our camera into our country’s streets, fields, ports, and factories],” they wrote, rehearsing one of the clichés of Italian inter-war documentary realism.63 On the other hand, breaking decisively with the more dogmatic advocates of documentarism, they insisted on the value of literary invention, from which, they argued, cinema “ha spesso avuto la migliore lezione di verità e di umanità [has often learned its most important lessons about truth and humanity].”64 Alicata and De Santis insisted that the two tendencies were complementary, not mutually exclusive: the human eye, no less than the camera eye, could penetrate reality; subjectivity, no less than objectivity, could capture authentic truths. Defending this position, the intellectuals of the Cinema group were to a significant degree reprising the arguments in favour of the “twofold alliance between the sphere of analysis and the sphere of [...] poetry” that buttressed the inter-war Italian reception of the “impressionist verismo” of Joyce and Proust. They refused, therefore, to distinguish between literary and documentary modes of representation, instead arguing that the two could work in concert to achieve a fidelity to the real that would surpass mere indexicality. In reaching this conclusion, they echoed some of the earliest Italian critical formulations of neorealism, and in particular those of Umberto Barbaro, whose advocacy of the pan-European tendency towards subjective hyper-realism can be traced throughout Cinema.65 Emphasizing what they termed the “poesia della verità [poetry of truth],” in fact, Alicata and De Santis drew substantially on Barbaro’s work, and in particular on his analyses of what today is known as European modernism, which was an important influence on Cinema, especially its reinterpretation of Verga.66 By providing a venue for exploring the potential cinematic applications of such theories, and with them the most innovative tendencies in literature and the arts, the journal helped to adapt the developing notion of neorealism to the terrain of Italian filmmaking.

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Italian Cinema Becomes Neorealist This was hardly new terrain, however. As a term used in film criticism, neorealism’s circulation in Italy significantly predated Cinema’s intervention, originating in the late 1920s and early 1930s in conjunction with similar developments in literature and the arts. Well before the first issue of Cinema was published, Libero Solaroli had already highlighted the “formal neorealism” of Soviet cinema; Umberto Barbaro had invoked neorealism in his introduction to the collected film criticism of Vsevolod Pudovkin; Ettore Maria Margadonna had identified a “forma di neo-­ realismo o realismo integrale [form of neorealism or integral realism]” in both American and European cinema; and Alberto Cavalcanti had analysed “[l]e mouvement néo-réaliste [the neorealist movement]” in British filmmaking.67 Yet Cinema nevertheless played a critical role in neorealism’s development. A conduit for many of the most advanced ideas circulating in European culture between the wars, the journal helped to keep the film community abreast of the bourgeoning modernist realism, along with other advances in the arts in Italy and beyond. In so doing, Cinema facilitated neorealism’s transition from a notion in Italian cultural theory into an ambition in Italian filmmaking. That transition has often been linked to Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, the film that came closest to realizing Cinema’s vision, becoming “una sorta di manifesto di questo gruppo [a sort of manifesto of the group],” as De Santis would describe it in later years.68 Whether Ossessione inaugurated Italian neorealist cinema, however, remains in doubt. Most now seem to believe that the film was as much noir as neorealist and that at most it represented a kind of pre-neorealist inflection point, signalling the end of the cinema of the Fascist ventennio and laying the groundwork for tendencies that would rise to prominence after the war.69 Yet there may be good reasons for seeing Ossessione as something more than this. Indeed, the genealogy of neorealism runs directly through Visconti’s film, a function both of its style and its source material. Contrary to expectations, perhaps, given Ossessione’s role as the unofficial manifesto of Cinema, the film was an adaptation not of Giovanni Verga but rather of the American novelist James M. Cain.70 The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s most famous work and the source for no fewer than five films, had attracted the interest of the French director Julien Duvivier, who suggested it to Jean Renoir, who in turn passed it on to Visconti, directorial assistant on the set of Renoir’s 1936 film Partie de campagne.71 Determined to adapt the novel for the cinema, Visconti could find neither an Italian translation nor an English original, and enlisted the help of his producer, Libero Solaroli, to track down a copy. Solaroli sent Giuseppe De Santis, who was to serve as one of the film’s screenwriters, to find Giorgio



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Bassani, at the time a virtual unknown, later a celebrated novelist, who agreed both to translate The Postman Always Rings Twice into Italian and to assist Visconti in its cinematic adaptation.72 For a cultural history of neorealism, this chain of influence is remarkable: each of these figures – Cain, Duvivier, Renoir, Visconti, Solaroli, De Santis, and Bassani – was key to neorealism’s development, and each in a way that bears directly on the production and reception of Ossessione. Among Visconti’s contemporaries, Duvivier and Renoir had been credited with inventing “neo-realismo francese [French neorealism],” a label that Umberto Barbaro traced back to the latter’s 1931 film La Chienne.73 Although he found no direct equivalents to this cinematic current in Italy, Barbaro did identify one film that seemed at least to point in a similar direction: Visconti’s Ossessione, which demonstrated “la rappresentazione artistica di una realtà angosciata [the artistic representation of an anguished reality],” as he detailed in a 1943 review of the film.74 In his own review, published in the same year, Walter Ronchi argued similarly. Contrasting the latest developments in French and Italian cinema, Ronchi insisted that “[g]li allettamenti del più vieto formalismo, del calligrafismo [italiano] sono stati certamente evitati dal miglior film francese che è passato alla storia dell’arte e della civiltà col nome di neo-realismo [The trappings of the most involuted formalism, of (Italian) calligrafismo, have certainly been avoided by the best French films that have been handed down into the history of art and civilization under the name of neorealism].”75 Among the exemplars of French neorealism, Ronchi explained, “basti citare i nomi di Renoir, di Carné, di Duvivier [it is enough to cite the names of Renoir, Carné, and Duvivier],” all of whom – and especially Duvivier – he believed to have exerted a visible influence on Visconti’s Ossessione.76 Guido Aristarco made a similar case in each of the two 1943 reviews he devoted to Visconti’s film. Ossessione, he demonstrated, è improntato ad un crudo realismo che ricorda in qualche battuta S ­ teinbeck e il neorealismo francese: dei Renoir, dei Carné, dei Duvivier. E un evidente influsso di questa corrente cinematografica ha tutto il film. Specialmente nella crudezza del contenuto che risente soprattutto del maestro Renoir.77 is marked by a raw realism that in certain instances recalls Steinbeck and French neorealism: Renoir, Carné, Duvivier. This cinematic current has an obvious influence on the entire film. The crudity of the film’s content ­reveals above all the influence of the maestro Renoir.

In keeping with the cinematic conventions of the day, Aristarco, Ronchi, and Barbaro all invoked neorealism to refer to a mode of French

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Italian Neorealism

filmmaking; they were following the lead of the Belgian film critic Carl Vincent, who had first drawn attention to what he termed “le néo-réalisme du cinéma français [the neorealism of French cinema]” in an essay of 1929 – the same year in which Solaroli had identified Soviet cinema’s “formal neorealism.”78 As we have seen, however, Barbaro’s understanding of neorealism was considerably broader than this borrowing might imply, encompassing as it did tendencies in literature and the arts in addition to cinema. In the context of his critical corpus, therefore, Barbaro’s reference to “neo-realismo francese [French neorealism]” suggested a certain relationship between the films of Renoir, Carné, and Duvivier and the “title of realism or even neorealism, with which we tend to characterize [...] the new and most vibrant European literature” that he had invoked more than a decade earlier.79 What his reference did not do, at least not yet, was identify the birth of a specifically Italian current of cinematic neorealism. Credit for that discovery is instead frequently ascribed to Mario Serandrei, Visconti’s long-time collaborator and Ossessione’s editor. In a 1965 interview, in fact, Visconti claimed that “[i]l termine ‘neo-realismo’ nacque con Ossessione [the term ‘neorealism’ was born with Ossessione],” and credited this birth to Serandrei, who had allegedly written from the set to say “[n]on so come potrei definire questo tipo di cinema se non con l’appellativo di ‘neo-realistico’ [I don’t know how to define this type of cinema except with the label ‘neorealist’].”80 Unpublished and apparently unnoticed until Visconti’s testimonial, twenty-two years after Ossessione’s debut, Serandrei’s letter may be significant, but it was not resonant enough rightly to be credited with announcing the arrival of neorealism in Italian cinema. News of that arrival was instead delivered by Giorgio Bassani, who observed in a 1947 essay that Ossessione was “uno dei primi film neorealistici italiani [one of the first Italian neorealist films].”81 For Bassani, this designation appears to have signified much the same tendency that it did for Barbaro, and later for Bellonci. In his words, neorealism constituted a “ritorno alle fonti del naturalismo attraverso le estreme conseguenze decadentistiche, francesi e americane [return to the sources of naturalism by way of the extreme consequences of French and American decadentism].”82 Neorealism was new, Bassani recognized, because it drew on the innovations of modernism – commonly referred to as decadentism in the Italian critical discourse of the time – in order to renew and to surpass outmoded notions of naturalism.83 When neorealism entered the Italian critical consciousness after the war, therefore, the term embraced cultural currents dating back to the late 1920s – currents that were literary as well as cinematic, modernist as well as



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realist. Bassani undoubtedly used the term in this way, commenting in a 1948 review of the young generation of Italian novelists, published not long after his discussion of Ossessione, that “già intorno al ’40 aveva tutta l’aria di rappresentare una tendenza letteraria ben precisa (neorealista, si disse) [already around 1940 they seemed to represent a very distinct literary tendency (neorealist, we used to say)].”84 There was an evident connection between this neorealist tendency in literature and the growing number of “Italian neorealist films” to which Bassani believed Ossessione belonged. In no small part, that connection was carried through the work of James M. Cain, whose brand of American realism had influenced a generation of Italian novelists – Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini ­especially – deemed to exemplify Italian literary neorealism.85 As Pavese himself put it in an interview in 1950, “[q]uando si parla di Hemingway, Faulkner, Cain, Lee Masters, Dos Passos, del vecchio Dreiser, e del loro deprecato influsso su noi scrittori italiani, presto o tardi si pronuncia la parola fatale e accusatrice: neo-realismo [when they speak of Hemingway, Faulkner, Cain, Lee Masters, old Dreiser, and their much maligned influence on Italian writers, sooner or later they utter that fatal and accusatory word: neorealism].”86 The arrival of Cain’s novel in Italy, in the hands of Visconti, to whom it had been given by Renoir on the recommendation of his colleague Duvivier, and for whom it would be translated by Bassani on the suggestion of Solaroli and De Santis, was in a symbolic but also a very real sense the arrival of cinematic neorealism. The chain of influence that began with Cain eventually led Visconti to adapt what was, in the Italian cultural context of the early 1940s, a recognizably neorealist (American) novel in a recognizably (French) neorealist style. Unsurprisingly, both his critics and his collaborators began to consider Ossessione, the product of this effort, itself to be a work of neorealism. Neorealism Becomes Italian Cinema As a category of Italian cinema production, neorealism was thus knowingly borrowed from the extant critical vocabulary and enlisted to describe tendencies in filmmaking that drew directly and indirectly on the most advanced international currents in the arts in the first half of the twentieth century. This process of adaptation can be located, albeit imprecisely, in the four-year gap between Aristarco and Barbaro’s discussion of French cinematic neorealism and Bassani’s reference to the “Italian neorealist films.” During that gap, critics recognized many of Ossessione’s most noteworthy innovations, but they did not yet describe

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those innovations as neorealist. Indicative, in this regard, is the work of Antonio Pietrangeli, a prominent critic as well as one of the contributors to Ossessione’s screenplay. In a 1944 review of Visconti’s film, Pietrangeli argued that, with Ossessione, “la realtà è entrata tutta intera e bruciante nel nostro cinema [reality, uncut and red-hot, entered into our cinema],” a forceful statement of Visconti’s contribution to Italian filmmaking.87 In his 1947 account of the making of the director’s ­follow-up, La terra trema, Pietrangeli took this point further still, assigning Ossessione to what he called “la nuova scuola cinematografica italiana [the new Italian cinematic school].”88 In both instances, the tendencies he was describing – a new form of realism and a new current in Italian filmmaking – were effectively neorealist, but Pietrangeli did not yet recognize them as such. Quite soon, however, the situation would change dramatically. “Vogliamo dare noi un nome al Gino di Ossessione? [Do we want to give a new name to Gino in Ossessione?]” – the critic asked in his influential 1948 essay “Panoramique sur le cinéma italien” (A panoramic view of Italian cinema) – “[l]o potremmo chiamare il neo-realismo italiano [we can call him Italian neorealism].”89 Pietrangeli had now found the name for the phenomenon that for some years he had been tracing in his film criticism. Several of Visconti’s other collaborators likewise seem to have embraced this sense of the term at roughly the same time. Bassani, as we have seen, adopted neorealism to classify Ossessione in 1947; Barbaro first referred specifically to Italy’s “scuola neorealistica [neorealist school]” in 1948; even Serandrei, letter to Visconti notwithstanding, seems to have used the term “neorealism” in a published work for the first time in 1948.90 A palpable shift had evidently taken place just a few years after the end of the Second World War: neorealism had become a category of Italian filmmaking. While this shift was being set in motion, in the four-year hiatus between Aristarco and Barbaro’s 1943 interventions and Bassani’s 1947 essay, notions of neorealism remained common currency in the Italian cultural conversation. The term and its cognates were repeatedly invoked, for instance, to classify the work of novelists such as Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, and Vasco Pratolini.91 They were used as well to describe Soviet and French cinema.92 In painting, too, neorealism – a term that had frequently been used to define the arts between the wars, as in the writings of Carlo Carrà, Roberto Papini, Lionello Venturi, and others – remained very much in circulation after 1945.93 Before notions of neorealism took hold in the cinema, in fact, they were commonly employed by leading critics and historians of the arts to classify the postwar work of Renato Guttuso, Mario Mafai, Domenico Purificato, and many other well-known artists.94 If neorealism was not yet the definitive



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descriptor for the latest developments in Italian film, therefore, it was anything but absent from Italian culture. Once it was adopted as a description for a form of contemporary Italian filmmaking, however, neorealism took on a new and more prominent cultural role. Just a few months after Bassani’s essay, for example, a 1947 review of Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo, paradiso nero could confidently assert that “[i]l film si inserisce senza fatica nel filone neorealistico del cinema italiano [the film fits effortlessly into the neorealist current of Italian cinema]” – a “filone [current]” that quickly came to include many of the films that continue to make up the neorealist canon: Roma città aperta, Sciuscià (Vittorio De Sica, 1946), Vivere in pace, Il bandito (Alberto Lattuada, 1946), Senza pietà (Lattuada, 1948), Sotto il sole di Roma (Renato Castellani, 1948), and Gioventù perduta (Pietro Germi, 1948).95 As these and other films began to be grouped under a common banner, neorealism became largely if not entirely a cinematic designation. Already by 1948, in fact, this was said to be the “comune definizione di neo-realismo [common definition of neorealism].”96 In that same year, a newsreel of the Settimana Incom informed Italian viewers that their national cinema represented “la voce dell’Italia fatta più autentica dall’esperienza del dolore. Ecco il segreto del nostro neorealismo [the voice of Italy made more authentic by her experience of pain. That is the secret of our neorealism],” a triumphant declaration that amplified one voice in the neorealist conversation while perhaps inadvertently silencing several others.97 Less than a year later, and just a few years after notions of Italian cinematic neorealism had first entered the cultural consciousness, the term had effectively become “una etichetta, sinonimo di film girato ‘dal vero’ [a label synonymous with films shot ‘on location’].”98 Italian cinema had not only adopted neorealism; it had appropriated it. Yet this appropriation was never complete. Even as notions of neorealism began to cohere in the cinema, the term retained a greater degree of flexibility and a broader range of reference than is sometimes recognized. Neorealism was not restricted to an Italian context, for example. After the war, Italian critics identified a “neorealismo inglese [English neorealism]” in the documentary films of John Grierson; a “Neorealismo sovietico [Soviet Neorealism]” in the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin; and a “‘neo-realismo’ americano [American ‘neorealism’]” in Hollywood films such as Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytyk, 1947), The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948), Call Northside 777 (Henry Hathaway, 1948), and Cry of the City (Robert Siodmak, 1948).99 They also continued to recognize currents of literary neorealism in international and Italian prose, and to classify as neorealist many of the latest trends in painting, sculpture, and eventually architecture and design.100

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Nevertheless, for many neorealism had become, and perhaps remains, primarily if not exclusively a cinematic designation, a label for a short-lived tendency in post-war Italian filmmaking, with its broader cultural manifestations at best relegated to secondary status. One telling result is that it was and often still is assumed that neorealism spread from film to literature and the arts, when the inverse is closer to the truth.101 The speed with which this mistaken genealogy managed to take hold in Italy after the war is striking. In a 1953 article facetiously entitled “Prima viene il film” (Film came first), Carlo Bo recounted how [p]roprio un anno fa un critico anonimo mi accusò di aver adoperato per la nuova letteratura il termine neorealistico che apparterrebbe invece alla storia del cinema e precisamente alla storia dell’ultimo cinema italiano. Ora le cose stanno diversamente.102 just one year ago, an anonymous critic accused me of having used the term neorealist for the new literature when it belonged instead to the history of cinema and precisely to the history of recent Italian cinema. The truth is quite different.

One decade after the release of Ossessione, many of Bo’s contemporaries had come to believe that neorealism was first and foremost a style of postwar Italian filmmaking, as if all the preceding discussion of neorealism in literature and the arts, in Italy and internationally, did not exist. The success of the most celebrated neorealist films and filmmakers had managed already to overshadow, even to occlude, neorealism’s many related manifestations. It was in this context, and in response to this ­erroneous narrative, that Bo insisted on neorealism’s nineteenth-century provenance, reminding his readers of the work of Jules Hûret and of the others who followed him in tracing a modernist neorealism throughout the European arts. Cinema had all but taken over neorealism; Bo was working to take it back. Neorealism across the Arts One way to read Bo’s 1951 Inchiesta sul neorealismo, therefore, is to see it as an attempt to reassert neorealism’s long history and broad sweep, to set the term’s burgeoning cinematic connotations in their proper historical and artistic context, and perhaps even to claim for neorealism a more accommodating and inclusive definition than some of its cinematic proponents appeared to offer. Emphasizing neorealism’s ­cosmopolitan foundations, and especially its debts to the most advanced



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currents in the European arts, was central to this enterprise. Many of Bo’s respondents made clear that, however innovative Italy’s new cinema may appear, neorealism was more than a post-war phenomenon, more than a form of filmmaking, and more than an exclusively Italian artistic tendency. “Per me il neorealismo è un processo di verità che si svolge un po’ dappertutto nei campi dello spirito, impegna e impegnerà gli sforzi di tutte le arti, e non può essere altrimenti, perché i dati reali del mondo stanno cambiando egualmente per tutti [For me, neorealism is a process of truth-telling that occurs across the creative fields. It engages and will engage the drives of all the arts, and it cannot do otherwise, because the facts of the world are changing equally for everyone],” the editor and critic Franco Antonicelli told the radio audience.103 The Inchiesta sul neorealismo, and the term’s long cultural history – traced in the critical interventions of Hûret and Lo Gatto; Evola, Solaroli, and Titta Rosa; Barbaro and Bocelli; Carrà, Papini, and Venturi; and eventually Bassani and Pietrangeli – together suggest that no single art form can make a definitive claim to ownership. Neorealism was “un clima comune [a common climate],” Antonio Pietrangeli argued in 1948, an ambitious project shared by “tutta la migliore cultura italiana [all of the best Italian culture],” Gianni Puccini suggested in the same year.104 It not only emerged and developed across the arts, it encouraged collaboration between the arts.105 Neorealism was “un realismo totale [a total realism],” as the critic Pierantonio Bertè explained in a 1950 essay, bridging “romanzo, teatro, cinema, pittura [novel, theatre, cinema, painting].”106 Others extended the designation still further, until it included music as well.107 Throughout the age of neorealism, specialization was understood as both an artistic and an ethical failure. The goal was cultural ­cross-pollination in the pursuit of a “sintesi fondata su autentici valori spirituali, etici, estetici, razionali [synthesis founded on authentic spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, and rational values],” in the words of the industrialist and political theorist Adriano Olivetti.108 Elio Vittorini offers a representative case in point. As both author and editor, Vittorini pursued an innovative combinatorial aesthetic, a cultural synthesis uniting photography, literature, music, and cinema. Wishing to prepare an illustrated edition of his most famous novel, Conversazione in Sicilia, he had first sought the collaboration of Renato Guttuso, who produced sixteen designs for the novel in 1943, but never completed the project.109 Luchino Visconti had already pursued a similar collaboration, inviting Guttuso to illustrate “Tradizione e invenzione” (Tradition and invention), the 1941 essay in which he explored the possibility of adapting Verga for the cinema.110 Moreover, when he later succeeded in carrying out that adaptation in La terra trema, Visconti cited Vittorini’s

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Conversazione in Sicilia as a key influence on his thinking.111 The lines of influence went both ways. Vittorini at one point sought to acquire the photographs taken in Acitrezza in preparation for Visconti’s film; the novelist planned a new illustrated edition of Conversazione, completed in 1953, which he prepared with what he called a “criterio cinematografico [cinematic criterion],” with the photographs working in conjunction with the text, like “una specie di film immobile [a sort of motionless film].”112 These suggestive links between painterly, novelistic, photographic, and cinematic developments in the age of neorealism demonstrate something of the intermedial character of artistic exploration during the period. Those links would have been even more substantial had Visconti’s planned film adaptation of Vittorini’s 1945 partisan novel Uomini e no come to fruition.113 Although that project was never realized, Uomini e no can nevertheless be said to constitute one of the most significant explorations of neorealism’s syncretic spirit. Vittorini had long wished to move beyond the standard language of literary realism, “[o]ttimo per raccogliere i dati espliciti di una realtà [ideal for capturing the explicit data of reality],” as he argued in a 1947 summation of his poetics, but “inadeguato per un tipo di rappresentazione nel quale si voglia esprimere un sentimento complessivo o un’idea complessiva, un’idea riassuntiva di speranze o insofferenze degli uomini in genere, tanto più se segrete [inadequate for a type of representation in which one tries to express a general feeling or a general idea, an idea that encapsulates mankind’s general hopes or prejudices, especially if these are kept secret].”114 To put it in the terms of Bellonci’s assessment of neorealism, with which Vittorini’s account shares many points in common, ­traditional realism succeeds in capturing the “objective world” (what Vittorini calls “explicit data”) but fails to capture the experience of reality, the “memories that remain in us without our being aware of them” (what Vittorini calls “a general feeling or a general idea”). As a result, Vittorini argued, traditional realism fundamentally misrepresents the human experience of reality, insofar as that reality remains at least partially hidden from human consciousness. The exploration of reality as reflected in human subjectivity, the examination of what Vittorini called “mankind’s general hopes or prejudices,” undergirds the ambitious representation of the partisan struggle in Uomini e no, a fact announced in the novel’s title. Unfortunately, the ambiguity of that title has led to much confusion, and many of Vittorini’s critics continue to misinterpret his intentions, insisting that the novel posits a Manichean division between partisans (“Uomini [Men]”) and Fascists (“Non uomini [Not men]”).115 Vittorini himself sought actively to avoid



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this confusion, explaining in an interview, an essay, and a letter to his publisher that “Uomini e no significa esattamente che noi, gli uomini, possiamo anche essere ‘non uomini.’ Mira cioè a ricordare che vi sono, nell’uomo, molte possibilità inumane [Uomini e no means precisely that men can also be ‘non-men.’ That is, it aims to remind us that there are many inhuman possibilities in mankind].”116 Vittorini’s expressed ambition, in other words, was to represent the anti-Fascist Resistance as a struggle within each individual partisan to retain his or her humanity while fighting against an enemy unburdened by such scruples. A new representational style thus proved necessary, he believed, because, although traditional realism was suitable for the representation of the Resistance as armed conflict, it was not up to the task of representing at the same time the partisans’ interior conflict, the manifestation of their conflicted humanity. In Uomini e no, therefore, Vittorini pursued a new and more holistic form of realism, one that he hoped could convey the reality of the struggle in its entirety. As he made clear in his 1947 précis, his goal was to “andare [...] oltre i riferimenti realistici [...] a farli suonare dei significati di una realtà maggiore [go (...) beyond realist references (...) to make them give voice to the sense of a greater reality].”117 That “greater reality” is not separate from or opposed to material reality in Vittorini’s poetics, but is rather an added dimension – what Vittorini sometimes called “l’in più [the something more],” the “quarta dimensione [fourth dimension]” – of reality itself. It is more real, or, as he put it, “due volte reale [twice real]”: objective and subjective together, material reality and the human experience of reality at one and the same time.118 In Uomini e no, however, the sense of hyper-realism that cohered in his earlier and more acclaimed Conversazione in Sicilia appears to break down, a sign, it is often argued, of a “crisis” in Vittorini’s ­poetics.119 Unlike the earlier novel, which pursues a unity between subjective and objective reality, in Uomini e no the exploration of the subjectivity of the author-figure’s reflections on the Resistance is largely confined to a series of metaliterary passages, set off from the rest of the text in italic script.120 What was once one, in other words, here seems to have been cleaved in two. Yet this dissolution can better be understood as a poetic strategy than as a poetic crisis. Indeed, dramatizing a divide between representation and reality, Uomini e no seeks to portray an ethical and political crisis to which the novel’s divided poetics can be understood as a partial response. For Vittorini the crisis was occasioned by the Resistance itself, which in Uomini e no comes to represent much more than a fight for liberation from the German occupation: it is nothing less than the struggle for the fate of humanity.

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This struggle is problematized, however, by the suggestion that humanity is a liability in wartime. Attacking a man, the novel’s narrator explains, the Nazis and Fascists aimed to “colpirlo dove l’uomo era più debole, dove aveva l’infanzia, dove aveva la vecchiaia, dove aveva la sua costola staccata e il cuore scoperto: dov’era più uomo [strike him where a human being is at his weakest, in childhood, in old age, in the opening in his ribs where his heart is exposed: where he is most human].”121 To be human is to be vulnerable, that is to say, and to be more human is to be more vulnerable. An enemy can exploit that vulnerability by suppressing his own humanity, choosing – and the novel’s narrator emphasizes that this is always a choice – to behave inhumanely. Uomini e no thus raises a series of disturbing questions. Were humanity and victory incommensurable goods? Could the partisans achieve the tactical goal of the Resistance (victory over the Nazis and the Fascists) only at the expense of nullifying the ethical goal (the advancement of humanity)? Could they defeat their enemy only through the temporary suppression of their own humanity? If so, did the means invalidate the ends, such that tactical victory entailed ethical defeat? Instead of positing definitive answers to these probing questions, Uomini e no internalizes them in its very structure, so that the solutions are held – or rather withheld – by the form of the novel itself. Ultimately, therefore, the poetic coherence of the text is made both to depend on and to suggest the ethical coherence of the Resistance. In the italicized sections, evocative and dreamlike, the author-figure engages in a lengthy conversation with the novel’s protagonist, the partisan Enne 2, about his memory, his childhood, his love and desire. In the back-slant portions, insistent and descriptive, the novel’s narrative describes the anti-Fascist activities of Enne 2 and his fellow partisans, their commitment to the cause, the trauma they endure in their effort to liberate Milan. By self-consciously dividing these two discourses, the novel provocatively conjoins two otherwise separate sets of questions: Can a partisan achieve a coherent synthesis between his humanity (italics) and his fight against the Nazi occupiers (back-slant)? Can literature achieve a coherent synthesis between subjective (italics) and objective (backslant) modes of representation? Adopting these questions as a structuring mechanism, Uomini e no deliberately withholds any definitive fusion in the service of a profound exploration of the interrelations between ethics, politics, and poetics. Critics at the time had a word for searching, ambitious, and experimental works such as Vittorini’s: subjective as well as objective; hyper-realist but also allusive and symbolic. They called Uomini e no neorealist, invoking the same term they had likewise used to describe Vittorini’s earlier efforts.122 And they continued to refer to his work as neorealist even after



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the term began to take on its cinematic connotations.123 In the 1951 Inchiesta, Vittorini reached a similar verdict, identifying in his own literary biography a phase corresponding to the same neorealist tradition he had helped to define more than a decade earlier, when he argued that the neorealists were the “eredi naturali proprio di coloro che dieci anni fa passavano per supertori del reale [natural heirs of those who ten years ago were understood to have transcended reality],” and thus that James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Richard Hughes, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf “e i neo-realisti degli ultimi anni formano [...] un’unica famiglia [and the neorealists of recent years form (...) a single family].”124 For both the author and his contemporary critics, it is clear, neorealism designated forms of introspective and experiential realism, inflected with modernist subjectivity, with which the arts – all of the arts – sought to capture the complex realities of human existence. Neorealism as Art Cinema In subsequent years, however, critical definitions of neorealism constricted so significantly that it is now frequently argued, against the judgment of his contemporaries – indeed, against his own judgment – that Vittorini was never in fact a neorealist.125 Neither, it is often claimed, were Vittorini’s celebrated (and formerly neorealist) contemporaries Italo Calvino, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Cesare Pavese.126 Disentangling the syncretic tendencies that once united all of the arts under the banner of neorealism, later accounts have so drastically reduced the term’s critical coverage that it no longer applies to many if not most of the artworks it once encompassed. Instead, over time neorealism has for many come to signify “primarily an ‘art’ cinema,” “a cinema of auteurs.”127 This usage of the term, far more restrictive than those that earlier obtained, tends in practice to crowd out all others. More problematically still, it appears to have severed current usage from much of neorealism’s history. Indeed, even as interest in neorealism’s early history has increased in recent years, most accounts of neorealism’s semantic roots tend to break off at 1945, implying, when not actually stipulating, a strict division between the broad and inclusive definitions of neorealism that held for the first five decades – from Hûret’s 1891 Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire through the end of the Second World War – and the later use of the term as a “synonym for films shot ‘on location.’” When it is acknowledged at all, this division is typically ascribed either to amnesia or to ignorance. Those who theorized and practised neorealism after the war had either forgotten the pre-war history of their adopted moniker, it is claimed, or else they were entirely unaware of that

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history, certain that they had invented the term themselves.128 Neither explanation is entirely convincing. In large measure, this is because the division was never as clear as such accounts would seem to suggest. After all, Alberto Moravia was deemed Italy’s leading neorealist writer in 1931 and then again in 1951; when his 1929 novel Gli indifferenti was republished in 1949, the publicity put out by its editor labelled the text “[l]’inizio del neorealismo [the start of neorealism].”129 The same pattern holds in the case of the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, designated a neorealist in 1938 and again in 1949.130 Conventional definitions and interpretations of neorealism likewise bridged the supposed divide. Witness, for example, Giovanni Battista Angioletti’s 1950 attack on the “ingenuo e depauperato ­‘neo-realismo’ [naïve and impoverished ‘neorealism’]” of those “imitatori dello stesso Joyce [imitators of Joyce]” he had similarly condemned in 1929.131 Moreover, as this last example suggests, the term not only conveyed the same meaning and identified the same artists, it was also wielded by many of the same critics. Thus, for instance, Umberto Barbaro, who had done as much as anyone else to disseminate notions of neorealism in the 1930s, continued after the war, as we have seen, to follow the development of what he called Italy’s “neorealist school.”132 Such self-evident continuities must surely dispel any strict divisions between pre-war and post-war definitions. What seems to have happened, instead, is that soon after the war neorealism underwent a process of retrenchment: its dominion shrank markedly, and borders were erected where none had existed before. Thanks largely to the international success of a handful of celebrated films, neorealism began to take on a set of entailments, increasingly enforced as a set of rules, which considerably reduced its scope. The result was not a recognizably different definition of neorealism – after all, the term had been used to identify modes of filmmaking since the 1920s – but it was certainly more limited, more circumscribed. A fraction of the former category was increasingly taken for the whole, and as time went on, the size of that fraction continued to shrink. By the standards at work in the immediate post-war period, which for the moment still reflected decades-old definitions of the term, both Ossessione and Uomini e no could be considered neorealist. Vittorini’s novel was soon displaced; in a few more years, Visconti’s film would also be removed from neorealism’s critical remit, with its earlier classification dismissed as “sheer, indiscriminate mystification.”133 Rather than a firm and fixed distinction between pre- and post-war ­neorealism, then, a process of gradual rigidification brought about neorealism’s continual contraction.



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Rebelling against this contraction, externally imposed and often unwelcome, many of those responsible for neorealism’s pre-war development began to question if not in fact to abandon the term in subsequent years. This is certainly true of Cesare Pavese, formerly recognized as one of neorealism’s leaders, its capiscuola, and a writer who had been labelled a neorealist well before 1945.134 In a 1950 radio address Pavese insisted that the term “ha soprattutto oggi un senso cinematografico, definisce dei film che, come Ossessione, Roma città aperta, Ladri di biciclette, hanno stupito il mondo [today has above all a cinematic meaning: it defines those films like Ossessione, Roma città aperta, and Ladri di biciclette, that have astonished the world].”135 Pavese was not denying neorealism’s pre-war history as a literary and artistic term, a history in which he had played no small role. Rather, he was trying to extricate himself from a critical characterization that, thanks to neorealism’s post-war retrenchment, no longer applied to his work. This effort did not invalidate earlier notions of neorealism. If anything, it called into question the more restrictive notions in vogue at the time. Indeed, many of Pavese’s contemporaries argued this latter point quite vehemently. Reconsidering neorealism’s purchase in the visual arts, for example, Domenico Purificato lamented that “si è fatto del neorealismo un atteggiamento programmatico, preconcetto, a volte settario e dogmatico [neorealism has become a programmatic, preconceived, at times sectarian and dogmatic attitude],” while Renato Guttuso made evident his “buone ragioni per aborrire questo termine equivoco e giornalistico [good reasons for abhorring this misunderstood and journalistic term].”136 Like Pavese, both artists had been associated with neorealism well before the term’s appropriation by Italian film critics. Once its definition narrowed, however, it no longer appeared to describe their projects. Neorealism narrowed so far, in fact, and so quickly, that leading filmmakers and film critics likewise came to reject it at the same time and in remarkably similar terms as Pavese, Purificato, and Guttuso. Accusing neorealism of “fossilizzazione [fossilization],” many argued that it had become little more than a “comoda ricetta [convenient recipe],” “una formula già troppo sfruttata [a formula that has already been used too much]”: it had been turned into an advertising slogan, a trick of the production companies eager to identify a brand in order to sell their films to the public.137 Those who advanced this case were not ignorant of neorealism’s history; they were dissatisfied with its increasing orthodoxy. Even many of the filmmakers most closely associated with neorealism in the public imagination began to rebel against the label. At the 1949 International Cinema Conference in Perugia, for instance, Cesare Zavattini, perhaps neorealism’s most recognized theorist, all but

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disavowed the term’s increasingly limited and limiting application. “Il cinema italiano è stato assalito dagli elogi più ambiti [Italian cinema has been assailed by its most coveted honours],” Zavattini argued. Non gli riuscirà facile difendersi da questi elogi, che involontariamente limitano il suo orizzonte con la definizione del neorealismo. Il nostro cinema ha qualche cosa di più duraturo di uno stile dentro di sé e di molto diverso da quello che lo portò alla gloria trent’anni fa: questo bisogno di verità.138 It will not be easy for it to defend itself from these honours, which involuntarily limit its horizons with the definition of neorealism. Our cinema has within it something more enduring than a style, something very different from that which brought it glory thirty years ago: the need for truth.

Precisely because of his admiration for the accomplishments of Italian cinema, in other words, Zavattini was wary of the mounting strictures of neorealism, a term that he believed was beginning to stifle artistic creation, impeding the development of a cultural conversation that transcended any one set of stylistic innovations. Once the definition of neorealism ceased to recognize the far-reaching ambitions of filmmakers or to encompass the most advanced tendencies in literature and the arts, many, Zavattini included, came to question its usefulness. The Convergence of Neorealism Among those to raise such questions, as we have already seen, was Luchino Visconti, who maintained that neorealism was not only “an absurd label” but also an impediment to artistic innovation, a “boundary, a law.”139 For Visconti, the desire to move beyond neorealism’s increasingly stringent confines was particularly acute. La terra trema, like the other Italian selections at the 1948 Venice Film Festival, had been conscripted into a battle on behalf of what critics defined as “la validità del [...] neorealismo [the validity of (...) neorealism]” and Visconti himself had been enlisted in what they christened “[l]a banda dei neorealisti [the band of neorealists].”140 Acclaimed as a neorealist, despite his reservations about that designation, Visconti found himself exposed to condemnation on the same grounds, the target of misguided reproach when the inevitable critical backlash began. “I nostri registi devono sentire nel subcosciente la fragilità di questo cosiddetto ‘neo-realismo’ [Our directors must feel in their subconscious the fragility of this so-called ‘neorealism’],” Luigi Chiarini wrote in 1948, “perché sono troppo preoccupati di far sapere al pubblico che tutto è vero nei loro film: i pescatori e le barche di Acitrezza



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come i gabinetti di decenza e la ‘pipinara’ di Roma [because they are all too concerned to let the public know that everything in their films is true: the fishermen and the boats of Acitrezza as well as the toilets and the lice of Rome].”141 Evidently, not everyone was persuaded by the “manifesto” set forth in the rolling text that opens La terra trema. What such analyses overlook, however, is that even as La terra trema announces its indexical fidelity to the people, language, and landscape of Acitrezza, it makes use of a diverse array of representational strategies that transcend this limited notion of realism. Fixated on the question of neorealism’s legitimacy, both those who would celebrate Visconti’s film and those who would denigrate it did so in terms that tended to distort its intentions and innovations, focusing on its truth-claims at the expense of its stylistic originality and heterogeneity. Yet the film’s hybrid realism was far more consonant with the history of neorealism than were the restrictive definitions subsequently imposed on Visconti and the rest of the supposed “band of neorealists.” Of particular note, in this regard, is the film’s reliance on elements borrowed from classical mythology, which augment and advance its realistic depiction of the Valastro family’s struggle for survival. After all, as Visconti explained in his 1941 essay “Tradizione e invenzione,” what first drew him to Verga was the sense of legend that infused his depictions of Sicily: A me, lettore lombardo, abituato per tradizionale consuetudine al limpido rigore della fantasia manzoniana, il mondo primitivo e gigantesco dei pe­ scatori di Aci Trezza e dei pastori di Marineo era sempre apparso sollevato in un tono immaginoso e violento di epopea: ai miei occhi lombardi, pur contenti del cielo della mia terra che è “così bello quand’è bello,” la Sicilia di Verga era apparsa davvero l’isola di Ulisse, un’isola di avventure e di fervide passioni, situata immobile e fiera contro i marosi del mare Jonio.142 To me, a reader from Lombardy, accustomed by traditional habits to the limpid rigour of Manzoni’s imagination, the primitive and gigantic world of the fishermen of Acitrezza and the shepherds of Marineo had always appeared elevated by the imaginative and violent tenor of epics: to my Lombard eyes, although content with the sky of my land that is “so beautiful when it is beautiful,” the Sicily of Verga really appeared to be the island of Ulysses, an island of adventures and fervent passions, lying motionless and proud against the waves of the Ionian sea.

The reverberations of Visconti’s reading of Verga can be felt throughout La terra trema, but in ways that complicate the filmmaker’s initial

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interpretation. As Visconti put it, in light of the political upheaval of the Second World War, [l]a chiave mitica in cui fino a quel momento avevo gustato Verga, non mi fu più sufficiente. Sentii impellente il bisogno di scoprire quali fossero le basi storiche, economiche e sociali sulle quali era cresciuto il dramma meridionale.143 the mythic key in which up to that moment I had appreciated Verga was no longer sufficient for me. I felt the need to discover the historical, economic, and social bases on which the southern drama had taken shape.

Envisioning the cinematic portrayal of the fishermen’s exploitation, Visconti believed he had to move beyond mythology, and beyond Verga, in pursuit of a historically informed and politically engaged account of Acitrezza’s structural inequalities. Whereas in Verga’s 1890 novel I Malavoglia the lives of the fishermen are determined by fate and the downfall of the Toscano family is attributed to the capriciousness of nature – timeless and abstract forces, like those of mythology – in La terra trema it is the social structure, the contemporary human order of manipulation and exploitation, that condemns the Valastro family.144 Visconti’s fishermen, that is to say, are the victims of historical forces, exploited in terms that are contingent rather than eternal, economic rather than mythological. In its representation of the exploitation of the fishermen, however, La terra trema relies on expressionistic intimations of mythology, conjoining indexical realism with visual and narrative invocations of mythic symbolism. Visconti’s Acitrezza, like Verga’s, thus remains fundamentally “the island of Ulysses,” and the language and imagery of Homeric conflict reinforce the film’s realistic portrayal of post-war capitalist exploitation.145 In La terra trema, the systemic inequities of Sicilian village life are elevated to the level of epic, with the mistreatment of the fishermen shown to be barbarous and the profiteering of the wholesalers to be monstrous. As the sign on their headquarters proclaims, those wholesalers are the Cyclopes, one-eyed monsters of Homeric legend, who ignore the customs of generosity and hospitality in their greedy desire to devour the shipwrecked mariners. ’Ntoni, in turn, figures as a kind of Odysseus, a prisoner of the bloodthirsty giants, who must struggle to free himself from their perilous grasp. The dialogue of La terra trema plays up this contrast between ’Ntoni/Odysseus and the wholesalers/ Cyclopes by placing repeated emphasis on the eyes: clear and perceptive in the former case, myopic and distorting in the latter. “Per tanti e tanti anni, e anche secoli, abbiamo tenuti tutti gli occhi chiusi [...] che non ci



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vediamo più chiaro [For many, many years, and even for centuries, we have all kept our eyes so closed (...) that we can no longer see clearly],” ’Ntoni declares in an effort to incite his fellow fishermen, who are said by the narrator to have “gli occhi aperti [their eyes open]” when they determine to renegotiate their agreement with the wholesalers.146 Likewise, in his final moments, ’Ntoni’s grandfather is described as having “occhi spenti [dead eyes],” and his family as having nothing left but “gli occhi per piangere [their eyes to cry]” after their bid for self-determination has failed.147 Catalyst for rebellion, signal of vitality, source of resilience, the eyes serve metonymically to symbolize the film’s ethical and political outlook, a function of the clash between ’Ntoni’s growing understanding of the need to revolt, symbolized as a kind of vision, and the wholesalers’ opposition to ’Ntoni’s just cause, their symbolic blindness. Underlying the realism of La terra trema, then, are the structures of Homeric myth, a creative scheme that recalls nothing so much as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Visconti’s interest in the literature that we call modernism and that his Italian contemporaries called neorealism – Mann, Musil, and Proust especially – has been well documented.148 So, too, have the modernist activities of his collaborators, and in particular his editor Mario Serandrei, who in 1930 published a cinematic treatment of Joyce’s Ulysses, praising the novel at that time as “oggettiva e soggettiva insieme [objective and subjective together],” a judgment that seems to contain, in nuce, his own subsequent theorization of cinematic neorealism.149 In La terra trema, in which Serandrei played a key role, a similar process is at work, with the empirical facts of ’Ntoni’s ­rebellion amplified and given symbolic resonance by virtue of the figurative parallels between his exploitation at the hands of the wholesalers and Odysseus’s imprisonment in the Cyclopes’ cave. Whereas Visconti sometimes claimed that his political awakening led him to reject his mythological reading of Verga, it is more accurate to say that it led him to repurpose mythology in the service of his political message. If I am correct, Ulysses was a significant analogue for that project, making Visconti’s “a Verga rediscovered after Joyce,” to adopt once again De Michelis’s formulation. The Homeric borrowings in La terra trema certainly appear to follow the same general pattern as those of Ulysses, in which, as Hugh Kenner once said, the parallels to the Odyssey owe “less to analogy of incident or character than to analogy of situation.”150 In Joyce’s novel, this means that the encounter with the Cyclops becomes a confrontation between Leopold Bloom, the novel’s Jewish protagonist, and the Citizen, an Irish nationalist who taunts Bloom for his allegedly divided loyalties. In Visconti’s film, it becomes the climactic clash between ’Ntoni and Raimondo, a cross-eyed

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wholesaler – note again the film’s emphasis on eyes – who taunts the fisherman for the alleged hubris that has brought about his financial ­misfortune.151 Moreover, as this scene plays out, on the wall behind Raimondo is printed a celebrated saying of Mussolini – “Decisamente verso il popolo [Decisively towards the people]” – which endures more than two years after Fascism’s defeat: a clear indictment of the wholesalers’ monstrous revanchism as well as their officious authoritarianism.152 The accumulated symbolic density thus makes Raimondo an avatar of both Cyclopean villainy and Fascist iniquity, heightening the drama of the film’s conclusion beyond that which its realist narration conveys. The same underlying structure, which generates Homeric parallels in a Joycean manner in order to superimpose layers of symbolism on the film’s spare realism, provides a sense of uplift in the otherwise dispiriting conclusion. Indeed, if it is true that ’Ntoni becomes a “vinto vincitore [vanquished victor]” in the final scenes of La terra trema, as some have argued, this message is conveyed largely, if not entirely, by means of the Joycean-Homeric echoes.153 In Homer, Odysseus succeeds in freeing himself, blinding the Cyclops and then deriding him as he sails away from the island. In Joyce, the scene is made parodic, mock-heroic, as Odysseus’s spear becomes Bloom’s cigar, and the Cyclops is “defeated” when his anti-Semitic nationalism is punctured by Bloom’s stingingly apposite rebuke. In Visconti’s film, the resolution becomes even less decisive, such that if the Homeric victory is symptomatically diminished in Ulysses, in La terra trema it is almost entirely denied. After all, ’Ntoni exits the Cyclopes’ cave not only having lost his family’s home and boat, their only means of support, but also having submitted once again to the unjust rule of the wholesalers. Considered symbolically, however, and interpreted in conjunction with his analogues in Homer and Joyce, ’Ntoni can in fact be seen to emerge triumphant. Mocked by the wholesalers, he responds with a withering glare that penetrates and punctures the lie of their demagogic populism, their claim to go “towards the people,” in this way metaphorically blinding the Cyclops and combatively asserting his unconquerable independence. Glowering defiantly, ’Ntoni makes it known that he has seen through the deceit, seen beyond it to the foundations of a more just order, and thus he remains a danger to the wholesalers even as he is forced temporarily to acquiesce to their authority. Crucially, this implied sense of an imminent political reckoning inheres in ’Ntoni’s penetrating glare, magnified by the expressive density of the film’s structuring mythology rather than the authenticity of its realist veneer. Put differently, the victory belongs to ’Ntoni as Odysseus, whose spear blinds the Cyclops, more than to ’Ntoni as fisherman, whose boat remains grounded. His is a metaphorical triumph, conveyed through



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classical analogy rather than realist indexicality. At the crux of Visconti’s film, therefore, the supposed “orthodoxy of neorealism,” with its dictates about authentic speech and non-professional actors, proved insufficient to the task at hand. To ennoble the struggles of the Valastro family, and to signal the hope for future rebellion that persists even in the moment of ’Ntoni’s defeat, something more than indexical realism was needed. This “something more” was neorealism itself. Indeed, one may extend not only to Visconti but to all of neorealism the claim that Peter Brunette makes of Roberto Rossellini, namely that “[t]he lack of a total commitment to realism [...] enables the director to get at things that lie beyond realism.”154 Exploiting the representational innovations of the twentieth century’s most advanced tendencies in literature, cinema, and the arts, neorealism was conceived as nothing less than a total realism, a creative adaptation of the techniques of symbolism and modernism in order to encompass both the subjective and the objective experience of reality in its human dimensions. No abstract set of “dictates” could ever hope to encompass the entirety of this process, which embraced a stylistic hybridity that always entailed something more than meticulous fidelity to the facts. Codifying neorealism into a “boundary, a law,” to put it in Visconti’s terms, thus inevitably results in omissions and oversimplifications. Neorealism’s unity in diversity emerges more fully when it is understood as “a moment” (again, the word is Visconti’s): a historical epoch whose complex unfolding shaped both artistic creation and critical reflection. The neorealism of La terra trema, too, is best understood as a function of its history, and it is thus to be located beyond the program set forth in the rolling text that opens the film. Adopting a historicist rather than a formalist definition, we can understand La terra trema as neorealist because of the interventions of the man who wrote that rolling text, the art critic Antonello Trombadori, a passionate advocate of what he called the “rinnovamento umano e realistico delle arti figurative [human and realistic renewal of the figurative arts]” and a central figure in the debates over neorealist painting and sculpture.155 It was neorealist because of the contributions of Antonio Pietrangeli, whose earlier collaboration with Visconti on Ossessione – a film he identified in 1948 as the origin-point of “Italian neorealism” – proved instrumental in the director’s development, just as his impassioned 1947 plea for a cinematic adaptation of Verga was instrumental in the director’s decision to adapt I Malavoglia.156 It was neorealist because its adaptation of I Malavoglia drew on the treatment of the novel by Mario Alicata, an assignment he undertook soon after collaborating with Giuseppe De Santis on the two influential Cinema essays on Verga and Italian film.157 It was neorealist because its editor, Mario Serandrei, had been one of the first to theorize

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cinematic neorealism, as well as to attempt the cinematic adaptation of Joyce, an author identified as early as 1931 as one of neorealism’s “spiritual fathers.” And it was neorealist because it represented so successfully what Visconti referred to in 1944 as his “eterno progetto, la realizzazione de I Malavoglia di Verga [eternal project, the realization of Verga’s I Malavoglia]” – a project that brought together influences which had been accruing since his early collaborations with Jean Renoir, exemplar of “French neorealism,” and which he had developed in the making of his “proto-neorealist” film, Ossessione.158 La terra trema thus proves to be something more than the “epicentre of neorealism,” a misplaced analogy that suggests neorealism radiated outward from Visconti’s film. The opposite was true: La terra trema was one of many points of convergence for the various, hybrid discourses that neorealism conveyed across the arts. Integrating a diverse set of cultural influences – Italian and international; cinematic, literary, and artistic – the film synthesized many of the most innovative tendencies of the modernist era. The breadth of those influences ensures that the film’s contribution to neorealism cannot be confined to any “manifesto.” Approached historically rather than doctrinally, however, La terra trema can indeed be seen to offer a kind of summa of neorealism, but to do so in a manner that, like Dante’s Ulysses at the Pillars of Hercules, wilfully surpasses the boundaries imposed by orthodoxy.

2 “Renewal through Conservation”: Neorealism after Fascism

As his pursuers arrive ever closer to the abandoned Nazi headquarters that serves as his gang’s hideout, Alberto (Andrea Cecchi) is faced with a formidable decision. On the one hand, he can continue his flight, remaining loyal to Daniela (Vivi Gioi), his lover and partner in crime, who insists on fighting to the end, as if the war were still ongoing, as if she were still a Nazi informant, as if her adversaries were still partisans, as if the conflict between Fascists and anti-Fascists were not just intractable but eternal. On the other hand, he can surrender, trusting his fate to the vigilante mob that has tracked him down in order to rescue the woman he has kidnapped, Giovanna (Carla Del Poggio), the wife of his former best friend and fellow concentration camp survivor, Michele (Massimo Girotti). To Daniela, the choice is clear. “Sei maledetto insieme a me [You and I are cursed together],” she tells Alberto, “non possiamo tornare indietro [we can’t turn back]”: there will be no forgiveness for Nazi collaborators and former Fascists after the war; the only hope lies in continued opposition.1 Yet Alberto disagrees. He knows that he has transgressed against civil society but he retains some hope that his judges will be merciful, that peace can bring with it reconciliation, clemency, a return to the community. In his moment of decision, the dramatic turning-point of Giuseppe De Santis’s under-appreciated 1947 neorealist classic Caccia tragica, Alberto forces his pursuers, as well as the film’s viewers, to confront one of the most pressing dilemmas facing Italy after the Second World War: what was to be done with the Fascists in a reformed country that claimed not only to be post-Fascist but also explicitly anti-Fascist? A cultural corollary, crucial for understanding the development of neorealism after 1945, regarded the post-war viability of the artistic, cinematic, and literary tendencies that had flourished in Italy during the Fascist ventennio. Would a new, anti-Fascist culture start with a clean slate, breaking with

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the culture of the past? That question, too, underpins the analysis of De Santis’s film. It is a question that has proved problematic in the scholarship on neorealism. As the previous chapter was intended to establish, neorealism’s definition did not change immediately or substantially after 1945: the use of the term in the 1930s, when Italy was under Fascist rule, continued to inform its application even to explicitly anti-Fascist texts like Vittorini’s Uomini e no and Visconti’s La terra trema. This argument is to be distinguished, however, from the superficially related but fundamentally specious claim that Italian culture remained largely – or, as is sometimes claimed, entirely – unaffected by the war, maintaining the same tendencies, the same biases, even the same ideologies as before. For decades, scholars have called for increased emphasis on post-war neorealism’s significant debts to the culture of the Fascist period, providing a needed corrective to the earlier, ahistorical tendency to sever neorealism from its past, as if the war changed everything.2 At the margins, however, the emphasis on post-war continuities always risks implying that the war changed nothing. Indeed, even in its more rigorous manifestations it has often tended in this direction, eliding neorealism’s post-war metamorphosis and scanting Italy’s cultural response to the depredations of Fascism and the horrors of total war. This chapter offers an alternative account and with it a more robust framework for interpreting neorealism’s post-war development, embracing the cogent arguments for continuity while recognizing Italy’s significant cultural transformation after 1945. It is an account that unreservedly renounces the position caricatured as “la favola dell’‘anno zero’ [the ‘Year Zero’ fable],” which wrongly insists that neorealism was entirely a post-war invention, anti-Fascist at its origins, whose aim was to cancel out the previous twenty years of Italian culture and to begin again from scratch.3 Yet it is an account that also renounces, no less forcefully, the standard arguments against the “the ‘Year Zero’ fable,” which wrongly imply that, failing to effect a sufficient break with the past, neorealism covertly perpetuated the culture of the Fascist ventennio, undermining its vocal claims to anti-Fascism and its solemn rhetoric of post-war renewal. Rejecting both of these competing extremes, this chapter reassesses neorealism’s periodization in light of the more supple standards of reform articulated in Italy’s emphatic post-war political, social, and cultural discourse. In their conceptual care and precision, these standards are more conducive to evaluating a cultural conversation begun under Fascism and nurtured by elements within the Fascist hierarchy, which nevertheless came to offer a powerful expression of anti-Fascism, and which did so catalysed by a critical rehabilitation of its own problematic origins.



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“A Certain Continuity” In his 1951 study Cinema italiano oggi (Italian cinema today), Gian Luigi Rondi examined several of the most consequential films of post-war Italian cinema – among them Roma città aperta, La terra trema, Ladri di biciclette, Il sole sorge ancora, and Caccia tragica – and argued that they represented something entirely new not only in the history of filmmaking but also in the history of Italy. Adopting a fateful phrase, Rondi asserted that “[l]’anno zero del cinema italiano coincide con l’anno zero ­d’Italia, il 1944 [Italian cinema’s Year Zero coincides with Italy’s Year Zero, 1944].”4 As he went on to explain in some detail, he believed that the war represented a watershed in Italian politics and culture, washing away all that had come before and baptizing all that would come after. Arguing that the triumphs of neorealism corroborated this interpretation, Rondi insisted that Italian cinema had been “rinato sulle macerie dell’anno zero [reborn on the rubble of the Year Zero].”5 This statement, a claim at once for neorealism’s radical originality and for Italy’s national rebirth, seems to have been the unacknowledged source for what has come to be known as “the ‘Year Zero’ fable.” The source for Rondi’s claim, however, is not entirely clear. Quite possibly it was adapted from the third film of Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist trilogy, 1948’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero), whose title was itself borrowed from Edgar Morin’s 1946 volume L’an zéro de l’Allemagne (Germany’s Year Zero).6 Neither Morin’s book, which sought to ascertain how Germany had descended into Nazism and to analyse the country’s hopes for a post-war recovery, nor Rossellini’s film, which offers a profoundly troubling account of the struggle to survive in a Berlin that has been reduced to rubble, can plausibly be accused of offering an optimistic portrait of post-war renewal. Neither suggests that history would begin again from scratch. Nevertheless, this appears to be the meaning subsequently imposed on the notion of a post-war “Year Zero” and then vigorously contested in much of the historical literature.7 That has certainly been the pattern as regards Italy. Seeking to diagnose the causes of the political crises of the 1960s and 1970s – the Tambroni affair, the social upheaval of 1968, the Piazza Fontana bombing, and the terrorism of the “Years of Lead” that followed – historians have repeatedly insisted that their origins are to be located in the substantial and detrimental “continuità dello Stato [continuity of the state]” after Fascism.8 Adopting this more critical and less consolatory historical narrative, scholars have been inspired to reconsider Italian cultural history as well, largely rejecting what some have come to see as the “mythology of a radical rupture between the Fascist era and post-war Italy” and insisting that, culturally no less than

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politically, “a significant degree of continuity existed between the pre-war and the post-war period.”9 Like their historical counterparts, these cultural correctives first began to circulate in the late 1960s, as critics sought to emphasize what Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti identified at the time as the “segno di una continuità storico-sociologica (e anche culturale) che il dopoguerra offre rispetto agli anni trenta [sign of the post-war period’s historical and sociological (as well as cultural) continuity with the 1930s].”10 With growing conviction, many began at this time to cast doubt on the triumphant narrative of a country and a culture refounded on the values of the Resistance and born anew after the war, released from its Fascist past and reconsecrated in a Year Zero. In cinema circles, such doubts came to a head in the programs for the 1974 and 1976 Pesaro Film Festivals.11 At the former, dedicated to a re-evaluation of neorealism, an upstart group of young contrarians polemically insisted that “non si può definire il neorealismo senza fare riferimenti al cinema degli anni trenta [neorealism cannot be defined without reference to the cinema of the 1930s]” and identified “una certa continuità [a certain continuity]” in Italian film production.12 Building on this insight, the latter festival offered a retrospective of “Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo” (Italian cinema under Fascism), inspiring a politically and emotionally charged debate that spilled over into the popular press. Many of the younger critics in attendance insisted that new historiographies of Italian cinema were needed: “è ora di dire basta alla lezione di padri che, per quanto ‘buoni’, hanno per trent’anni favorito l’occultamento di non poche scomode verità [it’s time to say enough to the lessons of our fathers who, however ‘good’ they may be, have for thirty years favoured the concealment of more than a few uncomfortable truths],” as Gian Piero Brunetta put it at the time.13 Strongly opposed to this revisionist tendency, the older generation argued that those who wished to reconsider Italian cinema under Fascism were in fact working surreptitiously to redeem Fascism itself: “Hanno fatto pace col nonno fascista” (They’ve made peace with their Fascist grandfathers), read the incendiary title of Tullio Kezich’s response to the retrospective.14 As the tenor of the debate makes clear, the arguments for cultural continuity, and in particular for neorealism’s debts to Italian culture under Fascism, were very much live issues, contested on political as well as aesthetic grounds and inseparable from the roiling social conflicts of the day. By the end of the decade, however, this once-provocative analysis had become a point of such evident consensus that a critic could confidently assert of the post-war moment è ormai storiograficamente assodato che tale stagione, nei suoi aspetti ­appunto “neorealistici,” [...] affondava le sue origini nel periodo precedente



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e nel lavoro di quella “generazione degli anni Trenta” [...] che aveva attraversato, operando e producendo, il fascismo.15 by now it is historiographically certain that this period, precisely in its “neorealistic” aspects, [...] had its origins in the previous era, in the work of that “generation of the 1930s” [...] that had had its first experience, managing and producing, under Fascism.

The signs of continuity were so clear, so incontrovertible, that the opposing arguments were unsustainable. Today the continuities between neorealism and the culture of the Fascist ventennio have become a critical commonplace, the new orthodoxy.16 Yet even now scholars argue vehemently against the existence of a post-war Year Zero and in favour of cultural continuity as if the defence of this consummately mainstream position were still as contentious, still as iconoclastic, still as necessary as it was forty years ago. The intensity with which the argument is repeatedly advanced belies the unanimity with which it is already accepted. Who today would deny, for example, the significant personal, practical, and stylistic continuities between pre- and post-war Italian cinema?17 The major genre traditions, including melodramas, adventure films, and comedies, carried on after the war all but unchanged.18 So, too, did most of the personnel working in the film industry. While hearings were held to arbitrate the cases of some of the filmmakers who had served the Fascist regime, and while some did receive temporary bans – two stars, Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida, were even executed as Nazi collaborators – the majority of those who had worked under or even in close association with Mussolini’s regime were allowed to continue their careers without sanction after the war.19 As a result, post-war Italian cinema, including neorealism, inherited its major producers, directors, actors, technicians, theorists, and critics from the film culture that had developed under Fascism.20 Continuities of genre and of personnel were paralleled by significant continuities of method, tone, and technique. It is indisputable, therefore, that even the supposedly defining stylistic traits of neorealism can be identified in Italian cinema of the Fascist ventennio.21 Every one of the identifying features of Italian neorealism catalogued by Alberto Farassino in the list discussed in the introduction to this volume, in fact, would just as readily have described films of the Fascist era; some of these features were recognized as defining elements of Fascist ­cinema.22 In his analysis, Farassino emphasized “the authorial [...] demands of expression and interpretation” at work in many neorealist films, and it is true that in the first reviews of Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 Roma città

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aperta, for instance, critics repeatedly called the film “un documentario romanzato [a fictionalized documentary],” recognizing that its rigorous realism was filtered through the director’s interpretive lens.23 Yet the very notion of the “documentario romanzato” said to characterize neorealism had been developed in Italian film theory during the Fascist ventennio and advocated by major figures in the Fascist film industry, most notably Luigi Freddi.24 Before the term was applied to Roma città aperta, it had been invoked in reviews of 1941’s La nave bianca, a film Rossellini directed and co-wrote in support of the Fascist war effort.25 A similar situation obtains with the second trait identified by Farassino, neorealism’s “use of non-professional actors.” Again, post-war Italian critics did indeed emphasize neorealism’s r­ eliance on “attori presi dalla vita [actors taken from real life],” as a 1949 essay in Bianco e nero put it.26 So did their counterparts during the Fascist ­ventennio, however: a 1933 review of Giovacchino Forzano’s propagandistic celebration of the rise of Fascism, Camicia nera, likewise championed the film for its use of “attori presi dalla vita” – precisely the same phrase that would be invoked sixteen years later to define neorealism.27 Examples of similar continuities can easily be multiplied, since Fascist-era filmmakers, film genres, and film aesthetics retained the dominant position in Italian film production after the war. “Neorealism avant la lettre ” To prove that neorealism had a Fascist past is by no means the same as to prove that the neorealists sought deceptively to suppress that past, however, and while critics have polemically insisted on the former point for at least the last four decades, they have not yet succeeded in establishing the latter. Nevertheless, many continue sententiously to assert that the proponents of neorealism “ignored,” “repressed,” or “denied” their Fascist origins.28 These accusations are often abetted by claims that the post-war Italian intelligentsia itself propagated the now discredited myth of a Year Zero, that this was done in order deliberately to disguise their debts to Fascism, and that the myth was thus designed from the start to hide what one scholar has referred to as the “mani sporchi [sic], or ‘dirty hands,’ of neorealism.”29 Even when it is conceded that many after the war acknowledged and even accentuated neorealism’s long history, it is said that they produced a selective account, singling out a few films that could be “saved” while discarding or eliding the broader tradition in which those works emerged.30 Thus, it is claimed that films like Alessandro Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole (1942), Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), and Vittorio De  Sica’s I bambini



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ci guardano (1944) were granted token status as anticipations of neorealism by critics otherwise eager to conceal the early history of this cultural category. Such accusations are untenable. From the beginning, it was readily apparent and widely affirmed that neorealism drew on a vast cultural inheritance. Artists and critics articulated a historical lineage that was far more inclusive and far less exculpatory than is often recognized. As we saw in the last chapter, for example, many of the respondents to Carlo Bo’s Inchiesta sul neorealismo – published, it might be remembered, in the same year as Rondi’s Cinema italiano oggi – traced the origins of the term “neorealism” back well before the Second World War. Similarly, as notions of neorealism began to be applied more consistently to post-war filmmaking, there was a concerted effort to locate the emerging tradition within the history of Italian cinematic realism.31 An editorial in a 1946 issue of the journal Quarta parete, for instance, argued that any hope for the success of Italy’s film industry after the war necessarily rested on the many gains made by the cinema of the Fascist period. In those years, the editorial maintained, “si sono pure fatti molti buoni e anche ottimi films [they made many good and even a few excellent films],” a claim supported not only by citing the early work of Blasetti, Visconti, De Sica, and Rossellini, but also by praising such filmmakers as Luigi Chiarini, Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, Gianni Franciolini, Mario Soldati, Renato Castellani, Alberto Lattuada, Mario Camerini, Goffredo Alessandrini, and Augusto Genina. Even when some of these filmmakers had worked for Mussolini’s regime, even when they had directed Fascist films, they had produced work of lasting value, the editorialists at Quarta parete explained: “non abbiamo difficoltà a riconoscere che durante il fascismo è sorta in Italia un’industria cinematografica per tanti aspetti rispettabile e che sarebbe doveroso salvare proprio da quella rovina alla quale il fascismo stesso ha condotto tutto il paese [we have no difficulty in recognizing that under Fascism there arose in Italy a film industry that was in many respects reputable, and it would only be right to save that industry from the ruin to which Fascism has led the entire country].”32 Likewise, in the journal Sud, an unsigned 1946 essay entitled “Nomi, possibilità del cinema italiano” (Names and prospects for Italian cinema) cited a lengthy list of the directors whose interwar work would continue to prove influential after the war, a list that included many of the same filmmakers enumerated in Quarta parete, as well as several more, such as Mario Mattòli, Carmine Gallone, Giorgio Simonelli, and Francesco De Robertis, whose 1941 film Uomini sul fondo the article called “un ‘classico’ [a ‘classic’]” even if it was a work of Fascist propaganda.33

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De Robertis was far from the only director after the war to be granted artistic absolution for his Fascist past. Indeed, amid scattered calls to censure the director Augusto Genina because of the propagandistic nature of some of his Fascist films – Lo squadrone bianco (1936), L’assedio dell’Alcazar (1939), and Bengasi (1942) especially – the journal Quarta parete leapt to his defence on the grounds that virtually the entire film industry would need to be shuttered if that standard were applied: nessuno osa scrivere che Blasetti, Alessandrini, Gallone, Vergano, ­Rossellini, Simonelli, Camerini e altri, non sono meno colpevoli di Genina (qui non vogliamo specificare se sieno meno o più capaci tecnicamente e ­artisticamente), e che meno colpevoli non sono gli attori, i soggettisti, gli sceneggiatori, i produttori che concorsero alla realizzazione di tutti i film di propaganda fascista.34 no one dares write that Blasetti, Alessandrini, Gallone, Vergano, Rossellini, Simonelli, Camerini, and others are any less guilty than Genina (here we do not want to discuss whether they are any more or less worthy technically and artistically), nor do they dare write that the actors, screenwriters, scriptwriters, and producers who joined Genina in creating all of his Fascist propaganda films are any less guilty than he is.

Genina might have made propaganda, it was admitted, but so too did many of Italy’s most respected filmmakers, including those who led the charge for neorealism. In the event, Genina would soon find himself included among their ranks, directing one of the more acclaimed post-war films, 1949’s Cielo sulla palude, for which he won the Nastro ­d’Argento, and which critics explicitly acknowledged both as a triumph of post-war neorealism and as an outgrowth of his pre-war production.35 A few years later his Fascist films were returned to circulation, receiving a wide post-war re-release in Italian theatres.36 Moreover, such films, despite their problematic history and ideology, were frequently invoked as important antecedents in the first accounts of neorealist cinema produced after the war. Thus, for instance, in his influential 1948 “Panoramique sur le cinéma italien” – the same essay in which, as we have seen, he identified Ossessione’s Gino as marking the birth of “Italian neorealism” – Antonio Pietrangeli explicitly located the “retroterra [...] della nostra tradizione cinematografica [background (...) of our cinematic tradition]” in Fascist-era films by Blasetti, Camerini, De Robertis, and Romolo Marcellini, among others, identifying these directors as the origin point of “la scuola del cosiddetto ­neo-realismo italiano [the school of so-called Italian neorealism].”37 This is a striking



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declaration, because while Ossessione is often associated or even conflated with the anti-Fascist Resistance, all of the filmmakers named by Pietrangeli made explicitly Fascist films during the ventennio: Vecchia guardia (Alessandro Blasetti, 1934), Kif Tebbi (Mario Camerini, 1928), Alfa Tau! (Francesco De Robertis, 1942), and Sentinelle di bronzo (Romolo Marcellini, 1937). Drawing on such a politically problematic heritage, Pietrangeli’s can hardly be considered a partial or expurgated history. Neither can Franco Venturini’s 1950 analysis, “Origini del neorealismo” (Origins of neorealism), which traced the development of Italian filmmaking as far back as 1900, and which identified the “genesi del ­neorealismo [genesis of neorealism]” within Italian cinema under Fascism.38 In his wide-ranging history, Venturini stressed the importance of cinematic calligrafismo – citing the work of Chiarini, Castellani, and Lattuada, in particular – as well as the influence of French realism (Renoir, Carné, Duvivier), examined in the previous chapter. Alongside Ossessione, moreover, he declared Camerini’s films, as well as Genina’s L’assedio dell’Alcazar and Bengasi, to be milestones in neorealism’s development. Most important, he drew attention to the crucial role played by the “filone del documentario di guerra [current of war documentaries],” in particular De Robertis’s Uomini sul fondo and Alfa Tau!, even as he recognized the films’ “carattere propagandistico [propagandistic character].”39 In fact, he argued that these Fascist films were more important for the development of neorealism than was Ossessione, calling Visconti’s work “un punto d’arrivo [a point of arrival],” the end of inter-war cinema, and De Robertis’s “un punto di partenza [a point of departure],” the beginning of a new tradition.40 Politically and historically this was a decidedly problematic claim, compromised by the recognition that Venturini, like De Robertis, had played a major role in the cinema of the virulently Fascist Italian Social Republic whereas, in the same period, Visconti had been arrested for his anti-Fascist activities.41 Venturini’s effort to reclaim and even to promote Fascist filmmaking as part of the history of neorealism was thus anything but disinterested. Neither, however, was it evasive or deceptive. Nor, in the end, was Roberto Rossellini’s explanation of neorealism’s origins under Fascism, which must certainly cast doubt on the accusations that the director had tried to hide his “dirty hands” by concealing his pre-war productions. In fact, Rossellini declared in a noteworthy 1952 interview that [s]e il cosiddetto neorealismo si è rivelato in modo più impressionante al mondo attraverso Roma città aperta, sta agli altri giudicare. Io vedo la na­ scita del neorealismo più in là: anzitutto in certi documentari romanzati di guerra, dove anche io sono rappresentato con La nave bianca; poi in veri e

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propri film di guerra a soggetto, che mi hanno visto collaboratore per lo scenario, come Luciano Serra pilota, o realizzatore come in L’uomo dalla croce; e in fine e soprattutto in certi film minori, come Avanti c’è posto, L’ultima carrozzella, Campo de’ Fiori, in cui la formula, se così vogliamo chiamarla, del neorealismo, si viene componendo attraverso le spontanee creazioni degli attori: di Anna Magnani e di Aldo Fabrizi in particolare.42 I’ll leave it to others to judge whether so-called neorealism first caught the world’s attention with Roma città aperta. I trace the birth of neorealism further in the past: first of all in certain fictional documentaries about the war, such as my own La nave bianca; then in fictional war films, on which I also collaborated, as a screenwriter on Luciano Serra pilota and as the director of L’uomo dalla croce; lastly, and above all, in certain minor films, such as Avanti c’è posto, L’ultima carrozzella, and Campo de’ Fiori, in which the neorealist formula, if we want to call it that, took shape in the improvisation of the actors, and in particular that of Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi.

Rossellini might be accused of offering a solipsistic history, citing as he did two films he had directed and another he had written, and focusing on the early careers of the stars of his neorealist classic Roma città aperta. He cannot, however, be accused of severing pre-war from post-war neorealism. Quite the opposite: by 1954 Rossellini came to identify La nave bianca as “neorealismo ante-litteram [neorealism avant la lettre]” because it offered “lo stesso atteggiamento morale [the same moral stance]” as his post-war films.43 Whatever one makes of such claims, it cannot be said that they were offered in the service of “the ‘Year Zero’ fable.” It is apparent, therefore, that well before the revisionist tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s, Rondi’s account of a new post-war cinema “reborn on the rubble of the Year Zero” had been successfully undermined by the efforts of the artists and intellectuals who first developed and debated neorealism. In fact, Rondi’s account was directly refuted before it had ever been elaborated. Among the contributors to Cinema italiano oggi was the director Alessandro Blasetti, whose essay on the history of Italian cinema, “Cinema italiano ieri” (Italian cinema yesterday), immediately preceded Rondi’s own contribution to the volume. Emphasizing the importance of historical perspective for an analysis of post-war Italian filmmaking, Blasetti argued in this essay that neorealism sottintende una comune condizione morale che non può essere spuntata da un giorno all’altro come un fungo; ma che è nata, al contrario, su di una certa tradizione ed è giunta ad esprimersi con chiarezza solo perché cercava, vagliava e affinava da anni il suo linguaggio. Un modo di riassumere



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la folla di opere e di nomi compresa nel cinema italiano prima di quello che Rondi chiama l’anno zero potrà consistere, credo, nel ricercarvi e ricordare gli antenati che competono di diritto a Roma città aperta ed a Ladri di biciclette, negando giustificazione al senso di imprevisto che ha spesso accompagnato i loro successi [...]. Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, De Robertis, Vergano, Castellani, Lattuada, De Santis, Germi, Zampa, tutti noi già operavamo da tempo prima della guerra nel cinema italiano.44 implies a common moral condition, which could not just spring up from one day to the next like a mushroom, but which was instead born from a particular tradition and which has come to express itself clearly only because it had already sought, sifted, and refined its language for years. One way to bring together the many creations and creators of Italian cinema before what Rondi calls the Year Zero, I believe, may be to seek and to recognize among them our predecessors, who rightfully bear some responsibility for Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette, rejecting the impression that these films’ success is in some way unexpected [...]. Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, De Robertis, Vergano, Castellani, Lattuada, De Santis, Germa, Zampa, all of us were already working in Italian cinema for some time before the war.

Without its pre-war history, Blasetti insisted, neorealism could not have emerged fully formed after the war. It needed a long gestation and a fertile cultural terrain in order to blossom after 1945. That it did blossom after 1945, however, Blasetti was not in doubt. While emphasizing neorealism’s long history, in other words, Blasetti continued to insist on the significant innovations of Italian cinema after the war. He did not believe the two claims to be in conflict. Recalling the debut of Roma città aperta, Blasetti wrote: Quel giorno del 1945 in cui, uscendo dalla prima proiezione del film data alla stampa e ai tecnici in una saletta ministeriale, sentii il bisogno di andare incontro a Rossellini che attendeva fuori l’esito con “indifferente” trepidazione e lo abbracciai per tutti noi, il gesto era veramente commosso e grato. Grato verso Rossellini, grato verso tutti quelli che Rossellini aveva letto, quelli di cui Rossellini aveva seguito e studiato il lavoro, quelli che costituivano, cioè, la precedente generazione del nostro cinema. I quali, quel giorno, potevano dire di aver ben lavorato e passare le consegne alla nuova, con coscienza appagata e tranquilla.45 On that day in 1945 when, leaving the first screening of the film, which took place in a government building in which the assembled press and technicians had gathered, I felt the need to greet Rossellini, who was waiting

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outside to gauge the response with “indifferent” trepidation, and I embraced him, on behalf of all of us, with emotion and gratitude. I was grateful to Rossellini, grateful to all those whose work Rossellini had read, all those whose work Rossellini had followed and studied, all of those, that is, who constituted the preceding generation of Italian cinema, and who, on that day, could say, with satisfaction and a clear conscience, that they had done their job well and had passed the torch on to the new generation.

Having drawn attention to Rossellini’s collaborations with De Robertis during the ventennio, and having explained in unstinting detail the propagandistic nature of Rossellini’s Fascist trilogy, Blasetti nevertheless identified in Roma città aperta the birth of a new era in Italian filmmaking. More recently, critics have argued that the film carries a significant birth defect, that it is “ambivalently postfascist,” a sign of Rossellini’s deceptiveness, his conspiratorial “indirection and faulty memory.”46 Blasetti’s remarks, however, point the way towards a rather more sympathetic interpretation of Rossellini’s ideological transformation and neorealism’s thematic revitalization. Neither concealing nor condemning Roma città aperta’s continuities with Italian cinema under Fascism, Blasetti argued that it was precisely such continuities, evidence of neorealism’s development during the ventennio, which allowed Rossellini and his contemporaries so effectively to innovate after the Second World War. This position merits renewed consideration in the present climate. Having long since moved beyond the more simplistic arguments for a post-war Year Zero – having recognized, in fact, that those arguments were disclaimed and effectively disproved from the very beginning – there is no longer any need to advance the more polemical and condemnatory case for continuity. What is needed, instead, is a new paradigm, or better still, new paradigms, which can account for neorealism’s innovations as well as for its debts to the past. Neorealism’s pre-war history has been widely recognized; even its derivations from Fascist cinema have long been beyond doubt. The question of its true relationship to the processes of post-war cultural renewal, however, remains to be reconsidered. “Hopes for a New World” “Ciò che distingue il neorealismo d’anteguerra (anni Trenta) dal neorealismo del dopoguerra (anni Quaranta-Cinquanta) è, appunto, la Guerra [What distinguishes pre-war neorealism (of the 1930s) from post-war neorealism (of the 1940s–1950s) is, precisely, the war],” argued the critic Paolo Mario Sipala.47 Without denying neorealism’s origins under Fascism, without asserting its creation from scratch, Sipala thus managed to



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recommend a renewed emphasis on the shaping force of the Second World War. Were this recommendation to be adopted more consistently, post-war Italian neorealism could plausibly be described as an extension of pre-war developments and yet meaningfully, perhaps even fundamentally, new. There would be no need to perpetuate the false dichotomy between continuity and innovation, as if new growth implied no roots, as if the only form of development were ex novo, as if the only distinctions were binary in nature. Freed from this encumbrance, analyses could aspire comprehensively to address continuities while also attending to the specificity and complexity of the “new” in the discourse of Italian neorealism. In contrast, the more polemical efforts to debunk categorical assertions of a political and cultural sea-change after 1945 and to accentuate post-war continuities have inspired not only a sceptical but at times even a cynical approach to the expressions of revival and renewal that greeted the end of hostilities in Italy. Even before the war had finished, prominent politicians, philosophers, and critics began to proclaim the necessity of a new, post-war era in Italian culture. With spirited rhetoric, they explored the borders of the “nuova Italia [new Italy],” aiming for the “creazione di un nuovo spirito sociale e politico [creation of a new social and political spirit]” and working to bring about a “nuova civiltà [new civilization]” and a “nuova società [new society].”48 Artists and intellectuals likewise sought to develop a “cultura nuova [new culture],” a “nuova arte [new art],” a “nuova letteratura [new literature],” and a “nuovo cinema italiano [new Italian cinema].”49 Across the ideological spectrum, and despite significant political divisions, there was a widespread, unequivocal, and irrepressible sense that, with the fall of Fascism, Italy could begin anew. Yet many now insist that claims to post-war renewal were entirely an illusion, a contradiction, a myth, or, worse still, a lie, intended to distract from the many post-war continuities.50 To speak of a new Italy, according to this account, was to deny historical memory, to ignore Italy’s recent travails, to conceal Italians’ activities during the years of dictatorship and war. This framing misrepresents the rhetoric of renewal, which, far from a denial of history, was in reality an expression of historical introspection, of critical self-examination, of public contrition and national reckoning.51 That national reckoning was conducted largely in the language of crisis. Indeed, however joyous they may have been when peace was declared, however hopeful for reconstruction, Italy’s social and cultural leaders feared they had witnessed the “crollo dell’Europa [collapse of Europe]” and believed themselves to inhabit “un mondo sconfitto [a defeated world].”52 They spoke of “[l]a grave crisi che l’Italia oggi attraversa [the grave crisis that Italy is experiencing now],” “[l]a crisi dei valori

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[the crisis of values],” “una crisi universale che avvolge tutti gli uomini [universal crisis that afflicts all mankind],” a “crisi di civiltà [crisis of civilization].”53 More than a year after Italy’s liberation, they continued to pose as an open question whether “viviamo come transitoria crisi di civiltà o definitiva civiltà di crisi [we are living in a temporary crisis of civilization or a definitive civilization of crisis].”54 That is, they continued to entertain the thought that the crisis of the war, the crisis that had caused the war, the civilizational crisis through which they understood themselves still to be living after the war, might yet bring about the end of Italy, the end of Europe, or even the end of the world. At the same time, however, they also understood the crisis to be the fundamental and necessary condition for renewal. Thus, for instance, in a 1944 essay entitled “Crisi di civiltà” (Crisis of civilization), the writer, painter, and political activist Carlo Levi spoke of the contemporary situation not only as “una crisi totale [a total crisis]” but also as “una frattura fra due civiltà [a fracture between two civilizations],” and on these grounds insisted that [l]a nostra [civiltà], quella in cui oggi noi viviamo tutti, non ha ancora preso forma, e ha ancora l’aspetto ambiguo di una creatura in formazione: ma è certo che non potrà, mai, riprendere le vecchie forme e rivolgersi indietro. Quella età dell’oro non ritornerà più per noi: altre strade dovremo seguire. La morte, e il senso della morte, si è interposta fra noi e i nostri padri. Non sapremo più dimenticarci della morte. Le famiglie sono disperse, le case devastate, le proprietà distrutte, gli Stati sconvolti. Se queste rovine fossero soltanto materiali, il mondo ritornerebbe rapidamente quello che era. Ma il vecchio senso della famiglia è perduto, il vecchio senso della casa è mutato, il vecchio senso della proprietà non regge più, il vecchio senso dello Stato ha perso ogni potere. E qualcosa di anche più profondo è cambiato nell’animo degli uomini, qualcosa che è difficile definire, ma che si esprime inconsapevolmente, in ogni atto, in ogni parola, in ogni gesto: la visione stessa del mondo, il senso del rapporto degli uomini con sé stessi, con le cose e col destino.55 our [civilization], the one in which we all live today, has not yet taken shape, and still has the ambiguous characteristics of a creature in the process of being born. What is certain, however, is that it cannot revert back to its old shape, it cannot turn back. The golden age will not return; we will have to follow other paths. Death, and the understanding of death, now stands between us and our fathers. We will never again be able to forget about death. Families are scattered, homes devastated, properties destroyed, countries shaken up. If today’s ruins were merely material, the world would



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quickly return to what it had been. But the old sense of family is lost, the old sense of home has changed, the old sense of property no longer holds, the old sense of the state has lost all power. And something even deeper has changed in the soul of mankind, something that is difficult to define, but which is expressed unconsciously, in every act, in every word, in every gesture. What has changed is the very image of the world, the sense of the relationships between men, and between men and their possessions, between men and their destiny.

The kinds of irreversible, epochal change surveyed in this essay were widely understood to have been set in motion by a crisis of which the war was only one symptom. In the midst of that crisis, it was unclear what would come next, but it was certain that whatever was to come would necessarily be different from what had existed before. In fact, that was precisely what Italian intellectuals seem to have intended when they spoke of crisis. As Gabriele Pepe explained in his 1945 treatise La crisi dell’uomo (The crisis of man), “[c]risi – oggi – significa appunto quel contrastato processo di svolgimento per cui ­un’epoca storica si dibatte nelle sue contraddizioni per uscirne con un ordine nuovo [crisis – today – means precisely this oppositional process of development through which the contradictions of a historical epoch are debated so as to produce a new order].”56 The crisis not only anticipated or facilitated historical transformation; it was itself the historical transformation in progress. The signs of crisis were thus taken to be the symbols both of ruination and of renewal. In the first issue of the poetry journal La Via, for example, an editorial took an inventory of the devastation caused by the war – “Distruzione. Rovine. Labirinto di problemi materiali e morali. Società sconvolta, disorientata. Individuo bisognoso di ritrovare tutto se stesso e la propria libertà [Destruction. Ruins. A labyrinth of material and moral problems. Societies upset, disoriented. Individuals needing to find themselves and their freedom]” – and then went on immediately after to explain that the attempt to confront and to communicate that devastation defined what could only be called “la nuova Arte, la nuova Poesia [the new Art, the new Poetry].”57 In the journal Costume, Enrico Emanuelli made a similar case, describing the destruction of the war, spiritual as well as physical – “[l]e città, le cattedrali, le campagne sono state distrutte anche dentro di noi [cities, cathedrals, croplands have been destroyed within ourselves as well]” – before concluding that all of this destruction pointed towards “il nascere d’una nuova società [the birth of a new society].”58 Most telling, perhaps, was a 1945 essay in Risorgimento liberale, which seemed to offer a particularly pessimistic take on the war’s effect: “le distruzioni più gravi sono

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dentro di noi. Gli anni che abbiamo attraversato, hanno profondamente scosso – dobbiamo riconoscerlo – molte nostre convinzioni e principi morali, su cui era fondata poi l’intera nostra civiltà [the most devastating destruction has taken place within ourselves. We must recognize that the years we have lived through have deeply shaken many of our moral convictions and principles, including those on which our entire civilization was founded].” The essay’s title: “Speranze di un nuovo mondo” (Hopes for a new world).59 This twinned rhetoric of crisis and renewal has been underemphasized in many accounts of the post-war moment, which tend to overestimate the influence of the position staked out by Benedetto Croce, who insisted that the Fascist ventennio had been little more than a temporary interruption in the nation’s illustrious tradition – an “interregno fascistico [Fascistic interregnum],” as Croce himself put it – which could simply be set aside as the country returned to the traditions of the liberal state.60 Croce dismissed those who argued that Fascism signalled a profound social crisis, and in particular those who argued that it signalled an Italian crisis. “Che cosa è nella nostra storia una parentesi di venti anni? Ed è poi questa parentesi tutta storia italiana o anche europea e mondiale [What is the importance of a parenthesis of twenty years in our history? And is this parenthesis only a part of Italian history or does it also belong to European and world history],” he asked in a much-quoted 1944 speech.61 From this perspective, Fascism was little more than a momentary disease; as Croce argued in a November 1943 article in the New York Times, “now Italy is free of the Fascist infection.”62 Croce’s insinuation was that the extent of the damage and the need for renewal had been overstated. Nothing essential, nothing epochal, had changed; the post-Fascist order would and should resemble the pre-Fascist order. Yet this belief was neither as prevalent nor as influential as has commonly been assumed. In fact, there was widespread opposition to Croce’s arguments, particularly, but not only, among left-leaning intellectuals.63 Croce’s critics and opponents tended to argue, as Eugenio Artom put it in a 1945 essay, that “[i]l fascismo non è stato una semplice parentesi nella nostra storia che chiudendosi consenta la ripresa del ritmo di vita rotto violentemente vent’anni or sono [Fascism was not just a simple parenthesis in our history that, once closed, allows us to resume the rhythms of life that were violently interrupted twenty years ago].”64 As Giaime Pintor explained one year earlier, they believed that “il fascismo non era stato una parentesi, ma una grave malattia e aveva intaccato quasi dappertutto le fibre della nazione [Fascism was not a parenthesis but a grave disease that infected the very fibres of the nation].”65 In fact, many were convinced, as Vittore Branca insisted, that Fascism in Italy “si



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rifletteva e propagava, come un cancro, a tutte le attività di tutto il paese, dall’economia alla cultura, dal lavoro alla vita morale [had metastasized like a cancer, infecting all of the activities of the entire country, from the economy to culture, from work to moral life].”66 They opposed Croce’s apparent optimism, then, by arguing that Fascism and the war were signs of a convulsion that was too profound, too widespread, too cataclysmic to permit a return to the pre-Fascist past. Where Croce saw a parenthesis, they saw a deep-seated crisis. In this context, to speak of a “new society” or a “new culture” was to speak of a continuing danger, a destabilization of the present caused by the catastrophes of recent history. It was to say that a new order did not yet exist, that a new foundation had not yet been created. The claims to renewal were thus anything but credulously or deceptively optimistic, as those who question the supposed post-war watershed often seem to imply. Instead, they were directly opposed to what was understood to be the naïvely idealistic interpretation of events, the Crocean interpretation, which posited that things could go on as they had before. The cogency and authority of the arguments for renewal rested on the belief that the crisis was not over, that civilization was still under threat. For the advocates of a “new Italy,” crisis entailed renewal, and renewal was predicated on crisis. The two were inseparable. “Decisions in the Cultural Field” Founded on a sense of crisis, the arguments for renewal were thus as much about Italy’s history as they were about its future. Much of the crisis discourse, in fact, presumed that a confrontation with the current catastrophe, whose consequences could be seen in the present but whose causes were to be traced to the recent past, was a necessary step in the rebuilding process. As the editor, translator, and cultural commentator Giuseppe Del Bo argued in an essay of 1947, “solo quando tutti saranno veramente arrivati al fondo della crisi in completa sincerità, solo allora si potrà veramente ricostruire [only when everyone, with complete sincerity, has truly arrived at the bottom of the crisis, only then can we really begin to rebuild].”67 The point, in other words, was to recognize the crisis, to recognize why and how the crisis had come about, and through that recognition to begin to envision a new and different state of affairs. In La crisi dell’uomo, Gabriele Pepe explained the situation clearly: “Se noi sapremo comprendere il significato di queste guerre, potremo veramente creare una nuova storia. Il futuro è oggi nelle nostre mani: la crisi è al suo punto culminante [If we can understand the meaning of these wars, we can really create a new history. Today the future is in our

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hands: the crisis has reached its climax].”68 In a moment of crisis, it was said, hope for the future required a reconsideration of the mistakes and misdeeds of the recent past. The claim behind “the ‘Year Zero’ fable,” however, is that the post-war reconstruction was predicated on a comprehensive rejection of the recent past. No less problematically, the arguments against that fable and against the post-war watershed – the arguments, that is to say, for continuity between pre- and post-war culture – have also largely accepted as true the assertion that the calls for renewal after 1945 intended to effect a definitive break with the culture of the past.69 They argue that such a break was never achieved, but they assume nonetheless that it was desired, even expected. From opposing sides, therefore, post-war culture tends to be judged against an absolute standard – a standard of total rupture with the past – on the presumption that the rhetoric of renewal, the claims to “a new Italy” or “a new culture,” posited a thorough renunciation of recent history. It is said that artists and intellectuals sought to enact “una rottura profonda e definitiva con il passato [a profound and definitive break with the past],” “ricominciare da zero [to begin again from scratch], and when it is shown that they did not achieve this supposed objective, the rhetoric of renewal is said to have been undermined.70 Indeed, in an attempt to undermine still further the claim to renewal it has even been said that the desire for historical rupture united the supporters of the Resistance with the Fascist true believers, whom they had overthrown, so that paradoxically the post-war drive to do away with the Fascist past was itself the sign of an ironic ideological continuity with Fascism.71 Such arguments fundamentally misread the post-war rhetoric of renewal, which did not propose “a profound and definitive break with the past” and which did not call for Italy to “restart from scratch.” To speak of “a new Italy” after the war did not imply that the country would wilfully do away with everything that had come before. To speak of a “new Italian cinema” did not require that the films, filmmakers, and film aesthetics of the Fascist ventennio be rejected entirely. Such absolutist, apocalyptic claims were almost entirely absent from the arguments for renewal. Even in the heated debates that erupted over the culpability of those artists and intellectuals who had supported or accepted Fascism, the positions were far more judicious, far more pragmatic. These debates, which began even before the war’s conclusion, gave rise to reconsiderations of the shortcomings of the arts under Fascist control, as well as to ambitious programs for the arts in a post-Fascist society, but they did not demand or even imply the abandonment of the culture of the ventennio in its entirety.72 Focused on artists’ responsibility for Fascism, their irresponsibility under Fascism, and their duty after



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Fascism, Italian intellectuals appear never seriously to have imagined that the “new society” they sought to create could immediately wipe away the remnants of Fascism and start again from scratch.73 The opposite is true. In a prominent 1946 debate over “letteratura e popolo [literature and the people]” in the pages of La Fiera letteraria, for example, Gaetano Trombatore argued that authors had forsaken their calling under Fascism, a situation he wished to overturn after the war with what he called “un appello ad una letteratura di rinnovata ispirazione umana [an appeal for a literature of renewed human inspiration].”74 Insisting that literature had to take on new themes – “[u]na poesia nuova può nascere solo da un nuovo contenuto [new poetry cannot be born except from new content],” as he put it – Trombatore argued that in a country damaged by war and in a society recovering from dictatorship, a popular literature, a literature addressed to the concerns of the people, was the only virtuous option.75 To counteract the contemporary crisis, the new literature would need to take on new responsibilities, examining previously ignored realities. Trombatore’s message to Italian writers was clear: “Uscite dalla vostra solitudine. Mescolatevi col popolo. Ascoltatene e condividetene il dolore e la speranza [Abandon your solitude. Interact with the people. Listen to them and share their pain and their hope].”76 For this, Trombatore was accused by Giovanni Battista Angioletti of rejecting literature itself, since for Angioletti “Uscite dalla vostra solitudine [Abandon your solitude]” meant nothing less than to forsake the purpose and practice of literary creation, to “uscire dalla letteratura [abandon literature].”77 Moreover, Angioletti questioned the very need for a “new poetry” after the war because he refused to accept Trombatore’s critique of the literature of the Fascist ventennio: “Gli scrittori che si vogliono mettere in istato d’accusa furono (e sono) soprattutto artisti, e come tali non subirono influenze esteriori se non in modo, appunto, esteriore [The writers who are being confronted with these accusations were (and are) above all artists, and as such they did not absorb external influences except superficially].”78 With that argument, the debate over “literature and the people” explicitly became a debate over Fascism, a common fate in the post-war intellectual and political climate. Trombatore’s invocation of a new popular literature was founded on a critique of Fascist culture; Angioletti’s opposition to literary renewal drew on his defence of Italian culture under Fascism. Even in his defence, however, Angioletti did not go so far as to accuse Trombatore of wishing to reject the culture of the past in its entirety. In any event it would have been a difficult accusation to prove, since Trombatore had said quite clearly, in calling for a “new poetry,” that “si rivolge in un invito a ritornare alle migliori

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tradizioni della nostra poesia [we extend an invitation to return to the best traditions of Italian poetry].”79 Trombatore insisted that a new literature was made necessary by the failures of recent history – failures that had led to Fascism and the war – but he nevertheless argued with equal conviction that any new literature would need to draw on the best of that history in order to thrive. Gabriele Pepe made largely the same point, in broader cultural terms, in the conclusion to La crisi dell’uomo. Having detailed the extent of the crisis that he and others saw as a continuing threat to civilization, Pepe argued that “per uscire dalla crisi della nostra civiltà, non bisogna distruggerla, ma sanarla [to get out of this crisis of civilization we need to heal civilization, not destroy it].”80 Even at the height of the crisis, then, Pepe insisted that the solution was not to do away with history, even recent history, and to start over, but instead to pursue incremental reform founded on a careful historical reexamination and reconsideration. In keeping with such a vision, advocates of renewal invited intellectuals to rethink the role of culture, and to do so by engaging with the culture of the past. Thus, for instance, stressing the importance both of “innovazione e tradizione [innovation and tradition],” Giuseppe Petronio argued in Avanti! in 1948 that the task facing the post-war generation was to “esprimere se stessa non solo con opere nuove, ma reinterpretando tutto il passato dal proprio nuovo punto di vista [express itself not just with new works but by reinterpreting the entirety of the past from a new point of view].”81 “Così la creazione di una cultura nuova non apparirà più una messianica creazione dal nulla [Thus the creation of a new culture will no longer seem like a messianic creation from nothing],” he wrote in another essay the same year, “ma una lenta ed organica costruzione [but rather a gradual and organic construction].”82 “Creare una cultura veramente nuova significa infatti riuscire a vedere con altro occhio i momenti più tipici della stessa storia del nostro popolo [Creating a truly new culture, in fact, means being able to see with new eyes the most representative moments of our history],” argued the essayist Renato Nicolai in Vie Nuove in 1947.83 The goal, in other words, was to make culture new, not to reject the culture of the past, and not even the culture of the Fascist past. As the artist Mario Mafai put it in a 1945 essay, “Possibilità per un’arte nuova” (Possibility of a new art), even under Fascism “un’arte c’è stata, ha avuto la sua funzione [...]. Può darsi che quest’arte abbia esaurito le sue funzioni; ma non si può dimenticare il contributo che hanno dato questi artisti: le loro esperienze, le loro conquiste sono state assimilate più o meno da tutti i pittori di oggi [there was art, it had its function (...). It may be that this art has exhausted its function; but we cannot forget the contribution made by these artists: their experiences, their achievements, have been more



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or less assimilated by all of today’s painters].”84 The new painters were new, in other words, because they had learned the lessons of the previous generations, even the generation that came of age under Fascism, and they could therefore begin to develop in new directions. Cultural continuity was thus no obstacle to renewal; it was, rather, a key weapon in the ongoing struggle for recovery, for a new culture after Fascism. This was no “‘Year Zero’ fable.” After the war, Italian artists and intellectuals had a far more nuanced, sophisticated, and realistic understanding of Italy’s post-war reconstruction. They refused to be bound by the literalism and positivism that underwrite the moralistic distinction between continuity and renewal in current scholarship. Instead, they tended to heed, whether knowingly or not, the warning issued in the Roman cultural journal Mercurio in July 1945: Bisogna liberarsi da questa concezione astratta intellettualistica, per cui un mondo nuovo dovrebbe sorgere tutto di un tratto, senza nessun legame col passato, anzi con netto distacco da esso. Non vi sono né miraggi sociali, né catastrofi sociali, ma lenta e difficile conquista dell’umanità di un assetto sociale migliore, creazione quotidiana di un mondo migliore che si deve faticosamente conquistare giorno per giorno, che non può quindi sorgere bello e fatto, tutto di un tratto come Minerva dal cervello di Giove, ma rappresenta un processo legato alle sue fasi precedenti di sviluppo.85 We have to free ourselves from this abstract, intellectualistic notion according to which a new world will take shape suddenly, without any links to the past, indeed with a sharp break from the past. There are neither social illusions nor social catastrophes, only slow and hard-won victories of the human race. To create a better social order, to build a better world, we must work tirelessly, day after day. These things will not emerge fully formed, all at once, like Minerva from Jupiter’s head. They will be the result of an ongoing process, with links to all the previous phases of their development.

Rather than radical rupture, that is to say, they offered a vision of gradual reform, rejecting outright the possibility of starting over from an entirely new beginning. In fact, post-war Italian cultural commentators consistently made clear their opposition to what the critic Mario Bonfantini dismissed in Società Nuova in 1946 as “l’ottimismo avventista (che è poi anch’esso un pessimismo) d’una cultura tutta nuova che sorgerà come per incanto da un giorno all’altro, sol che si sappia far tabula rasa del passato [the Adventist optimism (which is also a form of pessimism), which holds that an entirely new culture will arise as if by magic from one day to the next, so long

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as we are able to make a tabula rasa of the past].”86 Italy’s post-war “new culture” was thus explicitly and repeatedly declared not to consist in the abandonment of history, of the culture of the past. “[S]i sta lavorando a un rinnovamento [we are working towards renewal],” Renato Guttuso explained in Rinascita in 1945: in questo rinnovamento di valori, di sentimenti e di firme noi non siamo certo di quelli che propugnano di fare tabula rasa del passato antico o ­recente; crediamo anzi, il più fermamente possibile, che ogni progresso avverrà attraverso l’utilizzazione, attraverso l’esistere in noi di tutto quel che è stato fatto prima di noi.87 in pursuing this renewal of values, of feelings, and of men we do not advocate making a tabula rasa of the ancient or recent past. On the contrary, we believe, as firmly as possible, that all progress must occur through the use – through the presence within all of us – of all that has been done before us.

When they called for a new culture after Fascism, they did not mean a culture stripped of its roots, but rather a culture that would draw sustenance from the fertile soil of Italy’s cultural tradition, growing and extending itself in new directions. What Italian intellectuals were after, and what they meant when they spoke of a new culture and a new society, was a revitalization and repurposing of literature, cinema, and the arts in the pursuit of a better world after the war. The art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli gave voice to Italy’s post-war ambitions in a November 1944 speech at the University of Florence that would be repeatedly republished in the months and years to follow. In a revealing passage, he declared: Tocca a noi, uomini di cultura aperti alle idee progressiste, effettuare la ­selezione nel campo della cultura, per mantenere ciò che ha valore ­universale e sfrondare coraggiosamente ciò che appare legato a condizioni ormai superate o in via di superamento. Questo è il nostro compito, quello che giustifica la nostra esistenza, quello che giustifica la nostra presenza in un’aula, intenti a discussioni teoriche, mentre ai limiti della nostra provincia ancora si soffre, si combatte e si muore per compiere il primo passo verso la liberazione e verso la nuova civiltà dell’Europa unita. Il primo compito degli uomini ai quali la cultura è affidata, che di essa hanno fatto la propria ragione di vita, è, in tali tempi, di trapasso, il rinnovare conservando.88 It is up to us, as men of letters open to progressive ideas, to make decisions in the cultural field, to maintain whatever has universal value and



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courageously to lop off whatever appears to be linked to conditions that are now outdated or in the process of being superseded. This is our task, this is what justifies our existence, what justifies our presence in a lecture hall, fixated on theoretical discussions, while at the boundaries of our province men are still suffering, still fighting, and still dying for that first step towards liberation and towards the new civilization of a united Europe. In these times, the first task of all men to whom culture has been entrusted, the first task of all men who have made culture their very reason for being, is renewal through conservation.

To renew culture while conserving it, and to renew culture by conserving it, were the primary objectives of even the more militant Italian artists and intellectuals after the war.89 Bianchi Bandinelli compared that process to pruning a tree: intellectuals were to cut away culture’s dead branches to allow for new growth; what they were not to do was to uproot the living tree itself. “Rinnovare conservando [Renewal through conservation],” in Bianchi Bandinelli’s memorable phrase, required both the promotion of future progress and the protection of past production. The processes were in fact understood to be one and the same. The discourse of renewal after the war inspired and encompassed an incisive discussion of the gradual reforms by which culture could be transformed over time. To cite aspects of cultural continuity as evidence for an absence of cultural renewal is thus fundamentally to misunderstand Italy’s post-war project. The question was not whether to break with or to maintain the culture of the past. Rather, after the war Italian artists and intellectuals were faced with the question of how to redeem the past. “A Good Opportunity, but the Challenges Are Greater” Imbued with a sense of civilizational crisis and immersed in reflections on cultural history, the calls for “a new Italy” and “a new culture” presented more questions than answers, more challenges than solutions. As a result, they led to a series of profound debates regarding the possibility of creating a new future on the unstable foundations of the present, the opportunity for culture to respond to a social and political crisis, and the necessity for artists to envision, inspire, and initiate practical reforms. Too often these questions have been shunted aside, making it seem in retrospect as if the underlying ambition in Italian culture after the war had been to “rinnegare tutto il lavoro passato [reject all the work of the past].”90 In fact, post-war Italian cultural debates turned on a quite different ambition – an ambition that can help to clarify neorealism’s relationship to Fascism.

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In the consequential 1948 battle over “letteratura e società [literature and society]” in the pages of L’Unità and Vie Nuove, for instance, calls for reform were inseparable from invocations of the challenges facing the reformers – a situation that can provide a kind of template for a more historically accurate and critically perceptive understanding of the discourse of post-war renewal. Beginning as a dispute between Libero Bigiaretti, the poet and novelist, and Emilio Sereni, the cultural director of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the debate quickly spread to include many of the most celebrated writers and intellectuals of post-war Italy: Italo Calvino, Alfonso Gatto, Francesco Jovine, Alberto Moravia, and others, as well as important political figures, such as the leading trade unionist Giuseppe Di Vittorio, and Luigi Longo, a prominent Member of Parliament representing the PCI.91 At its origins, the “literature and society” debate focused on literature’s potential to speak to and even to create a new society that did not yet exist, a society that most believed would come into being after the defeat of Fascism, but that all agreed was still far from becoming a reality. Bigiaretti, who wrote an open letter to Emilio Sereni published in L’Unità in November 1948, raised serious doubts about the viability of that new society, questioning in particular the role that individual artists and intellectuals could play in bringing it about. He put that question to Sereni directly: “può uno scrittore recidere d’un colpo i legami con la cultura del suo tempo e del suo paese [...]. E ancora: può uno scrittore rappresentare una società diversa da quella in cui vive, una realtà sociale diversa da quella che lo condizionano? [can a writer suddenly sever ties with the culture of his age and his country (...)? And again: can a writer represent a society that is different from the one in which he lives, a social reality that is different from the one that affects him?]”92 Responding to Bigiaretti, Sereni largely concurred with the novelist’s assessment of the current climate but sought to reconsider his conclusions. Whereas Bigiaretti had wished to underscore literature’s necessary exposure to society’s imperfections, Sereni instead emphasized the writer’s responsibility for society’s transformation: Quel che noi richiediamo all’artista è [...] di esprimere, di rappresentare compiutamente la realtà del suo mondo, nel suo vivo contesto e nella sua interna dialettica. [...] Da un artista, da un’opera d’arte, noi richiediamo l’espressione artisticamente compiuta della sua società, del suo mondo, della sua realtà: che sarà sempre colta, quanto alla materia, al soggetto dell’opera singola, in un dettaglio, ma dovrà esprimerci, in questo dettaglio, al mondo dell’artista nella sua unità, nella sua totalità. Il guaio si è che il mondo in cui viviamo è una realtà non immobile e ferma, ma una realtà



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che si muove, che si sviluppa, che si trasforma. E qui sta la difficoltà per l’artista, come per lo scienziato. Non vi è conoscenza o rappresentazione compiuta di una realtà se questa realtà non viene conosciuta ed espressa nei suoi intimi mezzi, nella sua interna dialettica, nel suo movimento.93 What we ask is that artists [...] give expression, give full representation, to the reality of their world, in its vibrant contexts and in its internal dialectic. [...] From artists, from works of art, we demand the artistically complete expression of society, of the world, of reality. In terms of content, that expression will always suggest the subject of a single work, a single detail, but it will have to give voice, in this detail, to the unity, the totality of the artist’s world. The trouble has been that the reality of the world we inhabit is not fixed and immobile. It is a reality in motion, one that develops and transforms. And here is the difficulty for the artist, and for the scientist as well. There can be no complete knowledge or representation of reality if reality itself is not understood and expressed in its innermost processes, in its internal dialectic, in its movement.

Society is neither monolithic nor static, Sereni insisted, and if its influence is not purely generative, neither is it entirely destructive. Even in a moment of crisis, writers should be able to differentiate one influence from the other, grasping the first signs of constructive change and helping them to flourish. They should quicken and guide positive social processes, Sereni argued, by reflecting society as it is, reimagining society in their works, and redirecting the society of the future. For many of Sereni’s respondents, however, the passage from present crisis to future cohesion was neither obvious nor assured. Animated by the pressing need to work out literature’s proper contribution to the recovery from Fascism, the participants in the “literature and society” debate struggled to articulate the processes of representation and transformation that would make the society of the present into the “new society” of the future.94 They disagreed about how this might be accomplished, and even about whether it was possible, but they all agreed that society needed to transform, and that a new literature would be a part of that transformation. Crucially, they also agreed that this transformation would necessarily begin from a thorough examination of recent history. Of all the debate’s participants, it was the poet Alfonso Gatto who made this point most forcefully, announcing in the very title of his essay “I debiti e i crediti” (Debts and credits), that his argument rested on a critical re-evaluation of the recent past. Gatto argued, in his response to Bigiaretti and Sereni, that, after the Second World War, “[d]obbiamo rivedere tutta la cultura che ci ha preceduto e della quale siamo stati

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spesso attori e responsabili; non possiamo abbandonarla credendo d’essere scampati [we must re-examine all the culture that preceded us, the culture that shaped us and that we have shaped. We cannot toss it aside believing we have escaped it].”95 Intellectuals could not be expected to remake culture and society, Gatto insisted, without first reflecting seriously on the failures of the culture and society that had led to Fascism, as well as on their own complicity with those failures. They could not be expected merely to leave behind the past, as if Italy’s history, culture, and society were free of Fascism. As Gatto insinuated, Italian literature could not move on to the future before it had accounted for the errors and the accomplishments – “debts” and “credits” – of Italian history. This was precisely the point that Italo Calvino stressed in his own contribution to the “literature and society” debate. Sereni had emphasized only the creation of the society of the future, not the analysis of the societies of the past, arguing that the writers’ task was to “fare quel che han sempre fatto i grandi artisti che ancor oggi ammiriamo. Omero e Dante, Michelangelo e Cervantes, Balzac e Tolstoi, progressi o reazionari che fossero in quanto singoli individui politici [do what was always done by the great artists we continue to admire: Homer and Dante, Michelangelo and Cervantes, Balzac and Tolstoy, whether they were themselves political progressives or reactionaries].”96 Challenging Sereni in a response entitled, not without sarcasm, “Saremo come Omero!” (We’ll be like Homer!), Calvino called into question the evident, and to his mind oversimplified, analogy that Sereni had drawn between the classics of literary history and the role of literature in the present moment.97 As Calvino put it, “tu, Sereni, te la cavi a buon mercato, quando dici a Bigiaretti: sii Omero. Alla grazia! Ma la distanza tra noi e Omero, come la colmi? [you, Sereni, let yourself off too easily when you say to Bigiaretti: be Homer. By all means! But the distance between Homer and us, how would you bridge it?]”98 Writers would surely reclaim the status of a Homer if only they could, Calvino asserted, and for politicians to ignore the root causes of their inability to do so was useless if not downright pernicious. Rather than insisting on the impossible, political leaders should join artists and intellectuals in the attempt to remake society and to facilitate future artistic achievements. Despite his argument’s implications for present actions and future ambitions, however, Calvino seemed to place his greatest emphasis on the analysis of the past. Seeking to historicize the debate, he identified disparate and dissimilar periods in literature’s shifting relationship to society, some more and some less favourable to literary greatness. As he saw it, there were moments in history when society had been particularly conducive to literary advances, “momenti pieni per condizioni di civiltà o di



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genio individuale, in cui il poeta è cantore ‘diretto’ di tutta una società e un’epoca [moments filled with possibility for civilization and for individual genius, in which the poet can sing ‘directly’ of his society and his age],” and there were, likewise, moments, such as that in which Italy found itself after the war, when social conditions not only impaired but actively impeded literary greatness. What Calvino wanted to know from Sereni, therefore, was how writers were supposed to pass from one moment to the next, to attain the status of the classics when the social foundations for such an achievement were not yet (or were no longer) in place. The problem with Sereni’s demands, Calvino implied, was that they failed to account for the state of Italian literature and society after the war, after Fascism. Sereni wanted writers to reach new heights; Calvino cautioned that writers were bound to an old society, a society that had been brought low by totalitarianism. Calvino was insisting that real and lasting changes in society would have to be achieved before writers could be expected to achieve literary immortality. In the meantime, Calvino made clear, it was foolish to place demands on writers that they could not hope to meet. The vestiges of the old order would obstruct artistic achievement in the here and now; better, then, to reflect seriously on past accomplishments, to nurture present ambitions, and to prepare future attainment than to lament enduring imperfections. Better to prepare the ground for prospective successes than to demand the impossible under current conditions. Calvino’s “Saremo come Omero!” thus casts doubt upon one of the most celebrated and oft-cited invocations of “the ‘Year Zero’ fable.” In the 1964 preface to the republished edition his 1947 partisan novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Calvino famously wrote that, after the fall of Fascism, he and his fellow Italians were filled with a sense of almost infinite possibility: “quello di cui ci sentivamo depositari era un senso della vita come qualcosa che può ricominciare da zero [we felt ourselves imbued with the belief that life could begin again from zero].”99 For a fleeting moment, at least in Calvino’s memory, it was as if the sins of the past had been washed away, as if Fascism had left no mark on the Italian landscape, as if Italian culture could spontaneously regenerate, freed from the burdens of everything that had come before. Twenty years after the fact, Calvino remembered the post-war period as one of unlimited and unconditional renewal.100 Yet, while he was living through that period, and helping to shape its literary culture, Calvino understood the situation differently. Against Sereni, Calvino had at that time argued that writers could not immediately become the Homers of a new era because literature, culture, and society could not transcend so easily or so wilfully the limitations of a country and of a historical moment marred

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by Fascism. To put this another way, Calvino made the case that Italy and the Italians could not simply begin again with a clean slate, as if they were no longer stained by their problematic history. In a nation deeply wounded by Fascism, new beginnings and new directions might be hoped for, even cultivated, but not immediately expected. If, in 1964, Calvino remembered the post-war period as one of perfectly new beginnings, in 1947 he experienced it instead as one of unstable foundations, partial restoration, and ongoing transition. Indeed, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno – the very novel that inspired, two decades later, Calvino’s memory of a society that could “begin again from zero” – seems far more symptomatic of the difficult, partial, and conservative renewal of the post-war years than indicative of the optimistic faith in absolute renewal, renewal from scratch, that its author would later recollect. Over the course of the novel’s picaresque narrative, its young protagonist, Pin, passes from the indifferent care of his sister, a prostitute, to the harsh oversight of a Fascist prison, before an escape brings him into the orbit of a ragtag band of misfit partisans – “ i peggiori possibili [the worst partisans imaginable],” as Calvino would describe them.101 Pin shares with these partisans an inchoate rage, “una voglia d’uccidere [...] aspra e ruvida [a sharp, rasping urge to kill]”; this intense emotion nearly leads him to join the Fascist Black Brigades, but instead comes to inspire his contributions to the Resistance.102 In Calvino’s novel, the line between Fascism and the Resistance is not only thin but also frequently traversed. Kim, the medical student and Resistance leader responsible for forming the unit into which Calvino’s protagonist stumbles, is forthright in his assertion that the deepseated rage motivating Pin and his fellow partisans is the same rage that motivates the Fascists, a rage that the war itself will not mollify. It seems clear, in fact, and more than a little disconcerting, that Pin’s rage has not dissipated significantly by the novel’s conclusion. There is a real risk that he will continue as before, with the same tendencies that nearly led him to Fascism guiding his future decisions. After all, having left the partisan band and returned home, Pin seems almost unchanged: even after the war, the narrator announces, for Pin “tutto è lo stesso [everything is just as it was].”103 Yet this statement is not entirely true. If only in part, Pin’s attitude and his outlook have both begun to improve, shaped by his contribution to Italy’s liberation, which has helped to channel if not to calm his anger. What is more, he has found a new and more reliable adult guardian, Cugino, a fellow partisan. These developments should be seen to mark a new beginning for Pin.104 At the same time, however, having survived interrogation in a Fascist prison, having experienced first-hand the brutal Italian civil war, and having been party to the murder of his sister at the hands of his new guardian,



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Pin can hardly be said to have begun a new life from scratch. Scars from his previous experiences inevitably remain, and will undoubtedly mar his remaining childhood years. Pin begins his new life, then, bearing signs of trauma, but with the opportunity and the support to recover from the traumas of his past. In a free Italy – an Italy that he himself has helped to free – he can both grapple with his difficult history and pursue his hopeful future.105 Life may not begin again with a clean slate in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, but the novel nonetheless expresses real hope for new beginnings. What it does not do, despite the fairy-tale qualities that Calvino’s readers have often adduced in his work, is offer a “‘Year Zero’ fable.” Rather than the limitless faith in revolutionary transformation that he would later remember, Calvino’s more guarded optimism in 1947 could take him no further than the tentative and provisional solutions signalled by the conclusion of Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Yet, if they contradict Calvino’s subsequent nostalgia for his youthful faith in Italy’s post-war transformation “from zero,” the novel’s ambiguous conclusion and Pin’s incomplete transformation do not necessarily indicate the author’s outright rejection of Italy’s ongoing post-war renewal. They seem instead to point to Calvino’s recognition of the difficult task with which Italians were faced, a difficulty that he acknowledged and explored in numerous essays at the time. In a particularly striking comment published in 1947 in L’Unità, the same Communist daily that would host the “literature and society” debate the following year, Calvino insisted that, in the wake of Fascism’s defeat, “per noi che aspireremmo a fondare la cultura di una classe, di una società nuova, l’occasione sarebbe buona, ma più gravi le difficoltà [for those of us seeking to found the culture of a new class, of a new society, this might be a good opportunity, but the challenges are greater].”106 It was here, it would seem, rather than in his 1964 preface, that Calvino expressed the sense of history and possibility that he explored in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, where he balanced a very real hope for Italy’s cultural and social renewal after Fascism with the recognition that any such renewal would be fraught with challenges. The ambition articulated by Calvino thus appears rather far from the supposed naïveté of which the neorealists were subsequently accused. After all, it would be difficult to say that he was offering anything like the “mythology of a radical rupture between the Fascist era and post-war Italy.”107 It would be difficult, in fact, to make that accusation of any of the contestants in the “literature and society” debate. Even as they discussed various proposals for transforming Italian culture after Fascism – even as they questioned the status of that transformation, and the rate at which it would occur – Italian artists and intellectuals insisted that they were living through a

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period of crisis in which old certainties were giving way to new possibilities. They hoped that these new possibilities could be nurtured through a critical reassessment of the past, not a rejection, and they envisioned Italy’s transformation, its post-war renewal, as the impetus for a considered redeployment of cultural traditions in pursuit of an auspicious but still uncertain future. “Continuity between the Past and the Future” Like Calvino, Giuseppe De Santis in later years would look back on the age of neorealism as a time of new beginnings, of radical transformation, of rupture with the past. Like Calvino, too, he would do so in more absolute terms than those he and his contemporaries had employed after the war. “Il neorealismo nasce perché ci sono due avvenimenti storici, la caduta del fascismo e la resistenza [Neorealism was born thanks to two historical events: the fall of Fascism and the rise of the Resistance],” De Santis explained in a 1998 celebration of Giorni di gloria, the anti-Fascist documentary he had helped to direct more than forty years earlier, in 1945. “La resistenza libera grandi masse popolari che si riscattano. [...] La resistenza segna l’anno zero, l’anno in cui l’Italia cambia volto [The Resistance liberated and redeemed large swaths of the popular masses. (...) The Resistance marked the Year Zero, the year in which Italy changed face].”108 The director was here making the case for Giorni di gloria as the origin-point of Italian neorealism, a contextual detail that may help to account for a certain rhetorical excess in his pronouncement, which seems to diverge significantly from his own portrayal of the post-war period in his neorealist films, and in particular in Caccia tragica. De Santis’s first feature film, Caccia tragica dramatizes the resolution of a localized instance of the post-war crisis, and does so precisely by calling into question belief either in the total elimination or in the absolute continuation of the Fascist past. Its narrative of redemption thus seems ideally calibrated to disabuse its audience of two opposing dangers: cynical fatalism to one side; naïve moralizing to the other. In Caccia tragica, hope for a new beginning is predicated on a confrontation with historical guilt, not on starting from scratch. Indeed, it is predicated on the reclamation of a character with a problematic past – a reclamation opposed on one side by Daniela, for whom the war continues unabated, and on the other side by Alberto’s pursuers, former partisans, who believe their victory over Fascism to have been so definitive that they can consign the struggle entirely to the past. For Daniela, post-war peace frequently gives way to revanchist violence. Even the representatives of the landowners, who have suborned the thefts and kidnappings she carries out, condemn



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her frightening bellicosity: “Tu credi che ci sia sempre la guerra [You think the war is still going on],” they tell her; “la guerra è finita [the war is finished].” Daniela cannot and will not recognize that the situation has changed, that a new era has begun, and she continues her battle against the former partisans with the same ferocity as ever. Conversely, the partisans, now workers on a cooperative farm, are characterized by an ingenuous and unjustified optimism, telling the landowners’ representatives that they will soon reclaim all the land scarred by war, wiping away the lingering threats in order to permit future growth: “Vedete quante mine? È l’ultimo campo. Non ci resta niente da sminare ormai. Domani si può incominciare ad arare anche qui [Do you see all those mines? That’s the last field. There are no more mines to clear after that. Tomorrow we can begin to plough here, too],” they declare. “Abbiamo finito i conti. Paghiamo i debiti, restiamo puliti puliti [We’ve completed our accounts. We’ve paid our debts. Now we’re all clean].” These are resonant phrases, and the screenwriters responsible for Caccia tragica – a team that brought together many of neorealism’s most prominent theorists and practitioners, including Corrado Alvaro, Michelangelo Antonioni, Umberto Barbaro, Carlo Lizzani, and Cesare Zavattini – were surely aware of the reverberations of the words they had chosen. In the debates over Italian culture after Fascism, the need to “pagare i debiti con il passato [pay the debts from the past]” recurred with remarkable frequency: remember, for instance, that Alfonso Gatto’s important entry in the “literature and society” debate was entitled “Debiti e crediti” (Debts and Credits).109 In the efforts to reimagine the role of cinema after the war, too, the phrase had significant purchase, as in Alberto Lattuada’s celebrated exhortation to his fellow filmmakers: “Paghiamo tutti i nostri debiti con un feroce amore di onestà [Let’s pay all our debts with a fierce love of honesty],” Lattuada insisted, “e il mondo parteciperà commosso a questa grande partita con la verità [and the world, moved, will join us in this great struggle for the truth].”110 The partisans-turned-farmhands in Caccia tragica are thus suggestively echoing a language of post-war recovery whose implications exceed the specific terrain they are working to reclaim. They are declaring that they will soon purge the dangers of the past, literal landmines that signify metaphorically the persistent threat of war, and declaring, too, that they will then have paid the necessary debts, literally reimbursing the landowners and figuratively repenting for the sins of Italian history. They are insisting, in other words, on their freedom to begin again from a clean slate, from zero. Alberto thus finds himself torn between two opposing visions: Daniela’s, which conflates past and present and insists on absolute continuity between war and post-war; and the farmers’, which claims to have

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expunged the past and insists on an absolutely new beginning after Fascism. Both Daniela and the farmers understand their relationship as one of irreconcilable difference, categorical conflict, which will either be perennially contested (as Daniela insists) or definitively consigned to history (as the farmers believe). Alberto recognizes that neither presents a viable solution. The conflicts of the past have not yet been resolved: despite the farmers’ attempts to clear the landmines, Daniela still holds her hand on a lever that can explode this leftover ordnance, negating the recovery they believe they have almost completed and destroying the community they have worked to rebuild. With such dangers certain to remain as long as the conflict persists, it becomes apparent that true recovery, a true resolution, will have to be predicated on reconciliation. This is the argument that Michele advances on Alberto’s behalf in the makeshift trial that the farmers have set up to determine the criminal’s fate. Alberto, he says, è stato un debole, si, ma chi di noi non è debole quando è solo? Se non trovavo gli amici quando sono tornato dalla prigionia, se non mi aiutavano quelli che sono rimasti qui, se non mi facevano lavorare.... Lo sapete che significa essere a un passo dalla morte per due anni? Ci mangiavamo dalla fame tra di noi. E quando siamo tornati, e abbiamo cominciato a morire dalla fame anche a casa nostra, è venuta a tutti, la voglia di sparare. Noi... Voi non avete nessun diritto di fargliela pagare. Quelli che hanno pensato di farlo fuori è segno che non hanno capito niente di tutto quello che ­abbiamo sofferto, noi, che siamo stati lontani, in prigionia, e voi, che avete penato qui, a casa vostra. [...] Non si può continuare per tutta la vita a fare i carnefici. was weak, it’s true, but who among us is not weak when he’s alone? If I had not managed to find my friends when I came back from imprisonment, if those who were left here had not helped me, if they had not allowed me to work ... Do you know what it means to be on death’s door for two years? The two of us shared our hunger together. And when we came back, starving even at home, we both felt it, the desire to start shooting. We ... You have no right to make him pay for it. That some of you wish to do so is a sign you haven’t understood anything at all of what we suffered: we who were far away, imprisoned, and you who suffered here in your homes. [...] You cannot continue to be executioners your whole life.

Michele builds his case for reconciliation on a recognition of the continuing crisis of the war. He wants his audience to understand that to appreciate the suffering inflicted at home and abroad, in Italian towns and in



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foreign concentration camps, is to recognize the need to resolve the conflict, to end the suffering, to find a peaceful solution. Those who would perpetuate the conflict, whether by refusing to abandon prior struggles, as Daniela does, or by refusing to forgive prior mistakes, as the farmers do, must not have understood the extent of the crisis, or else they could not stand for it to continue. The crisis thus compels its own resolution – a resolution that seeks neither to perpetuate nor to deny the past, but rather to redeem it and through that redemption to create a new and lasting order. The farmers must allow for forgiveness and Alberto must work towards restitution, but a new unity can be achieved. An intricate intertextuality informs the vision of impending unity set forth in Caccia tragica’s hopeful resolution. In the film’s dénouement, Michele makes clear to Alberto that to earn his absolution he will need to contribute to the cause. “Lo sai, sul fiume stanno ricostruendo i ponti [You know, they’re rebuilding the bridges over the river],” Michele tells him. “Dicono che c’è lavoro per molta gente. Anche tu non hai tempo da perdere [They say that there’s plenty of work. You don’t have any time to lose].” This statement, which holds out the promise of redemption, echoes a significant precedent from the cinema of Italy’s recent past, repurposing one of the central conceits of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione. Caccia tragica has much in common with that earlier film, which De Santis had worked on as a screenwriter and assistant director.111 Not only were both films set in the countryside surrounding the Po River, but they also both starred Massimo Girotti, who played the part of Michele in Caccia tragica four years after appearing as Gino in Ossessione.112 Near the end of Visconti’s film, having conspired in the murder of his lover’s husband only to find himself trapped running the dead man’s inn, Girotti’s Gino is confronted by Lo Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo), who at an earlier moment had held out to him the promise of another life, of travel and freedom rather than bourgeois conformity. Sitting on a hillside together, Lo Spagnolo reprimands Gino for returning to the domestic embrace of his lover, as well as for the consequences that this decision has brought about, but he also offers him one last chance to escape his impending fate. If Gino will only come with him to Genoa, Lo Spagnolo explains, he can begin a new life. “So che stanno facendo una camionabile da quelle parti [I know they’re building a road for heavy vehicles there],” Lo Spagnolo tells him. “Si può facilmente trovare lavoro. Si passa la giornata a far brillare le mine, per via della montagna [You can easily find work there. They spend all day exploding mines to blast through the mountain].” In both Ossessione and Caccia tragica, as these echoed lines serve to indicate, the offer of work conveys the promise of redemption. In the earlier film, Girotti’s Gino refuses the offer and meets his demise;

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in Caccia tragica’s subsequent reworking of this scene, Girotti’s Michele extends a similar offer to Alberto, who accepts it, and who can thus be redeemed as Gino was not. There are thus several meaningful connections between the two scenes, but also consequential differences. In Ossessione, released in 1943, the job Gino refused had entailed exploding mines to clear a new road; in Caccia tragica, released four years later, after the end of the war, the job Alberto accepts will entail rebuilding bridges destroyed by German mines, which the former partisans are now working to clear from their fields. In a sense, the resolution of De Santis’s film thus suggests that the paths abandoned in an earlier era, when they were impeded by conventionality or cowardice, must now be followed for salvation to be achieved. At the same time, however, it also suggests that those paths are not entirely the same; after the war the terrain has changed and, as a result, new and different tasks must be undertaken. Caccia tragica’s Alberto may then be said to take up the offer Ossessione’s Gino had refused, but only if it is recognized that in the four intervening years the conditions of that offer and the responsibilities it entailed had been partially but fundamentally transformed. A related claim can be made with regard to De Santis’s reworking of Visconti. Interpreted meta-cinematically, that is to say, Caccia tragica can be seen to evoke Ossessione in order polemically to establish post-war Italian cinema’s nuanced relationship to the films of the recent past. It was a relationship characterized neither by absolute continuity nor by total rupture, but rather by a subtler combination of knowing debts and selective departures. De Santis’s film thus symptomatically invokes not a new path to be cleared, as had Visconti’s earlier effort, but instead a damaged bridge to be rebuilt. In this way, the film gives lie to De Santis’s own subsequent invocation of the post-war “Year Zero,” but it does more than this. According to critical convention, as articulated, for instance, by Callisto Cosulich, neorealism’s post-war transformation is invalidated by the recognition that it was founded upon an alleged “convinzione secondo la quale il 1945 sarebbe stato l’‘anno zero’ del cinema italiano, costretto a ripartire per l’appunto da zero, tagliando i ponti con un passato di cui nella maggior parte dei casi avrebbe dovuto tutt’al più vergognarsi [conviction that 1945 was the ‘Year Zero’ of Italian cinema, which was forced to start over from scratch, cutting the bridges to a past of which most were ashamed].”113 Caccia tragica provides a substantial alternative to this flawed narrative, demonstrating that hope for a new beginning after the war was premised on the act of rebuilding bridges, not tearing them down, of reclaiming the past, not rejecting it. Read alongside the prevalent critiques of Italy’s post-war reforms and the longstanding



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assumptions about its post-war continuities, the conclusion to De Santis’s film can be understood to adhere to a radically different standard of renewal, one in which cultural continuities – even continuities with Fascist culture – could help to create not only a new Italian cinema but also a new Italy. This, rather than any “‘Year Zero’ fable,” was the vision of reconstruction that shaped Italian political and cultural discourse in the age of neorealism – a vision that transcended the false opposition between continuity and renewal in favour of a shared emphasis on national recovery. It was the vision articulated, most prominently, in the first issue of the aptly named post-war cultural journal Il Ponte (The bridge). Prefiguring the resolution of Caccia tragica, the journal’s editor, Piero Calamandrei, here declared that [i]l nostro programma è già tutto nel titolo e nell’emblema della copertina: un ponte crollato, e tra i due tronconi delle pile rimaste in piedi una trave lanciata attraverso, per permettere agli uomini che vanno al lavoro di ricominciare a passare. In questo titolo e in questo emblema, non c’è soltanto il proposito di contribuire a ristabilire nel campo dello spirito, al disopra della voragine scavata dal fascismo, quella continuità tra il passato e l’avvenire che porterà l’Italia a riprendere la sua collaborazione al progresso del mondo [...]. Ma c’è, sopra tutto, il proposito di contribuire a ricostruire l’unità morale dopo un periodo di profonda crisi [...].114 our program is there in the title and the cover image: a collapsed bridge and, between the bases of the two remaining pillars, a beam, which allows men on their way to work to cross. This title and this image suggest not only the goal of contributing to a spiritual renewal, bridging the chasm carved by Fascism, but also the continuity between past and future that will allow Italy to contribute again to the world’s progress [...]. Above all, they suggest our intention to contribute to rebuilding moral unity after a period of profound crisis [...].

Calamandrei’s was a vision predicated on crisis, stressing the literal and metaphorical wreckage of war. It was an essentially conservative vision, which sought to reclaim and to redeem Italian history in pursuit of a solution to that crisis. Yet it was also a vision of radical renewal, imagining for Italy a brighter future to be achieved through creative reflection and collective action. Suggestively staged in Caccia tragica, it was a vision that drew the support of the National Association of Italian Partisans, which endorsed and helped fund De Santis’s film, as well as of the Italian Communist Party, who helped to promote the film in theatres in

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the hopes that its narrative of redemption might inspire a swing to the left in the pivotal 1948 election.115 It was a vision, finally, that encompassed and conveyed neorealism’s characteristic – and characteristically ­far-reaching  – post-war ambitions. In the chapters that follow, I  will examine those ambitions more closely, mapping out the clusters of interrelated objectives set out in the neorealist conversation. The validity of those objectives, I argue, should be judged not by the degree to which they established a break with the Fascist past, but rather by the cogency of their response to the challenges of the contemporary crisis and the persuasiveness of their articulation of future alternatives.

3 “Chronicle and Tragedy”: The Neorealist Representation of History

After a frantic but ultimately fruitless chase through Rome’s Traforo Umberto, the desperate Antonio Ricci turns to the local police in the hope that they might help him recover his stolen bicycle. Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), the protagonist of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, has been told that he must have a bicycle to qualify for work, and he and his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) have pawned their sheets in order to procure one. Much is riding on that bicycle, therefore, and much has been sacrificed to retrieve it from the pawnshop. So when, affixing a poster advertising Rita Hayworth’s star turn in Charles Vidor’s Gilda, Antonio turns to see a thief riding away on his bicycle, his face betrays not only a sense of shock but also a hint of terror. He knows that unless he recovers the bicycle he will lose his job, leaving him unable to provide for Maria, his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), and his newborn baby. Yet the attending officer to whom he reports the theft shows ­little concern for Antonio’s plight. Indeed, when an impatient journalist, on the lookout for an attention-grabbing story, asks whether anything newsworthy has come across his desk, the officer carelessly answers, “No, niente. Una bicicletta [No, nothing ... just a bicycle].”1 The rapacious journalist will have to look elsewhere to find his sensational headline. Antonio’s story, Ladri di biciclette’s story, is clearly too insignificant to merit his consideration. If the connotations of Antonio’s story escape the police officer and the journalist, they are readily apparent to the film’s audience. Indeed, the film effectively amplifies those connotations by implicitly contrasting the policeman’s casual dismissal with the movie camera’s rapt attention, the newspaper reporter’s jaded enquiry with the viewer’s increasingly empathetic apprehension of Antonio’s predicament. In this way, Ladri di biciclette foregrounds the ideologically significant opposition between two conflicting modes of understanding: to one side that of the political

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and cultural establishment, to the other that of the film itself. The confrontation in the police station thus conveys a substantive challenge to accepted norms of value – those of the police, the journalists, and the systems of power they represent – and offers a subtle but forceful expression of an alternative standard of social significance. Cesare Zavattini, the film’s screenwriter and De Sica’s close collaborator, revealed as much in a 1948 interview, asking, che cos’è una bicicletta? Roma è piena di biciclette come di mosche. Ne rubano decine e decine al giorno e i giornali non vi dedicano neanche una riga in corpo sei. Forse i giornali non sono più in grado di stabilire la vera gerarchia dei fatti. Se rubassero, per esempio, la biciclette a Antonio, i giornali dovrebbero, secondo noi, occuparsi del furto con un titolo su quattro colonne.2 what does a bicycle matter? Rome is as full of bicycles as it is flies. Dozens and dozens of them are stolen every day and the newspapers don’t even devote a single line to it in the back pages. Maybe the newspapers aren’t able to ascertain the real hierarchy of facts. If someone were to steal Antonio’s bicycle, for example, we believe the newspapers should report that fact with a headline four columns wide.

True to Zavattini’s notion of “the real hierarchy of facts,” Ladri di biciclette prizes what the newspaper casts off, emphasizes what the newspaper diminishes, reveals what the newspaper withholds, and it does so purposefully, asserting a system of values that functions not only instead of but against the flawed assessments of the popular press. De Sica made largely the same point in a 1948 interview, insisting that Ladri di biciclette represented “una vicenda meno straordinaria, nell’apparenza, una vicenda di quelle che accadono a tutti, e specialmente ai poveri, e che nessun giornale si degna di ospitare [an event that was seemingly unexceptional, one of those events that happens to everyone, and especially to the poor, and that no newspaper would deign to cover].”3 Like Zavattini, De Sica positioned his film in relation to the newspapers’ omission, explaining that his goal was to explore the significant implications of the kind of story the newspapers refused to cover. Post-war Italian filmmakers and writers had a word for such minor narratives, the ones that preoccupied desperate individuals but failed to engage the complacent authorities, the ones that determined a family’s fate but elicited little or no reaction from a preoccupied nation, the ones that could provide the plot for the greatest neorealist films while appearing too trivial to provide fodder for even the most provincial gazettes. The



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word was cronaca, a word only partially captured in English by terms like “chronicle” or “news item.” This was the term De Sica used to describe Ladri di biciclette in his 1948 interview. “Il mio scopo è di rintracciare il drammatico nelle situazioni quotidiane, il meraviglioso della piccola cronaca, anzi della piccolissima cronaca, considerata dai più come materia consunta [My aim is to identify the dramatic in everyday situations, the marvellous in the minor chronicle (cronaca), indeed in the most minor chronicle, which most consider worn-out material],” he explained.4 It was also the term Zavattini employed in a celebrated essay on neorealism’s development, where he expressed his “vecchio desiderio di adoperare il cinema per conoscere ciò che succede intorno a noi [...] in un modo diretto e immediato [longstanding desire to use the cinema to understand what happens around us (...) in a direct and immediate way,” and defined Italian neorealism as the cinema that “riproduce un fatto di cronaca nei luoghi dov’è realmente avvenuto e che interpretano coloro stessi che ne sono stati i principali protagonisti [reproduces a news item (cronaca) in the places it actually took place and with the actual participants as actors].”5 For both director and screenwriter, post-war Italian cinematic realism was defined by its foundations in the chronicle. De Sica and Zavattini could hardly have chosen a more suggestive term with which to explain the realist ambitions of their cinematic project. From the novels of Vasco Pratolini, who published both Cronaca familiare and Cronache di poveri amanti (1947), to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cronaca di un amore, 1950) and Luchino Visconti (Aspetti di un fatto di cronaca, 1951), to the poetry of Luigi Compagnone (“Cronaca,” 1946), Attilio Bertolucci (“Cronaca 1946,” 1951), and Elio Pagliarani (Cronache e altre poesie, 1954), to the plays of Leopoldo Trieste (Cronaca, 1946) and Marcello Sartarelli (“Teatro di cronaca”), the term recurred with remarkable frequency in post-war Italy. Well aware of the term’s apparent ubiquity in the first years after the Second World War, Carlo Salinari once argued that “l’esigenza della cronaca è stata ed è fondamentale del nuovo realismo italiano [the demand for chronicles was and is fundamental to the new Italian realism].”6 If anything, Salinari understated things. For many commentators, both during the age of neorealism and in recent years, the cronaca has appeared not just a fundamental aspect of neorealism but the very definition of neorealism itself. If the cronaca can be said to define neorealism, however, it must also be said that the cronaca itself remains imperfectly defined. It has been called the “aspetto contingente, momento subordinato o anche materiale grezzo della storia [contingent aspect, the subordinate moment or even the raw material of history], “il racconto indiscriminato di certi fatti [the indiscriminate account of certain facts],” the “visione più immediatamente

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sincera dell’oggetto [most immediate and sincere view of an object],” an “asciutta registrazione di eventi [dry registering of events],” an “assoluta obbedienza alla realtà dei fatti [absolute obedience to the reality of facts].”7 The cronaca, then, is understood in some way to pertain to material reality, as well as to the form in which that reality is represented. It denotes at once the routine, contingent, concrete facts of daily events and the instrument for capturing those events, for recording those facts, for registering their substantive particulars. Yet, in its focus on the actual, the specific, the sensible, the authentic, the corporeal, the neorealist cronaca was far more dynamic and far more intricate than the scholarly consensus would suggest. This chapter is an attempt to capture the remarkable conceptual dynamism of the neorealist cronaca, a term that designated both the realistic depiction of post-war Italy’s singular travails and the critical articulation of those travails in their full historical and even universal significance. “The Chronicle That Gives Weight to Our Words” The Second World War has been called a “people’s war,” one in which the line between combatant and non-combatant was all but erased, in which civilian deaths outpaced those of soldiers, in which the home front became the battlefield.8 Local resistance, urban bombing, and mass deportation brought the war to the civilian population on a scale that was largely unprecedented. Below the international horizon at which it was conducted, therefore, the war had a profound effect at a regional, civic, familial, and individual level as well. One result, Italian cultural commentators have sought to emphasize, was a communal compulsion to recount one’s particular experience of history, to explain from an individual perspective how the global conflict had been deeply personal as well as geopolitical, private as well as public, intimate as well as international. In Italo Calvino’s memorable phrase, the war’s immediate aftermath gave rise to a collective “smania di raccontare [craving to tell stories],” a necessity to narrate, to proclaim, to disclose, such that stories became almost unavoidable, omnipresent: “ci muovevamo in un multicolore universo di storie [we existed in a multicoloured world of stories],” as Calvino put it. “Chi cominciò a scrivere allora si trovò così a trattare la medesima materia dell’anonimo narratore orale [The result was that those who began writing in that period found themselves dealing with the same subject matter as these anonymous storytellers],” he recalled.9 Calvino argued that the end of the war had unearthed common ground between reader and writer, between the public and the intellectuals, with shared experiences, as well as a shared compulsion to recount those experiences, serving to



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unite artists and their audience across social barriers. That, at least, was how Calvino portrayed the post-war atmosphere nearly twenty years after the fact, looking back fondly on the period in which he composed his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, in the preface to its 1964 republication. Yet Calvino’s account obscures as much as it reveals. Despite all the talk of common ground, of a unity forged from a shared compulsion to narrate personal experiences, questions regarding how stories of the war were to be recounted and who was to recount them were among the most divisive issues of the day. In truth, the post-war Italian cultural marketplace perpetuated a categorical distinction between two classes of writers, which can be thought of as “scrittori-letterati [author-writers]” and “testimoni-scrittori [witness-writers],” in Bruno Falcetto’s terms, or, in Andrea Battistini’s formulation, as “partigiani diventati narratori [partisans who became writers]” and “narratori diventati partigiani [writers who became partisans].”10 The distinction, in other words, was between the class of professional writers and those who came to writing because of the war-induced “craving to tell stories,” with which Calvino wished retrospectively to associate his partisan novel. These “witness-writers,” often new or non-professional authors, were (or were understood to be) attempting to break into an established field, one with a rigorously enforced hierarchy of literary value, and they were met with considerable resistance. They countered that resistance, in turn, by attacking the literary establishment and insisting on an opposing form of authority, one based on personal experience rather than professional credentialing.11 To cite a prominent and particularly resonant instance, the Resistance leader Comandante Gracco (Angiolo Gracci) prefaced his Brigata Sinigaglia, the first book on the partisan struggle published in Italy after the war, with the assertion that, despite having never written before, and despite his lack of literary training, he was uniquely qualified to tell the story of the Resistance because he had lived it. Indeed, he explained, his experiences had instilled in him all the skills necessary to recount them, so that, “meglio di ogni altro, sia pur forbito ed esperto scrittore, ho creduto di poter maneggiare ed esporre la presente materia nella forma più vera, più schietta e più giusta [better than anyone else, however polished or expert a writer he may be, I thought I could handle and explain the present material in the truest, most sincere, most just manner].”12 By this standard, narrative authority was not a function of any innate talent for writing, as the denizens of the traditional literary sphere would have it, but rather of service to the cause of Italian liberation. Comandante Gracco’s claims, and those of the “witness-writers” more broadly, sought to undermine the competing claims of the “writerauthors.” In so doing, they drew heavily on the belief, expressed, for

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instance, by Roberto Battaglia in his first-hand account of the Resistance, Un uomo un partigiano (1945), that the Italian literary tradition had stood at a dangerous remove from Italian life. Battaglia argued that in Italy there had always been two distinct forms of expression, “una lingua scritta e una lingua parlata [a written and a spoken language],” and “[a]nche a causa di questa dualità [...] il sorgere spontaneo di decine di migliaia di uomini contro l’oppressione nazista corre rischio di non essere sufficientemente documentato [because of this duality (...) the spontaneous uprising of tens of thousands of men in opposition to Nazi oppression runs the risk of being insufficiently documented].”13 Put simply, Battaglia argued that the Italian literary language inhibited the desire to capture the lived realities of the Second World War. To produce works of valid testimony, therefore, and to keep the written record true to personal experience, a witness to the war would need to leave behind the rigid standards of Italian literature and to “narrare con semplicità la propria vita [narrate his own life with simplicity],” as Battaglia put it, to “chiarire a sé stesso e agli altri in qual modo le sofferenze della guerra lo hanno trasformato o migliorato [clarify to himself and to the others how the suffering of the war had transformed or improved them].”14 Established cultural norms would have to give way to a new set of values; not belles lettres but unmediated testimony was the new order of the day. It was so, in fact, even for intellectuals like Battaglia, a university graduate and budding art historian, or for Emanuele Artom, a student of history and philology who had enlisted in the Resistance, and who concluded from his experience that “[i]n tempi normali, quando la vita è comoda, saper accendere il fuoco, se c’è il termosifone, conta meno che saper scrivere correntemente, oggi conta di più [in normal times, when life is comfortable, when one has a radiator, knowing how to light a fire counts less than knowing how to write fluently; today it counts more].”15 In the eyes of the “partisans who became narrators,” as Artom sought to suggest, the extraordinary circumstances of the Resistance were seen to have brought about an inversion of literary value, one that demanded new forms in which new writers could depict their new experiences. Yet much of the literary establishment rejected such claims, instead reiterating and reinforcing the artistic merits of celebrated novelists and poets and setting them against those of the new class of writers. In countless reviews and critical essays, they explained that works of eye-witness testimony and narratives of personal experience were and would remain subliterary, worthy of journalistic interest but unworthy of aesthetic admiration. Such works were, in the chosen terminology of the period, mere chronicles. For instance, reviewing Arrigo Benedetti’s 1945 Paura all’alba, an autobiographical novel recounting the author’s



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experiences as a partisan in the Apennine Mountains, critics stressed its “modi arbitrari e disinvolti alle avare esigenze della cronaca [arbitrary and casual manner of meeting the tawdry demands of the chronicle],” insisting that its tone had “alcunché di cronachistico e di giornalistico [something of the journalistic and the chronicle-like],” that with its “modi della cronaca, del diario e del racconto [style of the diary, the report, the chronicle]” it demonstrated “il gusto e la precisione di una cronaca [the flavour and the rigour of the chronicle].”16 They used the same term and its cognates whether examining works of pure testimony, such as Giuseppe Zàggia’s account of his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, 1945’s Filo spinato (a “nuda cronaca delle sofferenze patite nella prigionia [nude chronicle of the suffering he endured in prison]”); literary autobiographies like Ezio Taddei’s 1944 Il pino e la rufola (“non abbiamo a che fare con un romanzo, ma unicamente con una cronaca [we are presented not with a novel but only with a chronicle]”); or even works of popular fiction like Silvio Micheli’s 1946 Pane duro (characterized by its “realismo cronachistico e brutale [brutal and chronicle-like realism]”).17 Such texts, a critic at the newspaper Avanti! explained, “[n]on sono opere letterarie, sono cronache, più o meno fedeli, più o meno infarcite di svolazzi pseudo-letterari che spesso sviliscono la materia invece di arricchirla [are not literary works, they are chronicles, more or less faithful, more or less padded out with pseudo-literary flourishes that often cheapen the material instead of enriching it].”18 As such judgments make clear, when used in this context “chronicle” was largely not a term of praise. Instead, it served to indicate either the inability or the unwillingness of the author to produce real art. As the critic Rosario Assunto put it in a 1947 essay, the critical establishment believed a chronicle to be fundamentally different from a work of literature “[p]erché lo scrittore instaura la propria verità, mentre il cronista si limita a riferire una verità data [because the writer establishes his own truth, whereas the chronicler limits himself to reporting an established truth].”19 A chronicle aspired to be entirely factual, Assunto was saying, whereas literature, the product of a writer’s talent, sought to convey something more significant than the unprocessed sense data of material facts. The two forms, literature and chronicle, were thus understood to be categorically distinct from one another. Surprisingly, and at times polemically, the authors of testimonial chronicles claimed for themselves the very same designation that literary critics would use to dismiss their work. It was thus true, for instance, as critics noted of Luciano Bolis’s 1946 account of his experiences in the Resistance, Il mio granello di sabbia, that “libri come questi sono soltanto delle cronache e come tali vogliono essere considerati [books

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like this one are just chronicles and wish to be considered as such].”20 After all, Bolis himself presented his work in those very terms, explaining in the introduction that “[q]uesta cronaca [...] non ha pretese letterarie [this chronicle (...) has no literary pretensions].” “L’unico pregio di questa storia è dunque l’assoluta autenticità di quanto vi si narra [The only merit of this story is thus the absolute authenticity of what it recounts],” he wrote, “e tale autenticità ho osservato proprio per l’urgenza di verità che mi ha indotto a documentare in parole un’esperienza che poteva sembrare inenarrabile, a me che non faccio di mestiere lo scrittore [and I have been faithful to that authenticity because the urgency of truth has led me to document in words an experience that might have seemed impossible to narrate for someone like me, who is not a writer].”21 In much the same way, Piero Carmagnola introduced his Vecchi partigiani miei of 1945 by insisting that his text “[n]on è un romanzo [is not a novel],” just as Luca Besani presented his 1945 “Un autunno coi partigiani” as an “epica cronaca [epic chronicle]” told with “austera semplicità [austere simplicity],” and Marcello Venturi began his 1949 “Io povero soldato” by stating that “[q]uesto non è un racconto e neanche una poesia americana. È una semplice esposizione dei fatti [this is not a short story and not an American poem. It is a simple account of the facts].”22 Claiming not to seek literary validation, the “partisans who became writers” adopted the extant critical vocabulary and inverted the hierarchy of values this vocabulary had traditionally been used to enforce. In opposition, and in an effort to distinguish themselves and their work from this nascent testimonial tradition, Italy’s leading novelists were compelled to reiterate, when not in fact to vindicate, the standards of traditional literary merit. Alberto Moravia, for instance, argued that “non si deve mai attribuire ad un’opera d’arte l’importanza di un documento o di una inchiesta giornalistica. L’opera d’arte è una testimonianza, tutt’al più, ossia una conferma mediata, indiretta e poetica di verità testuali riscontrabili altrove [one should never attribute to a work of art the significance of a journalistic document or enquiry. At most a work of art can give testimony – that is, a mediated, indirect, and poetic verification – of textual truths found elsewhere].”23 Cesare Pavese railed against the “confusione tra il giornalista e lo scrittore [confusion between the journalist and the author”] inherent in writers’ efforts to “tuffarsi [...] nella cronaca [dive (...) into the chronicle].”24 In his words, authors of true literary merit were “convinti che altro è far cronaca, altro fare romanzo [convinced that it is one thing to write a chronicle, quite another to write a novel].”25 One can imagine Luciano Bolis or Piero Carmagnola making the same declaration but with a completely different intent.



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Moravia and Pavese’s intent was to defend themselves against “chroniclers” such as these, against their incursion in the literary sphere, and against the inversion of literary values that they represented. The literary establishment was worried in particular about what was perceived to be the growing pressure on novelists to generate or emulate chronicles. “Se ne potrebbe arguire che l’epoca dello stile è ormai conchiusa [One could argue that the age of style is now over],” lamented the critic Mario Bonfantini in a 1946 essay; “ci interessano soltanto poi i documenti o i ragionamenti [we seem to be only interested in documents or enquiries].”26 Many at the time concurred with sentiments such as this, dismayed that narrative literature appeared to be giving way to testimony, that a text’s truth-value was beginning to matter more than its artistic refinement. As the editor Giambattista Vicari put it, there were signs of an emerging post-war “crisi del romanzo [crisis of the novel],” brought on by the “facili ripercussioni della cronaca [easy repercussions of the chronicle],” the “fedi scoperte nella cronaca [evident devotion to the chronicle],” which had come to predominate in the Italian cultural marketplace.27 For countless Italian literati, the preference for testimony over art represented a crisis because it demanded new evaluative criteria, implying that writers were to be judged on how well their work reproduced reality rather than how elegantly they represented it or how well they understood it. The literary establishment largely held to the opposing view. “Se l’umanità chiede luce di coscienza su ciò che avvenne e su ciò che resta quindi da fare [If the human race wishes for the light of conscience to be shed on what has befallen us and on what remains to be accomplished],” explained a critic in 1946 in La Fiera letteraria, a leading organ of the literary traditionalists, “gli scrittori spetta in primissimo luogo il compito [the task falls first of all to authors].”28 The literary establishment, those authors and critics who had made their reputations before the war, continued to believe that literature could accomplish what chroniclers could not, that truth alone was not enough to produce something of lasting value, that writers had somehow to transmute the facts of the chronicle into art, and that literary standards were falling as this necessary artistic refinement gradually gave way to lesser forms of expression. They argued, then, that the pressure to respond to current events was leading authors to forgo the tools and techniques proper to literature, and even to deny the tradition and the potential of literature to advance the cause of human wisdom. The “witness-writers” had their defenders, however, and they mounted a strenuous challenge to the prevailing beliefs that continued to support the traditional literary hierarchies. In a 1949 essay, for instance, the critic Giovanni Titta Rosa denounced what he saw as the “speciosa

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argomentazione [specious arguments]” of those who denied the power of testimonial writers to approach reality with genuine critical insight, those who believed that such authors “non possano quindi far più arte o poesia ma soltanto documento, cronaca [cannot therefore create a work of art or poetry but only a document, a chronicle].”29 Instead, as he saw things, the moral and ethical force of the writer’s reflection on his or her experience was sufficient to make art from chronicle. There was no need for sophisticated literary form, rhetorical style, or linguistic embellishment; indeed, these adornments would only impede the necessary task of chronicling the consequential events of recent history. For this reason, more than a few leading contrarian critics sought to emphasize the superiority of chronicles to literature after the war. Mino Caudana, for example, believed that the Italian literati had proven themselves incapable of capturing not only the facts but even the essence of Italian life: “I veri scrittori di oggi sono, forse, gli umili cronisti dei quotidiani. In difetto di pregi maggiori, la loro prosa disadorna ha, perlomeno, l’obbiettività onesta della Leica [perhaps the true writers today are the humble chroniclers of the dailies. In the absence of greater merits, their unadorned prose at least has the honest objectivity of a Leica].”30 Advancing a related argument, Niccolò Gallo, in a 1950 assessment of post-war Italian literature, condemned the literary establishment for its “posizione di netto isolamento e sfiducia nella realtà [stance of total isolation from and mistrust of reality]” and argued that “il ‘documento’ [...] è stato il mezzo più facile tentato dagli scrittori per esprimersi in una forma più diretta e più ‘popolare’ di rappresentazione [the ‘document’ (...) has been the most straightforward means for authors to express themselves in the most direct and ‘popular’ form of representation].”31 Titta Rosa, Caudana, Gallo, and other like-minded critics were convinced that the traditional literary genres had failed to capture the spirit of the age. Their formal and linguistic conventions, their standards of taste and style, their preference for sophisticated refinement over the candour of honest reporting, had served to distract writers from the necessary task of memorializing recent history. Such critics argued that this vital task, having been neglected by the literary establishment, had fallen instead to those who aspired only to write chronicles. The clash between these two critical camps, the defenders of art and the defenders of the chronicle, played out in countless venues throughout the post-war period. The issues at stake were framed with particular lucidity in the 1946 debate between Giuseppe Antonelli, literary critic for Avanti!, and Enrico Falqui, his counterpart at La Fiera letteraria. The debate began with Antonelli’s call for authors to immerse themselves in



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current events, to relinquish the reflective distance that had traditionally characterized their approach to reality. In his words, la funzione dello scrittore debba essere più immediata di quanto non possa esserlo una pura attività di cultura, di commento culturale. La loro esperienza, il loro senso di prospettiva storica, la loro morale gli scrittori devono usarle nell’interpretare la cronaca, i fatti di tutti i giorni perché soprattutto da questa interpretazione della cronaca, si possa mettere ordine nella cronaca stessa, si possa dare a tutti il modo di valutare questi fatti per quello che sono, si possa cioè cominciare una società.32 the task of the writer must be more immediate than a purely cultural pursuit, a cultural commentary, could ever be. Writers must use their experience, their sense of historical perspective, their morals to interpret the news, the events of the day, because it is above all through the act of interpretation that we can give order to the chronicle, providing everyone with the means to evaluate the facts for what they are and in this way helping to establish a society.

In his reply, Falqui claimed to accept much of Antonelli’s argument. Recent history was too important to be left out of even the most abstract or contemplative works, he conceded, and authors needed to remain abreast of what was happening outside their windows.33 Yet he nevertheless insisted that writers could not be mere stenographers, that their approach should not be “immediate,” as Antonelli would have it, but rather ruminative, and thus analytical. As Falqui put it, [a]nche un fatto di cronaca, messo a fuoco con studio dallo scrittore, può fornire materia d’arte, purché, nel passaggio attraverso la depurazione dello stile, che è piuttosto un fissaggio (senza che ciò implichi un abbellimento), la cronaca perda quel che ha in sé di precario e acquisti un accento, una risonanza che in certo senso sappiano già di memoria.34 even a news item [fatto di cronaca], if a writer examines it carefully, can ­provide the material for art, so long as, once it is purified by the processing of style, which is more like a tightening (implying, that is, no sense of embellishment), the news item loses its sense of contingency and gains an inflection, a resonance that somehow already feels like a memory.

Literature should reflect the historical moment, granted Falqui, but it should become more than a reflection of that moment, more than a recitation of reality: it should elevate its time-bound subject to the timeless

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status of art. In his reply, however, Antonelli questioned this claim, in fact questioned the very notion of artistic elevation, of artistic superiority, and thus articulated a profound challenge to traditional Italian literary culture. “La cronaca è il piano su cui si intrecciano i nostri rapporti sociali [The chronicle constitutes the plane at which our social relations intertwine],” Antonelli explained. È perciò la cronaca che dà peso alle nostre parole offrendoci un linguaggio che può essere dovunque compreso. Non solo, ma la cronaca è più difficile e impegnativa. Non ci vuole molto a far suonare la parola “aurorale” per esempio. Ci vuole molto di più per far suonare la parola “bicicletta.”35 It is therefore the chronicle that gives weight to our words by providing us with a language that can be understood everywhere. The chronicle is also more difficult and demanding. It does not take much to find music in the word “aurora,” for instance. It takes a lot more to find music in the word “bicycle.”

It was not art that uplifted the chronicle, Antonelli argued, but the chronicle that empowered true art. This was an inversion of the hierarchy of literary value that Falqui – and indeed the Italian literary establishment more generally – had always enforced. What is more, it was an inversion that rested fortuitously on the artistic value of a bicycle, and that did so months before the publication of Luigi Bartolini’s novel Ladri di biciclette and two years before the release of the film that Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini would base loosely on that text. “An Implicit Judgment” When De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette was released in theatres, its initial critical reception echoed the same vocabulary as the Antonelli–Falqui debate and the post-war critical context it exemplified. The film, one reviewer put it, “è e rimane cronaca e non giunge mai a valore universale di poesia [is and remains a chronicle and never reaches the universal quality of poetry].”36 The same judgment had been levelled against many of the other neorealist films. In the first reviews of Roma città aperta, for instance, critics singled out Roberto Rossellini’s film as “una cronaca giornalistica ben riuscita [a successful journalistic chronicle]” “nato da un’esigenza [...] francamente cronistica [born from a need that is (...) frankly chronicle-like],” offering “il documento di una cronaca viva [the document of a living chronicle],” with “fatti [...] coordinati e raccontati in maniera cronachistica [facts (...) that are coordinated and recounted



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in a chronicle-like manner],” as well as a certain “cronistica crudezza [chronicle-like crudeness],” perhaps as a result of its “brani di cronaca ancora palpitante e sanguinate [chronicle sections that are still throbbing and bleeding].”37 The two subsequent films in Rossellini’s neorealist trilogy were received similarly: of Paisà it was said that “[l]’asciutta fantasia di Rossellini si inserisce nella cronaca e la sommuove profondamente [Rossellini’s arid imagination enters into the chronicle and profoundly stirs it up],” while Germania anno zero, with its “imparziale distacco croni­ stico e obiettività documentaria [documentary objectivity and impartial and chronicle-like detachment],” was said to demonstrate “un pavido rifiuto di sortir dalla cronaca [a fearful refusal to abandon the chronicle].”38 Critics likewise located the origins of Visconti’s La terra trema in the “cronache giornalieri di Acitrezza [daily chronicles of Acitrezza],” just as they noted that Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia tragica was based on “una notizia di cronaca [a chronicle].”39 De Santis himself made a similar point in a 1949 essay, explaining that proprio in questi giorni m’è accaduto di pensare a come sono nati i miglio­ ­ri film italiani del nostro dopoguerra. Da una nozione di cronaca, dalla commozione suscitata nell’opinione pubblica attorno a urgenti problemi nazionali. Dall’impulso, insomma, di scrivere sulla pellicola vere e proprie “inchieste.” Già, inchieste: le più drammatiche, forse, che si siano compiute in questi anni, in Italia.40 in recent days I began to think about how the best Italian films of the post-war period originated from chronicles, from the commotion that urgent national problems had aroused in public opinion. In short, they had originated in the impulse to use film to conduct real “investigations.” Yes, investigations: perhaps the most dramatic that have been conducted in Italy in recent years.

De Santis, like many Italian film critics, thus sought to define neorealist cinema by its origins in and promotion of chronicles. Yet it was not always so clear where neorealist cinema was to be located in the dichotomy between the chronicle and the work of art. For some, neorealism had begun as a chronicle but had gradually transcended this limited outlook, so that the best films, mentre apparivano ancora concepite, se pur in diverso modo, nell’am­ bito del realismo cronistico, del “fait divers,” denunciavano come tale realismo avesse ormai compiuto il proprio cammino e dato i frutti che da esso era lecito attendersi. Si compieva, cioè, la seconda fase del così detto

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neo-realismo italiano: la prima, quella, per intendersi, di Rossellini, legata ad una cronaca più immediata ed autentica, la seconda [...] volta a “rico­ struire” una cronaca, che, come tale, non consente tuttavia alcun distacco.41 even as they appeared, in whatever way, still to have been conceived in the context of chronicle-like realism, of the fait divers, exposed how that ­realism had by now reached its conclusion and born whatever fruit could be expected of it. In other words, the second phase of Italian neorealism had reached its conclusion: the first, that of Rossellini, was tied to the most ­immediate and authentic chronicle; the second [...] sought to “reconstruct” a chronicle that, in and of itself, did not allow for any detached observation.

According to this account, having moved beyond dispassionate ­reporting in order to incorporate an increasingly subjective viewpoint, neorealism could no longer be defined with reference to the chronicle. Other accounts held, in contrast, that neorealist cinema was correctly characterized as a chronicle but that the concept of the chronicle had itself been poorly understood. This was the case put forward, for instance, by Pio Baldelli, who argued that in neorealist films “la cronaca oscilla tra questi due estremi: l’estremo del documento romanzato e l’estremo opposto e pur contiguo della ‘vita vissuta,’ delle cose che lo scrittore, sottraendosi con discrezione alla vista del lettore, lascerebbe parlare [the chronicle oscillates between two extremes: the extreme of a fictionalized documentary and the opposite and yet related extreme of ‘lived life,’ of those things that the writer, discreetly concealing himself from the gaze of the reader, would leave to speak for themselves].”42 For Baldelli, that is to say, the neorealist chronicle could be more or less dispassionate, more or less subjective, while remaining a chronicle, and remaining neorealist. Gianni Puccini advanced a related argument in his 1948 essay “Per una discussione sul film italiano” (For a discussion about Italian film). “C’è chi dice, avanzando dubbi sull’avvenire riserbato al cinema italiano ‘neo-realista’, che probabilmente esso avrà vita effimera e breve, per esser, come appare, legato a situazioni di cronaca contingente [There are those who say, when expressing their doubts about the future that attends Italian ‘neo-realist’ cinema, that its life will probably be fleeting and brief, since it is, as it appears, tied to the situation of the contingent chronicle],” he explained. Yet Puccini believed this position to be entirely mistaken. “La cronaca [...] non è solo, evidentemente, quello che i francesi chiamano ‘fait divers’ [...] ma tutto ciò [...] che a prima vista cada sotto l’osservazione, che si svolga in mezzo alla gente ‘normale’ [The chronicle (...) is not only, evidently, what the French call fait divers (...) but everything (...) that one can observe at first glance, everything



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that happens to ‘normal’ people].”43 For Puccini, therefore, the neorealist focus on the chronicle was central to the cinematic search for truth, which transcended the limited and limiting distinctions enforced by the Italian critical establishment. “Il dopoguerra e la cronaca, o, se volete, la cronaca del dopoguerra, hanno costretto gli artisti a indagare su uomini, regioni, paesi conosciuti imperfettamente dalla geografia, erroneamente dalla storia, sommariamente o affatto dalla cultura umanistica [The post-war period and the chronicle, or, if you prefer, the chronicle of the post-war period, has forced artists to investigate the people, the regions, the countries that have been understood imperfectly by geography, mistakenly by history, superficially or not at all by humanistic culture],” Puccini explained.44 The neorealist chronicle, in Puccini’s account, was not a guarantor of objective or dispassionate analysis. It was not base material reality to be transmuted into art. It was human truth in its essential form, a truth ignored by traditional histories and traditional art, and a truth which, in becoming the focus of cinematic investigation, was leading towards new forms of knowledge. Not only in cinema but across the Italian cultural landscape, the growing emphasis on the chronicle led to the term’s re-evaluation as well as to repeated attempts at redefinition. The prominent journal Società published a series of essays in the first years after the war which explored what came to be understood as the “Necessità di una cronaca” (Need for a chronicle). In an article by that title, in fact, the critic Gianfranco Piazzesi expressed his worry that “gli storici e gli artisti [...] non possono avere ancora quel distacco necessario [...] per vedere le cose [historians and artists (...) cannot yet achieve the detachment necessary (...) to see things]” and called for all writers to pursue a direct and unfiltered account of reality, one freed from “ogni alterazione che possa aver deformato l’avvenimento [any alteration that could have deformed the event].”45 Piazzesi was convinced that the time for judgment, for interpretation, had not yet arrived. The ambiguities of the post-war moment, the trauma of global conflict, and the uncertainty of recovery precluded any definitive conclusions. Authors might hope eventually to understand what had happened and to transmit that understanding in writing. At present, however, the moment of understanding remained a distant hope, which meant that to strive prematurely for definitive truths would only result in falsehood. Until such time as a comprehensive understanding was available, Piazzesi called for writers to recount their experiences “con la massima schiettezza [with the utmost candour].” This was not to say, however, that they were merely to transcribe facts. Instead, Piazzesi argued, they had to “rispettare i fatti e insieme [...] inquadrarli [...] in un determinato spazio tempo che dia loro vita [respect the facts and at the

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same time (...) frame them (...) in the specific space and time that brings them to life].”46 Chronicles, in this sense, had to situate the facts, and to structure them, in order to make them real for the reader; as Piazzesi put it they had to “sistemare i fatti in modo duraturo dentro di noi [arrange the facts in such a way that they remain within us].”47 Piazzesi believed that facts held an inherent meaning, and he argued that chronicles had to make that meaning clear, to disclose the historical significance of the facts they sought to recount. Indeed, he maintained that “la nuda elencazione dei fatti [...] contiene già un implicito giudizio contro i responsabili [the bare list of facts (...) already contains an implicit judgment against those who are responsible].”48 Proceeding from a respect for unmediated facts, Piazzesi’s chronicle represented a tentative but unmistakable step on the path to understanding, an attempt to develop a critical comprehension of the historical order while remaining rigorously tethered to historical detail. A more thorough elaboration of this notion of the chronicle followed in the November issue of Società, with Romano Bilenchi’s essay “Letteratura d’occasione” (Occasional literature).49 Like Piazzesi, Bilenchi argued for the pursuit of testimonial rather than creative writing after the war on the grounds that gli scrittori [...] hanno ricordi spesso troppo vivi, e scrivono, allora, sotto la suggestione dei fatti, con un istintivo espressionismo. Sarebbe il pericolo più grave, per la nostra cultura, proprio questo immediato scambio fra scrittore e lettore; l’uno che si eccita per scrivere, per eccitare, a sua volta, l’altro. Allora, terminerebbe anche ogni missione della letteratura, in funzione della società.50 writers [...] have memories that often remain too vivid, and their writing is then too heavily influenced by the facts, making it instinctively expressionistic. The resulting exchange between writer and reader would represent the gravest danger for our culture; the former provoked to write, in order to provoke, in turn, the latter. That would mark the termination of any social mission for literature.

Put simply, Bilenchi’s argument was that the weight of current events would inevitably overpower writers’ creative faculties, producing misshapen or prejudiced accounts. Yet the real danger, Bilenchi insisted, was that facts might be recounted accurately, even minutely, but in such a way that they became misleading, conveying to the reader an impression that differed from their true significance. “Falsare il senso delle cose, mantenendo un’apparente, rigida, fedeltà ai fatti, è il peccato più grave



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[Falsifying the meaning of events, while maintaining an apparent, rigid fidelity to the facts, is the gravest sin],” Bilenchi argued.51 An account could be factual, that is to say, but nonetheless false, meticulous in its reporting of the details but mendacious in its approach to reality itself. A faithful record of historical events could thus produce a fallacious interpretation of historical truth, and this, for Bilenchi, represented a profound threat to the emerging understanding of the war. Accurate but mindless accounts, he explained, “finirebbero col non farci comprendere neppure quegli esterni avvenimenti dai quali furono motivati [would end by making us fail to understand even the external events that had motivated them].”52 True chronicles, in contrast, had to aim for an informed comprehension of the truth even as they provided a precise record of the facts. They were to avoid premature synthesis, but were not to narrate events indiscriminately. This was undoubtedly a delicate balance to maintain, but Bilenchi and Piazzesi insisted that it was a necessary one, since an author’s erring to one side or the other would lead readers to misunderstand history in a precarious historical moment. Yet it was precisely this historical precariousness which led the intellectuals affiliated with the Milanese journal Il Politecnico to reject Società’s call for chronicles. From this opposing perspective, disinterested objectivity, “the bare list of facts,” could never hope to produce real historical understanding, which could emerge only through subjective critical reflection, authorial intervention, and skilful composition. As Franco Calamandrei put it in a polemical 1945 essay in Il Politecnico, raccontare, narrare, vuol dire rappresentare i fatti della vita nel loro determinarsi reciproci, nei loro rapporti scambievoli; vuol dire scoprire e mostrare per mezzo di parole scritte come un fatto nasce da un altro fatto, come a sua volta influisce sul fatto che l’ha originato, e a sua volta dà origine a un fatto nuovo; vuol dire chiarire in quale maniera si trasformi di continuo la vita, e per quali svolgimenti si formino in essa le vicende degli individui.53 to recount, to narrate, means to represent the facts of life in their reciprocal determination, in their relationships of exchange; it means discovering and demonstrating through the written word how one fact is born from another, and how in turn it influences the fact from which it originated, and gives rise to a new fact; it means clarifying how life is continually transforming, shaping individual experience.

For Calamandrei, who framed the issue in unmistakably Marxist terms, the function of narrative was to instil a sense of historical causality. The point was not only to recount facts but also to demonstrate how

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individual facts share a causal relation, each one leading to the next, each event containing within it the seeds of future change. By demonstrating the underlying structures of history as it unfolds, by making apparent how seemingly disparate facts are fundamentally and even inextricably linked, by revealing the causes as well as the effects of historical change, narratives produce real knowledge, transmuting the trivia of mere chronicles into a profound understanding of history. Taking up Società’s arguments regarding the uncertainty of the present moment – an uncertainty that for Piazzesi and Bilenchi had signalled the need for chronicles – Calamandrei insisted in a polemical follow-up essay, “Narrativa vince cronaca” (Narrative bests the chronicle), that only narrative prose could alleviate the disorder and uncertainty which had inspired the appeals for chronicles. For Calamandrei, “a questa confusione della cronaca, in cui si impiglia e si dimentica la coscienza degli uomini, ripara la narrativa, riparano i romanzi e i racconti [the response to the confusion of the chronicle, in which human consciousness is ensnared and abandoned, is to be found in narrative, it is to be found in novels and short stories].”54 For Calamandrei, while the upheaval of the war and its aftermath impeded understanding, it would not do patiently to wait for greater understanding to arrive on its own. Writers should not merely aggregate facts and anecdotes in anticipation of future comprehension. Instead, they had to create that comprehension, to impart knowledge, to foster understanding, and they had to do so through the act of writing. In Calamandrei’s words, it was the task of narrative to “cogliere nella sotterranea logica delle azioni umane termini prima di loro ignorati, a rendere maggiormente dialettica la nozione dell’uomo [grasp, in the subterranean logic of human actions, those terms that have remained ignored, and make our notion of humanity more dialectical].”55 It was up to writers, that is to say, to overcome historical confusion, discovering the causal links that gave meaning to disparate facts and then imparting this newfound sense of order to their readers. By this measure, to write chronicles was to shirk one’s duty, to give up the search for logic, for causes, for meaning in history, and to write as if history were itself meaningless. While Il Politecnico, like Società, often published testimonial chronicles, it maintained a strict and all but inviolable division between these documentary texts and those deemed to have real literary or historical value. Explaining Il  Politecnico’s position in an open letter to the journal’s readers, who were not always convinced by this distinction, Franco Fortini argued that [l]’interesse appassionato e l’emozione che si provano alla lettura di un immediato e magari sgrammaticato documento o diario o confessione o



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cronaca, è molto diverso non come quantità, ma come qualità, dalla emozione e dalla esperienza propriamente artistica che è data, a chi sa sentirla, da un’opera di letteratura o di poesia. Il diario delle sofferenze di un operaio, la lettera ultima di un partigiano condannato a morte, possono commuoverci fino all’ira o alle lacrime, ma ciò avviene perché risvegliano una zona di pensieri, di sentimenti e di passioni assai diversi da quelli che ci possono venire da una poesia di Petrarca o di Montale, da un racconto di Tolstoi o da una musica di Mozart.56 the passionate interest and the emotion that one feels when reading a first-hand and perhaps ungrammatical document or diary or confession or chronicle is quite different, in character if not in intensity, from the truly artistic emotion and experience provided, to those with the right sensibility, by a work of art or literature or poetry. The diary of a workingman’s plight, the last letter of a partisan condemned to death, can move us to rage or to tears, but this occurs because they arouse an area of thought, feeling, passion that is very different from those aroused by a poem by Petrarch or Montale, a story by Tolstoy, or a piece of music by Mozart.

Art was one thing, Fortini explained, testimony another. From Il Politecnico’s perspective, the problem was that, in the post-war period, the distinction between these two realms appeared to be breaking down. Thus, for instance, even as he praised Stefano Terra’s Rancore, a personal account of the author’s coming of age between the world wars, Franco Calamandrei expressed some reservations about what the work might portend for the future direction of Italian literature. In Calamandrei’s estimation, Rancore signalled the moment when the new generation of Italian writers “comincia finalmente a narrare il motivo profondo della propria esperienza [began finally to recount the profound material of their experience].”57 At the same time, however, he worried that those who would follow might take up the detailed personal exposition of Terra’s text without sufficiently achieving the broader historical awareness that distinguished his work. “Il pericolo è appunto che essi rimangano uno slancio sentimentale e istintivo, a poco a poco compiacendosi della propria protesta, e noncuranti di disciplinarla con l’ascolto delle ragioni continuamente elaborate dalla cronaca per la storia [The danger is precisely that it remains a sentimental and instinctive impulse, and that they are increasingly appeased by their own protest, failing to shape it in terms of the materials that the chronicle lends to history],” Calamandrei explained.58 Terra’s text had made vivid – and more to the point had made comprehensible – his generation’s break with Fascism. He had sought out root causes, marked the progressive stages of rejection, and

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identified the historical significance of this generational shift. His followers and imitators, however, might not possess Terra’s historical consciousness, and Calamandrei thus feared that, despite the force of their rejection of Fascism and the emotional weight of their anti-Fascist commitment, their texts would remain mere chronicles. Even as Calamandrei advanced Il Politecnico’s argument for a traditional and entirely orthodox distinction between testimony and literature, Piazzesi reiterated Società’s argument for a decidedly new model for the chronicle. In an essay published in June 1946, the same month as Il Politecnico had published Calamandrei’s piece, Piazzesi reviewed John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World – a 1919 account of the author’s first-hand experiences as a journalist in Moscow during the Russian Revolution – in which Piazzesi argued that le varie scene della rivoluzione ci sono presentate dallo scrittore John Reed con abilità e precisione, ed inoltre l’evidentissima sua simpatia verso un partito, nella lotta politica, non gli forza mai la mano, non lo costringe cioè a una cosciente deformazione dei fatti, ma è soltanto particolare interpretazione di questi fatti stessi.59 John Reed presents the various scenes of the revolution with skill and precision, and his evident sympathy for the party, in its political struggle, never forces his hand, never compels him consciously to distort the facts, but merely represents his particular interpretation of those very facts.

Reed’s text recommended itself to Piazzesi, then, because of its precision and factuality but also because of its evident historical and political connotations. For Piazzesi, Ten Days That Shook the World was a chronicle in the new and more compelling sense of that term, defined by its ability to “cogliere di ogni avvenimento, l’aspetto decisivo ed essenziale [grasp the decisive and essential aspect of every event].”60 Piazzesi found in Reed’s text, as he wished to find in all chronicles, both the record of the brute facts of a significant historical event and a revelation of the historical forces that had led up to that event. Reed’s work was rigorously, even minutely, factual, Piazzesi maintained, but it was also profoundly suggestive, offering to the reader a sense of history and of the justness of the cause. More even than his insistence on the “need for a chronicle,” Piazzesi’s review is the key text for understanding his and Società’s project for a new mode of historical narration. Readers may have reason to doubt whether Reed in any way lived up to this lofty standard, but they should



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nevertheless recognize that Piazzesi was convinced that he did. According to Piazzesi’s analysis, in fact, Reed demonstrated the potential inherent in chronicles, which were to avoid overt editorializing and to adhere to strict standards of documentation, but which were also to strive to shape history even as they worked faithfully to record it. To accomplish this feat – to present what Piazzesi had earlier called “the bare list of facts” while nonetheless providing what he termed in his review the “interpretation of those very facts” – required the writer to bridge modes of narration that had traditionally been divided by strict boundaries. As Piazzesi wrote in his assessment of Ten Days That Shook the World, [u]na cronaca [...] deve essere opera di un artista, se vuole dare esatta interpretazione degli avvenimenti: se non esistesse tale compiuta realizzazione formale libri come questi non verrebbero neppure presi in considerazione e resterebbero solo imprecise testimonianze, senza poter sopravvivere a lungo. Una cronaca però non può essere considerata solo da un punto di vista letterario, proprio per la sua immediata efficacia, per la sua aderenza ai fatti, e la sua non trascurabile funzione al servizio dei fatti stessi.61 a chronicle [...] must be the work of an artist, if it is to provide a precise interpretation of events: unless they are fully realized, books like this one would not even be considered, and they would remain nothing more than imprecise testimonies, unable to survive for long. A chronicle cannot only be evaluated from a literary vantage point, however, precisely because of its immediate impact, its adherence to the facts, and its not insignificant role in disseminating those facts.

In other words, Piazzesi placed chronicles between testimony and verdict, between immediacy and timelessness, between literature and history. Società’s claim to the “need for a chronicle” may have been countered by Il Politecnico’s insistence that “narrative bests the chronicle,” but it is clear that the chronicle which Il Politenico was attacking was not that which Società was promoting.62 The two journals were using the same term, but they were not contesting the same point. The intellectuals affiliated with Il Politecnico wished to preserve a role for literature in the face of the apparent demand for works of extra-literary (and even anti-literary) testimony, which they called chronicles. Those affiliated with Società wished to promote a new form of narrative, factual as well as interpretative, circumstantial as well as historical, which they called chronicles. They were effectively talking at cross-purposes, debating chronicles, perhaps, but not the same chronicles.

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“Chronicle as Unrealized History” The fluctuations in notions of the chronicle, evident in the debate between Il Politecnico and Società, and evident, as well, in the critical reception of Italian neorealism, can be attributed in large measure to the complexities of the term’s semantic history. After all, cronaca was a borrowed word, part of a critical vocabulary that post-war Italian artists and intellectuals had inherited from their predecessors, in particular from Benedetto Croce. It was Croce who had sought systematically to differentiate between two models of writing history, as well as between two modes of historical analysis, which he termed “[l]a storia [...], quella che abbiamo chiamato storia viva, storia (idealmente) contemporanea [history (...), that which we have called living history, (ideally) contemporary history]” and “la cronaca, la storia filologica, quella poetica e quella (chiamiamola pure storia) praticistica [chronicle, philological history, poetic and practical history (if we can even call it history)].”63 It was Croce, in other words, who had characterized histories written without sufficient historical knowledge, without genuine historical wisdom, without a sense of history’s development over time, as “chronicles.” Croce questioned the assumptions of those who believed that the accumulation of ­eye-witness testimony could serve to reconstruct a historical event. Such chronicles, Croce insisted, would never yield real knowledge because, produced without a proper understanding of the spirit of history, they were empty facts, mere data. In Croce’s words, “cronaca e storia non sono distinguibili come due forme di storia [...] ma come due diversi atteggiamenti spirituali. La storia è la storia viva, la cronaca la storia morta [chronicle and history cannot be distinguished as two forms of history (...) but they are two different spiritual modes. History is living history; chronicle is dead history].”64 Testimonial or documentary chronicles were not living, for Croce, because they lacked consciousness, uninformed as they were by any overarching historical narrative. In contrast to those who looked to chronicles for the “first draft of history,” Croce believed that the order of operations was reversed: “prima la Storia, poi la Cronaca. Prima il vivente, poi il cadavere; e far nascere la storia dalla cronaca tanto varrebbe quanto far nascere il vivente dal cadavere, che è invece il residuo della vita, come la cronaca è il residuo della storia [first History and then Chronicle, first the living and then the dead. To originate history from the chronicle would be like extracting life from a corpse, which is the residue of life, as the chronicle is the residue of history].”65 For Croce, one had always to understand the spirit of history before attempting to understand any particular historical fact; one could not proceed in the opposite order, accumulating facts in order to arrive



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at a historical narrative. History might degenerate into chronicle, but chronicle could never become history. As he put it, “le cronache ripulite, tagliuzzate, ricombinate, riordinate, restano pur sempre cronache, cioè narrazioni vuote: i documenti restaurati, riprodotti, descritti, allineati, restano documenti, cioè cose mute [cleansed, cut up, spliced together, and reordered, chronicles remain chronicles, that is, empty narratives. Restored, reproduced, described, aligned, documents remain documents, that is, silent].”66 This is not to say, it must be emphasized, that Croce disregarded historical sources, historical evidence, even historical detail. Rather, it is to say that Croce believed one had always to begin from an understanding of history itself, which could then reveal the historical truth in the document or in the narrative, in the particular or in the universal. Croce thus inveighed against what he called “la volgare storia universale, che vuole porre al luogo della mancante effettiva universalità del pensiero un’universalità materiale, un’universalità-cosa, abbracciante tutti i fatti che si trovano raccontati come accaduti nelle cinque parti della Terra [that vulgar sort of universal history which would atone for lack of an effective universality of thought by a universality of matter, of things, embracing all the facts that have been related as occurring in all the continents of the Earth],” and which he dismissed as “un aggregato o coacervo di un certo numero di cronache, [...] una grossa Chronica mundi [an aggregate or piling together of a certain number of chronicles, (...) a bulky Chronica mundi].”67 For Croce, to proceed from the massive compilation of data rather than from the recognition of the spirit of history was an inversion of the proper course of historical study. “La storia va dall’alto verso il basso, e non all’inverso [History goes from top to bottom, not the other way round],” he insisted.68 One had always to start with historical understanding in order to grasp the meaning of any historical detail; one could not hope to make progress in the other direction. The Crocean distinction between inert chronicle and living history, between accumulated facts and articulated wisdom, continued to shape Italian cultural discourse in the age of neorealism. This discourse was articulated, to a substantial degree, with terms supplied by Croce, the philosopher whose theories underpinned Italian art, politics, and social thought in the first half of the twentieth century. As the painter and novelist Carlo Levi succinctly put it in 1945, “Croce è stato per qua­ rant’anni il massimo ispiratore della cultura italiana [Croce has been the most influential figure in Italian culture for the last forty years],” and he would continue to exert his influence on Italian intellectual life for many more years to come.69 Between the wars, it had been all but impossible to finish school, let alone to publish in prominent literary periodicals, without demonstrating a thorough immersion in Crocean

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aesthetics, Crocean historicism, and Crocean liberalism. A writer might seek to emend Croce, or to contest one principle or another of Crocean philosophy, but one could not ignore Croce or work entirely without reference to his major ideas. “Non c’è quasi nessuno di noi, che non sia passato attraverso Croce [There is not one of us who has not studied his Croce],” explained Antonio La Penna in his 1946 essay “I giovanissimi e la cultura negli ultimi anni del fascismo” (Youth and Italian culture in the last years of Fascism).70 For La Penna’s generation of anti-Fascist intellectuals, who had risen to prominence in the last years of Mussolini’s regime, and who were central to the development of Italian culture after the Second World War, Croce had been not only an intellectual guide but also a political inspiration, thanks to his very public stand against Fascism.71 As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the younger generation’s turn to militant anti-Fascism led, in the end, to a political and intellectual break with Croceanism. Croce had provided Italy’s cultural opposition with the critical remove from which Fascism could be called into question, sustaining an ideal plane from which the debased reality of Fascist ideology could be found wanting. After the war, however, that intellectual remove, that ideal plane, began to seem sterile.72 Croce, we have seen, had dismissed Fascism as little more than an aberration, a “parenthesis” in Italian history, and this dismissal had helped many young intellectuals to resist the siren call of Mussolini’s regime. Yet after Fascism’s defeat most no longer wished to resist politicization, instead seeking to engage directly with the political demands of the post-war reconstruction, a task for which Croceanism was generally felt to be inadequate. There was, then, a sharp turn away from Croce after the war. Many of those whose notions of anti-Fascism had begun with Croce sought explicitly to break with him in their pursuit of new models for post-Fascism.73 Thus, as Luigi Russo put it in his 1949 Memorie di un vecchio crociano (Memoirs of an old Crocean), “quelli che passavano per i migliori e più devoti scolari del Croce nel ventennio nero, [...] con la caduta del fascismo presero strade diverse e non poterono fare altrimenti [those who were considered the best and most devoted of Croce’s pupils during the Fascist period, (...) followed different paths after the fall of Fascism, and they could not have done otherwise].”74 The case was put more polemically by Natalino Sapegno in his intellectual autobiography “Croce e la mia generazione” (Croce and my generation), in which he expressed both a sense of gratitude to Croce for his stance against the regime and a growing “sentimento di ribellione [sense of rebellion]” against Croce’s “dittatura intellettuale [intellectual dictatorship],” which he shared with many if not most young Italian intellectuals after the war.75 Elio Vittorini,



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editor of Il Politecnico, was one of those who led the charge against what he similarly called Croce’s “dittatura dell’idealismo [dictatorship of idealism],” declaring that la cultura italiana si è salvata dal fascismo perché si era già perduta nell’idealismo. E se oggi vogliamo che essa ritrovi la possibilità di non essere una cultura conservatrice, di essere una cultura progressista, di aderire alla vita e diventare la coscienza stessa della vita, occorrerà, per prima cosa, sottrarla all’influenza di ogni residuo della dittatura idealista.76 Italian culture had saved itself from Fascism because it had already lost itself in idealism. And if today we do not wish for it to be a conservative culture, if we wish for it to be a progressive culture, to cling to what is alive and to become life’s very conscience, it will be necessary, first of all, to abolish from it every remnant of the idealist dictatorship.

Rejecting what they saw as Croce’s “disinteresse umano [disregard for the human],” his “orgoglio storicistico [historicist pride],” his “reto­ rica dell’uomo olimpico [rhetoric of Olympian man],” many Italian intellectuals, often former Crocean devotees, were intent on pursuing greater engagement with post-war politics than Crocean theory would countenance.77 They wanted to remake Italian society, not to stand above it, to shape Italy’s political future, not to appraise it. In place of Crocean liberalism, many of those who came of age in the 1930s found themselves, in the 1940s, turning to Marxism, just as, in place of Crocean neo-idealism, they found themselves turning to materialism. Distancing themselves from Croce, indeed opposing themselves to Croce, they sought to direct Italian culture away from the Croceanism that had shaped their own education and their own intellectual beginnings. Despite their polemical rhetoric, however, with its denunciations of “assolutismo crociano [Crocean absolutism]” and its calls to “Bruciare il veleno crociano [Burn the Crocean poison],” theirs was a distinctly Crocean turn away from Croce, and their Marxism and materialism continued to bear the unmistakable signs of Croce’s influence.78 They may have rejected Croce, that is to say, but they could not abandon Crocean modes of thought or the Crocean critical vocabulary. In fact, to the extent that they rejected Croce, they did so largely in Crocean terms. They tried to move beyond Croce by means of Croce, to “uscire dal Croce per le strade da lui tracciate [depart from Croce following the paths that he had himself traced],” in the memorable phrase of Giacomo Debenedetti.79 As Mario Sansone described, after the war “quasi tutti quelli che si sono dichiarati contrari o nemici di Croce quando poi passano all’esame

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critico, generalmente o partono da Croce o ripetono Croce senza saperlo [nearly all of those who have declared themselves opposed to or enemies of Croce, when they pass to the stage of critical examination, either begin from Croce or repeat Croce without knowing it].”80 For many Italian intellectuals, no system of thought apart from Croce’s seemed capable of supplying the intellectual coordinates to replace Crocean neo-idealism and absolute historicism. Croce’s ideas were too powerful, and his influence too ingrained, to be discarded haphazardly. Dissatisfied with Croce, post-war Italian writers and thinkers were nonetheless Croce’s intellectual heirs, faced with the task of remaking Crocean thought from the inside in order eventually to liberate themselves from Croce’s camp. The post-war debate over the chronicle, which shaped the formulation and critical reception of Italian neorealism, reflected both the continuing prominence of Croce’s intellectual categories and the emerging push for a Crocean turn away from Croceanism.81 The persistence of Croce’s influence was evident across Italian culture, and not only in the work of the philosopher’s closest followers, such as Francesco Flora, who sought, in his response to Carlo Bo’s 1951 Inchiesta sul neorealismo, to distinguish between two branches of post-war realism, one characterized by what he termed “un neoverismo di cronaca [a neoverismo of the chronicle]” the other elevated to become “un neoverismo di poesia [a neoverismo of poetry],” a distinction that echoed Croce’s influential division between “poesia e non-poesia [poetry and non-poetry].”82 On the same occasion, Carlo Emilio Gadda, hardly an orthodox Crocean, offered an even more forceful judgment, in unmistakably Crocean terms, when he dismissed the “catena crudamente obiettivante della cronaca neorealista [crudely objective chain of the neorealist chronicle]” and argued that this “residuo fecale della storia [faecal residue of history]” was in need of a “dimensione noumenica [noumenal dimension]” in order to achieve the status of art.83 Carlo Dionisotti made a related point, with a similarly Crocean orientation, in his 1946 analysis of Resistance literature, a literature he found to be largely inadequate, since in the work of most partisan writers “la cronaca pesa e trabocca sul piano della storia [the chronicle weighs upon and floods the plane of history].”84 Many of the judgments levelled against post-war Italian films likewise rested on Crocean foundations. Thus, for instance, when Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera was dismissed as “un fatto di cronaca senza commenti e senza un interesse eccezionale [a chronicle without commentary and without much interest],” when Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pieta was branded a “tentativo di cronaca cruda dei nostri tempi [attempted crude chronicle of our times],” when Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta was deemed a “cronaca di tutti i giorni, arida, nella schematicità dei fatti [dry, everyday chronicle, with a



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schematic approach to the facts],” or when it was said of the depiction of childhood poverty in Sciuscià that “De Sica ha proprio superato la cronaca del fenomeno per ridarcene intera, attraverso il dramma, la storia [De Sica has surpassed the chronicle of this phenomenon in order to provide us, by means of drama, with its history],” these were Crocean judgments delivered in Crocean terms.85 In film circles, those terms would remain hegemonic for decades to come, thanks in no small part to their adoption by the influential critic Guido Aristarco, whose account of neorealism held that “la civiltà del nostro cinema è arrivata, nel dopoguerra [...] a una fase oggettiva del realismo: alla cronaca, al documento, alla denuncia [our cinematic culture arrived, in the post-war period (...) at an objective phase of realism: at the chronicle, at the document, at the exposé],” and who continually called for a new, post-neorealist cinema, defined by the passage “dalla cronaca alla storia [from chronicle to history].”86 Aristarco’s, it is apparent, was to a significant degree a Crocean interpretation of neorealism.87 What he consistently failed to recognize, however, was that the notion of the chronicle underwriting neorealist representation was not (or was not entirely) Crocean, and neorealism was thus far more original, and far less conventional, than he was willing to grant. In truth, prominent theorists in the age of neorealism, including Gianfranco Piazzesi, Romano Bilenchi, and the other intellectuals at Società, may have adopted Croce’s vocabulary, but they did so in order to advance a distinctly post-Crocean program. As Claudio Milanini put it, with the rise of neorealism, leading Italian artists and intellectuals increasingly found themselves “crocianamente polemizzando con Croce [polemicizing with Croce in a Crocean manner].”88 Bilenchi cogently explained the modes of understanding that contributed to this project when he said of Società’s founding editorial board, “sappiamo benissimo quali siano i limiti della scuola che fa capo a Croce e ai suoi discepoli. Ma sappiamo anche che nessun altro movimento di idee e di studi potrebbe oggi contrapporsi a quello idealista [we are well aware of the limits of the school of Croce and his disciplines. But we are also aware that no other philosophical and intellectual movement could today oppose that of idealism].”89 Società’s notion of the chronicle clearly reflected the journal’s post-Crocean conundrum, as Piazzesi was forced to distinguish his case for the “need for a chronicle” from previous (read: Crocean) uses of the term. In particular, he was led to insist that the generally established sense of “cronaca in quanto storia mancata, non è per niente paragonabile alle costruzioni di questa moderna intelligenza e l’antichissima parola ci sembra nuova in un significato impensato [chronicle as unrealized history is in no way related to the constructions of modern intelligence so that, in its previously unimagined meaning, this quite old-fashioned

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word now appears new to us].”90 Whereas Croce had drawn firm distinctions between the genres, Piazzesi sought to bridge the gap between modes of narration, even as he recognized the difficulty inherent in this task. Italian readers were, he admitted, “abituati [...] a distinguere nettamente tra opera d’arte e di pensiero, tra poesia da una parte e filosofia e storia dall’altra [accustomed (...) to distinguishing clearly between works of art, thought, and poetry to one side and those of philosophy and history to the other],” but this was because they had encountered relatively few texts like John Reed’s, “libri che sfuggano a questa ingenua, sommaria, ma utile distinzione [books that managed to get away from naïve, abstract, but useful distinction].”91 Reducing Croce’s thought in this way, until it appeared little more than an outmoded heuristic, Piazzesi managed to concede Italian culture’s Croceanism while also justifying his own efforts to move beyond Croce and to renew historical narrative by redefining the chronicle, a category Croce had disdained. This may help to explain the hostility with which Piazzesi’s ideas were received by the intellectuals affiliated with Il Politecnico, who, despite Vittorini’s expressed opposition to “the dictatorship of idealism,” remained wedded to a far more orthodox Crocean notion of the chronicle. The apparent contradictions in this position have often confounded scholars, who argue both that Vittorini and Il Politecnico engaged in “an unyielding polemic with the Crocean cultural hegemony” and that it is “abbastanza evidente che Vittorini è molto più vicino a Benedetto Croce che a Marx [rather evident that Vittorini is much closer to Benedetto Croce than to Marx].”92 The truth is that Il Politecnico, like Società, adopted a Crocean vocabulary and many Crocean categories even as its contributors reacted negatively to some aspects of Croce’s thought. The contradictions in this position, which were by no means unique to Il Politecnico, complicated the debates over post-war chronicles. Asserting varying degrees of opposition to the term’s Crocean origins, and doing so inconsistently and perhaps haphazardly, was bound to cause confusion. In truth, despite their apparent opposition, and despite their evident linguistic confusion, the writers at Società and those at Il Politecnico shared at least one significant common goal. Whether they emphasized chronicle or narrative, what they were after was historical understanding. Piazzesi, as we have seen, called for chronicles because he believed that “historians and artists [...] cannot yet achieve the detachment necessary [...] to see things.” We have seen, too, that Calamandrei preferred what he called narrative to chronicle because he insisted that the shaping force of the artist would begin “clarifying how life is continually transforming, shaping individual experience.” We have seen that Piazzesi and



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his colleagues at Società believed that a recent history could be reached through the steady accretion of first-hand factual testimony, while Calamandrei believed that testimony was not enough, that the processes of history had to be identified, analysed, and elucidated in self-conscious and ambitious narrative prose. They disagreed about means, that is to say, but not about ends, proposing contrasting solutions to a common problem: that of the proper historical mode in which to narrate the “people’s war,” with its interpenetration of collective and singular experience, of public and private history, of global decisions and personal consequences. “The Passage ‘from the Particular to the Universal’” Whether they called it chronicle or history, post-war Italian artists and intellectuals emphasized the effect of world historical forces on the lives of private citizens, taking up the challenge of connecting the intimate dynamics of individual lives to the geopolitical processes that had served, directly or indirectly, to transform them. Yet this challenge was exacerbated by a Crocean cultural inheritance which insisted that “History goes from top to bottom, not the other way around,” that one could never proceed from a factual account of private events to a total perception of world history. Some sought to overcome this apparent impasse by redefining the chronicle; others sought to overcome it by privileging the perceptive powers of art over the chronicle. The methods differed; the goal was the same. That goal, Italo Calvino outlined in his essay “Saremo come Omero!,” which we discussed in the previous chapter, was to discover “il nostro modo dialettico di realizzare quel passaggio ‘dal particolare all’universale’ che l’estetica classica considera come fondamentale della poesia [our dialectical manner of achieving the passage ‘from the particular to the universal’ that classical aesthetics considers fundamental to poetry].”93 The point, in other words, was to discover how each person’s experience reflected, on an intimate scale, the shared experience of global war, how it was both determined by and determinative of world history, how it was at once unique and typical, personal and political. It was to do so, moreover, from the bottom up, starting from individual experience in order to arrive at universal understanding.94 The problem with this approach – and this is where the challenge of Croce’s condemnation of the chronicle is most salient – was that the scale of the war so thoroughly surpassed the individual frame of reference that personal testimony, even the mass accumulation of each individual’s testimony, seemed incapable of ever comprehending it. The

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novelist Massimo Bontempelli identified the problem in the following terms: “La guerra ammassa gli uomini per disindividuarli, rifonderli in un loro magma originario. Di fronte a questo la nostra pietà si attutisce. Sentiamo la pena di una persona, non la pena di centomila confusi in una artificiosa unità [War amasses men in order to de-individuate them, melting them down again into their originary magma. When we face this our mercy is diminished. We feel the pain of one person, not the pain of one hundred thousand muddled in an artificial unity].”95 The death and destruction caused by the war surpassed human comprehension; it was impossible to cultivate an emotional response consonant with such devastation. Cesare Zavattini was among those to grapple with the implications of the resulting disparity between event and sentiment: Pensate ai morti, diranno autorevoli persone. Non possiamo. Se piango per un morto, quanto dobbiamo piangere per tre morti? Un anno senza un minuto di tregua. E per trecentomila morti tutta la vita strappandomi i capelli; e per tre milioni di morti? non si può essere curvi e afflitti proporzionatamente alle sciagure che ci sono toccate.96 Think of the dead, eminent people will say. We cannot. If I cry for one dead man, how much do I need to cry for three deaths? One year without a moment’s pause. And for three hundred thousand deaths an entire life spent tearing out my hair. And for three million deaths? One cannot be bowed and tormented in any way proportionate to the disasters that have befallen us.

Events that were heart-wrenching on an individual scale became numbing on a mass scale. “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” as Stalin is supposed (mistakenly) to have said. In a sense, Zavattini was giving voice to the need to make the statistic a tragedy, to give meaning to events whose magnitude beggared understanding, to convey with adequate proportion not only the suffering of an individual but also that of the masses. Neorealism, to which Zavattini was a key contributor, can be understood as an attempt to meet that need. With what artists and critics identified at the time as its search for a “sintesi tra l’io e il mondo [synthesis between the I and the world],” its emphasis on “il rapporto individuo-società [the relationship between individual and society],” its desire to “assumere la lezione della guerra come esperienza individuale e collettiva insieme [take up the lesson of the war as an individual and collective experience together],” its portrayal of an “individuo che riflette in sé il tutto, dell’io che, facendosi cosmo, in sé riassorbe e invera la brutalità della massa



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[individual who reflects the whole in himself, the I who, making himself the cosmos, reabsorbs and redeems the brutishness of the masses],” neorealism was an attempt to represent concurrently the struggles of the one and the many, portraying both the unique dynamics and the universal significance of individual experience.97 As Antonio Pietrangeli explained in a 1944 essay, one of the ambitious goals of the new cinema was to “cercare di scoprire la realtà dell’individuo nel suo mondo e la realtà del mondo attuale nell’individuo [try to discover the reality of the individual in his world and the reality of the contemporary world in the individual].”98 Cesare Zavattini himself made largely the same point in a 1951 essay. “Se il neorealismo fu davvero e prima di tutto una scoperta della coscienza, l’individuazione di quello che ciascuno di noi può contare nella vita collettiva [If neorealism was in fact and above all a discovery of consciousness, the identification of each individual’s contribution to communal life],” he wrote, then for neorealism to have a future basta che si continui il discorso sino alle estreme conseguenze per trovare gli elementi del nuovo spettacolo, se di spettacolo vogliamo continuare a parlare. Ci sembra che il film italiano del dopoguerra abbia contribuito come nessun altro a rendere esplicita e definitiva la funzione sociale di quest’arte.99 it will suffice for us to carry this discourse to its most extreme conclusions in order to discover the elements of the new performance, if it is of performance that we wish to speak. It seems to me that post-war Italian cinema has done more than any other to make explicit and definitive the social function of this art.

Emphasizing the role of the individual in a collective drama, Zavattini’s vision for neorealism can be read as a response to his earlier analysis of the war’s challenge to narrative. Neorealist films, he was saying, were uniquely equipped to portray the intimate struggles of their protagonists while also conveying the social and historical causes and consequences that gave those struggles their broader and more representative significance.100 They were so made as to speak at once of the one and the many. Zavattini’s analysis finds its echo in Marsha Kinder’s adoption of the Genettian distinction between “singulative narrative,” entirely specific to the event it recounts, and “iterative narrative,” which indicates a pattern, if not in fact a way of being, in order to grasp neorealism’s characteristic use of unique individual stories to narrate a collective experience.101 According to Kinder’s theory, Hollywood cinema stresses the singulative, the irreducible uniqueness of its protagonists, whereas “the neorealist

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intoxication with the iterative immerses the spectator [...] in the ideological relations between individual and collective experience.”102 As Kinder details, one of the ways neorealist films stress their iterative signification is through introductory texts or voiceovers, announcements that locate the specific events the film will recount within the general condition of humanity.103 The most famous example is one we have already seen, the rolling text at the outset of Visconti’s La terra trema, which explains that “the story the film tells is the same all over the world and is repeated every year everywhere that men exploit other men.” Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà similarly begins with a written declaration announcing, in part, that “Questo film vuol essere una testimonianza di verità. La storia si svolge in Italia, ma potrebbe svolgersi in qualunque parte del mondo dove la guerra ha fatto dimenticare agli uomini la pietà [This film wishes to testify to the truth. The story takes place in Italy, but it could take place in any part of in the world where war has caused men to forget mercy].” In Giuseppe De Santis’s Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, an introductory voiceover recounts the history of Ciociaria, the region in which the film is set, and then situates that history in a broader human narrative, insisting that “anche qui, come in tanta parte del mondo, c’è chi ha e chi non ha, chi possiede qualcosa, e chi niente [here, too, as in much of the rest of the world, there are those who have and those who don’t, those who own something and those who own nothing].” In each of these cases, the announcement declares that the film’s universality is predicated on its specificity, that its general truth is a function of the particular truths of the individual case it represents. The films are iterative, that is to say, because they are grounded in what Calvino called “the passage ‘from the particular to the universal.’” While Kinder refers to this “passage” as neorealism’s “intoxication with the iterative,” in the post-war Italian critical vocabulary it went by another name: cronaca. “New Laws of Performance” After the war, artists and critics alike began to extend and even to invert Croce’s definition of the term and to use it in order to discuss the universal significance of discrete, particular experiences. That is, while many continued to refer to the chronicle in a traditional sense, as we have seen, others conceived of it in new ways in order to confront new issues. This is how the term was used, for instance, in the presentation of Gott mit uns, Renato Guttuso’s 1945 collection of Resistance paintings, wherein Antonello Trombadori sought to draw attention both to the historical specificity and to the universal applicability of Guttuso’s project: “Questi



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disegni sono nati, innanzi tutto, per ricordare le lotte che il popolo ha sostenuto e vinto contro il fascismo [These drawings were born, in the first instance, to commemorate the struggle waged and won against Fascism],” he wrote. “E per consentire con esse. Essi invitano, attraverso la cronaca, all’universalità del simbolo [And to take a side in that struggle. They invite us, through the chronicle, to the universality of the symbol].”104 In a 1947 interview on the subject of Resistance literature in Italy, Arnaldo Bocelli made a similar case, stressing the prevalenza, di diari, memorie, confessioni, riferentisi agli ultimi tempi del fascismo, all’occupazione tedesca e alla guerra partigiana, cose viste e ­soprattutto vissute; esperienze individuali rievocate o rimediate nel quadro generale della sofferenza umana. Una letteratura nella quale documento, narrazione e autobiografia entrano in misura diversa a seconda del diverso temperamento dell’autore. Ma nella quale è tuttavia osservabile, anche dove le cose ritratte siano più fosche o dolenti, un certo studio, da parte d ­ egli scrittori, di dare non già sfogo ma prospettiva ai propri ricordi e passioni, di affrancarli dalla cronaca più massiccia. Come dire una ricerca o piuttosto una esigenza, nella provvisorietà e parzialità dell’ora, di universali.105 prevalence of diaries, memoirs, confessions, recounting the last days of Fascism, the German occupation, and the partisan war, events witnessed first-hand and above all events that have been lived; individual experiences recalled or reconsidered in the general framework of human suffering. A literature in which document, narration, and autobiography are employed to varying degrees depending on the author’s disposition. But a literature in which, even where the things depicted are quite dark and painful, we can yet see a certain desire, on the part of the writers, not to give vent but to give perspective to their memories and passions, to free them from the mass of the chronicle. This is to say that we can see the desire, or rather the need, for universals, despite the contingency and the partiality of the moment.

Bocelli, like Trombadori, was saying that particular and often deeply personal representations of the partisan struggle were not forsaking history for the chronicle, as Croce would have it, but were instead seeking Crocean history, in the sense of a historical imperative, in the very specificity and materiality of the chronicle. Articulated in similar terms, neorealist cinema was said to be defined by its “diretta ispirazione alla realtà, alla cronaca, se si vuole, [...] ma portata su un piano di più vasta significazione, rivissuta drammaticamente e trasformata in espressione di esigenze e di sentimenti collettivi [direct

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inspiration from reality, from the chronicle, if you like, (...) but raised to a broader significance, re-experienced dramatically and transformed into an expression of collective desires and emotions],” as Lorenzo Quaglietti wrote in a 1948 review of De Santis’s Caccia tragica.106 Pasquale Prunas, the young critic and editor of the journal Sud, made largely the same point in his 1946 review of De Sica’s Sciuscià: “Finalmente una storia, che nasce dalla cronaca [Finally, a history born from the chronicle],” he wrote, directly contradicting the central premise of Croce’s theory.107 Pace Croce, that is to say, the neorealist chronicle was promoted as a form of history. Paraphrasing Pietro Germi, a journalist had the following to say after an interview with the director in 1949: A quel che il critico francese voleva intendere col suo “neo-realismo,” Germi obbietta che i più consapevoli registi italiani tendono oramai tutti alla costruzione, al racconto elaborato e finito: la cronaca non è più per essi – o non lo è mai stata – un’occasione brutale e lampeggiante, ma semmai una base d’ispirazione, da cui elevarsi alla “storia” (almeno in un senso compattamente narrativo).108 Against what a French critic wished to imply with his “neo-realism,” Germi objects that the most conscientious Italian directors all tend by now to focus on construction, on the developed and finalized narrative: for them the chronicle is no longer – or never was – a raw or immediate circumstance, but rather a source of inspiration, from which to raise oneself to the level of “history” (at least in a heavily narrative sense).

In Germi’s view – and the same is true of Prunas’s and Quaglietti’s as well  – the individual experience of any singular cinematic chronicle seems to encapsulate, to embody, and to convey a collective, even a universal experience. In its singularity it is understood to reveal the processes of a shared history. In place of the rigid distinctions between chronicle and history, or chronicle and narrative, that is to say, the artists and critics of the age of neorealism worked to achieve true universality through the chronicle’s rigorous particularity. In many respects, the intricate representational dynamics at the heart of this project can be identified most clearly in the post-war work of the playwright Leopoldo Trieste. Today, Trieste’s fame, such as it is, results primarily from his performances as an actor in some of the celebrated films of Federico Fellini. In the immediate post-war period, however, Trieste was one of Italy’s most accomplished young dramaturges and one of the few authors under the age of thirty to have his works performed in the country’s major theatres. He was also closely tied to the intellectual



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environments in which neorealism took shape, having studied under Umberto Barbaro and Luigi Chiarini at Rome’s Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, and having collaborated on the screenplays for several films even as he wrote and produced three innovative plays in quick succession in the first years after the war.109 It was in his second production, the aptly named Cronaca, first performed in Milan in 1946, that Trieste offered something like a solution to the problem posed by Zavattini: how to convey the enormities of the Second World War through the particularities of one individual’s experience. Trieste’s play, believed to be the first theatrical production to ground its narrative in the Holocaust, tells the story of Daniele, a Jewish survivor of an unnamed Nazi extermination camp, who returns to Rome in order to reunite with two childhood friends, Lucia, who had been almost like a sister to him, and Massimo, who had been his closest friend, but who, we learn, had divulged his identity to the Nazis in exchange for money.110 Shocked to see his former friend return, and clearly frightened that Daniele will seek revenge, Massimo asks him nervously where he has been. “Uno dei tanti campi. Ne avrai appreso qualcosa dai giornali [One of the many camps. I’m sure you’ve read of it in the newspapers],” Daniele responds, making one of many references in the play to journalism, to the news of the day, to chronicles.111 Everyone on stage seems both transfixed and oppressed by the shocking details continually discussed in post-war newspaper headlines: “La tua maledetta cronaca [Your damned chronicles],” one character says in reproach to another as she sits near the fire with newspaper in hand; another laments, “comunque ti giri [...] non spremi che miseri titoli di giornale.... Confusi, rimediati, stampati con materiale cattivo che poi ti sporca le dita. Cronaca. Niente più che cronaca [wherever your turn (...) all you see are miserable newspaper headlines ... Confused, patched together, printed with cheap ink that smudges on your fingers. Chronicles. Nothing more than chronicles].”112 Daniele seems to be the only character in the play who can see such chronicles for what they might become: keys to a new understanding and even to a new society. In this way, Daniele can be said to advance the case that Trieste himself had made in a polemical essay, “Cronaca e tragedia” (Chronicle and tragedy), written contemporaneously with his play Cronaca and published in the theatre journal Quarta parete. As Trieste would later recall of the essay’s publication, la stesura era provocatoria secondo la mia scalpitante natura di allora, anche se i concetti erano addirittura ovvi (erano quelli in fondo del neorealismo

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che andava nascendo specialmente nel cinema, ma anche nelle altre voci di tutti gli artisti aperti al vento dei tempi) ne sprizzò una furiosa polemica dei lettori.113 the piece was provocative, thanks to my restless nature at the time, even if the concepts it expressed were actually quite obvious (in essence they were those of neorealism, which was then emerging, especially in the cinema, but also those of all the many artists who were open to the spirit of the times), so it inspired a furious polemic among the readers.

“Cronaca e tragedia” announced Trieste’s vision for a new theatre, “[u]n teatro onesto che scaraventi sui nervi del pubblico la impressionante nudità dei fatti [a theatre without pretence, one which assaults the public’s nerves with the astonishing nudity of the facts].”114 The essay’s primary contention was that the narratives of the past had been made obsolete by the war. They were no longer necessary in order to create dramatic tension; indeed, the dramatic tensions they could inspire fell far short of those that one experienced every day just by reading the headlines in the newspaper. “La cronaca ha un linguaggio violento che, tradotto in forme teatrali, diventa spontaneamente tragedia o farsa [The chronicle has a violent language that, when translated into the forms of theatre, immediately becomes tragedy or farce],” Trieste argued. “La cronaca [...] ha creato nuove leggi di spettacolo [The chronicle (...) has created new laws for performance].”115 Current events were thus the new drama; chronicles were the new theatre. From Trieste’s perspective, domestic dramas, comedies of mistaken identity, melodramas, farces, even tragedies, all seemed hackneyed, clichéd, and irrelevant after the war. New modes of representation were required, and new plays that were equal to and drawn from daily chronicles. “Al lavoro, gente di teatro [Get to work, people of the theatre],” Trieste concluded. “Quest’epoca fe­­ roce ci dà in pasto le sue viscere calde, e non è ammessa anemia [This ferocious age has served up for us its hot entrails, and anaemia is not allowed].”116 Trieste’s was far from a straightforward project, however, and one key reason is that Crocean notions of the chronicle continued to shape the Italian critical landscape. As a result, rather than ratifying Trieste’s “new laws for performance,” many of Italy’s leading artists and dramatists openly expressed their opposition to any “theatre of the chronicle,” and Quarta parete, the journal that had hosted Trieste’s “Cronaca e tragedia,” received and published a series of ripostes, many of them unfavourable, from some



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of Italy’s leading intellectuals.117 The argument of Trieste’s first respondent, the theatre director Leonardo De Mitri, is indicative of the general tenor of the debate. “La Cronaca [...] è un fatto, una eccezione della vita normale e non può e non deve dare al teatro nulla [The Chronicle (...) is a fact, an exception to everyday life, and it neither can nor should offer anything to the theatre],” De Mitri insisted. “I fatti di cronaca non sono una novità della vita del dopoguerra. C’erano anche prima [Chronicles did not begin with the post-war period. We had them before].”118 For De Mitri, “un fatto di cronaca resta un fatto di cronaca e un seguito di scene episodiche non è una commedia. La cronaca è nuda e non può essere vestita che di panni sporchi [a chronicle remains a chronicle, and a sequence of episodes is not a comedy. The chronicle is nude and cannot be dressed up except with dirty linens].” Indeed, De Mitri went so far as to deny “alcuna relazione tra Cronaca e Teatro [any relationship whatsoever between Chronicle and Theatre].”119 De Mitri’s argument, with its strict divisions between art and non-art, between the spiritual and the material planes, was distinctly Crocean. Even its phrasing was Crocean. After all, just as De Mitri asserted that “a chronicle remains a chronicle,” so too had Croce argued that “chronicles [...] remain chronicles, that is, empty narratives.”120 De Mitri might therefore be said to have opposed Trieste because Trieste opposed Croce. By calling for a “theatre of the chronicle,” Trieste was breaking down the categorical barriers that Croce had erected, and many of Trieste’s critics, including De Mitri, were attempting to reassert the legitimacy of Croce’s categories. They were fighting, that is, against Trieste’s efforts to redefine the chronicle after the war. Trieste’s critics were by no means mistaken: he was indeed attempting to redefine the chronicle. “Intorno a noi, tutti celebrano con ebbrezza la riconquista, o diciamo la scoperta della propria personalità. [...] Ognuno si sente soggetto di cronaca, cioè di storia [Everyone everywhere is celebrating with exhilaration the remastery, or let us say the discovery, of one’s own personality. (...) Everyone feels himself to be the subject of the chronicle, that is, of history],” Trieste declared, collapsing Croce’s binary division and granting to the chronicle the status of history.121 Chronicles were no longer to be understood as the accumulation of empty data, mere records of the contingent facts of individual existence. Instead, Trieste explained, “bisogna vedere la cronaca ‘sub specie aeternitatis,’ come fossimo figli di un’altra epoca che mietono fra le leggende di un tempo antico [we have to see the chronicle sub specie aeternitatis, as if we were the children of another age harvesting the legends of an ancient time].”122 In other words, since the trauma of war was now a collective memory, shared by all but also particular

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to each individual, the task for chronicles was to represent truths that were simultaneously specific and universal, timely and timeless. The old narratives had collapsed under the weight of experience and new narratives would need to emerge. Yet these new narratives could not simply generalize, synopsize, or totalize the stories of the present and of the immediate past; they had also to retain the unique, localized stories of each individual. That is, they had to remain chronicles even as they sought to encompass and to explain history. In effect, this is what Cronaca’s Daniele recognizes, and what drives his actions upon his return from the Nazi camp. Seeking an explanation for his own internment and for the massacre of six million Jews, Daniele interrogates the particular in pursuit of the universal, examining contingent, personal motivations so that they might reveal the general movements of history. As he explains to Lucia and to Massimo, Devo capire il perché dei camion appostati sull’orlo dei ghetti. Passano i secoli, e questo fatto ritorna: all’alba, risuonano passi pesanti, e il ghetto è accerchiato. I camion, i mitra: gente buttata giù dal letto con gli occhi ancora appiccicati dal sonno. E questo da sempre, capisci? Devo arrivare al meccanismo che mette in moto quei camion.123 I have to understand the reason for the trucks lurking on the edge of the ghettos. Centuries pass, and this event recurs: at dawn, one hears heavy steps, and the ghetto is surrounded. The trucks, the machine guns; people are thrown out of bed with their eyes still heavy with sleep. And this has always happened, you know? I have to understand the mechanism that sets those trucks in motion.

Daniele, then, is searching for both chronicle and history. Identifying his individual experience with a millennial history of persecution, he is pursuing a causal mechanism that can explain both a multigenerational cycle of violence (history) and a singular, violent betrayal (chronicle). More significantly still, inverting the Crocean para­ digm, Daniele is attempting to conduct his search at the level of the chronicle with the goal of arriving at history. He looks to Massimo’s motives – to the twisted machinations that led his friend to forsake him – in order to understand the Holocaust. To borrow Leopoldo Trieste’s suggestive phrase, Daniele seeks “to see the chronicle sub specie aeternitatis.” That phrase may well provide the most apt description not only of Trieste’s Cronaca but also of Italian neorealism broadly defined.



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“Ricci Is Not a Program, a Symbol, an Idea” The first shots of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette show a throng of unemployed labourers gathering outside the Val Melaina Employment Office, where they await the announcement of available work for the day. Although the film’s protagonist, Antonio Ricci, is among those in need of employment, he is not a part of the group, instead sitting some distance away, on his own, so that he must be gathered by an acquaintance in order to receive his commission. Literally and figuratively, that is to say, Antonio stands apart from the crowd; he shares their plight but is not one of the masses. Yet throughout the film Antonio is repeatedly treated not as an individual but as a mere face in the crowd, a nonentity. At the Monte della Pietà, the pawnbroker’s warehouse, the workers throw his sheets – which came from Maria’s dowry, and which she and Antonio have been forced to pawn – upon shelves stacked so high that they must be reached by a ladder. Their linens are no different from the thousands of others pawned by similarly desperate families. Nor is Antonio’s prized Fides different from the thousands of other bicycles with which it has been stored at the pawnbrokers. These possessions – their only set of sheets, his only bicycle – are precious to Antonio and Maria, but in the context of the Monte della Pietà they become part of an indiscriminate mass. For the police, too, Antonio’s stolen bicycle is one of many – “Capirai, ci vorrebbe tutta la Squadra Mobile solo pe’ sta’ a cerca’ le biciclette [Look ... We’d need an entire mobile brigade to find your bicycle],” the police officer tells him – and thus he is refused the help he needs to recover his property and to retain his job.124 Antonio is similarly rebuffed by the crowd gathered at the workers’ association, where the onlookers are more concerned with a lecture on unemployment than in the struggles of this one desperate and soon-to-be-unemployed man. The pattern repeats when Antonio tracks down a possible witness to the crime at a local church, where the indigent are fed soup, but where Antonio is silenced, then forced to pray, in a parody of Christian charity that ignores the source of the suffering it ostensibly seeks to alleviate. Like the police, like the pawnbrokers, like the workmen, like the rest of post-war Roman society, the volunteers in the church extend their care impersonally, feeding the crowds but ignoring individual needs or desires. Throughout the film, Antonio’s struggles are repeatedly subsumed in and dwarfed by the struggles of those around him: by the huddled masses of unemployed workers, by the other victims of theft, by the men queuing for soup. Yet the moral implication of the film is clear: Antonio is an individual and deserves to be treated as such. His need for work, his stolen bicycle, his

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impoverished family, must be understood on their own terms, as a personal tragedy on an intimate scale. At the same time, however, they must also be understood within a post-war context in which they were entirely unexceptional. As the film makes clear, countless others shared the same desperate need for work, the same difficult decision to pawn prized possessions for a chance at a better life, the same reliance on indifferent charity, the same desperate scramble for survival. Antonio was struggling to feed his family in a time of massive post-war inflation (prices in 1945 were twenty-four times higher than they had been in 1938) and stagnating pay (real wages after the war were half of their pre-war level), as well as post-war malnutrition (Italians spent on average around 95 per cent of their income on food and took in 1000 fewer calories daily than they had before the war).125 To see Antonio’s problems as entirely his own, to feel compassion for him, for Maria, for Bruno, while disregarding the systemic social problems that had exacerbated, if not in fact instigated, their misfortunes, is a failure of understanding, just as it is a failure of understanding to disregard the family’s personal tragedies in order to focus exclusively on the broader societal failures that hindered Italy’s post-war recovery. In practice, the two contrasting points of emphasis reinforce each other through what Robert Gordon refers to as Ladri di biciclette’s “dialectical interplay between the one and the many, between singularity and the undifferentiated mass.”126 In other words, Antonio functions both as representative of the victims of Italy’s post-war economic plight and as an individual whose plight is specific to his personal and familial situation. Indeed – and this is the crucial point – Antonio can be seen as broadly representative only to the extent that he is understood as a unique individual. Vittorio De Sica explained this point succinctly in a 1950 interview: I had no intention of presenting Antonio as a kind of “Everyman” or a ­personification of “the underprivileged.” To me he was an individual, with his individual joys and worries, with his individual story. In presenting the one tragic Sunday of his long and varied life, I attempted to transpose ­reality onto the poetical plane. This indeed seems to me one of the most important features of my work, because without such an attempt a film of this kind would simply become a newsreel.127

De Sica thus sought to make clear that Ladri di biciclette was not a story about unemployment in post-war Italy, for which a certain Antonio Ricci had been invented to serve as a typical or representative protagonist. Rather, Ladri di biciclette narrates the story of a specific individual: Antonio



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Ricci, a man struggling to support his family in a moment when work was scarce. Precisely because of Ricci’s irreducible individuality, however, he embodies the struggles of post-war Italian society, of which his particular case is symptomatically representative. This is what De Sica sought to convey in his discussion of the film’s foundations in the chronicle, declaring, as we have seen, that his ambition with Ladri di biciclette “is to identify the dramatic in everyday situations, the marvellous in the minor chronicle, indeed in the most minor chronicle, which most consider worn-out material.”128 According to this account, articulated by means of a vocabulary with significant post-war resonances, the film’s dramatic, artistic value both shaped and was shaped by its treatment of a minor story, a story insignificant according to traditional measures, but with disastrous implications for the lives of the protagonists as well as for Italian society. The film’s depiction of post-war Italy, whose cruel indifference shows through every time Antonio is thwarted in his efforts to retrieve his bicycle, thus offers a kind of commentary on recent Italian history, but a commentary that emerges from the specificity, materiality, and singularity of a chronicle. Several of the first critics to review De Sica’s film appreciated the significance of the director and screenwriter’s efforts to instil a general historical understanding by conveying the specificity of historical experience. “In questo film la cronaca è trascesa, i motivi attuali non rimangono contingenti, ma si trasferiscono, per virtù poetica, su un piano universale [This film transcends the chronicle; in it current events do not remain contingent but are transferred, through poetic virtue, onto a universal plane],” wrote one reviewer.129 “De Sica ha colto questa universalità del particolare nei suoi film [De Sica has captured the universality of the particular in his film],” wrote another.130 “La disavventura del poveraccio assume, nel film, valore universale [The misfortunate of the poor man assumes, in this film, a universal value],” argued a third critic; “Ricci [...] è l’uomo in mezzo ad altri uomini, incapaci ancor oggi di comprendersi e di amarsi abbastanza, e pertanto indifeso contro la sventura e la cattiveria [Ricci (...) is a man amid other men, who even today are unable to love each other, and who are therefore defenceless against misfortune and malice].”131 With what is perhaps the most insightful judgment offered in any of the early reviews, the critic Gino Visentini drew the viewer’s attention to how, “sempre, in questo film, il particolare è in rapporto diretto col generale [in this film the particular is always in direct rapport with the general].” “Tanto per cominciare Ricci non è un programma, un simbolo, un’idea [To begin with, Ricci is not a program, a symbol, an idea],” Visentini cogently argued; “è un personaggio, un uomo [he is a

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character, a man].”132 Visentini thus recognized what most of the characters in Ladri di biciclette do not: that Antonio Ricci must be understood on his own terms, that he is a unique individual. Yet he also understood the universal significance of Antonio’s singular struggles, which are indicative of broader problems in post-war society. He understood, therefore, the dialectical relationship between the film’s vision of particularity and universality, grasping in this way the historical ramifications of what De Sica compellingly described as Ladri di biciclette’s “most minor chronicle.” That dialectical relationship lends additional pathos to the film’s apparently ambiguous conclusion.133 In a moment of desperation to which the film’s narrative has been ominously building, Antonio is compelled finally to steal in order to replace his own stolen bicycle, a crime for which he is quickly apprehended. A vengeful crowd quickly gathers around him and calls for justice, insisting that Antonio be brought to the police station – that he be arraigned, in other words, by the same police who earlier ignored his own victimization – but their mood soon shifts. Once it becomes apparent that Antonio has been shamed before his son, and once it is recognized that this shaming is a punishment far worse than the police or the courts could impose, the victim of Antonio’s attempted theft determines not to press charges. Freed from the crowd’s clutches, Antonio grasps Bruno and the two slowly make their way towards the camera, then past it, until from behind we see them reabsorbed into the passing crowd. The act of individuation with which the film began is thus seemingly undone in its final images: the protagonists are subsumed by the masses. Some emphasize in this conclusion an indictment of the crowd’s hostility; others, more optimistically, identify a glimmer of hope in the reconciliation of father and son; still others, with what must be the most pessimistic reading, locate in the final images the tragic annihilation of Antonio’s individuality.134 These three glosses, seemingly divergent, are in fact mutually reinforcing, taking on the full weight of their implications only when they are understood to work in concert. Antonio’s complex humanity, revealed through his final tear-filled glance at Bruno, goes unrecognized by the crowd, which disregards both father and son in the film’s closing moments, compelling their acquiescence instead of identifying the moral urgency of their predicament. One final time, then, the film’s viewers are led to recognize what the crowd does not: that Antonio and Bruno’s ultimate reabsorption in the crowd is tragic. In fact, the significance of the conclusion can be said to turn upon this distinction between the crowd’s and the viewers’ comprehension. The scene’s true valence, then, can be seen to emerge only to the extent that the film has succeeded in establishing what Zavattini calls “the real



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hierarchy of facts” – only to the extent, in other words, that it has communicated the singular importance of the stolen bicycle and the human particularity of the members of the Ricci family. The conclusion’s moral suasion, however, appears in full relief only when we recognize the iterativity of the protagonists’ singular suffering, when we see them in relation to the countless other Italian families who have had to pawn their prized possessions in order to survive, when we extend our empathy to the masses of unemployed workers equally desperate for steady employment in the post-war economy, when we recognize the plight of the Roman crowd as well as the plight of the Ricci family. The connotations of Ladri di biciclette’s conclusion emerge, that is to say, only to the extent we have learned to appreciate the historical significance of what De Sica called the film’s “most minor chronicle,” rejecting the distinction between chronicle and history and recognizing the tragedy of Antonio Ricci as both unique and universal.

4 “From I to We ”: Neorealism’s Choral Politics

The central political dilemma facing Cesare (Vittorio Duse), the protagonist of Aldo Vergano’s 1946 film Il sole sorge ancora, is an ideological decision posing as a sexual competition. Unfulfilled after an abortive stop at a brothel, which was raided by the Germans before he was able to complete his transaction, Cesare soon finds himself the centre of a love triangle, caught between Laura (Lea Padovani), daughter of the workman who has taken his job at the factory, and Matilde (Elli Parvo), daughter of the factory owner. After four years of military service, which ended with the dissolution of the Italian army following the armistice with the Allies, Cesare has returned home intent on leaving the fighting behind him, he says, in order to pursue “una vita tranquilla [a peaceful life].” Working-class Laura offers nothing of the sort, instead goading Cesare to join the Resistance: “Molti soldati come lei se ne vanno sulle montagne [Many soldiers like you are heading up into the mountains],” she tells him. “Dopo, semmai, si potrà pensare all’avvenire [Afterwards, perhaps, you can think about the future].” Affluent Matilde, in contrast, attempts to seduce Cesare into abandoning the fight against Fascism and joining her in a life of comfort. “Qui si dimentica perfino la guerra [Here you can even forget about the war],” she says, posing enticingly in her hothouse. “E tu pensi di andartene in montagna con il freddo che farà? [And you’re thinking of going to the mountains, as cold as it is?]” Despite the appeal of Matilde’s offer, which momentarily waylays him, Cesare eventually chooses Laura, the workers, and the Resistance, rejecting a life of bourgeois luxury purchased with Nazi collaboration. This is a turning-point in the sexual rivalry, sealed for Laura with a slap from spurned Matilde. It is also a turning-point in Cesare’s political education, which sees him abandon myopic self-interest and accept his patriotic duty to fight for Italy’s liberation.



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In the critical imagination, neorealism has traditionally been defined by its inclination to portray such political awakenings, and at times even by its ability to produce them. Neorealism, it is often said, was born from the desire to “rivelare l’Italia agli italiani [reveal Italy to the Italians],” to raise awareness of the depredations of Fascism and the difficulties of the post-war reconstruction, to hold up a “specchio della vita [mirror to life],” depicting and thereby denouncing the ills of Italian society.1 Rather than delivering programmatic political messages, neorealism is generally thought to have borne witness to the struggle for survival, for liberation, for justice, privileging emotional insights and empathic involvement over dispassionate historical analysis.2 It is widely held, then, that the object of neorealist politics was not revolution or even ideological instruction, but rather the promotion of social solidarity.3 That such solidarity remained almost entirely aspirational, as neorealism’s appeals to the people largely failed to attract a popular audience, and were instead both produced and consumed by the cultural élite, has generated a certain scepticism in critical quarters.4 Indeed, many regard neorealism’s politics with suspicion, diagnosing what they see as the movement’s naïve humanitarianism, its conciliatory populism, its preference for symbolic gestures over concrete, material analysis.5 Some go further, arguing that neorealism irresponsibly encouraged in its audience a kind of passive nonparticipation, ostensibly evoking high-minded political ideals while surreptitiously modelling ineffectual and perhaps insensible political abstention.6 Others, more critical still, have accused neorealism of outright political evasion, of concealing the flaws in the foundation of post-war society, of refusing to hold Italians accountable for their own complicity in Fascism.7 Where some find poignant political symbolism, inspiration for reform, even redemption, others see political acquiescence. The consolidation of a virtual consensus definition of neorealism’s shared ethics, therefore, is somewhat surprising. Even many who question aspects of its apparent political program appear ready to concur that neorealism was characterized by a collective ethical ambition, by a common desire to promote social justice through creative intermediation.8 Emerging in the 1950s, this interpretation began to achieve a kind of critical hegemony in the 1970s, when Lino Miccichè offered what would become its standard formulation.9 Drawing a contextual link between neorealism’s cultural politics and Elio Vittorini’s post-war call for “una nuova cultura [a new culture],” Miccichè declared that il neorealismo fu [...] un’“etica dell’estetica”: la risposta, implicita, di una nuova generazione di cineasti alla domanda vittorniniana “Potremo mai avere una cultura che sappia proteggere l’uomo dalle sofferenze invece di

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limitarsi a consolarlo?” In questo, solo in questo, i Visconti e i De Sica, i Rossellini e i De Santis, per quanto “esteticamente” lontani, furono “eticamente” vicini.10 neorealism was [...] an “ethics of aesthetics”: the implicit answer of a new generation of filmmakers to Vittorini’s question “Can we ever have a culture that knows how to protect man from suffering instead of merely consoling him?” In this, and only in this, Visconti and De Sica and Rossellini and De Santis, however “aesthetically” distant, were “ethically” adjacent.

Miccichè thus proceeded from an acknowledgment of neorealism’s stylistic heterogeneity to an argument for its ethical unanimity, arguing, in effect, that works can be defined as neorealist insofar – indeed, only insofar – as they can be shown to participate in the fervent desire for social and cultural reform after Fascism. Articulating this desire in ­ethical terms, Miccichè subsumed neorealism’s social function under the notion of an “ethics of aesthetics” – ethics expressed aesthetically, ethics governing aesthetic practice – and insisted that this generalized program incorporated the many disparate artistic and political objectives pursued by individual neorealist artists. One can see the appeal of this proposition, which manages to define neorealism by its altruistic ambition while providing a plausible common ground between those who extol and those who doubt its ability to produce real change. Yet the theory’s apparent inclusivity and widespread acceptability may well signal a limitation as well as a source of strength. The discourse of post-war Italian cultural politics was not always amenable to consensus building. Prominent figures frequently advanced ambitious, immoderate programs. Competing factions repeatedly denounced their opponents’ positions. Radically different conceptions of the good society inspired vital, and at times bitter, disputes about the path for culture to follow. There is real risk of minimizing, even erasing, these points of difference in the search for a fundamental, or essential, unanimity. Below the banner of an “ethics of aesthetics” there remain substantive disputes, ethical disputes, concerning the politics of Italian neorealism. This chapter is an attempt to explore those disputes in order to trace the contours of this contested cultural territory. More to the point, it is an attempt to map some of the cracks and fissures in the allegedly solid structure of neorealism’s ethics and to place renewed emphasis on post-war cultural conflict, which retains more explanatory power than does the retrospectively adduced consensus. At least in part, conflict arose because artists and intellectuals developed contrasting and often opposing models of post-war reform, which they articulated polemically,



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in dialectics and debate. Reconsidering neorealist practice against and alongside those cultural debates shows it to be both more artistically contentious and more politically ambitious than it may at first appear. “The Search for Justice, for Liberty, for Equality” Inaugurating Il Politecnico, the “settimanale di cultura contemporanea [weekly review of contemporary culture]” launched in Milan mere months after the city’s liberation, Elio Vittorini advanced a provocative brief on behalf of the “new culture” he hoped would arise in response to the enormities of the Second World War. Vittorini’s essay is often remembered as a kind of rallying cry for post-war Italian cultural politics, but in truth it was rather more like a jeremiad, announcing that the ­victory over totalitarianism had coincided with a devastating defeat whose effects would haunt the post-war reconstruction. “Di chi è la sconfitta più grave in tutto questo che è accaduto? [Who has suffered the most serious defeat in all that has taken place?]” Vittorini asked his readers. Vi era bene qualcosa che, attraverso i secoli, ci aveva insegnato a c­ onsiderare sacra l’esistenza dei bambini. Anche di ogni conquista civile dell’uomo ci aveva insegnato ch’era sacra; lo stesso del pane; lo stesso del lavoro. E se ora milioni di bambini sono stati uccisi, se tanto che era sacro è stato lo stesso colpito e distrutto, la sconfitta è anzitutto di questa “cosa” che c’insegnava la inviolabilità loro. Non è anzitutto di questa “cosa” che c’insegnava l’inviolabilità loro? Questa “cosa,” voglio subito dirlo, non è altro che la cultura.11 There was something that, for centuries, had taught us to consider sacred the lives of children. It had taught us, too, that every triumph of civilization was also sacred: the same was true of bread; the same was true of work. And now, if millions of children have been killed, if much that was sacred has been damaged and destroyed, the defeat is above all of this “thing” that had taught us they were inviolable. Is it not the defeat, above all, of this “thing” that had taught us they were inviolable? This “thing,” I want to say straight away, is none other than culture.

In Vittorini’s account, any relief at Fascism and Nazism’s defeat, any joy for Italy’s liberation, was tempered by the knowledge that the cultural inheritance of millennia had not survived the struggle, undone by a habitual failure to realize the high-minded ideals it espoused. Giving way to forces that were antithetical to its very essence, culture had neglected entirely to ensure that the social order conformed to its moral imperatives. Despite its lofty pronouncements and exemplary standards, culture

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“non ha potuto impedire gli orrori del fascismo [could not prevent the horrors of Fascism],” as Vittorini put it, and after the war such an ineffectual culture could no longer endure. Something more, something different, would have to take shape if a truly humane society were to grow again from the rubble. What was needed, in the shadow of the Second World War, was “a new culture,” one that would remedy the failures of traditional culture by claiming dominion not only over the ideal but also over the real social order. It would need to adopt new forms, take on new powers, “partecipare attivamente e direttamente alla rigenerazione della società [participate actively and directly in the regeneration of society],” exert an “influenza trasformatrice sugli uomini [transformative influence on mankind].”12 This would require radical change, compelling culture to assume the responsibilities that throughout its history it had consistently failed to uphold. The terms on which such change would be pursued became the subject of a wide-ranging cultural conversation, to which Vittorini’s essay was one prominent contribution. Indeed, from the fall of Fascism through the early years of the republic, Italian commentators engaged in a seemingly unending series of essays, debates, and symposia on the question “Dove va la cultura? [Where is culture headed?]”13 The corollaries to that question were themselves the subject of solemn discussion: “dove va l’arte, dove va il romanzo? [where is art headed, where is the novel headed?]” asked Libero Bigiaretti in December 1944.14 “Dove va la narrativa italiana? [Where is Italian narrative headed?]” asked Arturo Tofanelli in August 1945.15 “Dove va il cinema? [Where is cinema headed?]” asked Luigi Comencini in October of the same year.16 In countless publications, and for many years to follow, leading figures would continue to ask “Dove va la cultura oggi? [Where is culture headed today?]”17 These questions, and the earnest responses they garnered, signalled the widespread sense of cultural crisis that persisted well into the post-war period. At the same time, however, they also signalled a very real belief in the power of culture to combat that crisis – the belief that “[d]i fronte alla crisi [...] l’unico atteggiamento autenticamente risolutivo sia quello di avere una franca fiducia nella cultura [in the face of the crisis (...) the only authentically determined attitude that one can have is a forthright faith in culture],” as one Italian writer put it at the time.18 More than seventy years removed from these debates and discussions, this can all seem rather nebulous. After all, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, “culture” is “a term that is repeatedly used without meaning much of anything at all, a vague gesture toward a dimly perceived ethos.”19 The theorists who have attempted to capture the term’s significance have thus repeatedly and almost unanimously declared culture



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to be an unalterably ambiguous concept, all but indefinable.20 In the specific context of post-war Italy, however, it is possible to arrive at some semblance of a definition, and this is possible in large measure because Italian thinkers were themselves concerned not only to establish where culture was going but also to redefine culture – to achieve what Alberto Moravia described at the time as “una precisazione sul termine di cultura [a clarification of the term ‘culture’]” – in light of what was perceived to be its crushing defeat.21 There were those who continued to employ the term quite traditionally, of course, invoking culture’s “autentico signi­ ficato di ricerca disinteressata di verità e di bellezza [authentic signi­ ficance of disinterested search for truth and beauty]” and envisioning culture as a canon of high art, a kind of Arnoldian “best which has been thought and said.”22 More common, however, was the desire radically to reconceive of culture in an active sense, to posit “una cultura come tecnica [culture as technics],” in the influential formulation of Felice Balbo, who argued for the need to “porre il problema di qualsiasi branca della cultura cosiddetta umanistica nel modo di un qualsiasi problema tecnico o scientifico [pose the problem of any branch of so-called humanistic culture in the manner of any technical or scientific problem].”23 Culture thus came to connote not only a form of knowledge but also of praxis, a way of being, or rather of intervening, in the world. Culture was understood to be much more than an assemblage of art, ideas, and social practices; it was the means for reshaping society by making it conform to ideas (and ideals) developed through artistic exploration and creative intervention. As the philosopher Antonio Banfi described it at the time, the culture being debated in post-war Italy was or would soon need to become a “cultura integrale in quanto si riferisce a tutto l’uomo e a tutte le sue attività, dalla tecnica professionale all’artistica, dalla politica alla scientifica, in quanto è o vuole creare la coscienza unitaria ed armonica della sua vita [integral culture, encompassing the entire man and all his activities, all his technics, from the professional to the artistic, from the political to the scientific, constituting or aspiring to create the unified and harmonized conscience of man’s life].”24 In this sense, then, culture was understood to offer a totalizing perspective on lived reality, omnicompetent in its apprehension and syncretic in its realization. It was also ­understood to compel a direct intervention in social affairs. Franco Fortini, writing in Il Politecnico and articulating a position shared by the journal’s editor, explained culture’s proper social role in the following way: Potenza della cultura non vuol dire né la poesia ai congressi (benché sia, anche, quello) né la lotta contro l’analfabetismo (benché sia, anche, quello): vuol dire che i mezzi di fare dell’uomo una persona invece che uno

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schiavo o un tiranno siano nelle mani e nel cervello di coloro che non sono né schiavi né tiranni, ma persone; vuol dire dare a questi gli strumenti per riconoscersi e a tutti gli strumenti per riconoscerli.25 The power of culture indicates neither poetry at congresses (although it is that, too) nor the fight against illiteracy (although it is that, too). It indicates that the means to make of man a person instead of a slave or a tyrant lie in the hands and the minds of those who are themselves neither slaves nor tyrants, but people; it indicates giving to these people the tools to recognize themselves and to everyone else the tools to recognize them.

Culture, in other words, meant using one’s knowledge and experience to create a more just society. “Questo esattamente è cultura [This is precisely what culture is],” Vittorini explained in an April 1946 open letter to Italian voters: “la linea più avanzata raggiunta nella ricerca della ve­rità ai fini della liberazione umana. È ricerca dunque di coscienza che diventa ricerca di giustizia, di libertà e di eguaglianza [the most advanced line reached in search for truth in the service of human liberation. It is therefore a search for consciousness that becomes a search for justice, for ­liberty, for equality].”26 In this definition, culture was nothing less than the actualization of human wisdom in the service of human liberation. This was no “vague gesture,” no “dimly perceived ethos,” but rather an expansive, assertive redefinition of a foundational concept, an attempt to claim for culture powers that had traditionally belonged to other realms. Vittorini’s “new culture” in particular represented an ambitious bid for power, an effort to annex for culture the right to govern society. “Se quasi mai [...] la cultura ha potuto influire sui fatti degli uomini dipende solo dal modo in cui la cultura si è manifestata [If culture (...) has almost never been able to influence human affairs, that is due only to the form in which culture has manifested itself],” Vittorini argued. “Essa ha predicato, ha insegnato, ha elaborato princìpi e valori, ha scoperto continenti e costruito macchine, ma non si è identificata con la società, non ha governato con la società, non ha condotto eserciti per la società [It has preached, taught, and elaborated principles and values, it has discovered continents and built machines, but it has not identified itself with society, it has not governed society, it has not mobilized armies for society].”27 Culture had consistently failed to achieve its aims, in Vittorini’s account, because it lacked the technical means to enforce its moral precepts. The “new culture” would need not only to furnish the principles by which society was to be judged, then, but also to conduct the battles by which society was to be defended. Vittorini advocated an active, interventionist culture, making a definitive break with traditional cultural criticism of the sort that, in his essay,



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he associated with Thomas Mann, Benedetto Croce, Julien Benda, Johan Huizinga, John Dewey, Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos and Miguel de Unamuno, Lin Yutang and George Santayana, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Nikolai Berdyaev.28 These thinkers had all developed impassioned philosophical critiques of the twentieth century’s autocratic regimes, but Vittorini judged their proposed cultural solutions to the global crisis of authoritarianism and total war to be tragically ineffectual. In fact, he suggested that their anti-Fascist programs, whether “militant humanism” or “humanism of the Incarnation,” “the religion of liberty” or “spiritual revolution,” exemplified the characteristic weaknesses of traditional culture.29 Casting doubt over culture’s supposed virtues, Vittorini thus asked, [d]a che cosa la cultura trae motivo per elaborare i suoi principi e i suoi valori? Dallo spettacolo di ciò che l’uomo soffre nella società. L’uomo ha sofferto nella società, l’uomo soffre. E che cosa fa la cultura per l’uomo che soffre? Cerca di consolarlo. Per questo suo modo di consolatrice in cui si è manifestata fino ad oggi, la cultura non ha potuto impedire gli orrori del fascismo. Nessuna forza sociale era “sua” in Italia o in Germania per impedire l’avvento al potere del fascismo, né erano “suoi” i cannoni, gli aeroplani, i carri armati che avrebbero potuto impedire l’avventuro d’Etiopia, l’intervento fascista in Spagna, l’“Anschluss” il patto di Monaco. Ma di chi se non di lei stessa è la colpa che le forze sociali non siano forze della cultura, e i cannoni, gli aeroplani, i carri armati non siano “suoi”?30 what is the source from which culture develops its principles and values? From the spectacle of man’s suffering in society. Man has suffered in society, man suffers. And what does culture do for the man who suffers? It tries to console him. Because of the consoling role that it has played until the present day, culture was unable to prevent the horrors of Fascism. In Italy and Germany culture “possessed” no social force with which to prevent Fascism’s rise to power: culture “possessed” no cannons, no airplanes, no tanks that could prevent the Ethiopian adventure, the Fascist intervention in Spain, the “Anschluss,” the Munich pact. But whose fault is it, if not culture’s own, if those social forces did not belong to culture, if the cannons, the airplanes, the tanks did not “belong” to culture?

In a very real sense, then, Vittorini was calling into question the underlying assumption of culture’s ethics, “its principles and values,” which he believed to be inextricable from the perpetual human suffering culture presumed to condemn. He asserted that the Western cultural inheritance, which offered moral preachments but no material reinforcement, was to blame for its own defeat, and thus to blame for the

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rise of Fascism. His own program, he insisted, would not suffer from the same shortcomings. He wanted tanks as well as ethics, airplanes as well as aesthetics. Vittorini wanted culture to govern over – and to produce fundamental, material, revolutionary changes within – society. In context, therefore, “Vittorini’s question,” which Miccichè quoted in order to locate neorealism’s “ethics of aesthetics,” takes on a profoundly different meaning: Potremo mai avere una cultura che sappia proteggere l’uomo dalle sofferenze invece di limitarsi a consolarlo? Una cultura che le impedisca, che le scongiuri, che aiuti a eliminare lo sfruttamento e la schiavitù, e a vincere il bisogno, questa è la cultura in cui occorre che si trasformi tutta la vecchia cultura.31 Can we ever have a culture that knows how to protect man from suffering instead of just consoling him? A culture that prevents, that wards off, that helps to eliminate exploitation and slavery, that frees men from want – we must transform the old culture into that kind of culture.

This was not a call for culture to reiterate its moral entreaties, to remind imperfect individuals of the ideals and values to which they should aspire. It was not a call for culture to convey progressive political messages, to make sentimentally humanitarian appeals, to denounce social injustices in ever more impassioned terms. It was not a call for compassion, for charity, for solidarity. This was a call for culture to take power. As Vittorini saw the situation, the problem with cultural ethics, the problem with cultural criticism of any kind, was that, despite the heartfelt calls for a principled stand against social degradation, there had remained an unbridgeable gulf between the high-minded ideals advanced by intellectuals and the real injustices of contemporary society. In his words, [l]a società non è cultura perché la cultura non è società. E la cultura non è società perché ha in sé l’eterna rinuncia del “dare a Cesare” e perché i suoi princìpi sono soltanto consolatori, perché non sono tempestivamente rinnovatori ed efficacemente attuali, viventi con la società stessa come la società stessa vive.32 society is not culture because culture is not society. And culture is not ­society because it has within itself the eternal renunciation “render to C ­ aesar,” and because its principles are only consolatory, because they are not immediately renovative and effectively current, living with society itself as society itself lives.



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Culture had consistently given expression to the ethical principles that made clear it was wrong to kill children, as Vittorini reminded his readers, but it had done nothing to wrest society from the hands of those who repeatedly failed to honour those principles. Even as they harshly condemned society in the name of culture, the intellectuals criticized in his essay were themselves guilty, by Vittorini’s standards, of enabling the very condition they condemned. Indeed, many of these thinkers had invoked the very same verse from Matthew 20:21 – “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” – on which Vittorini based his criticism, but they had done so in order to insist that culture should strive to remain untainted by the iniquities of contemporary society.33 They wanted culture to uphold its ideals in a fallen world and thus to stand in judgment of the calamities of the war; Vittorini countered by arguing that culture had to intervene in the world, to combat those calamities. They located in the citation from the Synoptic Gospels a safeguard against political coercion; Vittorini maintained that this citation expressed the very reason for culture’s subjugation. In mounting an attack on what he called “the old culture,” therefore, Vittorini was attempting knowingly, provocatively, militantly to call into question the very foundations of European civilization, starting with its avowed inheritance from Athens and Jerusalem. This was the unmistakable significance of his accusation against “pensiero greco, ellenismo, romanesimo, cristianesimo latino, cristianesimo medioevale, riforma, illuminismo, liberalismo, ecc. [Greek thought, the Hellenic and Roman eras, Latin Christianity, Medieval Christianity, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Liberalism, etc.].”34 Vittorini’s point was clear, and clearly contentious. As he saw it, culture’s disastrous incapacity to combat human suffering was congenital. A tradition with roots in Christianity and the Graeco-Roman classics had symptomatically shirked its responsibilities and forsaken its duties, not only continually but compulsively failing to ensure the realization of its cherished ideals. To underline this point, Vittorini made what would prove to be his essay’s most antagonistic claim, insisting that within the ineffectual and outmoded culture “c’è Cristo. Dico: c’è Cristo. Non ha avuto che scarsa influenza Gesù Cristo? Tutt’altro. Egli molta ne ha avuta. Ma è stata influenza, la sua, e di tutta la cultura fino ad oggi, che ha generato mutamenti quasi solo nell’intelletto degli uomini [Christ is to be found. I say Christ is to be found. Has Jesus Christ had only a scant influence? Of course not. He has had a tremendous influence. But His influence over culture, until the present day, has managed to produce change almost exclusively in men’s intellect].”35 Put differently, the principles that governed the social order were not those expounded by culture and religion – and for

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Vittorini, it is clear, the two were one – because of their self-imposed distinction between spirit and matter, between faith and works. As Vittorini saw it, culture and religion had pursued transcendent fulfilment without ensuring immanent well-being, and as a result had achieved neither. The traditional culture, like the Christian tradition on which it rested, had failed to uphold both its temporal and spiritual responsibilities, and it would thus need to be replaced by something altogether more powerful, more ecumenical, more evangelical. “A new culture” would have to take over where religion had fallen short. “A Religious Preoccupation” “L’aria intorno a noi si fa sempre più teologica [The air around us is becoming ever more theological],” perceptively noted the polymath Alberto Savinio in 1947, drawing attention to the religious inflection, or rather the religious ambition, of Italy’s post-war discourse of cultural renewal.36 This theological turn permeated the culture, exerting a profound influence well beyond the traditional spheres of official Catholicism. To find reference to the burgeoning “interesse verso il problema religioso [interest in the religious problem]” in Il Popolo, the daily paper of the Christian Democrats, or to find in a Catholic journal like L’Ultima the affirmation that “la vita di oggi, senza dubbio, è più religiosa di quanto non sembri [life today is undoubtedly more religious than it seems],” is perhaps unsurprising.37 Less expected, however, is the stress placed on the post-war period’s “senso religioso della vita [religious sense of life],” its “fervore quasi religioso [near-religious fervour],” in Avanti!, a Socialist daily.38 That a PCI-affiliated journal like Società was led to affirm Italian intellectuals’ newfound “religioso entusiasmo [religious enthusiasm],” expressed in “l’invocazione lanciata con tono quasi evangelico, di una cultura nuova [the invocation, launched in an almost evangelical tone, of a new culture],” or that an anarcho-socialist like Giuseppe Raimondi, in a 1947 speech at a cultural organization named for the Marxist theorist Antonio Labriola, could describe the campaign for a new culture and a new literature as having “qualcosa di una preoccupazione religiosa [something of a religious preoccupation],” as demonstrating “un ideale che ha qualcosa [...] della carità cristiana [an ideal that recalls (...) Christian charity],” is more surprising still.39 Such rhetoric betrays the unmistakable missionary zeal with which artists and intellectuals, regardless of their religious and political affiliation, approached Italian literature, cinema, and the arts after the war. That missionary zeal was to a significant extent envisioned as a continuation of the anti-Fascist Resistance, which countless commentators



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at the time, building on the example set by Benedetto Croce in his 1925 “Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti” (Manifesto of anti-Fascist intellectuals), described as a “guerra di religione [war of religion].”40 It was not just leading Catholics like Cardinal Schuster who stressed “la natura essenzialmente religiosa della guerra che fin d’ora scuote il mondo [the essentially religious nature of the war that has convulsed the world],” but also the leaders of the Liberal Socialist Action Party, who described the war against Fascism as “essenzialmente religiosa, [perché] essa si propone un rinnovamento totale dell’uomo con la potenza propria delle fedi religiose [essentially religious, (because) it promises a total renewal of mankind with the power of religious faiths],” and even the leadership of the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI), who similarly insisted that “la guerra partigiana ebbe un duplice carattere di guerra popolare e religiosa [the partisan war had the double nature of a popular and a religious war].”41 Cultural commentators from across the ideological spectrum seized on and promoted this interpretation. “La Resistenza [...] è stata soprattutto impulso religioso [The Resistance (...) was above all a religious impulse],” opined the literary critic Gianfranco Contini, whose insight inspired his colleague Oreste Macrì similarly to stress “la religiosità della Resistenza [the religiosity of the Resistance].”42 In a speech delivered in May 1946, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, then president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, told the gathered Constituent Assembly that Italy’s post-war “rivincita consisterà nella nostra risurrezione, nella quale abbiamo una fede fermissima [retribution will consist in our resurrection, in which we have an unbending faith].”43 In a 1947 panegyric, the partisans of the province of Parma pushed these parallels to Christ still further: “Abbiano i nostri martiri dall’infamia della croce [Let our martyrs have the infamy of the Cross],” they announced, “poiché anch’essi morirono per una redenzione, il premio d’una pasqua [because they too died for a resurrection, an Easter reward].”44 The rhetoric of martyrdom pervaded representations of the Resistance, from Aligi Sassu’s 1944 painting I martiri di piazzale Loreto (The martyrs of Piazza Loreto) to Visconti, De Santis, and Pagliero’s 1945 documentary Giorni di gloria, whose narrative voice-over described the Fosse Ardeatine massacre as “un martirio pari a quello dei primi martiri cristiani [a martyrdom equal to that of the first Christian martyrs],” to Julian Bogi’s 1946 epic poem celebrating the partisans’ “epifania del martirio [epiphany of martyrdom].”45 Even more consequentially, this rhetoric pervaded the discourse of the partisans themselves. Facing execution, many drew on their religious faith, describing the Resistance as a spiritual vocation and framing death, in explicitly Christian terms, as a sacrifice to “la Grande e Santa Causa della liberazione dell’Umanità oppressa [the Great and Holy

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Cause of the liberation of oppressed Humanity],” as Eusebio Giambone, one of the organizers of the National Liberation Committee in Turin, described his mission in the last letter he wrote to his wife before his sentence was carried out by the Fascists.46 That Giambone would sanctify the partisan struggle in this way, turning to the language of faith to convey his anti-Fascist conviction, demonstrates the widespread dissemination of what scholarship has come to consider the civil religion of the Resistance: a set of hallowed symbols, beliefs, and invented traditions on which a new national identity was to be founded.47 For partisans like Giambone – “guerrieri per missione divina [warriors on a divine mission],” as a 1945 essay described them – this nascent civil religion shaped their understanding of the fight against Fascism, which became a kind of crusade, an expression of devout faith consecrated in shared sacrifice.48 The Resistance, that is to say, was experienced as “un atto religioso: quasi un sacramento di penitenza, il miserere di un popolo nell’atto della resurrezione [a religious act: almost a sacrament of penitence, the misericord of a people in the act of resurrection],” in the words of a 1945 editorial.49 This was certainly true for Catholic partisans, those who took part in the struggle motivated by their interpretation of Christian doctrine and dogma.50 It was similarly true, however, for those who fought in the “Giustizia e libertà” (Justice and liberty) brigades of the Action Party, as well as for many Socialists and Communists, for whom their movements represented “la vera riforma religiosa di massa della società contemporanea [the true mass religious reform of contemporary society].”51 Even when they were divided by confessional faith or ideology, then, Italian anti-Fascist fighters were largely united in their belief in the sanctified struggle to liberate Italy. They were united, too, in expressing that belief in largely Christian terms, a reflection of Catholicism’s millennial role as diffused religion in Italian culture, to which it furnished a storehouse of images for the expression of secular as well as spiritual convictions.52 In the crucible of the Second World War, Italy’s omnipresent religiosity served symbolically to forge the Resistance coalition, with Christian rhetoric and iconography ­fashioning the historical, ideological, and potential bonds between the traditionally inimical blocks of Catholics and Communists. After the war, that same rhetoric and iconography came to constitute the liturgy of Italy’s civil religion of the Resistance. When artists and intellectuals assumed the responsibility of leading recitations of the Resistance credo, that is to say, they did so by adopting Christian symbolism in order to accentuate the Communists’ and the Catholics’ common “senso religioso [religious feeling],” their shared traditions, and their collaborative role in the sanctified struggle for human liberation.53 It was



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often suggested that the hope for social and cultural renewal entailed the potential to “Attuare il cristianesimo” (Actualize Christianity), as Antonio Greppi, the Socialist mayor of Milan, put it in December 1945: the effort to put into practice “quei valori e quei principi universali che hanno trovato nel Vangelo la loro sorgente più genuina e la più potente forza di irradiazione [those values and those universal principles that have found in the Gospel their truest wellspring and the most powerful force of illumination].”54 Prominent Catholics, too, insisted on the Socialist and even Marxist connotations of the Church’s pastoral mission, a point underlined, for instance, by the anti-Fascist priest Ernesto Buonaiuti, who expressed his conviction that “il Cristianesimo è nato comunista, e il comunismo è nato cristiano [Christianity was born Communist, and Communism was born Christian].”55 From all sides, then, there arose calls for continued cooperation, for a lasting communion sanctified by the spirit of the Resistance. In the long run this project failed to materialize, undone by a series of divisive post-war elections.56 With the rapid dissolution of the Resistance coalition, any hopes for a lasting, unifying civil religion founded on the sacralization of the fight against Fascism were dashed. In the immediate post-war period, however, even as it began to dissipate, the religious rhetoric of a sanctified struggle, of Christian Communism and Communist Christianity, of redemption and rebirth, would play a key role in the consecration of Italian cultural discourse. Indeed, one way to understand the major cultural tendencies of the immediate post-war period is to see them as attempts to capture the self-described religious enthusiasm of the partisans and to convert it for use in Italy’s social and political reconstruction.57 This is certainly true of Italian neorealism, which appears clearly to extend and to redeploy the Catholicism and Communism of the Resistance coalition, and to do so in largely Christian terms. In their representations of Italian poverty, for instance, many neorealist films blend a “coscienza di tipo socialista o marxista [Socialist or Marxist consciousness],” as Carlo Lizzani argued, with a “coscienza profonda di una certa parte del mondo cattolico. O meglio, se vogliamo essere ancora più generali, del mondo cristiano [profound consciousness of a certain portion of the Catholic world. Or rather, if we wish to be more general, the Christian world].”58 The Catholic critic Gian Luigi Rondi could thus identify an “angosciato credo cristiano [anguished Christian creed]” and an “incitamento alla solidarietà cristiana [exhortation to Christian solidarity]” in Luchino Visconti’s unmistakably Marxist La terra trema, while the marxisant poet and critic Franco Fortini perceptively analysed the apparent “pathos cattolico [Catholic pathos]” in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, emphasizing how it coexists in that film with “una analisi marxista [a Marxist analysis],”

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achieving in the protagonist Ricci a kind of synthesis whereby “uomini con la stampa di Cristo in viso e in cuore [...] vogliono giustizia sulla terra e violenza contro i mercanti del tempio [men with Christ stamped on their faces and on their hearts (...) want justice on earth and violence against the moneylenders in the temple].”59 Nowhere is this combination and interpenetration of Catholicism and Communism more apparent than in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, whose three protagonists, the Catholic priest Don Pietro, the Communist partisan leader Manfredi (who fights under a decidedly Christian pseudonym, Giovanni Episcopo), and Pina, pregnant fiancée of the partisan Francesco, are all martyred in Christ-like fashion, with Manfredi’s death reflecting the iconography of the Crucifixion and Pina’s that of the Pietà.60 Some have seen in such imagery “una ­cristiana esigenza [a Christian exigency],” declaring neorealism to be “rigorosamente cristiano [rigorously Christian.]”61 Others have ascribed the film’s appropriation of Christological themes to a vaguely conciliatory Christian humanism, an effort to avoid the divisive politics of an ­anti-Fascist Resistance that had been nothing less than an Italian civil war.62 Yet Rossellini’s film was neither as conventionally Catholic nor as evasively conciliatory as such explanations would suggest. Instead, it offered a formidable challenge to the status quo. Appropriating the Catholic sacraments to consecrate the Resistance, and appropriating the “sacrificial memory” of the Resistance martyrs to consecrate a new post-war order, Roma città aperta claimed, in a very real sense, to speak for the dead in order to authorize its own projection of a new faith for a new Italy.63 Indeed, although the film narrates events of the recent past – its working title was Storie di ieri (Stories of y­ esterday) – it is decidedly focused on the future, on the emerging post-war order.64 When Francesco reassures Pina of the impending victory of the Resistance, it seems clear he is speaking with a foresight shaped by the filmmakers’ experience of the war’s conclusion. “Noi lottiamo per una cosa che deve venire, che non può non venire [We’re fighting for something that has to be, that can’t help coming],” he hopefully declares. “Forse la strada sarà un po’ lunga e difficile, ma ­arriveremo e lo vedremo un mondo migliore, e lo vedranno soprattutto i nostri figli [Maybe the way is hard, it may take a long time, but we’ll get there, and we’ll see a better world! And our kids’ll see it!]”65 Such pronouncements not only endorsed Italy’s post-Fascist reconstruction as the fulfilment of the anti-Fascist Resistance, reminding viewers that their present freedom had been guaranteed by past sacrifice, but also revealed the political eschatology of the film’s images of Christian martyrdom, whose redemption was emphatically immanent rather than transcendent.66 Roma città



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aperta, in other words, offered a kind of prophecy of the civil religion of the Resistance, channelling its “religious impulse” towards the film’s symbolic vision of Italy’s impending resurrection.67 Pina’s Pietà, Manfredi’s Crucifixion, and Don Pietro’s execution thus served to endorse Roma città aperta’s own spiritual and temporal authority, its prerogative not only to portray but also to define fundamental aspects of Italy’s post-war reformation. This was something more than an expression of Catholic faith or Christian humanism. It was a self-benediction, claiming for a film – or, better still, claiming for cinema, and indeed for culture – the symbolic authority to direct society. “The Path outside Ourselves” Vittorini’s “new culture” sought similarly to channel Resistance religiosity in order to authorize its ambitious plan for culture to overcome “the eternal renunciation ‘render to Caesar’” and to become a “transformative influence on mankind.” The essay was accompanied on the front page of Il Politecnico by the striking image of a man scribbling in a notebook while standing over a dead partisan. Below the image, a caption read: “I caduti per la libertà di tutto il mondo ci hanno dettato quello che scriviamo [Those who have fallen in the worldwide struggle for freedom have dictated the words we write],” a controversial claim that made literal the kinds of figurative transference that would be employed by Roma città aperta and other neorealist films. This claim, which explicitly framed the arguments for an interventionist culture as the legacy of the anti-Fascist struggle, was seized upon by some of Vittorini’s opponents as a sign of intellectual overreach and was contested in the dozens of replies to his essay penned in the months and years that followed its publication.68 Vittorini was accused of instrumentalizing culture in an attempt to “conquistare un paradiso in terra [conquer a paradise on earth],” of overestimating culture’s capacity to produce material change, and of encroaching on the role of religion in trying to “trasformare la cultura attuale [...] in una nuova cultura a tipo messianico e predicatorio [transform contemporary culture (...) into a new culture that is messianic and proselytic].”69 In short, what Miccichè called “Vittorini’s question” was contested on all sides, instigating a cultural debate that was conducted with what can only be described as a religious fervour. At least implicitly, and perhaps inevitably, neorealism reflected the terms of this debate. In turn, the responses to Vittorini’s essay could be seen explicitly to illustrate the characteristics of the transition reshaping the arts in Italy after the war – a transition that many of the contestants

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believed to be integral to Italian neorealism. This is perhaps most obviously the case with regard to the issues raised in the debate between Vittorini and Carlo Bo, future host of the Inchiesta sul neorealismo. Bo identified the ethical implications of Vittorini’s essay and pointed to what he saw as its ethical shortcomings in a polemical broadside whose message has all too often been reduced to its epigrammatic title: “Cristo non è cultura” (Christ is not culture).70 As that title makes evident, Bo was one of the many Catholic critics to object to what was seen as Vittorini’s religious apostasy, his denial of Christ’s divinity.71 For Bo, however, this objection served as prelude to a significantly subtler critique of Vittorini’s notion of cultural intercession. Correctly identifying in “Una nuova cultura” the expression of what he termed Vittorini’s “natura ‘religiosa’ [‘religious’ nature],” Bo insisted that the distinction between Vittorini’s ambitions and his own Catholic proposals for post-Fascist social, cultural, and religious reform lay not in their goals but in their methods.72 For Bo, real change had to begin from within, effecting a fundamental conversion of the individual conscience, and thus, he argued, [i] rimedi in cui spera Vittorini non ci possono dare nessun aiuto vero; siamo pronti a combattere con lui contro l’ingiustizia ma qualcosa dentro di noi ci avverte che questa ingiustizia comincia da noi, che il male che v­ ediamo in spaventose forme esteriori ha una esatta rispondenza nel nostro cuore.73 the remedies in which Vittorini has placed his hopes cannot offer us any real help. We are ready to combat injustice alongside him, but something within warns us that this injustice has its origins within ourselves, that the evil we see in terrifying external manifestations has its precise correspondence within our own hearts.

In other words, Bo alleged that, even if Vittorini and his allies were to succeed in radically reforming the social order, they would not achieve their goal of reorganizing society around the highest cultural principles, because they would not have addressed human frailty; they would not even have contravened their own human failings. As Bo put it, “il male è dentro di noi e la strada più breve per combatterlo – non per annullarlo – comincia proprio dalla nostra anima [evil lies within us, and the most direct path to combat it – not to say abolish it – begins within our own soul].”74 To inspire real reforms, Bo thus argued, culture would have to provide the tools for introspection, allowing each individual to explore her own limitations as well as her own capacity for improvement. Postponing such introspection by privileging direct political intervention, Vittorini’s essay appeared to Bo to work against its own goals.



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Revealingly, Vittorini accepted Bo’s framing of the debate, responding to the assertions of his Catholic antagonist and justifying his decision to subordinate individual critical introspection to universal political transformation. “Il male è certo anche in me, [...] ma è proprio combattendolo fuori di me che io potrò veramente combatterlo anche dentro di me [It is certain that there is also evil within me, (...) but it is precisely by combatting it outside of myself that I can truly combat it within myself as well],” Vittorini insisted in his reply. Ogni colpo che io potrò dare agli sfruttatori e oppressori che sono fuori di me lo avrò dato anche allo sfruttatore che è in me e all’oppressore che è in me. Ed ogni ostacolo che potrò innalzare contro gli sfruttatori e oppressori che sono fuori di me lo avrò innalzato anche contro lo sfruttatore che è in me e l’oppressore che è in me. Tu parli di due vie, Carlo Bo, una che [è] dentro a noi e una che è fuori di noi. Io non voglio neanche dire che la via è una sola. Ma tu dici che la più lunga è la via fuori di noi, e la più breve quella dentro di noi. Io invece dico che è il contrario: che più breve è la via di fuori. È la via più umile, Carlo Bo, la più umana e terrena; per questo più breve.75 Every blow that I manage to strike against the exploiters and the oppressors who are outside of me will strike as well against the exploiter who is within me and the oppressor who is within me. And every obstacle that I manage to put in the way of the exploiters and oppressors who are outside of me I will also have put in the way of the exploiter who is within me and the oppressor who is within me. You speak of two paths, Carlo Bo, the one within and the one outside ourselves. I do not wish to say that there is only one path. But you say that the longer path is the one outside ourselves, and the shorter path is the one within. I say instead that it is the reverse: the shorter path is the one outside ourselves. It is the humbler path, Carlo Bo, the more human and earthly path, and that’s why it is shorter.

Momentarily shifting the ethical argument onto utilitarian grounds, Vittorini insisted that social transformation, “the path outside ourselves,” was demonstrably more effective than self-examination, “within ourselves.” At the same time, he sought to make clear that his differences with Bo were not only practical but also ethical and ideological, that they regarded both means and ends. Vittorini maintained that he and his antagonist offered contrasting models of cultural change and opposing visions for the ends to which culture should aim. It is not enough, therefore, to assert that Vittorini advanced an ethics of culture; so, too, did Bo. Nor can it be said that thinkers such as these were united by their faith in culture’s ethical mission; in fact, they were

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divided by their competing ethical visions. Nevertheless, the complex constellation of neorealism’s cultural politics can be traced across the divisive terms of this ethical debate. In truth, Carlo Bo said as much at the time, although he did not yet employ the term “neorealism” to designate the position with which he disagreed. Instead, he advanced the perceptive but tendentious insight that Vittorini’s program echoed the one he himself had put forward in his own 1938 essay “Letteratura come vita” (Literature as life): Quando io parlavo di letteratura come vita dicevo già molte cose che ora dice Vittorini, seppure le dicevo in un altro senso e con altre speranze: ingenuamente ma con il cuore sincero come non mai anch’io allora ho creduto di potere conquistare una riva eterna da cui dimenticare e risolvere per sempre la mia frazione di terra, l’orgasmo della mia “residencia en tierra” [...]. La questione sta tutta qua dentro: io dico, dentro di noi e tu, Vittorini, dici fuori di noi. Io vorrei salvarmi nella mia “stanza interiore” con l’aiuto indispensabile di Dio e tu invece vuoi trovare lo stesso Dio nel volto di chi ti sta vicino, di chi incontri sulla tua strada, dell’uomo che non conosci e che vedi soltanto. È dunque una questione molto vecchia, tu parli di una nuova cultura e io mi permetto di ricordarti che ti dibatti ancora nella trama di un problema eterno, e lascia che lo chiami cattolico.76 When I spoke of literature as life I was already saying many of the things that Vittorini now says, although I said them in a different way and with other hopes in mind: naïvely, but with a heart sincere as never before, I too believed then that I could seize an eternal shore from which I could resolve and forget forever my piece of earth, the orgasm of my “residencia en tierra” [...]. This is the entirety of the question: I say within ourselves and you, Vittorini, say outside ourselves. I wish to save myself in my “inner room” with the indispensable help of God and you instead wish to find that same God on the faces of those who stand near you, those you meet on the road, the man you don’t know and only see. It is therefore a very old question. You speak of a new culture and I permit myself to remind you that you are still debating in the terms of an eternal problem, one which you’ll permit me to call Catholic.

In making this comparison, Bo not only reiterated and clarified his earlier points; he also drew attention to the transformation that had reshaped Italian cultural politics in the seven years that separated his essay from Vittorini’s. After all, “Letteratura come vita” was and is commonly invoked as the manifesto or even Magna Carta of Hermeticism, the inter-war



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Italian poetic movement defined by its lyrical introversion, its political abstention, and its deliberate rejection of political engagement.77 “Una nuova cultura,” a harbinger of the post-war turn towards cultural commitment, seemed to Bo to draw on the same Christian foundations, and to offer a similarly utopian vision, while redirecting the vector of intervention from individual consciousness to social construction.78 Far from a minor difference, this was in fact the defining change that marked the political and ethical turn of Italian culture in the age of neorealism.79 The Hermetic poets – Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Vittorio Sereni foremost among them – had sought refuge from the evils of Fascist Italy by withdrawing into themselves, each introspectively exploring his conscience while refusing to pollute his poetry with direct references to the fallen world in which he lived and wrote.80 Privileging what Bo termed “assenza [absence],” the individual’s deliberate dissociation from history in pursuit of a “pulizia interiore [internal cleansing],” the Hermeticists had sought to turn away from their corrupted cultural context in the belief, as Bo phrased it, that “un reale immediato per il suo valore di storia non potrà mai interessarci [a reality made immediate by its value as history can never be of interest to us],” and that the proper course of action was to “rifarci a noi stessi [take inspiration from ourselves].”81 Hermetic poetry thus became a kind of private activity, an act of self-isolation, employing an often inscrutable literary language, a virtually closed system of reference, which all but rejected direct communication, let alone intercession. After the war, this inward turn was dismissed by many as “una fuga [an escape],” an evasion of responsibility, even a surrender to Fascism, and Hermeticism was branded a “sinonimo di falsità, di equivoco [synonym of falsehood, of error].”82 Displacing the compromised and ineffectual Hermetic movement, it was said, was a new literature, “un movimento di liberazione da questa poesia [ermetica] per un modo più aperto e più ‘sociale’ di poetare [a movement of liberation from this (Hermetic) poetry in pursuit of a more open and more ‘social’ mode of writing poetry],” a “neo-realismo antierme­ tico e antiborghese [anti-Hermetic and anti-bourgeois neorealism].”83 Carlo Bo, however, framed the relationship between Hermeticism and neorealism in a rather different way, stressing the gradual externalization of Hermeticism’s inward-looking ethics. Comparing “Una nuova cultura” to “Letteratura come vita” on these terms, he not only identified the significant political distinction between his position and Vittorini’s, he also pinpointed the characteristic ethical and aesthetic innovations which followed from this distinction, and which signalled the unfolding development of a poetics and politics of Italian neorealism.

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“A Choral Unity of Diverse but Blended Voices” Concluding his 1956 essay “Le vicende del romanzo negli ultimi cinquant’anni” (The story of the novel in the last fifty years), Goffredo Bellonci suggested that the Italian literary history he had recounted served ultimately to demonstrate come si rinnovi nelle nuove condizioni di cultura la nostra narrativa, ed innanzi tutto il romanzo, che non sarà più romanzo di una persona o di un personaggio nel mondo esteriore o nel mondo interiore, ma della convivenza delle persone e dei personaggi in questa nuova società che l’arte vuol decantare. Si è passati insomma dall’Io al Noi.84 the renewal of our narrative in new cultural conditions, and above all the renewal of the novel, which will no longer be the novel of a person or a character in the outer world or the inner world, but the novel of the coexistence of people and characters in the new society that art seeks to extol. In short, we have passed from I to We.

Five years after describing neorealism as a modernist hyper-realism, the insight from which I began the first chapter of this investigation, Bellonci had once again hit upon an incisive but far from customary definition. Neorealism, he argued, characteristically performed the transition from an individual to a social consciousness, from a personal to a collective experience, from the singular I to the plural we. Bellonci was referring specifically to the Italian novel, but the cogency of his claim can unproblematically be extended across the arts. Indeed, in the same year Bellonci offered his judgment, Brunello Rondi identified a similar tendency in Italian neorealist cinema, and Angelo Paoluzzi did the same for Italian poetry.85 Many prominent Italian poets had participated directly in the struggle against Fascism, Paoluzzi explained, and when they began once more to compose, they could not help but reflect their newfound experiences. “Si trascorre [...] dall’io al noi, dalla poesia come fatto individuale e privato, come dolore intimo e personale, alla lirica aperta, corale, popolare non in senso classista, ma come richiesta di una più vasta partecipazione umana alla realtà [We pass (...) from I to we, from poetry as individual and private event, as intimate and personal pain, to a lyric that is open, choral, and popular, not in the sense of class but in the sense of a demand for a broader human participation in reality].”86 As Paoluzzi saw it, the lyric poetry of the pre-war period, of Hermeticism, had become the choral poetry, the neorealist poetry, of the post-war period.



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Paoluzzi’s preferred term for the poetic turn towards a plural subject, “choral,” recurred throughout the post-war critical conversation. Salvatore Quasimodo, formerly regarded as one of the leaders of the Hermeticist school, had earlier adopted the same term in order to describe the post-war transformation in Italian poetry, his own as well as that of his contemporaries, explaining that “La poesia italiana dopo il ’45, è di natura corale [Italian poetry after ’45 has a choral nature].”87 Mario De Micheli, in his 1946 call for “Realismo e poesia” (Realism and poetry), similarly argued that after Hermeticism writers would need to cease their “solitaria protesta contro il mondo [solitary protest against the world]” and begin to engage with the wider society in which they worked. “Al monologo, o tutt’al più al dialogo, sostituisce la coralità [The monologue, or at most the dialogue, gives way to chorality].”88 The novelist Francesco Jovine made a related argument in broader cultural terms. As he put it in a 1944 essay, he believed that, from the “disperata miseria [desperate misery]” of the Second World War, un comune fondo di dolente poesia sia nato inconsapevolmente e [...] tutti portino nell’anima un tono dominante, un sentimento multiforme ma di identiche radici. Sta nascendo una unità corale di voci diverse ma fuse; il processo di formazione di un linguaggio comune scritto, seguirà fatalmente questa unità di tono intimo; la letteratura trascriverà in corrette misure quest’agitarsi ancora confuso ma potente e ci darà finalmente il volto dell’Italia; quello vero che nessuno forse mai ha visto.89 a common fund of painful poetry was born unknowingly, and [...] we all carry within our soul a common tone, a feeling that is multiform but springs from common roots. We are witnessing the birth of a choral unity of diverse but blended voices. The formation of a common written language will inevitably follow from this unity of intimate tone; literature will transcribe, in proper measures, this confused but powerful agitation and will finally give us the face of Italy, the true one that no one has ever seen.

In this vision, the task of literature, like the task of film, art, music, philosophy, and history, was to capture the popular voice. “Occorre [...] che la cultura abbia carattere corale, che gli scrittori gli storici i filosofi lavorino tenendo presenti nel loro lavoro tutti quelli che essi presumono siano chiamati ad ascoltarli [Culture must (...) have a choral character, produced by writers, historians, and philosophers, who will keep in mind, as they work, all those they believe are called to listen to them],” Jovine would argue in a subsequent essay. “Solo così la cultura diventa fatto determinante nella vita di un popolo [This is the only way for culture to become a determining

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factor in the life of a people].”90 As several of Jovine’s contemporary critics would similarly put it, the new literature, an expression of the “new culture,” would need to transcend what was seen at the time as Hermeticism’s “dramma della solitudine [drama of solitude],” its “solitudine dell’io [solitude of the ‘I’],” and repudiate “l’estremo individualismo degli ermetici [the Hermeticists’ extreme individualism]” in order to convey a collective response to a collective drama.91 “[O]ggi nessuno più può parlare in prima persona, nessuno può dire ‘io’ e quindi dobbiamo metterci alla ricerca delle nostre ragioni insieme con tutto il genere umano, vedere le cose e gli uomini, in compagnia degli altri, con i nostri pensieri ed i pensieri di tutti [Today no one can speak in the first person, no one can say ‘I,’ and we must therefore set out together in search of the motivations we share with the entire human race, we must look at both things and men, in the company of others, with our own thoughts and with the thoughts of all],” wrote the critic Tommaso Giglio in a 1946 essay.92 The task now, Giglio, Jovine, and their contemporaries insisted, was to speak to a broad audience and to relate a shared experience in order to make possible the active cultural intervention that commentators were calling for after the war. Chorality thus came to signify nothing less than the transformation articulated in the Vittorini–Bo debate: from “Literature as life” to “A  new culture,” from the “path within us” to the “path outside ourselves,” from Hermeticism to neorealism, “from I to We.” It served to indicate the performative conversion – in context, the use of that term is eminently justifiable – from personal introspection to social action, from spiritual reflection to political intervention, from solitary opposition to collective confrontation. In this last respect, the claim to chorality was decidedly aspirational, portraying – or rather projecting – a community that did not yet exist, one that was symbolically brought into being through the choral expression itself. Artists and intellectuals were trying to transform a culture of opposition into a culture of consent, minority beliefs into a majority viewpoint, private devotion into public virtue, critical judgment into communal ideology. They were trying to represent a community that did not yet cohere, and to establish its coherence through the act of representation. Within this project, chorality referred both to their political objective and to the artistic form with which they pursued its realization. This point must be emphasized, and unpacked, because chorality was and is widely invoked as one of the defining features of Italian neorealism.93 After the war, critics immediately identified a choral turn in Italian literature, theatre, the visual arts, even architecture.94 Above all, they stressed the chorality of neorealist cinema. In a 1948 investigation of what he termed “L’apparenza del coro nel cinema italiano” (The



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appearance of the choir in Italian cinema), to cite one prominent, representative example, Carlo Lizzani underlined the importance of filmmakers’ turn towards “storie non di individui ma di complessi sociali [stories not of individuals but of social complexes],” as a result of which, he insisted, “il coro, cioè il dramma di un paese o di una città, di una famiglia o di una regione, son tornati ad essere, attraverso il cinema, l’alimento della nostra produzione artistica [the choral, that is, the drama of a town or a city, a family or a region, has returned, through cinema, to be the nourishment of our artistic production].”95 Identifying the same phenomenon, Mario Verdone made the case that neorealism could be defined by “l’elemento corale, in quanto [...] non guarda alla storia individuale, ma alla storia collettiva [the choral element, in that [...] it looks not to the individual but to the collective story].”96 Just as Bo located in Vittorini’s “new culture” a shift from personal to collective salvation, so too did Lizzani, Verdone, and countless others identify in neorealism a move from the individual to the collective subject. In certain key respects, therefore, chorality can be understood to represent within the structure of the individual work of art the kind of social transformation Vittorini and other cultural critics sought to promote after the war.97 To invoke what is almost certainly the most significant point of intersection between the fictional and the political, by which I mean the turn to a collective subject in artistic representation and in social intervention, both Vittorini’s essay and neorealism’s characteristic transition “from I to We” were widely assumed to embody the “religious enthusiasm” that characterized the cultural conversation in post-war Italy. In an incisive and remarkably detailed 1948 essay entitled “Il cinema ita­ liano realistico” (Italian realist cinema), for instance, Gian Luigi Rondi drew attention to neorealism’s move away from the standard cinematic narrative structure, centred upon an individual protagonist, and towards a collective viewpoint, a process Rondi called an “approda alla coralità [attainment of chorality].”98 Rondi saw this as a transformative artistic development, a fundamental reconceptualization of the basis upon which film plots would be constructed. Yet he saw it as something more than this as well, and argued that by shifting from a singular to a multipolar cinematic perspective, “si forma una nuova coscienza, approda a un nuovo ‘tempo,’ e io credo sia quello della coscienza cristiana; perché è il ritmo di una fratellanza e d’un amore [a new consciousness is formed, a new ‘time’ is brought into existence, and I believe it is the time of Christian consciousness, because it has the rhythm of brotherhood and love].”99 Emblematically rejecting selfishness and self-interest in favour of fellowship in Christ, Rondi argued, neorealist chorality symbolically transformed disparate individuals into a community of the faithful.

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In other words, chorality was a characteristically religious expression of a decidedly political topos, rehearsing at the level of narrative the formation of a new society founded on the civil religion of the Resistance. It was the name given to the attempt to create an imagined community, a new Italian populace, after the tragedies of the war.100 Put another way, it was a kind of aesthetic corollary of the political project laid out by Vittorini in “Una nuova cultura.” The “old culture,” Vittorini had said, “has preached, has taught, has elaborated principles and values.”101 Chorality symbolized another approach, not preaching, not teaching, not speaking to the people, but instead speaking as the people and capturing – or, more accurately, ­creating  – a communal spirit. Treating their subjects chorally, artists and intellectuals sought to project and then to speak for a collective conscience in order to convey the cultural foundations of a new Italian society. “The Humility of an Impure Poetry” From this point of view, chorality can be seen to constitute the most significant artistic expression of neorealism’s politics. Consider what I have called Roma città aperta’s appropriation of the “sacrificial memory” of the Resistance, which authorizes the film’s vision of post-war reconstruction. In the course of the narrative, three successive deaths – the murder of a popolana, the torture of a partisan, and the execution of a priest – come to constitute a kind of “collective martyrdom,” a shared sacrifice borne by the Roman community, which presages the collective redemption of the Italian people.102 With each casualty the film’s subjective centre effectively shifts, from Pina to Manfredi, from Manfredi to Don Pietro, before it achieves true chorality, a collective voice, in the whistles of the children who witness the priest’s execution, and who are tasked metaphorically with rebuilding the country in the image of resistance that this tragic event has imparted.103 Chorality in Roma città aperta, authorized by the film’s Resistance martyrs to re-envision the country after Fascism, thus serves symbolically to create a collective conscience, a metonymic figuration of the post-war Italian body politic. This cinematic expression of a powerful vision of national unity was decidedly aspirational, a creative invention of Rossellini’s film itself. This is not to say, however, that the aspiration was expressed only in that film. Well beyond Roma città aperta, in fact, neorealist chorality can be understood performatively to have enacted a new democratic polity, one not yet present in the theatre of political action but already mobilized symbolically in the realm of art. The foundational move that facilitated chorality, therefore, was the representational claim to a kind of proxy from below, the right to speak



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for the people, including those partisans martyred to the cause of Italian liberation, and to dictate in their name the terms of the post-war order. This was a profound claim, and an audacious one. To justify it, artists and intellectuals sought to take on a new role and a new social status, publicly rejecting their traditional prestige and forgoing their participation in what Franco Fortini described as the “cosiddetto mondo della cultura, col suo orgoglio di scriba, il suo sprezzante servilismo di oggetto di lusso [so-called world of culture, with its scribe’s pride, its contemptuous and servile status as a luxury good].”104 “Noi non tolleriamo più gli studi che sieno semplicemente ‘ornamenti’ [We no longer tolerate studies that simply serve as ‘ornaments’],” announced the art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. E non li tolleriamo, perché [...] tali ornamenti costano un correspettivo troppo grande di sudore, di umiliazione e di miseria ad altri uomini. La cultura è cosa costosa. Essa non fiorisce nell’indigenza; essa presuppone una massa di lavoro materiale e direttamente redditizio, fatto da altri uomini per i quali i benefici della cultura restano intangibili, anche se indirettamente ne sieno anch’essi partecipi. [...] Noi abbiamo, è vero, il dovere e la responsabilità di essere guida a quelle masse nel progresso civile e in quello intellettuale, ma possiamo farlo solo in quanto quelle masse riconoscono l’utilità della nostra guida e della nostra esistenza e sono disposte a fornirci i mezzi per eseguire la nostra parte.105 And we no longer tolerate them because [...] those ornaments are purchased with too much of the sweat, humiliation, and misery of other men. Culture is a costly thing. It does not flourish amid poverty; it presupposes a mass of material and immediately profitable labour, performed by other men for whom culture’s benefits remain intangible, even if they too participate indirectly. [...] It is true that we have the duty and the responsibility to guide those masses in their civic and intellectual progress, but we can do that only to the extent that those masses recognize the utility of our guidance and of our existence, and are willing to provide us with the means to perform our part.

Culture had to become less exalted, Bandinelli was saying, in order for it to become more important, and intellectuals had to become more democratic in order to take on greater authority. They had a crucial role to play in Italy’s post-war recovery, a 1945 editorial in Società argued, provided they abandoned their “privilegio [privilege]” and accepted their identity as “il sale della terra [the salt of the earth],” not “una classe a sé [a s­eparate class].”106 Such pronouncements echo a famous phrase from the last letter of Giaime Pintor, written to his brother in

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1943 before setting off on the partisan mission that would prove to be his demise: “Musicisti e scrittori dobbiamo rinunciare ai nostri pri­ vilegi per contribuire alla liberazione di tutti [Musicians and writers, we must renounce our privileges in order to contribute to everyone’s liberation].”107 Artists and intellectuals, it was believed, could no longer remain loyal to an elite culture, divorced from the life of the people; they had to remake culture itself in the image of the people, advocating on behalf of those oppressed by the traditional hierarchies and speaking for those excluded from the conventional conversations. They had to “occuparsi del pane e del lavoro [attend to bread and work],” as Vittorini put it in “Una nuova cultura,” taking up the practical, material concerns that culture had affected to disdain.108 Borrowing a concept from Christian apologetics, several commentators have referred to neorealism’s attempt to capture in artistic practice this simultaneous acceptance of social responsibility and rejection of cultural privilege as an instance of sermo humilis.109 As Erich Auerbach detailed, the tradition of Christian exegesis inverted the hierarchies of classical rhetoric, forgoing the high style in the belief that “the highest mysteries of the faith may be set forth in the simple words of the lowly style which everyone can understand.” Beginning with the Church Fathers, then, Christian thinkers employed sermo humilis, the low style, in order to make Christ’s message “accessible to all, descending to all men in loving-kindness, secretly sublime, at one with the whole Christian congregation.”110 Neorealism may be understood to have attempted something similar both stylistically and thematically. Among the first to draw this connection was Pier Paolo Pasolini: Il neorealismo è il prodotto di una reazione culturale democratica alla stasi dello spirito del periodo fascista; letterariamente essa è consistita in una sostituzione del classicismo decadentistico, ipotattico, ordinante dall’alto e implicante una netta “distinzione stilistica” verso uno stile sublimis (in cui se c’era del realismo, si trattava di realismo prezioso e di genere) con un gusto della realtà, paratattico, operante documentaristicamente al livello della realtà rappresentata, attraverso un processo di mimesis da cui nasceva la riscoperta del monologo interiore, del discorso vissuto e di una mesco­ lanza stilistica, con prevalenza dello stile humilis (o dialettale).111 Neorealism is the product of a cultural-democratic reaction to the Fascist period’s stasis of the spirit. In literature it has meant abandoning decadent classicism, hypotactic, arranged from above, and entailing a clear “stylistic distinction” that favoured the sublimis style (in which, if there was any realism, it was a precious and generic realism) and replacing it with a taste of



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reality, paratactic, operating in a documentary fashion and representing reality through a process of mimesis, from which emerged the rediscovery of interior monologue, of lived discourse, and of the mixture of styles, with a preference for the humilis (or dialect) style.

Describing neorealism in both political and poetic terms, Pasolini sought to underline the social significance of the efforts to forgo accepted literary models, genres, and hierarchies in an attempt to describe reality more faithfully. Neorealism, Pasolini explained, manifested a democratic passion – popular, egalitarian, communal – for overturning traditional standards of style and describing ordinary reality in humble terms. Adopting Auerbach’s schema, itself imported into literary historiography from patristic discourses, Pasolini thus identified in neorealism a predilection for sermo humilis.112 The schema fit, largely because the neorealist rejection of Hermeticism in favour of chorality was indeed justified with a rhetoric that recognizably echoed the sermo humilis. For instance, in its 1946 call “Per una poesia nuova” (For a new poetry), the journal La Strada insisted that, “di fronte all’ambizione della poesia pura, dalla forma elaboratissima, noi preferiamo l’umiltà di una poesia impura, in cui la forma aderisca soprattutto alla sincerità e alla verità dello stato d’animo [faced with the desire for pure poetry, with its elaborate form, we prefer the humility of an impure poetry, in which form reflects the sincerity and the truth of our state of mind].”113 Austere, unadorned language was thus to be preferred to the aulic tradition, the lexical grandeur of Italy’s poetic inheritance. Arnaldo Bocelli, in the Inchiesta sul neorealismo, referred to this inverted hierarchy of literary value as neorealism’s “retorica alla rove­ scia [reverse rhetoric],” the adoption of which came to be known as “le poetiche dello scriver male [the poetics of bad writing].”114 Put simply, neorealism preferred the humility of the low style over the grandiosity of Hermeticism’s high style. In the same way, it preferred “low” subjects, pursuing what the narrator of Vasco Pratolini’s 1947 novel Cronache di poveri amanti called the “umile epicità [humble epic]” of the poor and the working classes.115 Critics at the time thus stressed how “il neorea­ lismo senza dubbio ha saputo riaccostarsi umilmente alla perduta realtà della vita [neorealism has without doubt managed humbly to reconnect itself to the lost reality of life],” drawing attention to its “umiltà di cuore e di mente [humility of heart and mind],” its depictions of a “mondo di gente viva ed umile, uomini che ci assomiglino [world of living and humble people, men who resemble us].”116 Not only did critics demand that artists be “umilmente spoglio da superbie creatrici [humbly stripped of creative arrogance],” but artists, too, stressed humility as their guiding

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objective.117 Vittorio De Sica concisely encapsulated the objective in a 1948 interview on the subject of Ladri di biciclette: “Alla sofferenza degli umili il mio film è dedicato [My film is dedicated to the suffering of the humble].”118 If the sermo humilis can thus be said to characterize neorealism’s address, however, this is not at all to say that neorealism’s ambitions were somehow humble. Indeed, behind the humility of tone and subject matter was a far-reaching cultural program whose goals were anything but modest. Neorealism’s dedication to Christian humility was never an end in itself; it was, instead, a cultural strategy with political import. This helps to explain, at least in part, why a cultural conversation that was often carried out in recognizably Christian terms frequently received a hostile reception in Catholic forums. While neorealism’s humble address suggested to some the seeds of a renewed Christian culture, many others, including prominent figures in the Italian government, perceived in neorealism’s claim to speak for the people a potential threat to Catholicism’s cultural and political hegemony.119 It was with this danger in mind that Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti, upon taking up his position as Under-Secretary for Entertainment in 1947, set about restructuring state funding of the film industry in order to intervene directly at the level of production and dissemination. This effort culminated with the 1949 bill dubbed, in recognition of its strongest proponent, the “Legge Andreotti” (Andreotti Law), which stipulated that films receive financing based on their box-office success, a situation that tended – as was intended – to encourage a certain conservatism in filmmakers and producers, who worried that taking risks, aesthetically or politically, could alienate the mass audience on which commercial viability increasingly depended. Put into effect in 1950, the Andreotti Law also offered additional financial support for films judged to have particular “artistic quality,” a judgment to be issued from the minister’s own office, which had already been entrusted with all decisions regarding censorship.120 With his power effectively redoubled, therefore, Andreotti had final approval on all filmmaking in Italy. Such approval, he explained at the time, would be made in such a way as to promote una produzione sana, moralissima e nello stesso tempo attraente, che può degnamente inserirsi nella corrente [...] della nuova scuola [neorealista] italiana, che fa onore alla nostra cinematografia e che all’estero ci viene invidiata, sicché a noi spetta valorizzarla, tendendo a che questa formula rappresenti un qualcosa che abbia anche – e può averlo – un significato spirituale.121 a sound production, of the highest morals and at the same time appealing, one that fits within [...] the new Italian [neorealist] school, which is a credit



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to our film industry and much envied abroad, and which we too must value, ensuring that this formula can and does have a spiritual significance.

While Andreotti thus suggested a desire to promote neorealism, in practice his aim was to control it. He wanted films to carry an unmistakably Christian – or more accurately Christian Democrat – message, and he was prepared to exert significant financial and political pressure to make sure his goals were realized. This was already apparent in 1948, with his insistence on cinema’s “spiritual significance,” and would become all the more apparent a few years later in a confrontation occasioned by his public opposition to Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D. Andreotti chastised the director, and by implication his neorealist contemporaries, for what he saw as the failure to uphold “un qualunque principio se non di religione almeno di solidarietà umana [any standard, if not of religion, at least of human solidarity].”122 In public statements such as these, Andreotti may perhaps be said to have articulated an ethics of cinema. Yet his material interventions, as well as his private correspondence, make evident that this was all in the service of a factional and confessional politics of cinema. Indeed, in a 1949 letter to then pro-secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI, Andreotti revealed his ambition to give confessing Catholics “un peso effettivo, nell’arte e nell’industria dello spettacolo [an effective weight in art and in the entertainment industry],” stipulating the need to “conquistare al cristianesimo le attività dello spettacolo in Italia [... e] formare e lanciare uomini ed iniziative chiaramente nostri o almeno indubbiamente vicini [take over the film industry in Italy (... and) shape and promote men and initiatives on – or at least unquestionably close to – our side].”123 These were far from empty boasts; Andreotti had the power not just to regulate but also effectively to reshape the Italian film industry. Recognizing in the humble rhetoric of some of Italy’s most celebrated neorealist filmmakers a bid for an alternative and potentially opposing authority, he intervened to attenuate their influence. From the opposing side of the political spectrum, Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, acted similarly in response to the evident bid for power articulated by Elio Vittorini in the pages of Il Politecnico. Insisting that political authority be accorded to cultural innovation, and more to the point that it be accorded to cultural innovators, Vittorini was repeatedly reproved by Italy’s post-war political leadership, whose power, unlike Vittorini’s, was effectively unmediated, and who believed that intellectual investigation and artistic exploration should respond to political direction. Beginning in 1946, Vittorini was accused, in the pages of Rinascita, the official organ of the Italian Communist Party,

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of “intellettualismo [intellectualism]” – intellectual arrogance, obscurantism, fecklessness – for a series of editorial decisions that failed to conform to the party’s increasingly stringent demands.124 When Vittorini refused to back down, a second rebuke followed, this time from Togliatti himself.125 Again, Vittorini defended his position, publishing an open letter that has sometimes been construed as a call for cultural independence, but which in fact offered not so much a defence of the artist’s freedom from political pressure as a declaration of the artist’s entitlement to political ­authority.126 Culture, Vittorini argued in his letter to Togliatti, è la forza umana che scopre nel mondo le esigenze di mutamento e ne dà coscienza al mondo. Essa, dunque, vuole le trasformazioni del mondo. Ma aspira, volendole, ad ordinare il mondo in un modo per cui il mondo non ricada più sotto il dominio di un interesse economico, o comunque di una necessità, di un automatismo, e possa, al contrario, identificare il proprio movimento con quello della ricerca della verità, della filosofia, dell’arte, insomma della cultura stessa. Così la cultura aspira alla rivoluzione come a una possibilità di prendere il potere attraverso una politica che sia cultura tradot­ ­ta in politica, e non più interesse economico tradotto in politica, privilegio di casta tradotto in politica, necessità tradotta in politica.127 is the human force that discovers and makes us conscious of how the world needs to change. Culture, therefore, desires the world’s transformation. But with this desire culture wants to arrange the world in such a way that it is no longer governed by economic interests, or in any event by need, by automatism, and so that its development tends, instead, towards the search for truth, philosophy, art; so that it tends, in other words, towards culture itself. Thus culture seeks revolution as a chance to seize power through a politics that is culture translated into policy, and no longer economic interest translated into policy, caste privilege translated into policy, necessity translated into policy.

Describing the issue in this way, Vittorini unapologetically identified his clash with the Communist Party as a struggle for power. His was not, then, an attempt to free culture from political interference, but rather to invest culture with political influence. Put simply, if Togliatti wanted politics to govern culture, Vittorini wanted culture to govern politics. That Togliatti’s authority substantially eclipsed Vittorini’s, leading eventually to the author’s exit from the party as well as to the demise of Il Politecnico, need not diminish the sincerity – or the audacity – of the demand for culture to take power.



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This demand, made explicit in Vittorini’s letter, was implicit in every instance of neorealism’s sermo humilis. With its humble register, neorealism may have signalled the concession modestly to relinquish the status of a cultural elite, but, as its opponents correctly recognized, it also disclosed the ambition immodestly to establish the direction of a cultural vanguard for a new mass politics. Indicative in this regard is Cesare Pavese’s pronouncement, variously expressed, that, after Fascism, “il problema è uscire dal privilegio – servile – che godemmo e non ‘andare verso il popolo’ ma ‘essere popolo’ [the challenge is to leave behind the – servile – privilege we enjoyed, no longer ‘going towards the people’ but instead ‘being the people’].”128 Overturning the same Fascist injunction mocked in Visconti’s La terra trema, as we saw in the first chapter, Pavese expressed a desire, or better still a need, to speak as rather than to the masses, a statement ostensibly self-effacing but in practice unmistakably presumptuous. What was being claimed, after all, was nothing less than the artist’s right to speak on behalf of the audience. Little wonder that Pavese described the assumption of this right as an escape from servility. If artists were refusing any longer to propagandize, they were now volunteering to sermonize, and perhaps in some sense to ventriloquize.129 Giving up one privilege, they were assuming another: the privilege to interpret, and even to invent, the collective voice of the masses. As Antonio Banfi explained in a 1947 essay, “[l]a cultura per noi non è cultura che il popolo riceve da una specie di grandi opere benefiche, dagli uomini di cultura, ma è cultura che il popolo crea dal suo profondo, dai suoi nuovi bisogni e dalla sua nuova responsabilità [By ‘culture’ we do not mean a culture that the people receive like a charitable gift, from men of letters, but a culture created from within the people, from their own new needs and new responsibilities].”130 In this manner, a manner typical of all those who adopted neorealism’s humble rhetoric, Banfi, like Pavese, dedicated himself to the democratization of culture. Yet he, and they, inevitably did so by assuming, extrapolating, or indeed arrogating a popular endorsement. Theirs was thus a popular culture created by fiat, which is to say that post-war Italian culture was “popular” because – and indeed in some cases only because – its creators claimed it to be an expression of the popular will. The aspiration to make popular art, in this context, did not necessarily mean making art people liked, or even making people like art, but instead making a people: creating a new audience, a new public, a new nation. This was the assignment, and the authority, that neorealism ambitiously appropriated for itself. As Cesare Zavattini put it at the 1944 inauguration of the Associazione culturale cinematografica italiana

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(ACCI), an organization that brought together many of the fledgling auteurs of the neorealist movement, [n]oi consideriamo il cinema, anziché una zona socialmente privilegiata, come l’arte più carica di doveri per la sua costante funzione popolare. Questa coscienza dovrà costituire l’unità del cinema italiano anche rispetto al cinema straniero dove il professionalismo, talvolta, spesso la maniera, pur attingendo risultati di eccellente gradevolezza, prosperano senza l’urgenza dell’umile racconto che noi italiani dobbiamo cominciare, facendolo echeggiare di valori non soltanto spettacolari.131 rather than socially privileged, we consider cinema to be the field most burdened with responsibilities because of its constant popular function. This awareness will have to constitute Italian cinema’s unity in comparison with foreign cinemas, which, despite achieving at times excellent results, thanks to an often determined professionalism, can thrive without the urgency of the humble narrative that we Italians must begin to recount, making it reverberate with qualities that go beyond entertainment.

In this exhortation, post-war Italian cinema was defined by its aspiration to speak of and for the people, an aspiration not so much to popular appeal as to popular sovereignty, manifest in the refusal of traditional standards of artistic or commercial success and in the adoption, with humble tone but ambitious intent, of the voice of the downtrodden in order to assert their right to rule. “The Chorus of the War” Neorealism’s structure and style, then, can be understood as an attempt to translate the social role that culture sought to assume in post-war Italy. In a sense, this is what Miccichè meant when he invoked neorealism’s “ethics of aesthetics,” a notion he related to Vittorini’s call for “a new culture.” Yet the social role outlined in Vittorini’s essay, with its criticism of a cultural heritage, including traditional Christianity, that “has managed to produce change almost exclusively in men’s intellect,” entailed something far more audacious than renewed or reformed cultural ethics. So, too, did Italian neorealism, which symbolically enacted a declaration of political solidarity, a new unity of intellectual and ­society, a new popular art, and a new religious enthusiasm, by channelling the collective popular voice of the community of believers that neorealism itself sought to create, to empower, and to conscript in its cultural program.



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Despite its rhetorical humility, therefore, that program was undeniably radical, promising material reforms by attempting to intervene in reality, not just to provide the moral or ethical standards by which reality was to be judged. As the poet Alfonso Gatto put it in a 1947 essay, gli intellettuali oggi sono chiamati a rispondere dei propri sentimenti alla vita del Paese e porre mano a quest’opera di educazione morale che ha in ognuno di noi il suo esempio umile, ma preciso, incorruttibile. La vera resistenza comincia oggi: oggi più di ieri gli scrittori, i giornalisti e gli uomini di cultura che abbandonassero i propri ideali di vita e i propri sentimenti per interessi già creati e in via di provocazione, si chiamerebbero collaborazionisti e traditori. Questi sentimenti e questi ideali debbono rompere, se veri e perseguiti sino in fondo, la scorza delle ambigue morali private che socialmente lasciano ancora sussistere, per mancanza di chiarezza storica, morali di osservanza o morali di protesta e non quell’aperta morale di lotta che s’identifica con la vita stessa e con le condizioni della nostra vita. Un uomo buono non può essere privatamente buono, deve essere socialmente buono, lavorare per il bene suo e di tutti, con gli strumenti che la lotta apertamente gli dà.132 intellectuals today are called upon to respond with their own sentiments to the life of the country and to lend their hand in this task of moral education that has in each of us its humble but precise, incorruptible example. The real resistance begins today: today even more than yesterday the writers, journalists, and men of letters who abandoned their ideals of life and their sentiments for the temptation of preconceived interests would be considered collaborators and traitors. If they are true and are followed to their conclusion, these sentiments and these ideals must crack the shell of the equivocal private morals that, because of their lack of historical clarity, allow for the persistence of moral conformity or moral protest, rather than facilitating an overt moral struggle linked to life itself and to the conditions of our own lives. A good man cannot be privately good, he must be socially good, working for the good of himself and of all, with the tools that the struggle overtly provides him.

Like Vittorini, Gatto was attempting to articulate the defining elements of post-war cultural politics, which emphasized social intervention, not ethical reflection. In his own post-war poetic practice, moreover, he demonstrated how this political programme translated into the sermo humilis of neorealist chorality. Before the war, Gatto had been one of the leading Hermetic poets, symptomatically portraying his isolation from society, his “absence,” in that period of crisis.133 His had been a

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rigorously but privately ethical withdrawal from society, a defiant disavowal of Italian Fascism, to which he denied even his tacit consent.134 Participation in the Resistance, however, would change Gatto’s understanding of anti-Fascism, and the repercussions of this transformation would significantly transform his poetry after the war in conjunction with the changing conception of the role of culture in the age of neorealism. Revealingly, in fact, many of Gatto’s public pronouncements on the Resistance showed signs of his adoption of Vittorini’s notion of “a new culture.” In a 1947 essay, for instance, Gatto insisted on the need to continue the Resistance struggle even after Fascism’s defeat, to “non abbandonare l’angoscia e lo sgomento della coscienza provata nei suoi vecchi orgogli culturali, nei suoi esercizi solitari e impegnata a trovare una solidarietà più larga, una più profonda consapevolezza nell’azione [hold onto the anguish and the confusion of a conscience that had been tested in its old cultural conceits, in its solitary exercises, and that had become committed to finding a broader solidarity, a deeper awareness in its action].”135 The point was clear: Hermetic individualism, Hermetic abstention, would have to give way to active social transformation, shepherded by a culture reconceived as practical intervention. For Gatto, moreover, poetry had an important role to play in this transformation, as he explained in another 1946 essay, which would serve as the introduction to his first collection of Resistance poetry, Il capo sulla neve (The head on the snow, 1947): Per i poeti, per gli scrittori che sentono e vedono la natura umana offesa ben al di là ormai delle sue tregue politiche tra le guerre, direi che è un dovere uccidere, sterminare l’arte ripiegata sulle irreparabili sconfitte ­ umane. In tal senso la resistenza è appena cominciata e la liberazione è nelle nostre mani di giustizieri o di suicidi. Occorre incominciare a riparare in questa terra al dolore degli uomini.136 For the poets, for the writers who hear and see human nature wronged well beyond the political truce between the wars, I would say that it is our duty to kill, to exterminate the art that retreated before the irreparable human defeats. In that sense the resistance has only just begun and the liberation lies in our hands, whether we are executioners or suicides. It is time to begin remedying human suffering in this land.

Gatto here set out a characteristically far-reaching program of cultural renewal and redemption. With echoes of Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia as well as of his assault on cultural criticism, characterized by its “principles” and “values” resting on the “spectacle of man’s suffering in



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society,” Gatto argued that human suffering could no longer serve as the predicate for cultural consolation. Instead, culture would need to be transformed into a weapon against suffering itself.137 Motivated by this conviction, Gatto sought to reform his own poetic practice, moving beyond Hermetic expressions of the individual’s ethical refusal of a society corrupted by Fascism and towards a choral declaration of the political redemption of the community of believers. The continuing realization of this transformation marked the poet’s postwar neorealist phase, propelling, for instance, what is perhaps the most famous poem of the Italian Resistance, Gatto’s “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto” (For the martyrs of Piazza Loreto).138 This poem, which circulated among the anti-Fascist forces during the war, and which was subsequently included in Il capo sulla neve, recounts the execution of fifteen partisans, taken from the San Vittore prison and shot in a square in central Milan. At first, it casts an impersonal eye on the aftermath of the massacre: no “I,” no singular vantage point, is provided until the fourth stanza. Instead of a viewing subject, the poem appears to emerge from its object, the true target of the German attack: the city of Milan itself. In the third stanza, then, it is said that the assassins [...] vollero il massacro perché Milano avesse alla sua soglia confusi tutti in uno stesso cuore i suoi figli promessi e il vecchio cuore forte e ridesto, stretto come un pugno.139 [...] wanted a massacre so that Milan would have at her threshold her promised sons all mingled in one heart and her old heart reawakened strong and tight as a fist.140

In this telling, the executions are an expression of the Germans’ fear at the city’s growing resolve, its increasingly unified opposition to the occupation. A shared emotion (“all mingled in one heart”) is beginning to constitute a collective force (“heart [...] strong and tight as a fist”), and this represents a clear threat to German authority. Having set out the conditions that preceded and inspired the massacre, the poem now arrives at its viewing “I” in the first line of the next stanza: Ebbi il mio cuore ed anche il vostro cuore il cuore di mia madre e dei miei figli

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Witness to the corpses left in the square, the speaker of the poem takes up their rebellion as his own cause, and takes into himself the hearts of his readers, his family, and the victims of the massacre. The poem thus declares, with pious defiance, that instead of dissolving Milan’s civic unity, the German assault has managed instead to transubstantiate the bodies of the victims into a collective spirit, which is borne within the heart of the poet-witness. The murder of fifteen partisans has transformed an inchoate threat into an elemental opposition – a living force for which the poet becomes the vessel, having witnessed the sound, the chorus, of national resurrection. Filled with this sound, and with the spirit of the martyrs, the poetic “I” becomes the resisting “we.” This daring gambit, the poet’s presumption to speak for the victims, thus represents the prelude to the choral recitation of the Resistance liturgy. Gatto’s contemporaries, struck by the novel poetic and political role he had taken up after the war, employed various strategies to convey the significance of his newly audacious project. Massimo Bontempelli, in his preface to Il capo sulla neve, stressed Gatto’s abandonment of the Hermetic subject. “Nella lirica di Alfonso Gatto è scomparso l’io come perno dell’universo (sia che in essi si smemorasse sia ne ritraesse illusione di divinità) [In Alfonso Gatto’s lyric poetry the I no longer appears as the centre of the universe (whether because it is forgotten or because it is portrayed as an illusion of divinity)],” Bontempelli explained. “Io non è per lui che una ammonizione a vedere gli altri, a difenderli, a ucciderli forse ma per liberarli [‘I’ is nothing more for him than an



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admonition to see others, to defend them, to kill them, perhaps, but in order to free them].”143 Italo Calvino, in an early investigation of Italian Resistance literature, argued that Il capo sulla neve “si può considerare a tutt’oggi la più piena testimonianza poetica dell’‘uomo della Resistenza’ sentito come un eterno e necessario prototipo umano [can be considered to this day the fullest poetic testimony of the ‘man of the Resistance’ perceived as a necessary and an eternal human prototype].” Gatto was thus representative of the most significant transformation of the post-war period, Calvino argued, after which “la nuda parola degli ermetici, giunta all’estrema essenzialità d’un linguaggio interiore si è trasformata in una parola di coro, tutta sentimenti ed echi [the naked word of the Hermeticists, having reached the extreme essentiality of an inner language, has transformed itself into the word of a chorus, all feelings and echoes].”144 For related reasons, Vasco Pratolini, Gatto’s one-time ­co-editor at the Hermetic journal Campo di Marte, stressed the poet’s emergent faith in a politically transformative culture, insisting that “la poesia di Gatto è una poesia civile. E nel senso più estensivo del ­termine, religiosa. Religiosa perché totalmente laica. E sotterraneamente cristiana [Gatto’s poetry is civic poetry. And, in the fullest sense of the word, it is religious. Religious because it is totally secular. And covertly Christian].”145 In Gatto’s poetry, as these three interrelated judgments make clear, the religiosity of the Resistance, having freed the subject from his self-imposed exile and having symbolically welcomed him into the community, is expressed chorally, not by the lone artist but by the transforming society, each member of which is led to undergo the religious conversion signalled by the poet: “from I to We.” In a figurative representation of the material transformation to be enacted after the war, when culture will assert its dominion over society, the poet refuses to stand apart, pronouncing ethical judgment on the community of sinners. Instead, he becomes the voice of the community, expressing what Gatto elsewhere termed Il coro della guerra (The chorus of the war).146 “The Dialectical Relationship between the Chorus and the Character” Not long after the publication of “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto,” Alfonso Gatto appeared in his first feature film: Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora. He was joined by several other notable first-time actors: the poet and novelist Stefano Terra, the author of Rancore and other significant post-war chronicles; the playwright and critic Ruggero Jacobbi, who worked on the film’s screenplay in addition to acting in a minor role; the film critic Glauco Viazzi, one of the central figures at the journal Cinema before the liberation, afterwards an influential

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commentator on Italian neorealism; Gillo Pontecorvo, at the time a foreign correspondent for La Repubblica, later to gain renown as the director of Kapò (1959) and La battaglia di Algeri (1966); Carlo Lizzani, a critic and screenwriter as well as one of the film’s assistant directors, who would go on to achieve his own lasting fame as a director in the years to come. While in interviews Vergano tended to speak of Il sole sorge ancora’s many amateur actors as an example of standard neorealist practices, his reviewers seem instead to have found something rather more remarkable about the film’s high-profile players, whose artistic accomplishments and intellectual promise lent Vergano’s work an evident cultural authority.147 What was not commented on at the time, but is particularly striking in retrospect, is the confluence between the film’s narrative of political redemption and the intellectual journey documented in the work of Gatto and the other artists and critics who joined him on set. Indeed, one way to understand Il sole sorge ancora is to see it as a choral representation of the unfolding conversion of the generation of poets, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, directors, and critics whose mission was to convert the “old” culture to the “new” while transforming their own subjectivity in their pursuit of neorealism. The film is structured on a series of plot reversals that, taken together, dramatically enact Italy’s ongoing political transformation. The first and final scenes, for instance, present mirror images of a sort, framing the film’s conversion narrative. In the first, a group of musicians outside the Milanese brothel play “Il tamburo della banda d’Affori” (The drum of the Affori band), a song that, in its original form, had become popular with disillusioned Italians after it had been censored by the Fascist government; the authorities took its reference to a bandleader directing “550 pifferi [550 fifes]” to be a mockery of Mussolini and the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, with its 550 delegates.148 In the film’s final scene, a band is once again playing, but this time theirs is a song of celebration, not delusion, of unity, not dissent, performed in honour of the partisans’ victory.149 Bracketed by these two musical scenes, Cesare, the film’s protagonist, undergoes a related transformation. At the brothel, he had expressed a certain cynicism about civic duty, explaining his desire to return home to a quiet life: “se scappano il Re e Badoglio [if the King and Badoglio can flee],” he asked one of the prostitutes, “perché non dovrei scappare io? [why shouldn’t I?]” At the film’s conclusion, he evinces a newfound spirit of solidarity, telling Laura of the message he learned from another partisan: “sai Beppe cosa diceva quando eravamo in montagna? Se dovessi morire, [...] cercate di vivere anche per noi [You know what Beppe used to say when we were in the mountains? If I should die, [...] try to live on for us].” From a position of self-interest, in



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other words, Cesare has passed to one of fellow feeling, a transformation he expresses in resonant terms: lexically as well as politically, his “I” has become a “we.”150 The terms of this personal conversion, inspired by participation in the anti-Fascist Resistance, are in fact the central motif of the film, which stages this socially significant passage from singular to plural, from personal dissent to collective rebellion, as its central structuring mechanism. As one of the first reviews of Il sole sorge ancora aptly put it, “il film vero non è nelle passioni dei singoli, bensì in quelli delle masse [the essence of the film is not to be found in the passions of the individual characters but in those of the masses].”151 In making this claim, the reviewer was referring especially to the film’s most famous scene: the public execution that concludes its second act. Investigating a partisan raid, the Germans have arrested two suspects: Pietro (Pontecorvo), one of the local Communist organizers, and Don Camillo (Lizzani), the parish priest. As the scene begins, German soldiers march through the village, gathering the citizens at gunpoint until thousands have been forced to congregate in the square to witness the execution. Bells toll as the prisoners are marched, impassive, towards their death. Reflecting in later years on this powerful scene, Lizzani recalled what happens next in the following terms: io, nel ruolo appunto del giovane prete, comincio a mormorare tra me e me le litanie. A un tratto, un vecchio contadino mormora un primo “Ora pro nobis ...” Io continuo “Virgo veneranda ...” mentre due, tre poi cinque voci fanno eco alla mia preghiera. Così, a poco a poco, quell’“Ora pro nobis” diventa un coro. La mia voce si alza, mentre il coro sembra trasformarsi – almeno così lo interpreta il comandante del plotone di ­esecuzione  – in un’esplicita protesta ... La raffica del plotone mette fine alla scena. Una scena che preannuncia le modalità ritmico-stilistiche peculiari, in seguito, di tutti i film di De Santis (il rapporto dialettico coro-personaggio).152 playing the role of the young priest, I begin to mutter to myself the litanies. Suddenly, an old farmer mutters the first “Ora pro nobis ...” I continue “Virgo veneranda ...” as two, three, and then five voices echo my prayer. Then, little by little, that “Ora pro nobis” becomes a chorus. My voice rises, while the chorus seems to transform – or at least that is how the commander of the firing squad interprets it – into an explicit protest ... The burst from the firing squad puts an end to the scene. A scene that prefigures the rhythmic-stylistic modality that would subsequently come to characterize all of De Santis’s films (the dialectical relationship between the chorus and the character).

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In the film, the pattern of call and response Lizzani described is reinforced visually by intercutting shots of the priest and the anonymous members of the crowd: a group of middle-aged men; a young boy standing before several older women; a group of children and adolescents; then an old man, his face unshaven, hat at an angle, who first offers, alone, the congregation’s refrain: “Ora pro nobis.” As the scene progresses, the camera continues to alternate between shots of the priest and shots of the villagers offering their replies to his litany. Visually as well as aurally, then, the scene exemplifies neorealist chorality, as countless commentators have noted.153 Lizzani’s comments expand on this point, indicating something of the political significance of the scene’s choral construction. In Lizzani’s description, the priest’s prayer is first offered privately, but nevertheless inspires a kind of clandestine response from a member of the crowd (the word “mutters” here is a clue), which then encourages ever more townspeople to reply, “two, three, and then five,” until the response becomes both choral and political, “an explicit protest.” Not only structurally but also ideologically, the scene can be said to turn on what Lizzani referred to as “the dialectical relationship between the chorus and the character,” with the priest’s intonation and the crowd’s expression shown to be interdependent: the call encouraging the response; the response reinforcing the call. The priest remains the scene’s centre, emotionally, visually, and aurally, but his voice is more compelled then compelling. It is the voice of the crowd that both drives the action and determines the scene’s political import, stimulating and motivating its own diffusion, gradually recognizing its own power and its own authority, then coalescing around the priest with growing unity in its open rebellion against the occupying forces. The priest becomes the conduit of the crowd’s choral outburst, which he has inspired but not imposed, and which is then empowered, through his sacrifice, to carry forward the political rebellion of the war and the social reformation to follow, a civic mission sanctified through religious expression. The transformative chorality at the centre of Il sole sorge ancora thus exemplifies the vector of cultural engagement prized by neorealism. First, it portrays a political sentiment that is assiduously popular, emanating from the crowd, with a cleric as its humble messenger. Second, it derives its political significance from the crowd’s chant, which intensifies and elevates the priest’s actions, making of his martyrdom an emerging threat to the totalitarian order. Third, it points forward to the communal organization that will displace the German occupation, radicalized by the crowd’s discovery of its increasingly forceful collective voice. Unfolding in this way, Il sole sorge ancora’s pivotal scene can be said to rehearse



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Italian neorealism’s foundational political gesture. Taking up the “religious enthusiasm” of the Resistance coalition, embodied metonymically by the martyrdom of the Communist organizer and the Catholic priest, the film represents in decidedly Christian terms the creation of a new political community, which comes into existence in the moment of its choral expression of anti-Fascism. What is more, it articulates this demonstrative act of social solidarity in the service of a bold assertion of its own artistic authority, reinforced through Vergano’s inspired casting of Lizzani, his assistant director and a former anti-Fascist partisan, in the role of the priest. Vergano had been chosen to direct the film, after all, because of his own role in the Resistance, which distinguished him from many of his contemporaries, and especially from Goffredo Alessandrini, the original choice to helm the project, who was dismissed in favour of Vergano after a series of protests over Alessandrini’s contributions to the Fascist film industry.154 Il sole sorge ancora’s partisan priest, portrayed by a filmmaker and former partisan, thus serves as a kind of analogue for Vergano himself, and the scene of his execution, in which he channels the crowd’s choral expression and inspires the rebellion that will remake the civic order, figuratively grants the director his artistic authority, bestowed in the name of the “divine mission” of the Resistance. In fact, it can be said symbolically to grant this authority not just to one neorealist filmmaker but to an entire generation of artists – several of whom appeared in Vergano’s film  – whose s­elf-appointed task was to transcend the limitations of individualist expression in order collectively to create a powerful “new culture” that could, in Vittorini’s terms, become a “transformative influence on mankind.” In its chorality, therefore, Il sole sorge ancora can indeed be said to offer what Miccichè called an “implicit answer [...] to Vittorini’s question,” but to do so in the service of something both more ambitious and more contentious than “an ethics of aesthetics.” Like many other neorealist texts, it expressed a profound faith in the power of culture to redeem society, a faith that was frequently communicated in Christian terms – Vergano’s film, for instance, was dedicated “ai caduti per la resurre­zione della Patria [to those who gave their lives for the resurrection of the Fatherland]” – but one whose vision of redemption was grounded in physical struggle rather than metaphysical transcendence. Culture’s role in that struggle was not just to furnish what Vittorini had compulsorily dismissed as “principles and values,” what Alfonso Gatto had similarly called “equivocal private morals.” Instead it was impelled to take on renewed authority – personal and political, material and spiritual – justified through a rhetorical rejection of intellectual privilege and a

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choral assumption of the popular will, in order to remake the very structures of post-war society. To the extent that they took up this project, the artists and intellectuals of the age of neorealism were driven by their profound faith in the politically transformative and socially redemptive power of cultural expression. Current conventions, focused on the sincerity of neorealism’s ethics or the efficacy of its politics, significantly understate the faith that animated its professed ambition to remake Italy. As we have seen in the course of this study, neorealism entailed an unprecedented effort to represent the whole of reality, to encompass in its entirety the truth of human experience. It inspired a messianic endeavour to save Italian society from the crises of Fascism and war, confessing and atoning for past iniquities while at the same time presaging an impending national redemption. It sought to bind the concrete facts of individual reality to the universality of collective history, recognizing the distinctiveness of personal struggles while also situating them within the unfolding narrative of the community. And it sought to appropriate the cultural authority to sanctify that narrative, raiding the storehouse of Christian symbolism in order to represent the immanent salvation of the Italian polis. More than an ethical agenda, this was a resolutely eschatological program, and it imparted a messianic spirit both to the cultural foundations and to the political ambitions of the neorealist conversation.

Conclusion

By 1949, the neorealist conversation was coming to a close. At least, that was how the situation appeared to the editorialists at the Italian film journal Bianco e nero, who in December of that year predicted that “la discussione sul neorealismo è probabilmente giunta ad una fase decisiva e conclusiva [the discussion of neorealism has probably reached its decisive and conclusive phase].”1 By most measures, this historical prognostication would appear to have been spectacularly wrong-headed. Discussions about neorealism did not cease after 1949; if anything, they grew more insistent. That year saw the publication of the first major monograph to address Italy’s post-war cinema comprehensively, Vittorio Calvino’s Guida al cinema, which carried a preface by Vittorio De Sica, and which announced the arrival of “una nuova tendenza artistica che prese il nome di ‘neo-realismo’ e che oggi è considerata la tendenza caratteristica del cinema italiano [a  new artistic tendency that took the name ‘­neo-realism’ and that today is considered the characteristic tendency of Italian cinema].”2 The following year, Anna Banti would compose her study “Neorealismo nel cinema italiano” (Neorealism in Italian cinema); Luigi Chiarini would deliver his “Discorso sul neorealismo” (Discourse on neorealism); Carlo Bo would begin conducting his Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Investigation of neorealism); and Bianco e nero, the same journal that had predicted an end to discussions of neorealism, would publish Franco Venturini’s essay “Origini del neorealismo” (The origins of neorealism).3 The five years to follow would see major new studies of neorealism by Alessandro Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi, Massimo Mida, Elia Santoro, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Gromo, Giulio Cesare Castello, and Brunello Rondi.4 This is to say nothing of the ever-expanding and increasingly influential discussions of neorealism beyond Italy: in Hollywood and Moscow; in Havana, Buenos Aires, and São Paolo; in Algiers, Rabat, and Dakar; in

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Beijing, Tehran, and Mumbai; in Berlin, Madrid, and Paris. The intensity and authority of the conversations that took place in the first and last of these cinematic capitals led critics in Italy to assume, as early as 1948, that their foreign counterparts, French and American in particular, had themselves invented Italian neorealism through their rapturous reception of Italian films, a myth that persists to the present day.5 In truth, international audiences and critics did not independently invent Italian neorealism. They did, however, ensure its lasting prestige on a global stage. Venerated both at home and abroad, neorealism has continued to attract attention worldwide for the last sixty years. It has attracted so much attention, in fact, that leading film scholars have found it necessary to call for “a moratorium on the mention of neorealism” in order to encourage the field of Italian film studies “to talk about something else.”6 Despite that moratorium, the sheer mass of scholarship on neorealism has only increased in recent years, and has increased still further with the publication of this volume. The very study you are reading, then, may be taken by some as an additional sign that the 1949 editorial in Bianco e nero was mistaken in its prediction of an impending end to the neorealist conversation. From another perspective, however, it may also be seen to provide evidence in support of that prediction. I have argued for an interpretation of neorealism as an all-embracing cultural conversation, one in which contrasting, and at times opposing, positions came up for discussion and debate. As we have seen, that conversation was beginning to change considerably by 1949, when Cesare Zavattini, just one year removed from Ladri di biciclette, came out strongly against the critical “honours, which involuntarily limit [Italian cinema’s] horizons with the definition of neorealism.”7 Zavattini was reacting to a distinct shift in the discourse. A neorealist orthodoxy was beginning to take hold; difference was being driven out. Perceptively picking up on the same conceptual rigidification, the editorialists at Bianco e nero recognized, correctly, that an end to the conversation was in sight. Conversations about neorealism would continue after 1949, of course, and continue to the present day. The neorealist conversation, however, had reached its conclusion. It is the difference between expressions of and assertions about neorealism, between approaching neorealism as a field of discussion and invoking neorealism as a standard of judgment.8 No longer an open question, neorealism became a fixed paradigm. It was possible to push that paradigm to its critical conclusion in order to pass “dal neorealismo al realismo [from neorealism to realism],” as Guido Aristarco advocated for Italian cinema and Carlo Salinari for Italian literature.9 It was possible, as well, to adapt the paradigm to



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the norms of genre cinema in order to produce new, hybrid forms  – ­neorealist romance (neorealismo rosa); neorealist noir (neorealismo nero); and neorealist mysteries (neorealismo giallo) – as Renato Castellani, Luigi Comencini, and many other directors sought to do throughout the 1950s.10 Either possibility, however, would invariably be classified as a departure from neorealist orthodoxy by a critical establishment which insisted on increasingly restrictive conceptual boundaries. Neorealism could either be adopted or opposed; it could not be altered. Innovations were dismissed as deviations. The point was no longer to advance the discourse of the neorealist conversation; it was to define the connotations of the neorealist legacy. As a result, neorealism became static, circumscribed, conventional. It was fixed and thus it was finished. By 1951, Giuseppe De Santis asked in the pages of the journal Filmcritica: “È in crisi il neorealismo?” (Is neorealism in crisis?). In the next issue of the same journal, Luigi Chiarini replied: “La crisi c’è” (There is a crisis).11 The crisis of neorealism did not go unopposed. Yet the resultant “battaglia per il neorealismo [battle for neorealism],” which sought to revive the neorealist legacy, served largely to monumentalize and thus further entomb the movement it claimed to advocate.12 This unintended consequence is perhaps most evident in the fight to protect neorealism’s funding from the manoeuvrings of Giulio Andreotti, who justified his efforts to shift Italian government support away from neorealism in large measure as an attempt to protect Italy’s “dignità nazionale [national dignity].”13 Mounting a counter-offensive, prominent figures in the Italian film industry created the Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano (Movement for the defence of Italian cinema), whose 1948 manifesto promoted Italian neorealism’s growing international prestige as evidence of its significant contribution to the national cause.14 Neorealism was not just good cinema, they insisted; it was good for Italy. Andreotti effectively argued the opposite. The terms of the conflict were thus set. They would become still more starkly delineated one year later with the passage of the so-called Andreotti Law, which served, as we have seen, further to hamstring neorealism financially. Opposition to this law and to the cinematic trends it would set in motion led neorealism’s proponents to adopt an ever-more inflated rhetoric. Witness Cesare Zavattini’s 1953 “Tesi sul neorealismo” (Theses on neorealism), with which the screenwriter sought to rally artists and intellectuals to his cause, declaring that “il neorealismo è oggi la nostra sola bandiera [today neorealism is our only flag].”15 This was a far cry from Zavattini’s position of 1949, when he had decried the limitations of the neorealist orthodoxy. What had formerly appeared to be boundaries to his creativity now seemed to be borders to protect. The implications were clear: neorealism was no

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longer expanding its frontier; now it was trying to defend its territory. As a result, Zavattini’s call to the ramparts attracted many adherents, including the editorialists at Cinema Nuovo, who took up his position with ­particular zeal. “‘Il neorealismo è la nostra bandiera,’ ha detto Zavattini. Noi vorremmo dire qualcosa di più: il neorealismo è l’Italia nella sua espressione più viva, più profonda, più umana, più antica e insieme contemporanea [‘Neorealism is our flag,’ Zavattini said. We wish to say something more: neorealism is Italy in its most vital, most profound, most human, most ancient and at the same time most contemporary expression].”16 By that measure, the neorealist flag was akin to the Italian flag and the fight for neorealism a matter of national defence. Against Andreotti, who presented himself as the defender of Italian dignity, neorealism came to be championed as a cultural patrimony that embodied Italy’s true identity.17 Neorealism had been transformed into a kind of national mythology. For many, it remains so today. Discussions of neorealism thus inevitably take on a symbolic weight that far exceeds the cinematic or critical context in which they appear to be situated. With great frequency, the films of the neorealist canon are said not only to portray but also to embody Italy’s anti-Fascist struggle and its post-war recovery, appearing to many, as Paolo Noto and Francesco Pitassio polemically suggest, to provide “l’emblema più efficace e sintetico della volontà di rinascita e riscatto nazionali [the most effective single emblem of the will for national rebirth and redemption].”18 However extravagant, this honour, this burden, continues to be conferred in a scholarly as well a popular context. Argues one recent critic, “il neorealismo è la storia: [...] è la Resistenza, è il dopoguerra, è la Ricostruzione [neorealism is history: (...) it is the Resistance, it is the post-war period, it is the Reconstruction].”19 “Italian neo-realist films [...] seem to contain something of a country’s ‘being and fate,’” maintains another.20 It has been apparent for decades, in fact, that when neorealism comes up for debate, what is being defended or derided is not just a filmmaking style but a historical moment, a political ideology, a foundational myth. Indeed, as Giovanni Falaschi has persuasively argued, it is neorealism’s extra-textual resonances, its political rather than its poetic entailments, that ensure its enduring legacy. Without denying its formal or thematic innovations, Falaschi insisted that se nel neorealismo si fosse vista solo l’attività artistica o letteraria o cinematografica, si sarebbe scritto di meno. Invece i critici se ne sono occupati così diffusamente perché vi hanno visto ciò che il neorealismo effettivamente conteneva, cioè una grande importanza politico-sociale e ideologica: discutere del neorealismo ha significato dunque discutere sul nodo storico



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più importante dell’Italia contemporanea, il passaggio dal fascismo all’attuale forma statale democratico-borghese.21 if neorealism had only been recognized as an artistic, literary, or cinematic activity, it would have been written about less. Instead, the critics have devoted so much attention to it because they have recognized what neorealism effectively comprised: that is, something of great socio-political and ideological importance. To discuss neorealism has therefore meant discussing the most important historical crux of contemporary Italy, the passage from Fascism to the current bourgeois-democratic form of government.

As well as a perceptive description of the scholarly consensus, Falaschi thus offered, perhaps unwittingly, an accurate diagnosis of the limitations and distortions of what has been called the “institution of neorealism.”22 Invariably transformed by the ideological connotations with which it is endowed, neorealism has become a fixed historical signifier, ensuring its cultural importance but also constraining its potential significance. “In the Name of Italian Neorealism” Put simply, the conversation about neorealism has all too often become a conversation about something else entirely. In filmmaking terms, neorealism has tended to function as a MacGuffin: instead of being considered on its own terms, it becomes a mere plot device in an unfolding narrative of Italian political history, for instance, or the desired object in ­teleological accounts of the history of world cinema. In this latter form, neorealism is usually made to represent the ideal of artistic independence, a virtuous alternative to the hegemony of a supposedly venal and corrupt Hollywood. For filmmakers in Cuba, Argentina, India, and beyond, Italian neorealism has often functioned as a model for a national cinema capable of resisting Hollywood’s imperial influence.23 There is something to this story. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, American business interests flooded the Italian market with more than six hundred Hollywood films.24 Despite this inundation, which represented a real threat to an Italian film industry still reeling from the war, filmmakers like De Sica and Rossellini succeeded in creating a handful of films that gained immediate recognition worldwide, and in which critics have often located a successful exemplar of resistance to Hollywood, a “cinema of contestation.”25 Here, the archetypal and oft-cited example is Vittorio De Sica’s hard bargaining with the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who had offered to finance Ladri di biciclette on the condition that Cary Grant

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star in the role of Antonio Ricci, an offer De Sica flatly refused. In most accounts, this refusal is reported as a testament to De Sica’s principled allegiance to neorealism, especially in light of his subsequent decision to cast the unknown Roman factory worker Lamberto Maggiorani instead of Grant, a bankable commodity, as the lead in his film.26 Such accounts miss the mark, however, insofar as they ignore De Sica’s counter-offer, in which, as the director recounted in an interview at the time, he had asked Selznick for permission to cast Henry Fonda, AcademyAward–nominated star of John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, settling on Maggiorani for the role of Ricci only after Selznick had turned down this request.27 De Sica’s bargain was thus far from the blanket opposition to Hollywood influence that many would wish to make it out to be. Indeed, not only De Sica’s film but all of neorealism may better be understood as engaging in a productive dialogue with the cinema of Hollywood.28 Yet many of neorealism’s supposed champions drown out this dialogue in their rush to conscript the movement in a revanchist battle not only against Hollywood but against popular culture tout court.29 In Italy in particular, veneration of neorealism has often accompanied a severe critique of the alleged depravities of contemporary culture. To cite one representative instance, in his introduction to Camillo Marino’s 1984 study Estetica politica e sociale del neorealismo (Political and social aesthetics of neorealism), the art historian and critic Luigi Serravalli lambasted the “cretinizzazione dell’intero popolo italiano [cretinization of the entire Italian populace]” in order to dramatize his claim that un paese così ha il bisogno supremo di superstiti come Camillo Marino, in nome del Neorealismo italiano che (qualunque cosa esso sia stato) può ­essere letto, proprio oggi, come un diaframma potente e cosciente contro la barbarie e la diseducazione, lo sfruttamento e l’analfabetismo di ritorno.30 a country in this situation profoundly needs survivors like Camillo Marino, to speak in the name of Italian neorealism, which (whatever it might have been) can be understood, even today, as a powerful and conscious barrier against barbarism and miseducation, exploitation and rising illiteracy.

For a certain kind of cinephile, it would seem, whatever ails Italy, neorealism is the remedy. Those less convinced of this analysis may question whether the proposed cure is in any way adequate to the diagnosed disease; they may be inspired, as well, to cast a sceptical eye towards the diagnosis itself. Some scepticism should likewise be extended to the repeated clamouring for a neo-neorealism, a renewal of Italian cinema and literature



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to be achieved through the conscious reclamation of post-war cultural archetypes, a project whose adherents in the critical establishment and popular press have exerted significant influence for at least the last thirty years. In effect, a handful of recent films – Ricordati di me (Gabriele Muccino 2003); Certi bambini (Antonio and Andrea Frazzi, 2004); Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005); Centochiodi (Ermanno Olmi, 2007); Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008); Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008); L’uomo che verrà (Giorgio Diritti, 2009) – have been seized upon by critics as evidence of a supposed revival of neorealist glory. Some of these films may indeed have borrowed from their neorealist predecessors and may therefore benefit from comparative analysis. Yet this need not lend any credence to the questionable claim that the innovations of contemporary Italian cinema must necessarily echo those introduced by filmmakers seventy years ago or that, as a recent introduction to the topic put it, “in order to re-invent and regenerate itself Italian cinema had to take a step back and return to la via maestra, that of neorealism.”31 Invoked in this way, neorealism appears to be little more than a brand identity, used to sell new products by drawing on a half-remembered sense of Italian cinema’s past greatness and a superficial lamentation for Italy’s faded virtue.32 In their search for the MacGuffin, some seem to have lost the plot. Others seem to have fashioned neorealism into an idol. As early as 1968, in fact, Gian Carlo Ferretti had reason to lament that the tendentious defence of the neorealist legacy “ha finito [...] per tradursi [...] in una sorta di ‘beatificazione’ del neorealismo [wound up (...) ­becoming (...) a kind of ‘beatification’ of neorealism].”33 Ferretti’s choice of words is notable, signalling a rather stunning transference. Neorealism, Ferretti was saying, had become an object rather than an expression of devout faith. Revered, idealized, sanctified, it had been invested with a notional power that significantly outstripped its already substantial artistic influence. In the critical imagination, then, neorealism would seem itself to have become something of “un oggetto di culto [an object of worship].”34 As Stefania Parigi aptly puts it, “una lunga serie di narrazioni [...] hanno finito per conferire un’aura sacrale e monumentale a quell’antica stagione del cinema italiano [a lengthy series of narratives (...) has wound up granting a sacred and monumental aura to that long-ago period of Italian cinema].”35 From Tullio Kezich’s call for a return to the “sacro fuoco neorealista [sacred neorealist flame]” to Carlo Lizzani’s attempt to deliver his self-described “decalogo neorealista [neorealist decalogue]” to Lino Micciché’s invocation of neorealism’s “sacri patres De Sica Rossellini Visconti,” in fact, there is a distinctly evangelical tenor to more than a few neorealist apologies.36 One need not question neorealism’s

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Italian Neorealism

historical importance or its cultural significance in order to find all this more than a little problematic. The ostensible incarnation of post-war Italian history, the manufactured archetype of anti-Hollywood cinema, the ersatz deity of an enduring aesthetic creed, neorealism seems to permeate the critical consciousness in ways that all too often obscure its cultural complexities. Neorealism Now Before the alleged revitalization of the neorealist legacy in the new millennium, before the academic instauration of the neorealist canon in the 1980s and 1990s, before the ideological re-evaluation of the neorealist project in the 1960s and 1970s, before the political contestation over the neorealist crisis in the 1950s, the cultural contours of Italian neorealism assumed an altogether different shape. Neither the stronghold guarded by its traditionalist defenders nor the impediment assailed by its iconoclastic critics, neorealism emerged in Italy as a creative exchange between artists and intellectuals who espoused dissimilar views, worked in disparate media, and pursued diverse goals. The common adoption of the term neorealism to characterize this exchange served for a time to reveal the substantial unity underlying the period’s creative diversity and artistic hybridity – a unity that the present study has sought to recover. To that end, my analysis has been guided by an understanding of neorealism as a cultural conversation, a coherent field of discourse in which discussion and debate worked to shift the confines of creativity and to revise the terms of artistic expression. It has been guided, as well, by the awareness that those terms must invariably exceed the limits of this or any study, constrained to illustrate by example, to offer summaries or samples in place of the totality of a historical culture. It is my hope, therefore, that others will continue the discussion, corroborating or complicating the claims I have put forward after considering some of the many contributions I have had to leave aside. My study is far from exhaustive; that was never my aim. I have sought only to make it easier to listen attentively, perceptively, to a conversation that has all too often been distorted by history, by mythology, and by ideology. I cannot help but believe that Italian neorealism still has much left to say.

Notes

Introduction 1 See, for instance, Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), xvii; Gian Piero Brunetta, “Cinema italiano dal neorealismo alla ‘Dolce vita,’” in Storia del cinema ­mondiale, vol. 3, tome 1, L’Europa: Le cinematografie nazionali, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 583–612 (593); Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 402–5. 2 See, for instance, Luciano Caramel, “La questione del realismo e i realismi nella pittura e nella scultura del secondo dopoguerra,” in Realismi: Arti figurative, letteratura e cinema in Italia dal 1943 al 1953, ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Electa, 2001), 22–35; Emanuela Garrone, Realismo neorealismo e altre storie (Milan and Udine: Mimesi Edizioni, 2015); Antonella Russo, Storia culturale della fotografia ita­­liana: Dal neorealismo al postmoderno (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 9–10; Barbara Grespi, “Italian Neo-Realism between Cinema and Photography,” in Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity, ed. Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 183–216. 3 See, for instance, Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani, “The Myth of Reality: Notes on Neorealism in Italy 1946–1956,” in Architecture and Arts 1990/2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design, Cinema, Painting, Sculpture, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Skira, 2004), 75–9; Enrico Bascherini, Da pagano al neorealismo: Le radici minori dell’architettura moderna (Patti Messina: Casa Editrice Kimerik, 2013); Maristella Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentations in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 25–53; David Escudero, “Beyond Filmmaking: Searching for a Neorealist

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Notes to pages 3–4

Architecture in Italy, 194X–195X,” The Journal of Architecture 24, no. 4 (2019): 441–68; Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London and New York): Wallflower, 2006), 73–9. 4 On neorealism in music, see Ben Earle, “‘In onore della Resistenza’: Mario Zafred and Symphonic Neorealism,” in Red Strains: Music and Communism outside the Communist Bloc, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 149–71; Fernando Ludovico Lunghi, “La musica e il neo-realismo,” in La musica nel film (Rome: Bianco e nero editore, 1950), 56–60. On the importance of neorealism in literature, see, for instance, Walter Siti, Il ­neorealismo nella poesia ita­­liana, 1941–1956 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 265; Alberto Cadioli, L’industria del romanzo. L’editoria letteraria in Italia dal 1945 agli anni ottanta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981), 27; Vittorio Spinazzola, L’egemonia del romanzo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2007), 17. 5 Two recent essay collections have investigated the breadth of neorealism’s international influence. See Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, eds., Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012); Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, eds., Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). 6 Vittorio De Sica, “Gli anni più belli della mia vita.” Originally in Tempo 16, no. 50 (16 Dec. 1954), now in Vittorio De Sica, ed. Orio Caldiron (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1975), 275–81 (278). All translations from the Italian are my own unless otherwise indicated. 7 In order, these quotations are taken from Franco Vigni, Le città visibili: Lo spazio urbano nel cinema del neorealismo (1945–1953) (Florence: Aska edizioni, 2017), 13; Pio Rasulo, La poetica del Neorealismo (Taranto: Edizioni Nuove proposte, 1987), 47; Giovanni Falaschi, “Negli anni del neorealismo,” in Italo Calvino: Atti del Convegno internazionale (Firenze, Palazzo Medici-Riccardi 26–28 febbraio 1987), ed. Giovanni Falaschi (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), 113–40 (114); Giorgio Nisini, Il neorealismo italiano: Scritture, imma­ gini, società (Rome: Giulio Perrone, 2012), 12. 8 This is a critical commonplace. See Giorgio Tinazzi, “Il primo neorealismo e Rossellini,” in Storia del cinema: Dall’affermazione del sonoro al neorealismo, ed. Adelio Ferrero (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1978), 125–33 (126); Bruno Falcetto, Storia della narrativa neorealista (Milan: Mursia, 1992), 8; Guido Oldrini, Il cinema nella cultura del Novecento: Mappa di una sua storia critica (Florence: Casa editrice Le Lettere, 2006), 294. 9 Again, a commonplace, repeated for decades in virtually every study of neorealism at least since Franco Venturini, “Origini del neorealismo,” Bianco e nero 11, no. 2 (Feb. 1950): 31–54 (49). See, for instance, Giovanni Falaschi, Realtà e retorica: La letteratura del neorealismo italiano (Messina and Florence: G. D’Anna, 1977), 55; Adelaide Sozzi Casanova, Neorealismo



Notes to page 4

10

11 12

13 14

15

16

17

18

181

e neorealisti (Milan: Cooperativa Libraria IULM, 1980), 30; Tommaso Pomilio, Dentro il quadrante: Forme di visione nel tempo del neorealismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 2012), 16–17. Ruggero Eugeni, “Quattro cose che so di lui: Neorealismo e identità del cinema italiano,” in Incontro al neorealismo: Luoghi e visioni di un cinema pensato al presente, ed. Luca Venzi (Rome: Edizioni Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo, 2007), 135–45 (139). Alfonso Canziani, Gli anni del neorealismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977), 15. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91; Pietro Pintus, Storia e film: Trent’anni di cinema italiano (1945–1975) (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1980), 21. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies, 1939–1990 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 117. Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni, A History of Italian Cinema (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 67; Torunn Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 24; Angelo Festa, Il neorealismo nel cinema italiano (Manocalzati: Edizioni Il Papavero, 2013), 17. Alberto Asor Rosa, “Lo Stato democratico e i partiti politici,” in Letteratura ita­­liana, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 549–643 (570); Mary P. Wood, Italian Cinema (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 86; Gaspare De Caro, Rifondare gli italiani? Il cinema del neorealismo (Milan: Jaca Book, 2014), 27. Falaschi, Realtà e retorica, 55; Cristina Benussi, L’età del neorealismo (Palermo: Palumbo Editore, 1980), 156; Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema ita­ liano: Dal neorealismo al miracolo economico 1945–1959 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993), 407; Guglielmo Moneti, Neorealismo fra tradizione e rivoluzione: Visconti, De Sica e Zavattini verso nuove esperienze cinematografiche della realtà (Siena: Nuova Immagine Editrice, 1999), 60. Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 85; Lucia Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 14; Angelo Porcaro, Aspetti critici e letterari della narrativa del neorealismo italiano (Pozzuoli: Boopen, 2011), 3. Romano Luperini, “Riflettendo sulle date: alcuni appunti sul neorealismo in letteratura,” in Les réalismes dans les années 1940: Italie, France, ed. Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky and Tiphaine Samoyault (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2001), 81–91 (91); Paolo Noto and Francesco Pitassio, Il cinema neorealista (Bologna: Archetipolibri, 2010), 52–3; Elena Candela, Neorealismo: Problemi e crisi (Naples: L’Orientale Editrice, 2003), 33–4; Bruna D’Ettore, Il neorealismo: pittura e cinema: Origini e fortuna di una stagione artistica (1930–1954) (Treviso: Canova Edizioni, 2014).

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Notes to pages 4–6

19 Even in an introduction to a volume jointly exploring neorealist literature and cinema, for instance, Tinazzi stressed what he called “il tenue rapporto tra letteratura e cinema negli anni del neorealismo [the tenuous relationship between literature and cinema in the age of neorealism].” Giorgio Tinazzi, “Un rapporto complesso,” in Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, ed. Giorgio Tinazzi and Marina Zancan (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1990), 11–37 (12). 20 The emblematic case is the debate surrounding Corti’s influential account of neorealist literature, which insists on definitions and distinctions that are said by Corti’s critics to exclude all the major writers of the post-war period. See Maria Corti, Il viaggio testuale (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 25–110. For the criticism of Corti’s account, see Asor Rosa, “Lo Stato democratico,” 570–2. 21 De Sica, “Gli anni più belli della mia vita,” 278. 22 This argument was first advanced by Pietrangeli, who wrote in 1948 that, “parlando di realismo o neorealismo cinematografico vorremo soltanto significare un clima comune, imposto alle coscienze da problemi umani oggettivi e reali, mutevoli attraverso le contingenze storiche [speaking of realism or cinematic neorealism, we wish merely to indicate a common climate, imposed on our consciousness by objective and real human problems, which change according to historical contingencies].” Antonio Pietrangeli, “Panoramique sur le cinéma italien,” originally published in La Revue du Cinéma (May 1948); republished in Panoramica sul cinema ita­ liano (Florence: Società Editrice “Il Ponte Vecchio,” 1995), 18. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, “Cognitive Styles in Comparative Literature,” in Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, ed. Michael F.D. Young (London: Collier-Macmillan Publishers), 1971), 189–207 (191). 24 Kezich’s comments appear in Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI 1944–1958 (Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza, 1979), 211. 25 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Cinema italiano 1945–1951 (il dopoguerra),” in Il neorealismo italiano: Documentazioni. Quaderni della mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia (Rome: Poligrafica Commerciale, 1951), 9–26 (9); Italo Calvino, “Prefazione 1964 al Sentiero dei nidi di ragno,” in Romanzi e ­racconti, by Italo Calvino, ed. Claudio Milanini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), I: 1185–204 (1187); Italo Calvino, preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Martin McLaughlin (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 7–30 (10). 26 Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 26. See, too, Filippo Maria De Sanctis, “Relazione,” in Il cinema italiano dal fascismo all’antifascismo Atti del seminario organizzato a Roma nei giorni 15 febbraio–18 marzo 1964 dal Circolo “Charlie Chaplin” e della Biblioteca del cinema “U. Barbaro,” ed. Giorgio Tinazzi (Modena and Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1966), 168–79 (179); Ennio Di Nolfo, “Intimations of Neorealism in the Fascist Ventennio,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington and



Notes to pages 6–9

27

28

29

30

31

32 33

34

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Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 83–104 (87–8); Stuart Klawans, “Nothing but the Truth? Revisiting Italian Neorealism’s StillDecisive Moment,” Film Comment 45, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 2009): 48–53 (49). Leonardo Quaresima, “Neorealismo senza,” in Il neorealismo nel fascismo: Giuseppe De Santis e la critica cinematografica 1941–1943, ed. Mariella Furno and Renzo Renzi (Bologna: Edizioni della Tipografia Compositori, 1984), 64–73 (66). For the former claim, see Alexander García Düttmann, Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10; for the latter, see Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 3rd ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 2008), 26. For the former claim, see Carlo Tagliabue, “Premessa,” in La terra trema: Un film di Luchino Visconti dal romanzo I Malavoglia di Giovanni Verga, ed. Sebastiano Gesù (Lipari: Edizioni del Centro Studi, 2006), 11–12 (11); for the latter, see Gianni Rondolino, Storia del cinema, rev. ed. (Turin: UTET, 2000), 382. For the former claim, see Massimo Mida, Roberto Rossellini (Parma: Guanda, 1953), 27; for the latter, see Sidney Gottlieb, “Rossellini, Open City, and Neorealism,” in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–42. Some, for example, would confine neorealism exclusively to critical discourse, others exclusively to creative expression. For an example of the former, see Sergio Antonielli, Letteratura del disagio (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1984), 126. For an example of the latter, see Adriano Aprà, “Capolavori di massa,” in Neorealismo d’appendice. Per un dibattito sul cinema popolare: Il caso Matarazzo, ed. Adriano Aprà and Claudio Carabba (Rimini and Florence: Guaraldi Editore, 1976), 9–36 (9). Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 165–6. On neorealist “contamination,” see Giuliana Minghelli, “Neorealismo: Anacronismo/Avanguardia,” in Ripensare il neorealismo: Cinema, letteratura, mondo, ed. Antonio Vitti (Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2008), 197–221 (197–9); Alessia Ricciardi, “Neorealism,” in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2007), II: 1283–6 (1283); Stefania Parigi, “Le carte d’identità del neorealismo,” in Nuovo cinema (1965–2005): Scritti in onore di Lino Miccichè, ed. Bruno Torri (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2005), 80–102 (81); Paolo Baldan, Per una lettura del Neorealismo (Venice: La Baùta Edizioni, 1995), 113. In order, these quotations are taken from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Cinema nuovo and Neo-Realism,” Screen 17, no. 4 (1977): 111–17 (111); Camilla Colaprete, Carlo Marletti, Giuliano Rossi, and Massimo Vannucchi, “Tra critica e teoria: Alcune aporie del discorso neorealista,” in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, ed. Lino Miccichè (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1999),

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35 36 37 38

39

Notes to pages 9–15 183–91 (183); Giuliano Manacorda, Storia della letteratura ita­­liana contemporanea 1940–1965 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967), 29. Alberto Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” in Neorealismo: Cinema italiano, 1945–1949, ed. Alberto Farassino (Turin: EDT, 1989), 21–36 (28). Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” 27. Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” 34. In order, these quotations are taken from Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” 28; Gian Carlo Ferretti, La letteratura del rifiuto e altri scritti sulla crisi e trasformazione dei ruoli intellettuali, 2nd ed. (expanded) (Milan: Mursia, 1981 [1968]), 21; Ernesto G. Laura, “Alla scoperta dell’Italia della scienza e dell’arte,” Cinema 7, no. 128 (28 Feb. 1954): 114; Niccolò Gallo, “La narrativa ita­­liana del dopoguerra,” originally published in Società 6, no. 2 (1950), republished in Scritti letterari, ed. Ottavio Cecchi, Cesare Garboli, and Gian Carlo Roschioni (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1975), 29–47 (36). See, too, Piero Raffa, “Per una definizione rigorosa del ‘neorealismo’ cine­­­ matografico,” Nuova corrente 9–10 (1958): 25–38 (esp. 27–30). On Vivere in pace, see Lino Miccichè, “Per una verifica del neorealismo,” in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, ed. Lino Miccichè (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1999), 7–28 (8). On Jovine, see Francesco Jovine, “Aspetti del neo-realismo,” originally published as “Divagazioni letterari” in I diritti della scuola 1 (23 Sept. 1934), republished in Scritti critici, ed. Patrizia Guida (Lecce: Edizioni Milella, 2004), 189–91 (189); Arnaldo Bocelli, “Morte e resurrezione del personaggio,” Mercurio 2, no. 6 (Feb. 1945): 141–5. 1. What Was Neorealism?

1 Lino Miccichè, Visconti e il neorealismo: Ossessione, La terra trema, Bellissima (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1990), 175–6. See, too, Giuseppe Ferrara, “Visconti e il neorealismo italiano,” in L’opera di Luchino Visconti: Atti del convegno di studi Fiesole 27–29 giugno 1966, ed. Mario Sperenzi (Florence: Alviero Linari, 1969), 138–67 (160). 2 Luchino Visconti, La terra trema, transcription by Enzo Ungari (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1977), 22–3. 3 Guglielmo Moneti, “La messa in scena del pensiero,” in La terra trema: Analisi di un capolavoro, ed. Lino Micciché (Turin: Lindau, 1994), 63–97 (64); Luciano De Giusti, I film di Luchino Visconti (Rome: Gremese Editore, 1985), 43. 4 Luchino Visconti, “Sul modo di mettere in scena una commedia di Shakespeare,” originally published in Rinascita (Dec. 1948), republished in Il mio teatro, vol. 1, 1936–1953, ed. Caterina d’Amico de Carvalho and Renzo Renzi (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1979), 134–8 (134). 5 Paolo Gobetti, “Insegnamenti del Festival di Venezia: Dal documentario al ‘soggetto’ ricetta del neorealismo cinematografico,” originally published



Notes to pages 15–19

185

in L’Unità (11 Sept. 1948), reprinted in Neorealismo D.O.C., ed. Paolo Gobetti et al. (Turin: Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza, 1995), 181–2. 6 These quotations are taken, in order, from Walter Mauro, “Linguaggio filmico e linguaggio letterario nel neorealismo italiano,” in Il neorealismo nella letteratura e nel cinema italiano, ed. Rosa Brambilla (Assisi: Biblioteca Pro Civitate Christiana, 1987), 35–50 (44); Adelio Ferrero, “La parabola di Visconti,” in Storia del cinema: Dall’affermazione del sonoro al neorealismo, ed. Adelio Ferrero (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1978), 167–84 (168); Tagliabue, “Premessa,” in La terra trema, 11; Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, 112; Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 69–70. 7 Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 14. 8 Carlo Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Turin: ERI, 1951), 31–2. 9 The temporal category invoked here is that outlined in F.W.J. Hemmings and Giovanni Carsaniga, The Age of Realism (Hammondworth: Penguin Books), 1974. 10 Jules Hûret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, ed. Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1999 [1st ed. 1891]), 221–78. 11 See Carlo Bo, “Primo viene il film,” originally published in Cinema Nuovo 2, no. 2 (1 Jan. 1953), reprinted in Antologia di Cinema Nuovo 1952–1958: Dalla critica cinematografica alla dialettica culturale, vol. 1, Neorealismo e vita nazionale (Rimini and Florence: Guaraldi Editore, 1975), 262–4 (262); Giuseppe Ferrara, Il nuovo cinema italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957), 94–5n1. 12 Ettore Lo Gatto, Letteratura soviettista (Rome: Istituto per l’Europa Orientale, 1928), 12. The term “neorealismo” seems first to have emerged around 1915 in Italy, where it was used to refer to American philosophical New Realism, but these early uses appear distinct from and unrelated to the literary, artistic, and cinematic uses of the term that would soon follow. On what might be considered the semantic prehistory of neorealism, see Sergio Raffaelli, “Neorealismo,” Lingua nostra 71, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2010): 18–19. 13 Julius Evola, “Americanismo e bolscevismo,” Nuova Antologia 1371 (1 May 1929): 110–28 (125); Libero Solaroli, “Il nostro referendum: esterni dal vero o esterni in studio,” Cinematografo 12 (8 June 1929): 14; Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “Sistemazione delle teorie scenotecniche,” Il Regime Fascista (10 Aug. 1932): 3; Giovanni Titta Rosa, “Indifferenza,” La Stampa (15 Nov. 1930): 3. In compiling this account, I have drawn on Nisini, Il neorealismo italiano, 28–9; and Stefania Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2014), 21. 14 On Barbaro’s importance for the pre-war history of neorealism, see Gian Piero Brunetta, Umberto Barbaro e l’idea di neorealismo (1930–1943 ) (Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1969).

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Notes to pages 19–21

15 Umberto Barbaro, “Letteratura russa a volo d’uccello (II),” L’Italia lette­ raria 6 (9 Nov. 1930). This essay, the second in a five-part series published between November 1930 and February 1931, was reprinted in its entirety in Neorealismo e realismo, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta, 2 vols. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976), I: 99–118 (108). 16 For the relationship of this tendency to Italian neorealism, see L. Mario Rubino, “La Neue Sachlichkeit e il romanzo italiano degli anni Trenta,” in Gli intellettuali italiani e l’Europa (1903–1956), ed. Franco Petroni and Massimiliano Tortora (Lecce: Piero Manni, 2007), 235–74 (esp. 250). 17 Giovanni Necco, “Espressionismo e neorealismo [1933],” in Realismo e idealismo nella letteratura tedesca moderna: Caratteristiche e saggi da Goethe a Carossa (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1937), 166–200 (185). 18 Umberto Barbaro, “Alessandro Neverov,” originally published in L’Italia letteraria 7 (11 Oct. 1931), reprinted in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 1, 119–21. 19 Umberto Barbaro, preface to Il soggetto cinematografico, by V. Pudovkin (Rome: Edizioni d’Italia, 1932), quoted in Gian Piero Brunetta, Intellettuali cinema e propaganda tra le due guerre (Bologna: Pàtron, 1972), 133. 20 Arnaldo Bocelli, “Scrittori d’oggi,” Nuova antologia 7, no. 280 (Dec. 1931). Bocelli’s account is quoted in Brunetta, introduction to Neorealismo e rea­­ lismo, 32–3. See, too, Bocelli’s comments about “quegli scrittori, in massima parte giovanissimi, che si sogliono definire ‘neorealisti’ [those writers, for the most part very young, who are usually called ‘neorealists’]” in Almanacco letterario Bompiani (1932), which are quoted and discussed in Cesare De Michelis, “Vittorini e l’affermazione del primato della poesia,” Angelus novus 20 (1971): 1–39 (6n17). 21 “Neorealismo,” L’Ambrosiano, 27 July 1931, 1. This account is quoted in Brunetta, Intellettuali cinema e propaganda tra le due guerre, 134–5. Moravia himself seems to have been unhappy with this designation; a critic at the time, summarizing the author’s comments in an interview, reported that “non è possibile negare al romanziere de ‘Gl’indifferenti’ – la fisionomia, i fini del neorealismo, o meglio del realismo, perché i ‘nei’ egli si compiace di conservarli sulla sola epidermide delle donne, cioè delle belle donne [it is not possible to deny to the novelist of Gli indifferenti the appearance, the ambition of neorealism, or rather of realism, since he finds a ‘neo’ (a beauty mark) pleasing only on the face of a woman, and even then only a beautiful woman].” Ettore Zocaro, “Simpatie: Dalla Stazione di Firenze alla Clinica dell’umorismo,” Il Regime Fascista, 6 Aug. 1932, 3. 22 On neorealism as modernism, see Renato Bertacchini, “Il neorealismo e le tecniche narrative,” Convivium 29 (May–June 1961): 360–3 (362); Alfredo Taracchini, “Il neorealismo come letteratura di Stato,” Rendiconti 24 (1972): 333–42; Manuela Scotti, “ ‘Solaria’ e solarismo nella cultura ita­­ liana del secondo dopoguerra,” in Gli anni di Solaria, ed. Gloria Manghetti



Notes to pages 21–2

23

24

25

26

27

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(Verona: Bi & Gi Editori, 1986, 165–71 (170); Giovanni Calogero, La ­narrativa del neorealismo (Milan: G. Principato, 1979), 32–3; Vito Santoro, Letteratura e tempi moderni: Il lungo dibattito negli anni Trenta (Bari: Palomar, 2005), 17–19; Daniele Gallo, Elementi di letteratura ita­­liana: Il neorealismo del Novecento fra guerra e dopoguerra (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Viator, 2012), 27; Giuliana Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 54. On modernism’s complex composition, see especially Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vii; Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1. Paolo Valesio, “Foreword: After The Conquest of the Stars,” in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), ix–xxii. In recent years there has been an attempt by critics and scholars to identify an Italian modernism said to share important commonalities with the well-known European modernisms. See Romano Luperini, “Il mo­­ dernismo italiano esiste,” in Sul modernismo italiano, ed Romano Luperini and Massimiliano Tortora (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2012), 3–12; Raffaele Donnarumma, “Tracciato del modernismo italiano,” in Sul modernismo italiano, 13–40; Massimiliano Tortora, Introduction to Il modernismo italiano, ed. Massimiliano Tortora (Rome: Carocci editore, 2018), 11–14. Thus, for instance, while Steimatsky has argued that “[t]he earliest articulations of a neorealist project betray an engagement with both realist and modernist genealogies,” I contend that there were no “modernist genealogies” in pre- or post-war Italy, and in fact that none would be developed until the 1990s. I would argue, then, that Italian artists and critics discovered a realist genealogy in some cultural currents that are now considered modernist, but that they would not have recognized as such. Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvii. Diego Angeli, “Un romanzo di gesuiti,” Il Marzocco 22, no. 32 (12 Aug. 1917), cited in Giovanni Cianci, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia: Saggio e Bibliografia (1917–1972) (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1974), 15. On the Italian reception of Joyce, see also Serenalla Zanotti, “James Joyce among the Italian Writers,” in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, vol. 2, France, Ireland and Mediterranean Europe, ed. Geert Lernout and Wim van Mierlo (London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 329–61; Sara Sullam, “Le peripezie di Ulisse nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra,” Letteratura e letterature 7 (2013): 69–86. Giorgio Prosperi, “Realismo e impersonalità,” Il Saggiatore 12 (1932), cited in Giuliana Bendelli, “La presenza di James Joyce nelle riviste italiane tra le due guerre,” in Chi stramalediva gli inglesi: La diffusione della letteratura

188

28

29

30

31

32

33 34 35

36

Notes to pages 22–3 inglese e americana in Italia tra le due guerre, ed. Arturo Cattaneo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2007), 79–110 (107–8); Eugenio Montale, review of Dubliners, by James Joyce, originally published in La Fiera letteraria 2, no. 38 (19 Sept. 1926), reprinted in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920-1979, ed Giorgio Zampa, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), I: 143–50 (148). Guido Piovene, “Narratori,” La Parola e il Libro 9–10 (Sept.–Oct. 1927): 253; and Giovanni Battista Angioletti, “Aura poetica,” originally published in La Fiera letteraria (7 July 1929), reprinted in Servizio di guardia: Polemiche letterarie (Lanciano: Rocco Carabba, 2005), 67–75. Both reviews are cited in Cianci, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia, 49, 52. Luigi Tonelli, “Marcel Proust, botanico morale,” La Stampa (6 Aug 1922): 3. On the Italian reception of Proust, see Gilbert Bosetti, “Les proustisme en Italie,” Cahiers du CERCIC 9 (1988): 29–100; Anna Dolfi, “Proust, il proustismo e l’incidenza proustiana nella cultura ita­­liana del Novecento: Prodromi di una ricerca,” Revue franco-italica 4 (1993): 21–40; Albarosa Macrì Tronci, “Uno sguardo al proustismo fiorentino: Specularità e ­rifrazioni in Vittorini, Bilenchi, Pratolini,” Esperienze letterarie 27, no. 1 (Jan.–March 2002): 87–100. Mario Pannunzio, “Necessità del romanzo,” Il Saggiatore, June 1932, 154–62, cited in Cianci, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia, 57; Silvio Benco, “Ricordi di Joyce,” Pegaso 2, no. 8 (2 Aug. 1930), cited in Bendelli, “La presenza di James Joyce,” 96–7. Renato Famea, “Joyce, Proust e il romanzo moderno,” Meridiano di Roma, 14 April 1940, cited in Cianci, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia, 81; Augusto Guerriero, “A proposito di antirealismo,” Critica fascista 5, no. 8 (15 April 1927), cited in Edoardo Esposito, Maestri cercando: Il giovane Vittorini e le letterature straniere (Milan: CUEM, 2009), 15. On the Crocean foundations of this reading, see Roberto Ludovico, “Tra Europa e romanzo: ‘Solaria’ e il fantasma James Joyce,” in Frammenti di Europa: Riviste e traduttori del Novecento, ed. Carla Gubert (Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2003), 39–59 (40–1). Angioletti, “Aura poetica,” 71. Angioletti, “Aura poetica,” 75. On Solaria and the reception of European modernism, see Gloria Manghetti, “Appunti per l’europeismo solariano e oltre,” in Le riviste dell’Europa letteraria, ed. Massimo Rizzante and Carla Gubert (Trento: Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento: 2002), 187–200; Anna Panicali, “‘Solaria’: Narrativa e critica,” Rivista di letteratura ita­­liana 22, no. 3 (2004): 121–5; Giuseppe Neri, Solaria: una stagione letteraria del Novecento italiano (Lungro: Marco, 1994). Giansiro Ferrata, “Sull’aura poetica,” Solaria 4, no. 9–10 (Sept.–Oct. 1929): 40–4 (42).



Notes to pages 23–5

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37 Alberto Moravia, “Omaggio a Joyce,” originally published in Prospettive 4, nos. 11–12 (15 Dec. 1940), reprinted in Antologia della rivista “Prostpettive,” ed. Glauco Viazzi (Naples: Giuda Editori, 1974), 131–4. 38 See Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (London: Verso, 1985). 39 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. See, too, Peter Brooks, “Modernism and Realism: Joyce, Proust, Woolf,” in Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 198–211. 40 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 106, 108. 41 Ezra Pound “James Joyce et Pécuchet [1922],” in Pound / Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 208; Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), 53–4. 42 See, for instance, Bocelli’s comment that “a ben guardare ci si accorge che perfino la distanza fra l’ala estrema del neorealismo e il surrealismo non è così grande come a tutta prima potrebbe sembrare [on closer inspection, one even realizes that the extreme wing of neorealism and surrealism are much closer than they seem at first].” Arnaldo Bocelli, “Un’annata di rea­ lismo narrativo,” La Fiera letteraria 4, no. 1 (2 Jan. 1949): 1. 43 Attilio Ricci, “Arrigo Benedetti e le forme del nuovo realismo,” La città ­libera 1, no. 30 (6 Sept. 1945): 12–13. 44 Mario De Micheli, “Realismo e poesia,” Il ’45 1, no. 1 (Feb. 1946): 35–44 (41). 45 Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 39. 46 Luigi Chiarini, “Discorso sul neorealismo,” Bianco e nero 12, no. 7 (July 1951): 3–25 (4). 47 Cf. Carlo Lizzani, Storia del cinema italiano 1895–1961 (Florence: Parenti Editore, 1961), 124; Parigi, “Le carte d’identità del neorealismo,” 82–3; Vito Attolini, Dal romanzo al set: Cinema italiano dalle origini ad oggi (Bari: Dedalo, 1988), 85. 48 The quotation comes from B. Anemone, review of Roma città libera, orriginally published in Hollywood 3, no. 28 (12 July 1947), reprinted in Il cinema ricomincia: I film italiani del 1945 e del 1946, ed. Stefano Della Casa (Turin: Archivio Nazionale della Resistenza, 1992), 22. For uses of the term “neoverismo,” see Gaetano Trombatore, “La battaglia delle idee: Moravia, La Romana,” Rinascita 4, no. 9 (Sept. 1947): 271; Arturo Lanocita, “La ­seconda nascita del film italiano,” originally published in Corriere della Sera, 5 June 1947, reprinted in Cinema freddo: I film italiani del 1947, ed. Paolo Gobetti et al. (Turin: Archivio nazionale cinematografico della Resistenza, 1993), 103–4; Vinicio Marinucci, “A Locarno l’Italia ha confermato la posizione di eccezionale significato assunta dal suo cinema nel campo

190

49

50 51

52 53

54

55 56

57

58

Notes to pages 25–6 internazionale,” La Cinematografia ita­­liana 3, nos. 13–14 (July 12 1947): 9. For contemporary references to the influence of Verga on post-war Italian literature and cinema, see Lorenzo Quaglietti, “Originalità del verismo,” Libera arte 1, no. 2 (1 June 1946): 2; Massimo Bontempelli, “Giovane neoVerga [Feb. 1945],” in Dignità dell’uomo (1943–1946) (Milan: Bompiani, 1946), 93–6; Emiliano Zazo, “‘I Malavoglia’, oggi,” Avanti! 14 Nov. 1945, 2. As critics such as Falaschi and Asor Rosa have correctly noted, references to Verga appeared far less frequently in the critical debates and cultural journals than has often been suggested. Falaschi, Realtà e retorica, 26; Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo 1965: Scrittori e massa 2015 (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), 89. Romano Luperini, Simbolo e costruzione allegorica in Verga (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 105–7, 122–5. On the mid-century interpretation of Verga alongside European modernism, see Romano Luperini, “ ‘I Malavoglia’ nella cultura letteraria e nella produzione narrativa del Novecento,” in Verga: L’ideologia le strutture narrative il “caso” critico, ed. Romano Luperini (Lecce: Milella, 1982), 181–232 (223–5). Moravia, “Omaggio a Joyce,” 133. Moravia, “L’uomo e il personaggio,” originally published in Prospettive 22 (15 Oct. 1941), reprinted in L’Uomo come fine e altri saggi (Milan: Bompiani, 1964), 19–26 (25). Enrico Emanuelli, “Romanzi fra due tempi,” Costume 3 (15 July 1945): 17–18 (18). See also, e.g., Franco Fortini, “Nuovi libri nuovi lettori,” Avanti! (Milan edition), 26 August 1945, 1–2; Mario Bonfantini, “Ritratto del romanzo,” Società Nuova 2, no. 5 (May 1946): 25–30; Giovanni Titta Rosa, “Fortuna della narrativa,” L’Illustrazione ita­­liana, 12 Jan. 1947, 32; Giuseppe Raimondi, “Una generazione letteraria.” L’indicatore partigiano 1, no. 1 (Nov.–Dec. 1947): 3–9 (6–7); Francesco Mei, “Ieri e oggi il romanzo.” Il Popolo, 28 Dec. 1948, 3. Eurialo De Michelis, “È stato così di Natalia Ginzburg,” Mercurio 5, no. 34 (Jan. 1948): 118–19 (118). On Cinema, see Laurent Scotto d’Ardino, La Revue Cinema et le néo-réalisme italien: Autonomisation d’un champ esthétique (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1999); Lino Micché, “L’ideologia e la forma: Il gruppo ‘Cinema’ e il formalismo italiano,” in La bella forma: Poggioli, i calligrafici e dintorni, ed. Andrea Martini (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1992), 1–28. Gianni Puccini, “I fermenti di ‘Cinema’ e ‘Bianco e Nero’: Testimonianze,” in Il cinema italiano dal fascismo all’antifascismo: Atti del Seminario organizzato a Roma nei giorni 15 febbraio–18 marzo 1964, ed. Giorgio Tinazzi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1966), 110–14 (113). Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano,” originally published in Cinema 127 (Oct. 10, 1941), reprinted in Giuseppe De Santis, Verso il neorealismo: Un critico cinematografico degli anni



Notes to pages 26–7

59 60

61

62

63

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Quaranta, ed. Callisto Cosulich (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1982), 45–50; Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, “Ancora di Verga e del cinema italiano,” originally published in Cinema 130 (Nov. 25, 1941), reprinted in Verso il neorealismo, 50–3. Jean A. Gili and Marco Grossi, eds., Alle origini del neorealismo: Giuseppe De Santis a colloquio con Jean A. Gili (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2008), 69. De Santis and Alicata, “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano,” 49–50. As Zagarrio puts it, for the Cinema group “Verga è una linea di demarcazi­ one con le manie retoriche dell’Italia imperiale; un recupero dell’appa­ renza mite e discreta che diventa, anche inconsapevolmente, nelle mani di chi lo usa, un’arma di battaglia [Verga signals a departure from the rhetorical fads of imperial Italy; he signals a recovery of mildness and decency that, even unknowingly, becomes, in the hands of those who use it, a weapon].” Vito Zagarrio, “Primato”: Arte, cultura, cinema del fascismo attraverso una rivista esemplare (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2007), 210. De Santis and Alicata, “Verità e poesia,” 46. On the vision of realism advocated in this essay, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 195; Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism, 137–8; Luperini, Simbolo e costruzione allegorica in Verga, 129; Enrique Seknadje-Askénazi, “À propos de la distinction, dans le champ du cinéma, entre néoréalisme littéraire et néoréalisme documentaire,” in Littérature et cinéma néoréalistes: Réalisme, Réel et Représentation, ed. Michel Cassac (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 229–43. See especially Franco Montesanti, “Della ispirazione cinematografica,” originally published in Cinema 129 (Nov. 10, 1941), reprinted in Il lungo viaggio del cinema italiano: Antologia di “Cinema” 1936–1943, ed. Orio Caldiron (Padua: Marisilio Editori, 1965), 439–43 (439, 442). De Santis and Alicata, “Ancora di Verga e del cinema italiano,” 52. Marcus and others have tended to interpret this line to mean that De Santis and Alicata were advocating “unmediated naturalistic reportages.” I take it, instead, as a pro forma announcement. Nearly a decade earlier, Longanesi had similarly called for directors to “gettarsi alla strada, portare le macchine da presa nelle vie, nei cortili, nelle caserme, nelle stazioni [get out into the streets, bring your camera into the streets, the courtyards, the barracks, the stations],” and Chiarini had called for them to look “fuori dalla cartapesta dei teatri, all’aria aperta [beyond the false walls of the theatres, into the open air].” Echoing such statements, “Ancora di Verga” appears to have adopted a cultural cliché, from which it then departed, rejecting the more simplistic interpretations of realism with which that cliché was associated. Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 16; Leo Longanesi, “Breve storia del cinema italiano,” L’Italiano 17–18 (1933), quoted in Vito Zagarrio, Cinema e fascismo: Film, modelli, immaginari (Venice: Marsilio

192

64 65

66

67

68

69

70

Notes to pages 27–8 Editori, 2004), 125–6; Luigi Chiarini, Cinematografo (Rome: Cremonese, 1935), 40. De Santis and Alicata, “Ancora di Verga e del cinema italiano,” 52. Alicata and De Santis, “Verità e poesia,” 48. For Barbaro’s influence on this essay, and on the Cinema group more generally, see Brunetta, Umberto Barbaro e l’idea di neorealismo, 143–6. Giuseppe De Santis, “L’arte della profondità [1996 interview],” in Rosso fuoco: Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, ed. Sergio Toffetti (Turin: Lindau, 1996), 17–51 (18). On the reception of literary modernism in the journal Cinema, see Gian Piero Brunetta, “Il cammino della critica verso il neorealismo,” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 2, Il cinema del regime 1929–1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001), 197–230 (199); Carlo Lizzani, “Linee e premesse di una breve storia del cinema,” originally published in Bianco e nero, Feb. 1949, reprinted in Attraverso il Novecento (Turin: Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, 1998), 57. Barbaro, preface to Il soggetto cinematografico, 133; Solaroli, “Il nostro referendum,” 14; Ettore Maria Margadonna, “Il realismo nel cinema europeo,” originally published in Comoedia 14, no. 6 (15 May 1932), reprinted in Critica ita­­liana primo tempo: 1926–1934, ed. Bianca Pividori, Bianco e nero 34, no. 3–4 (April–May 1973): 92–6; Alberto Cavalcanti, “Le mouvement néo-réaliste en Angleterre,” originally published in Le rôle intellectuel du cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1937), reprinted in Anthologie du cinéma, ed. Marcel Lapierre (Paris: La Nouvelle Edition, 1946), 271–6. Giuseppe De Santis, quoted in Il sole sorge ancora: 50 anni di resistenza nel cinema italiano, vol. 2, Memoria, mito storia: La parola ai registi. 37 interviste, ed. Alessandro Amaducci et al. (Turin: ANCR, 1992), 86. On Ossessione as film noir, see Mary P. Wood, “Italian Film Noir,” in European Film Noir, ed. Andrew Spicer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 236–72 (240); Derek Duncan, “Ossessione,” in European Cinema: An Introduction, ed. Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), 95–106 (104). For the accepted account of Ossessione’s status vis-à-vis neorealism, see especially Miccichè, Visconti e il neorealismo, 65; Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 20; Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 38; Bruno Torri, “Il caso ‘Ossessione,’” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 6, 1940/1944, ed. Ernesto G. Laura (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2010), 176–84. Visconti had first planned an adaptation of Verga’s L’amante di Gramigna but the project was rejected by the censors. The treatment of that unmade film has been published as Luchino Visconti and Giuseppe De Santis, “L’amante di Gramigna”: Verga e il cinema, ed. Nino Genovese and Sebastiano Gesù (Catania: Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 1996), 44–8. On the censorship of the project, see Miccichè, Visconti e il neorealismo, 23–5.



Notes to pages 28–30

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71 Gaia Servadio, Luchino Visconti: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 63. 72 Giuseppe De Santis, “Visconti’s Interpretation of Cain’s Setting in Ossessione,” trans. Luciana Bohne, Film Criticism 9, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 23–32 (29–30). See, too, Federica Villa, “Giorgio Bassani e le occasioni letterarie per Luchino Visconti: Qualche appunto preliminare,” in Luchino Visconti, la macchina e le muse, ed. Federica Mazzocchi (Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2008). 239–55. 73 Umberto Barbaro, “Neo-realismo,” originally published in Film 6, no. 23 (5 June 1943), reprinted in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 2, Cinema e teatro, 500–4 (501–2). Brunetta sees this essay as a kind of summa of Barbaro’s aesthetic and ideological position between the wars. Brunetta, “Il cammino della critica,” 229. 74 Barbaro, “Neo-realismo,” 501, 504; Umberto Barbaro, “Realismo e mora­ lità,” originally in Film 6, no. 31 (31 July 1943), reprinted in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 2, Cinema e teatro, 505–9. 75 Walter Ronchi, review of Ossessione, by Luchino Visconti, Il Popolo di Romagna, 19 June 1943, 3. On this review, and the initial critical reception of Ossessione more broadly, see Mauro Giori, Poetica e prassi della trasgressione in Luchino Visconti:1935–1962 (Milan: Libraccio, 2018), 67–71. 76 Ronchi, review of Ossessione, 3. 77 Guido Aristarco, review of Ossessione, by Luchino Visconti, originally published in Corriere Padano, 8 June 1943, reprinted in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 6, 1940/1944, ed. Ernesto G. Laura (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2010), 632–3 (633). Aristarco nevertheless recognized the originality of Visconti’s film, defending it against a critical establishment that saw it as nothing more than “una vieta imitazione del neorealismo francese (Carné, Duvivier e il caposcuola Renoir) [a blocked imitation of French neorealism (Carné, Duvivier, and the master Renoir)].” Guido Aristarco, “Equivoci su ‘Ossessione,’” originally published in Corriere padano, 27 June 1943, reprinted in Vent’anni di cultura ferrarese: Antologia del “Corriere padano,” 2 vols., ed. Anna Folli (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1979), II: 275–6. 78 Carl Vincent, “Les horizons du cinéma,” Cahiers de Combat 5 (1939): 27, cited and discussed in Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 27. 79 Barbaro, “Alessandro Neverov,” 119–21. 80 Luchino Visconti, “Vita difficile del film ‘Ossessione,’” Il Contemporaneo, 24 April 1965, 7–8 (8). 81 Giorgio Bassani, “Giovanni Verga e il cinematografo,” originally published in Il Popolo, 29 May 1947, republished as “Verga e il cinematografo,” Il mondo europeo, 1 July 1947, reprinted as “Verga e il cinema,” in Opere, ed. Roberto Cotroneo (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 1036–9 (1037). 82 Bassani, “Verga e il cinema,” 1037.

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Notes to pages 30–2

83 As Baldi puts it, “[s]e il modernismo è un fenomeno chiave nel canone letterario anglosassone, in Italia l’etichetta di decadentismo è ancora egemo­ ­ne [if modernism is a key phenomenon in the English literary canon, in Italy the label of decadentism remains hegemonic].” Valentino Baldi, “A che cosa serve il modernismo italiano?” Allegoria 63 (2012): 66–82 (66). See, too, Mimmo Cangiano, La nascita del modernismo italiano: Filosofie della crisi, storia e letteratura 1903–1922 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018), 16–17. 84 Giorgio Bassani, “Neorealisti italiani,” originally published in Lo Spettatore italiano 1, no. 4 (April 1948), reprinted in Opere, 1054–9 (1054). 85 For contemporary discussions of the influence of American literary “neorealism” on Italian culture, see Bocelli, “Morte e resurrezione del personaggio,” 141–5; Gianni Castelnuovo, “Il nuovo realismo americano,” Comunità 2, no. 17 (9 Aug. 1947): 5; Enrico Falqui, “Paragrafi sulla narrativa I,” originally published in Mattino di Roma, 30 Dec. 1947, reprinted in Novecento letterario: Serie terza (Florence: Vallecchi editore, 1961), 405–12. See, too, Daniela Brogi, “Tra letteratura e cinema: Pavese, Visconti, e la ‘funzione Cain,’” in Giovani: Vita e scrittura tra fascismo e dopoguerra (Palermo: Duepunti edizioni, 2012), 83–110. 86 Cesare Pavese, “Intervista alla radio,” originally broadcast 12 June 1950, published in La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 263–7 (263–4). 87 Antonio Pietrangeli, “Quattordici anni di cinema: Bilancio,” originally published in Star, 2 Sept. 1944, reprinted in Neorealismo e dintorni, ed. Antonio Maraldi (Cesena: Società Editrice “Il Ponte Vecchio,” 1995), 19–26 (25). 88 Antonio Pietrangeli, “‘I Malavoglia’ di Verga sullo schermo: Personaggi che aspettano,” originally published in Fotogrammi, 21 June 1947, reprinted in Neorealismo e dintorni, 110–12 (111). 89 Pietrangeli, Panoramica sul cinema italiano, 34. 90 Umberto Barbaro, “L’Azione cattolica lavora per Hollywood,” originally published in L’Unità, 18 Jan. 1948, reprinted in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 2, Cinema e teatro, 527–9 (529); Mario Serandrei, “Dal taccuino di un montatore,” originally published in La Critica Cinematografica 9 (June–July 1948), reprinted in “La Critica Cinematografica” (1946-1948): Antologia, ed. Andrea Torre (Parma: Uni.Nova, 2005), 298–9. 91 For “neorealism” as a literary term in the immediate post-war context, see Antonio Piccone Stella, “Il secondo quarto del secolo,” La Nuova Europa 1, no. 4 (31 Dec. 1944): 5; Giuseppe Sala, “Realismo e religiosità,” Il Commento 2, no. 24 (16 Dec. 1945): 537; Eurialo De Michelis, review of Lavorare stanca, by Cesare Pavese, Mercurio 3, nos. 19–20 (March–April 1946): 169–70; Enrico Falqui, “Paragrafi sulla narrativa II,” originally published in Milano Sera, 29–30 Oct. 1946, reprinted in Novecento letterario: Serie terza, 419–23; O.A.



Notes to page 32

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Bontempo, “Italian Literature in 1946,” The Modern Language Journal 31, no. 5 (May 1947): 283–8 (286); Remo Cantoni, “Nota sul Convegno di Perugia,” Il Politecnico 38 (Nov. 1947): 11–12 (12); Dario Puccini, review of Il compagno, by Cesare Pavese, L’Italia che scrive 31, no. 10 (Oct. 1948): 177; Félix A. Morlion, “Il neorealismo letterario di Eugenio Corti,” originally published in L’ora dell’azione, 30 Dec. 1948, reprinted in Presenza di Eugenio Corti: Rassegna della Critica, ed. Argia Monti (Milan: Edizioni Ares, 2010), 99–102; Angelo Mele, “Un romanzo di cui si parla,” Controvento 1, no. 9 (Dec. 1949), cited in Sandro de Nobile, Il fermento e non: Le riviste letterarie abruzzesi e il neorealismo (1948-1959) (Chieti: Edizioni Solfanelli, 2015), 46. 92 Glauco Viazzi, “Il cinema che vorremmo,” originally published in Film d’oggi 2, no. 5 (2 Feb. 1946), reprinted in Il cinema ricomincia, 117; Alfredo Orecchio, review of Caccia tragica, by Giuseppe De Santis, originally published in Il Messaggero, 5 March 1948, reprinted in Cinema freddo, 18. 93 Carlo Carrà, “Neoclassicismo e neorealismo,” originally published in L’Ambrosiano, 1 Aug. 1925, reprinted in Tutti gli scritti, ed. Massimo Carrà (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), 253–8; Lionello Venturi, Il gusto dei primitivi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1926), 4, referenced by Nisini, Il neorealismo italiano, 32; Roberto Papini, “La crisi delle arti figurative: Il pubblico sbadiglia,” La Stampa, 14 Feb. 1928, 3; Palm, “La Mostra del pittore Vacca al Circolo Artistico,” La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 24 Oct. 1931, 4; Dario Sabatello, “Contemporary Italian Painting,” in Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Painting under the Auspices of the Western Art Museum Association and the “Direzione generale italiani all’estero” (Tivoli: Officine Grafiche Mantero, 1934), 5–17 (16–17); Vincenzo Costantini, “Neorealismo,” in Pittura ita­­liana contemporanea: Dalla fine dell’800 ad oggi (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), 357–86; Marziano Bernardi, “Il Duce alla ‘vernice’ della seconda Quadriennale,” La Stampa, 5 Feb. 1935, 3; Carlo Carrà, “Dal mio taccuino,” Il Frontespizio 7 (July 1937): 526–8 (527); Alberto Bragaglia, “Neorealismo in pittura,” Augustea 13, no. 12 (15 June 1938): 13–15; Carlo Carrà, “Orientamenti,” originally published in Panorama, 12 Feb. 1940, reprinted in Tutti gli scritti, 331–4 (331); Carlo Carrà, “La pittura ita­­liana contemporanea nel quadro dell’arte europea,” originally published in Romana 5, no. 5 (May 1941), now in Tutti gli scritti, 290–8 (294). 94 Toti Scialoja, “Dal Neo-realismo al Realismo nuovo,” Immagine 1, no. 4 (Sept.–Oct. 1947): 258–9; Enrico Galluppi, “L’Arte a Roma,” La Fiera letteraria 2, no. 22 (29 May 1947): 6; Marcello Venturi, “Pugni, schiaffi e pennelli,” originally published in La Voce Repubblicana, 6 Nov. 1947, reprinted in La via ita­­liana al realismo: La politica culturale artistica del P.C.I. dal 1944 al 1956, by Nicoletta Misler, 2nd ed. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1976), 123–5 (125); Umbro Apollonio, “La XXIV Biennale di Venezia II,” La Rassegna d’Italia 3, no. 7 (July 1948): 786–91 (789–90); Domenico Maselli, “Conclusione sulla

196

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96

97

98 99

Notes to pages 32–3 XXV Biennale Veneziana: La sorte di Aristide incombe su Carlo Carrà,” La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 13 Aug. 1950, 3. L’Operatore, review of Tombolo, paradiso nero, by Giorgio Ferroni, originally published in Intermezzo 21–22 (Nov. 1947), reprinted in Cinema freddo, 77. For instances of the formation of the neorealist “tendency,” see Amedeo Rivolta, “Gioventù perduta,” originally published in Hollywood 4, no. 131 (20 March 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 79; “Il cinema italiano ricomincia da Venezia,” originally published in La Critica cinematografica 3, no. 12 (Nov. 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 183–4; Giulio Cesare Castello, “Senza pietà,” originally published in Bianco e nero 9, no. 10 (December 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 110; Lorenzo Quaglietti, “Il cinema n ­ eo-realista: Intervista con Carla Del Poggio Vittorio Duse e De Santis,” originally published in L’Unità, 10 Dec. 1948, reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 170. L.L., “Realtà e cultura nel cinema italiano contemporaneo,” originally published in Rivista del Cinematografo, April 1948, reprinted in I cattolici e il neorealismo, ed. Amédéé Ayfre and Sergio Trasatti (Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 1989), 25–9 (27). For similar attempts to define Italian neorealist cinema in this period, see Gian Luigi Rondi, “Il cinema italiano realistico,” La Fiera letteraria 3, no. 21 (30 May 1948): 5; Vittorio Calvino, Guida al cinema (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale “Academia,” 1949), 339; Mario Gromo, “Italia,” in Il film del dopoguerra, 1945–1949, ed. Luigi Chiarini (Rome: Bianco e nero editore, 1949), 71–81; Dino Risi, “Cinema: il cosidetto ‘­neorealismo,’” La Rassegna d’Italia, Feb. 1949, 197–9. “Questo è il cinema nostro: Il cammino fra due date 1944–1948,” La Settimana Incom, no. 19, 14 Oct. 1948, directed by Alberto Pozzetti, written by Gaetano Carancini, Vinicio Marinucci, and Mario Ungaro, patrimonio. archivioluce.com/luce-web/detail/IL5000010326/2/questo-e-cinema-­ nostro-cammino-due-date-1944-1948.html, last accessed 21 May 2019. “Ladri di biciclette,” originally published in Sipario 4, no. 33 (Jan. 1949), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 94 Ermanno Contini, “Il documentario,” in Il film del dopoguerra, 1945–1949, 167–81 (175, 180); “Radio – Teatri – Cinematografi,” L’Unità, 15 Sept. 1948, 2; Guido Aristarco. “Film di questi giorni: ‘Chiamate Nord 777,’” Cinema 1 (1948): 30–1; Alfredo Panicucci, “Cinema col nonno,” Avanti! 2 Jan. 1949, 3; Vinicio Marinucci, “Appunti sul realismo del film americano,” Bianco e nero 9, no. 4 (June 1948): 36–41; P. Virg., “Le ‘Prime’ del cinema: L’urlo della città,” La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 14 Sept. 1949, 4; Paolo Gobetti, “Un anno di cinema,” originally published in L’Unità, 31 Dec. 1949, reprinted in Patto col diavolo: Il cinema italiano del 1949, ed. Cristina Balzano, Isabella Novelli, Paola Olivetti, Roberto Radicati, Morena Rossi, Ivana Solavagione, Marta Teodoro, and Baldo Vallero (Turin: Archivio nazionale cinematografico della Resistenza, Regione Piemonte, 1996), 160–1.



Notes to pages 33–4

197

100 For international literary neorealism, see, e.g., Luigi Somma, Storia della letteratura americana (Rome: Casa editrice Libraria corso, 1946), 149; Braccio Agnoletti, “Ottimismo e neorealismo,” Idea 1, nos. 13–14 (7–14 Aug. 1949): 8; Giovanni Savelli, “Svolgimenti del neo-realismo americano,” La Fiera letteraria 3, no. 12 (28 March 1948): 4. For Italian literary neorealism, see Goffredo Bellonci, “Italo Calvino tra i contemporanei,” Mercurio 5, no. 35 (Feb. 1948): 103–8; Renzo Tian, “Paradiso maligno,” La Fiera letteraria 3, no. 37 (5 Dec. 1948): 4; Aldo Borlenghi, “Narrativa 1948,” Avanti! 2 Feb. 1949, 3; Mario Apollonio, “Neorealismo,” Il Popolo, 29 Nov. 1949, 3; Ferruccio Ulivi, “Sul neorealismo,” Mondo Operaio 2, no. 35 (23 July 1949): 8; Olga Lombardi, “Breve storia del neorealismo italiano,” La Fiera letteraria 4, no. 25 (19 June 1949): 5; Marcello Camilucci, “Romanzi di sinistra,” Vita e ­pensiero (April 1950): 209–13 (212). For neorealism in the visual arts, see Toti Scialoja, “Neorealismo andata e ritorno,” Immagine 2, nos. 9–10 (Aug.–Dec. 1948): 612; Rodolfo Pallucchini, introduction to XXV Biennale di Venezia: Catalogo (Venice: Alfieri Editore, 1950), xv; Raffaele Carrieri, Pittura scultura d’avanguardia in Italia (1890-1950) (Milan: Edizioni della conchiglia, 1950), 270–2. On neorealism in architecture and design, see Carlo Perogalli, Introduzione all’arte totale: Neorealismo e astrattismo architettura e arte industriale (Milan: Libreria A. Salto, 1952); Giudo Canella and Aldo Rossi, “Mario Ridolfi,” originally published in Comunità 41 (1956), reprinted in Architettura urbanistica in Italia nel dopoguerra: L’Immagine della Comunità, ed. M. Fabbri et al. (Rome: G. Gangemi, 1986), 336–44 (344); Paolo Portoghesi, “Dal neorealismo al neoliberty,” originally published in Comunità 65 (1958), reprinted in Architettura urbanistica in Italia nel dopoguerra, 356–72 (360); Aldo Cuzzer, “Realismo del neorealismo,” Marcatrè 3, nos. 11–13 (1965): 288–91. 101 See, e.g., Giovanna Gasparini, Neorealismo (Milan: Mursia, 2000), 19; Antonio Medici, Neorealismo: Il movimento che ha cambiato la storia del cinema, analizzato, fotogrammi alla mano, nei suoi procedimenti tecnico-formali (Rome: Dino Audino editore, 2008), 16; John Gatt-Rutter, “The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–1956),” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 533–57 (535). 102 Bo, “Primo viene il film,” 262. Evidence for the diffusion in an English-language context of the same mistaken genealogy can be found in Nicola Chiaromonte, “Realism and Neorealism in Contemporary Italian Literature,” The English Journal 42, no. 5 (May 1953): 431–9 (437). Four years earlier, the same author, noting certain similarities between the latest developments in Italian literature and film, had drawn attention to a group of filmmakers whom he called “the directors of the so-called ‘neo-realistic’ school.” See Nicola Chiaromonte, “Rome Letter: Italian Movies,” Partisan Review 16, no. 6 (June 1949): 621–30.

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103 Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 69. 104 Pietrangeli, Panoramica sul cinema italiano, 18; Gianni Puccini, “Per una discussione sul film italiano,” originally published in Bianco e nero 9, no. 2 (April 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 159–63 (163). 105 Among the studies to underline the links between the arts in the age of neorealism, see Elisabetta Chicco Vitzizzai, Il neorealismo: Antifascismo e popolo nella letteratura dagli anni Trenta agli anni Cinquanta (Turin: Paravia, 1977), 3–4; Daniela Scardia, La stagione del trionfo: La cultura del Neorealismo in Italia (Cavallino: Pensa Editore, 2016), 14; Gian Carlo Ferretti and Stefano Guerriero, Storia dell’informazione letteraria in Italia dalla terza pagina a internet, 1925–2009 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010), 77–9; Lorenzo Pellizzari, Cineromanzo: Il cinema italiano 1945–1953 (Milan: Longanesi, 1978), 20; Luigi Fontanella, “Neorealismo e neorealismi italiani: alcuni appunti,” in Ripensare il neorealismo, 127–31 (127); Francesco Galluzzi, “Il cinema dei pittori: Film e arti visive nel dopoguerra in Italia,” in Il cinema dei pittori: Le arti e il cinema italiano 1940–1980, ed. Francesco Galluzzi (Milan: Skira, 2007), 13–29. 106 Pierantonio Bertè, “La critica e il neorealismo,” Il Quotidiano, 24 Feb. 1950, 3. 107 See, for instance, Angiola Maria Bonisconti, “Il Nuovo Realismo Musicale,” Rassegna Musicale 18, no. 2 (1948): 123–9. Claims to a musical neorealism predated 1945: see, for instance, Alfredo Parente, “L’estetica musicale e i neorealisti,” La Nuova Italia (April–May 1939), cited in Stefania Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 23n27. 108 Adriano Olivetti, “Riprendendo il cammino,” originally published in Comunità 2 (1950), reprinted in Architettura urbanistica in Italia nel dopoguerra, 13–15. As Milanini put it, “Diffusa fu la passione per una cultura globale, il desiderio che i vari discorsi di ogni specifica ricerca e produzione rientrassero a far parte di quel discorso comune che è la storia degli uomini [There was widespread passion for a global culture, for the various discourses of each specific field of production to take part in that common discourse that is the history of mankind].” Claudio Milanini, introduction to Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, ed. Claudio Milanini (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980), 10. 109 Giulio Ungarelli, “Elio Vittorini: La parola e l’immagine,” Belfagor 63, no. 377 (30 Sept. 2008): 501–21. Falaschi describes the set of Guttuso’s designs for the novel as “neorealistico [neorealist].” See Giovanni Falaschi, “Introduzione e note,” in Conversazione in Sicilia, by Elio Vittorini (Milan: BUR, 2007), 5–54 (12). 110 Luchino Visconti, “Tradizione e invenzione,” originally published in Stile italiano nel cinema (Milan: Guarnati, 1941), reprinted in Leggere Visconti, ed. Giuliana Callegari and Nuccio Lodato (Pavia: Amministrazione Provinciale, 1976), 19–20 (19). On this collaboration, see Lara Pucci, “History, Myth, and the Everyday: Luchino Visconti, Renato Guttuso, and the Fishing



Notes to pages 35–7

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Communities of the Italian South,” Oxford Art Journal 36, no. 3 (2013): 417–35 (420); and Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano tra le due guerre: Fascismo e politica cinematografica (Milan: Mursia, 1975), 94. On Visconti’s Verga, see, too, Giovanna Taviani, “Tra Verga e Zola: Visconti e il dibattito sulla rivi­ sta ‘Cinema,’” in Il verismo italiano fra naturalismo francese e cultura europea, ed. Romano Luperini (San Cesario di Lecce: Manni Editori, 2007), 55–81. 111 Luchino Visconti, “Oltre il fatto dei Malavoglia,” originally published in Vie Nuove, 22 Oct. 1960, reprinted in Leggere Visconti, 48–50. 112 Vittorini discussed his request of Visconti in an April 1950 letter to Vasco Pratolini. See Elio Vittorini, Gli anni del “Politecnico”: Lettere 1945–1951, ed. Carlo Minoia (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 315; Nino Genovese and Sebastiano Gesù, Vittorini e il cinema (Siracusa: Emanuele Romeo Editore, 1997), 30–1. The author’s comments on the cinematic aspects of his illustrated novel are taken from Elio Vittorini, “La foto strizza l’occhio alla pagina,” originally in Cinema nuovo 3, no. 33 (15 April 1954), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, vol. 2, Articoli e interventi 1938–1965, ed. Raffaella Rodondi (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), 701–8 (702). On Vittorini’s project, see especially Heike Brohm, “Elio Vittorini e l’intermedialità: A proposito di Conversazione in Sicilia del 1953,” Rivista di letteratura ita­­liana 25, no. 2 (2007): 87–104; Jan Baetens and Bart Van Den Bossche, “Back Home, Back to the Image? The Editorial History of Conversazione in Sicilia as a Case of Tense Relations between Literature and Photography,” Italian Studies 70, no. 1 (Feb. 2015): 117–30; and Angelo Rella, Elio Vittorini e la seduzione delle immagini: Dal “Politecnico” a Conversazione illustrata (Szczecin: Szczecin volumina, 2011), 213–64. 113 Fiamma Lussana, “Neorealismo critico: Politica e cultura della crisi in Luchino Visconti,” Studi Storici 43, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 2002): 1083–103 (1100–1). Critics have frequently traced cinematic elements in Vittorini’s novel. See, for instance, Elena Lencioni, “Tra cinema e romanzo: Fenomeni di scrittura filmica in Uomini e no,” Italianistica 38, no. 3 (2009): 81–96. 114 Elio Vittorini, “Prefazione a ‘Il garofano rosso,’” originally published in Il garofano rosso (Milan: Mondadori, 1948), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 478–501 (484–5). 115 See, for instance, Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2013), 155; Felice Rappazzo, Vittorini (Palermo: Palumbo, 1996), 37; Ennio Di Nolfo, La repubblica delle speranze e degli inganni: L’Italia dalla caduta del fascismo al crollo della Democrazia Cristiana (Florence: Ponte alla Grazia, 1996), 92; Antonio Girardi, Nome e lagrime: Linguaggio e ideologia di Elio Vittorini (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1975), 57. 116 Elio Vittorini, letter to Michel Arnaud, 7 July 1947, in Gli anni del “Politecnico,” 124. See, too, Elio Vittorini, “Intervista con la giornalista Kay

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Notes to pages 37–9

Gittings,” originally published in Corriere del Libro 2, no. 2 (15 Feb.–March 1947), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 326–39 (333); Elio Vittorini, “Uomo e sottosuolo,” Il Politecnico 35 (Jan.–March 1947), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 424–7 (426). 117 Vittorini, “Prefazione a ‘Il garofano rosso,’” 486. 118 Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia, in Le opere narrative, by Elio Vittorini, ed. Maria Corti, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), I: 569–710 (§XI, 603–4). 119 Sandro Briosi, Elio Vittorini (Florence: Il Castoro, 1970), 93; Sergio Pautasso, Elio Vittorini (Turin: Borla Editore, 1967), 170. 120 On these passages, see Rosa Montesanto, “Nota al corsivo in ‘Uomini e no,’” in Elio Vittorini: Atti del Convegno nazionale di studi (Siracusa – Noto, 12–13 Feb. 1976), ed. Paolo Mario Sipala and Ermanno Scuderi (Catania: Edizioni Greco, 1978), 79–87; Raffaella Rodondi, “Nota ai testi,” in Le opere narrative, II: 1165–248 (1213); Giovanni Falaschi, La Resistenza armata nella narrativa ita­­liana (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 84–5; Virna Brigatti, Diacronia di un romanzo: Uomini e no di Elio Vittorini (1944–1966) (Milan: Ledizioni, 2016), 79–80; Guido Bonsaver, Elio Vittorini: Letteratura in tensione (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2008), 143. 121 Elio Vittorini, Uomini e no. in Le opere narrative, I: 711–920 (§ LXIV, 809) 122 See especially Goffredo Bellonci, “Il romanzo italiano,” Svizzera ita­­liana 7, no. 64 (1947): 274–81 (280); R., “La gente parla di: ‘Uomini e no,’” La lettura 1, no. 1 (23 Aug. 1945): 9; Enrico Falqui, “Elio Vittorini: ‘Uomini e no,’” originally published in Risorgimento liberale, 12 Sept. 1945, reprinted in Novecento letterario: Serie sesta (Florence: Vallecchi editore, 1961), 154–8. For the term’s application to Vittorini’s earlier work, see especially Giacomo Antonini, “La nuova prosa narrativa ita­­liana,” in Narratori italiani d’oggi, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1943 [1939]), 15–105 (83). 123 Fiorenzo Forti, “In margine alla narrativa della Resistenza,” L’indicatore partigiano 1, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1948): 23–4 (23); Olgo Lombardi, Narratori neorealisti (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1957), 18-19. 124 Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 30; Elio Vittorini, “Inghilterra,” originally published in Tempo 4, no. 52 (23 May 1940), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 90–2 (91). 125 Sergio Pautasso, Guida a Vittorini (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1977), 163; Anthony M. Cinquemani, “Vittorini’s Uomini e no and Neorealism,” Forum Italicum 17, no. 2 (1983): 152–63 (152); Anna Panicali, Elio Vittorini: La narrativa, la saggistica, le traduzioni, le riviste, l’attività editoriale (Milan: Mursia, 1994), 162. 126 Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 221; Milanini, introduction to Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, 12; Nicola Tranfaglia, “Pavese e l’Italia degli anni Quaranta,” in Cesare Pavese: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. Torino-Santo Stefano Belbo, 24-27 ottobre 2001, ed. Margherita Campanello (Florence: Leo S.



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Olscchki, 2005), 131–42 (141); Gigliola De Donato, Saggio su Carlo Levi (Bari: De Donato, 1974), 8; Giulio Ferroni, Passioni del Novecento (Rome: Donzelli, 1999), 59. For the problematic definition of a neorealist literary canon, see Nicola Turi, “Il romanzo neorealista,” in Il romanzo in Italia, vol. 3, Il primo Novecento, ed. Giancarlo Alfano and Francesco de Cristofaro (Rome: Carocci editore, 2018), 375–84. 127 Bondanella and Pacchioni, A History of Italian Cinema, 68; Marcia Landy, Italian Film, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15. 128 Nisini, Il neorealismo italiano, 57–9; Cesare De Michelis, Alle origini del neorealismo: Aspetti del romanzo italiano negli anni ’30 (Cosenza: Lerici, 1980), 81; Anna Baldini, “Il Neorealismo: Nascita e usi di una categoria letteraria,” in Letteratura ita­­liana e tedesca 1945–1970: Campi, polisistemi, transfer, ed. Irene Fantappiè and Michele Sisto (Rome: Istituto italiano di studi germanici, 2013), 109–28 (126); Massimo Mida and Lorenzo Quaglietti, Dai telefoni bianchi al neorealismo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 183n1; Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 89–90; Porcaro, Aspetti critici e letterari della narrativa del neorealismo italiano, 26; Baldan, Per una lettura del Neorealismo, 6; Sergio Turconi, La poesia neorealista ita­­liana, (Milan: Mursia, 1977), 16, 74n26; Parigi, “Le carte d’identità del neorealismo,” 83. 129 Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 16; Alberto Moravia, Gli indifferenti (Milan: Bompiani, 1949 [2nd ed.]), cited in Ines Scaramucci, “La narrativa del neorealismo italiano,” Il neorealismo nella letteratura e nel cinema italiano, ed. Rosa Brambilla (Assisi: Biblioteca Pro Civitate Christiana, 1987), 69–88 (76). 130 Euralio De Michelis, “Zavattini o il sentimento frenato [Part 1],” La Nuova Italia 5 (May 1938): 152; Euralio De Michelis, “Zavattini o il sentimento frenato [Part 2]” La Nuova Italia 6 (June 1938): 187, cited by Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 23; Mario Verdone, “La parte dello scrittore nel cinema italiano: Il contributo di Zavattini,” Cinema: Quindicinale di divulgazione cinematografica 2, no. 30 (Nov. 1949): 284–6. 131 Giovanni Battista Angioletti, “Joyce, martirio dei traduttori,” La Nuova Stampa 6, no. 47 (24 Feb. 1950): 3. This same definition of neorealism as modernism is evident in many of the reviews of the 1951 Inchiesta. See Giuseppina Nirchio, “Sintesi di un’inchiesta,” La Fiera letteraria 33 (2 Sept. 1951): 5–6 (5); Emilio Cecchi, “Processo senza sentenza ai narratori italiani,” L’Europeo, 5 Aug. 1951; Giuseppe De Robertis, “Inchiesta sul Neorealismo,” Tempo illustrato, 1 Sept. 1951, 3; I.I., “Notizie del teatro: Teatro e neorealismo,” L’Unità, 19 Jan. 1952, 3. 132 Barbaro, “L’Azione cattolica lavora per Hollywood,” 529. 133 Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, 26. 134 Salvatore Rosati, review of Paesi tuoi, by Cesare Pavese, L’Italia che scrive 24, nos. 7–8 (July–Aug. 1941): 229; Salvatore Rosati, “Prosa 1941,” Romana: Rivista mensile degli Istituti di cultura ita­­liana all’estero 5, no. 12 (Dec. 1941):

202

Notes to pages 41–4

778–89; Mario Alicata, review of Paesi tuoi, by Cesare Pavese, originally published in Oggi, 19 July 1941, reprinted in Scritti letterari (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 84–8 (84–5). 135 Pavese “Intervista alla radio,” 264. 136 Domenico Purificato, “Realismo e tradizione,” L’Unità, 19 July 1952, 3; Renato Guttuso, “Sulla via del realismo,” originally published in Alfabeto 3–4 (15–29 Feb. 1952), reprinted in Scritti, ed. Marco Carapezza (Milan: Classici Bompiani, 2013), 1103–15. 137 The notion of “fossilizzazione” was developed in Massimo Mida, “A ­colloquio con il popolare regista di ‘Fabiola,’” L’Unità, 2 March 1950, 3. The quotations are taken, in order, from Turi Vasile, “Non esiste una scuo­ ­la neorealista ita­­liana, esiste il cinema italiano,” Rivista del Cinematografo 11 (1949): 7–8; g.m., “Il pubblico è stanco di neorealismo e formule simili,” La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 16 Nov. 1948, 3. 138 Cesare Zavattini, “Il cinema e l’uomo moderno,” speech delivered at the Convegno Internazionale di Cinematografia di Perugia (24–27 Sept. 1949), then published in Umberto Barbaro, Il cinema e l’uomo moderno (Milan: Le Edizioni Sociali, 1950), reprinted in Cinema: Diario cinematogra­ fico e Neorealismo ecc., ed. Valentina Fortichiari and Mino Argentieri (Milan: Bompiani, 2002), 678–83 (680). 139 Visconti, “Sul modo di mettere in scena una commedia di Shakespeare,” 134. 140 Elia Santoro, “Il Festival veneziano del cinema,” La Provincia del Po, 12 Aug. 1948; M. Cattraneo, “Al lido di Venezia dive problematiche e mocassini,” Provincia del Po, 26 Aug. 1948, both quoted in Mauro Giori and Tomaso Subini, “Questioni aperte su La terra trema: Ipotesi preliminari intorno ad alcuni nuovi documenti,” Cabiria 176 (2014): 4–36 (17, 34n45). 141 Luigi Chiarini, “Cattivi pensieri sul realismo,” Cinema 1 (1948): 11. 142 Visconti, “Tradizione e invenzione,” 19. 143 Visconti, “Oltre il fatto dei Malavoglia,” 48–9. 144 On Verga’s concept of “Il caso [fate],” see Alberto Asor Rosa, “I Malavoglia di Giovanni Verga,” Letteratura ita­­liana: Le opere, vol. 3, Dall’Ottocento al Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 733–877 (756–9). On Visconti’s political rereading of I Malavoglia, see P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 66–7; Nino Genovese and Sebastiano Gesù, “Verga e il cinema: ‘Castigo di Dio’ o ‘San Cinematografo’?” in Verga e il cinema, ed. Nino Genovese and Sebastiano Gesù (Catania: Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 1996), 7–25 (21); Cristina Bragaglia, Il piacere del racconto: Narrativa ita­­liana e cinema 1895–1990 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993), 130–2. 145 On the resulting “infinite regress of intertextual borrowings” underlying the reading of Verga and Homer that inspired the film, see Millicent Marcus, “Visconti’s La terra trema: The Typology of Adaptation,” in Filmmaking by



Notes to pages 44–6

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the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 25–44 (26). See, too, Rosario Castelli, “Storia e gloria di un capolavoro annunciato. La terra trema: Tra ‘epos’ romanzesco e reale ‘maraviglioso,’” in La terra trema: Un film di Luchino Visconti dal romanzo I Malavoglia di Giovanni Verga, ed. Sebastiano Gesù (Lipari: Centro Studi e Ricerche di Storia e Problemi Eoliani, 2006), 21–45. 146 Visconti, La terra trema, 102, 53. 147 Visconti, La terra trema, 121, 187. 148 On Visconti and literary modernism, see Francesco Rosi, introduction to La terra trema: Trascrizione di Enzo Ungari (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1977), 9–17 (16); Lussana, “Neorealismo critico,” 1085, 1094; Servadio, Luchino Visconti, 30. Although a complete Italian translation of Ulysses was not available until 1960, excerpts circulated in Italy as early as 1926. Moreover, versions in English and French would have been available to Visconti in France, where the novel was first published in 1922, and where Visconti lived during the period he worked with Renoir. See Serenella Zanotti, Joyce in Italy: L’Italiano in Joyce (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2004), 33, 38, 59, 78, 93. 149 Mario Serandrei, “Dall’Ulysse di Joyce (1930),” originally published in Cinematografo, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1930), reprinted in Poemi e scenari cine­ matografici d’avanguardia, ed. Mario Verdone (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1975), 299–302 (302). 150 Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 24. 151 On the mythological resonances of Visconti’s adaptation, see Sandro Bernardi, “La terra trema: Il mito, il Teatro, la Storia,” in Il cinema di Luchino Visconti, ed. Veronica Pravadelli (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2000), 65–88; as well as Sam Rohdie, “Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13, no. 4 (2008): 520–31 (529–30); Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, “De l’hubris à la métis ou de la nécessité du courbe (La Terre tremble, Luchino Visconti, 1948),” Gaia: Revue interdisciplinaire sur la Grèce Archaïque 7 (2003): 585–92; Agata Sciacca, “I Malavoglia ­nell’occhio di Visconti,” Prospettive sui Malavoglia: Atti dell’incontro di studio della Società per lo studio della Modernità letteraria, Catania, 17–18 febbrario 2006, ed. Giuseppe Savoca and Antonio Di Silvestro (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), 137–59 (158–9). 152 We can ascertain the date of the confrontation because the eviction notice the Valastros received after ’Ntoni’s failed bid for independence is dated 25 October 1947. On Mussolini’s saying, see the chapter “‘Andare verso il popolo’: L’Ufficio stampa e le origini della propaganda di massa (1926–1933),” in Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975), 67–99. On the Fascist implications of the scene in La terra trema, see Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 77–78; Vincent F. Rocchio, Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 102–3.

204

Notes to pages 46–50

153 Lino Micciché, “Visconti e il mito del personaggio positivo,” in L’opera di Luchino Visconti, 123–37 (128). 154 Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60. 155 Antonello Trombadori, “Prima mostra di artisti-artigiani,” originally published in L’Unità, 6 April 1946, reprinted in La via ita­­liana al realismo, 118–19. On Trombadori’s contributions to La terra trema, see Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 210; Stefania Parigi, Cinema-Italy, trans. Sam Rohdie, ed. Sam Rohdie and Des O’Rawe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 60. On his contributions to the visual arts after the war, see Luciano Caramel, Arte in Italia 1945–1960, new edition (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2013), 48; Adrian R. Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 30–1. 156 Pietrangeli, “ ‘I Malavoglia’ di Verga sullo schermo,” 110–12. 157 On Alicata’s adaptation, which he carried out while imprisoned in Regina Coeli, where he had been sent for his anti-Fascist activities, see Mario Alicata, “Appunti per una sceneggiatura dei ‘Malavoglia’ [1943],” in Verga: Guida storico-critica, ed. Enrico Ghidetti (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979), 240–2. 158 Silvano Castellani, “I nostri registi: Attività di Luchino Visconti,” Star 1, no. 10 (14 Oct. 1944): 11. On Visconti’s “homage” to Renoir in La terra trema, see Ivo Blom, Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2018), 224. 2. “Renewal through Conservation”: Neorealism after Fascism 1 On the opposition in the film as symbolic of the anti-Fascist Resistance, see Guglielmo Moneti, Studi su Caccia Tragica (Giuseppe De Santis, 1947), (Siena: Nuova Immagine Editrice, 2004), 44; Alberto Farassino, Giuseppe De Santis (Milan: Moizzi editore, 1978), 22; Andrea Martini, “Precursore del cinema della modernità,” in Giuseppe De Santis: La trasfigurazione della realtà, ed. Marco Grossi (Rome: Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, 2007), 18–25 (22). 2 As early as 1972, Isnenghi called for scholars to “portare l’accento sui nessi e le giunture [put the accent on the links and joints]” in their analyses of mid-century Italian culture. Nearly twenty years later, Ben-Ghiat reiterated this exhortation, suggesting that “studies which stress continuities rather than disjunctures may prove more fruitful for understanding twentieth-century Italian culture.” Nearly thirty years after the publication of Ben-Ghiat’s essay, I contend that this approach has by now largely borne its fruits and that it is thus time to look anew at possible post-war disjunctures. Mario Isnenghi, “Trenta-Quaranta: l’ipotesi della continuità,” Quaderni storici 12, no. 34 (1977): 103–7 (104); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Neorealism in



Notes to pages 50–2

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Italy, 1930–50: From Fascism to Resistance,” Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991): 155–9 (159). 3 Callisto Cosulich, “I conti con la realtà,” Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 7, 1945/1948, ed. Callisto Cosulich (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2003), 3–34 (19). See, too, Miccichè’s extended critique of what he calls the “visione mitica della fase neorealistica come rivoluzione ‘ex abrupto’ [mythic vision of the neorealist phase as an ‘ex abrupto’ revolution].” Lino Miccichè, “Il cinema italiano sotto il fascismo: Elementi per un ripensamento possibile,” Risate di regime: La commedia ita­­liana 1930–1944, ed. Mino Argentieri (Venice: Marislio Editori, 1991), 37–63 (38). 4 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Cinema italiano oggi,” in Cinema italiano oggi, ed. Alessandro Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi (Rome: Carlo Bestetti – Edizioni d’Arte, 1951), 49–145 (52). 5 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Cinema italiano oggi,” 145. 6 Edgar Morin, L’An zéro de l’Allemagne (Paris: Éditions de la Cité universelle, 1946). The most sustained reflection on the connections between Morin and Rossellini is to be found in Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema, 1942–1948 (PhD diss., New York University, 2009), 198–217. 7 See, for instance, Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 216; Tony Judt, preface to The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), vii–xii (vii); Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2013), xiv–xv; Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 242–243, 260. 8 Claudio Pavone, “La continuità dello Stato: Istituzioni e uomini,” in Alle origini della Repubblica: Scritti su fascismo, antifascismo e continuità dello Stato (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), 70–159. See, too, Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2005), 37–53; Philip Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 111–13. 9 In order, these quotations are taken from Landy, Italian Film, 83; and Bondanella and Pacchioni, A History of Italian Cinema, 40. For the effect of the political debates of the 1960s and 1970s on Italian film studies, see Giulia Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo: Percorsi attraverso il neorealismo cinematografico italiano (Rome: Lithos, 2000), 208. 10 Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, La cultura e la poesia ita­­liana del dopoguerra (Bologna: Capelli, 1968), 72. For early instances of the efforts to emphasize the importance for post-war neorealism of Italian culture under Fascism, see Ferrara, Il nuovo cinema italiano, 91–2; Guido Oldrini, “Postille alla

206

11

12

13

14

15

16

Notes to pages 52–3 critica del neorealismo,” Ferrania 3 (March 1962): 17–19 (17); Claudio Quarantotto, Il cinema, la carne e il diavolo (Milan: Edizioni del Borghese, 1963), 170–6; Riccardo Scrivano, “Le vie della narrativa,” in Riviste, scrittori e critici del Novecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 203–15; Manacorda, Storia della letteratura ita­­liana contemporanea, 3–16; Ferretti, La letteratura del rifiuto [1968], 145; Ruggero Jacobbi, “Storia di un giornale letterario,” in Campo di Marte trent’anni dopo 1938–1968, ed. Ruggero Jacobbi (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1969), 7–83 (11); Camillo Bassotto. ed., Atti del convegno di studi sulla resistenza nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra 24/27 Aprile 1970, Palazzo del Cinema, Lido (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1970), 93; Romano Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra e l’ideologia della ricostruzione nel dopoguerra (Rome: Edizioni di Ideologie, 1971), 9; Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1971), 41; Mario Santoro, Momenti della narrativa ita­­liana: Dal romanzo storico al romanzo neorealista (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1971), 283–4; Taracchini, “Il Neorealismo come letteratura di Stato,” 337. On these two significant festivals and their impact on Italian film historiography, see Adriano Aprà and Patrizia Pistagnesi, “Il cinema italiano, questo sconosciuto,” in I favolosi anni trenta: Cinema italiano 1929-1944, ed. Adriano Aprà and Patrizia Pistagnesi (Rome: Electa, 1979), 24–33. Gruppo Cinegramma (Francesco Casetti, Alberto Farassino, Aldo Grasso, and Tatti Sanguinetti), “Neorealismo e cinema italiano degli anni ’30,” in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, ed. Lino Miccichè (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1999), 331–85 (376–7). Gian Piero Brunetta, “Padri ‘buoni’ e verità scomode,” originally ­published in La Repubblica, 27 Oct. 1976, reprinted in Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, ed. Riccardo Redi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1979), 261–3 (262–3). Tullio Kezich, “Hanno fatto pace col nonno fascista,” originally published in La Repubblica, 12 Oct. 1976, reprinted in Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, 251–2. On the shifting approaches to Italian cinema from the Fascist ventennio since the 1970s, see Vito Zagarrio, “Per una revisione critica del cinema ‘fascista’: Il dibattito dagli anni settanta al Duemila,” in Cinema e fascismo: Film, modelli, immaginari (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004), 13–39. Bruno Bongiovanni, “Gli intellettuali la cultura e i miti del dopoguerra,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 5, La Repubblica 1943–1963, ed. Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1979), 441–523 (454). As De Caro puts it, “[n]on c’è effettivamente dubbio sulla continuità tra le due fasi, [...] così nel cinema come, con conseguenze anche meno commendevoli, in molti altri aspetti della vita nazionale [there is indeed no doubt regarding the continuity between the two phases, (...) in the cinema as (...) in many other aspects of national life].” De Caro, Rifondare gli italiani, 9. For decades, in fact, virtually every study of neorealism has insisted on continuity between pre- and post-war culture. See, for instance,



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Jean A. Gili, “Problemi e tendenze del cinema italiano: Lo sviluppo del dissenso dal ’40 al ’45,” in Gli intellettuali in trincea, ed. Saveria Chemotti (Padua: CLEUP, 1977), 121–32; Nino Tripodi, “Cinema in rosso e nero,” in Intellettuali sotto due bandiere (Rome: Ciarrapico Editore, 1978), 427–70; Ted Perry, “The Road to Neorealism,” Film Comment 14, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1978): 7–13; Pellizzari, Cineromanzo, 8; Calogero, La narrativa del neorealismo, 16–20; Siti, Il neorealismo nella poesia ita­­liana, 197n4; Romano Luperini, Il Novecento: Apparati ideologici, ceto intellettuale, sistema formali nella letteratura ita­­liana contemporanea (Turin: Loescher editore, 1981), xviii–xix; Giuseppe Langella, Il secolo delle riviste: Lo statuto letterario dal ‘Baretti’ a ‘Primato’ (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1982), 328–83; Piero Luxardo Franchi, “L’altra faccia degli anni Trenta,” Indagini Otto-Novecentesche 182 (1983): 263–88; Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 257; Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 4; Baldan, Per una lettura del Neorealismo, 6; Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo, 221; Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 349; Maurizio Fantoni Minnella, Non riconciliati: Politica e società nel cinema italiano dal neorealismo a oggi (Turin: UTET, 2004), 11–12; Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 22–3; Ennio Di Nolfo, “Le origini del ‘neorealismo’ cinematografico italiano nel ventennio fascista,” Nuova antologia 2250 (April–June 2009): 126–45 (144); Noto and Pitassio, Il cinema neorealista, 51; Porcaro, Aspetti critici e letterari della narrativa del neorealismo italiano, 3; Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 3; Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 87–88; Simonetta Milli Konewko, Neorealism and the “New” Italy: Compassion in the Development of Italian Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 11. 17 Even as he argues, unconvincingly, that with the neorealist auteurs after the war “si riparte [...] da zero [things began again (...) from zero],” Brunetta grants that “non si butta via certo il patrimonio professionale accumulato dagli operatori nei decenni precedenti [the professional inheritance that film crews had accumulated in the previous decades was certainly not thrown away],” an admission that effectively negates the claim it is intended to modify. Gian Piero Brunetta, ‘E um dia repente aqui el cinema italiano explodindo com Roma cidade aperta,’” in Invenzioni dal vero: Discorsi sul neorealismo, ed. Michele Guerra (Parma: Diabasis, 2015), 23–41 (28). 18 Orio Caldiron, introduction to Le fortune del melodrama, ed. Orio Caldiron (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2004), 9–25 (11–12); Ernesto G. Laura, “I percorsi intrecciati della commedia anni ’30,” in Risate di regime, 109–37 (135–6); Aprà, “Capolavori di massa,” 11; Giorgio Tinazzi, “Sulla ‘popolarità’ nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra,” in Dietro lo schermo: Ragionamenti sui modi di produzione cinematografici in Italia, ed. Vito Zagarrio (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1988), 81–8 (82).

208

Notes to pages 53–4

19 Stephen Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 12; Ernesto G. Laura, “I reduci del c­ inema di Salò,” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 7, 1945/1948, ed. Callisto Cosulich (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2003), 310–29; Salvatore Ambrosino, “Il cinema ricomincia: Attori e registi tra continuità e frattura,” in Neorealismo: Cinema italiano, 1945–1949, ed. Alberto Farassino. Turin: EDT, 1989), 63. 20 On this point, see Parigi, “Le carte d’identità del neorealismo,” 90; Di Nolfo, “Intimations of Neorealism in the Fascist Ventennio,” 84; Gian Piero Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, vol. 2, Dal 1945 ai giorni nostri (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1998), 39; Francesco Pitassio and Simone Venturini, “Building the Institution: Luigi Chiarini and Italian Film Culture in the 1930s,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Malte Hagene (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 249–67 (263); Giuliana Muscio, “Le ceneri di Balzac: Sceneggiatura e sceneggiatori nel neorealismo,” in Sulla carta: Storia e storie degli sceneggiatura in Italia, ed Mariapia Comand (Turin: Lindau, 2006), 109–41 (121); Antonella C. Sisto, Film Sound in Italy: Listening to the Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 107–9. 21 On stylistic continuities in cinema, see especially Zagarrio, “Before the (Neorealist) Revolution,” 19–36. 22 Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” 28. 23 Ennio Flaiano, “Città aperta,” originally published in Domenica, 30 Sept. 1945, reprinted in Lettere d’amore al cinema, ed. Cristina Bragaglia (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1978), 81–2; Luigi Comencini, “Roma città aperta,” Avanti! 24 Oct. 1945, 2. 24 See Luigi Freddi, Il cinema, 2 vols. (Rome: L’Arnia, 1949), I: 209. On this tradition in cinema under Fascism, see Mino Argentieri, L’occhio del regime (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2003), 108–9; Caminati, “The Role of Documentary Film in the Formation of the Neorealist Cinema,” in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 52–70 (esp. 58–62); Zagarrio, Cinema e fascismo, 195–7. 25 Mario Gromo, “Sullo schermo: La nave bianca di F. De Robertis e Ro. Rossellini,” La Stampa, 1 Nov. 1941, reproduced in Gianni Rondolino, “La critica ita­­liana e la ‘trilogia della guerra fascista,’” in L’antirossellinismo (Turin: Edizioni Kaplan, 2010), 29–46 (30). 26 “Stile e maniera,” Bianco e nero 10, no. 12 (Dec. 1949): 3–7. On the use of non-professional actors in neorealist films, see Stephen Gundle, Fame Amid the Ruins: Italian Stardom in the Age of Neorealism (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2020), 303–32. 27 Corrado D’Errico, “Camicia nera, il grande film della nuova Italia,” originally published in Il dramma 160 (15 April 1933), reprinted in Critica ita­­ liana primo tempo, 159–61 (160).



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28 In order, these quotations are taken from Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 3; Rocchio, Cinema of Anxiety, 101; Sam Rohdie, “A Note on the Italian Cinema During Fascism,” Screen 22, no. 4 (1981): 87–90 (90). 29 Siobhan S. Craig, Cinema after Fascism: The Shattered Screen (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 21. In the last decade, a similar case has been made, for instance, by Silvio Celli, “Piccoli cineasti crescono: A passo ridotto con i Cineguf,” in Schermi di regime. Cinema italiano degli anni trenta: La produzione e i generi, ed. Alessandro Faccioli (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2010), 190–200 (199); Maurizio Zinni, Fascisti di celluloide: La memoria del ventennio nel cinema italiano (1945–2000) (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2010), 25–6; Giacomo Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11; Chiara Ferrari, The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 127; De Caro, Rifondare gli italiani, 71. 30 See, for instance, Lino Miccichè, “Il cadavere nell’armadio,” in Cinema itali­ano sotto il fascismo, ed. Riccardo Redi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1979), 9–18. 31 See Liborio Termine, “Il dibattito sugli antefatti,” in Storia del cinema itali­ ano, vol. 7, 1945/1948, ed. Callisto Cosulich (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2003), 73–81; Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 40–1. 32 “La lotta intorno al cinema,” Quarta parete 2, no. 14 (24 Jan. 1946): 1–2 (2). 33 “Nomi, possibilità del cinema italiano,” Sud 1, no. 7 (20 June 1946): 10, 12. 34 C., “[Note].” Quarta parete 1, no. 2 (11 Oct. 1945): 2. 35 Fernaldo Di Giammatteo, review of Cielo sulla palude by Augusto Genina, Bianco e nero 10, no. 12 (Dec. 1949): 50–3 36 Daniela Baratieri, “La riedizione di due film fascisti,” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 9, 1954/1959, ed. Sandro Bernardi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004), 178–9. 37 Pietrangeli, Panoramica sul cinema italiano, 12, 14, 18, 33. See, too, the discussion of the contributions of filmmakers such as Brignone, Camerini, Castellani, Franciolini, Lattuada, Mastrocinque, Mattòli, Poggioli, and Soldati, in Pietrangeli, “Quattordici anni di cinema,” 19–26; and Pietrangeli, “Colpi di scena all’A.C.C.I: Cronaca della riunione,” originally published in Star, 13 Jan. 1945, reprinted in Neorealismo e dintorni, 41–6. See, as well, the emphasis on Alessandrini’s influence on neorealist filmmakers in Silvio Guarnieri, “Cinema e letteratura [1950],” in Cinquant’anni di narrativa in Italia (Florence: Parenti editore, 1955), 137–62 (148–9). 38 Venturini, “Origini del neorealismo,” 42. 39 Venturini, “Origini del neorealismo,” 41. 40 Venturini, “Origini del neorealismo,” 42–3. 41 Vito Attolini, “Prima, durante, dopo il fascismo,” in Il cinema di Francesca De Robertis, ed. Massimo Causo (Bari and Milan: Edizioni dal Sud, 2018), 39–49.

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Notes to pages 58–61

42 Mario Verdone, “Colloquio sul neorealismo,” originally published in Bianco e nero 2 (Feb. 1952), reprinted in Il mio metodo: Scritti e interviste, ed. Adriano Aprà (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1987), 84–94 (85). 43 Roberto Rossellini, “Entretien avec Roberto Rossellini,” trans. Johanna Capra, originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma 37 (July 1954), reprinted in Il mio metodo, 113–14. 44 Blasetti, “Cinema italiano ieri,” in Cinema italiano oggi, 17–48 (34). 45 Blasetti, “Cinema italiano ieri,” 48. 46 In order, these quotations are taken from Craig, Cinema after Fascism, 1; and Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, 8. 47 Paolo Mario Sipala, “La poetica del neorealismo,” in Il neorealismo nella letteratura e nel cinema italiano, 51–68 (54). A less pithy articulation of the same argument can be found in Mino Argentieri, Il cinema in guerra: Arte, comunicazione e propaganda in Italia 1940–1944 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1998), 335. 48 In order, these references to Italy’s post-war social and political renewal are taken from Palmiro Togliatti, Rinnovare l’Italia: Documenti del V Congresso del P.C.I. (Rome: Società editrice “L’Unità,” 1946), 14; Giuseppe Petronio, “La crisi dell’idealismo e la critica letteraria,” Socialismo 3, nos. 3–5 (1 March 1947): 33–36 (36); “Avvertenza,” Il ’45 1, no. 1 (Feb. 1946): 3–4; Enrico Emanuelli, “Giorni, sentimenti,” Costume 2 (25 June 1945): 12–13. 49 In order, these references to Italy’s post-war cultural renewal are taken from Alberto Moravia, “Nuovo realismo nella letteratura,” Vie Nuove 2, no. 44 (2 Nov. 1947): 8; Tito Guerrini, “Scrittori dell’età borghese,” Vie Nuove 2, no. 2 (12 Jan. 1947): 8; Sala, “Realismo e religiosità,” 537; Pietrangeli, “‘I Malavoglia’ di Verga sullo schermo,” 111. 50 See, for instance, Mirella Serri, I redenti: Gli intellettuali che vissero due volte, 1938–1948 (Milan: Corbaccio, 2005); and Giuseppe Iannaccone, Il fascismo ‘sintetico’: Letteratura e ideologia negli anni Trenta (Milan: Greco & Greco, 1999). 51 Historians have increasingly emphasized this point in recent years. See Rosario Forlenza and Bjørrn Thomassen, Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 149–50; Luca La Rovere, L’eredità del fascismo: Gli intellettuali, i giovani e la transizione al postfascismo 1943–1948 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 11; Robert Ventresca, “Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy,” Modern Italy 11, no. 2 (2006): 189–209; and Hans Woller, I conti con il fascismo: L’epurazione in Italia 1943–1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), 14. In scholarship on neorealism, however, such views have received less attention. One notable exception is the work of Minghelli, whose central question “is not one of continuity, but rather of trauma,” and who thus sees neorealism as an important locus for confronting the Fascist past. Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 3.



Notes to pages 61–4

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52 Filippo Burzio, “Il crollo dell’Europa,” originally published in La nuova stampa, 14 Aug. 1946, reprinted in Repubblica anno primo: Scritti politici di attualità (Turin: Casa Editrice Egea, 1948), 22–5; Il lunarista, “GennaioFebbraio,” Il Campo 1, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Feb., 1946): 1–4. 53 In order, these references are taken from Pietro Barbieri, “Presentazione,” Idea: Mensile di cultura politica e sociale 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1945): 3–4; Pantaleo Caraballese et al., La crisi dei valori (Rome: Partenia, 1945); Giorgio Sacerdote, “La crisi della società contemporanea,” Il Commento 2, no. 4 (16 Feb. 1945): 104; Vittore Branca, “Umanità del realismo romantico,” Il Ponte 2, no. 4 (1946): 317–24 (324). 54 Luciano Anceschi, “Crisi e poesia,” La Rassegna d’Italia 1, no. 9 (Sept. 1946): 110–16 (116). 55 Carlo Levi “Crisi di civiltà,” originally published in La Nazione del popolo, 12–13 Sept. 1944, reprinted in Il dovere dei tempi: Prose politiche e civili, ed. Luisa Montevecchi (Rome: Donzelli, 2004), 60–2 (60). 56 Gabriele Pepe, La crisi dell’uomo (Rome: Capriotti Editore, 1945), 19. 57 Renzo Modesti, “Della poesia contemporanea,” La Via: Rivista mensile di poesia e di cultura 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1946): 12–14. 58 Emanuelli, “Giorni, sentimenti,” 12–13. 59 Giorgio Granata, “Speranze di un nuovo mondo,” Risorgimento liberale, 18 Sept. 1945, 1. 60 Benedetto Croce, “L’Italia nella vita internazionale,” originally presented as a speech at Rome’s Teatro Eliseo, 21 Sept. 1944, published in Scritti e di­­ scorsi politici (1943–1947), 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1963), II: 87–104 (102). 61 Benedetto Croce, “La libertà ita­­liana nella libertà del mondo,” originally presented as a speech at the Congresso dei partiti uniti nei Comitati di liberazione, Bari, 28 Jan.1944, published in Scritti e discorsi politici, I: 49–58 (56–7). On Croce’s metaphor, see Charles L. Leavitt IV, “‘An Entirely New Land’? Italy’s Post-war Culture and Its Fascist Past,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 21, no. 1 (Jan. 2016): 4–18. 62 Benedetto Croce, “The Fascist Germ Still Lives,” New York Times Magazine, 28 Nov. 1943, 9, 44–5. 63 Detailed accounts of this political rejection of Croce can be found in Daniela La Penna, “The Rise and Fall of Benedetto Croce: Intellectual Positionings in the Italian Cultural Field, 1944–1947,” Modern Italy 21, no. 2 (May 2016): 139–55; David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46: Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the “Actionists” (Madison, NJ, and Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996; David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 224–38; Charles L. Leavitt IV, “Probing the Limits of Crocean Historicism,” The Italianist 37, no. 3 (2017): 387–406.

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Notes to pages 64–7

64 Eugenio Artom, “Il compito del liberalismo,” originally published in La Nazione del popolo, 21 Jan. 1945, reprinted in Un quotidiano della Resistenza: ‘La Nazione del popolo’: Organo del Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (11 agosto 1944–3 luglio 1946), ed. Pier Luigi Ballini, 2 vols. (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2008), I: 247–8 (247). 65 Giaime Pintor, “Il colpo di stato del 25 luglio,” originally published in Quaderni italiani 4 (1944), reprinted in Il sangue d’Europa (1939–1945), ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 165–81 (181). 66 Vittore Branca, “La nuova ‘Nazione,’” originally published in La Nazione del popolo, 12 Aug. 1944, reprinted in Un quotidiano della Resistenza, I: 152–3 (152). 67 Giuseppe Del Bo, “Orientarsi prima di ricostruire,” La Cittadella 2, nos. 7–10 (15–30 May 1947): 9. 68 Pepe, La crisi dell’uomo, 25–6. 69 Fabbri, for instance, argues that “the reference to neorealism cannot but authenticate the narrative trope of post-1943 Italy as the nation’s year zero, a point of departure for all sorts of self-specious versions of national history.” Lorenzo Fabbri, “Neorealism as Ideology: Bazin, Deleuze, and the Avoidance of Fascism,” The Italianist 35, no. 2 (June 2015): 182–201 (194). While I concur with this challenge to the year-zero narrative, I question the claim that such a narrative is inherent in neorealist discourse. 70 Giovanni Ronchini, Le questioni del canone e del realismo. Due casi: Le terre del Sacramento e Metello (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 2007), 124–5. See, too, Anna Maria Torriglia, Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 3, 6; Mario Cannella, “Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of NeoRealism,” Screen 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973–4): 5–60 (16, 27); Giuseppe Ghigi, La memoria inquieta: Cinema e resistenza (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2009), 15. 71 See G. Silvano Spinetti, Vent’anni dopo: Ricominciare da zero (Rome: Edizioni di “Solidarismo,” 1964), 224–5, 232–4. 72 See, for instance, Alberto Moravia, “Colpe letterarie,” Domenica 1, no. 1 (6 Aug. 1944): 1, 6; Libero Bigiaretti, “Cronache delle lettere: I discorsi del giorno,” Domenica 1, no. 2 (13 Aug. 1944): 5; Massimo Bontempelli, “Meriti letterari,” Domenica 1, no. 4 (27 Aug. 1944): 1, 6; Bruno Romani, “Autonomia della letteratura,” Domenica 2, no. 5 (4 Feb. 1945): 1, 8; Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, “Cultura e popolo,” Rinascita 2, no. 2 (Feb. 1945): 48; Ugo Bernasconi, “Responsabilità degli artisti [Discorso tenuto al Centro Maestri Comacini in Como l’8 maggio 1946],” La Rassegna d’Italia 1, no. 11 (Nov. 1946): 63–72. 73 See, for instance, Bontempelli, “Apologia del ventennio letterario [Aug. 1944],” Dignità dell’uomo, 33; Bontempelli, “Apologia seconda [June 1945],” in Dignità dell’uomo, 124–6; Enrico Falqui, La letteratura del ventennio



Notes to pages 67–70

74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83 84 85 86

87 88

213

nero (Rome: Edizioni della Bussola, 1948), 320; Francesco Flora, Ritratto di un Ventennio (Naples: Gaetano Macchiaroli Editore, 1944), 114. Gaetano Trombatore, “Letteratura e popolo,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 24 (19 Sept. 1946): 1. Trombatore, “Letteratura e popolo,” 1. Trombatore, “Letteratura e popolo,” 1. Giovanni Battista Angioletti, “Scrittori del ventennio e letteratura popolare,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 26 (3 Oct. 1946): 1 (emphasis in the original). Angioletti, “Scrittori del ventennio e letteratura popolare,” 1. Trombatore “Letteratura e popolo,” 1. The debate continued several weeks later, with the following entries: Gaetano Trombatore, “Per fatto personale,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 28 (17 Oct. 1946): 1; Giovanni Battista Angioletti, “Non fu Arcadia,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 28 (17 Oct. 1946): 1. Pepe, La crisi dell’uomo, 106 (emphasis in the original). Giuseppe Petronio, “Innovazione e tradizione,” Avanti! 4 Aug. 1948, 3. For a similar position, see Virgilio Guzzzi, “Nuova guerra ed arte antica,” Ulisse 1, no. 2 (Aug. 1947): 234–40. Giuseppe Petronio, “Cultura vecchia e nuova,” Avanti! 23 June 1948, 2. Renato Nicolai, “L’insegnamento di De Sanctis: Letteratura ma in mezzo alla società,” Vie Nuove 2, no. 28 (13 July 1947): 8. Mario Mafai “Possibilità per un’arte nuova,” Rinascita 2, no. 3 (March 1945): 89–91 (90). Antonio Pesenti, “Crisi sociale e ricostruzione,” Mercurio 2, no. 11 (July 1945): 5–9 (6). Mario Bonfantini, “Situazione della cultura,” Società Nuova 2, nos. 7–9 (July–Sept. 1946): 1–2 (2). See, too, Giani Stuparich, Discorso per l’inaugurazione dell’attività del Circolo della cultura e delle arti: Funzione della cultura e messaggio dell’arte, 17.IV.1946 (Padua-Trieste: Simone Volpato Studio Bibliografico, 2010), 14. Renato Guttuso, “Pitture di Mario Mafai,” originally published in Rinascita 11 (Nov. 1945), reprinted in Scritti, 212–15 (214). The speech was delivered on 13 Nov. 1944 in honour of Bandinelli’s assumption of the chair of art history at the University of Florence. It was first published as Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, “L’impegno degli intellettuali,” in La Nazione del Popolo, 14 November 1944, reprinted in Un quotidiano della Resistenza, II: 575–8 (578). It was subsequently published as Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, “A che serve la storia dell’arte antica?,” Società 1, nos. 1–2 (1945): 8–23. On Bianchi Bandinelli’s speech and essay, see Eugenio Garin, “La cultura dopo la liberazione,” in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi: La Toscana, ed. Giorgio Mori (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 711–31 (714); Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra, 61–2; Eugenio Di Rienzo, Un dopoguerra storiografico: Storici italiani tra guerra civile e Repubblica (Florence: Le Lettere, 2004), 208–10.

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Notes to pages 71–4

89 Luperini argues, in fact, that Bianchi Bandinelli’s call for “renewal through conservation” “esprimeva una posizione coerente con l’atteggiamento complessivo del PCI [expressed a position consistent with the overall attitude of the PCI].” Luperini, Il Novecento: Apparati ideologici, II: 371. A similar argument was advanced in one of the first substantial retrospective accounts of post-war Italian culture. See Mario Sansone, “La cultura,” in Dieci anni dopo 1945–1955: Saggi sulla vita democratica ita­­liana (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1955), 515–98 (esp. 519–20). 90 Carlo Bo, “I pericoli della letteratura [1949],” in Riflessioni critiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1953), 7–35 (11). 91 In addition to the articles quoted and cited in the discussion that follows, see also Giansiro Ferrata, “Letteratura e società: Ascoltiamo anche il punto di vista dell’ammalato che vogliamo curare – Ecco che cosa ci direbbe,” L’Unità, 11 Dec. 1946, 3; Giovanni Titta Rosa, “Non viene dal cielo: Lo scrittore è parte della sua societa,” L’Unità, 16 Dec. 1948, 3; Roberto Battaglia, “Esigenza di chiarificazione,” Vie Nuove, 12 Dec. 1948; Alberto Moravia, “Moravia a Sereni,” Vie Nuove, 19 Dec. 1948; Luigi Longo, “Longo a Moravia,” Vie Nuove, 26 Dec. 1948; Giuseppe Di Vittorio, “C’è da fare per voi nel mondo del lavoro: Giuseppe Di Vittorio risponde a Libero Bigiaretti,” Unità, 19 Feb. 1949, 3. 92 Libero Bigiaretti, “Letteratura e società: Lettera aperta ad Emilio Sereni,” L’Unità, 13 Nov. 1948, 3. 93 Emilio Sereni, “Letteratura e società: Risposta di Sereni a Bigiaretti,” L’Unità, 16 Nov. 1948, 3. 94 See Francesco Jovine, “Letteratura e società: Risposta di Jovine a Sereni,” L’Unità, 24 Nov. 1948, 3; Giannino Degani, “La forma e i contenuti: La polemica sulla letteratura,” L’Unità, 17 Nov. 1948, 3; Antonello Trombadori, “Coscienza e spontaneità: La polemica sulla letteratura,” L’Unità, 30 Nov. 1948, 3; Margherita Guidacci, “Letteratura e società,” originally published in Cronache Sociali 4–5 (1949), reprinted in Cronache Sociali: 1947–1951, ed. Marcella Glisenti and Leopoldo Elia, 2 vols. (Rome: Luciano Landi Editore, 1961), II: 1083–7; Franco Catalano, “Letteratura e società,” Avanti! 3 Dec. 1948, 3. 95 Alfonso Gatto, “I debiti e i crediti: La polemica sulla letteratura,” L’Unità, 7 Dec., 1948, 3. Gatto’s emphasis on history was shared by at least one of the “letteratura e società” debate’s commentators. See l.a., “Quattro poeti dopo la guerra,” Socialismo 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1949): 14–17 (esp. 14). 96 Sereni, “Letteratura e società: Risposta di Sereni a Bigiaretti,” 3. 97 Italo Calvino, “Saremo come Omero!” originally published in Rinascita (Dec. 1948), reprinted in Saggi, 1945–1985, ed. Mario Barenghi, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), I: 1483–7. 98 Calvino, “Saremo come Omero,” 1485–6.



Notes to pages 75–7

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99 The English translation, which I have quoted elsewhere, here reads “begin again from scratch,” but I have chosen to remain more faithful to the Italian original, which reads “ricominciare da zero.” Calvino, “Prefazione 1964 al Sentiero dei nidi di ragno,” 1185 (emphasis mine). 100 His account was not always consistent, however. Just a few years earlier, in his 1960 “Autobiografia politica giovanile” (Political Autobiography of Youth), Calvino explained that in the post-war period “[n]on si trattava d’una rottura totale [...]: dovevamo trovare tra le idee dei nostri padri quelle cui potevamo riattaccarci per ricominciare, quelle che loro non erano stati capaci o non avevano fatto in tempo a rendere operanti [we weren’t after a total break (...): we had to find among the ideas of our fathers those we could hang onto in order to start again, those that they had been unable or had not had the chance to implement, or to implement in time].” Italo Calvino, “Autobiografia politica giovanile,” in Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiografiche (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 149–79 (168–9). In the 1964 preface to Il sentiero, he would make precisely the opposite point. On the republished edition of Il sentiero and Calvino’s tendency to reframe his early literary ambitions, see especially Jennifer Burns, “Telling Tales about ‘Impegno’: Commitment and Hindsight in Vittorini and Calvino,” Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (2000): 992–1006. 101 Calvino, “Prefazione 1964,” 1192; Calvino, preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 16. 102 Italo Calvino, Il Sentiero dei nidi di ragno: Romanzi e racconti, I: 5–147 (71), [First edition Turin: Einaudi, 1947]; Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Martin McLaughlin (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 102. 103 Calvino, Il Sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 144; Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 181. 104 Although he finds a more unadulterated happy ending in Calvino’s novel than do I, Weiss identifies important parallels between Pin’s new beginnings and those of the Italian nation. Benno Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 15. Others who read the conclusion as marking, (perhaps too) optimistically, the birth of a new era both for Pin and for Italy include Frank Rosengarten, “The Italian Resistance Novel,” in From “Verismo” to Experimentalism: Essays on the Modern Italian Novel, ed. Sergio Pacifici (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 212–38 (225); Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, 119–21. 105 Among those who stress the significant incompleteness of Pin’s transformation, see Domenico Scarpa, Italo Calvino (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 223; Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 29–30; Claudia Nocentini, Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood (Leeds: Northern University Press, 2000), 27; Re, Calvino and

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Notes to pages 77–82

the Age of Neorealism, 307; Claudio Milanini, L’utopia discontinua: Saggio su Italo Calvino (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), 19; Raffaele Cavalluzzi, “La vita degli uomini come ‘storia di sangue e corpi nudi’: Personaggi omodiegetici del Sentiero dei nidi di ragno di I. Calvino,” Critica letteraria 182 (2019): 59–75 (74–5). 106 Italo Calvino, “Sherwood Anderson scrittore artigiano,” originally published in L’Unità, 4 Nov. 1947, reprinted in Saggi 1945–1985, I: 1283–5 (1284–5). 107 Landy, Italian Film, 83. 108 Giuseppe De Santis, “Un grande film collettivo,” in Mario Serandrei: Giorni di gloria, ed. Laura Gaiardoni (Florence: Il Castoro, 1998), 23–4. On this film, including De Santis’s contribution, see Ivelise Perniola, Oltre il neorealismo: Documentari d’autore e realtà ita­­liana del dopoguerra (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2004), 24–32. 109 See, too, the use of the same rhetorical formulation in, e.g., Libero Bigiaretti, “Dove va la letteratura?” Domenica, 31 Dec. 1944, 6. 110 Alberto Lattuada, “A proposito del cinema italiano: Paghiamo i nostri de­biti,” originally published in Film d’oggi 1, no. 4 (30 June 1945), reprinted in Il cinema ricomincia, 125. 111 Although he makes no mention of the significant connections I trace in this section, Medici offers an otherwise convincing account of the links between Ossessione and Caccia tragica. Medici, Neorealismo, 44. 112 It is worth recalling, as well, that Antonioni, one of Caccia tragica’s screenwriters, had some years earlier emphasized the significance of this location for the rebirth of Italian cinema in an influential essay and a subsequent documentary. See Michelangelo Antonioni, “Per un film sul fiume Po,” originally published in Cinema 68 (25 April 1939), reprinted in Sul cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004), 77–80. 113 Cosulich, “I conti con la realtà,” 19. Arguing the same point from the other side, Argentieri has claimed that “[i]l neorealismo non è stato a sufficienza scandagliato quale occasione per ripensare la collettività e la propria storia attraverso gli occhiali di una cultura che avesse fatto saltare i ponti con il passato. Il neorealismo non è stato a sufficienza scandagliato come espressione dell’inizio di un rivolgimento [neorealism has not been sufficiently explored as an opportunity to rethink our and its own history through the lens of a culture that had destroyed its bridges with the past. Neorealism has not been sufficiently investigated as an expression of the beginning of a revolution].” Mino Argentieri, “Cinema e vita nazionale,” in Rosso fuoco: Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, ed. Sergio Toffetti (Turin: Lindau, 1996), 109–26 (115–16). While I concur with his emphasis on neorealist renewal, I insist that this renewal was not at all envisioned as destroying bridges to the past.



Notes to pages 83–9

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114 Piero Calamandrei, “Il nostro programma,” originally published in Il Ponte 1, no. 1 (April 1945), reprinted in Scritti e discorsi politici, ed. Norberto Bobbio, vol. 1, Storia di dodici anni (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966), 99–103 (100). 115 For the PCI’s role in Caccia tragica, see Farassino, Giuseppe De Santis, 21. On cinema’s significance for the 18 April 1948 Italian elections, see especially Nicola Tranfaglia, ed., Il 1948 in Italia: La storia e i film (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1991). 3. “Chronicle and Tragedy”: The Neorealist Representation of History 1 Bicycle Thieves: A Film by Vittorio De Sica, trans. Simon Hartog (Hertfordshire: Lorrimer Publishing, 1968), 35. Among those who have emphasized the importance of Ricci’s exchange with the officer, see especially Giaime Alonge, Vittorio De Sica: Ladri di biciclette (Turin: Lindau, 1997), 39–40; Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 54–5. 2 Cesare Zavattini, “Ladri di biciclette,” originally in Bis 11 (25 May 1948), reprinted in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 77–83 (77). 3 Vittorio De Sica, “Abbiamo domandato a Vittorio De Sica perché fa un film dal ‘Ladro di biciclette,’” originally published in La Fiera letteraria 3, no. 5 (6 Feb. 1948), reprinted in Vittorio De Sica, ed. Orio Caldiron (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1975), 258–9. 4 De Sica, “Abbiamo domandato a Vittorio De Sica,” 259. 5 Cesare Zavattini, “Film-lampo: Sviluppo del neorealismo” (26 June 1952), reprinted in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 711–13 (711). 6 Carlo Salinari, La questione del realismo (Florence: Parenti Editore, 1960). 7 In order, these quotations are taken from Turconi, La poesia neorealista ita­­ liana, 108 (emphasis in the original); Alberto Asor Rosa, Vasco Pratolini (Rome: Edizioni Moderne, 1958), 115–16; Manacorda, Storia della letteratura ita­­liana contemporanea, 32 ; Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 52; Giovanna Benvenuti Riva, Letteratura e Resistenza (Milan: Principato editore, 1977), 28. 8 Philip Morgan, “‘I was there, too’: Memories of Victimhood in Wartime Italy,” Modern Italy 14, no. 2 (May 2009): 217–31 (217). As Di Scala relates, while the First World War had seen greater Italian combat deaths, the Second World War “more than made up the difference among civilians.” Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy from Revolution to Republic, 1700 to Present, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 277. 9 Calvino, “Prefazione 1964 al Sentiero dei nidi di ragno,” 1186; Calvino, preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 8. 10 Andrea Battistini, Sondaggi sul Novecento (Cesena: Società editrice ‘Il Ponte Vecchio,’ 2003), 202. Falcetto, Storia della narrativa neorealista, 116, 131. Corti famously collapsed this dichotomy, emphasizing the interpenetration

218

11

12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22

Notes to pages 89–92 or contamination of the two forms of narrative, in her influential study. Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 34–5, 56. Although it remains a key point of reference, Corti’s thesis has been repeatedly and convincingly challenged, most recently in Nisini, Il neorealismo italiano, 13. Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism, 89–90; Stefano Calabrese, introduction to Parole in guerra: Romanzo e resistenza, ed. Stefano Calabrese (Modena: Mucchi editore, 1996), 3–22 (3); Falaschi, La resistenza armata, 27–8; Gaetano Gazziano, Occasioni e valori del Neorealismo (Florence: De Bono, 1988), 53. Angiolo Gracci, “Prefazione alla I edizione (1945),” in Brigata sinigaglia, 4th ed. (Naples: La città del Sole, 2006), 45. Roberto Battaglia, Un uomo un partigiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004 [1945]), 19–20. Roberto Battaglia, Un uomo un partigiano, 7. A similar argument can be found in Giusto Astuti, “Due anni di letteratura,” Socialismo 2, no. 3 (March 1946): 77–8. See the entry from 4 Dec. 1943 in Emanuele Artom, Diari di un ­partigiano ebreo, gennaio 1940–febbraio 1944, ed. Guri Schwarz (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 80–1. Attilio Riccio, “Arrigo Benedetti e le forme del nuovo realismo,” La città libera 1, no. 30 (6 Sept. 1945): 12–13 (13); Giuseppe Sala, review of Paura all’alba, by Arrigo Benedetti, Il Campo: Rassegna mensile di politica, cultura e arte 1, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Feb. 1946): 76–7 (76); Enrico Falqui, “Arrigo Benedetti: ‘Paura all’alba,’” originally in Risorgimento liberale, 18 Dec. 1945, reprinted in Novecento letterario: Serie sesta, 316–20 (316); Gianfranco Piazzesi, review of Paura all’alba, by Arrigo Benedetti, Società 1, no. 3 (1945): 292–4. Eurialo De Michelis, review of Filo spinato, by Giuseppe Zàggia, Mercurio 3, no. 17 (Jan. 1946): 125–6; Rosario Assunto, review of Il pino e la rufola, by Ezio Taddei, Socialismo 2, nos. 7–8 (1 July 1946): 223; Enrico Falqui, “Silvio Micheli: ‘Pane duro,” originally published in Risorgimento liberale, 22 May 1946, reprinted in Novecento letterario: Serie sesta. Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1961. 210–13. L.C., “Letture,” Avanti! 24 Nov. 1945, 2 Rosario Assunto, “Le poetiche dello scriver male,” Lettere d’oggi 4–5 (Jan.–Feb. 1947): 5–6 (5). Enzo Forcella, review of Il mio granello di sabbia, by Luciano Bolis, La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 8 (30 May 1946): 5. Luciano Bolis, Il mio granello di sabbia (Turin: Einaudi, 1973 [1946]), 3. Piero Carmagnola, “Prefazione all’edizione 1945,” in Vecchi partigiani miei, new edition, ed. Andrea D’Arrigo (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2005), 19–20 (19); Marcello Venturi, “Io povero soldato,” L’Unità, 13 March 1949, 3.



Notes to pages 92–7

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23 Alberto Moravia, in Confessioni di scrittori: Interviste con se stessi (Turin: ERI, 1951), 77. 24 Cesare Pavese, “Hanno ragione i letterati,” originally broadcast over the radio on 4 Feb. 1948, and first published in Il Sentiero dell’Arte 30 Oct. 1948, reprinted in La letteratura americana, 249–52 (249). 25 Pavese, “Hanno ragione i letterati,” 251. 26 Mario Bonfantini, “Moralità moderne: Letteratura del dopoguerra,” Società Nuova 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1946): 22–5 (25). 27 Giambattista Vicari, “Per una provvisoria rinunzia,” Lettere d’oggi 3 (Dec. 1946): 2–3 (3). 28 Alfredo Gargiulo, “La parte dello scrittore,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 3 (25 April 25 1946): 3. 29 Giovanni Titta Rosa, “Mescolarsi alla vita,” Mondo operaio 2, no. 12 (19 Feb. 1949): 12. 30 Mino Caudana, “Aquile di piombo,” Avanti! 21 May 1946, 1. 31 Niccolò Gallo, “La narrativa ita­­liana del dopoguerra,” 30. 32 Giuseppe Antonelli, “Lo scrittore che non scrive i suoi libri,” Avanti! 15 Sept. 1946, 3. 33 Enrico Falqui, “Paragrafi sulla narrativa V [1946],” Novecento letterario: Serie terza, 431–6 (434). 34 Falqui, “Paragrafi sulla narrativa V,” 435–6. 35 Giuseppe Antonelli, “Invito alla cronaca,” Avanti! 24 Nov. 1946, 3. 36 Piero Regnoli, review of Ladri di biciclette, by Vittorio De Sica, L’Osservatore Romano, 26 Nov. 1948, 2. 37 Pietro Bianchi, review of Roma città aperta, by Roberto Rossellini, originally published in Oggi, 6 Nov. 1945, reprinted in L’occhio di vetro: Il cinema degli anni 1945–1950 (Milan: Edizioni il Formichiere, 1979), 15–16; Emanuele Farneti, “Punto e da capo,” La città libera 1, no. 43 (6 Dec. 1945): 15; Silvano Castellani, “Servizio informazioni: ‘Città aperta’ a porte chiuse,” Star 2, no. 37 (6 Oct. 1945): 1; Alberto Moravia, review of Roma città aperta, by Roberto Rossellini, originally published in La Nuova Europa, 30 Sept. 1945, reprinted in Cinema italiano: Recensioni e interventi 1933–1990, ed. Alberto Pezzotta and Anna Gilardelli (Milan: Bompiani, 2010), 56–7; Pasquale Prunas, review of Roma città aperta, by Roberto Rossellini, Sud 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1945): 7–8 (7); vice, “ ‘Roma, città aperta’ al Festival del Cinema,” originally published in Indipendente (26 Sept. 1945), reprinted in La storia di Roma città aperta, ed. Stefano Roncoroni (Bologna: Cineteca Bologna, 2006), 460. 38 Alfredo Orecchio, review of Paisà, by Roberto Rossellini, originally published in Il Messaggero, 9 March 1947, reprinted in La Resistenza nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra. Quello che scrissero... allora. Convegno di studi: Palazzo del Cinema 24–27 aprile 1970, ed. Nedo Ivaldi (Rome: Eliograf, 1970), 53;

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40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Notes to pages 97–103 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Germania anno zero,” originally published in Il Tempo, 13 April 1948, reprinted in Prima delle “prime”: Film italiani 1947–1997 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 43–5 (43); Gian Luigi Fiandaca, “Germania anno zero,” originally published in Hollywood 5, no. 175 (22 Jan. 1949), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 73. Vito Pandolfi, “Le stagioni dello spettacolo. Il Festival cinematografico a Venezia: Le opere italiane,” La Rassegna d’Italia 3, no. 10 (Oct. 1948): 1071–6 (1073); Irene Brin, review of Caccia tragica, by Giuseppe De Santis, originally published in Film rivista 4, no. 13 (30 July 1947), reprinted in Cinema freddo, 22. Giuseppe De Santis, “Anche il cinema ha la parola nel dibattito sui fatti di Calabria,” originally published in L’Unità (15 Nov. 1949), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 171. “Il cinema italiano ricomincia da Venezia,” 183–4. Pio Baldelli, “Cronaca, realtà e poesia,” Cinema 3, no. 15 (Feb. 1950): 70–3 (73). Gianni Puccini, “Per una discussione sul film italiano,” originally ­published in Bianco e nero 9, no. 2 (April 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 159–63 (159). Puccini, “Per una discussione sul film italiano,” 160–1. Gianfranco Piazzesi, “Necessità di una cronaca,” Società 1, no. 3 (July–Sept. 1945): 6–9 (7). Piazzesi, “Necessità di una cronaca,” 8. Piazzesi, “Necessità di una cronaca,” 8. Piazzesi, “Necessità di una cronaca,” 8. “Letteratura d’occasione,” originally published in Società 1, no. 4 (1945), reprinted in Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, 49–53. The essay was published anonymously but Bilenchi subsequently claimed autorship. See Alberto Cadioli, Tra prosa d’arte e romanzo del Novecento (1920–1960) (Milan: Acipelago Edizioni, 1989), 187–8n2. “Letteratura d’occasione,” 52. “Letteratura d’occasione,” 52. “Letteratura d’occasione,” 52. Franco Calamandrei, “Raccontare significa chiarire a noi stessi la vita,” Il Politecnico 13–14 (22–29 Dec. 1945): 8. Franco Calamandrei, “Narrativa vince cronaca,” Il Politecnico 26 (23 March 1946): 3. Franco Calamandrei “Narrativa vince cronaca,” 3. Franco Fortini, “Documenti e racconti,” Il Politecnico 28 (6 April 1946): 3. Franco Calamandrei, “Una generazione e un suo narratore,” Il Politecnico 30 (June 1946): 35–6 (35). Franco Calamandrei, “Una generazione e un suo narratore,” 36.



Notes to pages 104–8

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59 Gianfranco Piazzesi, “Dieci giorni che sconvolsero il mondo di John Reed,” Società 2, no. 6 (June 1946): 562–4 (563). 60 Piazzesi, “Dieci giorni che sconvolsero il mondo,” 563. 61 Piazzesi, “Dieci giorni che sconvolsero il mondo,” 562. 62 Among those who have similarly argued that the debate was caused by a confusion in terms, see Asor Rosa, “Lo Stato democratico,” 577; Anna Vecchiutti, “Concezione e ruolo della letteratura nel ‘Politecnico’ di Vittorini,” Problemi 69 (1984): 54–72 (60–1); Falcetto, Storia della narrativa neorealista, 139–40. 63 Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, 2 vols. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007 [1916]), I: 39. 64 Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, I: 18; Benedetto Croce, “Storia e cronaca,” in A Croce Reader: Aesthetics, Philosophy, History, and Literary Criticism, ed. and trans. Massimo Verdicchio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 40–50 (45). 65 Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, I: 19; Croce, “Storia e cronaca,” 46. 66 Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, I: 24. 67 Benedetto Croce, “Contro la ‘storia universale’ e i falsi universali: Encomio dell’individualità,” in Discorsi di varia filosofia, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1959), I: 129–62 (130); Benedetto Croce, “In Praise of Individuality and against ‘Universal History’ and Fake Universals in General,” in Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays by Benedetto Croce, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 509–38 (509). 68 Benedetto Croce, “Considerazioni sul problema morale dei nostri tempi [15 Dec. 1944],” originally published in Quaderno della “Critica” 1, no. 1 (1945), reprinted in Pensiero politico e politica attuale: Scritti e discorsi (1945) (Bari: Laterza, 1946), 3–24 (3). 69 Carlo Levi, “Giolittismo ideale,” originally published in Italia libera 3 (1 Dec. 1945), reprinted in Il dovere dei tempi, 110–11 (110). 70 Antonio La Penna, “I giovanissimi e la cultura negli ultimi anni del fasci­­ smo II,” Società 3, nos. 7–8 (July–Dec. 1946): 678–90 (682). 71 On Croce’s anti-Fascism, see Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 87–91. 72 See, for instance, Lucio Lombardo-Radice, Fascismo e anticomunismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1946), 27. On this turn, see Rodolfo Montuoro, “Il filosofo e la guerra: Benedetto Croce e il secondo conflitto mondiale,” in L’Italia in guerra 1940–43, ed. Bruna Micheletti and Pier Paolo Poggio (Brescia: Annali della Fondazione “Luigi Micheletti,” 1990–1), 853–62 (855–6); Sandro Setta, Croce, il liberalismo e l’Italia postfascista (Rome: Bonacci Editore, 1979), 158–60; Ward, Antifascisms, 56. 73 Enrico Ghidetti, Il Tramonto dello storicismo: Capitoli per una storia della cri­tica novecentesca (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), 106; Roberts, Benedetto

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76 77

78

79

80 81

82

83

84

85

Notes to pages 108–11 Croce, 224–38; Alberto Asor Rosa, “La cultura,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 4, tome 2, Dall’Unità a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 1592; Raffaello Franchini, Intervista su Croce, ed. Arturo Fratta (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1978), 9. Luigi Russo, “La collera del Vico e la stizza del Croce (Dalle Memorie di un vecchio crociano),” Belfagor 4, no. 5 (31 Aug. 1949): 560–82 (562). Natalino Sapegno, “Croce e la mia generazione,” in Letteratura e critica: Studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno, 5 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1979), V: 617–21 (620). Elio Vittorini, “La dittatura dell’idealismo,” originally published in L’Unità, 20 May 1945, reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 210–12 (211). The quotations are taken, respectively, from Franco Catalano, “Marxismo ed estetica: Croce e la nostra età,” Avanti! 26 Nov. 1949, 3; Luigi Russo, “La collera del Vico e la stizza del Croce,” 571, 581. The quotations are taken, respectively, from Emiliano Zazo, “Arte e so­­ cietà,” Avanti! 29 Nov. 1949, 3; Giuseppe Bertolucci, “Bruciare il veleno crociano,” Avanti! 23 Nov. 1949, 3 Giacomo Debenedetti, “Probabile autobiografia di una generazione,” originally an address to the Pen Club in Venice, Sept. 1949, published in Saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 97–123 (110–11). Mario Sansone, “La lezione di Croce,” in Croce quarant’anni dopo, ed. Edoardo Tiboni (Pescara: EDIARS, 1993), 7–14 (10). On Croce and neorealism, see Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 206–7; Roberto De Gaetano, Teorie del cinema in Italia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2005), 27–8; Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 22–3. Quoted in Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 15. For the source of Flora’s terminology, see Benedetto Croce, La poesia di Dante (Bari: Laterza, 1956 [1920]), 49–68; Benedetto Croce, Poesia e non poesia: Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono (Bari: Laterza, 1955 [1922]); Benedetto Croce, La Poesia: Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura (Bari: Laterza, 1936), 58–63. Quoted in Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 49–51. On the idealistic foundations of Gadda’s judgment, see Manuela Marchesini, La galleria interiore dell’Ingegnere (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2014), 99. Carlo Dionisotti, “Letteratura ‘Partigiana,’” originally published in Aretusa 3, nos. 7–8 (Jan.–Feb. 1946), reprinted in Aretusa: Prima rivista dell’Italia liberata, ed. Raffaele Cavalluzzi (Bari: Palomar, 2001), 147–58. Doriana Danton, “La notte porta consiglio, ovvero: ‘Roma, città libera,’” originally published in Hollywood 3, no. 18 (3 May 1947), reprinted in Il cinema ricomincia, 23; Castello, “Senza pietà,” 110; Rivolta, “Gioventù perduta,” 79; Guido Guerrasio, “De Sica sociale,” La lettura, 4 May 1946.



Notes to pages 111–15

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86 Guido Aristarco, Neorealismo e nuova critica cinematografica. Cinematografia e vita nazionale negli anni quaranta e cinquanta: Tra rotture e tradizioni (Florence: Nuova Guaraldi Editrice, 1980), 20–1. 87 The Crocean framework of Aristarco’s analysis of neorealism was already apparent in his 1949 comment that “il problema del cosiddetto ‘neorealismo’ va di là dalla ‘formula’ e dalla cronaca pura e semplice. Si tratta di arte o di non arte [the problem of so-called ‘neorealism’ goes beyond the ‘formula’ of the chronicle, plain and simple. It is about art versus non-art],” Guido Aristarco, “Presentazione,” Sequenze: Quaderni di cinema 1, no. 4 (Dec. 1949): 1–3 (1–2). 88 Milanini, introduction to Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, 13. 89 Romano Bilenchi, Amici, new edition, ed. Sergio Pautasso (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988), 217. 90 Piazzesi, “Necessità di una cronaca,” 7. 91 Piazzesi, “Dieci giorni che sconvolsero il mondo,” 563. 92 Tito Perlini, “Left-Wing Culture in Italy since the Last War,” 20th Century Cultural Studies 5 (Sept. 1971): 6–17 (12); Asor Rosa, “La cultura,” 1602. On Il Politecnico’s contradictory Croceanism, see also Gazziano, Occasioni e ­valori del Neorealismo, 221. 93 Calvino, “Saremo come Omero,” 1485–6. 94 On neorealism’s “bottom up” approach, see Gian Piero Brunetta, “Italian Cinema and the Hard Road towards Democracy, 1945,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 3 (1995): 343–8 (344). 95 Bontempelli, “Ritrovamento dell’orrore [Nov. 1944],” in Dignità dell’uomo, 50–4 (54). 96 Zavattini, “La condizione migliore – 1946,” in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 58–59 (59). 97 Quoting, respectively, Sala, “Realismo e religiosità,” 537; Giulio Preti, “Marxismo e religione,” La Cittadella 2.7–10 (15 April–30 May 1947): 6; Mario Stefanile, “Lezione di una guerra,” Sud 1, no. 1 (15 Nov. 1945): 2; Raffaello Franchini, “Cultura, come?” Sud 1, no. 7 (20 June 1946): 2. This aspect of neorealism is stressed in Ricciardi, “Neorealism,” 1284; Raffa, “Per una definizione rigorosa,” 36. 98 Pietrangeli, “Quattordici anni di cinema italiano,” 26. 99 Cesare Zavattini, “Cinema italiano domani,” originally in Cinema italiano oggi (1950), reprinted in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 693–6 (693) 100 As Wagstaff aptly put it, in the neorealist context “[t]he job of the ‘realist’ artist [...] is to portray the universal contained in the particular.” Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 69. See, too, Brunetta, “Dal neorealismo al neorealismo,” in Ripensare il neorealismo, 63–75 (69); Roberto De Gaetano, “Introduzione: Il cinema senza uniforme,” in Lessico del cinema italiano:

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Notes to pages 115–20

Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita, ed. Roberto De Gaetano, 2 vols. (Milan and Udine: Mimesis, 2014), I: 7–40 (18–19); Spinazzola, L’egemonia del romanzo, 16; Falcetto, Storia della narrativa neorealista, 120; Fernanda Moneta, Cinema neorealista e infanzia violata (Rome: UniversItalia, 2012), 12; Milanini, introduction to Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, 10. 101 Marsha Kinder, “The Subversive Potential of the Pseudo-Iterative,” in Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 204–9. These terms are adapted from Gérard Genette, “Time and Narrative in À la recherche du temps perdu,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 121–38 (127–30). 102 Kinder, “The Subversive Potential of the Pseudo-Iterative,” 208. 103 A similar analysis is found in Noto and Pitassio, Il cinema neorealista, 25–6. 104 Antonello Trombadori, “Prefazione alla prima Edizione [1944],” in Gott mit uns, by Renato Guttuso (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960), 17–22 (21). 105 Arnaldo Bocelli, “Letteratura della resistenza: Che cosa è stata, e che cosa è in Italia,” Vie Nuove 2, no. 35 (7 Sept. 1947): 8. See, too, the editorial “Premessa,” Mercurio 1, no. 4 (Dec. 1944): 5–7 (6). 106 Lorenzo Quaglietti, “‘Caccia tragica’ di Giuseppe De Santis: Da un breve fatto di cronaca una grande opera cinematografica,” L’Unità, 6 March 1948, 3. 107 Pasquale Prunas, “Una lezione,” Sud 1, no. 7 (20 June 1946): 11. 108 G.P., “In nome della legge di Pietro Germi,” originally published in Bianco e nero 10, no. 5 (May 1949), now in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 86–8. 109 Leopoldo Trieste, “Trieste racconta Trieste,” in Leopoldo Trieste: Un intruso a Cinecittà (Turin: ERI/Edizioni Rai Radiotelevisione ita­­liana, 1985), 25–61 (52); Giorgio Taffon, “Il teatro di Leopoldo Trieste: 1944–1947,” in Anna Bonacci e la drammaturgia sommersa degli anni ’30–’50, ed. Anna T. Ossani and Tiziana Mattioli (Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2003), 303–19; Giovanni Antonucci, Storia del teatro italiano del Novecento (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1996), 177–8. 110 Leopoldo Trieste, “Cronaca: Commedia in tre atti,” in Leopoldo Trieste: Inseguendo sirene, vol. 2., Alcune opere, ed. Carmelo Zinnato (Catanzaro: Abramo editore, 1999), 35–62. On the significance of this play, see Gianfranco Angelucci, “Leopoldo Trieste,” in Profili di Scena: Maurizio Costanzo – Tullio Pinelli – Luigi Squarzina – Leopoldo Trieste (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2003), 432–41 (448). 111 Trieste, “Cronaca,” 39 112 Trieste, “Cronaca,” 35, 61. 113 Trieste, “Quando scrissi Cronaca,” in Leopoldo Trieste: Un intruso, 65–6 (66). On the neorealism of Trieste’s essay and play, see, too, Mario Verdone, “Leopoldo Trieste tra neorealismo teatrale e cinema,” Ridotto 51, nos. 4–5 (April–May 2003): 29–31.



Notes to pages 120–6

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114 Leopoldo Trieste, “Cronaca e tragedia,” Quarta Parete 2, no. 12 (10 Jan. 1946): 1–2 (2). 115 Trieste, “Cronaca e tragedia,” 1. 116 Trieste, “Cronaca e tragedia,” 2. 117 See, among other responses, the letters from three readers in “Dopo l’articolo di Leopoldo Trieste i lettori polemizzano sul tema ‘Cronaca e Tragedia,’” Quarta parete 2, no. 14 (24 Jan. 1946): 2; and “Lettere di Vittorio Gassman,” in Leopoldo Trieste: Inseguendo sirene, vol. 1, Tratti ­biografici, 127–8 (128n1). 118 Leonardo De Mitri, “Cronaca e Teatro,” Quarta Parete 2, no. 13 (17 Jan. 1946): 5. 119 De Mitri, “Cronaca e Teatro,” 5. 120 Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, 24. 121 Trieste, “Cronaca e tragedia,” 2. 122 Trieste, “Cronaca e tragedia,” 2. 123 Trieste, “Cronaca,” 60. 124 Bicycle Thieves, 35. 125 Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1995 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 317; Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London and New York: Penguin, 2007), 554. 126 Robert S.C. Gordon, Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 41. See, too, Sorlin, “Settant’anni dopo: perché il neorealismo continua a essere vivo,” in Invenzioni dal vero, 265–73 (271); Moneti, Neorealismo fra tradizione e rivoluzione, 106–7; Bruno Torri, “La più pura espressione del neorealismo,” in De Sica: Autore, regista, attore, ed. Lino Miccichè (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1992), 43–54 (47); Gualtiero De Santi, Vittorio De Sica (Venice: Editrice il Castoro, 2003), 62–3; Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Bozzacchi, Neorealismo: Non eravamo solo Ladri di biciclette (Rome: Triwold, 2013), 81. 127 Francis Koval, “Interview with De Sica,” Sight and Sound 19, no. 2 (April 1950): 63. 128 De Sica, “Abbiamo domandato a Vittorio De Sica,” 259. 129 Giulio Cesare Castello, “Ladri di biciclette,” originally published in Bianco e nero 10, no. 5 (May 1949), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 97. 130 Arnaldo Frateili, “Vittorio De Sica poeta dei poveri,” originally published in Milano Sera, 25 Nov. 1948, reprinted in Ladri di biciclette: Nuove ricerche e un’antologia della critica (1948–1949), ed. Gualtiero De Santi (Atripalda: Laceno, 2009), 115–17 (115). 131 Rudi Berger, review of Ladri di biciclette, originally published in L’Umanità, 21 Jan. 1949, reprinted in Ladri di biciclette: Nuove ricerche, 144–5. 132 Gino Visentini, “Ladri di biciclette,” originally published in Cinema 1, no. 2 (10 Nov. 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al. Neorealismo D.O.C., 98–9.

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Notes to pages 126–9

133 On the scene’s apparent ambiguity, see Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies, 123–4; Landy, Italian Film, 138. 134 For the first interpretation, see Vigni, Le città visibili, 107. For the second, see Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, 114–16. For the third, see Pietro Cavallo, “Un paese in bianco e nero: L’Italia del ’48 in cinque film,” in Le linee d’ombra dell’identità repubblicana: Comunicazione, media e società in Italia nel secondo Novecento, ed. Pietro Cavallo and Gino Frezza (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2004), 81–105 (96). 4. “From I to We”: Neorealism’s Choral Politics 1 Quoting Ennio Flaiano, “ ‘A mandunella,” originally published in Bis 8 (4 May 1948), reprinted in Lettere d’amore al cinema, ed. Cristina Bragaglia (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1978), 95–8 (97); and Mario Gromo, “Italia,” 78. Similar pronouncements can be found in Salinari, La que­ stione del realismo, 40–2; Canziani, Gli anni del neorealismo, 18; Gian Piero Brunetta, “La ricerca dell’identità nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra” in Identità ita­­liana e identità europea nel cinema italiano dal 1945 al miracolo economico, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1996), 11–67 (41); Gasparini, Il Neorealismo, 42–3; Sozzi Casanova, Neorealismo e neorealisti, 21; Armando Borrelli, Neorealismo e Marxismo (Avellino: Edizioni di Cinemasud, 1966), 24; Luigi Reina, “Neorealismo e crisi,” in Romanzo e mimesis. Dal romanticismo al neorealismo: Aspetti della narrativa ita­­liana (Salerno: Società editrice salernitana, 1975), 195–210 (200); Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious (Bristol and Portland: Intellect, 2006), 57–8. 2 Baldan, Per una lettura del Neorealismo, 8–9; Landy, Italian Film, 15; Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 29; Claudio Venturi and Antonio Di Cicco, introduction to Gli anni del neorealismo, ed. Claudio Venturi and Antonio Di Cicco (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980), 1–10 (4); Gian Carlo Ferretti, “Illustrazione del problema,” in Introduzione al neorealismo: I narratori, ed. Gian Carlo Ferretti (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974), 7–24 (8); Francesco De Nicola, Neorealismo (Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1996), 31–2; Paolo Turco, “Alle origini del neorealismo: Dal populismo al marxismo,” in Populismo, neorealismo e avanguardia, ed. Pio Baldelli (Avellino: Edizioni di Cinemasud, 1967), 7–25 (19). 3 Sipala, “La poetica del neorealismo,” 66; Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Vitality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 24–5; Konewko, Neorealism and the “New” Italy, 6–7; Ermanno Taviani, “L’immagine della nazione nella cinematografia tra fascismo e repubblica,” in 1945–1946: Le origini



Notes to page 129

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della Repubblica, vol. 1, Contesto internazionale e aspetti della transizione, ed. Giancarlo Monina (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2007), 239–76 (252–3); Goffredo Fofi, “Neorealismo e oltre (1979),” in I limiti della scena: Spettacolo e pubblico nell’Italia contemporanea (1945–1991) (Milan: Linea d’ombra edizioni, 1992), 57–67 (60); Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 49–50; Todd McGowan, “Political Desire in Italian Neorealism,” in The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 107–12; Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, vol. 2, Dal 1945 ai giorni ­nostri, 8–9. 4 Vittorio Spinazzola, Cinema e pubblico: Lo spettacolo filmico in Italia 1945–1965 (Milan: Bompiani, 1974), 7; Richard Dyer, “Music, People and Reality: The Case of Italian Neo-realism,” in European Film Music. ed. Miguel Mera and David Burnand (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 28–40 (28); Francesco Pitasso, “Popular Tradition, American Madness and Some Opera. Music and Songs in Italian Neo-Realist Cinema,” Cinéma & Cie 11, nos. 16–17 (Spring–Fall 2011): 141–6 (141); John Gatt-Rutter, Writers and Politics in Modern Italy (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1978), 13; Renzo Renzi, “Neorealismo e sua eutanasia,” in Commedia all’ita­­liana: Angolazioni controcampi, ed. Riccardo Napolitano (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 1986), 55–63 (58–9); Gianfranco Casadio, Adultere, fedifraghe, innocenti: La donna del “neorealismo popolare” nel cinema italiano degli anni Cinquanta (Ravenna: Longo editore, 1990), 21–2. 5 This argument was advanced most forcefully in Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo, 129–17. See, too, Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism, 113; Taracchini, “Il Neorealismo come letteratura di Stato,” 341; Turconi, La poesia neorealista ita­­liana, 9; Alberto Abruzzese, “Il rapporto politica-cultura durante il neorealismo,” in Politica e cultura nel dopoguerra con una cronologia 1929/1964 e una antologia (Pesaro: Mostra internazionale del nuovo cine­ ­ma, 1974), 12–23 (14); Benussi, L’età del neorealismo, 53; Tinazzi, “Sulla ‘popolarità’ nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra,” 83; Cannella, “Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses,” 31–4; Raffaele Cavalluzzi, “Neorealismo: Dimensioni spazio-temporali di un’utopia della realtà,” Italianistica 2–3 (2002): 71–5 (72); Bruno Torri, Cinema italiano: Dalla realtà alle metafore (Palermo: Palumbo, 1973), 25; Michele Guerra, “Il fatto e la forma: Breve viaggio tra le consapevolezze neorealiste,” in Intorno al neorealismo: Voci, contesti, linguaggi e culture dell’Italia del dopoguerra, ed. Giulia Carluccio, Emiliano Morreale, and Mariapaola Pierini (Milan: Scalpendi editore, 2017), 43–9 (44–5). 6 See, for instance, Kolker’s claim that “[a] notion of passivity is built into neo-realist theory, and as a result the filmmakers only allow their characters and their audience to reap the rewards of passivity: more pain, more

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poverty, softened somewhat by a notion of stoicism and endurance (on the part of the characters) and sadness, understanding, and not a little bit of superiority (on the part of the audience).” Kolker, The Altering Eye, 68–9. See, too, the cogent critique advanced along similar lines in Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 219. 7 Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 36; Rocchio, Cinema of Anxiety, 47; Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 74; Steimatsky, Italian Locations, 47–48; Zinni, Fascisti di celluloide, 21; Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945, 18; De Caro, Rifondare gli italiani, 69. 8 Gualtiero De Santi, “Il neorealismo o della messa in scena etica del reale,” Cinema e cinema 21 (1979): 66–75 (69); Romano Luperini and Eduardo Melfi, Neorealismo, neodecadentismo, avanguardie (Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza, 1980), 12; Gianni Rondolino, Luchino Visconti (Turin: UTET, 1981), 221; Asor Rosa, “Il neorealismo o il trionfo del narrativo,” in Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, 79–102 (80); Antonielli, Letteratura del disagio, 115; Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 129; Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 23; Salvatore Battaglia, “Le Italie sconosciute della stagione neorealista,” in I facsimile della realtà: Forme e destini del romanzo italiano dal realismo al neorealismo (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991), 115–24 (115); Guglielmo Moneti, Lezioni di Neorealismo (Siena: Nuova immagine, 1998), 20; Giorgio Luti, “Il dibattito sul neorealismo nelle riviste del dopoguerra,” Nuova ­antologia 2218 (2001): 179–96; Ghigi, La memoria inquieta, 27; Guerra, “‘Una sconfinata tematica sull’uomo’: umanismi neorealisti,” in Invenzioni dal vero, 97–109 (97); Scardia, La stagione del trionfo, 399–400. 9 For early instances of this tendency, see Adolfo Diana, “Aspetti letterari del primo e del secondo dopoguerra in Italia,” Momenti 7, no. 18 (May–June 1954): 11; Sergio J. Pacifici, “Notes toward a Definition of Neorealism,” Yale French Studies 17 (1956): 44–53 (52); Ruggero Jacobbi, Secondo Novecento (Milan: Nuova Accademia, 1965), 85; Guido Oldrini, “Problemi di teoria generale del neorealismo [1965],” in Problemi di teoria e storia del cinema (Naples: Guida Editori, 1976), 69–97 (83); Manacorda, Storia della letteratura ita­­liana contemporanea, 1940–1965, 31. 10 Miccichè, “Per una verifica del neorealismo,” 27–8. Miccichè was not the only critic to draw this connection. See, too, Battistini’s claim that Vittorini’s essay “risulta il manifesto del neorealismo [is the manifesto of neorealism].” Battistini, Sondaggi sul Novecento, 84. 11 Elio Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” originally published in Il Politecnico 1 (29 Sept. 1945), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 234–7 (234). 12 Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235; Elio Vittorini, “Polemica e no per una nuova cultura,” originally published in Il Politecnico 7 (10 Nov. 1945), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 247–58 (254).



Notes to pages 132–5

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13 Luciano Anceschi, “Dove va la cultura?” Avanti! 9 Dec. 1945, 1–2; Giovanni Titta Rosa, “Dove va la cultura? Problema morale,” Avanti! 13 Dec. 1945, 1–2; Vittorio Sereni, “Dove va la cultura? Funzione rispetto alla società,” Avanti! 16 Dec. 1945, 1–2; Enrico Emanuelli, “Dove va la cultura? Quattro appunti,” Avanti! 20 Dec. 1945, 1–2; Alberto Vigevani, “Dove va la cultura? Esigenza d’una civiltà,” Avanti! 29 Dec. 1945, 1–2; Giuseppe Dessì, “Dove va la cultura? Arte libera o arte sociale?” Avanti! 6 Jan. 1946, 1–2; Sergio Solmi, “Dove va la cultura? Cultura aperta o ­chiusa?” Avanti! 13 Jan. 1946, 1–2; Carlo Bo, “Dove va la cultura? Non cedere al tempo,” Avanti! 27 Jan. 1946, 1–2. 14 Bigiaretti, “Dove va la letteratura,” 6. 15 Arturo Tofanelli, “Tre romanzi,” Avanti! 19 Aug. 1945, 1–2. 16 Luigi Comencini, “Il cinema a congresso,” Avanti! 3 Oct. 1945, 2. 17 Mario Bonfantini, “Occasioni: Dove va la cultura?” Società Nuova 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1946): 26–8. 18 Gio Cai, “Fiducia nella cultura,” Comunità 2, no. 1 (19 April 1947): 3. 19 Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in The Greenblatt Reader, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 11–17 (11). 20 See, for instance, Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87; Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 1. 21 Alberto Moravia, “Romanzo e cultura,” Comunità 1, no. 4 (July 1946): 10. Post-war glosses of the term “cultura” can be found in Giacomo Devoto, “Cultura dei due dopoguerra,” originally published in Nuovo Corriere, 3 May 1949, reprinted in Autobiografia di un giornale: “Il Nuovo Corriere” di Firenze 1947–1956, ed. Fabrizio Bagatti, Ottavio Cecchi, and Giorgio van Straten (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1989), 149–51 (149); Franco Cagnetta, “Note sugli intellettuali italiani,” Socialismo 2, no. 6 (1 June 1946): 156–60 (157n1); r.b., “Per l’università proletaria,” Nuova critica sociale 1, nos. 4–5 (Aug.–Sept. 1945): 60–2 (61). 22 See, for instance, Adriano Olivetti, “Democrazia integrata,” Comunità 1, no. 2 (May 1946): 3. 23 Felice Balbo, Il laboratorio dell’uomo [1946], in Opere 1945-1964 (Turin: Editore Boringhieri, 1966), 107–99 (116, 118). 24 Antonio Banfi, “Per una cultura umana,” L’Unità, 27 Jan. 1946. 25 Franco Fortini, “Chiusura di una polemica: Cultura come scelta n ­ ecessaria,” Il Politecnico 17 (19 Jan. 1946): 1. 26 Elio Vittorini, “Lettera agli elettori,” originally published in L’Unità, 6 April 1946, reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 279–81 (280–1). 27 Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235 (emphasis in the original). 28 Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 234. On the Italian reception of these thinkers in the period immediately preceding the publication of Vittorini’s

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30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39

Notes to pages 135–8 essay, see Michela Nacci, Tecnica e cultura della crisi (1914–1939) (Turin: Loescher, 1982), 47–52; Pasquale Voza, Coscienza e crisi: Il Novecento italiano tra le due guerre (Milan: Liguori editori, 1983), 11. Mann developed his notion of “militant humanism” in Thomas Mann, “Europe Beware [1935],” in Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 69–82. Maritain’s “humanism of the Incarnation” is outlined in Jacques Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, trans. Lionel Landry (London: Sheed & Ward, 1946 [1943]), 16–17. Croce’s “religione della libertà [religion of liberty]” received its fullest expression in a work dedicated to Mann: Benedetto Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1967 [1932]), 370–2. Berdyaev called for a “spiritual revolution” in Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom (London: Centenary Press, 1943), 254. Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235. Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235. Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, 140; Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), 78–9; Georges Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 182–3; Lin Yutang, Between Tears and Laughter (New York: John Day Company, 1943), 157; Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, trans. M.R. Adamson (London: Centenary Press, 1938), 289. Perhaps most notably, this phrase had been invoked as a model of good governance by prominent Christian Democrats, including future prime minister Alcide De Gasperi, in the years before Vittorini’s essay was published. See especially Alcide De Gasperi, “La parola dei Democratici Cristiani: Il Programma della Democrazia Cristiana,” originally published in Il Popolo, 12 Dec. 1943, reprinted in Alcide De Gapseri nel Partito Popolare Italiano e nella Democrazia Cristiana: Un’antologia di Discorsi politici 1923-1954, ed. Giovanni Allara and Angelo Gatti, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1990), II: 77–88 (85–7). Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 234. Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235. Alberto Savinio, “Immagine perduta,” originally published in Janus Pannonius 1, no. 1 (Jan.–March 1947), reprinted in Scritti dispersi, 1943– 1952, ed. Paola Italia (Milan: Adelphi, 2004), 491–5 (493). Giuseppe Sala, “La religione dei letterati,” Il Popolo, 16 Jan. 1945, 1; Bruno Nardini, “Mito leggenda storia,” L’Ultima 3, no. 30 (25 June 1948): 5–14 (13). Mario Dal Pra, “Politica e cultura,” Avanti! 2 June 1948, 3; Luciano della Mea, “Marxismo ed estetica: Storicizzare Croce,” Avanti! 7 Dec. 1949, 3. Antonio La Penna, “I giovanissimi e la cultura negli ultimi anni del fascismo I,” Società 3, no. 3 (1947): 380–405 (401); Antonio La Penna,



Notes to pages 138–9

40

41

42

43

44

45

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“I giovanissimi e la cultura negli ultimi anni del fascismo II,” 690; Raimondi, “Una generazione letteraria,” 9. Benedetto Croce, “Una risposta di scrittori, professori e pubblicisti italiani, al manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti,” originally published in Il Mondo, 1 May 1925, reprinted in Fascismo e cultura, by Emilio R. Papa (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1974), 212–17 (213). I. Schuster, “O Cristo o comunismo (10-2-1945),” Riv. Dioc. Mil. 34 (1945), quoted in Antonio Acerbi, “Il problema dei giovani nella pastorale dei vescovi durante il secondo dopoguerra (1945–1958),” in Chiesa e progetto educativo nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra (1945–1958) (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1988), 37–74 (43); “Seduta antimeridiana e pomeridiana di venerdì 4 agosto [1944],” in I congressi del Partito d’Azione, ed. Giancarlo Tartaglia (Rome: Archivio Trimestrale, 1984), 39–47 (45); Comitato Nazionale A.N.P.I. e Ufficio Partigiani alla Presidenza del Consiglio, Cento dei centomila (Rome: Convitto scuola ANPI, 1947), quoted in Alan R. Perry, Il santo partigiano martire: La retorica del sacrificio nelle biografie commemorative (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2001), 16. Gianfranco Contini, “Relazione sulle cose di Ginevra: Dove va la cultura europea,” La Fiera letteraria 1–2 (31 Oct. 1946): 2; Oreste Macrì, “Lo spirito europeo,” originally published in Libera voce, 16–30 Nov. 1946, reprinted in Realtà del simbolo: Poeti e critici del Novecento italiano (Trento: La Finestra, 2001), 594–7 (596). Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, “Saluto all’assemblea costituente: Seduta del 25 giugno 1946,” in Discorsi parlamentari di Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, vol. 4 (Rome: Tipografia della Camera dei deputati, 1965), 1608–9, quoted in Maurizio Viroli, Come se Dio ci fosse: Religione e libertà nella storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2009), 357. Partigiani della Provincia di Parma, Parma Partigiana: Albo d’oro dei caduti nella guerra di Liberazione 1943–1945 (Modena: Soc. Tip. Modenese, [1947?]), quoted in Alan R. Perry, Il santo partigiano martire, 17. Julian Bogi, I quisling, povera terra... (Turin: Gattiglia, 1946), 11. On the ­discourse of martyrdom in the commemoration of the Fosse Ardeatine, see the section “Sacrificio, martirio, consacrazione?” in Alessandro Portelli, L’ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria (Rome: Donzelli editore, 1999), 259–65; Guri Schwarz, Tu mi devi seppellir: Riti funebri e culto nazionale alle origini della Repubblica (Turin: UTET, 2010), 61–83. On the characteristic religiosity of partisan writing, see Domenico Tarizzo, Come scriveva la Resistenza: Filologia della stampa clandestina 1943-1945 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969), 44–45; Mauro Boarelli, La fabbrica del passato: Autobiografie di militanti comunisti (1945–1956) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2007), 14–16; Marta Bonzanini, introduction to Con le armi e con la penna: Poesia clandestina della Resistenza (Novara: Interlinea, 2009), 14–41 (26); Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 67–73.

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46 See Pietro Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli, eds., Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza ita­­liana (8 settembre 1943–25 aprile 1945) (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 147–8. 47 On the concept of civil religion, see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xii, 143. On its relevance to the Resistance, see, too, Stephen Gundle, “The ‘Civic Religion’ of the Resistance in Post-war Italy (1943–1949),” Modern Italy 5, no. 2 (2000): 113–32; Yuri Guaiana, “The Formation of a Civil Religion in Republican Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14, no. 3 (2009): 329–45. 48 “Questa è la vittoria dell’uomo comune,” Giornale dell’Emilia, 26 April 1945, quoted in Stefano Cavazza, “La transizione difficile: L’immagine della guerra e della resistenza nell’opinione pubblica nell’immediato dopoguerra,” in La grande cesura: La memoria della guerra e della resistenza nella vita europea del dopoguerra, ed. Giovanni Miccoli, Guido Neppi Modona, and Paolo Pombeni (Milan: Società editrice il Mulino, 2001), 427–64 (457). 49 “VIII Settembre,” originally published in L’Uomo, 8 Sept. 1945, reprinted in Il secolo dei manifesti: Programmi delle riviste del Novecento, ed. Giuseppe Lupo (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2006), 309–13 (310). 50 On this tendency, see Ernesto Preziosi, “Tra solidarietà e Resistenza: Sulla partecipazione dei cattolici,” in Ribelli per amore: I cattolici e la Resistenza, ed. Ernesto Preziosi (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2007), 17–40 (esp. 36); Paolo Blasina, “Resistenza, guerra, fascismo nel cattolicesimo italiano (1943–1948),” in La grande cesura, 123–93; Lorenzo Bedeschi, La sinistra cristiana e il dialogo con i comunisti (Parma: Guanda, 1966); Nicola Antonetti, L’Ideologia della Sinistra cristiana: I cattolici tra Chiesa e comunismo (1937–1945) (Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 1976), 17–20; Angelo Ventrone, La cittadinanza repubblicana: Come cattolici e comunisti hanno costruito la democrazia ita­­liana (1943–1948) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996); Gianni Baget-Bozzo, L’Intreccio: Cattolici e comunisti 1945–2004 (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). 51 Fabrizio Onofri, “Le tre ideologie dell’Italia contemporanea,” Rinascita, Dec. 1945, 279. 52 On Italy’s “diffused religion,” see Roberto Cipriani, “‘Diffused Religion’ and New Values in Italy,” in The Changing Face of Religion, ed. James A. Beckford and Thomas Luckmann (Newbury Park, CA, London, and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1991), 24–48; Robert N. Bellah, “The Five Religions of Modern Italy,” in Varieties of Civil Religion, by Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond (Cambridge and New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980), 86–118. On the adoption of this religious imagery in the Resistance, see Rosario Forlenza, “Sacrificial Memory and Political Legitimacy in Postwar Italy: Reliving and Remembering World War II,” History & Memory 24, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2012): 73–116.



Notes to pages 140–2

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53 See, for instance, Alberto Moravia, La speranza, ossia cristianesimo e comunismo (Rome: Documento, Libraio Editore, 1944); Italo Calvino, “Marxismo e cattolicesimo,” originally published in L’Unità, 9 March 1947), reprinted in Saggi: 1945-1985), I: 1473–5; Ignazio Silone, “Come ricostruire? (Appunti per un dialogo tra socialisti e cattolici),” Mercurio 2, no. 9 (May 1945): 15–19. 54 Antonio Greppi, “Attuare il cristianesimo,” Corriere d’informazione 1, no. 167 (2 Dec. 1945): 1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this call was used to bolster Vittorini’s vision for an interventionist, evangelical “new culture.” See Giuseppe Del Bo, “Religione per un comunista,” Il Politecnico 13–14 (22–29 Dec. 1945): 7. 55 Ernesto Buonaiuti, La Chiesa e il comunismo (Rome: Bompiani, 1945), 5–8; 36–7, quoted in Daniela Saresella, Cattolici a sinistra: Dal modernismo ai giorni nostri (Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza, 2011), 45. 56 As Battini puts it succinctly, “il progetto di una religione civile repubblicana condivisa fallì [the project for a Republican civil religion failed].” Michele Battini, “Una debole religione politica: il patriottismo costitu­ zionale,” in 1945–1946: Le origini della Repubblica, vol. 1, Contesto internazionale e aspetti della transizione, ed. Giancarlo Monina (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2007), 229–38 (231). See, too, Paolo Acanfora, “Myths and the Political Use of Religion in Christian Democratic Culture,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 307–38; Rosaria Leonardi, “Il sacro come strumento politico: Le elezioni del 1948, la Democrazia Cristiana e i manifesti elettorali,” California Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 457–84; Angelo Ventrone, “Fascist legacies: L’antifascismo bloccato in Italia,” in Antifascismo e identità europea, ed. Alberto De Bernardi and Paolo Ferrari (Rome: Carocci editore, 2004), 318–40; Robert A. Ventresca, From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 57 A similar process of politicization (and political appropriation) of religious imagery had been central to Italian unification. See Lucy Riall, “Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” The Journal of Modern History 82, no. 2 (June 2010): 255–87. On the broader cultural turn of Resistance memory, see Leonardo Rapone, “Antifascismo e storia d’Italia,” in Fascismo e antifa­ scismo: Rimozioni, revisioni, negazioni, ed. Enzo Collotti (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2000), 219–39 (223–4); Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance, 77, 87–9; Maurilio Guasco, Politica e religione nel novecento italiano: Momenti e figure (Turin: Il Segnalibro, 1988), 248. 58 Quoted in Giuseppe Chinnici, Cinema, Chiesa e Movimento Cattolico Italiano (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2003), 123. 59 Gian Luigi Rondi, “La terra trema applaudita a Venezia,” Il Tempo, 3 Sept. 1948, quoted in Giori and Subini, “Questioni aperte su La terra trema,” 15;

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61 62

63

64

Notes to page 142 Franco Fortini, “La pietà e la giustizia,” in Ladri di biciclette di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sopralluoghi, ed. Orio Caldiron and Manuel De Sica (Rome: Editoriale Pantheon, 1997), 38–9. On the latter film’s religious symbolism, see Virgilio Fantuzzi, “La religiosità nel cinema di Vittorio De Sica,” in Vittorio De Sica: L’attore, il regista, l’uomo totale. Atti della I Rassegna Cinematografica d’Autore. Troina 9/15 dicembre 1996, ed. Isidoro Giannetto and Giovanni Virgaduala (Troina: Laboratorio per l’Arte e la Cultura l’Ambiente, 1997), 69–83. On the film’s religious symbolism, see Virgilio Fantuzzi, “Riflessi dell’iconografia religiosa nel film ‘Roma città aperta’ di Roberto Rossellini,” La civiltà cattolica 146, no. 4 (4 Nov. 1995): 264–76; David Bruni, Roberto Rossellini Roma città aperta (Turin: Lindau, 2006), 99–100, 112; Peter Fraser, Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1998), 51–2; Marcia Landy, Stardom Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 98–100; Alessio Scarlato, “Religione,” in Lessico del cinema italiano: Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita, ed. Roberto De Gaetano, 3 vols. (Milan: Mimesis, 2016), III: 93–161 (107–8); Sara Pesce, Memoria e immaginario: La seconda guerra mondiale nel cinema italiano (Genoa: Le Mani, 2008), 50–5. Gian Luigi Rondi, “Cinema italiano oggi,” 56–7; Gian Luigi Rondi, “Cinema italiano 1945–1951 (il dopoguerra),” 9. JoAnn Cannon, “Resistance Heroes and Resisting Spectators: Reflections on Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta,” The Italianist 17, no. 1 (1997): 145–75 (149); Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism, 113; Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 473–4; Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 249. Examining the “sacrificial memory” of the Resistance, Schwarz convincingly argues that “L’Italia repubblicana nata dalla resistenza ebbe in effetti come suo fondamento il rapporto coi morti, coi martiri e gli eroi della guerra (e della guerra civile in particolare) [Republican Italy, borne from the Resistance, effectively had as its foundation a relationship with the dead, the martyrs and heroes of the war (and especially the civil war)].” Schwarz, Tu mi devi seppellir, 34. As Mancino puts it, “il film, anziché registrare il clima teso della capitale occupata dai nazisti, sembrò voler preludere al dopo [the film, rather than registering the tense climate of the capital under Nazi occupation, seemed to wish to foreshadow the next phase].” Antonio Giulio Mancino, Il processo della verità: Le radici del film politico-indiziario italiano (Turin: Kaplan, 2008), 28. See, too, David Forgacs, “Neorealismo, identità nazionale, modernità,” in Incontro al neorealismo, 41–7 (42–3); Gian Piero Brunetta, “In nome del padre Roberto....,” in Rossellini: Dal neorealismo alla diffusione della



Notes to pages 142–3

65 66

67

68

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conoscenza, ed. Pasquale Iaccio (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2006), 1–16 (10); Pietro Cavallo, Viva l’Italia: Storia, cinema e identità nazionale (1932–1962) (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2009), 177–8. Stefano Roncoroni, ed., The War Trilogy: Open City, Paisan, Germany – Year Zero, trans. Judith Green (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 70. Although Perry ascribes more orthodoxy to the civil religion’s appropriation of Christian symbolism than I believe is warranted, he nevertheless provides what is to my mind the best account of that symbolism’s transformation, explaining that “morire per l’Italia o il Partito non può essere assimilato al morire per Cristo e la sua chiesa: la sacralizzazione degli eroi laici si produsse quindi per secolarizzazione di un tratto specifico della cultura cristiana [dying for Italy or for the Party cannot be equated to dying for Christ and his Church; the sacralization of lay heroes was thus produced through the secularization of a specific facet of Christian culture].” Alan R. Perry, Il santo partigiano martire, 39–40n100. Rancière is perhaps even closer to the mark when he identifies in Rossellini’s film both “asceticism and idolatry,” “renunciation and incarnation,” “prayer and blasphemy.” Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 129–30. On the appropriation of religious imagery in Rossellini’s film, in which “[a]ll seven sacraments undergo a transformation into their political counterparts,” see Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, 41–2. See, too, Tonia Caterina Riviello, “Rossellini’s Amalgam of Resistance and Religion in ‘Roma, città aperta,’” Italian Culture 14 (1996): 367–84. For a critical response to Vittorini’s appropriation of the partisan dead, see Giancarlo Vigorelli, “È uscito ‘Il Politecnico,’” Costume 1, no. 9 (15 Oct. 1945): 4. So far as I am aware, no complete catalogue of Vittorini’s respondents has yet been produced. At the time, however, some of the responses provided partial summaries. These can be found, for instance, in Fortini, “Chiusura di una polemica,” 1; Enzo Forcella, “Campo della cultura: Una polemica inutile,” Avanti! 3 Nov. 1946, 3; and Gli Osservatori, “Qualcuno ha risposto a Vittorini,” Il Costume politico e letterario 2 (Oct. 1947): 91–3. Some of these contain references that were not included in the retrospective summaries, such as those found in Raffaele Crovi, Il lungo viaggio di Vittorini: Una biografia critica (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1998), 240; Alfonso Botti, “Politica togliattiana e ‘corrente Politecnico’: Religione, DC, questione cattolica,” Il Ponte 36, nos. 7–8 (July–Aug., 1980): 709–22 (715n25); and Raffaela Rodondi, in Vittorini, Letteratura arte società, 236–7, 255–6. Rosario Assunto, “Fedeltà della cultura,” Comunità 2, no. 15 (26 July 1947): 5; Sergio Solmi, “Lettera a Marco Valsecchi,” originally published in Uomo, Dec. 1945, reprinted in Letteratura e società: Saggi sul fantastico, La

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Notes to pages 143–7 Responsabilità della cultura, Scritti di argomento storico e politico, ed. Giovanni Pacchiano (Milan: Adelphi, 2000), 432–9 (434). For representative Marxist attacks on Vittorini’s essay, see Cesare Luporini, “Rigore della cultura,” Società 2 (Jan.–March 1946): 5–17 (10); Fabrizio Onofri, “Lettera a un intellettuale del nord,” Risorgimento 1, no. 4 (July 1945): 323–32 (330). For examples of the criticisms mounted against Vittorini’s proposal on ­religious grounds, see also Ferrante Azzali, “Cultura e rivoluzione,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 13 (4 July 1946): 1; Giuseppe Sala, “Comunismo e cultura,” Il Commento 2, no. 20 (16 Oct. 1945): 444; Augusto Del Noce, “Di una nuova cultura,” originally published in Il Popolo Nuovo 1, no. 137 (6–7 Oct. 1945), reprinted in Scritti politici 1930–1950, ed. Tommaso Dell’Era (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2001), 97–9 (97); Bruno Romani, “Cultura e no,” Domenica 2, no. 42 (21 Oct. 1945): 4; Arrigonio, “Colloqui,” L’Osservatore Romano, 29 Oct. 1945, 2. Carlo Bo, “Cristo non è cultura,” originally published in Costume 1, no. 9 (15 Oct. 1945), reprinted in Letteratura come vita, ed. Sergio Pautasso (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), 1167–73. In addition to Bo, see, for instance, Guglielmo Usellini, “Cultura vecchia e nuova,” La Lettura 1, no. 14 (15 Nov. 1945): 3; David Maria Turoldo, “Cristo e cultura,” L’Uomo: Pagine di vita morale 3, no. 14 (8 Dec. 1945): 2, partially reproduced in Daniela Saresella, David M. Turoldo, Camillo De Piaz e la Corsia dei servi di Milano (1943–1963) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2008), 107; A.B., “Così per dire...” Il Commento 2, no. 24 (16 Dec. 1945): 535; Enzo Petrini, “Nonvalore del frontismo culturale,” Humanitas 1, no. 6 (June 1946): 615–16 (615). Bo, “Cristo non è cultura,” 1167. Bo, “Cristo non è cultura,” 1168. Bo, “Cristo non è cultura,” 1169. Vittorini, “Polemica e no per una nuova cultura,” 252. Bo, “Cristo non è cultura,” 1172. This statement came from Bo’s second reply to Vittorini, which has subsequently been republished along with the first as one essay and is here cited as such. Originally it was published as Carlo Bo and Giancarlo Vigorelli, “Due risposte chiarificatrici,” Costume 11 (December 1945): 17. Carlo Bo, “Letteratura come vita,” originally published in Frontespizio (Sept. 1939), reprinted in Letteratura come vita, 5–16. For Bo’s essay as “Magna Carta,” see Massimo Caprara, “Rinascita dell’ermetismo?” Rinascita 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1948): 20. For interpretations of the essay and attestations to its status as manifesto, see Niva Lorenzini, La poesia ita­­liana del Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 108–10; Beatrice Stasi, Ermetismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 90. On this point, see Donato Valli, Storia degli ermetici (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1978), 198–203; and Caterina Verbaro, “Il dibattito letterario: Idee,



Notes to pages 147–9

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80

81

82

83

84

85 86

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poetiche, movimenti, gruppi lettarari a confronto dal secondo dopoguerra ai primi anni Settanta,” in Storia letteraria d’Italia: Il Novecento, ed. Giorgio Luti (Padua: Piccin Nuova Libraria, 1993), 1309–61 (1318). Siti, Il neorealismo nella poesia ita­­liana, 167; Turconi, La poesia neorealista ita­­ liana, 165; Anna Dolfi, “Ermetismo e ‘realismo’: Ragioni e modi di una crisi interna,” in Les Réalismes dans les années 1940, 135–51. As Mario Luzi once put it, “alla base c’è quella insoddisfazione totale della realtà storica (inclusa la politica, naturalmente, ma vorrei adoperare la parola ‘storica’ perché è più vasta) [at its foundation there is that total dissatisfaction with historical reality (including politics, of course, but I would prefer to use the word ‘historical’ because it is more extensive)].” “Che cosa è stato l’ermetismo? Dibattito letterario al Gabinetto Vieusseux tenuto a Firenze il 21 febbraio 1968,” L’approdo letterario 14, no. 42 (1968): 99–120 (103). Bo “Che cos’era l’assenza [1945],” in Letteratura come vita, 76–103; Bo, “Per la prima ragione,” originally published in Campo di Marte 1, no. 4 (1938), reprinted in Campo di Marte trent’anni dopo, 105–6 (105). Stefanile, “Lezione di una guerra,” 2; Mario Alinei, “Osservatorio,” La Strada 1, no. 1 (April–May 1946): 78–81 (81). See, too, Antonio Russi, “Svolta della poesia,” Mercurio (March–April 1945): 139–41 (140); Ferdinando Giannesi, “Necrologio dell’ermetismo? (Lettera di un giovane),” Belfagor 1, no. 2 (15 March 1946): 258–62. Maria Poma, “La poesia ‘oscura,’” Agorà 3, no. 1 (1947): 26–9 (26); Mario Apollonio, Ermetismo (Padua: Cedam, 1945), 97–9; Toti Scialoja, “Appunti per un primo bilancio ad uno del Nord,” Mercurio 2, no. 9 (May 1945): 145–50 (147). Goffredo Bellonci, “Le vicende del romanzo negli ultimi cinquant’anni,” Ulisse 10 (1956–7): 918–42 (942, emphasis in the original). Bellonci had already identified the same literary dichotomy, but at this time in the negative – “l’io e non il noi [the I and not the we]” – ten years before the publication of this essay, in Goffredo Bellonci, “Cronaca bianca e nera del 1946 letterario,” Mercurio 3, nos. 27–8 (Nov.–Dec. 1946): 153–65 (155). Brunello Rondi, Il neorealismo italiano (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1956), 75. Angelo Paoluzzi, La letteratura della Resistenza (Florence: Edizioni 5 Lune, 1956), 56. On the development from “I” to “we” in post-war Italian poetry, see Siti, Il neorealismo nella poesia ita­­liana, 27–37. For the same development in Italian prose, see Giancarlo Bertoncini, “‘Scrivere con l’acqua’: Del romanzo neorealista negli anni ’40,” in Les Réalismes dans les Années 1940, 93–133 (101). Salvatore Quasimodo, “Discorso sulla poesia,” in Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), 283–93 (291). De Micheli, “Realismo e poesia,” 37.

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Notes to pages 149–51

89 Francesco Jovine, “Le due Italie,” originally published in Domenica, 17 Sept. 1944, reprinted in Scritti critici, 478–81 (480–1). 90 Francesco Jovine, “Rientrare nel circolo,” Il mondo europeo, 15 April 1947. 91 In order, the three quotations come from Luciano Malaspina, “Il dramma della solitudine,” Libera arte 1, no. 1 (15 May 1946): 1; Mario Alicata, “Plausi e botte,” in Intellettuali e azione politica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976), 9–10; Apollonio, Ermetismo, 101. On this point, see Re, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism, 52; Silvio Ramat, L’Ermetismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1969), 380; Antonielli, Letteratura del disagio, 53; Antonio Russi, introduction to Gli anni della Antialienazione (Dall’Ermetismo al Neorealismo) (Milan: Mursia, 1967), v–xii (vi). 92 Tommaso Giglio, “Momento polemico della poesia,” Sud 1, nos. 3–4 (15 Jan. 1946): 1–2. 93 See, for instance, Marina Zancan, “Tra vero e bello, documento e arte,” in Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, 39–77 (46); Steimatsky, Italian Locations, 79–116; Benussi, L’età del neorealismo, 103–4; Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 49–50; Gian Piero Brunetta, “Il lungo viaggio del cinema neorealista,” in NeoRealismo: La nuova immagine in Italia 1932–1960, ed. Enrica Viganò (Milan: Admira, 2006), 31–9 (35); Pierre Sorlin, “Ce qu’on a appelé ‘néoréalisme cinématographique,’” Cahiers d’études italiennes 28 (2019): 1–16 (6–9). 94 On “choral” literature, see Goffredo Bellonci, in “Italo Calvino tra i contemporanei,” 105–6; Bocelli, “Letteratura della resistenza,” 8. On “choral” theatre, see “Ieri a Forlì: S’è aperto il Convegno del Teatro di massa,” L’Unità, 21 Dec. 1951: 3; Francesco Jovine, “Malinconico bilancio,” originally published in La Nuova Europa, 26 Aug. 1945, reprinted in Cronache teatrali: Commedie inedite e cronache teatrali, by Francesco Jovine, ed. Francesco D’Episcopo (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1983), 358–60. On “choral” art, see Salvatore Quasimodo, “Antologia di otto pittori [1950],” in Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1967), 257–61 (259). On “choral” architecture, see G. Michelucci, “Come ho progettato la chiesa della Vergine,” L’architettura. Cronache e Storia 16 (1957), cited in Bascherini, Da Pagano al Neorealismo, 51. 95 Carlo Lizzani, “L’apparenza del coro nel cinema italiano,” L’Unità, 11 May 1948, 3 96 Mario Verdone, Il cinema neorealista da Rossellini a Pasolini (Trapani: Celebes, 1977), 16 (emphasis in the original). 97 This is not to say, however, that chorality was a post-war invention. It was a descriptor used to define Verga’s nineteenth-century verismo, and was invoked with relative frequency, as well, to define Fascist cinema. See, for instance, D’Errico’s description of Forzano’s hagiographical depiction of Fascism’s triumphant reforms, 1933’s Camicia nera, as “eminentemente



Notes to pages 151–4

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corale [eminently choral],” a judgment that would not have been out of place had it been applied, just over a decade later, to a neorealist film. D’Errico, “Camicia nera, il grande film della nuova Italia,” 160. The difference between Fascist and neorealist chorality, I would argue, was not technical or formal but ideological, since with neorealism it was most often the expression of a conversion to the struggle to free Italy from Fascist influence. 98 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Il cinema italiano realistico,” 5. 99 Gian Luigi Rondi, “Il cinema italiano realistico,” 5. 100 On the neorealist creation of an imagined community, see Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, 24–5. On the political function of chorality and its role in creating such a community, see Joseph Luzzi, A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 20; and Elizabeth Alsop, “The Imaginary Crowd: Neorealism and the Uses of Coralità,” The Velvet Light Trap 74 (Fall 2014): 27–41 (28–9). 101 Vittorini, “Una nuova cultura,” 235. 102 As Guaiana puts it, “in the republican liturgical calendar collective ­martyrdom was more relevant than individual martyrdom.” Guaiana, “The Formation of a Civil Religion in Republican Italy,” 349. 103 See Robert C. Pirro, The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 69–70; and Charles L. Leavitt IV, “Notes on the End of Rome Open City,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 6, no. 3 (July 2018): 359–72. 104 Franco Fortini, “Il silenzio d’Italia II,” originally published in Rivista della Svizzera Ita­­liana 4 (30–31 May 1944), reprinted in Saggi ed epigrammi, ed. Luca Lenzini (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1218–14 (1223, emphasis in the original). 105 Bandinelli, “L’impegno degli intellettuali,” 577. 106 “Situazione,” Società 1, nos. 1–2 (1945): 3–7 (6). See, too, the call for culture to become “service” in Igino Giordani, “Servizio della cultura,” Il Campo 1, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Feb. 1946): 5–8. 107 Giaime Pintor, “L’ultima lettera [28 Nov. 1943],” in Il sangue d’Europa, 183–8 (187). 108 Vittorini “Una nuova cultura, ” 236. 109 Gian Piero Brunetta, Guida alla storia del cinema italiano 1905–2003 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 151; Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 88–91; Corti, Il viaggio testuale, 74–5; Forgacs, “Neorealismo, identità nazionale, modernità,” 42; Lorenzo Marmo, Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra: Neorealismo, melodramma, noir (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2018), 58. 110 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Random House, 1965), 37, 65.

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Notes to pages 154–6

111 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Nota su Le notti” originally published in Federico Fellini: Le notti di Cabiria, ed. Lino Del Fra (Bologna: Cappelli, 1957), reprinted in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), I: 699–707 (702–3). 112 On Pasolini’s debts to Auerbach, in this analysis and throughout his literary corpus, see Alessandro Cadoni, “‘Mescolanza’ e ‘contaminazione’ degli stili: Pasolini lettore di Auerbach,” Studi pasoliniani 5 (2011): 79–94; Emanuela Patti, Pasolini after Dante: The ‘Divine Mimesis’ and the Politics of Representation (Leeds: Legenda, 2015). 113 “Per una poesia nuova,” La Strada 1, no. 1 (April–May 1946): 3–18 (16). 114 Bocelli’s comments were delivered in Bo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo, 24; Assunto, “Le poetiche dello scriver male,” 5–6. See, too, Giacinto Spagnoletti, “Narratori allo sbaraglio,” originally published in Il Nuovo Corriere, 11 Aug. 1948, reprinted in Autobiografia di un giornale, 146–8 (147); Eurialo De Michelis, Novecento e dintorni: Dal Carducci al neorealismo (Milan: Mursia, 1976), 202–3. 115 Vasco Pratolini, Cronache di poveri amanti [1946], in Romanzi, ed. Francesco Paolo Memmo, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), I: 587–1019 (966). 116 “Stile e maniera,” 3; Pietrangeli, “ ‘I Malavoglia’ di Verga sullo schermo,” 110; “Nomi, possibilità del cinema italiano,” 10. 117 Mario Casagrande, “Realismo ed arte,” originally published in Darsena Nuova 2, no. 1 (March 1946), reprinted in Darsena Nuova: Ristampa ana­ statica dei cinque numeri 1945–1946 (Viareggio and Lucca: Mauro Baroni, 1997), 85–7 (87). 118 De Sica, “Abbiamo domandato a Vittorio De Sica,” 259. 119 For a significant attempt by a Catholic critic to lay claim to neorealism’s Christian humility, see Félix A. Morlion, “Presupposti cristiani nel realismo italiano,” Sequenze 2, no. 7 (1950): 27–9 (28). On the conflict over neorealism within Catholic culture, see Tomaso Subini, La doppia vita di ‘Francesco giullare di Dio’: Giulio Andreotti, Félix Morlion e Roberto Rossellini (Milan: Libraccio, 2011), 34–44; Daniela Treveri Gennari, Post-War Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 113; Elena Dagrada, “A Triple Alliance for a Catholic Neorealism: Roberto Rossellini According to Félix Morlion, Giulio Andreotti and Gian Luigi Rondi,” in Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power, ed. Daniel Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 114–34; Mariagrazia Fanchi, “Non censurare, ma educare! L’esercizio cinematografico cattolico e il suo progetto culturale e sociale,” in Attraverso lo schermo: Cinema e cultura cattolica in Italia, ed. Ruggero Eugeni and Dario E. Viganò, 2 vols. (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006), II: 103–13. 120 On this law and its impact on the financing of Italian cinema, see Lorenzo Quaglietti, “Il cinema italiano di Giulio Andreotti,” in Storia economico-politica del cinema italiano 1945–1980 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980), 52–73;



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Barbara Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno: Storia economica del cinema italiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001), 49–50; Giovanni Sedita, “Giulio Andreotti e il Neorealismo: De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti e la guerra fredda al cinema,” Nuova Storia contemporanea 16, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2012): 51–70. 121 Giulio Andreotti, “I film italiani nella polemica parlamentare,” originally published in Bianco e nero (Dec. 1948), reprinted in Gobetti et al., Neorealismo D.O.C., 166–7. 122 Giulio Andreotti, “Piaghe sociali e necessità di redenzione,” originally published in Libertas, 28 Feb. 1952, reprinted in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 8, 1949/1953, ed Luciano De Giusti (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2003), 563–4 (563). Brunetta argues that “La lettera a De Sica [...] si può considerare come l’enciclica cinematografica del pontificato di Andreotti [the letter to De Sica (...) can be considered Andreotti’s cinematic papal encyclical].” Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 93. 123 Andreotti’s letter is quoted in Sedita, “Giulio Andreotti e il neorealismo,” 53. 124 See Mario Alicata, “La corrente ‘Politecnico,’” originally published in Rinascita 3, nos. 5–6 (May–June, 1946), reprinted in Scritti letterari (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968), 243–5. Even at the time, this essay was interpreted as an official rebuke and a sign of Vittorini’s break with the party. See the unsigned “La sconfessione,” La Fiera letteraria 1, no. 17 (1 Aug. 1946): 8. On the effect of this rebuke on Vittorini’s fate, and on the fate of his journal, see Bonsaver, Eltio Vittorini, 156–62; Marina Zancan, Il progetto ‘Politecnico’: Cronaca e strutture di una rivista (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1984), 104–26; Gian Carlo Ferretti, L’editore Vittorini (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 99–114; Elisabetta Mondello, L’avventura delle riviste: Periodici e giornali lette­ rari del Novecento (Rome: Robin Edizioni, 2012), 242–50. 125 See Elio Vittorini, “Politica e cultura,” originally published in Il Politecnico 31–2 (July–Aug. 1946), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 303–9; Palmiro Togliatti, “La battaglia delle idee: Lettera a Elio Vittorini,” Rinascita 3, no. 10 (Oct. 1946): 284–5. Togliatti’s response “revealed a change in the PCI’s attitude towards the intelligentsia.” See Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 181. See, too, Giuseppe Vacca, “Alcuni temi della politica culturale di Togliatti (1945– 1956),” in I corsivi di Roderigo: Interventi politico-culturali dal 1944 al 1964. ed. Ottavio Cecchi, Giovanni Leone, and Giuseppe Vaca (Bari: De Donato, 1976), 5–122; Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 113–38; Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra, 83–90; Sergio Bertelli, Il gruppo: La formazione del gruppo dirigente del PCI 1936–1948 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 319–25; Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 24–31. 126 Among those who interpret the letter along the lines I have suggested, as a bid for power, see Matteo Di Giorgio, L’Impegno politico di Elio Vittorini

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Notes to pages 158–61

(Taranto: Edizioni Cressati, 1972), 19–20; Mario Valente, Ideologia e potere: Da ‘Il Politecnico’ a ‘Contropiano,’ 1945/1972 (Turin: ERI, 1978), 40. 127 Elio Vittorini, “Politica e cultura. Lettera a Togliatti,” originally published in Il Politecnico 35 (Jan.–March, 1947), reprinted in Letteratura arte società, 394–419 (406). I am far from the first to read this letter in the context of neorealism’s cultural politics. See especially Adelio Ferrero, “La ‘coscienza di sé’: Ideologie e verità del neorealismo,” in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, 229–49 (248). 128 Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere (Diario 1935–1950) (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 329 (5 March 1948). See, too, two alternative articulations of the same idea: Cesare Pavese, “Ritorno all’uomo,” originally published in L’Unità, 20 May 1945, reprinted in La letteratura americana, 197–9 (198); Cesare Pavese, “Il comunismo e gli intellettuali [14–16 April, 1946],” in La letteratura americana, 207–16 (214–15). 129 See, on this point, Asor Rosa’s trenchant criticism: “l’intellettuale [del dopoguerra] va verso il popolo, ma il più delle volte, prima ancora di raggiungerlo concretamente e seriamente lo trasforma in mito, in immagine rovesciata di sé [the (post-war) intellectual goes towards the people, but most of the time, before reaching them concretely and seriously, he transforms them into a myth, an upside-down version of himself ].” Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo, 130 (emphasis in the original). On intellectual appeals to the “popolo,” see too Giulia Bassi, Non è solo questione di classe: Il “popolo” nel discorso del Partito comunista italiano (1921–1991) (Rome: Viella, 2019). 130 Antonio Banfi, “Il problema etico-sociale della cultura popolare,” originally published in Atti del primo Congresso nazionale della cultura popolare (Milan: Vallardi, 1948), reprinted in Scritti e discorsi politici, vol. I., Scuola e società, ed. Alberto Burgio (Bologna: Istituto Antonio Banfi, 1987), 58–67 (63). 131 Cesare Zavattini, “L’Associazione culturale cinematografica ita­­liana,” in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 662–6 (663–4). On the conference’s importance for neorealism, see Virgilio Tosi, Quando il cinema era un circolo: La stagione d’oro dei Cineclub (1945–1956) (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2000), 19–20. On the complexities of Zavattini’s adoption of a popular voice, see Giorgio Bertellini, “Il ‘popolare’ fra immagine e parola: Note sparse su neorealismo, Gramsci e le belle bugie di Zavattini,” in “Diviso in due”. Cesare Zavattini: cinema e cultura popolare, ed. Pierluigi Ercole (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1999), 108–19. 132 Alfonso Gatto, “La Resistenza è appena incominciata,” L’Unità, 4 July 1947, 1. 133 La Rosa traces throughout Gatto’s pre-war poetry “l’esigenza di ­un’inquadratura che distanzi l’io dalla realtà [the search for a frame that can distance the I from reality].” Franco Pappalardo La Rosa, Alfonso Gatto: Dal surrealismo d’idillio alla poetica delle “vittime” (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2007), 11.



Notes to pages 162–6

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134 On Gatto’s Hermeticist anti-Fascism see Giovanni Sedita, “Scrittori e polizia fascista: Battaglie letterarie sotto il regime,” Strumenti critici 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 271–83 (280–1); Bartolo Pento, Alfonso Gatto (Florence: Il Castoro, 1972), 11–12. On his subsequent participation in the Resistance, see Emilio Giordano, “Poesia ‘resistenziale’ di Alfonso Gatto: Un contri­ buto,” in Stratigrafia di un poeta: Alfonso Gatto. Atti del Convegno nazionale di studi su Alfonso Gatto (Salerno–Maiori–Amalfi, 8–9–10 aprile 1978), ed. Pietro Borraro and Francesco D’Episcopo (Galatina: Congedo Editore, 1980), 299–322 (304). 135 G.P., “Le poesie di Gatto: Un poeta parla di sé e del suo lavoro,” L’Unità, 23 Nov. 1947, 3. 136 Alfonso Gatto, introduction to Il capo sulla neve: Liriche della Resistenza (Milan: Toffaloni, 1950), 9–12 (9). First published as Alfonso Gatto, “L’uomo è stato offeso,” Il Settimanale 1, no. 5 (26 Oct. 1946). 137 On the connection with Vittorini, see Anna Modena, Alfonso Gatto a Milano (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2010), 73–7. 138 As Benevento puts it, in this collection “[i]l linguaggio lascia cadere ora i tratti più vistosi dell’ermetismo, acquistando in evidenza e immediatezza e accostandosi a quello del neorealismo [the language now drops the most prominent features of Hermeticism, taking on evidence and immediacy and approaching the language of neorealism].” Aurelio Benevento, “‘Il capo sulla neve’: La poesia senza rima di Alfonso Gatto,” Critica letteraria 34, no. 4 (2006): 739–49 (748). 139 Alfonso Gatto, “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto,” in Tutte le poesie, ed. Silvio Ramat (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), 242. 140 Alfonso Gatto, “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto,” in The Wall Did Not Answer: Selected Poems 1932–1976, trans. Philip Parisi (New York: Chelsea Editions, 2011), 70–3 (71). 141 Gatto, “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto,” in Tutte le poesie, 242. 142 Gatto, “Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto,” in The Wall Did Not Answer, 73. 143 Massimo Bontempelli, preface to Il capo sulla neve, 5–7 (5). 144 Italo Calvino, “La letteratura ita­­liana sulla Resistenza,” originally published in Il movimento di liberazione in Italia 1, no. 1 (July 1949), reprinted in Saggi 1945–1985, I: 1492–500 (1494). 145 Vasco Pratolini, “Alfonso Gatto,” in Stratigrafia di un poeta: Alfonso Gatto, 405–18 (417). 146 Alfonso Gatto, ed., Il coro della guerra: Venti storie parlate raccolte da A. Pacifici e R. Macrelli (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1963). 147 Aldo Vergano, “Aldo Vergano ci parla del suo film ‘Il sole sorge ancora,’” Libera arte 1, no. 1 (15 May 1946): 2; Massimo Mida, review of Il sole sorge ancora, by Aldo Vergano, originally published in La critica cine­ matografica 1, nos. 3–4 (Sept. 1946), reprinted in La Resistenza nel cinema

244

Notes to pages 166–72

italiano del dopoguerra, 61; Augusto Borselli, “Milano ‘Gira,’” Star 2, no. 48 (22 Dec. 1945): 4. 148 Dario Martinelli Give Peace a Chant: Popular Music, Politics and Social Protest (New York: Springer, 2017), 169–70. 149 This scene would seem to confirm Lunghi’s assertion that in neorealist films, “Anche per la musica si tratta di uscire [...] dal particolare al ‘tutti’ [For music, too, it is a question of leaving behind (...) the particular for the ‘whole’].” Lunghi, “La musica e il neo-realismo,” 58. 150 In Italian the same word, “noi,” refers both to “we” and to “us.” This is the word Cesare attributes to Beppe. 151 Arturo Lanocita, review of Il sole sorge ancora, by Aldo Vergano, originally published in Corriere della Sera, 12 Jan. 1947, reprinted in La Resistenza nel cinema italiano 1945–1995, ed. Mauro Manciotti and Aldo Viganò (Genoa: Istituto storico della Resistenza in Liguria, 1995), 55. 152 Carlo Lizzani, Il mio lungo viaggio nel secolo breve (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 66. 153 See especially Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 203; Canziani, Gli anni del neorealismo, 153–4; and Fernaldo Di Giammatteo, Lo sguardo inquieto: Storia del cinema italiano (1940–1990) (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1994), 79. 154 On Alessandrini’s removal in favour of Vegano, see the 1945 exchange of letters between the ANPI and Giorgio Agliani in “Fondo Agliani,” Il Nuovo Spettatore 7 (2003): 39–112 (esp. 42, 44). Conclusion 1 “Stile e maniera,” 3. 2 Vittorio Calvino, Guida al cinema, 339. See, too, the essays in Luigi Chiarini, ed., Il film del dopoguerra, 1945–1949 (Rome: Bianco e Nero, 1949). 3 Venturini, “Origini del neorealismo,” 31–54; Anna Banti, “Neorealismo nel cinema italiano,” originally published in Paragone 1, no. 8 (1950), reprinted in Opinioni (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961), 90–101; Chiarini, “Discorso sul neorealismo,” 3–25. 4 Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi, eds., Cinema italiano oggi; Massimo Mida, Roberto Rossellini (Parma: Guanda, 1953); Elia Santoro, ed., Realismo del cinema italiano (Cremona: Pubblitur, 1954); Carlo Lizzani, Il cinema italiano (Florence: Parenti, 1954); Mario Gromo, Cinema italiano: 1903–1953 (Milan: Mondadori, 1954); Giulio Cesare Castello, Il cinema neorealistico italiano (Turin: Edizioni Radio Ita­­liana, 1956); Brunello Rondi, Il neorealismo italiano. 5 Among those who credited foreign critics with the discovery of Italian neorealism, see Luigi Comencini, “Che cosa vuole il pubblico?” originally published in Tempo Nuovo, 21 Dec. 1946, reprinted in Al cinema con cuore: 1938–1974,



Notes to pages 172–3

245

ed. Adriano Aprà (Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2007), 70–1; Mario Gromo, “Hollywood contro Venezia: Gli italiani incapaci di giudicare i film di una libera democrazia?” La Nuova Stampa 4, no. 221 (29 Sept. 1948): 3. This claim has been repeated in many recent studies, including Alberto Pezzotta, La critica cinematografica (Rome: Carocci editore, 2007), 30. On the essential differences between the French and Italian critical receptions of Italian neorealism, see especially Alessia Ricciardi, “The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorealism from Bazin to Godard,” Romanic Review 97, nos. 3–4 (May–Nov. 2006): 483–500. 6 Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 1 (2011): 107–28 (117, 127). 7 Cesare Zavattini, “Il cinema e l’uomo moderno,” 680. 8 On the shift that took place at this time, see also Parigi, Neorealismo: Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, 56; Vito Zagarrio, “La generazione del neorealismo di fronte agli anni cinquanta,” in Il cinema italiano degli anni ’50, ed. Giorgio Tinazzi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1979), 99–116 (101–2). 9 For Aristarco’s proposed program, see the documents contained in the section entitled “La polemica su ‘Senso,’” which were originally published in the journal Cinema Nuovo and can now be found in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 9, 1954/1959, ed. Sandro Bernardi (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2004), 549–55. For Salinari’s, see his Preludio e fine del realismo in Italia (Naples: Morano Editore, 1967), 107–27. For the impact of these two critics on the institution of neorealism, see Paolo Paolini, “Tra le polemiche su ‘Metello’ e quelle sul ‘Gattopardo’: La fine del neorealismo,” Otto/ Novecento 26, no. 3 (2002): 47–69. 10 On these diverse genres, see especially Alberto Farassino, “Viraggi del neorealismo: Rosa e altri colori,” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 8, 1949/1953, ed. Luciano De Giusti (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2003), 203–22. 11 Giuseppe De Santis, “È in crisi il neorealismo?” originally published in Filmcritica 4 (March–April 1951), reprinted in Neorealismo: Poetiche e pole­­ miche, 136–43; Luigi Chiarini, “La crisi c’è,” originally published in Filmcritica 5 (1951), reprinted in Sul neorealismo: Testi e documenti (1939– 1955) (Pesaro: Quaderno Informativo 59, 1974), 161–3. 12 See Miccichè, “Il cinema italiano sotto il fascismo,” 38–9. 13 Andreotti, “I film italiani nella polemica parlamentare,” 166–7. 14 “Manifesto del Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano [22 Feb. 1948],” in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 7, 1945/1948, ed. Callisto Cosulich. (Venice: Marsilio Editore), 546–7. 15 Cesare Zavattini, “Tesi sul neorealismo,” originally published in Emilia 17 (Nov. 1953), reprinted in Cinema: Diario cinematografico e Neorealismo ecc., 741–52 (741).

246

Notes to pages 174–6

16 “Più che una bandiera,” originally published in Cinema Nuovo 26 (31 Dec. 1953), reprinted in Sul neorealismo: Testi e documenti (1939–1955), 239. 17 On this “‘patrimonizzazione’ del neorealismo [‘patrimonization’ of ­neorealism],” see Michele Guerra, “Introduzione: Ancora di neorealismo e di cinema italiano,” in Invenzioni dal vero, 11–19 (13). 18 Noto and Pitassio, Il cinema neorealista, vii. 19 Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo, 22–3. 20 Donatella Spinelli Coleman, Filming the Nation: Jung, Film, Neo-realism and Italian National Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 69. 21 Falaschi, Realtà e retorica, 7. 22 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 184. 23 As Sklar succinctly puts it, neorealism is supposed to offer “a template for filmmaking practices that could succeed apart from or in opposition to U.S. global market dominance and Hollywood’s industrial style.” Robert Sklar, “‘The Exalted Spirit of the Actual’: James Agee, Critic and Filmmaker, and the U.S. Response to Neorealism,” in Global Neorealism, 71–86 (71). For similar claims, see Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, 1–24 (10). 24 See Lorenzo Quaglietti, Ecco i nostri: L’invasione del cinema americano in Italia (Turin: Nuova ERI, 1991), 79; Gian Piero Brunetta, “La lunga marcia del cinema americano in Italia tra fascismo e guerra fredda,” in Hollywood in Europa: Industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945–1960, ed. David W. Ellwood and Gian Piero Brunetta (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1991), 75–87 (80–2). 25 Vincent F. Rocchio, “Patriarchy Has Failed Us: The Continuing Legacy of Neorealism in Contemporary Italian Film,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29, no. 2 (2012): 147–62 (148). 26 This account is repeated, for instance, in Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 129. 27 Mario Verdone, “De Sica ‘ladro onorario’: Dalle biciclette ai clowns,” originally published in Il Progresso d’Italia, 20 Dec. 1948, reprinted in Ladri di biciclette: Nuove ricerche, 139–41 (141). A detailed archival reconstruction of these complex negotiations can be found in Steve Eaton, “To Catch a Bicycle Thief: David O. Selznick’s Failed Attempt to Co-Opt the Neorealist Classic,” The Italianist 39, no. 2 (2019): 222–30. See, too, Henri Agel, Vittorio De Sica (Paris: Èditions Universitaires, 1955), 87; Alonge, Vittorio De Sica, 19; David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 139; Elisa Baldini, “Ladri di biciclette e l’America: Ovvero l’arte della realtà e il commercio del reale,” in Ladri di biciclette: Nuove ricerche, 60–6. 28 For noteworthy analyses of aspects of this dialogue, see Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 21; Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor:



Notes to pages 176–7

29 30

31

32

33 34 35 36

247

Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 205; Marilyn Fabe, Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 106; Veronica Pravadelli, “Neorealismo e cinema hollywoodiano: Identità collettiva, immaginario e stili di regia,” in Incontro al neorealismo, 189–203 (202–3); Ora Gelley, Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism: Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Italy (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 85–6; Giuliana Muscio, Napoli/New York/Hollywood: Film between Italy and the United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 256. See Catherine O’Rawe, “‘I padri e i maestri’: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies,” Italian Studies 63, no. 2 (2008): 173–94 (177–8). Luigi Serravalli, “Presentazione,” in Estetica politica e sociale del neorealismo, by Camillo Marino (Avellino: Edizioni neorealistiche di avanguardia, 1984), 1–14 (14). Antonio Rossini and Carmela Bernadetta Scala, introduction to New Trends in Italian Cinema: “New” Neorealism, ed. Antonio Rossini and Carmela Bernadetta Scala (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 1–9 (1, emphasis mine). See the cogent diagnosis of this trend in Carlo Celli, “The Nostalgia Current in the Italian Cinema,” in Incontri con il cinema italiano, ed. Antonio Vitti (Rome and Caltanisetta: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 2003), 277–87 (286–7). Ferretti, La letteratura del rifiuto, 176. Borelli, “Il futuro ha un cuore antico,” 49. Stefania Parigi, “Le mille e una forma: Il racconto interminabile del neorealismo,” in Intorno al neorealismo, 51–6 (51). Kezich, “Hanno fatto pace col nonno fascista,” 251; Carlo Lizzani, “Questi borghesucci erano prefascisti,” originally published in La Repubblica, 16 Oct. 1976, reprinted in Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, 254; Lino Micciché, “Fra due dissolvenze incrociate,” in Il fantasma della realtà, 27–9 (28).

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Index

Alessandrini, Goffredo, 169 Alicata, Mario: adaptation of I Malavoglia, 47; and De Santis, 26–7, 47, 191n63; on Verga, 26–7 Andreotti, Giulio: the Andreotti Law, 156–7, 173; vs. De Sica, 157, 241n122 Angioletti, Giovanni Battista, 22–3, 40; vs. Trombatore, 67 Antonelli, Giuseppe: art vs. chronicle, 94–6 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 26, 79, 87, 216n112 Argentieri, Mino, 216n113 Aristarco, Guido: and French cinematic neorealism, 31; on neorealism, 111, 172, 223n87; on Ossessione, 29, 193n77 Arnold, Matthew, 133 Artom, Emanuele, 90 Artom, Eugenio, 64 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 242n129 Assunto, Rosario, 91 Auerbach, Erich, 154, 155 Balbo, Felice, 133 Baldelli, Pio, 98 Baldi, Valentino, 194n83

Bandinelli, Ranuccio Bianchi, 70–1, 214n89; on culture, 153 Banfi, Antonio, 133; on culture, 159 Banti, Anna, 171 Barbaro, Umberto: on French neorealist cinema, 29, 30; on neorealism, 19–20, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 40 Bartolini, Luigi: Ladri di biciclette, 96 Bassani, Giorgio: on neorealism, 30– 1, 32; and Ossessione, 29, 30–1, 32 Battaglia, Roberto, 90 Battistini, Andrea, 89, 228n10 Bellonci, Goffredo: on neorealism, 17–18, 21, 24, 26, 36, 148 Benedetti, Arrigo, 90–1 Benevento, Aurelio, 243n138 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 204n2 Bertè, Pierantonio, 35 Besani, Luca, 92 Bigiaretti, Libero, 72, 74, 132 Bilenchi, Romano, 100–1, 111 Blasetti, Alessandro, 54, 55, 56–7; on neorealism, 58–60; on Rossellini, 59–60 Bo, Carlo — debate with Vittorini, 144–7, 150, 151 — and Hermeticism, 146–7, 150

304 Index — Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Investigation of neorealism), 16–17, 19, 21, 24, 26, 34–5, 39, 55, 110, 144, 171 — and introspection, 144–6 — Letteratura come vita (Literature as life), 146–7, 150 — Primo viene il film (Film came first), 34 Bocelli, Arnaldo, 20, 117, 155, 186n20, 189n42 Bogi, Julian, 139 Bolis, Luciano, 91–2 Bonfantini, Mario, 69–70, 93 Bontempelli, Massimo, 113; on Gatto’s poetry, 164–5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5 Branca, Vittore: on Fascism, 64–5 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 52, 193n73, 207n17, 241n122 Brunette, Peter: on Rossellini, 47 Buonaiuti, Ernesto, 141 Cain, James M.: and Italian neorealism, 31; The Postman Always Rings Twice, 28 Calamandrei, Franco, 101–2, 103–4, 112–13 Calamandrei, Piero, 83 Calvino, Italo — on Gatto’s poetry, 165 — and “the literature and society” debate: vs. Sereni, 74–5 — from the “particular to the universal,” 116 — on post-war story-telling, 88–9 — Saremo come Omero (We’ll be like Homer!), 74–6, 113 — Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno: Fascism and the Resistance, 76; hope for new beginnings, 77; and neorealism’s periodization, 12;

plot, 76–7; preface, 89; and “the ‘Year Zero,’” 75, 76, 77, 215n100 Calvino, Vittorio, 171 Camerini, Mario, 56, 57 Carmagnola, Piero, 92 Carné, Marcel, 29, 30 Castellani, Renato, 173 Catholicism, 138, 139, 140, 141; and Communism, 140–2; and neorealism, 156–7 Caudana, Mino, 94 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 28 Chiarini, Luigi, 191n63; Discorso sul neorealismo (Discourse on neorealism), 24, 171; on La terra trema, 42 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 197n102 Christianity: Christian rhetoric, 154– 6, 169–70; as tradition, 137–8, 139–43, 147, 151, 160, 165. See also Catholicism; Jesus Christ Comandante Gracco. See Gracci, Angiolo Comencini, Luigi, 132, 173 Contini, Gianfranco, 139 Corti, Maria, 182n20, 217n10 Cosulich, Callisto, 82 Croce, Benedetto, 22, 25; antiFascism of, 108; on the Fascist ventennio, 64, 108; history and chronicles, 106–7, 111–12, 113–14, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122; influence of, 107–13, 117, 120, 121; Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti (Manifesto of antiFascist intellectuals), 139; opposition to, 64–5; poetry and non-poetry, 110; rejection of, 108–11, 112 debates: Alicata and De Santis, 26–7; Antonelli–Falqui, 94–6; Dove



Index 305

va la cultura? (Where is culture headed?), 132; “literature and the people,” 67–8; “literature and society,” 72–5, 77, 79; Il Politecnico–Società, 101–5, 111– 13; Vittorini–Bo, 143–6, 150; Vittorini–Togliatti, 157–8 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 109 decadentism, 30, 154, 194n83. See also modernism De Caro, Gasparo, 206n16 De Gasperi, Alcide, 230n33 Del Bo, Giuseppe, 65 De Micheli, Mario: Realismo e poesia (Realism and poetry), 24, 149 De Michelis, Eurialo, 26, 45 De Mitri, Leonardo, 121 De Robertis, Francesco, 55–6, 57 De Santis, Giuseppe — and Alicata, 26–7, 47, 191n63 — Caccia tragica: as chronicle, 97; Fascism and partisans, 78–80; film promotion, 83–4; and history, 78–81, 82–3; hope for new beginnings, 78, 79–80, 82, 83; and neorealism’s periodization, 12; and Ossessione, 81–2; plot, 49, 78–81; and reconciliation, 80; and redemption, 81–2, 83; review of, 118 — Giorni di gloria, 78; Fosse Ardeatine massacre, 139 — and neorealism, 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 78, 167; on chronicles, 97; crisis of, 173 — Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, 116 De Sica, Vittorio — Ladri di biciclette, 12, 96; Antonio’s individuality, 123, 124–5, 126–7; Christian-Marxist ethos in, 141–2; and the

chronicle, 86–7, 96; conclusion, 126; De Sica’s interview on, 86, 87, 124, 156; and the masses, 123, 126, 127; as minor chronicle, 125, 126–7; plot, 85–6, 123–4; reception of, 96, 125; system of values in, 86; and Selznick, 175–6 — and neorealism: imagined conversation, 3–4, 5, 7; and Guida al cinema, 171 — Sciuscià, 111; review of, 118 — Umberto D, 157 Dionisotti, Carlo, 110 Duvivier, Julien, 28, 30, 31 Emanuelli, Enrico, 25, 63 Fabbri, Lorenzo, 212n69 Falaschi, Giovanni, 174–5 Falqui, Enrico: art vs. chronicle, 94–6 Farassino, Alberto, 9–10, 53 Fascism: anti-Fascism, 49–50, 67, 78, 104, 108–9, 117, 128, 135–6, 138–9, 140–1, 142, 143, 148, 162, 163, 167, 169, 174; anti-Fascist religious rhetoric, 138–43; and artists, 66–7; and Croce, 108; and culture, 67–9, 131; defeat of, 46, 61, 72, 131; Fascist chorality, 238n97; Fascist cinema, 53, 55–60, 66, 169; evils of, 46, 132, 147; mockery of, 166; and Nazis, 38, 128; and neorealism, 50, 71; post-Fascist period, 12, 49, 51, 69, 70, 73, 75–8, 79–80, 103, 108, 109, 130, 144, 152, 159, 170, 175; and the religiosity of the Resistance, 164–5; and the Resistance, 36–7, 38, 52, 78, 139–43, 166, 167, 169, 234n63; rise of, 135–6; Il tamburo della

306 Index banda d’Affori (The drum of the Affori band), 166; ventennio, the, 12, 26, 28, 36, 49, 50, 52–3, 54, 64–5, 66, 67, 68, 74, 83, 84, 129, 154, 163, 166; and “the ‘Year Zero’ fable,” 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 66, 83 Ferrara, Giuseppe, 19 Ferrata, Giansiro, 23 Ferretti, Gian Carlo, 177 Ferroni, Giorgio, 33 Flora, Francesco, 110 Fonda, Henry, 176 Fortini, Franco, 102–3, 133–4, 153; on Ladri di biciclette, 141–2 Forzano, Giovacchino: Camicia nera, 54, 238n97 Freddi, Luigi, 54 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 110 Gallo, Niccolò, 94 Gatto, Alfonso: and anti-Fascism, 162; Il capo sulla neve (The head on the snow), 162, 163–5, 243n138; civic poetry of, 165; and cultural renewal, 162–3, 169; Debiti e crediti (Debts and credits), 73–4, 79; as hermetic, 161; Per i martiri di Piazzale Loreto (For the martyrs of Piazzale Loreto), 13, 163–4; and Il sole sorge ancora, 165–6 Genette, Gerard, 115 Genina, Augusto, 56, 57 Germans: and Milan, 163–4; in Il sole sorge ancora, 167. See also Nazism Germi, Pietro, 110, 118 Giambone, Eusebio, 140 Giglio, Tommaso, 150 Ginzburg, Natalia, 8 Girotti, Massimo, 81–2 Gracci, Angiolo, 89 Grant, Cary, 175–6

Greenblatt, Stephen, 132 Greppi, Antonio, 141 Guaiana, Yuri, 239n102 Guttuso, Renato, 35, 41, 70, 116–17 Hermeticism, 146–7, 148–9, 150, 237n80, 243n138; Hermetic journal Campo di Marte, 165 Hollywood cinema, 33, 115, 171, 175–6, 178, 246n23 Homer, 44, 45, 46, 74, 76, 202n145 Hûret, Jules, 19, 34, 35, 39 Isnenghi, Mario, 204n2 Italy — Action Party, 139; Giustizia e libertà (Justice and liberty), 140 — Associazione culturale cinematografica Italiana (ACCI), 159–60 — Associazione Nazionale dei Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI), 83, 139 — Christian Democrats, 138, 156– 7, 230n33 — cinema: continuities between pre-war and post-war period, 53– 60; and Croce, 110–11; post-war, 82, 83; post-war chronicle, 86–7 — chorality: in culture, 149–53; neorealist choral poetry, 148–9, 162–5, 166, 168, 169; and popular art, 159; role of intellectuals, 153–4; transition from I to we, 148, 150–1, 162–5 — the chronicle (cronaca), 87, 91–6; 99–101, 104, 110–13, 116, 117–20; art vs. chronicle, 94–6, 113; author-writers vs. witness-writers, 89–96, 217n10; chronicles as theatre, 120–1; history and chronicle, 106–13,



Index 307

118–22; and the Italian literary language, 90; literature vs. chronicle, 90–6, 105; literature and the novel, 93, 148–50; narrative vs. chronicle, 101–5, 112–13, 118; testimony vs. art, 90–3, 102–4 — culture: and Christianity, 139–41, 147, 154–6, 157, 160, 165, 169, 170; and Croce’s influence on, 107–12; cultural conversation, 8, 12, 149; cultural politics, 130, 131, 146, 152–60; culture’s ethics, 135–7, 145–6; culture’s social role, 133–6, 143, 152–3, 159, 169–70; definition of culture, 132–4; and the experience of war, 113–14, 122; a new culture and society, 61, 63, 65, 67–71, 72–8, 109, 119, 131–8, 140, 144, 147, 148, 152–3, 159, 160, 165–6; and religious rhetoric, 138–43, 151, 152, 167–9 — Italian Communist Party (PCI), 72, 77, 83, 138, 140; Communists and Catholics, 140–2; in Il sole sorge ancora, 167, 169; Togliatti vs. Vittorini, 157–8 — Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano (Movement for the Defence of Italian Cinema), 173 — political crises of the 1960s and 1970s, 51 — post-war period: and crisis, 61–4, 65–6, 68, 78, 83, 132; and national recovery, 69, 73, 79, 80, 83, 99, 124, 153, 174; a “new Italy,” 66, 71, 83, 142, 152, 159; pre-war and postwar continuities, 51–2, 61, 66,

69, 79, 83, 204n2, 206n16; reconstruction of, 61, 66, 69, 83, 108, 129, 131, 141, 142, 152–3, 174; reform, 68, 69, 71, 72, 82–3, 130, 144, 161; and renewal, 50, 51, 60, 61, 62, 63–4, 65, 66, 68, 69–71, 72, 75, 76, 77–8, 83, 138, 139, 141, 148; society, 123–5, 126, 129, 161–3, 162, 169–70; the “‘Year Zero’ fable,” 53, 54, 60, 66, 69, 77, 82, 83 Jacobbi, Ruggero, 165 Jesus Christ, 137, 142, 144. See also Catholicism; Christianity journals — Ambrosiano, L’, 20 — Avanti!, 58, 68, 91, 94, 138 — Bianco e nero, 171, 172 — Campo di Marte, 165 — Cinema, 165; and European modernism, 27; and neorealism, 28; rereading of Verga, 26–7 — Cinema Nuovo, 174 — Costume, 63 — Fiera letteraria, La, 67, 93, 94 — Filmcritica, 173 — Mercurio, 69 — Politecnico, Il, 101–3, 104–5, 109, 112–13, 133, 143, 157; demise of, 158; launch of, 131 — Ponte, Il, 83 — Popolo, Il, 138 — Quarta parete, 55, 120–1 — Rinascita, 70 — Risorgimento liberale, 63–4 — Società, 99, 100–2, 104–5, 111–13, 138, 153 — Società Nuova, 69–70 — Solaria, 23, 25 — Strada, La, 155 — Sud, 55, 118

308 Index — Ultima, L’, 138 — Unità, L’, 72, 77 — Via, La 63 — Vie nuove, 68, 72 Jovine, Francesco, 11, 72, 149–50 Joyce, James, 18, 20, 21–4; Italian reception of, 21–3, 40; and realism, 22–4; and Verga, 26; and verismo, 25 — Ulysses, 24; influence on La terra trema, 45–6; Italian translation of, 203n148 Kezich, Tullio, 5, 52, 177 Kinder, Marsha: singulative and iterative narratives, 115–16 Kolker, Robert Phillip, 227n6 Labriola, Antonio, 138 La Penna, Antonio, 108 Lattuada, Alberto, 79; Senza pietà, 110, 116 Levi, Carlo: Crisi di civiltà (Crisis of civilization), 62–3; on Croce, 107 Lewis, Wyndham, 24 Lizzani, Carlo, 141, 151, 177; and Il sole sorge ancora, 166, 167–8, 169 Lo Gatto, Ettore, 19 Longanesi, Leo, 191n63 Lunghi, Fernando Ludovico, 244n149 Luperini, Romano, 214n89 Luzi, Mario, 147, 237n80 Macrì, Oreste, 139 Mafai, Mario, 68 Maggiorani, Lamberto, 176 Mancino, Antonio Giulio, 234n64 Marcus, Millicent, 191n63 Margadonna, Ettore Maria, 28 Marino, Camillo, 176

Massolo, Arturo, 24 Miccichè, Lino, 177, 205n3; and “ethics of aesthetics,” 129–30, 136, 169, 228n10; “Vittorini’s question,” 143, 169 Micheli, Silvio, 91 Milan: San Vittore massacre, 163–4 Milanini, Claudio, 198n108 Minghelli, Giuliana, 210n51 modernism, 18–19, 26, 39, 45, 47, 48; European, 27; Italian, 187n24, 194n83; Italian reception of 21, 23, 30; and Joyce, 21–3; and neorealism, 30–1, 34, 148; and Proust, 21–3; and realism, 23–4, 25, 28 Moravia, Alberto — vs. chroniclers, 92–3 — on culture, 133 — Gli indifferenti: as neorealist, 20–1, 40, 186n21 — Omaggio a Joyce (Homage to Joyce), 23, 25 Morin, Edgar, 51 Mussolini, Benito, 4, 12, 46, 53, 55, 108, 166. See also Fascism Nazism: collaboration with, 49, 53, 128; concentration camps, 49, 81, 91, 119, 122; in Germany, 51; in Italy, 37–8, 49, 53, 90, 131, 163–4. See also Fascism; partisans; Resistance, the Necco, Giovanni, 20 Nicolai, Renato, 68 neorealism (American), 28, 31, 33 neorealism (British), 28, 33 neorealism (French): Carnè, Duvivier, and Renoir, 29, 30, 31, 32; influence on Italian neorealist cinema, 29–30; in literature, 20



Index 309

neorealism (Italian) — across the arts, 16, 32–3, 35–6, 39, 48, 143–4, 148, 198n108; beyond Italy, 34–5, 171–2 — canon of: 4, 6, 7, 33, 174, 178 — and chorality, 150–2, 155, 164, 238n97 — and Christian rhetoric, 164, 170 — and the chronicle, 87–8, 114, 118; and definition of, 87–8; neoverismo of, 110; sub specie aeternitatis, 122 — and cinema, 28–31; as category of filmmaking, 32, 33, 34, 41; and cinematic calligrafismo, 57 — and common climate, 5, 35, 182n22 — and Croce, 111 — as cultural conversation: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 10, 11–12, 13, 16, 32, 33, 42, 50, 84, 132, 151, 154, 156, 170, 178; and end of conversation, 171, 172 — as cultural discourse, 10–11, 48, 55, 83, 107, 172, 173, 178, 183n31 — cultural politics of, 146, 159–60, 167–70 — and debates, 5–6, 16, 47, 52, 58, 71–2, 96, 106, 110, 112, 121, 131; Alicata and De Santis, 26–7; Vittorini–Bo, 143–6, 150, 172, 174, 178 — definition of: 4, 7, 8–10, 12, 16, 17–18, 39, 50, 53–4, 78, 114–15, 129, 130, 148, 154–5, 170, 174–5, 178 — as eschatological program, 170 — ethics of: 45, 94, 129–30, 144, 145–6, 147, 170; “ethics of aesthetics,” 129–30, 136, 160, 169, 228n10

— European modernism, 18–21, 23, 34; Neue Sachlichkeit, 20–1 — and the experience of the war, 114–15 — and Fascism, 50, 71, 73, 74, 78–80, 83–4, 210n51; antiFascism, 50; complicity with, 129; continuities with 52–3, 54; reform after, 130; and the Resistance, 78, 164 — genealogy of, 16, 28–30, 34, 78, 129, 187n25 — vs. Hermeticism, 147, 150, 155, 243n138 — and history: as category, 16; as historical signifier, 175; as “a moment,” 47 — and humble rhetoric (sermo humilis), 154–6, 159; as cultural strategy, 156; and new mass politics, 159, 242n129; and reformist agenda, 161 — ideology of, 6–7 — as label, 32 — and literature, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 45, 47, 67–8, 103, 146, 147, 149–50, 165, 176–7, 197n102; and “literature and society” debate, 72–5, 77, 79 — as movement: 3, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 17 — periodization of, 4, 10–11, 16, 50; pre-war and post-war, 12, 39–40, 58, 60–1; pre-war, 55; and Second World War, 60–1 — politics of, 129–30, 146, 147, 152–4, 159, 227n6 — the post-war period: and ambitions, 84; continuities and renewal in, 61, 206n16; contraction of, 40–1; “the ‘Year Zero’ fable,” 50, 58, 59

310 Index — and realism, 17–20, 22–3, 26–7, 36, 43, 47; as experimental realism, 20–3, 39; vs. naturalism, 18–9, 24, 30; as new modernist hyper-realism, 18, 21, 22–3, 24, 25; vs. nineteenth-century realism, 24, 25 — and representation of history, 12–13, 114–16 — scholarship on, 6–7, 171 — from singular I to plural we, 148, 150–1, 164 — as a term, 19, 28, 31, 32–3, 35, 38–9, 40, 50, 55, 146, 178, 185n12; beyond Italy, 33; as label, 40–1 — and verismo, 24–5; rereading of Verga, 25–7 neorealism (Soviet), 19, 20, 28, 30, 32, 33 neorealist cinema (Italian) — vs. Andreotti, 156–7, 173, 174 — as brand identity, 177 — canon of, 7, 11, 174, 178 — as category, 31, 33, 34, 41 — and chorality in, 150–2; as community of faithful, 151; in Il sole sorge ancora, 166–9 — and Christian rhetoric, 141–2, 167–70, 235n66 — and the chronicle, 87, 97, 110– 11; vs. art, 97–8; as history, 118; as minor chronicle, 125 — and Cinema, 26, 27–8, 47 — and contemporary Italian cinema, 176–7 — as conversation, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 84, 170, 173, 178; end of conversation, 171, 172 — and creating a new audience, 159–60 — crisis of, 173

— and cultural authority, 143, 157, 159, 169–70 — and cultural engagement, 143–4, 168, 169–70 — as cultural patrimony, 173–4 — definitions of, 9, 87, 117–18, 151, 170, 174–5, 178 — and documentarism, 27, 191n63 — end of, 171, 173 — ethics of: 45, 170; “ethics of aesthetics,” 129–30, 160, 169, 228n10 — and Fascism, 52–60, 79–84; antiFascism, 174; and fictionalized documentaries, 54; “the ‘Year Zero’ fable,” 58, 59, 82, 207n17; war documentaries, 57 — and French neorealism, 29–31, 48 — and genre cinema, 173 — goal of, 115, 156, 170 — and Hollywood, 171, 175–6, 178 — and humble rhetoric (sermo humilis), 154–7, 159, 168 — as idol, 177–8 — from the individual to the collective, 115–16, 117–18, 125–7, 151, 167, 170, 244n149; from singular I to plural we, 148, 167, 244n149 — beyond Italy, 171–2 — as iterative, 115–16 — and literature, 27, 28–9, 30–1, 34, 45, 47, 48, 197n102 — as MacGuffin, 175 — and modernist hyper-realism, 27 — as movement, 28, 129, 160, 173, 176 — narrative techniques of, 115–16 — as national mythology, 174, 178 — and neo-neorealism, 176–7



Index 311

— origins of, 56, 57, 59, 78, 172; arrival of, 30, 31; as conversation, 3–4; cultural history of, 28–30; 1945 as “year Zero,” 82, 216n113 — as orthodoxy, 172–4 — Pesaro Film Festivals, 52 — politics of, 129, 227n6, 170 — vs. popular culture, 176 — popularity, 5, 171–2 — and Quarta parete, 55 — scholarship on, 171, 172, 174 — standard criteria of, 14 — and Sud, 55 — as a term, 28, 30–1, 32, 33, 34, 39–40, 41–2, 54, 171, 178 neorealist directors (Italian). See Blasetti, Alessandro; Castellani, Renato; De Santis, Giuseppe; De Sica, Vittorio; Ferroni, Giorgio; Germi, Pietro; Lattuada, Alberto; Lizzani, Carlo; Rossellini, Roberto; Vergano, Aldo; Visconti, Luchino; Zampa, Luigi Noto, Paolo, 174 Olivetti, Adriano, 35 Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 139 Pagliero, Marcello, 110 Paoluzzi, Angelo, 148–9 Parigi, Stefania, 177 partisans, 37, 38, 49, 76, 78–9, 82, 83, 89, 90, 91, 92, 110, 117, 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 152, 153, 154, 163–4, 166, 167, 169. See also Fascism; Resistance, the Pasolini, Pier Paolo: on neorealism, 154–5 Pavese, Cesare: vs. chroniclers, 93; and the masses, 159, 242n129; on neorealism, 31, 41

Pepe, Gabriele: La crisi dell’uomo, 63, 65–6, 68 Perry, Alan R., 235n66 Petronio, Giuseppe, 68 Piazzesi, Gianfranco, 111; on the chronicle, 99–100, 104–5, 111–13 Pietrangeli, Antonio, 35, 47, 182n22; on neorealism, 56, 115; and Ossessione, 32, 47 Pintor, Giaime, 64, 153–4 Pitassio, Francesco, 174 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 166 Pound, Ezra, 24 Pratolini, Vasco, 155; on Gatto’s poetry, 165 Proust, Marcel, 18, 20, 21–2; Italian reception, 21–3; and realism, 22–3; and verismo, 25 Prunas, Pasquale, 118 Puccini, Gianni, 35; on the neorealist chronicle, 98–9 Purificato, Domenico, 41 Quaglietti, Lorenzo, 118 Quaresima, Leonardo, 6, 7 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 149 RAI (Italian broadcasting company), 16 Raimondi, Giuseppe, 138 Rancière, Jacques, 235n66 Reed, John: Ten Days That Shook the World, 104–5, 112 Renoir, Jean, 28, 30, 31, 48 Resistance, the, 37–8, 52, 57, 66, 76, 78, 88–90, 91–2, 128, 138–43, 152, 161, 166, 167, 169, 174, 234n63; and Resistance literature, 110, 117, 162–5; Resistance paintings, 116–17. See also Fascism; partisans

312 Index Ronchi, Walter, 29 Rondi, Brunello, 148 Rondi, Gian Luigi, 6, 141, 151; Cinema italiano oggi, 51, 55, 58, 59 Rosa, Giovanni Titta, 93–4 Rossellini, Roberto, 47, 98 — Fascist trilogy of, 60 — Germania anno zero 51; as chronicle, 97 — La nave bianca, 54, 57–8 — on neorealism, 57–8 — Paisà: as chronicle, 97 — Roma città aperta: CatholicCommunist ethos, 142–3, 235n66; chorality in, 152; as chronicle, 96–7; as neorealist, 7; plot, 142, 152; and the post-war period, 142, 234n64; reception of, 53–4, 59–60, 96 Russo, Luigi, 108 Salinari, Carlo, 87, 172 Sansone, Mario, 109–10 Sapegno, Natalino, 108 Sassu, Aligi, 139 Savinio, Alberto, 138 Schuster, Ildefonso, 139 Schwarz, Guri, 234n63 Second World War, 4, 12, 44, 49, 88, 90, 128, 131, 132, 140, 149 Selznick, David. O, 175–6 Serandrei, Mario: and the term “neorealism,” 30, 32, 47–8; treatment of Ulysses, 45, 48; and Visconti, 30, 32, 45 Sereni, Emilio, 72–3, 74 Serravalli, Luigi, 176 Settimana Incom (Italian newsreel), 33 Sipala, Mario, 60 Sitney, P. Adams, 235n77 Sklar, Robert, 246n23

Solaroli, Libero, 28, 30, 31 Squarotti, Giorgio Bàrberi, 52 Steimatsky, Noa, 187n25 Taddei, Ezio, 91 Terra, Stefano, 103–4, 165 Tinazzi, Giorgio, 182n19 Tofanelli, Arturo, 132 Togliatti, Palmiro: vs. Vittorini, 157–8 Trieste, Leopoldo, 118–19; chronicle and history, 121–2; Cronaca, 12, 119–20, 122; Cronaca e tragedia (Chronicle and tragedy), 119–20; and “theatre of the chronicle,” 120–1 Trombadori, Antonello, 47; on Guttuso’s paintings, 116–17 Trombatore, Gaetano: and “a new poetry,” 67–8 Valesio, Paolo, 21 Venturini, Franco, 57, 171 Verdone, Mario, 151 Verga, Giovanni: and neorealism, 25, 190n49; I Malavoglia, 44; rereading of, 25–7; verismo, 24–5, 238n97. See also Visconti, Luchino Vergano, Aldo — role in the Resistance, 169 — Il sole sorge ancora: amateur actors in, 165–6; authority of, 166, 169; choral anti-Fascism in, 167–9; first and final scenes, 166; and neorealism, 13, 166; plot, 128, 166–8; the public execution scene, 167–9; reception of, 167 Viazzi, Glauco, 165 Vicari, Giambattista, 93 Vincent, Carl, 30 Visconti, Luchino — as anti-Fascist, 57



Index 313

— influence on Vittorini, 35–6 — and I Malavoglia, 47, 48 — and modernism, 45 — and neorealism, 7, 15, 30, 41, 42, 47 — Ossessione : and Caccia tragica, 81–2; location of, 81, 216n112; plot, 81–2; as neorealist, 7, 28–9, 30–2, 40, 47, 57, 193n77; and The Postman Always Rings Twice, 28–9; as proto-neorealist, 16, 48; and reworking of, 81–2 — Pietrangeli’s influence on, 47 — La terra trema: anti-Fascism in, 46; conclusion of, 46; as chronicle, 97; emphasis on eyes in, 45, 46; and Homeric mythology, 43–5, 46–7; initial rolling text, 14, 43, 47, 116; and Joyce’s Ulysses, 45–6, 203n148; Marxism of, 141; as neorealist, 7, 11, 14–6, 42–3, 47, 48; ’Ntoni/ Odysseus vs. wholesalers/ Cyclopes, 44–5, 45–7; and postwar exploitation in, 44–5; and Serandrei’s collaboration, 45; and Verga, 35, 43–4, 45 — Tradizione e invenzione (Tradition and invention): and Verga, 35, 43–4 — and Verga, 192n70 Visentini, Gino, 125–6 Vittorini, Elio — and artists’ political authority, 158 — Conversazione in Sicilia: collaboration with Guttuso, 35 — and Croce, 108–9, 112

— debate with Bo, 143–7, 150; ethics of culture, 145–6 — human vulnerability, 38 — influence on Visconti, 35–6 — and neorealism, 39 — and the post-war “new culture,” 131–2, 134–8, 143, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 160, 162, 169; and Christ, 137; critical responses to, 143–4, 235n68; and culture and religion, 137–8, 143; vs. the “old culture,” 137, 152, 160, 230n33; and social transformation, 145, 151, 169 — and realism, 36; and reality, 37 — religious apostasy of, 144 — vs. Togliatti, 157–8; vs. the Communist Party, 158 — vs. traditional cultural criticism, 135, 137, 160, 162, 230n33 — Uomini e no: and anti-Fascist Resistance, 37–8; as neorealist, 11, 36, 38–9, 40; on the title, 36–7 Wagstaff, Christopher, 223n100 Weiss, Benno, 215n104 Zagarrio, Vito, 191n60 Zàggia, Giuseppe, 91 Zampa, Luigi, 11 Zavattini, Cesare, 40; and Ladri di biciclette, 86, 87, 96; on neorealism, 41–2, 115, 172; on post-war cinema’s socio-political role, 159–60; Tesi sul neorealismo (Theses on neorealism), 173–4; on the tragedy of war, 114