From Myth to Borgata

From Myth to Borgata: Rome in Postwar Italian Narrative A dissertation presented By Victoria Gayle Tillson To The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2009

© 2009 – Victoria Gayle Tillson All rights reserved.

iii Prof. Francesco Erspamer

Victoria Gayle Tillson

From Myth to Borgata: Rome in Postwar Italian Narrative Abstract This study examines the Roman borgate’s (peripheral slums’) urbanistic and social transformations in Italian literature and cinema that emerged during the postwar period. I begin my analysis with works produced at the close of World War II and conclude with those signaling the inauguration of Italy’s Economic Boom. This work does not attempt to chart Rome, although occasional maps illustrate the modern capital city’s irregular, “oil stain” expansion. Nor does this study attempt to integrate an overarching theoretical explanation for the city’s shape and for the issues afflicting it while it transformed into the administrative seat of a dictatorship in that of a democratic government. From Myth to Borgata, rather, uses a variety of modern European philosophies to address the socio-political and economic circumstances that affected individual artistic representations of Rome in post-World War II Italian narratives. I couch these philosophies in twentieth century cultural movements, including modernism and mythification/ demythification so as to provide a cohesive structure to the work.

It is highly debatable whether or not Rome is a modern/-ist city on par with other European capitals such as London, Paris, or Berlin; however this analysis explores examples of modernist architectural styles and urban conditions that arose and propagated from the end of the 1940s through the 1950s, as a means to demonstrate the physical presence of modernism amidst and beyond Rome’s more famous ancient and Christian monuments. This investigation furthermore takes into consideration modernizing urbanism, including the introduction of increasingly expeditious means of transportation, public works, and conurbation, which all arguably emerged from European modernism’s ethics of progress and evolution. From Myth to Borgata contemporaneously reveals the Italian cultural opposition to Fascism following Benito Mussolini’s ejection from power. In particular, it shows how authors’ and cinematographers’ rejected and debased Il Duce’s mythicized notion of romanità (Roman-ness) in their portrayals as well as juxtapositions of the capital’s semiotically charged monuments and ahistorical periphery.

iv Table of Contents Title Page Copyright page Abstract Table of Contents Table of Figures Acknowledgements Dedication Introduction: What is Rome? 1-56 The Myth and Modernization: The Risorgimento Modernity and Modernization The Myth and Modernism: Fascist Rome Post-Fascist Demythification

i ii iii iv-v vi-x xi-xii xiii 3 16 29 37

Chapter 1: From Fascism to Neorealism: The Emergence of the Borgate. 57-120 Fascist Cinema and Rome 57 Cinema’s First Borgate 70 Beyond Neorealism’s Big Three 87 Carlo Lizzani: “L’amore che si paga” 95 Michelangelo Antonioni: “Tentato Suicidio” 103 Chapter 2: Fragments and the Carnevalesque: Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita. 121-177 Benjamin and Fragmentation 121 The Politicized Culture Wars 128 Bahktin and the Carnevalesque 133 Gramsci, de Certeau and Freud 149 Subverting Rome 161 Chapter 3: A Crossroads: Contradicting Cinematic Perspective. 178-254 The Right to the City Building a Home in De Sica’s Il tetto Fellini’s First Roman Periphery Fellini’s Piazzas and the Acqua Felice Aqueduct Homes and Homelessness in Le notti di Cabiria Fellini and Pasolini

178 190 212 219 228 245

Chapter 4: Rome before the Boom: Moravia and Gadda. 254-308 History and Becoming Alberto Moravia and His Invisible City Mirrors and Masks Gadda and Fascism Irony in the Suburbs “That Awful Mess” of Urban Renewal

254 259 269 277 282 290

v

Conclusion: Rethinking Rome. 309-320 The Pasolini School The Borgate and the Boom Why the Demythification of Rome?

Works Cited. 321-351

309 315 319

vi Table of Figures Figure 1. Rome in 1900: The Emerging Oil Stain. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001).

Figure 2. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Veduta degli avanzi del Tempio della Pace. (17201778) Figure 3. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Veduta di Piazza Navona sopra le rovine del Circo Agonale. (1720-1778) Figure 4. The Victor Emanuel II Monument (Il Vittoriano). 1911. Rome.

Figure 5. Giorgio de Chirico. Melanconia. 1912. Private Collection.

Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirco. Piazza d’Italia. 1913. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.

Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d’Italia. 1960. Private Collection.

Figure 8. Publio Morbiducci. La storia di Roma attraverso le opere edilizie. 1939.

Palazzo degli Uffici, EUR, Rome.

Figure 9. Foro Italico (formerly Foro Mussolini). 1928-1931. Rome.

Figure 10. The neighborhood Esposizione Universale di Roma, EUR (formerly E42).

1937-present. EUR, Rome.

Figure 11. The Palazzo della Civiltà (Square Colosseum) 1938-1943. EUR, Rome.

Figure 12. The Permolio (Gazometro). Rome’s Gas and Electric Generator. Ostiense, Rome.

Figure 13. Case rapidissime. Porta Portese, Rome.

Figure 14. Shack in Rome.

Figure 15. Palazzi. Pietralata, Rome.

Figure 16. The Conurbation of a Shantytown. Rome.

Figure 17. Rome in 1930. The Growing Oil Stain. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001).

Figure 18. St. Peter’s Dome Centers in Opening Credits. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto

vii Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 19. Child Partisans March toward Saint Peter’s Dome. Roma città aperta, dir.

Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 20. Allied Troops Ride down the via dei Fori Imperiali. Paisà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946.

Figure 21. View of Prenestino. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 22. Bombed Apartment. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 23. Partisans on a Bridge by EUR. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 24. A Horse-Drawn Carriage in Modern Rome. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 25. Motorcycle Screeches to a Halt. Roma città apertà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 26. Case convenzionate in Prenestino: 1. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

Figure 27. Case convenzionate in Prenestino: 2. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

Figure 28. Maddelena and Annovazzi near the Permolio. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

Figure 29. Cinecittà Entranceway. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

Figure 30. Characterless Palazzi and Barren Landscape in Val Melaina: 1. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

Figure 31. Characterless Palazzi and Barren Landscape in Val Melaina: 2. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

Figure 32. Women at the Water Pump. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

Figure 33. Shadow-Like Prostitute. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 34. Shadowing a Prostitute. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 35. The Baths of Caracalla as an Open-Air Bordello. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

viii

Figure 36. The Tram to Rome’s Periphery. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 37. View of a Palazzo from a Prostitute’s Window. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 38. A Prostitute Returns to Her Shack. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 39. The Gathering of Suicide Survivors. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 40. Orthogonal Lines in I vinti, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1952.

Figure 41. Orthogonal Lines in Cronaca di un amore, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950.

Figure 42. Incomplete Postwar Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato Suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 43. Estranging and Anonymous Peripheral Environment. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato Suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 44. Ever-Changing Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 45. Beginning of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 46. Middle of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 47. End of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 48. Squalid Dwelling. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 49. Establishing Shot of Mina’s Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 50. Mina at Her Window. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 51. Rome in 1960. The Oil Stain Expands.

ix Figure 52. Vittoria’s Aerial View of Rome. L’eclisse, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962.

Figure 53. Helicopter Flies over Roman Aqueducts. La dolce vita, dir. Federico Fellini, 1960.

Figure 54. Helicopter Flies over the Developing Periphery. La dolce vita, dir. Federico Fellini, 1960.

Figure 55. Beginning of the Pan across the Borgata with a Shot of the Italian Flag. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 56. The Pan Continues across the Borgata. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 57. The Anatomy of a Building. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 58. The Postwar Periphery with a View of Mountains. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 59. The Shack Standing in the Middle of the Construction Site. Il tetto, dir.

Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 60. The Excavator. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 61. Dynamised view of the Roman Forum. Filippo Masoero. 1934.

Figure 62. Tullio Crali. Incuneandosi nell'abitato. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 1939.

Figure 63. Tato. Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo (Spiralata). Collezione Ventura, Rome, 1930.

Figure 64. Natale and Luisa’s Brick and Mortar Home. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 65. A Palazzo Rising. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 66. A Crane Sweeping across the Sky. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 67. A Cement Barrel Moving across the Sky. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 68. The Housing Boom’s Progress. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 69. Gelsomina Waits Outside the Prison near Saint Paul’s Basilica. La strada, dir.

Federico Fellini, 1954.

x

Figure 70. Rome’s “Great Expansion”. La strada, dir. Federico Fellini, 1954.

Figure 71. Augusto Moves across Piazza del Popolo. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

Figure 72. Shacks Lining the Acqua Felice Aqueduct. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

Figure 73. A Shantytown in Broad Daylight. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

Figure 74. Picasso Feigns to Assign Apartments. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

Figure 75. The Appia Antica and the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. Le notti di Cabiria, dir.

Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 76. Acilia. La notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 77. Alberto Lazzari’s Hall of Mirrors. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 78. Alberto Lazzari’s Bernini-esque Spiral Column. Le notti di Cabiria, dir.

Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 79. Cabiria Emerging from a Dark Wood. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 80. Modern Urban Development: 1. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 81. Modern Urban Development: 2. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 82. “La Bomba” in Her Cave. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 83. “Viva Maria” at the Santuario del Divino Amore. Le notti di Cabiria, dir.

Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 84. Rome’s Desolate Countryside. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 85. Prostitutes at the Passeggiata Archeologica. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 86. Nanni Moretti Investigates Spinaceto. Caro diario, dir. Nanni Moretti, 1993.

xi Figure 87. The Pasolini Memorial in Ostia. Caro Diario, dir. Nanni Moretti, 1993.

Figure 88. The Disintegrating Frescos. Roma, dir. Federico Fellini, 1972.

Figure 89. Traffic Chokes the Colosseum. Roma, dir. Federico Fellini, 1972.

xi Acknowledgements Whoever said that writing a dissertation was a solitary process was highly mistaken.

Numerous people deserve my deepest gratitude for helping me ideate, research, and compose this project.

I would first like to thank my advisor Prof. Francesco Erspamer, whose arrival at Harvard University has made all the difference in my doctoral experience. His intellectual and professional support and guidance over the last three years have transformed graduate school into everything I had hoped it would be. I also wish to express my sincerest appreciation for Prof. Giuliana Minghelli, whom I have worked with the most over the past seven years. She has been nothing short of an inspiration. Her close readings of my work and invaluable suggestions have undoubtedly transformed this dissertation from a fragmented, agglomeration of materials into a cohesive project of which I am proud. I would also like to thank Prof. Antonio Vitti, who has provided me with unmatched professional opportunities and moral support. He has constantly opened my eyes to a wealth of information, especially on Pasolini and Italian cinema, and I feel very lucky to have had a chance to not only work with him but also get to know him.

I would furthermore like to recognize my sweetheart Dr. Daniel Evans who, despite being extraordinarily busy, helped me scan, edit, and then insert images into my dissertation. This present thesis would not be nearly as aesthetically pleasing without his loving support. Hélène Stril-Rever, my dear roommate, likewise volunteered hours of her free time to capture still frames from several films. I would have never completed collecting images without her unselfish assistance, and for that, and also for being an awesome roommate, I am eternally grateful. Prof. Ara Merjian also deserves my gratitude. He generously helped me identify several Futurist paintings and photographs of cities, and in particular, of Rome that I could not find on my own.

Many people in Italy, with whom I discussed my ideas, provided me with materials that I would have taken years to discover on my own. A special thanks goes to Prof. Eugenio Ragni, who practically lent me half of his personal library to sift through primary texts printed during the 1950s. I would also like to thank Prof.ssa Maria Ida Gaeta at the Casa delle Letterature in Rome, who opened Enzo Siciliano’s collection of books and periodicals to me as well as located several articles, which have proven to be very fruitful resources. Dott.sse Giuliana Zagra and Laura Biancini at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale a Roma guided my research in the Fondo Enrico Falqui, a collection dedicated to Rome and Roman writers. They uncovered several postwar poets and authors that I had not found elsewhere. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Enrico Di Addario at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia’s Videoteca in Rome, who opened the film library to me despite its closure during the August break. Roberto Chiesi, Gigi Virgolin, and Loris Lepri at the Centro Studi - Archivio Pasolini in Bologna who likewise kindly kept their facilities open for me during the summer break and selflessly sifted through shelves of scholarly texts on Pasolini in order to identify the practical inexistence of essays and books on Pasolini’s Rome. Gigi, thank you for digitizing the films I needed

xii that were not available in DVD format so that I could watch them and include them in my dissertation. I must also am thankful for Alberto Cau’s assistance at the Associazione Fondo Alberto Moravia in Rome who located conference films as well as articles specifically about Moravia and Rome.

My colleagues at Harvard University, beyond a shadow of a doubt, have created an amazingly intellectually stimulating environment and have challenged me to expand my horizons beyond anything I could have ever imagined. They have also been tremendous friends, especially during rough times, and I will never forget them for that. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Scala Reale / Context Rome from whom I have been learning over the past nine years. Everyone’s unique perspectives on Rome’s multifaceted culture, from the archeological to the theological, have enriched my understanding of Rome’s centrality to Western Civilization as well as of what makes it more special than an other European city.

My friends in Italy likewise deserve recognition and thanks, especially those who opened their homes to me during my many research trips to Italy over the last three years: Calogero Mancuso, Davide Hanau, Britta Moehring, Chris Deutsche, and Gabriele Buonasorte. Grazie infinite!

I would also like to thank the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Graduate Student Council for providing me with travel and conference funding to conduct my research abroad.

Special thanks are, of course, due to my family. To my dad, who I wish could have seen this project come to an end, and who I miss very dearly. Your humor constantly kept my spirits high. To my mom, who always reminded me that I was good enough and smart enough to get through my dissertation, even in the bleakest of moments. To my brother and sister, who have continually kept me grounded, and whom I count among my closest friends.

I would also like to thank all of my friends in Boston, DC, and around the world who have never stopped being there for me over the last seven years. I love you all.

xiii

In memory of my Pippy and for the strength of my Mommacita - The best parents I could have ever asked for.

1 Introduction: What is Rome?

Cos’è Roma? Qual è Roma? Dove finisce e dove comincia Roma?

Roma sicuramente è la più bella città d’Italia – se non del mondo.

Ma è anche la piú brutta, la piú accogliente, la piú drammatica, la piú ricca, la piú miserabile…. Le contraddizioni di Roma sono difficili da superarsi perché sono contraddizioni di genere esistenziale: piú che termini di una contraddizione, la ricchezza e la miseria, la felicità e l’orrore di Roma, son parti di un magma, di un caos.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il fronte della città,” Vie nuove, 24 May 1958.

Understanding the complexities and contradictions of Rome, a city founded nearly three millennia ago, 1 requires an endless effort of disentangling myths from realities, legends from history, the present from the past. The city represents a magmic blend of contrasting as well as complementing components of what people think it is, and what they really experience it to be. As a result, Rome has received an impressive array of mythologizing monikers, ranging from Caput Mundi, The City of God (Civitas Dei), The Cradle of Western Civilization, The Urbs, The City par excellence, and perhaps most famously The Eternal City. 2 Each designation speaks to Rome’s centrality in various

1

The natalis urbis, the legendary birthday of Rome, has formed a cornerstone in the city’s mythological as well as actual identities. The story recounts that Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the god Mars and the Vestal Virgin Rea Silvia, were left by their mother in the wilderness where they were found and suckled by a she-wolf. The two brothers eventually joined a tribe on the Palatine Hill, among whom they earned great prestige as they grew older, until the both desired to claim power and create Rome’s first kingship. Accounts declare that Romulus received a more auspicious sign from the auguries, resulting in his murder of his brother Remus. Romulus, thus, became the first king of ancient Rome, founding the city on April 21, 753 BCE. Ancient historians accepted this tale as fact, while modern historians have generally viewed it as a fable. The archeologist Andrea Carandini has recently published his and his team’s findings from digging on and around the Palatine Hill which confirm that a bronze age establishment, in fact existed in that area from as far back as the 8th or 9th centuries BCE, lending physical support for this legendary assertion. He also provides an excellent explanation of the ancient calendar’s transformations in order to explain to precision of this date. For a full account of his work, see: Andrea Carandini, “21 aprile 753 a.C.: La fondazione della città,” I giorni di Roma (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 2007) 3-32.

2

The origins of these terms are difficult to trace as they have become so universal and common place. One early work that does addresses the importance of Rome to humanity is Saint Augustine’s De civitate dei, composed shortly after the Visigoths sacked the city in 410 C.E. André Vauchez situates this

2 epistemological realms, ranging from classical literature to urban design. Clichés likewise abound as a result of Rome’s long history due to its being a crossroads in European and Mediterranean cultures, resulting in the generation of such transnational phrases as: “All roads lead to Rome;” “Rome wasn’t built in a day;” and “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Rome has existed as a cosmopolitan destination for peoples from around the world from the time it was the capital of an ancient republic and empire, through its role as the Seat of the Catholic Church, sustaining its place at times as a multifaceted myth and at others as a decadent Babylon. 3 Its function as a beacon of civilization has outlasted the Gothic invasions, which practically reduced Rome to ruin in the early fifth century CE, 4 as well as Charles V’s troops’ Sack in 1527, which many scholars sustain abruptly terminated the city’s Renaissance. 5 People from all socioeconomic sectors and of all professions have swarmed the city’s ruins, churches and piazzas to witness not only the physical remains of Rome’s cemented glory, but to participate in the Eternal City’s stratified mystique.

work at the forefront of his discussion of the myth of Rome: “Ma Roma era più di una città: era la città per eccellenza, insieme Urbs e Civitas, termine che secondo la definizione di sant’Agostino nel De civitate dei (1, 15) designa ‘una moltitudine di uomini uniti dai legami della Concordia’.” Andrea Giardina and André,Vauchez, Il mito di Roma: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 2008) 12.

3

The notion of Rome as Babylon symbolically appears as early as the New Testament in the “Book of Revelation,” 14:8 and 17:1-19:10.

4

Many texts discuss the trauma inflicted upon the social and urban fabric of Rome after the socalled barbaric invasions. For an excellent and concise history of the Gothic invasion’s contribution to the Roman Empire’s decline, see Chapter XXXI “Invasion of Italy, Occupation of Territories by Barbarians,” of Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Hans-Friedrich Mueller (New York: The Modern Library, 2003) 563-577.

5

The 1527 Sack of Rome forms a cornerstone in Roman history and numerous scholarly texts investigate the subject. For a brief, culture-centered investigation into Charles V and his troop’s occupation of the city, see: Antonio Pinelli, “6 maggio 1527: Il Sacco di Roma,” I giorni di Roma (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 2007) 117-179.

3 But what is this mystique? What is the myth that draws so many groups and individuals from the four corners of the world to ponder the meaning and memory of Rome?

The Myth and Modernization: The Risorgimento No other city has had a comparable role in the identity and history of western civilization as Rome. Legends, art, literature, and more recently cinema have perpetuated the memory of Ancient Rome’s glory, dependant upon a number of central themes which André Vauchez has synthesized as: “un certo senso della grandezza, l’idea di uno spazio amministrativo unificato e regolato dal diritto, un’efficacia tecnica associata alla bellezza della forma nelle arti e nelle costruzioni, come pure un insieme di virtù morali in cui si era tentati di vedere il segreto di un simile successo.” 6 He further acknowledges that the Rome of the senate and of the emperors would not have remained as sources of cultural inspiration if the centuries of Christian dominion had not continued its legacy, citing the fundamental components of Rome’s relationship to the Christian religion: Bisogna sottolineare subito il ruolo decisivo svolto in questo processo dal papato, che fece di Roma, dal IV secolo d.C., un punto di riferimento fondamentale per tutti i cristiani e il centro di un potere convinto di essere investito del compito di dirigere la Chiesa, e più tardi la cristianità, sulla base del prestigio degli apostoli Pietro e Paolo e del culto dei martiri romani. 7 The marriage of the first two Romes, the Ancient polis and its Christian successor, provided fertile ground for the nascent Italian government, emerging in the nineteenth century, to recognize the Eternal City as the seat of its Third Rome, the capital of Italy.

6

Giardina and Vauchez ix.

7

Giardina and Vauchez ix.

4 Italy, a modern nation-state, is relatively young when compared to its European counterparts or even to the United States. The Risorgimento, or Unification, concluded in 1870, when the Piedmontese-led government and army annexed Rome and the surrounding Papal States into the country after spending nearly a decade engaging in debate and political maneuvering. Their decision to “sack” Rome once more and install the national government in the city rested largely on Romantic notions of Rome’s legendary and mystical past, which they hoped to reincarnate in the new nation’s vision for its capital. Giuseppe Mazzini, who by 1864 was no longer actively involved in Italian politics, nevertheless reflected on his childhood visit to the city and on its significance: Roma era il sogno de’ miei giovani anni, l’idea-madre nel concetto della mente, la religione dell’anima; e v’entrai, la sera, a piedi, sui primi del marzo, trepido e quasi adorando. Per me, Roma era – ed è tuttavia malgrado le vergogne dell’oggi – il Tempio dell’umanità: da Roma escirà quando che sia la trasformazione religiosa che darà, per la terza volta, unità morale all’Europa. 8 Mazzini inserts Rome into the emerging Liberal nationalistic rhetoric that was largely to color the period of the monarchy, focusing on Rome’s mystical and supposed moral qualities. He describes the city in terms of its religious mythical identity, favoring the impact of recent history over the ancient, although he does not obscure the latter. John Agnew, however, argues that the city’s association with the ancient Roman Empire provided Rome with “a crucial advantage over its competitors in the selection of an Italian capital,” 9 while its universal value, over its municipal history, distinguished it from other options, such as Turin, Florence or Milan. The sense of universality inherent in the myth of Rome provided the necessary foundations, desired by the new Italian

8

Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche, ed. Roberto Pertici (1864; Milano: Rizzoli, 1986) 382.

9

John Agnew, Rome (Chichester, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1995) 14.

5 government, to create ideological commonalities among its variegated populace, who until 1861 (and arguably beyond), viewed one another as foreigners. Andrea Giardina, in fact, opines: “I dati storici… consentivano certo di individuare nella storia antica il motivo dell’Italia unita sotto la guida di Roma, e quindi la nascita del regno d’Italia come una ri-unificazione, come la riparazione di un torto durato circa quindi secoli;” 10 however, this construction, as he recognizes, was artificial as people could not realistically extricate themselves from their communities’ centuries-long parochialism, tied to local traditions, festivities, and patriotism, sociologically identified as campanilismo.

Despite social and psychological resistance on the local level, high-level politicians continued to couch their nationalistic rhetoric in Rome’s mythical universality, determined to make the Eternal City the capital of the new Italy. Camillo Cavour, assuming a romantic tone similar to the one adopted by Mazzini, 11 likewise praised Rome for its moral greatness in his attempt to identify it as the nation’s administrative center. He declared in a famous speech from 1861: Ora in Roma concorrono tutte le circostanze storiche, intellettuali, morali, che devono determinare le condizioni della capitale di un grande Stato.

Roma è la sola città d’Italia che non abbia memorie esclusivamente municipali; tutta la storia di Roma dal tempo dei Cesari al giorno d’oggi è la storia di una città la cui importanza si estende infinitamente al di là del 10 11

Giardina and Vauchez 181.

Mazzini issued several famous statements regarding the centrality of Rome in creating the myth of an Italian nation. He envisions Italy’s mission partially as continuing the city’s greatness in its new role as the capital of a modern European state. Mazzini, in fact, issued a passionate and prophetic appeal to Italian youths in 1859, entitled “Ai giovani d’Italia” in which he proclaims: “Di mezzo all’immenso, vi sorgerà davanti allo sguardo, come faro in oceano, un segno di lontana grandezza. Piegate il ginocchio e adorate: là batte il core d’Italia: là posa eternamente solenne, Roma. E quel punto saliente è il Campidoglio del Mondo Cristiano. E a pochi passi sta il campidoglio del Mondo Pagano. E quei due mondi giacenti aspettano un terzo Mondo, più vasto e sublime dei due, che s’elabora fra le potenti rovine. Ed è la Trinità della Storia, il cui Verbo è in Roma.” Mazzini, Note autobiografiche 382.

6 suo territorio, di una città, cioè, destinata ad essere la capitale di un grande Stato. 12 It should come as no surprise that only a few days after Italy became a unified nation on March 17, 1861, the new national leaders declared Rome as their capital. 13 Such rhetoric issued from Cavour and other founding fathers emphasized the importance placed on Rome’s annexation over the next nine years, eventually spurring the monarchy to order the capture and occupation of the ecclesiastical capital in 1870. 14 The “Breccia di Porta Pia” on September 20, 1870, which involved the demolition of a portion of Rome’s Aurelian Wall, ushered in a new era for the Urbs as the city assumed its modern identity as the “Third Rome”. This military event, despite its brevity, was anything but minor, for the Church’s temporal dominion over the city, which had endured for nearly a millennium and a half, suddenly concluded, and the modern history of Italian Rome abruptly began. Pope Pius IX refused to accept the Italian government’s claim to Rome and lived as a deposed monarch and an antagonistic cultural figure to the city’s modernizing monarchy until his death in 1878. 15 Fifty-nine years of tense municipal relations between the Liberal State and the Conservative Church commenced, 12

Pietro Scoppola, ed., I discorsi di Cavour per Roma capitale (Roma: Istituto di studi romani,

1971) 42.

13

“Proclamata l’Italia unita il 17 marzo 1861, qualche giorno dopo, il 27 marzo, Roma era stata acclamata capitale del nuovo Stato.” Vittorio Vidotto, “20 settembre 1870: La breccia di Porta Pia,” I giorni di Roma (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 2007) 212.

14

Other international diplomatic motives inspired the Breccia di Porta Pia in 1870; however a discussion of all the reasons is beyond the scope of this current study. For more in-depth historical and political analyses of this event, see: Vittorio Vidotto, “20 settembre 1870” 211-237; and the first two chapters of: Vittorio Vidotto, Roma contemporanea (Roma: Laterza, 2006) 3-71.

15

Apart from the obvious grievances the pope held against the Liberal monarchy for usurping his temporal power, Pius IX also issued an encyclical entitled Quanta cura and a document called Sillabo, which urged believers to demonstrate absolute respect for Catholic dogma and oppose Italy’s political unification. He likewise condemned all contemporary philosophical trends that aligned with nationalistic political ideologies.

7 a period which would endure until Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI managed to reach a mutual agreement at which point they signed the 1929 Lateran Treaty, establishing the Vatican’s diplomatic independence. The Italian state’s inheritance of a city that had been locked within the papacy’s centuries-long conservative urbanistic and architectural policies, however, challenged the recently relocated king and ministers with the onerous task of modernizing Rome. They discovered a città-contadina, 16 in which di notte il silenzio della Città Eterna era punteggiato di continuo dal canto dei galli, da ragli di asini e belati di pecore. Pareva d’essere in una città d’agricoltori, e questa impressione era largamente confermata di giorno, dai branchi di pecore e di capre che lasciavano chiari segni del loro passaggio anche nelle strade principali. 17 Another contemporary account relates: “The city lies like a gigantic farmhouse in the middle of the most fertile plain in the world. The capital for Catholicism is today the capital employed in raising grain.” 18 In a similar oxymoronic spirit to that which Pasolini expresses in the epigraph’s quotation of “Il fronte della città”, the writer later declares that “the Campagna di Roma is a vast meadow, broken in a few places by the plow; it is also the most fertile, the most uncultivated, the most unhealthy.” 19 The city suffered from a lack of any functional urban planning, developing into the chaotic and irregular macchia d’olio, or oil stain (See Fig. 1), a shape scholars so often cite in association with Rome throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

16

Italo Insolera, Roma moderna: Un secolo di storia urbanistica: 1870-1970 (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001) 38.

17

Silvio Negro, Seconda Roma: 1850-1870 (Milano: Hoepli, 1943) 115.

18

Edmond About, Rome of Today (New York: James O. Noyes Publisher, 1861) 118-119.

19

About 192.

8

Figure 1. Rome in 1900: The Emerging Oil Stain. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001).

9

Figure 2. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Veduta degli avanzi del Tempio della Pace. (1720-1778)

even before the Piedmontese monarchy’s arrival. Despite such obstacles, the Italian government selected Rome as its capital for the city’s universal prestige on the international stage. It was difficult to overlook its aesthetic and mythical reputation celebrated over the centuries, by such landscape artists as Giovanni Battista Piranesi (See Fig. 2 and 3). The transformation of Rome into a modern European capital, however, involved an intense battle between progress and obscurantism, generating an ambiguous urbanistic modernism. The conflicting programs of “piemontesizzazione” 20 or

20

Daniela Pasquinelli d’Allegra describes the architectural and urbanistic interventions of the Sabaudian government, composed largely of Turinese bureaucrats, as a transfer of the northern aesthetic to Rome. Elements typical of Turin’s design were large boulevards and piazzas, surrounded by arcaded porticos, set within okra-colored structures. Daniela Pasquinelli d’Allegra, La forma di Roma: Un paesaggio urbano tra storia, immagini e letteratura (Urbino: Carocci, 2008) 79-86.

10

Figure 3. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Veduta di Piazza Navona sopra le rovine del Circo Agonale. (17201778)

“Haussmannization” 21 of the city’s urban fabric and that of cultural preservation left Rome in an ambiguous state. Some sections remained partially crystallized as art objects, leaving Rome a museum-city, much deplored by such avant-garde thinkers such as F.T. Marinetti, 22 the father of Futurism. Others resented the city’s emerging modernization, 21

This term derives from the work of the Seine prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who led the radical transformation of Paris between 1853 and 1870. Haussmann did not have a preservationist approach to modernization, but rather preferred to raze indiscriminately to the ground entire zones of the French capital. His approach entailed establishing wide boulevards along rational axes and imposing strict regulations on building façades, public parks, city facilities and infrastructure, which generating a new form of urban scenario celebrated most famously in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 1999).

22

Marinetti polemicizes his distaste for Rome, a city so steeped in its past that it stands in precise opposition to Futurism’s premises: “Voglio dire, però, l’Italia di domani deve essere e sarà infinitamente più grande di quella archeologica e culturale… un’Italia futurista… fortissima e prepotente per la forza del

11 which was extracting it from its mythical realm and situating it within the ranks of other European capitals.

Gabriele D’Annunzio was one of the major figures who abhorred the modernizing urbanistic policies that the new ruling political class imposed upon Rome. In his mind’s eye, the monarchy was sacrificing the aristocratic beauty and glory of the Papal city in the name of progress. His novel, Il piacere (1889), which appeared at the closure of Rome’s first febbre edilizia (building fever), forms a cornerstone in Italy’s, decadentismo, which Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni situate as the nation’s first plausible modernist literary movement. 23 The author celebrates through his antihero Andrea Sperilli the magnificence of his great love, Rome, “la Roma della Ville, della Fontane, delle Chiese. Egli avrebbe dato tutto il Colosseo per la Villa Medici, il Campo Vaccino per la Piazza di Spagna, l’Arco di Tito per la Fontanella delle Tartarughe.” 24 He likewise expresses disappointment, disgust, as well as disturbance by the Third Rome’s intrusion of building speculation upon the city. Sperelli, at one point, stands atop the Janiculum Hill admiring the Urbs spanning before him, which shines under the morning sun. His gaze shifts from the Tiber River across the numerous piazzas, bell towers, columns and obelisks appearing against the horizon. D’Annunzio, quickly thereafter, shifts the text’s focus onto the hill’s architectural structures, situating his protagonist suo genio novatore, liberata perciò dalla stupida, aleatoria e umiliante industria del forestiero; insomma l’Italia di Milano, di Genova, di Torino, non l’Italia di Roma attuale…” F. T. Marinetti and Gubello Memmoli, “Con Marinetti in ‘terza saletta’,” Il Giornale d’Italia, (30 October 1913) 3.

23

Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, “Modernism in Italy: An Introduction,” Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, eds. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004) 6-9. Moroni provides a thorough analysis of Decadentism’s various forms and meanings in turn of the century Italy in his essay “Sensuous Maladies: The Construction of Italian Decadentismo” published in the same volume (65-85).

24

Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il piacere (1889; Milano: Garzanti, 2002) 44.

12 “nella Villa Sciarra, già per metà disonorata dai fabbricatori di case nuove.” 25 This denunciation of the presence of modern structures within Rome’s supposedly aristocratic urban fabric speaks to D’Annunzio’s conservationist attitude toward the Eternal City. He certainly viewed Rome as a museum-city, while he feared the ruinous effects of the emerging modern sprawl.

The establishment of State ministries, nevertheless, impinged upon the Eternal City’s historical urban fabric, initially ordering the usurpation of decadent noble palazzi, abandoned monasteries, and disabused lands within Rome’s Aurelian Walls. 26 The administration, however, quickly shifted focus onto expanding its operations geographically outwards, purchasing lands along the city’s periphery. The Liberal government’s transfer to Rome likewise resulted in the erection of multiple-story apartment complexes to house the ever-augmenting influx of bourgeois residents who sought employment within the civil bureaucracy. Such needs ushered in Rome’s first construction boom between 1883 and 1888, often referred to as the febbre edilizia, which consequently introduced the chaos and disorganization which would mark all the city’s for the rest of the modern era: an insufficient as well as ineffective “official” building plan combined with unbridled private, or “unofficial” speculation. The regulatory plans designed in 1873 had miserably failed, while the 1883 building strategy at least generated major thoroughfares, such as the corso Vittorio Emanuele, via Nazionale, via Cavour, and

25 26

D’Annunzio 144.

Ferdinand Gregorovius records in his 1871 Diari romani: “Trasformare la città santa in una città temporale è il rovescio di quell’epoca in cui Roma pagana fu trasformata con la stessa passione in una Roma cristiana. I conventi vengono tramutati in uffici; se ne aprono le finestre sbarrate o se ne aprono di nuove nelle pareti, oppure vi si sfondano nuovi portali. Dopo secoli il sole e l’aria penetrano di nuovo in queste clausure di frati e di monache.” Ferdinand Gregorovius, Diari romani, trans. Romeo Lovera (Milano: U. Hoepli, 1895) 54.

13

Figure 4. The Victor Emanuel II Monument (Il Vittoriano). 1911. Rome.

via Tritone, which connected the city’s outlying areas to the emerging city center. 27 The municipal government also sanctioned Rome’s first sventramenti, or demolitions, flattening picturesque Medieval and Renaissance neighborhoods to accommodate both the arrival of its new citizens as well as edifices memorializing Italy’s unification. The most infamous of these events involved the Capitoline Hill, 28 where the administration commissioned the construction of the highly polemical Vittoriano (See Fig. 4), 29 a 27

Rome remained a polycentric capital without clear urban planning until the local administration under the Liberal monarchy’s arrival. It began clearing spaces to lay down wide avenues connecting outlying areas, such as Termini Train Station and Saint Peter’s, in order to connect one end of the city with the other. Piazza Venezia, thus, emerged as Rome’s de facto modern city center, which the Liberal government and the Fascist regime further ensured with their sventramenti programs. Mussolini and Rome’s governor Francesco Boncompagni ensured the creation of this new urban nucleus by issuing an order to lay two new large boulevards that radiated from Piazza Venezia outwards: via dell’Impero (today via dei Fori Imperiali) and via del Mare (today via del Teatro di Marcello).

28

The Capitoline Hill is one of the original legendary seven hills of Rome, recognized more often as the Campidoglio in Italian. It currently serves as the seat of Rome’s local government and the prestigious Capitoline Museums; however the location has traditionally served as a center of Roman politics from antiquity through the early Baroque.

29

Guido Piovene disparages both the Vittoriano’s architecture and the government responsible for its construction, stating: “L’altare della patria, col monumento d’oro del primo re d’Italia, non è soltanto un saggio di pessima architettura, ma un atto di brutalità, di volgarità e d’arroganza.” Guido Piovene, Contro Roma, ed. Alberto Moravia (Milano: Bompiani, 1975) 34. Many Italians today joke that the best view of Rome is from atop the Vittoriano, because it is not part of the view.

14 massive, white marble structure celebrating the Risorgimento, the fatherland, as well as the nation’s first king, Vittorio Emanuele II. 30 The piedmontese modernization project eventually developed, whether intentionally or not, into a demythifying endeavor, as the new government removed tracts of famous gardens, beautiful churches and ancient ruins in order to carved a place for itself within Rome’s urban fabric. Its choice to eradicate portions of the Eternal City’s magmic infrastructure rather than completely meld into it called into question the urbanistic policies of the Italian State, as the monarchy and Rome’s municipal leaders seemed to impose the ethics of progress and speed, typical of European modernism, upon the quite ruins of Ancient and Christian Rome.

Concerns regarding Rome’s irregular expansion under the monarchy emerge in a second major literary work, Luigi Pirandello’s first novel Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904). In his book, Pirandello amalgamates the notions of a sprawling metropolis, hinted at by D’Annunzio, with a space still in the making, as the Urbs transformed to accommodate the needs of the new Italian administration. The novel’s protagonist, Mattia Pascal, in fact decides to move to Rome after his wife believes to have found him dead, so that he may live in perfect anonymity within a cosmopolitan setting. He adopts the pseudonym Andrea Meis, a man also in the making, and undergoes a personal transformation that mirrors the modern capital city’s attempt to adapt to its new political environment. Meis

30

This structure aroused Romans’ indignation not only for the government’s use of eminent domain to evict members of the working class from their homes, but for its arguably garish mélange of materials and architectural decorative elements in its construction. The Palazzo di Giustizia (Italy’s Supreme Court), popularly called the Palazzaccio (The “Ugly” Palace), is perhaps the only other Roman building that vies for the title as the city’s worst architectural abomination as evidenced by its epithet. The latter structure features prominently in one a concluding sequence of the Neorealist classic: Sciuscià (Ragazzi), dir. Vittorio De Sica, Medusa Video, 1946.

15 rents a room along the Tiber River, and from his window he admires Rome’s development: Si vedeva in fondo Monte Mario, Ponte Margherita e tutto il nuovo quartiere dei Prati fino a Castel Sant’Angelo; si dominava il vecchio ponte di Ripetta e il nuovo che vi si costruiva accanto, più là, il ponte Umberto e tutte le vecchie case di Tordinona che seguivan la voluta ampia del fiume; in fondo, da quest’altra parte, si scorgevano le verdi alture del Granicolo, col fontanone di San Pietro in Montorio e la statua equestre di Garibaldi. 31 Pirandello’s description accentuates the presence of the Third Rome. His protagonist’s panoramic vision, while it seizes such historical structures as Castel Sant’Angelo 32 and a church fountain, recognizes primarily the new government’s architectural and artistic symbols. Meis/Pascal observes Ponte Margherita, dedicated to Italy’s queen, as well as Ponte Umberto, another bridge honoring the nation’s second king. He mentions the statue atop the Janiculum Hill, which commemorates the valor of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the general credited with having united Italy during the Risorgimento. In addition, Meis/Pascal acknowledges the presence of the developing residential neighborhoods, which were in the process of transforming Rome into a sprawling metropolis.

Pirandello’s juxtaposition of the new against the old emphasizes Rome’s status as a city in the making, as a place that exists but that strives to reconstruct its identity. The author best articulates this notion of identity composition and decomposition in his literary masterpiece Uno, nessuno e centomila (1925); however traces of his theories, which would earn him the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature and which appear in earlier texts such as Il fu Mattia Pascal and his academic treatise L’umorismo (1908), secured a place for 31 32

Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904; Milano: Garzanti, 2003) 109-110.

Castel Sant’Angelo was initially the Mausoleum of Hadrian, emperor of Ancient Rome between 117 and 138 C.E. The popes converted thee monumental tomb into a fortified castle during the fourteenth century, connecting to the Vatican Palaces, and then later, in the sixteenth century it became a prison. The monarchy eventually transformed it into a museum in 1901.

16 Pirandello as one of Italy’s indisputable modernist, if not postmodernist, 33 cultural agents.

Modernity and Modernization A great debate rages in Italian cultural studies over whether or not one can speak of Italian modernism, least of all of a modernist Rome. Conservative tradition maintains that Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical De modernistarum doctrinis, also known as Pascendi dominici gregis, declared that modernity was “la sintesi di tutte le eresie,” 34 thus the public (largely Catholic, from Pius X’s perspective) should not consider it a viable philosophical explanation for temporal or even spiritual affairs. This text, which inveighs against the blasphemous and scandalous affronts of contemporary lay intellectuals, ironically provides one of the best accounts of what modernity was during the early twentieth century. The points delineated by Pope Pius X reveal not only the presence of an emerging modernity in Rome, if not in all of Italy, 35 given the Holy Father’s activity

33

Pirandello’s metatheater, including such masterpieces as Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1920) and O di uno o di nessuno, ideologically and culturally aligns the playwright with the self-reflexive art identified with postmodernism. One could easily argue that he was a man before his time, who literally set the stage for the neo-avant-garde during the 1960s.

34

Pope Pius X, “Lettera enciclica dell’8 settembre 1907 (Pascendi dominici gregis) circa le dottrine moderniste,” Modernismo? ed. Giuseppe Prezzolini (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1908) 146. The pope uses the term “modernismo” in his text, referring to modernity, rather than to the English equivalent “modernism”.

35

Giuseppe Prezzolini’s immediate response to Pope Pius X’s encyclical indicates the velocity with which his letter spread within Italian intellectual circles. The journalist divides his published rejoinder into three distinct sections: the first argues the points delineated by the pope in his declaration against modernism; the second encourages young modernists to continue their idealism and march towards progress; the third identifies that certain clerical members sympathize with socialism. For a full account, see Giuseppe Prezzolini’s Modernismo?. Ernesto Buonaiuti, likewise, published a response to Pius X’s invective against modernism in 1908 entitled Programma dei modernisti, while Giovanni Gentile, one of the intellectual supporters of Fascism, composed Il modernismo e i rapporti fra religione e filosofia in 1921. Despite these early reactions, few scholars engaged notions of Italian modernism until Emilio Vedova’s 1963 Scontro di situazioni; liberta dell’espressione, which preceded the outbreak of open debate by a quarter century. The late 1980s mark the initiation of a sort of Renaissance in Italian modernist studies.

17 and residence in that city, but also the ideological undertones influencing modern ideas.

He justly identifies the fragmentary nature of twentieth century modernity, which many have identified as emblematic of the modernist movement: “È artificio astutissimo dei modernisti… presentare le lor dottrine non già coordinate e raccolte quasi in un tutto, ma sparse invece e disgiunte l’una dell’altra, allo scopo di passare essi per dubbiosi e come incerti, mentre di fatto sono fermi e determinati.” 36 Any modernist scholar would acknowledge that there is in fact no monolithic modernism that crosses all humanistic disciplines or even national borders. The movement, is rather, an agglomeration of ideas that challenge traditional and hegemonic epistemologies that generally evolve independently of one another. One can, thus, explain the quasi-contemporaneous appearance of Luigi Pirandello’s 1908 treatise L’umorismo, and F. T. Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto futurista. The former, which I engage as a theoretical foundation for Alberto Moravia’s conception of own his literary oeuvre and for Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana in Chapter 4, differentiates comedy from humorism, identifying the latter as an intellectual reflection on the highly ironic sentimento del contrario. Marinetti’s manifesto, on the other hand, which provides a suggestive aesthetic framework for exploring Rome’s postwar construction boom, particularly in De Sica’s Il tetto (Chapter 3), celebrates speed and technology, glorifies war, and vilifies institutions safeguarding the past. Futurism is perhaps the most recognizable form of any Italian

36

Pope Pius X 105.

18 modernism, representing a revolutionary cultural avant-garde whose influence is still palpable today. 37 Pirandello’s and Marinetti’s break with past notions of artistic philosophies challenges the Church’s stance as the representative of conservatism and tradition. Pius X correctly attributes modernity’s intellectual transformation to the Darwinian notion of evolution, which largely underpins the modernism’s general ethic of progress. The pope recognizes the antithetical and antagonistic natures of Catholic dogma and modernization’s evolutionary discourse, observing: Quindi, studiando più a fondo il pensiero dei modernisti, dee dirsi che si combattono, delle quali una è progressiva, l’altra conservatrice. La forza conservatrice sta nella Chiesa e consiste nella tradizione. L’esercizio di lei è proprio dell’autorità religiosa; e ciò, sia per diritto, giacché sta nella natura di qualsiasi autorità il tenersi fermo il più possibile alla tradizione. 38 This precise ideological battle waged in the urbanistic and architectural modernization of the Third Rome. It was a fight between the transplanted Piedmontese administration and the dispossessed Church.

There were, however, modern intellectual who were also preservationists, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, 39 who preferred that the Eternal City remain frozen in its mythical form, just as there were politicians, capitalists, and architects who pushed for a

37

2009 marks Futurism’s centennial celebration, as such, Italian intellectual and cultural circles have published several articles and catalogues, as well as prepared symposia and exhibitions to mark this anniversary. Futurism also appears in everyday European life as Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculpture Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (1913) figures on a euro coin.

38 39

Pope Pius X 131.

Richard Drake situates D’Annunzio’s elitism regarding the conservation of Rome as a museumcity within the era’s cultural context: “The Italian bourgeoisie looked to the aristocracy as a model for its own social pretensions, and as an ally against the mob. Here lay the social basis of cultural and political nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, and after 1885 no one better represented the aristocratic yearnings of the Italian middle class than D’Annunzio.” Richard Drake, Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy: 1878-1900 (Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1980) 168.

19 Haussmannization of Rome. The concept of modernization, generally not to be confused with or interchanged for modernism, actually forms a cornerstone in Rome’s urbanistic participation in the movement. Modernism and modernization both emphasizes development, progress, as well as evolution, processes instituted in the Eternal City’s geographical and architectural reconfigurations. The post-Risorgimento construction policies, thus, align quite well with some of modernism’s major theoretical underpinnings.

Part and parcel with the Third Rome’s modernization policies is the destruction of portions of Rome, despite their artistic value or association with the Church’s mythifying presence. It is in the destructive element that Rome’s modernity and its mythology greatly diverge, as Pius X once again declared: Ed eccovi, o Venerabili Fratelli, descritto per sommi capi il metodo apologetico dei modernisti, in tutto conforme alle loro dottrine: metodo e dottrine infarciti di errori atti non ad edificare ma a distruggere, non a far dei cattolici ma a trascinare i cattolici all’eresia, anzi alla distruzione totale di ogni religione! 40 The pope twice emphasizes destruction’s philosophical antagonism to Catholic, and over all, religious thought. The first, conveniently, juxtaposes the notion with edification, the etymology of which indicates the metaphorical relationship between building edifices and providing spiritual support. One could extend the metaphor to the policies and practices of the Third Rome with its regulatory plans and speculation founded precisely on the notions of demolition (sventramento) and construction. The second form of opposition directs the reader towards another fundamental figure of European modernism, namely Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously developed the philosophy of Nihilism as well as

40

Pope Pius X 144.

20 proclaimed the death of God. 41 Nietzsche, like Darwin, forms a philosophical cornerstone in modernism, and as the Church considered it, in the modernist propagation of agnosticism and atheism in modern society. 42 The influence of the German philosopher’s thought on the modernization as well as on representations of Rome during the twentieth century have ironically often served opposing ideological camps. Benito Mussolini adopted Nietzsche’s Nihilism in his massive sventramento and risanamento programs, which he conducted throughout the city center both to create monumental showcases for ancient Roman ruins and clean (risanare) the capital of its picturesque, yet decadent, popular structures. Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History (1874), which emphasizes “becoming”, which Gianni Vattimo a century later reinterpreted as “progress” in La fine della modernità (1985), provides an opposing notion to Nihilism, emphasizing growth and development. These principles guide several images of Rome presented in postwar Italian narratives that either criticize or ignore Fascism’s influence on the city, generating an antagonism between Mussolini’s adoption of Nietzsche’s philosophy and its reincorporation in postwar literature and film.

Pope Pius X’s condemnation of modernity and its supporters furthermore derived largely from the introduction of the “individual experience” in the interpretation of everyday life, a position which tended to negate religion’s, and by association the Church’s, social function. The pope contends that in the believer’s search for divine truth 41

Nietzsche declared “God is Dead” is several works, but perhaps most famously in The Gay Science: “After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006) §108.

42

Pius X declares throughout the Pascendi dominici gregis that acceptance or expression of modernist anti-conformist, individualist, or anti-authority ideas is an anathema.

21 and reality, one should recognize that it “esiste di fatto in se stessa, nè punto dipende da chi crede. Che se poi cerchiamo qual fondamento abbia cotale asserzione del credente, i modernisti rispondono: l’‘esperienza individuale”. – Ma nel dir ciò, se costoro si dilungano dai razionalisti, cadono nell’opinione dei protestanti e dei pseudo-mistici.” 43 His argumentation derives from the increasing cultural credence given to the nascent field of psychology over religion to explain irrational events, 44 a field revolutionized by the Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories which The Interpretation of Dreams inaugurated in 1895. Freud’s works, which filtered into northern Italy during the early twentieth century, 45 profoundly influenced scientific thinking as well as various art forms both in style and in content. 46 The psychoanalyst, from his conceptualization of humankind’s divided consciousness to those on that of the libido and death instinct, has transformed Western civilization’s ways of understanding itself and understanding reality. The breadth of his oeuvre is too expansive to discuss in this current study; suffice it to say that proto-psychoanalysis penetrated Italian modern culture at least as early as Italo Svevo’s first two novels Una vita (1892) and Senilità (1898) while his third and last novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), 47 makes direct reference to the pseudoscientific

43

Pope Pius X 115.

44

The pope mentions psychology in passing, without referencing any particular practicians, theorists, or epistemologies, although the informed reader may deduce them: “Quindi quel comun precetto della scuola del modernismo, che la nuova apologia debba dirimere le controversie religiose per via di ricerche storiche e psicologiche.” Pope Pius X 140.

45

The Interpretation of Dreams was translated into and published in Italian by 1913.

46

A large and widely-accepted debate has emerged regarding the scientific validity of Freud’s ideas, many of which scholars have debunked. It is not the intention of this current work to investigate the veracity of his theories, but rather explore their historical and cultural impact and application.

47

Giuliana Minghelli investigates Svevo’s position with modernist discourse, particularly in his relationship to psychoanalysis, in: Giuliana Minghelli, In The Shadow of The Mammoth: Italo Svevo and The Emergence of Modernism (Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2002).

22

Figure 5. Giorgio de Chirco. Melanconia. 1912. Private Collection.

therapy in its last chapter. Freud’s focus on the biological and environmental influences on the mind’s operation and mechanisms have a less obvious impact on the urbanistic and architectural manifestations of Rome’s modernism; nevertheless, his theoretical influence

23 through his allegorization of Rome’s stratified architectural history as representative of the layers of the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), discussed in Chapter 2, which provides a psychoanalytical interpretation of Rome and its visibly stratified history. His influence on the evolution of existentialism, which formed the cornerstone of the modernist crisis of the subject, appears in works as disparate as De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), investigated in Chapter 1, and Moravia’s La ciociara, which I examine in Chapter 4. The psychoanalyst’s work on dreams, likewise, affected artistic surrealism as well as the highly metaphysical cinema of Federico Fellini, which I analyze at length in Chapter 3.

Metaphysics, a cornerstone in Western philosophy, likewise experienced a renaissance of sorts in Italy during the early twentieth century. The pittura metafisica, championed by Giorgio de Chirico, and subsequently adopted by other painters including his brother Alberto Savinio, 48 Carlo Carrà, and Giorgio Morandi, sought to represent the psychical reality that lurked beyond (meta) the senses. As Freud wrote in his essay “The Uncanny”: Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before…. Other situations which have in common with my adventure an unintended recurrence of the same situation… also result in the same feeling of helplessness and uncanniness. 49 Freud’s reference to a piazza highly resonates with de Chirico’s painting Melanconia (See Fig. 5) or the multiple renditions of Piazza d’Italia (See Fig. 6 & 7), which uncannily juxtapose monumentality with empty space, modern technology (often represented by a distant locomotive), and ancient statuary. Jennifer Hirsh’s article, 48

Alberto Savinio was the penname of Giorgio de Chirico.

49

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 8.

24

Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d’Italia. 1913. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.

“Representing Repetition: Appropriation in de Chirico and After,” in fact links the psychoanalyst’s explanation of sensorial and emotional discomfort to the visual manifestation of such feelings in de Chirico’s artworks. She contends: “Remembered for the ways in which his metaphysical art prefigured Freudian motifs that fascinated his Surrealist followers, de Chirico was memorialized in the history of art not only as the progenitor of pittura metafisica but also as the father of the surrealist movement....” 50 A

50

Jennifer Hirsh, “Representing Repetition: Appropriation in de Chirico and After,” Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, eds. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004) 406.

25

Figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d’Italia. 1960. Private Collection.

suggestion of de Chirico’s uncanny vision, and by association Freud’s, appears in such films as Federico Fellini’s Il bidone (1955), analyzed in Chapter 3, as well as in Federigo Tozzi’s unfinished novel Gli egoisti (1921).

Federigo Tozzi’s vision of Rome substantially diverges from D’Annunzio’s hedonistic glorification of Baroque and aristocratic Roman structures. It furthermore provides a more elaborate representation of the Eternal City than Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal, despite the text’s incomplete and fragmentary nature. 51 What it does offer is a highly painterly image of Rome. The novel’s city never reaches the expressionistic or

51

Tozzi died from pneumonia in 1921 before completing this work.

26 even “fragmentistic” heights, 52 with which Tozzi imbues Siena in his literary masterpiece Con gli occhi chiusi (1919); nevertheless, the author manages to create a city that reflects the mind of his protagonist, Dario Gaviani. The musician, who relocates to Rome in search of fame and opportunity, discovers an inhospitable city, largely composed of grey winding streets, in which he continuously meanders in vain as he undergoes an existential crisis. His Rome slowly evolves into an intellectual construct, a sort of mirror that Tozzi holds to his protagonist as he suffers delusions, creating a surrealistic if not impressionistic urban landscape. Every architectural fragment that Dario encounters is a visible transfiguration of his suffering, a materialized abstraction, rendering Rome seemingly unreal. The hallucinatory descriptions, which Tozzi offers of Rome, project a blend of sensorial and mental impressions figurating Dario’s confusion and suffering: Ora gli pareva d’essere in una piazza; dove non era stato mai; camminava a passi cadenzati, e una specie di fanfara, anche questa inespressa, lo faceva muovere come se danzasse. La piazza era grande è non finiva più; si allargava sempre; benché restasse eguale. Poi, la fanfara si allontanò da una parte ed egli da un’altra; e per quanti sforzi facesse, non riuscì più a trovarla. Avrebbe voluto domandarlo a qualcuno; ma aveva paura che gli rispondessero chi sa quale menzogna. Ed egli, allora, pianse. 53 The novel’s metaphysical image of a Roman piazza reflects Dario’s intimate hopes as well as his desperation. He believes that he hears applause, an illusion of his long soughtafter musical success in Rome, which initially fills him with joy. The fanfare, however, is ephemeral, and vanishes in the square’s spatial infinity. The city consumes his dream, 52

Frammentismo was a minor modernist movement in Italy during the early twentieth century pioneered by a group of young writers, including Scipio Slataper, Piero Jahier, Carlo Michelstaedter, and Giovani Boine, who published La Voce. Their poetry and short prose pieces challenged the function of literature and its formal structures, rejecting the Futurists’ cult of modernization and D’Annunzian aesthetics while generating a “fragmented” style. Moroni and Somigli argue that “that fragmented style of the ‘vociani’ tended to implode into an investigation of the self and its problematic relationship with the world, animated by an intense moral and ethical tension.” Moroni and Somigli, “Introduction,” Italian Modernism 19.

53 Federigo Tozzi, Gli egoisti (Pistoia: Libreria dell’Orso, 2002) 53-54.

27 placing it out of reach and fomenting a profound bitterness and hatred in Dario towards Rome. The Roman piazza in Gli egoisti, in fact, appears to elaborate the metaphysical tradition inaugurated in de Chirico’s paintings, while countering Pius X’s antimodern, conservationist Church policy. The pope declares in a diatribe against modernity that “ammoniamo poi quelli che insegnano di ben persuadersi che il discostarsi dall’Aquinate, specialmente in cose metafisiche, non avviene senza grave danno.” 54 He views metaphysics as part of the Church’s intellectual property, and orders the censure of any publications, congresses, or propaganda that oppose his view.

The human apparatus instituted by Pius X to prevent the diffusion of modernizing ideas was both massive and well-organized. In investigation of its mechanisms helps explain, in part, the lack of scholarly engagement with such intellectual discourse in Italy for several decades. The pope in his encyclical letter orders his “Venerabile Brothers” to be vigilant as well as condemn and even prevent the dissemination of certain antiestablishment texts, 55 above all those which declared the ethic of the new. His objection appears to counter the emergence of avant-garde art and theories, which sought to push the envelope in terms of both content and form. Pius X declares, citing his predecessor Leo XIII: Non si potrebbe approvare nelle pubblicazioni cattoliche un linguaggio che ispirandosi a malsana novità, sembrasse deridere la pietà dei fedeli ed accennasse a nuovi orientamenti della vita cristiana, a nuove direzioni 54 55

Pope Pius X 155.

Pius X ordered the creation of censorship offices throughout the Catholic world, and most importantly Rome, to battle the dispersion of modernizing ideas. He cites his predecessor Leo XIII, who commanded that “gli Ordinari, anche come Delegati della Sede Apostolica, si adoprino di proscrivere e di togliere dalle mani dei fedeli i libri o altri scritti nocivi stampati o diffusi nelle proprie diocesi.” Pope Pius X 158. Pius X subsequently refers to the operations implemented in Rome beginning under his authority: “Anche nella Curia romana, non altrimenti che nelle altre, si stabiliranno Censori d’ufficio.” Pope Pius X 160.

28 della Chiesa, a nuove aspirazioni dell’anima moderna, a nuova vocazione del clero, a nuova civiltà cristiana. 56 His reference to “Catholic publications” does not pertain only to works composed by clergy members, but also to those created by secular scholars who were Catholic. As a result, Italian intellectual discourse rarely entertained the theoretical accompaniment to modernization and modernity, namely modernism, in reference to the nation’s own cultural, and particularly literary patrimony until the late 1980s; 57 and in reality, the majority of such scholarship has only appeared within the last ten years, 58 opening the arena to conduct an informed investigation of modernism and modernist Rome. This investigation into Pius X’s encyclical letter against an Italian modernizing movement,

56

Pope Pius X 163.

57

Renato Poggioli notes how his 1962 theoretical investigation into the aesthetics and the relationship between the artist and the public in avant-garde art derived from his residence outside of Italy: “Licenziando alle stampe questo lavoro, mi rendo conto quanto esso sia stato influenzato dal mio soggiorno fuori d’Italia, dal contatto con altri popoli e con altre forme di vita, e come esso diverge dalla linea generale della critica letteraria italiana. So erò che la tempra dei tempi sta suscitando anche in Italia curiosità ed interesse per quelle forme di cultura letteraria dove le idee siano non solo il mezzo ma anche il fine dell’indagine critica.” Renato Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962) 7.

58

The most expansive cultural investigations Italian literary modernism from the last decade include: Luca Somigli and Mario Moronti, eds., Italian modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004); Fausto Curi, Epifanie della modernità (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 2000); Ann Hallamore Caesar and Michael Caesar, Modern Italian Literature (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007); Valeria Giordano, La metropolis e oltre: Percorsi nel tempo e nello spazio della modernità (Roma: Meltemi editore, 2005); Adrian Lyttelton, Liberal and Fascist Italy: 1900-1945 (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2002); Guido Guglielmi, L’invenzione della letteratura: modernismo e avanguardia (Napoli [Naples]: Liguori, 2001); and Renato Barilli, È arrivata la terza ondata: Dalla neo alla neo-neoavanguardia (Torino [Turin]: Testo & Immagine, 2000). More focused analyses of Italian literary modernism appear in: Angelo Raffaele Pupino, Ragguagli di modernità: Fogazzaro, Pirandello, "La Ronda," Contini, Morante (Roma: Salerno, 2003); Simona Micali, Miti e riti del moderno: Marinetti, Bontempelli, Pirandello (Firenze [Florence]: Le Monnier, 2002); Giuliana Minghelli, In The Shadow of The Mammoth: Italo Svevo and The Emergence of Modernism (Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2002); Deidre O’Grady. Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2000). Other texts locate Italian forms of modernism within the larger context of Western culture, such as: Michael H. Whitworth, ed., Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Peter Childs, Modernism (London & New York: Routledge, 2008); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Luca Somigli, Legitimizing The Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism: 1885-1915 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003).

29 however, demonstrates that precepts of modernism did in fact exist and in various forms, whether or not one wishes to assert that an Italian modernism existed. Whether or not scholars managed to publish and disseminate their ideas on Italy’s, and Europe’s, supposedly “subversive” or “agnostic/atheist” groups is beside the point, as modernist thought clearly developed and circulated around the peninsula from the late nineteenth century to the present. 59 The Myth and Modernism: Fascist Rome One of Italy’s most infamous modernizing, and arguably modernist, movements was Fascism, which under its leader Benito Mussolini “Il Duce”, refashioned the myth of Rome to serve the party’s nationalistic and imperialistic aims. Mussolini, in fact, adopted the rhetoric and philosophies of several modernist thinkers, ranging from Nietzsche to D’Annunzio and Marinetti, to renovate and redefine the notion of romanità (Romanness). “Roma”, along with “Impero” (Empire), conditioned the orientation of Fascism’s politics, culture, and religion, shaping “la vita quotidiana degli italiani, il loro comportamento, il modo come salutano, come parlano fra di loro, persino come e perché devono amarsi e formarsi una famiglia.” 60 Romanità and empire formed the core of

59

Antonio Gramsci provides an excellent analysis of the Church’s success in suppressing modernism in Italy with the assistance of Italy’s major early twentieth century bourgeois intellectuals, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, while identifying the Italian movement’s roots in Catholic culture: “I modernisti, dato il carattere di massa che era dato loro dalla contemporanea nascita di una democrazia rurale cattolica… erano dei riformatori religiosi, apparsi non secondo schemi intellettuali prestabiliti, cari allo hegelismo, ma secondo le condizioni reali e storiche della vita religiosa italiana. Era una seconda ondata di cattolicismo liberale, molto piú esteso e di carattere piú popolare… L’atteggiamento del Croce e del Gentile (col chierichetto Prezzolini) isolò i modernisti nel mondo della cultura e rese piú facile il loro schiacciamento da parte dei gesuiti, anzi parve una vittoria del papato contro tutta la filosofia moderna.

L’enciclica antimodernista è in realtà contro l’immanenza e la scienza moderna.” Antonio Gramsci, “La filosofia di Benedetto Croce: Parte II,” Quaderni del carcere: Quaderni 6-11: 1930-1933, Vol. 2, ed.

Valentino Gerratana (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001) 1304-1305.

60

Emilio Gentile, “9 maggio 1936” 241.

30 Mussolini’s myth of Rome, yet not has they had existed in previous centuries, but in a “fascistized” form, so that society could distinguish the ideological underpinnings of his politics from those of the Liberal Monarchy. As a result Il Duce constructed his notion of romanità around six major concepts, individuated by Emilio Gentile: la universalità del tempo… associandola però all’italianità; […] la romanità del cattolicesimo; […] Un terzo elemento fondamentale… è il destino imperiale; […] Dal destino imperiale, la vitalità della razza; […] la funzione mitica della romanità; […] Infine, al carattere mitico della romanità fascista, l’attualità modernista del mito di Roma. 61 The fascist leader, however, did not always express a fervent love for Rome.

During Mussolini’ s post-World War I ascent to power, it was commonly held that “Roma era la città che sfruttava l’Italia,” 62 an opinion which the Fascist leader even echoed as a young socialist nearly ten years before he initiated his modernization of the Eternal City’s image in his rhetoric: Roma, città parassitaria di affittacamere, di lustrascarpe, di prostitute, di preti e burocrati, Roma… non è il centro della vita politica nazionale, ma sebbene il centro e il focolare d’infezione della vita politica nazionale….

Basta, dunque, con lo stupido pregiudizio unitario per cui tutto, tutto, dev’essere concentrato a Roma – in questa enorme città vampiro che succhia il miglior sangue della nazione. 63 Mussolini clearly abhorred the “real” Rome, which in his eyes, still resembled the provincial, parasitic, papal city, despite the government’s urbanistic interventions to render it the Third Rome. The aforementioned regulatory plans from 1873 and 1883-89, as well as the last one organized under Rome’s mayor Ernesto Nathan, 64 failed to

61

Emilio Gentile. Fascismo di pietra (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 2007) 46-48.

62

Giovanni Prezzolini, “I fatti della Romagna,” La Voce, 11 August 1910.

63

Benito Mussolini, “Contro Roma,” La Voce, 25 August 1910.

64

For a description of Nathan’s 1909 regulatory plan, which substantially differed very little from the previous two, see: Insolera 89-101.

31 revitalize Rome’s identity, leaving it a city of the past rather than a metropolis of the present. Even Tozzi had rejected the monarchy’s Rome in Gli egoisti, insisting: “La terza Roma mi fa schifo. È degna del suo parlamento e della borghesia che l’abita. Io vorrei che, su la borghesia immonda e scema, Dio facesse piovere le fiamme.” 65 Such harsh criticism, which found echoes in Fascist rhetoric, 66 fueled Mussolini’s desire to remake Rome and its history along his own designs.

Mussolini’s claim to power, following the March on Rome on October 28, 1922, involved a massive reconceptualization of both modernity and the myth of Rome; however, not as separate entities but as two faces of the same coin. Il Duce amalgamated several, at times even contradictory ideologies, to generate a modern myth and revitalize the city’s image for a population disenchanted with the Liberal administration. April 21, 1924, the day he received honorary Roman citizenship, Mussolini affirmed: “Roma non può, non deve essere soltanto una città moderna, nel senso banale della parola; deve essere una città degna della sua gloria, e questa gloria deve rinnovare incessantemente per tramandarla, come retaggio dell’età fascista, alle generazioni che verranno.” 67 His urbanistic and architectural plan, thus, involved conducting two major types of work. The first was the construction of a Fascist legacy, in which every single architectural form

65

Tozzi, Gli egoisti 79.

66

The Fascist squadristi, who filled the Urbs following the infamous March on Rome, sang a hymn deprecating members of the current administration: “Me ne frego di morir / me ne frego di Giolitti / e del sol dell’avvenire/… Me ne frego del Questore / del Prefetto e anche del Re.” Mario Piazzesi, Diario di uno squadrista toscano: 1919-1922 (Roma: Bonacci, 1980) 201. Another former Fascist, likewise, recollects in his autobiography: “I fascisti erano piovuti a Roma da ogni provincia d’Italia… considerando Roma come una città nemica da conquistare per vendicarsi dell’odio e del disprezzo con cui vennero circondati nei giorni del Congresso [il terzo dei Fasci].” Alfredo Signoretti, Come diventai fascista (Roma: G. Volpe, 1967) 120.

67

Benito Mussolini, Opera omnia: 44 volumi, eds. Eduardo and Duilio Susmel (Firenze [Florence]: La Fenice, 1951-81) Vol. XX, 234.

32 represented the physical manifestation of Mussolini’s grandiose vision for Rome and its new Fascist empire. Each work was a tessera nella costruzione del grande mosaico del consenso… Nell’immaginario collettivo, anche il più piccolo edificio è un mattone aggiunto nell’opera della costruzione della moderna nazione italiana e fascista. Ogni architettura è un contrassegno del fascismo, da tramandare ai posteri. Una testimonianza dell’apparizione del regime in un orizzonte storico mitico…. 68 The second element of Mussolini’s reconstruction and fascistization of the myth of Rome involved the excavation of ancient imperial monuments and the elimination of decadent structures obstructing their view. Il Duce, who earned the moniker “il piccone” (“The Pickaxe”) for his aggressive demolition projects and obsessive participation in every urbanistic change, 69 idealized the Rome of the emperors, and above all Augustus, who understood the propagandistic impact of renovating the capital’s cityscape. 70 His idea was to usher in a modern Golden Age dependant upon an evident imitatio Augusti in his choices of monumental typology. 71 This resulted in the urbanistic liberation and at times, reconstruction, of such structures as the Augusteo (the Mausoleum of Augustus), the Theater of Marcellus, the Imperial Fora of Augustus and Trajan, as well as the Ancient Roman Senate. As Emilio Gentile articulates: “Nel connubio fra Roma e fascismo, non fu

68

Paolo Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto: Propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia fascista (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2008) 4.

69

Paolo Nicoloso emphasizes Mussolini’s participation in Rome’s architectural transformation, by noting that “a Roma, non c’è opera di architettura di una certa importanza che non sia contrassegnata da un suo intervento personale, dall’esame di un disegno, da un’ispezione sul cantiere, da un gesto in augurale.”

Nicoloso 47.

70

Mussolini declared on December 31, 1925 that “tra cinque anni Roma deve apparire meravigliosa a tutte le parti del mondo: vasta, ordinata, potente, come fu ai tempi del primo impero di Augusto.” Mussolini, Opera omnia Vol. XXII, 48.

71

Pierre Gros and Mario Torelli, Storia dell’urbanistica: Il mondo romano (Roma: Editori Laterza, 1988), 198.

33

Figure 8. Publio Morbiducci. La storia di Roma attraverso le opere edilizie. 1939. Palazzo degli Uffici, EUR, Rome.

34

Figure 9. Foro Italico (Formerly the Foro Mussolini). 1928-1931. Rome.

35 tanto la Roma antica a romanizzare il fascismo, quanto il duce a fascistizzare la Roma antica, la sua storia, il suo mito, persino le sue vestigia monumentali, secondo le esigenze della nuova Roma fascista;” 72 a notion which the sculptor Publio Morbiducci incorporated in his monumental relief La storia di Roma attraverso le opere edilizie (See Fig. 8), tracing the Eternal City’s urbanistic and architectural transformation from the legendary founding twins Romulus and Remus to Benito Mussolini himself.

A modernist artistic and above all architectural embodiment of Fascism’s myth of Rome appeared in a number of projects inaugurated by Mussolini throughout the city, ranging from the celebratory Forum Mussolini, today the Forum Italico (See Fig. 9), to the international world exhibition center, initially named E42, now EUR (See Fig. 10). Il Duce’s appropriation of ancient Roman design for his political and cultural ambitions inspired the respective development of the sports complex, which ideologically fused the of the Palazzo della Civilità (See Fig. 11), which appears as a rationalist interpretation of the Colosseum. 73 These structures, rather than faithfully replicating ancient forms, hybridized architectural modernism, largely represented by rationalism and functionalism, with the grandeur of classicizing elements. The number of architects that Mussolini employed under his authority resulted in a variety of modernist designs emerging within Il Duce’s massive building program, centered on establishing his own mythical image as well as that of a new Rome. Andrea Giardina, Renzo De Felice, and Gentile Emilio likewise note the almost empathetic petrification of Mussolini’s own

72

Emilio Gentile, “9 maggio 1936” 269.

73

The nickname of the Palazzo della Civilità is the Colosseo Quadrato (Square Colosseum).

36

Figure 10. The neighborhood Esposizione Universale di Roma, EUR (Formerly E42). 1937-present. Rome.

Figure 11. The Palazzo della CiviltĂ (Square Colosseum). 1938-1943. EUR, Rome.

37 image during the course of his rule, who increasingly projected himself as a living statue while he reconstructed Rome. The former writes: Aveva la rigidità e la perpetuità della pietra e la vitalità possente del bronzo…. Parole come queste esprimevano perfettamente una qualità importante del corpo di Mussolini in quanto sembianza di un romano antico: il corpo del duce era quasi una dissolvenza incrociata tra una statua romana e un essere vivente… di volta in volta la statua esprimeva una vitalità prorompente o il corpo si marmorizzava. 74 Renzo De Felice generates an extensive analysis of Mussolini’s petrification after his brief victory in the 1936 War in Ethiopia entitled Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso: 1929-1936; 75 while Gentile echoes De Felice’s research, opining that “era come se l’ambizione mussoliniana di consegnare il fascismo e la propria fama all’eternità immortalandoli nella pietra, avesse investito la sua stessa persona, tramutandola in una statua vivente.” 76 Post-Fascist Demythification The fascistization of the myth of Rome clearly inspired a number of positive as well as unusual outcomes in the modernization of Italy’s capital; yet romanità produced numerous negative effects on the lives of those who did not conform to, or even opposed the party’s rhetoric. Antifascists operated inside and outside of Italy practically from the advent of Fascism; however, once Il Duce managed to consolidate his power, he ordered the suppression of “subversive” activities as well as the imprisonment of oppositional figures. This resulted in the incarceration of Antifascist activists such as Leone Ginzburg 74

Giardina and Vauchez 242-243.

75

Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso: 1929-1936 (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi,

1974) 758.

76

Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra 131.

38 and Antonio Gramsci, both of whom spent stints within Rome’s major prison, Regina Coeli. Both men died while interned by the Fascist regime, becoming political legends during the postwar period. It was following the Second World War that a proliferation of texts emerged celebrating imprisonment as a badge of honor for those who either ideologically or militaristically combated Fascism, creating a minor yet important postMussolinian myth of Rome. The artist and writer Carlo Levi, who had in fact endured a brief exile in 1935 for suspected Antifascist activity, proclaims in his novel L’orologio (1950): “A Roma, uno scalino, uno scalino mitologico, divide un mondo da un altro: ‘Dentro a Regina Coeli, c’è uno scalino; chi non lo ha salito non è romano’.” 77 Other cultural figures interweave references to Rome’s central prison as a sort of rejection of, or resistance to, the totalitarian order imposed by Mussolini and his Fascists. A Pinellian or even Bellian revival occurs in postwar Roman prose and cinema, 78 which present black market affairs, delinquency, and imprisonment as regular events of everyday life. De Sica produces a Marxist humanist commentary on Rome’s juvenile reformatory, Porta Portese, within his Neorealist classic Sciuscià (1946); while Pavese’s Il compagno alludes to Regina Coeli and a number of Alberto Moravia’s Racconti romani (1954) as well as Nuovi racconti romani (1959) present characters heading to or exiting that prison. 79

77

Carlo Levi, L’orologio (1950; Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1985) 30. This expression derives from a popular Roman expression: “A Reggina Celi ce sta 'no scalino chi nun salisce quelo nun è romano, manco 'n trasteverino.”

78

Bartolomeo Pinelli, a Roman artist during the early nineteenth century, depicted scenes of popular everyday life in Rome, particularly from the working class neighborhood Trastevere, that occasionally glorified criminal or subversive activities. Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, a contemporary of Pinelli, composed thousands of poems in Roman dialect celebrating the city’s plebian culture.

79

From Alberto Moravia’s Racconti romani, see: “Fanatico” (389-94), “Arrivederci” (395-402) and “Prepotente per forza” (511-517); Alberto Moravia, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti 1950-1959, Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004). Examples from the writer’s Nuovi racconti romani include: “Io e lui” (1562-1568), “Tutto per la famiglia,” (1569-1575) and “Il sistema del

39 Images of prisons and various degrees of criminality become mechanisms for authors and cinematographers to develop a counter-culture to the bourgeois hegemony, recognized as Neorealism. Roberto Rossellini, one of the leading figures of this movement, constructs an Antifascist vision of the Italian capital in Roma città aperta (1945), through a presentation of torture conducted at the Nazi-Fascist detention center on via Tasso. The film’s title ironically comments on the wartime myth that no army would invade or bomb Rome, as it was the city of the pope and of the Vatican.80 Other major, as well as minor, Neorealist cinematographers organized their demythifying filmic narratives around prostitutes and thieves, in order to counter the Fascist image of risanamento, which Mussolini ardently propagated through his social and urban initiatives. Such elements additionally appear in texts that are ambiguously Neorealist or even unambiguously not, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita (1955), which I examine in Chapter 2, as well as Alberto Moravia’s La ciociara (1957) and Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), which I analyze in Chapter 4.

Even Federico Fellini’s cinema, which is difficult to align fully with Neorealism, presents highly demythifying images of Rome in his early masterpieces La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955) and Le notti di Cabiria (1957). Every prose piece and film that I examine in this current work demonstrates the presence, operations, and spatial positioning of such

silenzio” (1928-1934); Alberto Moravia, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004).

80

A huge debate has erupted within the last ten years over the degree to which Pope Pius XII Paccelli maintained a politically neutral stance during World War II. Some scholars even argue that he collaborated with Hitler and the German National Socialists during the deportation of Italian Jews to concentration camps; while others sustain that he helped save the lives of thousands. That debate, while fascinating, extends beyond the scope of this current work. For two in depth opposing views in English, see: John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (London: Viking, 1999); José M. Sanchez, Pius XII and The Holocaust: Understanding The Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 2002).

40 figures. Their inclusion in the Urbs, as a result, highlights the false mythification of Rome’s image during the Fascist regime, while each works’ creation, publication and release during the postwar period tie the texts’ and films’ commentaries to counterbalancing measures for the subsequent highly moralizing government: the Republic under the Christian Democratic party.

Analyzing reality against myth is fundamental to understanding Roman culture during practically every period of its existence, including the heavily demythifying postwar era. Mussolini despised the Liberal monarchy’s Third Rome, which he declared in 1910, a “città parassitaria di affittacamere, di lustrascarpe, di prostitute, di preti e burocrati,” 81 and embarked to transform it, or “restore” it to its fictionalized, mythified past. 82 “Si potrebbe dire, dunque, che la conquista fascista del potere, con la Marcia su Roma, fu l’inizio di una lunga Marcia fascista contro la Roma reale, per cambiarla rapidamente e costruire la Roma fascista come il duce la immaginava.” 83 Artists of the post-World War II era reacted to Fascism’s fictionalized construct of the city by developing Neorealism, which valued chronicle over fantasy, the quotidian over the monumental, the real over the myth. Filmmakers’ and authors’ turned to pre-Fascist literary models, especially Giovanni Verga’s verismo, 84 to construct paradigms for

81

See note 59.

82

An article entitled “Abbozzo per un ritratto di Benito Mussolini,” quotes Il Duce as saying: “Oggi in Italia… non è tempo di storia…. È tempo di miti…. Il mito soltanto può dare foma ed energia a un popolo che sta per martellare il proprio destino.” Angelo Gatti, Popolo d’Italia, 27 March 1938.

83 84

Emilio Gentile, “9 maggio 1936” 253.

Giovanni Verga’s verismo, inspired by nineteenth century French naturalisme, attempted to provide a dispassionate observation of reality using scientific-like precision to explore the regional, archaic, quasi ahistorical culture of Sicilian peasantry. His most famous works include I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro Don Gesualdo (1889), the former of which formed the literary basis for Luchino Visconti’s Neorealistic cinematic classic La terra trema: Episodio del mare (1948). Verga’s incomplete novel cycle of the vinti, or the defeated, which he intended to develop with the abovementioned books and two others that

41 confronting recent history in all its minute details, local color, and celebration of the umili (the weak). The Neorealist movement, which initially focused on Rome’s working class people and spaces, often expresses a highly Marxist ideology, as epitomized in Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini’s collaborative productions as well as Giuseppe De Santis’ cinema and film theories. The integration of Karl Marx’s ideas into Italian film and literature marks the continuation of modernity’s principles in the nation’s culture, as Marx undeniably formed a cornerstone in the generation of European modernism. His “Communist Manifesto may be viewed as in some senses the first of the many modernist proclamations of (the need for) a radical break from the past.” 85 He likewise counters bourgeois values and culture, viewing an impending crisis in that class’ unquestioning acceptance of capitalism. Marx explores creation and recreative destruction, renewal, innovation and constant change in the Manifesto, which all figure into Modernism dynamics. Many Italian intellectuals enriched their contact with Marxism through the reinterpretation of Marxist Communist precepts in Antonio Gramsci’s posthumously published Quaderni del carcere. These notebooks, which Gramsci composed between 1929 and 1935 and which slowly appeared in Italy beginning in 1948, formulated theories on the role of intellectuals in society as mediators of culture that certainly influenced the literature of the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia during the 1950s. Gramsci urged the creation of a National Popular Literature, which would meet the interests as well as educate the Italian masses. For these people, “non esiste nel

never came to fruition, serve as a cultural predecessor to modernism’s emphasis on the anti-hero, exemplified in Italy by Italo Svevo’s inetti (inept characters) and Alberto Moravia’s indifferenti (indifferent characters).

85

Childs 40.

42 paese un blocco nazionale intellettuale e morale, né gerarchico e tanto meno egualitario.” 86 Gramsci’s principles, which sought to elevate the people and displace the traditionally hegemonic bourgeoisie, resonate with Marx’s socio-politics, while shifting his philosophy’s focus away from economics and onto culture.

A new form of Marxism clearly emerged in post-World War II Rome to counter Fascism’s past mythifying rhetoric and found expression primarily in representations of the city’s gas and electric generator, the Permolio, standing beside the Tiber River (See

Figure 12. The Permolio (Gazometro). Rome’s Gas and Electric Generator. Ostiense, Rome.

86

Antonio Gramsci, “Problemi della cultura nazionale italiana: 1° letteratura popolare,” Quaderni del carcere: Quaderni 12-29: 1932-1935, Vol. 3, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001) 2117.

43 Fig. 12). Some films and texts, including Visconti’s Bellissima, Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, and De Sica’s Il tetto depict other, less iconic figures of Rome’s limited industrial architecture such as Cinecittà (the movie studios), factories, and constructions sites. Even Alberto Moravia, who generally abstained from composing detailed descriptions of his native city, dedicates a lengthy passage to the capital’s major industrial area in his short story, “Scherzi del caldo”. In it, he writes from the perspective of his protagonist Ernesto Rapelli: Abitiamo sulla via Ostiense…. Me ne andai al ponte di ferro…. Giunto al ponte, mi appoggiai alla spalletta di ferro imbullonato: scottava…. Il gasometro che sembra uno scheletro rimasto da un incendio, gli altiforni delle officine del gas, le torri dei silos, le tubature dei serbatoi di petrolio, i tetti aguzzi della centrale termoelettrica chiudevano l’orizzonte così da far pensare di non essere a Roma ma in qualche città industriale del Nord. 87 Several of his other Racconti romani, and even Nuovi racconti romani, depict the structures composing various sections of the city’s minor industrial zones’, such as found in “La rovina dell’umanità,” 88 “Il guardiano,” 89 “Rigoletta,” 90 “La riparazione,” 91 “La fossetta,” 92 “Il letto sul tetto,” 93 and “La sveglia;” 94 however none provides as rounded a

87

Alberto Moravia, “Scherzi di caldo,” Racconti romani, 1954. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 425.

88

Alberto Moravia, “La rovina dell’umanità,” Racconti romani, 1954. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 619-624.

89

Alberto Moravia, “Il guardiano,” Racconti romani, 1954. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 809-815.

90

Alberto Moravia, “Rigoletta,” Nuovi racconti romani, 1959. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 1621-1627.

91

Alberto Moravia, “La riparazione,” Nuovi racconti romani, 1959. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 1688-1694.

92

Alberto Moravia, “La fossetta,” Nuovi racconti romani, 1959. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 1855-1861.

44 portrayal of Ostiense, Rome’s major industrial center, in terms of the neighborhood’s material and architectural makeup as “Scherzi di caldo.” These stories, generated during the author’s so-called period of engagement with National-Popular literature, express Moravia’s brief flirtation with Marxism, a weak romance that dissipated by the end of the 1950s.

The most complex urbanistic representation of Marxist opposition to Fascism, which quickly evolved into an image of social protest against the hegemonic Christian democratic party during the postwar period, was in fact the borgate. A major component of Mussolini’s modernizing project for Rome, the borgate essentially functioned as peripheral ghettoes for accommodating the thousands of displaced poor, whom the government evicted from their homes during the infamous sventramenti. Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta compare them to London’s slums or Paris’ banlieue, viewing Rome’s late development as its evolution into a modern European capital.95 Italo Insolera, however, takes a more nuanced approach. He documents that the first official time that the term borgata entered into urbanistic discourse occurred in 1924, in reference to Acilia, where the former residents of the Fora of Augustus and Trajan were transferred in order to construct the via dell’Impero. He, further, recognizes that shantytowns and slums had been forming on abandoned tracts of land outside of Rome since the Sabaudian monarchy first transferred to the city nearly a half century earlier; however, these

93

Alberto Moravia, “Il letto sul tetto,” Nuovi racconti romani, 1959. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 2017-2024.

94

Alberto Moravia, “La sveglia,” Nuovi racconti romani, 1959. Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 2039-2045.

95

Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta, Borgate di Roma (Roma: Editori Riunti, 1976) 156.

45 residential areas only received recognition, albeit inconsiderable, in mainstream culture during the first postwar period. 96 The urban historian goes on to define a borgata as: un pezzo di città cioè non ha la completezza e l’organizzazione per chiamarsi ‘quartiere’, oppure un agglomerato rurale chiuso da un sistema economico feudalistico in una dimensione che ne vieta lo sviluppo a organismo completa. Borgata è una sottospecie di borgo: un pezzo di città in mezzo alla campagna, che non è realmente né l’una né l’altra. 97 This definition encompasses both the borgate ufficiali or regolari sanctioned by the Fascist administration, as well as the borgate non ufficiali (or irregolari, spontanee, abusive), which developed like mushrooms in the Agro Romano. The ever growing migrant population would discover there were few available and affordable accommodations in Rome and thus would consequently construct makeshift housing often lining the consular roads radiating in every direction from Rome. The initial borgate ufficiali differed very little from the irregolari, although the government provided quickly constructed homes (case rapidissime), often one- or two-stories high, made of poor materials within the former (See Fig. 13). It was incumbent upon the inhabitants of the latter, however, to build their own dwellings, which were often oneroom shacks and hovels with muddy floors and no glass in the windows (See Fig. 14).

Both types of Fascist-period borgata generally lacked basic utilities, means of communication and even transport to reach Rome’s center. The government also made sure to develop the borgate at a great distance from the city walls so as to render them

96

“Le baracche che già da decenni erano sorte qua e là nei terreni abbandonati della campagna piú vicina, aumentano enormemente nel dopoguerra. Nuclei di case poverissime le affiancano lungo le principali vie consolari: Cantocelle e Torpignattara sulla Casilina. Quadraro sulla Tuscolana. Lontanissime dai confini del piano regolatore queste prime ‘borgate’ romane sorgono favorite dalla presenza lungo quelle vie delle ferrovie vicinali per Fiuggi e per i castelli romani.” Insolera 104.

97

Insolera 135.

46

Figure 13. Case rapidissime. Porta Portese, Rome.

practically invisible to visitors and the capital’s bourgeois citizens. 98 Insolera comments on the psychological impact of such placement upon the minds of those forced to reside practically in exile from Rome, which intensified the social alienation already endured by the working and subaltern classes: “Si ha… l’impressione che il rapporto tra la gente e il mondo sia diverso che per gli altri, come filtrato attraverso uno schermo che ha trattenuto qualche cosa lasciando su tutto un senso di provvisorio e di incompleto, di abbandono e umiliazione.” 99 Fascism, thus, created a sharp rupture between its mythified and poor visions of Rome, dividing the beautiful form the ugly, the stupendous from the

98

Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta, who conducted the first book-length sociological investigation into the borgate, offer an alternative, more Marxian definition to Insolera’s of what life was like on Rome’s periphery: “Erano agglomerati di abitazioni poverissime, sorte spontaneamente (o create dall’edilizia popolare ‘ufficiale’) in zone lontane, sprovviste, dei piú elementari servizi pubblici, con criteri contrastanti ai dettami dell’urbanistica contemporanea; ai margini della ‘città’, secondo le esigenze della speculazione edilizia, ed il piú lontano possibile dagli occhi e dal contatto della ‘città ufficiale’.” Berlinguer and Della Seta 159.

99

Insolera 140.

47

Figure 14. Shack in Rome.

miserable. 100 Literary and film scholars, as well as authors and cinematographers, who have not investigated the borgate’s full architectural and urbanistic history or who wish to impact their audience with the periphery’s most abhorrent conditions, often limit their discussions and portrayals to the two abovementioned housing types. As such, images of decrepit shantytown abound in postwar cinema, as evidenced by Luigi Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina, Giuseppe De Santis’ Roma ore 11, Carlo Lizzani’s vignette “L’amore che si paga” in Zavattini’s L’amore in città, and Federico Fellini’s Il bidone.

Carlo Levi, likewise, provides a colorful metaliterary anecdote relating the legends 100

Mario San Filippo notes Rome’s social dichotomy established through Fascist urbanist practices: “È sotto il fascismo che diventa sempre più netta la contrapposizione tra centro antico e nuove periferie.” San Filippo, Le tre città di Roma: Lo sviluppo urbano dalle origini a oggi (Bari & Roma: Editori Laterza, 1993) 116.

48 surrounding life in Rome’s baracche in his novel L’orologio. The writer describes the borgate as impenetrable and peripheral zones, almost as belonging to another world in which suffering and crime abound, as well as where “succedevano anche cose piú oscure, misteriose vicende di un tempo diverso.” 101 Levi plays on the areas’ actual physical distantiation from the city center to suggest a temporal distance, generating a Bakhtinian chronotope for the borgate in his subaltern tale. 102 His protagonist, additionally, recounts a story regarding a lactating mother, exhausted from breastfeeding and the summer heat, who has strange dreams that scare her and often awaken her from her sleep. One day, the woman opens her eyes in a delirium to find a snake, rather than her newborn drinking from her breast, an extraordinary event that takes the story within L’orologio’s narrative into the realm of the metaphysical: “La donna rimase immobile per l’orrore. Il latte usciva dal seno, entrava nella bocca del serpente, si spargeva sulla pelle: ma già, prima che ella potesse urlare, la bestia aveva sentito il suo risveglio: rapidissima e silenziosa, s’era staccata e… s’era dileguata sotto il saccone.” 103 This fantastic, nightmarish account assumes the tone of popular folklore, characteristic of peasant communities in Italy’s countryside, lending a sense of archaism to Levi’s passage. The snake, a common symbol of evil, heightens the savageness that many Italian authors and directors, especially Pasolini, attributed to the

101

Levi, L’orologio 111.

102

M. M. Bakhtin composed the literary philosophy of the chronotope (literally “time-space”), based on Albert Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity,” which stresses “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in The Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 2002) 84.

103

Bakhtin 112.

49 borgate, while the mother’s hallucinatory state underscores the trope of illness that appears throughout the 1950s in narratives set along Rome’s periphery.

Alberto Moravia similarly addresses the notions of malady and filth in his short story “Scherzi del caldo,” partially examined above. The protagonist, Ernesto Rapelli, wanders between his home on via Ostiense and the surrounding countryside on a day so hot that he hallucinates. Despite Moravia’s shift between reality and the fantastic (presumably when Ernesto discovers a shack, an urban “mirage”), the author provides one of his richest descriptions of Rome’s physical environment out of his entire oeuvre. 104 Moravia accentuates the periphery’s ambiguously urban and rural nature, while calling attention to its secondary function as a dumping ground: 105 “Camminai… tra campi brulli sparsi di mondezze; poi la strada diventò un viottolo terroso e le mondezze diventarono mucchi alti, quasi collinette… non si vedeva un filo d’erba, ma soltanto cartacce, scatolame rugginoso, torsoli, detriti, in una luce che accecava.” 106 Ernesto continues his walk, whereupon he finds a tiny tilting hovel, which he had never before noticed. A young girl approaches him, asking if he is the doctor her mother needs, and he follows her into the shack, unable to explain that he cannot help. He enters the structure, observing the dwelling’s squalor: “Dapprima mi sembrò di essere entrato in un negozio di rigattiere, a Campo di Fiori. Tutto pendeva dal soffitto: vestiti, calze, utensili, stoviglie, stracci. Poi capii che era la roba loro, appesa a chiodi in mancanza di

104

Rome is generally invisible in his texts, a point upon which I elaborate in Chapter 4, p. 260-

270.

105

Italo Insolera likewise notes the debasement of residential areas in Rome’s early borgate as trash dumps, for the former city dwellers unaccustomed to country life, would immediately transform their gardens into “mucchi di immondizie e sambuchi.” Insolera 137.

106

Moravia, “Scherzi di caldo” 426.

50 mobili.” 107 Ernesto’s return to his own modest, yet more civilized home, concretizes the lower class’ social hierarchy at the story’s end, as Moravia notes that not every poor citizen of Rome was a subaltern inhabitant of the borgate, but occasionally they were members of the small, but extant proletariat.

It is important to note, therefore, that like any living organism, Rome’s subspecies of neighborhood continued to evolve from its inauspicious introduction under the Fascist regime as shantytowns (baraccopoli or villaggi abissini) and peripheral ghettoes into other architectural forms throughout the twentieth century. The one and two-story structures of the early borgate later stood beside a second group of buildings “denominati le ‘case’, in quanto con i loro tre o quarto piani sembrava agli abitanti delle cassette dei ‘lotti’ piú degne di tale nome. Nell’immediato dopoguerra si costruirono i ‘palazzi’ ossia case a cinque piani.” 108 The distribution of structures developed according to the social hierarchy, with the indigent, the evicted, and the unemployed living in huts, a more heterogeneous group occupying the case, and the working class or those with connections residing in the palazzi (See Fig. 15). 109 The palazzi, likewise, transformed the borgate even further during the post-World War II period, as they began to exceed six stories in height, sometimes reaching over ten, replacing the baraccopoli closest to the city as Rome’s center pushed outwards and the periphery pushed inwards in a process of conurbation (See Fig. 16). The underclass occupying the worst dwellings also changed over time, with the working class Romans displaced by the sventramenti representing the

107

Moravia, “Scherzi di caldo” 427.

108

Insolera 140-141.

109

Insolera 141.

51

Figure 15. Palazzi. Pietralata, Rome.

first wave, migrant workers mostly from the surrounding countryside and south, representing the second wave, and foreign immigrants representing the third and final wave. Popular, literary, and cinematic culture, however, generated a more colorful interpretation of those who inhabited the borgate, focusing primarily on the postMussolini-era Resistance fighters as well as on the criminal or “immoral� members of society. Berlinguer and Della Seta provide wonderful examples of leftist newspaper articles reporting the activities of partisans defending Rome against the Nazis and protesting against the harshness of conditions under their occupation, 110 such as seen in

110

Berlinguer and Della Seta 278-285.

52

Figure 16. The Conurbation of a Shantytown. Rome.

Roma città aperta (1945) or later in Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (1960). Tullio Aymone, on the other hand, laments the weight given to the presence of prostitutes, pimps, and thieves in the borgate, such as witnessed in the majority of Pasolini’s Roman literary and cinematic production, rather than to the impoverished migrant workers living in the very same conditions. The sociologist decries: “È una sfilata di dolente umanità, quella dei baraccati; cosí diversa dalle immagini che propaga la cronaca nera, di prostitutelle, ladri, ruffiani. Certo ci sono anche quelli: ma rimangono schiacciati da queste figure nere, caparbie, silenziose, di contadini calabresi, abruzzesi, siciliani….” 111 111

Tullio Aymone, “La culture dei baraccati: Un’inchiesta del 1960,” Borgate di Roma, eds.

Giovanni Berlinguer and Piero Della Seta (1960; Roma: Editori Riunti, 1976) 287.

53 From Myth to Borgata endeavors to examine the borgate’s urbanistic and social transformations through literature and film produced during Italy’s postwar period, beginning with the close of World War II in 1945 and concluding with the inauguration of Italy’s Economic Boom in 1958. This work does not attempt to chart Rome, although occasional maps do appear in the text in order to illustrate the modern capital city’s irregular, macchia d’olio expansion (See Fig. 17). Nor does this study attempt to integrate an overarching theoretical foundation to explain the city’s shape and the issues afflicting Rome as it transformed into the administrative seat of a democratic national government. 112 From Myth to Borgata, rather, uses a variegated theoretical framework to address the socio-political and economic circumstances that affected the individual artistic representations of spaces and places in post-World War II Italian narrative. These theories incorporated are couched in major twentieth century cultural movements, including modernization/modernism and mythification/demythification so as to provide a comprehensive and cohesive structure to the work. It is highly debatable whether or not Rome is a modernist city on par with other European capitals such as London, Paris, or Berlin; however this analysis explores examples of modernist architectural styles and urban circumstances that arose and propagated from the end of the 1940s and through the 1950s so as to demonstrate the physical presence of modernism amidst and beyond Rome’s more famous ancient and Christian monuments. This investigation further involves the consideration of modernizing urbanism, including the introduction of increasingly fast means of transportation, public works, and conurbation, which all 112

The degree to which Italy is a functioning democracy is an issue too large for me to address in this introduction. For a compelling recent analysis, see: Paul Ginsborg, La democrazia che non c’è.

(Torino: Einaudi, 2006). For a more polemical account, see: Alexander Stille, The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

54

Figure 17. Rome in 1930. The Growing Oil Stain. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001).

arguably emerged from modernism’s ethics of progress and evolution.

Chapter 1 develops its discourse around Italian culture’s first examples of borgate in Neorealist literature and cinema. It traces the periphery’s shifting representation from a

55 site of Partisan activity in Rossellini’s Roma città aperta and Pavese’s Il compagno, an anonymous space in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, and the embodiment of Marxism’s proletarian ideology in Visconti’s Bellissima; to the decrepit homes of Rome’s unemployed and underemployed destitute and desperate residents in Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina, De Santis’ Roma ore 11, as well as in Lizzani’s “L’amore che si paga” and Antonioni’s “Tentato suicidio” in L’amore in città. This chapter, as all the subsequent ones, focuses on the aesthetic as well as sociological significance of each work. Chapter 2 conducts a thorough investigation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s highly controversial image of Rome in his first book, Ragazzi di vita. This episodic narrative transformed the periphery’s problems of marginalization and delinquency from a minor and largely ignored social phenomenon into a major cultural debate. I adopt Walter Benjamin’s flâneuristic and fragmented descriptions of European cities, as well as M. M. Bakhtin’s literary theories of the carnevalesque and the chronotope, to explain Pasolini’s debasing and demythifying portrayals of the Eternal City. Chapter 3 adopts Henri Lefebvre’s urbanistic theory on “The Right to the City” to investigate the socio-political protest against the lack of adequate housing in Rome during the mid-1950s. De Sica’s Il tetto, as well as Fellini’s La strada, Il bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria foreground this issue while integrating various forms of early Italian artistic modernism, including suggestions of Futurism and Metaphysical Painting. Chapter 4 rounds out the investigation into images of Rome’s modernism and demythification with close analyses of two novels from 1957, Alberto Moravia’s La ciociara and Carlo Emilio Gadda’s second version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Both authors, likewise, integrate fierce criticism of war’s and Fascism’s ravaging effects on Rome’s urban and

56 architectural environment, which reflect the more contemporary concerns with the Republic’s Christian Democratic party’s perpetuation of the regime’s social policies.

57 Chapter 1 From Fascism to Neorealism: The Emergence of the Borgate Fascist Cinema and Rome The representation of Rome underwent a tremendous metamorphosis in postwar Italian cinema, particularly as directors once again moved their cameras onto the city streets and out beyond the walls of the Cinecittà studios.1 Rome became the undisputed urbanistic protagonist of Neorealist cinema, as Neorealism was born in Rome with Rossellini’s Roma città aperta and many of the movement’s productions take place there. 2 In the two decades preceding Neorealism’s success, precisely those of the Fascistera, it was the myth of Rome that sustained the film industry and vice versa. According to the film scholar Americo Sbardella, the myth of Rome appeared in the film di propaganda del regime, i film Luce, che creano uno spazio urbano da palazzo Venezia all’altare della Patria, ai fori, fino al Colosseo, attraverso la nuova e scenografica arteria, via dei Fori Imperiali, realizzata grazie a uno dei più radicali sventramenti sul tessuto dei rioni operati durante il regime. 3 The Italian movie industry, which ironically was initially overlooked as a powerful ideological tool by the Fascist regime in the 1920s, received generous funding during the late 1930s in order to help it transition from producing solely “educational” documentaries and newsreels, to commercially viable films. During Mussolini’s tenure in

1

According to Peter Bondanella, the “wealth of ruins and grandiose monuments, as well as the favorable climate and natural light of the peninsula, encouraged feature films shot on location” in Italy’s historical films created during the cinema’s early period. He cites La presa di Roma (1905), La caduta di Troia (1910) and Agnese Visconti (1910) as the most successful examples from the period. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1996) 2-3.

2

Americo Sbardella, ed. “Introduzione,” Roma nel Cinema (Roma: Semar, 2000) xv.

3

Sbardella xiv.

58 power, the Fascist leader added film to the Venice Arts Festival (the Biennale), creating the Venice Film Festival, an important showcase for Italian films to this day. He also founded both the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (1935), a professional film school still in operation; as well as the Istituto LUCE (L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa, 1925), later moved to and amalgamated with Cinecittà, which Il Duce placed under the auspices of his son, Vittorio Mussolini, a film enthusiast and editor of the prestigious periodical Cinema. 4 The Fascist dictator charged Cinecittà’s employees with the duty of producing entertaining films that could compete with Hollywood and German productions, while inserting moral and ideological undertones into their works so as to curry favor for the regime’s contemporary militaristic aims. Mussolini’s speech for Cinecittà’s inauguration in April 1937 resonated with Fascist dogma, 5 as he declared: “Il cinema è l’arma più forte,” 6 fully acknowledging the propagandistic potential of the

4

The Italian film scholar Antonio Costa notes that “tra i collaboratori di Cinema troviamo i più prestigiosi intellettuali dell'epoca e buona parte dei cineasti che saranno protagonisti della rinascita del cinema italiano dopo la caduta del fascismo.” “Il cinema del ventennio fascista.” (2001) 3.

5

Scholars disagree over Cinecittà’s inauguration date. Some place it on April 28, 1937, a date that does not resonate with the regime’s mythology; others place it on April 21, 1937, which is the natalis urbis, the mythological birthday of Rome, a date on which Mussolini established several of his most important urban projects, including E42; and was the date he was granted Roman citizenship on the Campidoglio in 1924. The “City of Cinema”, if opened on the earlier date, would certainly carry greater ideological weight according to Fascist propaganda, which insisted upon the myth of Rome and romanità; however since there is no consensus on the matter, I will not favor one date over the other. For texts that favor coinciding Cinecittà’s inauguration with Rome’s founding date, refer to: Peter Bondanella. Italian cinema cit. 13; Emilio Gentile. Fascismo di Pietra. (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2007). For texts that have chosen to place Cinecittà’s opening on April 28, 1937, refer to: Borden W. Painter Jr., Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) 117; Claudio Rendina. Roma: Giorno per giorno.

(Roma: Newton Compton, 2008) 551. Natalia Marino and Emanuele Valerio Marino in L’ovra a Cinecittà: Polizia politica e spie in camicia nera offer an explanation for the two dates: “A impero conquistato, a soli quattordici mesi dalla posa della prima pietra, il gran giorno. Data prevista, il 21 aprile 1937, Natale di Roma e festa del lavoro…. Inaugurazione rimandata di una settimana, al 28 aprile. I giorni precedenti sono stati all’insegna del maltempo; pioggia e vento minacciano di guastare la festa.” (Torino [Turino]: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005) 196. For an example of even another date, April 27, 1937, refer to: Lorenzo Codelli and Françoise Liffran, “Cinecittà ou l’utopie fasciste,” Rome 1920-1945: Le modèle fasciste, son Duce, sa mythologie (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1991) 196.

6

Marino and Marino tab. 1.

59 medium, whether or not any given film projected overt or covert messages. 7 The erection of this “City of Cinema”, however, has generally failed to capture the attention of architectural and urbanistic scholars in terms of its modernizing and ideological importance for Mussolini’s monumentalizing plans for Rome. Most intellectuals, including Italo Insolera, Emilio Gentile, Paolo Nicoloso, Borden W. Painter, Jr., Donatella Cialoni, and Antonio Cadrerna, celebrate the development of the Città universitaria completed in 1935 along with the development of E42, or EUR, 8 as the architectural archetypes of Il Duce’s redevelopment of Rome. Nicoloso describes the situation most succinctly in his recently published study, Mussolini Architetto: “È attraverso la collaborazione di Piacentini che Mussolini sperimenterà una politica architettonica che implica alcune precise stilistiche. E questo avviene principalmente in due episodi romani, nella Città universitaria e nell’E42.” 9 Gentile, however, best situates the latter of these two sites, Mussolini’s E42, within Fascism’s mythologizing urbanism, contextualizing remarks made by the then Ministry of Education Director, Giuseppe Bottai: Bottai insisteva sul ‘valore politico’ dell’Esposizione Universale del 1942, come ‘espressione attuale, concreta e, in una parola, fascista dell’idea 7

It is precisely against the Fascist, as well as the Nazi, regimes’ propagandistic employment of cinema as well as of other media of mass communication to manipulate the masses that Walter Benjamin warns in the epilogue of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno rail in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” I will address both essays in the following paragraph.

8

Fascism’s official, though quite idyllic, description of E42 declares it as the “meditata ed organica attuazione a questo cammino di Roma verso il mare…. La nuova metropoli, allegata all’antica, si estenderà in una grandissima ampiezza di terra, per larghe vie, per edifici non soffocati, per quartieri suburbani ricchi di spazi verdi e di frescura di acque e di fronde, al libero sole, al vasto ventaglio respiro del mare.” Vittorio Cini, “Invito,” Esposizione universale di Roma. MCMXLII-ANNO XX° E.F., ed.

Commissariato Generale (Roma: n.p. 1939) 44-45.

9

Paolo Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto: Propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia fascista (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2008) xxvii.

60 eterna di Roma,’ dove l’attributo ‘universale’ non era sinonimo di internazionale o mondiale, ma affermazione del primato imperiale dell’Italia fascista, in cui si rinnovava, per un messo ‘organico e necessario’, l’universalità della tradizione romana. 10 The historical predilection for the new Sapienza university campus and for what was to be the urbanistic and architectonic heart of the 1942 World’s Fair does not, however, undermine the importance that the cinematic complex and its productions exercised under Fascism.

Three major twentieth century thinkers launched vehement criticisms against Italian Fascism’s, as well as the German National Socialist Party’s, employment of technological media, most importantly the cinema, as a tool to sway the masses and propagate their militaristic causes. Walter Benjamin, who never officially became a member of the Frankfurt School but who nevertheless contributed essays on cultural issues from a literary criticism perspective, provided the first of the two critiques. One of his most famous pieces, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” provides a warning against cinema’s dissolution of art’s mystical component, namely its aura, as well as against the potential misuse of film and other technological art forms for political gains. In regards Fascism, he writes: Fascism seeks to give [the masses] an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. 11

10

Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di Pietra 185. Rpt. of Giuseppe Bottai, Politica fascista delle arti (Roma: Signorelli, 1940) 75.

11

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations. ed Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 241.

61 In his view, technology-based aesthetic practices, placed in the hands of a political party, reduce humankind to mere mechanisms of such politics. He further claims that the liquidation of art’s aura permitted Fascism to make politics aesthetic, and Communism to politicize art. This ongoing process of the aura’s dissolution and of the adoration of art for art’s sake, which form in his mind a negative theology, plants the seeds for humankind’s “self-alienation [which] has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” 12 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, two other thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who explored the commercialization and politicization of art, complement Benjamin’s critical analysis of technologically reproducible art in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” While Benjamin focuses his criticism on the reification of the art object, Horkheimer and Adorno place their attention on the producers of culture and entertainment who perpetuate mind-numbing sameness through commercial media. The two Marxist philosophers, after going into the exile in the United States, collaborated at the end of World War II to produce an analysis of the totalizing and destructive incorporation of the culture industry into politics. Horkheimer and Adorno remark on the consequences of rendering culture both inexpensive and mass producible, using the radio as an exemplum of how Fascism manipulated entertainment, or mass communication, for propagandistic purposes: The radio becomes the mouthpiece of the Führer;… The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation. The metaphysical charisma of the Führer invented by the sociology of religion has finally turned out to be no

12

Benjamin 242.

62 more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the radio, which are a demonical parody of the omnipresence of the divine spirit. 13 Mussolini made similar use of the radio in Italy and of documentaristic cinema; 14 however, if one investigates Italian fictional cinema from the Fascist period, the propagandistic message is noticeably subtler, particularly with regards to Rome and the party’s mythologized notions of romanità.

Few motion pictures from the ventennio fascista place Rome, the city, and expressions of its grandeur in the narrative foreground. Scholars for the most part quote Enrico Guazzoni’s Messalina (1922) and Il sacco di Roma (1923), Georg Jacoby’s and Gabriellino D'Annunzio’s Quo vadis? (1925), Amleto Palermi’s and Carmine Gallone’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (1926), as well as Gallone’s Scipione l’africano (1937) as the few, representative Fascist projections of the Eternal City in its cinema. They are puzzling choices from an urbanistic perspective as the city appears more as a culture concept rather than as a stone and concrete entity. In the case of Quo Vadis?, in which Rome figures greatly, the directors portray empire as corrupt and weak, countering Fascism’s propagandistic goals. Mario Volpi’s Il grido dell’aquila (1923), however, furnishes a rare filmic case of Fascist ideology placed against the structures of the Eternal City. The title alone projects traditional emblematic conceptions of empire, through the symbol of the eagle, while the film’s subtext underscores Il Duce’s efforts to merge regional cultures through a new patriotism founded on legendary notions of imperium and 13

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, Continuum, 2002) 159.

14

According to Mino Argentieri’s study on Fascist cinema, L’occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo, the radio audience of 26,865 listeners was not enough for the dictator, and thus, “[n]ella sua intuizione, fomentagli da fiuto giornalistico, Mussolini precedette di qualche anno I primi e più organici tentative di avere una propria voce nel cinema.” (Firenze [Florence]: Vallechi, 1979) 13.

63 romanità. Volpi transfigures local monuments into nationalistic, and mythological symbols, identifying Fascism’s archetypical landmarks, such as the Colosseum or Palazzo Venezia, which according to Emilio Gentile, “rimase fino alla fine del regime il centro sacro della religione fascista. Una religione politica, che si richiama a Roma….” 15 The Roman cityscape, however, functions more as a backdrop than as a protagonist in Il grido dell’aquila, as the majority of story unrolls outside the capital city; nevertheless Volpi’s film presents a curious instance of fictional cinema in which fundamental, ideological spaces of Mussolini’s Rome appear in Fascist-era cinema.

One may argue that the lack of Rome’s appearances in Fascist fictional cinema resulted from the regime’s desire to maintain a moderate level of censorship and propaganda in mainstream films. Directors, thus, inserted the party’s political ideology in indirect, rather than direct, manners, propagating petit-bourgeois mores and conformism, 16 two systems abhorred as totalizing mechanisms by Horkheimer and Adorno, 17 using the popular telefoni bianchi melodramas as a medium. These types of films essentially adapted international standards, formulaic plots, and predetermined 15

Emilio Gentile, “6 maggio 1936” 256.

16

The author who arguably best captured these socio-psychological aspects of Fascism in his novels is Alberto Moravia. Many read his first book, Gli indifferenti (1929) as a lightly veiled criticism of the Italian, represented through the synecdoche Roman, petit-bourgeoisie under the Fascist regime. Typical of most of his literature, Moravia expresses the class’ inadequacies through its impotence, boredom, and as the title suggests, indifference. Another novel that more openly censures the group-think perpetuated under Fascism is Il conformista (1951). The book recounts the existential crisis of a Fascist secret agent sent to France to murder his former professor who has become an active Antifascist. His professional as well as personal life decisions, constantly in conflict with his nature, reflect his desire to be like everyone else, to conform, allegorizing once again the petit-bourgeoisie’s mentality under Fascism.

17

A semantic analysis of the variety and quantity of terms expressing the middle class’ conformism in “The Culture Industry” is beyond the scope of the current study; however, the following excerpt provides one of many references to the “universalization” of bourgeois society through the culture industry: “Self-preservation in the shape of class has kept everyone at the stage of a mere species being.

Every bourgeois characteristic, in spite of its deviation and indeed because of it, expressed the same thing: the harshness of the competitive society.” Horkheimer and Adorno 155. The circumstances generated by the culture industry create a bourgeois monotony.

64 directorial forms in order to achieve domestic commercial success. The telefoni bianchi genre, in fact, provided ample material for escapism among the masses, a sensation described by Italo Calvino as a satisfaction of “un bisogno di spaesamento, di proiezione… in uno spazio diverso.” 18 Calvino, who preferred the American variety of escapist film to the Italian, nevertheless, recognized that the movies offered an indirect venue for the enactment of people’s repressed dreams and desires, utopic strains which one could conceivably trace in the regime’s urbanism and architecture. Michael Siegel, in his article “The Techniques of the Italian Observer: Fascist and Postfascist Spatio-Visual Culture”, addresses the shared aesthetic “utopic strains” found in both Fascist-era cinema and architecture. The scholar argues that the smooth pure lines of some of the regime’s later buildings and building projects, of its supposedly axial boulevards, and of its exaggeratedly orderly maps are mirrored in the telefono bianco film by the perfectly seamless structuration of bourgeois spaces via classical Hollywood matching techniques. 19 Referring to Mussolini’s architectural archetypes, including the Città universitaria and E42, Siegel draws formalistic parallels between two of Fascism’s major propagandistic and cultural components. Even Horkheimer and Adorno juxtapose cinema and architecture as products of the same totalizing mechanism of the culture industry, though they place them in broader cultural terms. The incipit of their fundamental essay asserts that culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every 18

Italo Calvino, “Autobiografia di uno spettatore,” La strada di San Giovanni (Milano: Mondadori, 1990) 31.

19

Michael Siegel, “The Techniques of the Italian Observer: Fascist and Postfascist Spatio-Visual Culture,” Cinematic Rome, ed. Richard Wrigley (Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2008) 18.

65 part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. 20 In their opinion, no activity or product connected to the culture industry, the generator of commercialized arts (or the business of commercialized arts, as they view it), escapes reduction to a formula or cliché. Homes become identical and thus subsumed by the totalizing efforts of the culture industry, which creates unity through artificial frameworks, developing identity-less structures and slums, such as housing projects. The two intellectuals continue: Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary. 21 The point that city housing projects were “designed to perpetuate the individual” is a specious argument, particular under a totalitarian regime, as Fascism overtly sought to create uniformity. Such as notion of creating sanitized lodgings for the masses does, however, tightly coincide with Mussolini’s risanamento initiative for Rome and the consequent construction of several borgate, discussed in the introduction. Structures intended as temporary solutions to the housing problem, 22 as one easily recognized by the

20

Horkheimer and Adorno 120.

21

Horkheimer and Adorno 120.

22

Prince Ludovico Boncompagni Ludovisi, a governor in the Fascist Senate, supervised the first housing projects initiated under a 1928 law ordaining the creation of case convenzionate. This piece of legislation provided “financial incentives to banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, real estate companies, and construction firms for apartments built with the understanding that rents would be affordable for the working- and middle classes.” Painter 98. By 1931, Boncompagni Ludovisi recognized the benefits gained by investors, rather than by the inhabitants, of such structures. He once proclaimed in

66 way they fell into disrepair only a few years after their construction, demonstrate the Fascists’ then the Christian Democrats’ false attempts to provide aid for the working classes rather than a sincere desire to contain and control the displaced and unemployed.

The aesthetic relationship between housing projects and cinema perhaps became more evident after the dictatorship crumbled, for Fascist era directors never depicted any crosscultural totalizing aesthetics by framing the borgate in their films.

Postwar economic conditions transformed the filmmaking industry from one that relied heavily on peplum films, formulaic telefoni bianchi melodramas, professional actors, and studio sets, to another based on everyday life tragedies, non-professional actors, and on-site shooting. These latter components, hallmarks of cinematic Neorealism, mark a change in the way Italian directors approached the capital city in Italian film. Filmmakers began venturing for the first time into the peripheral slums, the borgate, to show another face of Rome, one that countered Fascism’s mythologized official one. The Eternal City began shedding its role as a monumental, triumphal backdrop to military marches down the Via dell’Impero 23 as well as its role as the arena regards to the displacement of the popular classes from the city center to its periphery in favor of building speculation: “La durata di queste costruzioni sarà di quindici anni […] così il governatorato realizzerà un notevole guadagno, perché il terreno, da tre e quattro lire al metro quadrato, si potrà vendere ad un prezzo molto più alto….” Antonio Cederna, Mussolini urbanista: Lo sventramento di Roma negli anni del consenso (Venezia [Venice]: Corte del Fontego, 2006) 154.

23

The construction of Via dell’Impero under Mussolini, which creates a straight and direct link between the Colosseum and Piazza Venezia, respectively the symbol of ancient Rome’s greatness and Mussolini’s seat of power, required the demolition of large swathes of popular housing within and around the archeological remains of five imperial fora. As Emilio Gentile describes it, “permaneva in Mussolini un’avversione profonda per la vecchia Roma dei quartieri pittoreschi, con il suo ‘colore locale’ che affascinava gli stranieri ma mandava in bestia i fascisti.” Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra 70. As a result Mussolini ordered his pickaxe workers, “picconatori” to begin obliterating homes covering the Markets and Forum of Trajan, the Forum of Augustus and the Forum of Julius Caesar in 1924, in the process condemning thousands of families to move to the new borgate quickly constructed along the periphery.

Mussolini’s project for Via dell’Impero had three major scopes: first, to ease the traffic of the ever growing number of automobiles in Rome; second, “dare ai monumenti antichi una ‘aureola di spazio’,”, and third, to bestow on Rome “l’aspetto di una città armoniosa e moderna.” Pierre Chanlaine, Mussolini parle (Paris, 1932) 69-70; Rpd. in Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra 78-9. According to Emilio Gentile, the

67 of Il Duce’s speeches; instead, cinematographers remade it as what film scholar Noa Steimetsky calls a “ruinous landscape,” 24 reflecting Italy’s destruction and stagnation while the nation wallowed in the trauma inflicted by the ravages of war. The capital city in particular continued evolving into its ambiguously modernist shape following the fall of Fascism, at times representing hope in the symbols of its most famous structures through their seemingly eternal mythical pasts. The opening as well as concluding shots of Saint Peter’s Dome in Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (See Fig. 19) or the Allies’ triumphal march down the Via dell’Impero from the Colosseum to Piazza Venezia in Paisà (See Fig. 20) reflect this belief. 25 In other cases, the city’s ancient and Christian monuments vanish, so as to erase the memory of Fascism’s symbolic appropriation of Ancient Rome’s First Golden Age. 26 Rome reduces to practical anonymity in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and Sciuscià (Ragazzi), for the city stops its “art of growing old, by

transformation of that zone into a long avenue planked by flower gardens and imperial statues “fu l’opera urbanistica più spettacolare realizzata dal regime nel primo decennale dell’era fascista…. La nuova strada era la consacrazione del trionfo della Roma mussoliniana sulla Roma reale.” Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra 88.

24

Noa Steimetsky explains his choice of integrating the term ‘ruinous” to describe Rossellini’s, and by association other Neorealist directors’ landscapes, in postwar films so as to evoke physical as well as psychological meanings: “My choice imparts, rather more so than the simpler ‘ruined,’ the connotation of a pervasive condition of collapse, a terrain made up of ruins, this beyond the subjection to a specific aggressive agent as a particular, limited point. ‘Ruinous’ may add, as well, a nuance of the haunting, traumatizing impact of this terrain on the viewer, on the image, on the postwar experience broadly conceived.” Noa Steimetsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008) 191.

25

The Italian version of the film opens with a pan across the city starting with St. Peter’s Dome centered in the background. The American version, however, begins with Fascist soldiers marching across Piazza di Spagna during the night. Readers should take note of this difference while watching the American version of the film.

26

The First Golden Age of Rome’s ancient empire denotes the period of Augustus’ reign, during which the dictatorship first came into being and the city of Rome received its transformed under the first monumental imperial building projects. Several scholars refer to Mussolini’s ambition to remake Rome according to Augustus’ plans, noting his redevelopment of the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, where Augustus’ family mausoleum and Alter of Peace, the Ara Pacis, stand, as well as Mussolini’s inauguration of the Mostra Augustea della Romanità on September 23, 1937 at the Piazza delle Esibizioni on Via Nazionale. In his analysis of Mussolini’s Augustan projects, the urban historian Borden W. Painter, Jr.

68

QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.

Figure 18. St. Peter’s Dome centers in opening credits. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Figure 19. Child Partisans March toward Saint Peter’s Dome. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1944. remarks: “The fascist presentation of the new Mostra Augustea emphasized the direct connection between Rome’s glorious past and the possibilities of the present. The parallel between the Roman Empire of antiquity and the modern Italian Empire created by fascism was obvious. The glorification of Augustus as the founder of the ancient empire pointed the audience toward Mussolini as the founder of the new empire.” Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, cit. 77. Borden, furthermore, accentuates the relationship between Augustan Rome and the Fascist myth of romanità, set within the cultural context of modern Italy: “Romantic notions of romanità abounded. An ideal fatherland brought equality for all peoples and a sense of social community based on Roman thought, politics, art, law, language, and religion. Christianity was the spiritual force that also represented romanità. A universal culture and civilization permeated romanità….” Ibid., 76.

69

Figure 20. Allied Troops Ride down the via dei Fori Imperiali. Paisà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946.

playing on all its pasts,” 27 instead appearing primarily in its present, modern form. It was, in fact, during the height of Neorealism, from 1945 to 1949, 28 that the Italian cinema first discovered the capital’s newly constructed periphery, a place that continually expanded and evolved under Fascism, while beginning its cultural shift from the margins to the center of attention throughout the postwar period. 29

27

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1984) 91.

28

Christopher Wagstaff identifies these four years as the height of Neorealist cinema in his most recent study Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007) 412.

29

Mark Sheil makes the argument that Neorealism functioned as a fulcrum in Italian cinema’s shift from the imagined spaces created in the studios to modern, built spaces located throughout the city. He writes: “In neorealist films, Rome does not seem to epitomize modernity, so much as exist between modernity and the pre-modern.” “Imagined and Built Spaces in the Rome of Neorealism,” Cinematic Rome, ed. Richard Wrigley (Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2008) 28.

70 Cinema’s First Borgate The earliest, although not archetypical, films to explore the city’s borgate include some of Neorealism’s most famous productions. 30 Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945), for example, incorporates Prenestino, a borgata that underwent continual development and reconstruction throughout the Fascist period (See Fig. 21). The director revolves the film around the clandestine movements of both adult and child resistance fighters within this initially working class neighborhood, for it provides an anonymous space, detached from all Fascist symbolism, to conduct the antifascist and anti-Nazi movement. The area also carries the contemporary symbolic charge of being associated with the clandestine Antifascist movement, for as Berlinguer and Della Seta ably demonstrate: “È nelle borgate che la Resistenza acquistò carattere di massa,” 31 as Fascism was the natural enemy for having segregated the residents from the city center and “li aveva bollati come ‘indesiderabili’ e ‘temibili sotto ogni rapporto’.” 32 The borgata, for clarity purposes, is thus not one of the film’s protagonists, nor does Rossellini intend for the viewer to conceive it as such. 33 Any concerns over housing 30

Pier Paolo Pasolini reflects on Neorealism’s relationship with the borgate in an article dated November 27, 1966: “Il problema delle baracche e del fango, della miseria e della polvere, non è un problema particolaristicamente italiano: esso è legato alla cultura del neorealismo solo perché il neorealismo l’ha scoperto per la prima volta; ma l’ha lasciato così com’era: ossia un problema particolaristicamente italiano.” “L’altro volto della città, ” Paese sera. 1966. Rpt. in Walter Siti, ed., Storie della città di Dio: Racconti e cronache romane: 1950-1966 (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 157. The poetcum-director impugns the movement for its passive, rather than proactive politics, although he rightfully acknowledges that it was the Neorealists and not him, as often stated by scholars, who artistically discovered the borgate. He furthermore takes a “terzamondista” position in his criticism, since by 1966, he had moved his camera away from Rome’s periphery and into the underdeveloped areas of foreign countries.

31

Berlinguer and Della Seta 223.

32

Berlinguer and Della Seta 217.

33

Millicent Marcus claims that “the protagonist of the story is Rome itself, as a place, as a people, and as a historical entity.” Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1986) 46. She continues her discussion justly elaborating on the presence of maps within the Gastapo’s office and in the

71

Figure 21. View of Prenestino. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

shortages or the projects’ architectural development took a backseat to the present German occupation; 34 yet the film required an environment representative of the current crisis’ immediacy, thus a space evocative of Rome’s present. The film, apart from its

apartment of Francesco, a Resistance fighter and the heroine’s fiancé. She, like Rossellini, however, do not account for the city as an architectural or urbanistic entity, which is the scope of this current work. Marcus furthermore identifies the demythifying actions of the film’s child partisan fighters. The boys’ leader, Romoletto, alludes to the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, and as Ben Lawton notes, the Fascist proclivity for naming their children after classical heroes. “Italian Neorealism: A Mirror construction of Reality,” Film Criticism, No. 3 (Winter 1979) 14. Marcus correctly elucidates her point, stating: “The filmmaker is thus able to challenge Mussolini’s mythomania by revising the myth according to anti-Fascist ideals.” Marcus 49.

34

I would like to note, for clarity’s sake, that the Resistance involved combating both the Italian and German forms of Fascism that still remained in Rome after Mussolini’s removal from power. The Nazi army’s occupation of Rome was an extension of Fascist oppression, yet it contemporaneously worsened living conditions while making the enemy more easily identifiable.

72

Figure 22. Bombed Apartment. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1944.

memorable and highly metonymical closing shots, locates the action within the modern cityscape, emphasizing the importance of contemporary affairs over history, such as when Pina, the pregnant heroine played by Anna Magnani, 35 glances upward at a shell of a building across from her apartment, the top floor of which the Allies reduced to ruin in

35

Two major cultural figures comment on Anna Magnani’s role in representing Rome in postwar cinema. The first is Federico Fellini, who introduces her in a cameo in his 1971 auto-biopic, Roma. In the film’s last episode, the actress appears first as a shadow emerging from the bottom left-hand corner of the frame then in full form returning to her home in Trastevere, the prototypical popular neighborhood of Roma. The director, conducting the voiceover, narrates as she walks and stops to interact with him in the night scene: “Questa signora che rientra a casa costeggiando il muro dell’antico palazzetto patrizio è un’attrice romana: Anna Magnani, che potev’essere simbolo stesso della città. Una Roma vista come lupa e vestale, aristocratica e stracciona, tetra e buffonesca, potrei continuare fino a domattina.” Pasolini further emphasizes Fellini’s point by dedicating the entire first passage of his short story, “Donne di Roma,” to a description of Magnani at a party. Pasolini, Storie della città di Dio 73-74. Pasolini’s casting of her as Mamma Roma in the eponymous 1962 film, both as a tribute to as well as a subversion of her role in Rossellini’s Neorealist classic Roma città aperta furthermore accentuates her role as the female cinematic archetype of the demythified, postwar city. Many scholars also comment on her role as the cinematic personification of the city: Daniela Pasquinelli d’Allegra, La forma di Roma: Un paesaggio urbano tra storia, immagini e letteratura (Roma: Carocci, 2008) 161; Ettore Zocaro, “Vecchia e nuova Roma nella filmografia del regime.” L’Urbe e i “romani di Roma”: Contraddizioni (1919-1939), ed. Piergiorgio Mori (Roma: Aranche, 2007) 108.

73

Figure 23. Partisans on a Bridge by EUR. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1944.

a bombardment (See Fig. 22). A second, highly relevant case is the sequence in which an organized group of partisan soldiers free their comrades whom the Nazis captured during a raid of Pina’s apartment complex. As the German trucks transport the men across a newly paved road stretching alongside Mussolini’s E42, within which the Palazzo della Civiltà or Colosseo Quadrato 36 passes in the background, the partisans open fire (See Fig. 23). Rome, in Città aperta, is not the Eternal City, but an urban space undergoing a modernizing e demythifying metamorphosis. The juxtaposition of various forms of transportation moving in and out of Rossellini’s camera frame emphasizes this point.

Characters move, at times, on foot or in horse-drawn carriages, articulating the still

36

The Palazzo della Civiltà, ideated as the ideal center of E42 and intended to house the Mostra della Civiltà Italiana, a celebration of great Italians from Augustus to Mussolini, evokes through its arches aligned along four facades, “una insistenza ritmica,” according to its architects Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto B. La Padula and Mario Romano, that is “una affermazione di essenzialità eterna [e] chiara espressione di romana italianità,” E42: Utopia e scenario del regime: Ideologia e programma per l’“Olimpiade delle civiltà” V. 2, (Venezia [Venice]: Marsilio, 1987) 74. The building was also to contain a room completely dedicated to il Duce, proclaiming his greatness in restoring Rome to its former universal greatness.

74

Figure 24. A Horse-Drawn Carriage in Modern Rome. Roma città aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

premodern aspects of the city (See Fig. 24); at others, trams advance down traffic-less streets, trains move slowly towards the city’s Termini train station, or motorcycles come to a screeching halt (See Fig. 25). Rossellini, thus, searches for Rome’s new identity in the film, an identity contemporaneously located in as well as dislodged from the zones propagating, and propagated by, Fascist ideology, as well as straddling modernization.

Rossellini introduces the borgata Prenestino as an anonymous place for fascism’s enemies, the “sovversivi,” to conduct their campaign away from the officials circulating within the city center. The borgata’s indistinguishable aesthetic characteristics and lack of historicity keep the partisans away from other’s attention, a fact that Cesare Pavese repeats in his most politically motivated novel, Il compagno (1947). His protagonist Pablo, rejected by his lover Linda, decides to move from Turin to Rome to search for a different life. He leaves with his friend Carletto, acquires a job repairing bicycles near the

75

Figure 25. Motorcycle Screeches to a Halt. Roma città apertà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945.

Ponte Milvio, and even finds a new lover, to whom he seems rather indifferent. The two young men establish themselves outside the city walls within one of the capital’s characterless palazzi constructed on Rome’s periphery. Pavese does not seem to encapsulate the area within its historical-political context, but certainly juxtaposes the buildings’, signs of the city, against the surrounding countryside. Rome, standing before hills and umbrella pine trees, a nature that evokes memories of Pablo’s Turin, projects the mythical qualities typical of pastoral spaces found in Pavese’s oeuvre. 37 Pavese’s articulation of a myth of Rome does not reflect the Fascist one. He displaces the caput 37

Pavese may have recognized architectural affinities between the buildings along modern Rome’s boulevards and structures within Turin’s city center, although he does not explicitly articulate them. Italo Insolera documents how nineteenth century Rome initially developed as a reflection of the Piedmontese style, imported by the royal family and their northern government officials: “Dell’ampliamento ottocentesco di Torino i nuovi quartieri di Roma riprendevano tipi e modi. Napoleone aveva impostato i tre ampliamenti torinesi a ovest, sud ed est su tre piazze: cosí a Roma gli architetti ‘piemontesi’ tracciano piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, piazza dell’Indipendenza, piazza Cavour…. Qua e là, timidamente, i ‘piamontesi’ tentarono di trapiantare i portici: ma… il clima di Roma non li richiedeva e la tradizione non li conosceva.” Insolera 35.

76 mundi from its legendary cosmopolitan glory, removes it from its historicity, and inserts it within a natural sphere, emphasizing the simplicity of Roman life and the city’s provision of humankind’s most basic needs. Carletto speaks to Pablo about the city before their departure, “come Milo di donne. Mi diceva che Roma è una grande città dove tutti ci mangiano e dànno da mangiare. – C’è tanto grasso, - mi diceva, - che lo senti nell’aria. Nessuno chiude nemmeno la porta di casa.” 38 The two young men discover ways to enjoy themselves, despite the presence of Fascist officials throughout the city.

They even manage to reinvent themselves, eventually becoming involved in covert Antifascist activities, which they conduct either within centrally located dives or outside the city in the countryside. Pablo, unfortunately does not hide his political interests as successfully as his friend does, and is discovered and pulled from his bed by the police who take him to the prison on the via Lungara, namely Regina Coeli. He awaits interrogation fpr only a short while, expecting physical punishment, which never comes.

What is interesting, nevertheless, is the place where the police find him; it is unmistakably within a borgata. Pavese never once uses this term, yet, he describes in a few words the basic, typical appearance of borgata architecture while Carletto and Pablo approach Dorina’s dwelling: “Dorina stava su una piazza in capo a un ponte. – È ponte Milvio -. Io camminavo e mi guardavo intorno. C’erano a dieci piani e da ogni parte le colline illuminate. Non passava nessuno. – Sembra d’essere a Torino nel centro, - dicevo.

– Invece siamo in barriera.” 39 These few lines, interestingly, highlight the ambiguous and contradictory nature of Rome’s borgate. The architecture imbues them with a modern,

38

Cesare Pavese Il compagno (1947; Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1990) 78.

39

Pavese 80.

77 urban appearance, yet they do not stand in the city center but in the midst or against the countryside. In Il compagno, the area is neither distinctly urban nor distinctly rural; it is both and neither, a characteristic that becomes more evident in later Roman narratives, including Luchino Visconti’s film, Bellissima.

Luchino Visconti adapts various similar aspects to Pavese’s perspective as well as to Rossellini’s demonumentalizing and demythifying approach to Rome, in his Neorealist classic Bellissima (1951). The director hired Anna Magnani to play a working class mother, who projects her own petit-bourgeois ambitions for a materialistically better life onto her seven-year-old daughter, Maria, in whom she invests the family’s savings to prepare her for an audition with the then famous director, Alessandro Blasetti. Visconti recognized Magnani’s force as the Neorealist voice and face of Rome, replicating Rossellini’s stylistic choice by building upon Roma città aperta’s cinematic archetypes.

Visconti, for instance, situates Magnani’s residence once again in Prenestino, the working class borgata featured in Rossellini’s film (See Fig. 26 and 27). Case convenzionate, constructed with private and some public capital under Fascism’s Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI) to handle the housing crisis, characterize this area of Rome. The structures generally have eight to ten floors, and served to house a variety of people either “1) disabled from the war of the fascist revolution; 2) large families; 3) veterans and decorated veterans of the war; 4) workers and pensioners of the Governatorato; and 5) those evicted by judicial authority for reasons other than failure to pay rent or questions of ‘morality’.” 40 The structures in Bellissima, which primarily alternate between the family’s basement-level apartment and the grounds of Cinecittà, accentuate the working-

40

Painter 99.

78

Figure 26. Case Convenzionate in Prenestino: 1. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

Figure 27. Case convenzionate in Prenestino: 2. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

79

Figure 28. Maddelena and Annovazzi near the Permolio. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

class nature that Visconti, a Marxist supporter, wished to communicate in his film. The Italian cinema, the only real, centralized industry in Rome, has the potential to actualize dreams, beyond its psychologically escapist elements, while providing employment opportunities for Romans, especially for those residing in the borgate surrounding the “City of Cinemaâ€? in the postwar era. It is this more practical element of Italian cinema that Visconti aesthetically accentuates in his film, as he ensures that his camera never once frames Roman ruins or intact monuments of any kind. The sequence along the Tiber River bank involving Maddalena (Anna Magnani) and Annovazzi, a worker of sorts at CinecittĂ who has taken a liking to her and thus has promised to help her, highlights the working class aesthetics that Visconti sought to achieve in Bellissima.

80

Figure 29. Cinecittà Entranceway. Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1951.

The two potential lovers rush through the high reeds, while the skeletal Permolio and a factory stand clearly in the background (See Fig. 28). Visconti creates an industrial-age locus amoenus within the confined, yet wild nature along the water, depriving Rome of any monumental charge.

The director’s Roman film seems to adhere to the urbanistic theorist, Lewis Mumford’s, 1938 declaration of “The Death of the Monument”. Mumford recognized Rome as the archetypical monumentalized city that condemns one Italian generation after another to mount guard and protect the strength of its ancient structures. 41 He believed this sort of mentality reduced the city to a glorified cemetery and prevented people from living. Visconti, like Mumford, articulated the importance of progress and renewal typical of modernism, through the transference of human energy from the construction of lifeless temples to operational dwellings. His film, thus, depicts some of the most active

41

Lewis Mumford, “The Death of the Monument,” The Culture of Cities (1938; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970) 435.

81 and new areas of Rome, including Prenestino and Cinecittà (See Fig. 26, 27 and 29). As Mumford writes: One of the most important attributes of a vital urban environment is one that has rarely been achieved in past civilizations: the capacity for renewal. Against the fixed shell and the static monument, the new architecture places its faith in the powers of social adaptation and reproduction. The sign of the older order of architecture, in almost every culture, was the House of the Dead: in modern culture, it is the dwelling house, or House of the Living, renewable generation by generation. 42 Visconti ensures that Rome appears as a House of the Living, focusing on the present drama and human tragedy endured by Maddalena and Maria. After witnessing Blasetti and his crew ridicule Maria’s audition tape while hiding behind a projector at Cinecittà, Maddalena emerges and chastises them for their indifference to her family’s sacrifice to prepare the child for the contest. Mother and daughter storm out of the studios and walk home, arriving at a park bench outside their apartment at night, where Maddalena cries holding her daughter on her lap. Blasetti, in the meantime, has changed his mind about the child, appreciating her comedic value, and sends two assistants to Prenestino to have Maddalena sign a contract so that he may include her daughter in the film. Maddalena, however, is no fool and realizes why Blasetti wants her daughter. She angrily evicts the men from her house, despite the economic relief that Maria’s participation in the film would provide. Maddalena has realized that her daughter’s wellbeing supercedes fame and fortune, and she refuses to subject her daughter to further humiliation. There is no hopeful promise projected in Bellissima’s concluding frame, as in Roma città aperta; nevertheless, Visconti has taken the city out of the hegemonic class’ hands, and made it the city of its small but true working class.

42

Mumford 433.

82 Rossellini’s as well as Visconti’s films coincide with Cesare Zavattini’s notions of neorealist cinema, which he formed while working as the movement’s preeminent screenwriter throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. As he proclaims in his 1953 “Alcune idee sul cinema:” “Il cinema non dovrebbe mai voltarsi indietro. Dovrebbe accettare, come conditio sine qua non, la contemporaneità. OGGI, OGGI, OGGI, OGGI.” 43 The opening sequences in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette from 1948, on which Zavattini collaborated as a screenwriter, thus similarly correlate contemporary duress with the urbanistic space of a Roman borgata; but again, the peripheral area carries a negligible politico-ideological weight, while communicating instead a rather strong humanist charge. 44 It is seemingly a semiotically empty space, for the viewer cannot connect any past or cultural significance to the quarter except for its own construction, unlike areas erected as part of Mussolini’s official, celebratory urbanism, such as E42 or the Stadio Olimpico, 45 the latter of which appears in the film’s demoralizing conclusion. Val Melaina, across which De Sica’s camera pans in the establishing shot, emerged under the Fascist government during the late 1930s, and bears

43

Cesare Zavattini, “Alcune idee sul cinema,” Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura: Come si scrive un capolavoro: Umberto D. (Parma: Monte Università Parma, 2005) 16.

44

John David Rhodes provides a compelling analysis of Ladri di biciclette’s incorporation of the borgata Val Maleina. He insists that Fascism’s sventramenti and resettlement projects are legible in the film; however, I believe that such an impression can only form in the mind of the viewer who has read the political and urbanistic history preceding Ladri di biciclette’s production. The only clear connection to the past is the economic misery endured by several of the film’s characters, and in particular, its protagonist.

John David Rhodes, Stupendous Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 2007) 7.

45

“The boldest new project announced by the regime dedicated a new site to a sports complex.

The site, several miles up and across the Tiber, took years to develop as the Foro Mussolini [Foro Italico].

By unveiling the project in 1927, the regime made it clear that the work of transforming Rome amounted to more than projects in the historic center devoted primarily to recovering ancient monuments. The Foro Mussolini would give Rome a new, modern complex, or ‘city’, devoted to sports, physical fitness, and youth.” Borden 14.

83

Figure 30. Characterless Palazzi and Barren Landscape in Val Melaina: 1. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

Figure 31. Characterless Palazzi and Barren Landscape in Val Melaina: 2. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

84 its ontologically real emptiness to the viewer through the director’s lens (See Fig. 30 and 31). One immediately perceives the lack of infrastructure: there are dirt roads, barren landscapes, and women gathering water from outdoor pumps (See Fig. 32). De Sica uses the borgata’s impoverished environment, characterized only by the identical five-story modern apartment complexes standing apparently in the middle of nowhere to highlight and mirror the estrangement of the film’s unemployed antihero, Antonio Ricci. The director seems to have intuited or out-right recognized the human pathologies that the borgate’s urbanistic deplorability seemed to instigate, which Italo Insolera later articulates in reference specifically to Fascism’s late 1930s housing projects, such as Val Maleina: Si ha, nelle borgate romane, l’impressione che il rapporto tra la gente e il mondo sia diverso che per tutti gli altri, come filtrato attraverso uno schermo che ha trattenuto qualche cosa lasciando su tutto un senso di provvisorio e di incompleto, di abbandono e di umiliazione. La malinconia della speranza e l’esasperazione dell’attesa diventarono ben presto le caratteristiche morali della passività forzata e obbligatoria. 46 Rome is thus unrecognizable, and intentionally so. It stands in a state of stasis, just as the borgatari do, after Mussolini’s sventramento of the area around the Mausoleo di Augusto forced them to leave not only their homes, but abandon their small shops and family trades. The postwar government served the displaced popolo no better as it slowly transitioned into a democracy following four years of foreign occupation and political indecision. Ladri di biciclette’s lack of construction sites, generally distinguished by moving machinery, steel girders and semi-completed structural skeletons, typical of later films that investigate the borgate and their inhabitants, hence underscores the sense of “incompleteness,” 46

Insolera 141.

85

Figure 32. Women at the Water Pump. Ladri di biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948.

“abandonment,” and “forced and obligatory passivity” of Antonio Ricci and other impoverished Romans like him.

The city, as in Visconti’s Bellissima, also lacks monuments. As Millicent Marcus indicates: “De Sica’s Rome… is a fragmented, decentered space with few familiar landmarks and no sense of cohesion. With the exception of [the palm reader] La Santona’s apartment and Antonio’s tenement, we never return to the same place twice, nor does De Sica ever give us any establishing shots to tell us where we are.” 47 De Sica hinges his picaresque plot on the wanderings of Antonio Ricci and his young son, Bruno,

47

Marcus 73.

86 through areas of Rome unbeknownst to the average non-Roman viewer. The two figures search for the father’s bicycle, which was stolen from him while he was working as a poster biller in Rome’s city center. His and family’s livelihood depend on that object, for without it, Antonio cannot do his job and the government will reassign his position to one of his many jobless neighbors. The bicycle, thus, ontologically obtains a level of importance beyond its usual value, rendering the story’s simple plot more tragic. De Sica exploits the tragic alienation of the father and son by filming the father and son beyond the Colosseum, away from the Vatican, and nowhere near the flamboyant fountains in the Baroque city center. Only, perhaps, the viewer familiar with the tortuous Medieval streets of Trastevere, the architectural elements of various bridges, or the post-Risorgimento avenues stretching through Rome could understand Antonio’s and his son’s movements in and around Italy’s modern capital. Their story is anonymous, and as a result, the film’s locations are equally indistinctive. De Sica, furthermore, tells the story at street level, avoiding panoramic shots found in Rossellini’s contemporary films. This choice imbues the film with a sense of simple reality, and keeps the viewer with Antonio and Bruno as they physically write their story in their motions. Michel de Certeau explains this effect in “Walking in the City,” a chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life: The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is blind. 48 Ricci, in fact, moves through Rome like a blind man in his effort to recover his bicycle.

The lack of toponyms does not facilitate matters, as only four places are named, further 48

de Certeau 93.

87 creating a sense of disorientation: Val Melaina, Via della Paglia, Porta Portese, and Piazza Vittorio. Rossellini and Visconti adopt a similar technique in their films, although film historians have often exposed the former’s sense of the city by mapping Roma città aperta’s locations (not to mention, the appearance of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the film’s conclusion imbues the narrative with a sense that Rome, the Eternal City, will survive the Nazi occupation). Visconti, on the other hand, makes his demonumentalized Rome somewhat more identifiable by showing the entrance to Cinecittà towards the end of the film, disclosing Maddalena’s residence in the dialogue, and selecting Rome’s most recognizable symbol of the working class, the Permolio. It is, however, difficult to determine to what extent contemporary audiences would have comprehended Visconti’s engagement in Marxist discourse with his decision to include several shots of Rome’s gas and electric generator; nor can one gauge the impact that muttering the family’s address during the film’s last ten minutes would have had on viewers’ socio-economic conceptualization of Maddalena and her daughter in Bellissima.

Beyond Neorealism’s Big Three The juxtaposition of Rome’s peripheral slums and their demythification of Rome with economic depression evolves throughout the 1950s resurfacing in a variety of films by numerous well-known directors, beyond the Neorealist triumvirate: Rossellini, Visconti, and De Sica. The earliest figures maintain a highly Neorealistic approach, tightly correlating the borgate with the struggle of the working-class; however, over the decade filmmakers began developing a more modernist approach to the capital city’s

88 slums. 49 Giuseppe De Santis, a largely overlooked Neorealist filmmaker and theorist, shot Roma ore 11 (1952) as a cinematic reproach against the government’s and the capitalist system’s inability to provide sufficient work for the Italian people. Depicting a Marxist allegory of actual events surrounding the collapse of a building’s staircase, where over two hundred female job applicants had convened for a typist position, Roma ore 11 transforms the central structure located at via Savoia, n. 31 into a symbol of “un Potere burocratico-assistenziale che, arroccato agli ultimi piani, distante e irraggiungibile, dispensa alla folla lasciata giù ad attendere, un lavoro appena sufficiente per la sopravvivenza.” 50 According to Antonio Parisi, the physical violence inflicted upon these girls and women when the staircase falls expressionistically reflects the “violenza morale della città” 51 where those forced to live precariously even lose the hope to better their social and economic standing.

De Santis’ film navigates the individual stories of eight women who appeared that fateful day to apply for a job. All but one actually needed the income, while many came from the low and subaltern classes both from within and without the capital city’s walls.

One of the women whom De Santis chronicles in his choral film, and who also manages to escape serious injury during the accident, is Caterina, a prostitute searching for a more

49

The French director and film critic Alexandre Astruc coined the expression “neorealismo interiore” to describe the heavily intellectual, metaphysical, and existential themes adopted by Michelangelo Antonioni in his work, referring in particular to Il grido (1957). While he proposes a conceptually adequate way of considering Antonioni’s cinema within the filmic culture of the time, the term may actually have a broader application when thinking about the manipulation of the Roman cityscape by other filmmakers. Otherwise the expression, which many Antonioni scholars replicate, loses its semantic and theoretical charge when limited to one cultural figure.

50

Antonio Parisi. Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis: Tra passione e ideologia (Roma: Cadmo,

1983) 118.

51

Parisi 118.

89 honest means of financial support. In the second half of the film, after the stairs collapse, the lonely and destitute woman returns to the site of the incident after being discharged from the hospital. She searches desperately for an umbrella and purse she had borrowed from neighbors and lost in the chaos and ruin of the crumbled stairs. Caterina, who manages to recover the belongings, encounters a wealthy client, who accompanied her to the interview that morning. He offers to take her to her home in Tormarancio, one of the worst Roman borgate, 52 where the anonymous man ultimately decides to abandon her, frightened by the neighborhood’s squalor. De Santis understood the psychological importance, not only for the characters but also for the viewers, of correlating a film’s environment with its storyline. He opines in an article composed for Vittorio Mussolini’s Cinema in 1941: “L’importanza di un ‘paesaggio’ e la scelta di esso come elemento fondamentale dentro cui i personaggi dovrebbero vivere recando, quasi, i segni dei suoi riflessi, così come intesero i nostri grandi pittori quando vollero sottolineare maggiormente ora il sentimento di un ritratto, ora la drammaticità di una composizione,” 53 are necessary components for any artistically successful film. De Santis believed that filmic landscapes gain meaning from those who occupy them, while cinematic human subjects conversely gain meaning from their surroundings, as “il paesaggio non avrà

52

Alberto Moravia dedicates an article to Tormarancio’s fifteenth anniversary in 1947 entitled “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” in which he articulates the insalubrious, prison-like conditions of the borgata. He comments that since “non ci sono cloache a Tormarancio, due fossi di cemento corrono lungo i padiglioni: sono piene di acque sporche e detriti che emanano un fetore agro come di immondezza che fermenti.” L’Europeo. Vol. 3 n. 14, 1947. Rpt. in Enzo Siciliano, ed. Moravia e Roma (Roma: Fondo Alberto Moravia, 2003) 57. The so-called “author of Rome” adds that the visitor, upon arriving in Tormarancio, “ha la sensazione precisa di trovarsi in un campo di concentramento del tipo di Buchenwald.”

Moravia, “Fossa di Tormarancio” 57.

53

Giuseppe De Santis, “Per un paesaggio italiano,” Cinema, N. 116, 25 April, 1941; Rfd. Verso il Neorealismo: Un critico cinematografico degli anni quaranta, ed. Callisto Cosulich, (Roma: Bulzoni , 1982) 42.

90 alcuna importanza se non ci sarà l’uomo, e viceversa.” 54 Including the borgata was thus imperative to Roma ore 11’s plot if De Santis was to communicate the marginalization and abandonment of Rome’s underclass by members of bourgeois society, whom the prostitute Caterina and her trepid male companion respectively represent.

According to Antonio Vitti, the shot in Tormarancio “caused De Santis problems with the producer and the state censors, who wanted the prostitute’s return home edited out.” 55 A long legal dispute ensued, and even Cesare Zavattini testified, criticizing the episode; nevertheless, the court eventually decided in the director’s favor, supporting his artistic claim of self-expression. The sort of disapproving attention this scene received, in comparison with those depicting borgatari and their environs in films such as Roma città aperta and Ladri di biciclette, resulted from the highly moralistic social climate promulgated by the newly-instated Christian Democratic party. Love stories, typical of Neorealismo rosa, 56 easily complemented the wealth and promise offered within Rome’s reviving historical city center with the capital’s outlying popular neighborhoods, as witnessed in Luciano Emmer’s Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (1952). For classical Neorealism, however, films that perpetuated images of squalor and stories of unemployment as well as countercultural daily activities experienced by Rome’s subaltern citizens troubled the hegemonic bourgeoisie who wished to ignore the continual problems of poverty and desperation while it personally shifted into an era of prosperity.

54

De Santis, “Per un paesaggio italiano” 45.

55

Antonio Vitti, Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996)

66.

56

Neorealismo rosa, or “Pink Neorealism”, refers to a commercially more profitable, though critically less successful comic (or tragicomic) form of cinematic Neorealism. The subgenre is often linked to the commedia all’italiana and filmic melodramas form the 1950s. For more information and examples of such films, refer to: Bondanella, Italian Cinema 88-89.

91 Umberto Eco composed a compelling essay in 1995 that addresses the emerging discomfort of the Italian middle class’ with images of poverty and underclass affairs in the 1950s. The scholar attributes the political motivations for such behavior to the perpetuity of Fascism, which as a cultural movement, never fully disappeared. Eco notes that governmental regimes, such as Mussolini’s, can be overturned and discredited; however, because of underlying ways of thinking and feeling, “una serie di abitudini culturali, una nebulosa di istinti oscuri e di insondabili pulsioni,” 57 Fascism managed to survive in alternative forms during the postwar era due to the Italian mentality. He explains that the term and parts of its ideology, likewise, endured in Italy throughout the Christian Democratic era as well as abroad in other modern dictatorships precisely because the original Italian form lacked any monolithic principles. He argues that Fascism is a “totalitarismo fuzzy… piuttosto un collage di diverse idee politiche e filosofiche, un alveare di contraddizioni.” 58 This observation provides a theoretical foundation on which to base the proliferation of denunciations against the Christian Democratic party that major cultural figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia expressed in publications during the 1970s and 1980s. 59 Eco, however, updates

57

Umberto Eco, “Fascismo Eterno,” Cinque scritti morali (Milano: Bompiani, 1997) 30.

58

Eco 33.

59

Pasolini composed one of his most famous articles in 1975, the year of his murder, against the Fascism of the Christian Democrats. Entitled “Il vuoto del potere in Italia” but more popularly referred to as “L’articolo delle lucciole”, this piece directly associates the hegemonic party of the postwar period with the dictatorship that proceeded it: “Essa poteva valere ancora fino a circa una decina di anni fa: quando il regime democristiano era ancora la pura e semplice continuazione del regime fascista. Ma una decina di anni fa, è successo "qualcosa". "Qualcosa" che non c'era e non era prevedibile non solo ai tempi del ‘Politecnico’, ma nemmeno un anno prima che accadesse (o addirittura, come vedremo, mentre accadeva).

Il confronto reale tra "fascismi" non può essere dunque ‘cronologicamente’, tra il fascismo fascista e il fascismo democristiano: ma tra il fascismo fascista e il fascismo radicalmente, totalmente, imprevedibilmente nuovo che è nato da quel "qualcosa" che è successo una decina di anni fa.” Pier Paolo Pasolini, “1° febbraio 1975: L’articolo delle lucciole,” Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, eds. Walter Siti e Silvia De Laude, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 2006) 404. Rpt. of “Il vuoto del

92 the terminology, reformulating Fascism into the expressions “Ur-Fascismo” and “Fascismo Eterno” to conceptualize and encompass the loose assemblage of characteristics comprising Fascism’s nebulous nature.

It is important to recognize that within the writer’s inventory of Ur-Fascist characteristics, there are a few which particularly speak to the bourgeoisie’s denunciation of certain images of underclass and dubiously moral aspects of Rome in postwar cinema.

The first is the “paura di differenza”, 60 which in turn feeds the middle class’ xenophobic fear that outsiders are assailing them, generating “l’ossessione del complotto.” 61 In order to assuage their discomfort, in Eco’s opinion, the bourgeoisie turns to a popular form of elitism, which encourages the “disprezzo per i deboli,” 62 in addition to a complex form of machismo, which disparages as well as condemns non-conformist sexual behaviors, ranging from homosexuality to prostitution. As a result, cinematic characters such as De Santis’ Caterina or the streetwalkers in Lizzani’s “Amore che si paga”, met social and

potere in Italia.” Corriere della sera. 1 February 1975. Alberto Moravia compliments his close friend’s assertions, first by organizing a compilation of writings by numerous writers of the 1970s denouncing Rome as Italy’s capital, entitled Contro Roma. He tended to focus his criticism more on the party’s moral and physical debasement of the capital, rather than generalize it into an overarching political protest. By the 1980s, Moravia blames the Christian Democrats for reducing Rome to ruin in an interview with his friend and biographer Constanzo Costantini. Costantini inquires, “Come’era la Roma degli anni di guerra e del dopoguerra?” Moravia responds with an answer highly reminiscent of Pasolini’s own impressions of modern Rome: “Posso tuttavia dire che, nonostante il fascismo, Roma era ancora una città bellissima. Non c’erano ancora quartieri costruiti dalle giunte democristiane. L’orrore è cominciato con le giunte democristiane e con le speculazioni edilizie. Io e Elsa eravamo andati a vivere ad Anacapri, ma tornavamo spesso a Roma, e ogni volta le rovine aumentavano. Roma è andata sempre in rovina, è la città per eccellenza delle rovine. Alle rovine antiche si sono aggiunte quelle moderne, in specie quelle democristiane, ma è rimasta tuttavia una città molto viva.” Costanzo Costantini and Alberto Moravia, “L’intervista: Alberto Moravia: La mia Roma,” Roma ieri, oggi, domani, V.2 (1989), n. 9 (febbraio), 21.

60

Eco 41.

61

Eco 41

.

62

Eco 44.

93 political resistance, especially through censorship, throughout the 1950s for they threatened the new, democratic, yet still bourgeois, brand of Fascism.

Scholars generally agree that Pier Paolo Pasolini launched Ur-Fascism-type “undesirable” people and places into the eyes of mainstream Italian society with his novel Ragazzi di vita in 1955, which I thoroughly analyze in Chapter 2. The intellegentsia’s predilection for his fictional representations is constantly evidenced by their innumerable references to the borgate modified by the adjective pasoliniane; however, one should by now understand, as demonstrated by the abovementioned examples, that Pasolini was not the first to examine nor assign meaning to Rome’s underclass periphery and its inhabitants, which represented anomalies to many cultural figures in a supposedly modern/modernizing Western country. In fact, an important, yet underestimated film that exposes and analyses these spaces as expressions of existential crises pre-Pasolini is the collectively produced film L’amore in città (1953). Organized by Neorealism’s preeminent screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini, and composed of six distinct vignettes, each directed by a different artist, L’amore in città presents modernist, urbanized melodramas of men and women in Rome. The film opens with “Lo Spettatore”, a cinematic journal “scritto con la pellicola e l’obbiettiva anziché carta e inchiostro” announcing the following inquiries into the multifaceted love lives of Roman citizens, including: Dino Risi’s “Paradiso per 3 ore”, Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Tentato Suicidio”, Carlo Lizzani’s “Amore che si paga”, Federico Fellini’s “Agenzia matrimoniale”, Francesco Maselli’s and Cesare Zavattini’s “Storia di Caterina”, and Alberto Lattuada’s “Gli italiani si voltano.” Each episode presents a face of love situated within the context and space of the contemporary Italian capital. Some offer lighthearted renderings of affection, such as

94 “Paradiso per 3 ore,” a dance hall sequence; or “Gli italiani si voltano,” a montage of men turning their heads to glance at beautiful women. Others, instead, depict the difficult choices one makes when confronted with emotional duress, such as in Antonioni’s “Tentato Suicidio,” stories of suicide attempts following separations; and “Storia di Caterina,” a tragic chronicle of a mother compelled to abandon her infant due to poverty.

Two of the young filmmakers involved in L’amore in città’s creation, who agreed to participate in the project for free, emerged as major international cinematic figures in the years to come, namely Fellini and Antonioni, while Carlo Lizzani earned critical recognition on a more national scale. These three directors present signature reconstructions of the Roman borgate in their early cinema, not to mention before Ragazzi di vita’s appearance in 1955, inserting themselves and their individual visions within the wake of Neorealism’s cinematic success. Each filmmaker developed a unique artistic relationship to the Roman slums in their early films, thus falsifying the constantly perpetuated idea that discussions pertaining to the Roman periphery require a “Pasolinian” designation. In L’amore in città, Antonioni and Lizzani take the opportunity to explore the Roman slums’ connection to socioeconomic and existential crises. These two directors successfully juxtapose the physical as well as psychological distance created between the borgatari and mainstream society, introducing images in their semidocumentaristic film shorts that resonate more with later 1950s films than with their High Neorealist predecessors. 63 Fellini, on the other hand, waits a year before conducting a

63

There are a variety of ways of referring to the stages of Neorealism’s development. Some scholars prefer to divide the postwar movement into two categories, namely before the Cold War and after it. Christopher Wagstaff, however, provides what I believe is a useful paradigm for recognizing works pertaining to High Neorealism, a term which refers to the movement’s critical and sometimes box office success in the immediate postwar period, beginning in 1945 and ending in 1949; and Low Neorealism, when the movement began losing steam as well as political, cultural, and not to mention financial support.

95 series of investigations into Rome’s margins, starting with La strada (1954), then followed with Il bidone (1955), to climax with Le notti di Cabiria (1957), before surprisingly returning to the borgate in La dolce vita (1960), a film epitomizing the Economic Boom. Fellini’s multifaceted creative excursion into the Italian capital’s periphery takes others’ early literary and cinematic conceptions of the borgate and inserts them into a plethora of original discourses. As such, a lengthy analysis of Fellini’s early cinema will appear in Chapter 3; Lizzani’s and Antonioni’s work, however, provides one of the first realistic and polysemous fictionalized representations of Rome’s margins, capturing not only these areas’ contradictorily modern and premodern characteristics, but also the various communicative possibilities of that impoverished urban environment.

Carlo Lizzani: “L’amore che si paga” Carlo Lizzani’s “L’amore che si paga” is the first vignette to appear in the commercially and critically unsuccessful film journal. The film short’s setting is highly reminiscent of that of film noir, as the filmmaker avails himself of certain lighting techniques to accentuate the movements of real-life prostitutes strolling in and out of dark spaces over the stretch of a night. He artfully adopts Zavattini’s aesthetic of pedinamento della realtà, 64 “shadowing of reality,” recreating the city in sharp chiaroscuros, manipulating light and its absence to create silhouettes against walls as well as to hide the prostitutes when bourgeois families or authorities emerge in the streets. The women’s figures often

Many important Neorealist films still emerged, nevertheless, including De Sica and Zavattini’s Umberto D. (1952) as well as Antonioni’s Il grido (1957). See Note 32.

64

Gabrielle Lucantonio, ed., “Giovanni registi diventeranno grandi,” L’amore in città: film a episodi (Minerva Classica - Gianluca & Stefano Curti) 5.

96

Figure 33. Shadow-Like Prostitute. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir.

Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

recede and vanish into Rome’s buildings or under trees, blending like chameleons into the dark urban landscape (See Fig. 33 and 34). The director correlates their presence in the city center as well as along its periphery with Rome’s emerging modern night life, later immortalized by Fellini in La dolce vita (1960), as the women work under electric street lamps along the Passeggiata Archeologica, alongside the neon lights of a movie house and of the newspaper Il Messaggero’s downtown headquarters, as well as in front of the transient and frenetic space of Termini Train Station. Lizzani’s Rome abounds with movement, objects and people, creating a sense of modernization, intensification, and progress re-initiated under the capitalist government.

According to the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, this increased action creates shifts in humankind’s internal responses to swift external stimuli:

97

Figure 34. Shadowing a Prostitute. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir.

Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

With every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization of creatures dependant on differences, [the metropolis creates] a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence. 65 There is a noticeable increase in life’s tempo between Lizzani’s representation of modernizing Rome and the almost stagnated images presented in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. There is also a recognizable change in attitude among the figures represented in each film. Simmel ideates a correlation between sensory stimulation and the city that somewhat resonates with Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur. He profers the idea that walking around the city, which has increasingly become a fragmentary experience, renders the city dweller blasé, a notion that Lizzani translates into his female wanderers, 65

Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2002) 70.

98 Rome’s streetwalkers, who slowly write their stories moving in and around Italy’s modernizing capital. Benjamin simply believed it was “the only valid field of experience,” 66 as he quotes André Breton in the epigraph to his essay on Marseilles, which begins with his observations of prostitutes within the alleyways around the Southern French city’s port. The director shoots the streetwalkers’ feet as they stroll, and even accompanies them in an andante tempo tracking shot down a dark street. The voiceover’s innocuous interview, however, humanizes these women, often treated as commercialized goods rather than people, metaphysically inserting and mirroring them in their urban surroundings. Even the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla are debased, as Lizzani inserts them into a modern documentaristic tragedy. The stone structures stand hidden behind a dark, trafficked road, which displaces them, demythifies them as well as modernizes them (See Fig. 35). Lizzani documents the ruins’ contemporary usage as an open-air brothel, degenerating the imperial bath complex into one of many dystopias within a modernist society.

Peter Bondanella exclaims in one of the few analyses of this filmic episode that it was “censored from the American version by the Italian government because of its shocking revelation that prostitution existed in Italy!” 67 The few monographs on Lizzani’s work barely address this short, focusing predominantly on his feature-length films, his early work for the publication Cinema, and his four-year stint as the Venice Film Festival’s director. Gualtiero De Santi offers a mere summary of the episode, occasionally quoting the dialogue between the narrator-interviewer and the prostitutes, 66

Walter Benjamin, “Marseilles,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Reflections, ed. and intro. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) 131.

67

Bondanella, Italian Cinema 101.

99

Figure 35. The Baths of Caracalla as an Open-Air Bordello. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

but providing practically no critical analysis.68 Not a single article compiled in Carlo Lizzani: cinema, storia e storia del cinema refers to the short, 69 while Lizzani’s own autobiography, Il mio lungo viaggio nel secolo breve, discusses his open adherence to Communist ideology as well as collaborations with major Italian producers, Neorealist 68

The most analytical information with which De Santi provides the reader is the following: “Tutte storie di miseria ed abbandono… colte da uno sguardo attento alla dimensione sociologica e umana della prostituzione ma anche in grado di mostrare la metropoli moderna nel suo aspetto notturno. C’è insomma in Lizzani una attitudine partecipe ma anche un certo distacco, che consente di cogliere le cose con una maggiore complessità e senza moralismi. E anche il racconto sa disporsi su un asse cronologico una passata, le due e mezzo, le tre – che ordina la materia e in parte la sottrae alla ruvidità dell’inchiesta pura.” Gualtiero De Santi, Carlo Lizzani (Roma: Gremese, 2001) 22. The author does not go beyond the descriptive, avoiding technical, cultural, psychological, and sociological analyses, and leaving his readers with no more than they would gain by watching the film themselves.

69

Gualtiero De Santi and Bernardo Valli, eds. Carlo Lizzani: Cinema, storia, e storia del cinema (Napoli [Naples]; Liguori, 2007).

100 directors, and movie stars, while avoiding any mention of “L’amore che si paga.” 70 Lizzani’s episode in L’amore in città, however, cinematically presages a new vision of Rome and of those who frequent the city, which others, including Pasolini, Fellini, in addition to the lesser famous Mauro Bolognini and Franco Rossi will perpetuate in later works. As anyone who reads Pasolini’s novels Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) or watches the other directors’ films, respectively Le notti di Cabiria (1957), La notte brava (1959) and Morte di un amico (1959) will discover, the placement of prostitutes working along the Passeggiata Archeologica, 71 and living in the peripheral borgate cinematically originated in Lizzani’s work. 72 The other filmmakers may have not referred to “L’amore che si paga” when ideating their films, but were simply miming reality; however recognition must be paid to Lizzani’s initial demythifying connection between the modern borgate and the baths.

The borgate appear in the latter third of the film short, after three in the morning, when a couple streetwalkers allow Lizzani to follow them home with his camera. The camera frames one as she approaches a tram, while the voiceover narrates that “la maggior parte vivono nell’estrema periferia,” a living situation expected for Rome’s socially and economically marginalized (See Fig. 36). One returns to a small apartment owned by a friend. The viewer does not watch her approach the building, but instead 70

Carlo Lizzani, Il mio lungo viaggio nel secolo breve (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2007).

71

The Passeggiata Archeologica is the archeological area set within Rome’s city center designated for the display of the Eternal City’s most monumental ruins. It runs from the Imperial Fora, past the Colosseum, under the Arch of Constantine, to the Circus Maximus, and down the Appian Way to the Baths of Caracalla.

72

The initial scenes of “L’amore che si paga” expose the place where Rome’s prostitutes wandered at night in search of clients, while the final scenes follow three of them home, one to her rented room in a pensione, another to an apartment in a large housing project, and the last to a shack in one of the capital’s shantytowns.

101

Figure 36. The Tram to Rome’s Periphery. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 37. View of a Palazzo from a Prostitute’s Window. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

102

Figure 38. A Prostitute Returns to Her Shack. Carlo Lizzani, dir., “L’amore che si paga,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

follows the gaze of the camera through the bedroom window, into the dark interior. The unnamed prostitute does not have a view of landscape, nor does she or Lizzani identify where she lives. All one sees is the internal courtyard of her casa popolare, characterized by a grid of identical windows spreading across and extending up the walls of the building, emphasizing her anonymity within Rome (See Fig. 37). Lizzani allows for the building to consume the entire window frame, before he passes onto the woman who briefly recounts the failure of three different matrimonial engagements. The lack of space and sky creates a stifling effect, accentuating the prostitute’s entrapment in her current life style. The director cuts away from the room to the film’s final scene, which depicts one last prostitute walking to her single-room hut in a baraccopoli (See Fig. 38). Lizzani introduces her story as another example of abandonment and rejection, traits that not only describe the women compelled to work on the capital city’s streets, but also their

103 residences. The darkness of night and lack of artificial lighting prevent the viewer from recognizing the exact location of this woman’s makeshift shack; however, the line of corrugated tin roofs attached parasitically to a second brick structure emphasize the exclusion endured by women such as her. Lizzani explains how her father evicted her from the house after she became pregnant, and how she came to Rome in order to support herself. She could not find employment since she was carrying a bastard child, so she turned to prostitution after a failed suicide attempt. Lizzani, thus, creates a clean social and psychological correlation between the streetwalker and her environment, while illustrating the unmythical contemporary realities of postwar Rome.

Michelangelo Antonioni: “Tentato Suicidio” Antonioni’s contribution to L’amore in città, “Tentato suicidio”, continues Lizzani’s reference to one woman’s thoughts of taking her life, by providing a larger, dispassionate look at the faces and places of several failed suicides attempted around Rome. The director approaches his investigation in a manner that resonates with De Santis’ claim that filmed landscapes and people reciprocally designate meaning. 73 The film short depicts intermittent shots of a scattered line-up of shadowy men and women against a large white curtain stretched around a movie studio, while five women recount the reasons why they wanted to take their lives (See Fig. 39). The blank background projects each human figure forward as the camera cuts among the participants’ glances around at each other and towards the camera, allowing the viewer to focus not on the scene but on the women’s words and thoughts. The location clears distractions from the

73

Ref. Note 33.

104

Figure 39. The Gathering of Suicide Survivors. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

background, leaving an abstracted space permitting Antonioni to highlight the psychology of his participants. The director believed that setting and character highly depend upon one another, as demonstrated by his assertion in an interview with professors and students from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico in 1961: “Il rapporto tra attore e ambiente è importantissimo perché evidentemente io mi affido proprio all’ambiente, naturale o artificiale che sia, per i particolari momenti psicologici, perché ogni scena abbia la sua efficacia maggiore, la sua suggestione maggiore.” 74 The

74

Michelangelo Antonioni and Leonardo Fioravanti, “La malattia dei sentimenti,” Bianco e Nero, n. 2-3, February-March 1961. Rpt. in Michelangelo Antonioni, Fare un film è per me vivere: Scritti sul cinema, eds. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi (Venezia [Venice]: Marsilio, 1994) 41.

105 empty film studio with exposed ceiling rafters gives the illusion that the women stand alone ready to expose their most inner thoughts. It furthermore provides a characterless space that emphasizes the feelings of desperation and alienation, which Antonioni sought to investigate in this short.

The clips of the suicide survivors aggregated in the studio interweave with onlocation reenactments of their individual suicide attempts around the city, as Antonioni uses Rome’s structures as expressionistic symbols of the women’s loneliness and alienation in ways that are significantly more abstract than the works of his Neorealist predecessors and contemporaries. 75 De Sica, in fact, investigates suicide and marginalization in Rome as early as 1942 with I bambini ci guardano, 76 while Rossellini projects a grim image of postwar life abroad, inserting a child’s self-inflicted fall to death following his act of patricide in Germania, anno zero (1949). De Sica revisits the theme in Umberto D. (1953), which appeared in cinemas the same year as L’amore in città, continuing a Neorealist tradition of judging and subverting the bourgeois Fascist as well as Christian Democratic values of family and security through suicide. The film’s 75

It is aesthetically and ontologically difficult to determine whether or not Antonioni was ever a Neorealist director. As discussed in Note 37, the French film director and critic Alexandre Astruc attempted to apply the term “neorealismo interiore” to Antonioni’s early 1950s filmic production; however, introducing such a term to insert one figure into a larger movement, in my opinion, negates Astruc’s purpose. “Tentato Suicidio” does conform to the precepts of Zavattini’s Neorealist project, L’amore in città, and Antonioni does adopt several of Neorealism’s basic stylistic tenets, such as using nonprofessional actors, on-location shooting, a documentary-like treatment of his subject, and contemporary subject matter. He, however, discusses the limitations of “Tentato suicidio” and questions the Neorealistic nature of his own work: “Credo che l’episodio di Amore in città sia assolutamente ricollegabile alla corrente neorealista. Ma come si può dare un giudizio basandosi sul frammento di un film che per esigenze di metraggio sono stato costretto a mutilare a quel modo? Avrei voluto raccontare molte altre storie….

Avrei dovuto fissare tutto ciò sulla pellicola, lì, subito: avrebbe potuto essere ancora il vero film neorealista di cui tanto parla Zavattini.” Michelangelo Antonioni and André S. Labarthe, “All’origine del cinema c’è una scelta.” Cahiers du cinéma, N. 112, October 1960; Rpt. in Antonioni, Fare un film 124-125.

76

The De Sica scholar, Gualtiero De Santi contextualizes the plot of I bambini ci guardano within the moral climate of the Fascist years: “In nessuna maniera il racconto di un adulterio, con lo sfaldamento drammatico del nucleo familiare e con un suicidio finale, era un argomento contemplabile nella cultura del Ventennio.” Gualtiero De Santi, Vittorio De Sica (Milano: Il Castoro Cinema, 2003) 40.

106 representation of a septuagenarian protagonist who contemplates committing suicide on a number of occasions always assumes a subjective and compassionate stance, as the director situates the camera’s lens from the perspective of the retired and impoverished professor, Umberto D. When Umberto stands before his open bedroom window considering jumping out, De Sica places the camera at a high-angle, so as to focus on the street’s cobblestones and tram rails below in anticipation of the pensioner’s fate. Umberto D. changes his mind, however; and after his greedy landlady evicts him from her boardinghouse in Flaminio, he wanders the city trying to determine where and with whom to leave his only friend, his dog. He eventually decides to keep him, but he believes that he should take both their lives by standing alongside a railroad track with his dog in his arms waiting for a train to pass. The camera sits at Umberto’s eye-level as he and the film’s audience listen to the whistles of an approaching train. The area is isolated from the city, next to an unidentifiable park beyond Rome’s walls, a space that evokes the same sort of social alienation experienced by Antonio Ricci in Ladri di biciclette’s anonymous streets. The train arrives and passes only inches away from Umberto and his dog. The near miss seems to renew the pensioner’s will to live and the film concludes with him returning to Roman society.

Antonioni, on the other hand, does not use shots of landscape, streets from above, or of bridges to anticipate the actions of his film short’s participants. Everyone, from the director to the “characters” and the viewers, enters the vignette knowing that each women interviewed has attempted suicide. Pans of peripheral cityscapes, dolly shots of street pavement, and trolly shots along the base of a bridge permit Rome and its modern buildings to emerge within Antonioni’s camera frame and assume a role as protagonists.

107 Antonioni achieves this effect in his preproduction preparation for the film, which he describes as the following: Mi piace trovarmi solo nell’ambiente in cui devo girare e cominciare a sentire l’ambiente, prima di tutto senza personaggi, senza le persone.

Perché è il modo più diretto di ricreare l’ambiente, di entrare in rapporto con l’ambiente stesso, il modo più semplice per lasciare che l’ambiente suggerisca qualche cosa a noi. Naturalmente noi siamo predisposti bene nei riguardi di quell’ambiente dal momento che l’abbiamo scelto e quindi sappiamo che in quel posto c’è la possibilità per ambientare una determinata scena. Si tratta soltanto di inventare … la sequenza, adattandola proprio alle particolari caratteristiche dell’ambiente. 77 Antonioni favors the environment over his actors in his films’ plots, and even in a work as early as “Tentato Suicidio”, which follows only three years after his first feature-length film, Cronaca di un amore (1950), Antonioni had already developed his signature filming techniques that were to characterize his trilogy, L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962): long, deep-focus shots that bring everything detail of the landscape within the camera’s frame into focus.

Antonioni’s manipulates images of Rome’s architecture to create an external mirror for the existential and psychological turmoil suffered by his interviewees. Rome assumes a Freudian metaphysical dimension, becoming at times “uncanny,” as the director’s long, deep focus shots force the viewer not only to look at scenes, but to internalize them. Antonioni demythifies Rome’s urban space by concentrating on the psychological charge of the environment, rather than trying to extract any political meaning from it. To demythify Rome is in part to depoliticize it. “Tentato suicidio”, along with his documentary Nettezza urbana (N.U., 1948), I vinti (1952) and L’eclisse (1962) are poetic visions of Rome, and seem to project Antonioni’s indifference to the

77

Antonioni, Fare un film 28.

108 city’s long and continuous past as a capital city. As noted in the Introduction, Rome, in antiquity, was first the capital of a kingdom, then a republic, and finally of an empire.

The city then became a capital of Christianity, of Catholicism, and thus of the Ecclesiastical State, the Vatican. Rome, ultimately, entered the hands of the modern Italian nation, which has likewise undergone several political metamorphoses, from being a parliamentary monarchy, a dictatorship, and finally a republic; nevertheless, Rome has always remained a capital. Nationalistic rhetoric is, however, absent in Antonioni’s films.

The director strips Rome of its universal values, rendering it a dystopic rather than utopic place.

The auteur clearly and intentionally adapts Rome to his individual artistic vision, creating deep-focus orthogonal lines using architectural structures or long streets that extend into the background to create compositional organization reminiscent of Florentine Renaissance painting. In “Tentato suicidio”, Antonioni memorably creates this effect incorporating the surrounding wall of a factory, from which emerges one working class victim after her shift. She follows the road flanking the structure, walking seemingly towards an indefinable point in the distance. This technique repeats throughout his cinema, such as in the shot of Claudio, a bourgeois cigarette smuggler, laying in pain on enclosed soccer field bleachers in the Rome episode of I vinti (See Fig. 40); or in the scene depicting a meeting between Paola and her former lover Guido on the stadium-like seating surrounding Milan’s water-landing strip in Cronaca di un amore (See Fig. 41).

Lines extend straight into the distance, directing the viewers’ gaze in the direction in which they lead and generating a highly constructed location. Antonioni once declared that he is, “un amante della pittura. È una delle arti che, con l’architettura, vengono

109

Figure 40. Orthogonal Lines in I vinti, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1952.

Figure 41. Orthogonal Lines in Cronaca di un amore, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950.

110 per me subito dopo il cinema.” 78 He later recalls the passion he held for the plastic arts that he demonstrated even as a child: “A differenza della maggior parte dei miei coetanei, già da bambino non disegnavo pupazzetti ma portali, capitelli, piante di edifici assurdi; con il cartone costruivo quartieri di città e poi dipingevo con colori accesi.” 79 The two arts of painting and architecture, through urban design, certainly influenced the ways he viewed and adapted his profilmic environment. Antonioni adopts a rather linear, rational, modernist design, which resonates with the functionalist architecture under construction in Rome during the postwar period. 80 This aesthetic affiliation with contemporary architecture perhaps explains his depictions of several of the women in their homes located in modern apartment blocks in borgate, for their modernity permitted him to develop a vision of Rome without the interference or distraction of the city’s more famous artistic traditions.

A striking image of the Roman periphery appears precisely in the same sequence as the factory worker, Maria. Her story cuts among four very distinct locations during the reenactment of her failed suicide attempt: first, outside the factory where she works; on the street in the borgata under construction where she, her lover Giacomo, and her

78

Antonioni and Fioravanti, “La malattia dei sentimenti” 43.

79

Michelangelo Antonioni and André S. Labarthe, “All’origine del cinema c’è una scelta,” Cahiers du cinéma, n. 112, October 1960. Rpt. in Antonioni, Fare un film 123.

80

Theodor Adorno addresses the socio-cultural significance of functionalist architecture in his essay “Functionalism Today.” He counters the notion that functionalism represents a triumph over ornamentation and by association over the violence perpetuated by ornamentation’s irrationality. Using a similar tone to that found in “The Culture Industry,” he declares that functionalism’s subordination to usefulness extracts pleasure from architecture. As such, he “would like to emphasize [that]… architecture, indeed every purposeful art, demands aesthetic reflection.” Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997) 18.

Antonioni does precisely what Adorno urges, by aestheticizing the rationalist modern structures composing Rome’s borgate and imbuing them with a modernist interpretation that supercedes their architectural style.

111

Figure 42. Incomplete Postwar Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato Suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 43. Estranging and Anonymous Peripheral Environment. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Tentato Suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

112

Figure 44. Ever-Changing Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 45. Beginning of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

113 lover’s wife, Marcella, reside; at the park on Monte Sacro where she swallows pills to take her life; and finally in front of the repetitive façade of her and the couple’s apartment complex. The second and fourth scenes, in particular, underscore her sense of abandonment and estrangement as Antonioni manipulates the image of the borgata’s incomplete and anonymous peripheral environment to communicate her story (See Fig. 42 and 43). Maria recounts how she and Giacomo met as children in the same tenement in which they currently dwell, postdating the neighborhood and architecture at least to the end of the Fascist period. The borgata has clearly undergone several changes as blocks of differently shaped housing projects appear in the background in several frames (See Fig. 44). Some areas have paved roads, while among others, dirt streets typical of Rome’s outskirts under construction stretch, while barren fields extend in front and beyond buildings, including some that are nothing more than mere steel skeletons.

The entire affair unfolds out-of-doors, either on the forsaken streets of Maria’s nameless borgata, or in the midst of one of Rome’s first “garden cities”, Monte Sacro.

Italo Insolera argues that Monte Sacro, and the borgate Val Melaina and Tufello that initially surrounded it, failed as urbanistic extensions of Rome, due to their urbanistic closure, “proprio per il loro rifiuto della città.” 81 In a similar self-alienating manner, Maria rejects the city and all that is part of it in her suicide attempt. She ingests pills using the drinking water from a public fountain in the center of Monte Sacro, before returning home on a bus where a relative fortunately perceives her precarious condition.

Maria’s story concludes with the camera cutting to a close-up dolly shot that tracks backwards to capture the immensity of her peripheral modern dwelling. Maria recounts

81

Insolera 112.

114 throughout this moving shot that all three involved in the love triangle continue to see each other live in the same building, she “nella scala O, lui nella scala I, and Marcella nella scala C.” Her declaration of three separate living spaces within one structure highlights the ultimately ambiguous nature of their relationships, as she never specifies whether a romantic affair endures between either of the women and Giacomo or whether they have all remained friends. Maria’s is a curious, indefinable reality, much like that of the borgate.

Two other stories that unfold within borgate are those of Rosana and Mina. The first woman’s story opens the sequence of suicide reenactments, with her sitting on a bench in Piazza Santa Croce in Geruselemme, which flanks an aqueduct that functions as part of the city walls. The narrator begins to provide information on her immediate personal background – when she attempted suicide, who was just with her, and most important to this discussion, where she lives. Rosana resides in an unnamed borgata along Rome’s periphery, to which Antonioni’s camera cuts following the narrator’s introductory statement. His and her voice fall silent while the camera pans nearly one hundred and forty five degrees from the typical colorless low-rises standing upon a manmade embankment, across a ditch, over a wide field of overturned earth, to a differently styled group of characterless apartment complexes, to the makeshift hovels among which Rosana lives alone (See Fig. 45, 46, and 47). Antonioni manages to capture in one long shot the typical characteristics of Rome’s poor periphery and its various forms of architecture. The film’s image is reminiscent of two descriptions that Carlo Levi presents in his novel L’orologio: “Avevo sentito tante volte parlare… delle borgate di Roma, che avevano una fama sinistra…. I giornali le descrivevano: pubblicavano le fotografie di

115

Figure 46. Middle of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 47. End of a Pan across a Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

116

Figure 48. Squalid Dwelling. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir.

Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

Figure 49. Establishing Shot of Mina’s Borgata. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

117 gruppi di baracche squallide, costruite con legnami sconnessi e lamiere ondulate, dove vivevano i poveri, nella promiscuità e nella sporcizia.” 82 Antonioni captures this face of the borgate in a secondary shot, after cutting away from the pan, to a close-up on Rosana’s personal dwelling. The walls have pealing paint, the architectural components are set at uneven intervals, and the building communicates intense squalor (See Fig. 48).

A secondary image, portrayed in Levi’s novel, projects the more modern face of Rome’s periphery, which governmental programs urged through private speculation. It is not the one his protagonist learns of secondhand, but discovers through a personal visit: “Non c’erano catapecchie, né capanne di legno e di lamiera ondulata, ma invece grossi e alti palazzi pretensiosi.” 83 The two faces of the borgate, the tenements and the huts, receive equal billing in “Tentato Suicidio” for they both communicate the periphery’s stylistic differentiation from the rest of Rome. Antonioni, like Levi, understands that Rome’s surrounding areas’ physical distantiation from the city center engenders a similar psychological marginalization, an idea which the author directly articulates in his text: “Erano lí, a pochi chilometri dal centro della città, impenetrabili come se appartenessero a un altro mondo. Vi si svolgeva, ogni giorno, la sofferenza quotidiana.” 84 Nothing could better express the underlying emotional theme of Antonioni’s film short, the pain driving women to suicide.

A final image of a Roman borgata in “Tentato Suicidio” appears during Antonioni’s visit to a variety show dancer’s home. Mina, who swallowed barbiturates to

82

Levi, L’orologio 111.

83

Levi, L’orologio 113.

84

Levi, L’orologio 111.

118

Figure 50. Mina at Her Window. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. “Tentato suicidio,” L’amore in città, exec. dir. Cesare Zavattini, 1953.

guilt her husband into returning to her and their children, resides in one of the three-story apartment complexes typical of the city’s modernizing efforts for the borgate. Antonioni provides first an establishing shot of the building from the outside, while Mina recounts her story (See Fig. 49). The viewer cannot differentiate one apartment from another, while the typical dirt roads wrap around the imagination-less structure. The camera then cuts to her smoking a cigarette in the studio, before it enters her home, where she continues speaking about her suicide in front of her young children (See Fig. 50). The room has scratched walls draped in darkness, and the interior’s impression recalls another portion of Levi’s quasi-contemporaneous literary account of poor living situations in

119 Garbatella, one of Fascism’s first public housing projects: “Non c’era luce in quei borghi miserabili e provvisori, la vita vi scorreva nell’ultima miseria, nell’ozio forzato, nella violenza e nell’abbandono.” 85 Italo Insolera delineates the desperate circumstances conditioning Garbatella from its ideation: Inizialmente si cominciarono a costruire le cosidette ‘case rapide’ destinate ad alloggiare senza-tetto e baraccati: il livello di queste case era bassissimo…. Con gli anni il piano iniziale della Garbatella subisce molte varianti: vengono adottati tipi edilizi di maggiore sfruttamento che favoriscono il superaffollamento delle abitazioni. 86 The borgata represented in Mina’s story remains nameless, as in Rosana’s case, but the impression that Antonioni leaves with the viewer is of a space exploited and abandoned like its desperate inhabitants. Both women’s homes are dark and bear, with strong shadows covering the few pieces of furniture that adorn the spaces. Antonioni provides a realistic yet metaphorical interpretation of their lives, leading to the ultimate question: Would Mina and Rosana have attempted suicide if their lives were not so bleak and obscure?

L’amore in città, despite its own relative historical obscurity, conveys one of the most striking portrayals of Rome’s borgate in Neorealist cinema. The directors, Michelangelo Antonioni and Carlo Lizzani, do not attempt to cloak the places’ dire realities by injecting political ideologies onto the poor environment, nor generate new mythologies, such as one finds most notably in Roma città aperta. The periphery, once ideated as the housing solution for the city’s working class evicted from their homes during Mussolini’s sventramento, rightfully becomes the shared cultural property of the

85

Levi, L’orologio 111.

86

Insolera 109-110.

120 postwar subaltern class. The two directors do not shy away from “indecent” or grim thematics, but probe them for their cinematic and poetic potential. They also create strong juxtapositions between the city center and its distantiated borgate, developing a sense of tension between the two spaces, which society under Mussolini apparently attempted simply to ignore: Mentre la propaganda fascista cominciava a proclamare che “Roma deve apparire meravigliosa a tutte le genti del mondo: vasta, ordinata, potente, come ai tempi del primo impero di Augusto”; mentre si cominciava a creare il mito dell’ “Urbe”, di questa città “a nessun’altra seconda per tesori di bellezze artistiche e panoramiche” non si poteva certo ammettere che le baracche facessero parte dell’organismo urbano, che fosse responsabilità e compito dell’intera società operare per la loro scomparsa. 87 Lizzani and Antonioni, on the other hand, made it their responsibility to work for the opposite effect under the Christian Democratic party’s hegemony. They showed the borgate for what they were, despite the overall failure of their message. L’amore in città’s lack of aesthetic and commercial success prevented its vignette’s from engaging in a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Italian society. It slipped into overall anonymity, constraining Zavattini, its cinematic architect, to abandon his cinematic journal project and return to working as a screenwriter for De Sica on such classics as L’oro di Napoli (1954) and Ieri, oggi e domani (1963). Pier Paolo Pasolini, on the other hand, who remained relatively unknown until 1955, continued Zavattini’s, Lizzani’s, and Antonioni’s efforts to bring Rome’s modern margins into the consciousness of the mainstream. He, probably more than anyone else, had the most success in projecting a realistic yet controversially expressionistic image of the capital city’s borgate with his first long narrative, Ragazzi di vita.

87

Insolera 105-106.

121 Chapter 2 Fragments and the Carnevalesque: Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita Benjamin and Fragmentation A number of Walter Benjamin’s essays published in the collection Reflections record the philosopher’s impressions of several European cities and of the people who dwell within them. Benjamin notes in his description of Moscow: One ought to know Moscow as… beggar children know it. They know of a corner beside the door of a certain shop where, at a particular time, they are allowed to warm themselves for ten minutes, they know where one day each week at a certain hour they can fetch themselves crusts, and where a sleeping place among stacked sewage pipes is free. 1 These children, whom Benjamin observed much like a nineteenth century French flâneur, demonstrate a perhaps rarely considered truism of urban spaces: that few people really know a city as those who live in its streets. The beggar children, whom Benjamin watched, seem to have internalized the city’s social rhythms: the movements of Moscow’s workers, the doling of bread, the clearing of neighborhood corners at night.

Their city is a series of brief encounters and unfixed, nameless spaces that neither project an idealized image of the then-Soviet Union’s capital, nor reflect its institutions and monuments. Benjamin’s Moscow is, instead, an incohesive mixture of places and time.

The street-meandering Marxist, through his example, encourages readers to contemplate and explore the disdained and discounted aspects of urban life. While other writers have tended to position impoverished city youths on society’s margins and within its underground, he establishes a useful paradigm for examining and understanding the

1

Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 105.

122 unique and fragmentary spatial and social relationships extant between homeless children and the spaces in which they perennially dwell. His cultural model becomes especially relevant when one examines the changing composition of populations within quickly expanding urban centers. The explosive metropolitan development that occurred throughout the twentieth century often generated a proliferation of street-children in European capitals, making Benjamin’s case study of Moscow a paradigm for future flâneurs of “down and out” children and spaces.

Another example of a fragmentary, marginal and lowly image of a European capital appears nearly thirty years later in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first episodic long narrative, 2 Ragazzi di vita. This text, published in 1955, reflects the substance of Benjamin’s musings on Moscow, for it represents the picaresque existence of underclass, and oftentimes homeless, children as they wander the streets of the Italian capital, Rome, in search of food, prostitutes, and money. Their Rome is a squalid place: burnt by the sun, swathed in mud, littered in trash, and reeking of urine. It consists of characterless slums, hovels, and huts, all lacking history, clear urban organization, and individual identity.

Pasolini’s depiction of Rome is an unfamiliar face of the city, much like the “stacked sewage pipes” in Benjamin’s “refection.” It is a vision of the city that endured the “anni

2

I have chosen to avoid using the term “novel,” or “romanzo,” to define Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita due to the critical debate over whether or not the text actually fits the criteria to be one. The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Vol. 17 Robb-Schi, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, defines “romanzo” as: “Componimento letterario di carattere narrativo, di struttura complessa e articolata e di ampia estensione, caratterizzato da libertà d’invenzione e di intreccio.” Tullio De Mauro’s Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso: Vol. 5 Pom-Se defines a romanzo as: “Componimento letterario di carattere narrativo, originariamente in versi o di argomento eroico, poi in prosa, di struttura complessa e articolata e di ampia estensione, caratterizzato da libertà d’invenzione e d’intreccio.” Pasolini’s text, as some readers have noted, does not have a flowing narrative structure, but is a combination of episodes loosely linked through the appearance of il Riccetto, the boy-protagonist. The only ever-present figure in the book is the city, Rome.

123 duri,” 3 a city in crisis, when many lived in conditions of extreme poverty, while at the same time private speculators and the Christian Democratic party focused on expanding the capital’s geographic boundaries, rebuilding the economy, and reshaping local politics.

Many major cultural figures, particularly film directors, emerged in the midst of this upheaval, creating the loosely defined movement known as Italian Neorealism, explored in the previous chapter. These artists attempted to document, with fictional storylines, the socioeconomic and political struggle of Rome’s poor inhabitants from the close of the Second World War through at least the early 1950s. Roberto Rossellini in Roma città aperta, Vittorio De Sica in Ladri di biciclette and in Umberto D., Luchino Visconti in Bellissima, Giuseppe De Santis in Roma ore 11, and Carlo Lizzani and Michelangelo Antonioni in Cesare Zavattini’s 4 episodic journalistic film project L’amore in città laid many of the thematic and stylistic foundations for cinematic and literary productions in subsequent years. Cesare Pavese’s Il compagno, Carlo Levi’s L’orologio and several of Alberto Moravia’s Racconti romani, likewise, artistically chronicle working class and subaltern Rome in their novels and short stories, perpetuating the filmic representations of urban suffering and disillusionment.

In what ways did Pasolini perpetuate his Neorealist predecessors’ projects of demythifying and modernizing Rome’s image in his first long narrative, and in what ways does he surpass them? One can easily identify thematic similarities, as I previously demonstrated in the Introduction and Chapter 1; however, it is much more difficult to 3 4

Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 186.

Critics credit Cesare Zavattini with the ideation of the episodic film, although he was not the only director involved in the L’amore in città’s production. Dino Risi directed “Paradiso per 3 ore;” Michelangelo Antonioni filmed “Tentato Suicidio;” Carlo Lizzani shot “Amore che si paga;” Federico Fellini created “Agenzia matrimoniale;” Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini adopted “Storia di Caterina” from contemporary news articles; and Alberto Lattuada produced the playful montage “Gli italiani si voltano.” For additional information on this film, see Chapter 1, p. 92-120.

124 account for the stylistic affinities between Ragazzi di vita’s literary Rome and the city portrayed in the text’s cinematic predecessors. The notion of fragmentation, illustrated in Benjamin’s description of Moscow, however, provides a powerful rubric under which to examine the commonalities between these postwar cultural productions. Films, although they may superficially appear to have flowing narratives, are actually montages of fragmentary shots arranged in sequences so to create a sense of narrative cohesion, mirroring Franco Karrer’s notion that “frammentazione e mancata integrazione fisica è il carattere prevalente della città contemporanea, anche di Roma.” 5 Ragazzi di vita’s presentation of Rome is similarly a composite of episodes, reminiscent of Paisà’s and L’amore in città’s assemblage of vignettes, a point upon which I will later expand at length. First, it will be helpful to conceptualize the term fragmentation in order to situate its role in not only in the works under analysis, but also in Rome’s modernization and demythification.

Fragmentation implies a subdivision of a whole that becomes, or is already composed of, many pieces, that do not necessarily have a natural correlation among one another. Accordingly, fragmentation leads to the inorganic, the multiple, and the broken.

Such notions provide the key for understanding Rome’s form in postwar Italian cinema and literature, as the capital city and its society struggled to rebuild, consolidate, and expand its urbanistic and civil structures. New, unregulated neighborhoods continued spawning on the capital’s margins ushering in a veritable boom in the 1950s, while the Marshall Plan along with the Italy’s own national neocapitalist economic policies slowly pulled many Italians out of postwar misery and into the prosperity associated with the 5

Franco Karrer, “La frammentazione urbana e la nuova organizzazione funzionale della città,” Roma contemporanea: storia e progetto, eds. Roberto Cassetti and Gianfranco Spagnesi (Roma: Gangemi, 2006) 270-271.

125 Economic Miracle. As a result, by 1955, the year in which Pasolini published Ragazzi di vita, Rome was undergoing a period of significant flux, as the city both continued its march towards modernization and development, while socioeconomic disparities among classes became increasingly evident.

The visible embodiment of this crisis was, of course, the borgate. These areas, which often formed either as a result of illegal building speculation or as a temporary housing arrangement for homeless migrants, formed a salient feature of 1950s intellectual and popular debates. The polemical nature of the borgate, in fact, helped launch Pasolini’s official Roman literary career, 6 as his first long narrative, Ragazzi di vita, presents the infernal world of these impoverished surrounding areas, which Italian, and more specifically Roman society, had either remained ignorant of, or simply chose to ignore. Pasolini’s book succeeds in aestheticizing the urbanistic chaos and squalor plaguing the capital city’s outlying areas, compelling the author’s contemporaries to examine the lives of those whom misfortune or socioeconomic circumstance had marginalized and confined along Rome’s edge. 7 He writes in Ragazzi di vita: “E nei 6

I use the term “official,” because Pasolini had published several short stories preceding the publication and subsequent success as well as scandal of his first major narrative, Ragazzi di vita in 1955.

These short stories include: “Ragazzo e Trastevere,” Il Mattino d’Italia, Roma, 5 June 1950; “La bibita,” Il Quotidiano, Roma, 25 June 1950; “Il palombo,” La Libertà d’Italia, Roma, 20 September 1950; “La passione del fusajaro,” Il Popolo di Roma, 18 October 1950; “Roma allucinante,” La Libertà d’Italia, Roma, 9 January 1951; “Domenica al Collina Volpi,” Il Popolo di Roma, 14 January 1951; “Castagne e crisantemi,” La libertà d’Italia, Roma, 3 April 1951; “Da Monteverde all’Alteri,” n.p., n.d.; “Santino nel mare di Ostia,” Il quotidiano, Roma, 11 September 1951; “Terracina,” n.p., n.d.; Rpd. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Storie della città di Dio: Racconti e cronache romane, ed. Walter Siti (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 5-58.

7

It is important to clarify that Pasolini was not the first Italian artist to recognize and depict the borgate in his work; he was, however, the first one to succeed in bringing nationwide attention and notoriety to these underdeveloped areas along the capital city’s periphery. Examples of earlier written narratives and films that present the borgate are Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945); Luigi Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina (1947); Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948); Carlo Emilio Gadda’s first version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1946-7); Carlo Levi’s L’orologio (1950); Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista (1951) and several of his Racconti romani (1954) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959); Luciano Emmer’s Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (1952); Michelangelo Antonioni’s Tentato suicidio (1953); Carlo Lizzani’s Amore che si paga (1953); and Federico Fellini’s Il bidone (1955). There

126 centri delle borgate, nei bivii, come lì al Tiburtino, la gente s’ammassava, correva, strillava, che pareva d’essere nei bassifondi di Shanghai.” 8 It was a scene of chaos along the border of the Eternal City, an uncomfortable crossroads where the modernized and underdeveloped worlds met that was too close to home for many readers to bear during the author’s early career.

Pasolini’s fascination with, and focus on, slums and in particular Rome’s peripheral architectural and urban decay, differed greatly from his predecessors’ representations, for he desired to situate the borgatari, those who resided in the borgate, within the symbolic nucleus of Italian social regeneration. His vision stood in complete contrast to the hegemonic order, embodied by the fascistic Christian Democrats, who received their power from the bourgeoisie and preferred, like their Fascist predecessors, to ghettoize and conceal the underclass’ presence in Rome. Pasolini explicates his stance in a scathing article from 1975, the year of his murder, which foreshadows Umberto Eco’s theoretical outlining of “Eternal Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism”: Essa poteva valere ancora fino a circa una decina di anni fa: quando il regime democristiano era ancora la pura e semplice continuazione del regime fascista. Ma una decina di anni fa, è successo "qualcosa". are likely other texts and films that depict the borgate; however, the authors and cinematographers abovementioned have remained in the modern Italian canon and therefore bestow a considerable level of importance to the subject. They also all feature the borgate as a landscape or backdrop, not as the protagonist as Pasolini does.

8

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita, (1955; Milano: Garzanti, 2006) 184. During the 1950s, Western scholars considered Shanghai and the newly formed People’s Republic of China as part of the developing world, for it was not until the early 1950s that “the Chinese government began to introduce centralized planning of the economy, of social life, and of the basic necessities in the cities.” Gui Shixun and Liu Xian, “Urban migration in Shanghai, 1950-88: Trends and Characteristics,” Population and Development Review, 18.3 (Sept. 1992) 533. Even though Shanghai’s development coincides with that of postwar Rome, the Asian city became the paradigmatic “Third World” city for Pasolini. He introduces it in the abovementioned quote and later incorporates it in his novel Una vita violenta to describe the shantytowns lining Rome’s Aniene River where that book’s protagonist Tomasino Puzzili lives, calling the area Piccola Shangai. The similar urbanistic conditions of the two places, Rome’s borgate and China’s Shanghai, correlate two cultures that should have theoretically contrasted, call into question Rome’s level of modernity.

127 "Qualcosa" che non c’era e non era prevedibile non solo ai tempi del ‘Politecnico’, ma nemmeno un anno prima che accadesse (o addirittura, come vedremo, mentre accadeva). Il confronto reale tra "fascismi" non può essere dunque ‘cronologicamente’, tra il fascismo fascista e il fascismo democristiano: ma tra il fascismo fascista e il fascismo radicalmente, totalmente, imprevedibilmente nuovo che è nato da quel "qualcosa" che è successo una decina di anni fa. 9 Pasolini, thus, clearly states his belief that Italy’s hegemonic party was nothing other than a political continuation of Fascism that simply renamed itself in order to seem different.

As such, the author sought an alternative and based not only his sociopolitical hope but also his Roman narrative voice on the borgatari, whom he envisioned as pure, archaic, and uncorrupted by mainstream modern society. The result is that Ragazzi di vita and Pasolini’s subsequent Roman narratives situated in the borgate, including his novel Una vita violenta (1959) and his films Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La ricotta (1963), and Uccellacci e uccellini (1965) assume the perspective and voice of Rome’s subaltern class. 10 Unlike his predecessors, Pasolini imbues his underclass characters with a vitalistic charge that celebrates their alternative and unadulterated view of society as he unabashedly presents them demythifying and desecrating “official” Rome. The young author furthermore adopts the slang of the borgatari through quasi-ethnographic research, often wandering Rome’s periphery and recording what he hears, in order to imbue his work with greater linguistic authenticity. His approach to the borgate along with Ragazzi di vita’s success compelled other writers and directors to reconsider the

9

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “1° febbraio 1975: L’articolo delle lucciole,” Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, eds.

Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 2006) 404. Rpt. of “Il vuoto del potere in Italia.” Corriere della sera, 1 February 1975.

10

I have not included his film shorts La terra vista dalla luna (1967), Cosa sono le nuvole?

(1968), and La sequenza del fiore di carta (1969), because Pasolini produced them after becoming disillusioned with Rome’s subaltern class. He believed that it was increasingly adopting middle class values and losing its purity, leading him eventually to shift his attention abroad to the developing world in search of the archaic.

128 ways in which Rome’s margins encapsulated the contradictory and muddled state of the nation and its capital during the pre-Boom years. Ragazzi di vita’s public recognition, both positive or negative, challenged the reading populace to reconceptualize Rome as a chaotic, magmic space, as the book attempted to alter the city’s highly mythicallycharged image. Before delving into the book’s cultural import, however, an analysis of the political, literary and cinematic environments in which Pasolini ideated his first Roman masterpiece will help identify the book’s role in challenging contemporary Italian society.

The Politicized Culture Wars According to many of the literary and cultural debates raging among 1950s intellectuals, the years surrounding the publication of Ragazzi di vita signal the moment in which Neorealism was going out of fashion and Neo-experimentalism, tied to postmodernity, began to arise. As discussed in the prior chapter, Neorealism was a cinematic and literary movement spurned by the conclusion of, and economic devastation following, World War II in Italy. According to the film scholar Louis Giannetti, Neorealism’s major theoretical tenants, though not set in stone as it was a movement rather than a school, include: a new democratic spirit, that emphasizes the values of the common man; a compassionate perspective based on complex moral issues; a preoccupation with the Fascist past, the Resistance, and the consequences of the Second World War’s devastation; a combination of Marxist humanism and Christian beliefs; and finally, a focus on feelings instead of on abstract ideas. 11 The cultural productions generated from such principles present a grim image of the Italian state, one that often 11

Louis Giannetti. Understanding Movies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996) 437.

129 clashed with the country’s hopes for renewal during the 1950s. Politicians and even the public eventually grew weary of seeing the Italian nation constantly represented in a state of depression, and the government encouraged writers as well as directors to explore alternative subjects and means of expression. 12 The Under Secretary Giulio Andreotti took charge, contending that “the duty of the cinema was to ‘realistically conform to reality’; but it must be objective and avoid any exaggeration, it must commit itself to offer its public ‘a healthy and constructive optimism’. In other words, the cinema had to demonstrate that everything is fine and everybody is satisfied.” 13 As one of the major exponents of Italy’s Christian Democratic party, his desire to proliferate a positive image of Italy and its government was hardly disinterested. 14 Everything in Italy at that time was politicized, and Andreotti endeavored to counter and even suppress through censorship, works espousing the counter political ideology: Communism.

The Christian Democratic government used its power to sequester the Communist newspaper L’Unità, 15 as well as prevent the circulation of certain films, such as occurred with De Santis’ Roma ore 11. 16 It even encouraged police repression and legal action 12

Zavattini outlines what he determines are the principle “accusations” of Neorealism bourgeois critics: “1) Il neo-realismo descrive solo la miseria; 2) Il neo-realismo non offre soluzioni, non indica strade. I finali dei film neo-realistici sono evasivi al massimo; 3) Che i fatti qualsiasi non interessano, non costituiscono spettacolo.” Zavattini, “Alcune idee sul cinema” 13-15.

13

Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema 1896-1996 (London & New York: Routledge, 1996) 89.

14

Giulio Andreotti is one of the most powerful and mysterious figures to emerge in postwar Italy.

He has maintained the longest political career of any modern Italian politician, surviving periods of trauma, including the 1970s anni di piombo, marred by terrorist kidnappings and bombings, as well as of controversy, such as Tangentopoli, when the Christian Democratic party crumbled under the weight of its own corruption. Paolo Sorrentino recently produced an intriguing impressionistic film on Andreotti and his career entitled Il divo (2008).

15

Paul Ginsborg related that between 1948 and May 1954, six hundred seventy people in Bologna went to trial for selling L’Unità, another one thousand eighty-six for affixing posters, and three hundred thirty-eight for attending politics meetings. A History of Contemporary Italy 187.

16

See Chapter 1, p. 87-90.

130 against left-wing organizations, which resulted in thousands of legal trials throughout the 1950s. 17 Pasolini, a self-proclaimed Marxist although not a card-carrying member of the party, 18 endeavored to counter the DC’s fascistic repression, denouncing the party in poems such as Alla mia nazione and Il pianto della scavatrice. His books Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta, as well as his films Accattone and Mamma Roma, artistically formulated sociopolitical protest as they depicted not only the difficult living conditions of Rome’s working class, but more uniquely, the decrepit and substandard dwellings of the capital’s unemployed. Pasolini’s opposition to the Christian Democratic suppression of the Italian communist movement, and lack of interest in society’s most indigent members, arguably shifted the attention of other left-leaning intellectuals onto the borgate and the borgatari. Authors and cinematographers, who had previously generated working-class commentaries, redirected the highly Marxist gaze of Neorealism deeper into the life of Rome’s periphery.

The greatest screenwriter of the Neorealist period, Cesare Zavattini, in fact offered a list of ideological principles to counter what he deemed as Christian Democratic criticism of Italy’s postwar cultural “atmosphere” in an interview entitled “Alcune idee sul cinema.” He espoused that Neorealism, by 1953, had attained an analytical stance, in which “c’era un potente movimento verso le cose: un desiderio di comprensione, di adesione, di partecipazione di convivenza, insomma.” 19 He also believed that “il tentativo vero del cinema neorealista non era quello di inventare una storia che somiglia alla realtà 17

Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 187.

18

The party expulsed the writer from the party in 1949 after he was tried for the corruption of youth in Friuli, his hometown. This incident precipitated his transfer with his mother to Rome in 1950.

19

Zavattini, Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura 8.

131 ma di raccontare la realtà come fosse una storia.” 20 No one could have declared better the theoretical foundations of Neorealism’s documentaristic proclivities, which Pasolini incorporated into, and later used to defend his literature. 21 This is not to say, however, that Pasolini was fully a Neorealist artist. In many senses, the young writer developed a narrative voice that was in clear opposition to Neorealism’s generally anti-literary stance, 22 filling his text with “bourgeois” and “high” cultural references. Pasolini quotes Tolstoj and Dante in the epigraphs of chapters four 23 and six, 24 in addition to his more subtle incorporation of Giovanni Verga’s free-indirect discourse and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s symbolism. He also connects Neorealism with Italy’s Fascist past, opining in an interview with John Halliday entitled “Accattone” that “il neorealismo è un prodotto culturale della Resistenza per quanto riguarda i suoi contenuti e il messaggio che esprimono, ma stilisticamente è ancora legato alla cultura pre-resistenziale. Alla sua base c’è qualcosa di ibrido.” 25 Pasolini sees in Neorealism traces of the nation’s Fascist past, and therefore, together with his linguistic contamination of high and low registers as well as his recall to free indirect discourse and symbolism, he creates a technique that he 20

Zavattini, Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura 16.

21

A discussion of the criminal trial that ensued the publication of Ragazzi di vita appears later in the chapter.

22

Neorealist cinematographers, as mentioned in the Introduction’s note 84, found inspiration in Giovanni Verga’s literary verismo. Pasolini, likewise, drew from the Sicilian writer’s repertoire, integrating free indirect discourse as well as focusing on the indigent, affiliating himself to a certain degree with those generating works within the loose ideological constructs of Neorealism. This instance of incongruity is just one of many examples of Pasolini’s contentious and contradictory writing.

23

“Il popolo è un grande selvaggio nel seno della società. L. Tolstoj.” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 83.

24

“Traiti avanti, Alichino, e Calcabrina/ - cominciò egli a dire – e tu, Cagnazzo;/ E Barbariccia guidi la decina./ Libicocco vegna oltre, e Draghinazzo,/ Ciriatto sannuto, e Grafficane./ E Farfarello, e Rubicante pazzo. Dante, Inferno.” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 150.

25

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Accattone,” Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, eds. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere. (Milano: Mondadori, 2006) 1312.

132 believes frees art of Fascism’s hold, generating what he terms “neo-sperimentalismo.” 26 Pasolini argues in his essays “Osservazioni sull’evoluzione del ’900” and “La libertà stilistica” collected in Passione e ideologia that cultural practice had to separate itself from Fascist as well as pre-Fascist ideology, language, and literary modes. The author’s work, in every one of its elements, stands purposefully against both what were initially Mussolini’s ideals and what the Christian Democratic party subsequently perpetuated.

This includes, of course, his representation of Rome.

While some filmmakers, and consequently writers, began to diverge and delve into lighter themes in reaction to Neorealism, Pier Paolo Pasolini chose to move in the opposite direction, to emphasize the pain inflicted upon impoverished residents of Rome, which resulted from Fascist and Ur-Fascist practices. He deepens and heightens the experience of postwar misery not just through plots of economic and personal hardship, but through intense sensory and visceral imagery. For example, in one of Ragazzi di vita’s accounts of a day in the life of Roman juvenile characters, Pasolini writes: Capirai, il Begalone aveva fatto nottata, metà appennicato al Salario e metà a Villa Borghese, tra paragule e frosci, o sui tram a borseggiare i micchi. Quell’altro lì il Piattoletta invece era venuto a fiume dopo aver passato la mattinata con la nonna a capare l’immondezza in mezzo ai prati puzzolenti e ai tuguri dove la cloaca del Policlinico sfocia nell’Aniene. 27 The author exposes the reader to the vagrant lives of Rome’s street children, who subsist on thievery or by scavenging reusable goods in trash dumps and near the mouth of a sewer, a portrayal not so distant from Benjamin’s reflection on Moscow’s homeless children. Pasolini’s Roman ragazzi, like Benjamin’s Russian children, live in a subaltern world, a space separate from that of the status quo and even from most Neorealist 26

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Passione e ideologia (Turin [Torino]: Einaudi, 1985) 407.

27

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 157.

133 characters where the rules of survival rely on a very different social code. These characters, also, clearly detract from the moral and urbanistic risanamento of Rome, which Mussolini endorsed and the Italian Republic strove to continue. Pasolini’s resistance to official political and cultural policy, however, did not develop in a vacuum, but actually partakes in a Western literary tradition articulated by his contemporary, M. M. Bahktin, popularly called the carnevalesque.

Bakhtin and the Carnevalesque M. M. Bakhtin generated several theories on the novel as well as on grotesque reality, often referred to as the carnevalesque, in his works “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel” and “Images of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum.” The former offers a fascinating way to explore the dark and seamy side of everyday life, as presented within official literary canons. In his study, the Russian literary critic observes: Everyday life is the nether world, the grave, where the sun does not shine, where there is no starry firmament. For this reason, everyday life is presented to us as the underside of real life. At its center is obscenity, that is, the seamier side of sexual love; love alienated from reproduction, from a progression of generations, from the structures of family and the clan.

Here everyday life is priapic, its logic is the logic of obscenity. But around this sexual nucleus of common life (infidelity, sexually motivated murder, etc.) are distributed other everyday aspects: violence, thievery, various types of fraud, beatings. 28 Bahktin, who drew inspiration from the entire Western literary tradition, developed his theories from investigating ancient literature, exemplified by the Greek Romance, Apulius and Petronius, in addition to Renaissance texts, epitomized by Rabelais. His broad cultural foundation, which formed the basis of general European intellectual discourse, was hardly any different from Pasolini’s, who was well-educated and arguably 28

Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope” 128.

134 just as versed in the Western literary tradition. The two men were also contemporaries, both dying in 1975. As such, it is not unreasonable to believe that similar historical as well as current political and cultural affairs informed each of their writings. One must bear in mind, however, that Bakhtin’s work did not reach the general Italian public until the late 1970s, when Einaudi published Rabelais e la cultura popolare nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento in 1975 and Estetica e romanzo in 1979. 29 Pasolini, thus, never directly engaged with Bakhtin’s thought, despite the fact that the Russian literary theorist formulated his ideas for three quarters of the twentieth century. The correlations between Pasolini’s oeuvre and Bakhtin’s relate more to underlying European cultural strains rather than to an open discourse between the men and their works.

The similarities between Bakhtin and Pasolini, however, should not overshadow their differences. Bahktin grounded his approach to literature on a Russian education post-Red Revolution, while Pasolini inevitably applied a more Mediterranean methodology to his study of modern Italy’s subaltern class. Their interactions with Communism, which was prevalent in both the Soviet Union and Italy, likewise varied greatly. For Bakhtin. it was highly Stalinist and Marxist, informing not only the shape of politics, but also that of everyday life. In Pasolini’s case, at least during the 1950s, Communism was largely filtered through a Gramscian lens and it did not act as the hegemonic power in Italy. It was, rather, more of an ideology than a way of life. As a result, Pasolini’s presentation of a carnevalesque Rome rests more on theoretical commonalities between their thoughts than on actual exchanges. That being said, popular

29

Even though Pasolini may have obtained copies of Bahktin’s work in French, the Russian’s study on Rebelais and the grotesque appeared in that language only in 1970, while his theories on the chronotope reached French audiences only in 1978, after Pasolini’s death. Pasolini’s encounters with his contemporary’s ideas were, therefore, at very limited if not nonexistent.

135 countercultural and grotesque “obscenity,” as outlined by Bakhtin, does color the Italian author’s short stories, novels, and films; yet unlike in Bakhtin’s analysis, prostitution, promiscuity and criminality no longer remain in the shadowy underground but in the spotlight. Prostitutes, pimps and thieves evolve in Pasolini’s oeuvre from their traditional fictional roles as the “third person,” who, as Bakhtin describes, eavesdrops and spies on the protagonist’s private life in order to provide insight into what is generally considered exclusively personal. 30 Pasolini’s narratives, instead, show the streetwalker, procurer, and criminal standing in Rome’s blazing sun, which burns the city, rather than redeems it. 31 The brutality and oppression imposed by the sun inverts western tradition’s depiction of solar energy as a life sustaining source and symbol of divinity, a transposition which better fits Pasolini’s underclass characters. These shifts in semiotics, especially the movement of society’s lowest members from the background to the foreground, challenges traditional concepts of the positive prose hero and empowers authors, as wlel as directors to expose society’s secrets to readers and viewers. The readers and viewers, mediated by the prospective of whom many deemed as “obscene” protagonists, scrutinized the world presented to them rarely as they had done before, therefore needing a different, non-bourgeois system under which to examine these figures.

Bahktin’s notion of the carnevalesque, intended to create a space befitting the underground and subversive, explores, as Michel Holquist states, “the interface between a

30 31

Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope” 123.

The violent Roman sun forms a leitmotif in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita as exemplified by the following passages: “Si sentivano i clacson e i motori che sgragavano su per le salite e le curve, empiendo la periferia già bruciata dal sole della prima mattina con un rombo assordante,” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 7; “Il sole spaccava i sassi.” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 8; “Il sole batteva in silenzio sulla Madonna del Riposo, Cassetto e, dietro, Primavalle.” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 9; “I mercati vuoti come un cimitero, sotto un sole che li sgretolava.” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 10.

136 stasis imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and unofficial.” 32 Postwar Italian literature and cinema followed in a cultural current theorized by Bakhtin which shifted prostitutes, pimps, and thieves from the sociospatial margins, not only the outside but also the bottom, and resituated them in the center. The Russian writer’s notion of the carnevalesque, thus, provides a useful framework within which to explore this shift, as he likewise took note of a decentralization of the universe that occurred in literature during the Renaissance. At that time, writers recognized that the “center was not in heaven but everywhere; all places were equal. This new aspect permitted the author to transfer the relative center of the universe from heaven to the underground….” 33 Pasolini does something quite similar with the social structure of modern Rome. He displaces the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie from the city center to the periphery, where his “pure of heart” underclass resides. Literature, thus, assumed a new center, in fact a multiplicity of centers, which challenged the very concept of the canon and its hierarchy of high and low culture. It fragmented the accepted social hierarchy, dissolving and debasing the accepted social order in order to reorganize it.

As Bahktin further notes in his essay on the novelistic chronotope: “Playing the lowest role in the lowest level of society… the protagonist does not participate internally in that life and is, therefore, in an even better position to observe it and study all its secrets.” 34 Changing the role, and consequently the position, of an underclass protagonist

32

Michael Holquist, ed., Prologue, By M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Trans. Hélène Iswolksy (1965; Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1984) xvi.

33

Bahktin, “Images of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 369.

34

Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope” 122.

137 provides a means for illuminating certain aspects of social life that the bourgeoisie, and by extension Fascism and later Ur-Fascism, purposefully kept in the dark. The once tertiary characters of the underclass present a richer tableau of society’s moral chiaroscuros and call into question what the hegemonic class has deemed right or wrong.

The introduction of figures such as the prostitute, pimp, and thief, enabled Pasolini to investigate, criticize, and reinterpret Rome’s gamma of social iniquities in his narratives, which Mussolini would have never allowed under the Fascist regime. Although the Christian Democrats continued implementing a number of Il Duce’s cultural policies, such literary and cinematic subjects as presented in Ragazzi di vita began “demythifying” the Eternal City piece by piece, and creating a new critical understanding of what is Rome.

This newfound Italian cultural interest and sympathy for people once-defined as immoral or “obscene” certainly becomes popularized and problemitized by Pasolini, despite earlier representations. As the author insists in his 1963 Reportage sul Dio: Nelle grandi città… c’è tutto un mondo sconosciuto che, ogni tanto, ti compare davanti agli occhi attraverso la persona fisica di uno che lo conosce e che ne è in qualche modo deputato…: preordinato, da un maligno destino, a essere una possibile spia, un ruffiano, uno spacciatore di cocaina, un imprenditore di spettacoli di quart’ordine ecc. Finirà col fare il viaggiatore di commercio. E molto presto. Egli è deputato della vita notturna della città. 35 Pasolini watched these unknown figures of Rome’s underground, often engaging in the city’s nightlife, by dining with, observing, and learning from the city’s poor and oftentimes criminal inhabitants. 36 He used his pen to expose them and their lifestyles to the unwilling eyes of a highly moralistic bourgeois society, which generally slept while

35

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Album Pasolini, ed. Graziella Chiarcossi (Milano: Mondadori, 2005), 94.

138 pimps, drug dealers, and prostitutes of both sexes worked at night. He became intimately acquainted with them during his nocturnal excursions around the city’s periphery in his search for easy, sexual encounters with impoverished young boys. In Rome, his city of adoption, Pasolini seems to have developed a sympathy, if not a passion, for the subaltern population, forced to live vicarious existences through expedients, doing whatever was necessary to stave off hunger. As Ragazzi di vita’s narrator claims: “Quando c’era da rubare, il Riccetto rubava, capirai, con quella fame addietrata di grana che teneva!” 37 Pasolini’s sympathy for marginalized young boys had, in fact, become the foundation of his new mythology, that of the sottoproletariato, or subproletariat, which represented for him the innocence of a primitive, pre-historical age.

This myth stands in clear opposition to Mussolini’s romanità, founded on the precept of one’s knowledge of Rome’s glorious history and charge as a symbol of power.

As Il Duce once declared: Roma è veramente il segno fatale della nostra stirpe, Roma non può essere senza l’Italia, ma l’Italia non può essere senza Roma. Il nostro destino di popolo ci inchioda alla storia di Roma. Noi prendemmo Roma per purificare, redimere ed innalzare l’Italia; noi terremo Roma solidamente fino a che il nostro compito non sarà totalmente compiuto. 38 Pasolini’s sottoproletariato does just the opposite from a bourgeois perspective. It does not purify, redeem, nor celebrate Italy, but contaminates the nation. The word itself is a contamination, one that I find difficult to adopt, as the term’s etymology implies a proletariat or industrial working class. Its use, thus, presents a problematic notion as Rome is not, nor has ever been, an industrial city. Franco Ferrarotti justly notes this fact,

37

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 140.

38

Mussolini, Opera omnia Vol. XX, 74.

139 observing that Rome has been, and is nothing more, than a parasite-city, a city that cannot sustain itself or help balance the precarious lives of its lowest class: Roma… è rimasta una città burocratica parassitaria, cioè solo indirettamente produttiva, e… per importanti aspetti si presenta come una città pre-capitalista. Abbiamo detto più sopra che alla base della città moderna, della sua genesi e del suo sviluppo, c’è un fatto tecnologico.

Alla base della vita di Roma moderna non c’è un fatto tecnologico produttivo; c’è il bisogno di darsi una facciata, c’è una burocrazia, ci sono le aquile imperiali, c’è il centro della cristianità…. La tradizione delle antiche turbe clientelari si salda qui alla esistenza precaria di un sottoproletariato che sarebbe probabilmente più esatto definire ‘semiproletariato’, cioè un proletariato intermittente….39 Ferrarotti turns Rome’s myth against itself, blaming the city’s tradition of imperial and Catholic hegemonies for the city’s inability to evolve into a modern metropolis, an assertion that highly resonates with postwar representations of Italy’s capital. He even uses Rome’s historical nature to reevaluate the term “subproletariat,” to which Pasolini clung throughout his lifetime, by redefining Rome’s underclass at the “semi-proletariat.”

The term, subproletariat, however, speaks to 1950s Italian society, 40 just as its etymology bears the conceptually useful prefix “sub-” connoting the words’ social and spatial connotations. 41 This linguistic marker of social and spatial relationships, likewise, suits Bahktin’s notion of the carnevalesque, for he demonstrates: “downward movement is… inherent in all forms of popular-festive merriment and grotesque realism. Down, inside39

Franco Ferrarotti, Roma: Da capitale a periferia (Bari & Roma: Laterza, 1979) 7-8.

40

The term “sottoproletariato” first officially entered the Italian language in 1956, according to Tullio De Mauro’s Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso. This dating indicates its rise in usage either before Pasolini’s publication of Ragazzi di vita or sometime a little before Garzanti published the book. The Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana furthermore defines the term along sociological lines: “Nelle moderne società industriali, lo strato della popolazione più povero economicamente e culturalmente, privo di coscienza politica, i cui componenti traggono il loro reddito da occupazioni occasionali, spesso degradanti, parassitarie o sfocianti nell’illegalità.” The Italian subproletariat is, thus, equivalent to the Russian notion of the Lumpenproletariat, or “proletariato straccione.”

41

I will not integrate the term sottoproletariato or subproletariat into my discussion of underclass Rome as I agree with Ferrarotti that the term is culturally inappropriate, due to Rome’s lack of a manufacturing or industrial center.

140 out, vice versa, upside down, such is the direction of all these movements. All of them thrust down, turn over, push headfirst, transfer top to bottom, and bottom to top, both in the literal sense of space, and in the metaphorical meaning of the image.” 42 Pasolini certainly understood this relationship between social practice and spatial positioning, as it plays prominently in Ragazzi di vita, as well as in his later novel Una vita violenta.

Pasolini’s fixation on Rome’s underclass 43 and his carnevalesque representation of its urban life appears to have contributed to firing his earliest detractors’ criticism.

They accused him of corrupting public morality following the publication of his first long narrative, Ragazzi di vita. Pasolini’s empathetic focus on Rome’s malavita, or criminal element, and the spaces it inhabits found many opponents, creating un caso letterario following the book’s publication in 1955. His didactic critics claimed that Ragazzi di vita contaminated the Italian language with base jargon and dialect, as well as sullied the nation’s sense of morality with the book’s vulgar characters and situations. Several of his naysayers actually gathered in July 1955 to discuss the text’s so-called moral defects, decrying two major faults: “Il primo riguarda il linguaggio che è un impasto di dialetto, di traduzione di dialetto e di buon italiano. Il secondo…, collegato al primo, è di contenuto: il gusto del morboso che falsa quel mondo fedele delle borgate del quale l’autore

42 43

Bahktin, “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 370.

As mentioned before, Pasolini sought the truth in what he believed was the underclass’ primitive innocence. Sam Rohdie explains in his article “Neo-realism and Pasolini”: “There was a general sense, expressed by many, that within the present, non-bourgeois ‘other’ – the people – there was a core of irrationality, of something primitive, close to nature and hence to truth, not like the falsities inherent in bourgeois culture, or in culture tout court. Thus within the peasant, non-bourgeois world, it was believed, there was something purer and more innocent than in the bourgeois world. By going beyond the bourgeois, therefore, one went beyond the social and beyond history since there was only ever bourgeois history and bourgeois society.” Pasolini Old and New, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999) 180.

141 porrebbe essere documentarista e cronista.” 44 The first objection raised against Ragazzi di vita derives from the centuries-old questione della lingua: a political and cultural movement that sought to develop an unified national identity through the dissemination of a codified Italian language. 45 Scholars have studied at length this initially highly criticized aspect of Pasolini’s literary oeuvre. Most scholars, however, have overlooked the nucleus of the second accusation.

Pasolini’s detractors, beyond the issue of language, claimed that the author falsified his purportedly realistic portrayals of Rome’s poorest neighborhoods, the borgate, which were slums and shantytowns lying on the outskirts of the capital city. His critics’ objection to this aspect of the novel derives from a variety of political, economic, social, religious, and psychological motivations. Scholars have attended to these epistemological bases of their objection, but for some reason, have glossed over the fundamental component of the controversy: Pasolini’s representation of Rome. This seemingly obvious aspect of Pasolini’s narrative literature has largely escaped critical 44

“Dibattito su ‘Ragazzi di vita’ di Pier Paolo Pasolini: Un equivoco libro sulle borgate romane,” L’Unità, 5 July 1955.

45

Italy was still tackling that matter in the mid-1950s, a period of great sociopolitical, economic and cultural crisis as a new Italian republic sought to establish a cohesive, democratic nation following the disaster of Fascism. Pasolini’s insistence on writing in a mix of Italian, Roman, romanesco, and gergo romanesco thus seemed like a slap in the face to the intellectual, political, and religious authorities, who dedicated great energy to this goal. Many Pasolini scholars have, in fact, composed lengthy studies focusing on his linguistic experimentation, choices, and intentions, and the matter extends beyond the scope of this text. What is important to note, however, is that the debate surrounding the questione della lingua continued through the mid-twentieth century from at least the time of Dante’s late medieval De vulgari eloquentia to Pasolini’s post-World War II narratives, a point which highlights the matter’s overall cultural significance. For a more in-depth discussion of the linguistic matters informing and evolving from Pasolini’s narrative literature, consult: Antonio Vitti, Il primo Pasolini e la sua narrativa (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); Dante Della Terza, et al. Pasolini in periferia (Cosenza: Edizioni Periferia, 1992); Paolo Lago, L’ombra corsara di Menippo: La linea cultural menippea fra letteratura e cinema: Da Pasolini a Arbasino e Fellini (Firenze [Florence]: Felice Le Monnier, 2007); Marcello Teodonio, ed. Pasolini tra friulano e romanesco (Roma: Colombo: Centro studi Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, 1997); Luigi De Nardis Roma di Belli e di Pasolini (Roma: Bulzoni, 1977); Laurie Jane Anderson, Challenging The Norm: The Dialect Question in The Works of Gadda and Pasolini (Stanford: Humanities Honors Program, Stanford University, 1977); and Francesco Ferri, Linguaggio, passione e ideologia: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra Gramsci, Gadda e Contini (Roma: Progetti museali, 1996).

142 review, for no book exists in Italian or in English that exposes Pasolini’s complicated, contradictory, and controversial literary interpretation of the city. 46 While this current work mainly analyzes Ragazzi di vita, contextualized within postwar Italian modernism and the demythifying of Rome’s image, Pasolini’s first major narrative marks a turning point in the thematic evolution of Italian cultural productions during the per-Boom era.

Ragazzi di vita’s moralistic condemnation, which escalated and eventually lead to a criminal trial of the author and his publisher in Milan in early 1956, should be considered within this context of the contemporary socio-political atmosphere. The case lasted for several months until the judge cleared Pasolini and Garzanti of all charges of having offended the public’s morality. Many journalists chronicled the author’s pardon, 47

46

A few articles exist on the subject, but do not delve extensively into the historical, personal, and theoretical questions that informed Pasolini’s literary narrative depiction of Rome. They include: Edoardo D’Onofrio, “Lettere al Direttore: Le borgate di Roma e il romanzo di Pasolini,” Rinascita, January 1960; Rpd. in Pasolini e Roma, eds. Enzo Siciliano and Federica Pirani (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2005) 30-33; Renato Nicolini, “Pasolini e Roma,” Per conoscere Pasolini, eds. Luciano Lucignani and Carlo Molfese (Roma: Bulzoni & Teatro Tenda, 1978) 11-15. Some scholars have even devoted chapters to discussing Ragazzi di vita and/or Una vita violenta, although they only in passing connect the city to the narratives’ content. These texts include: Pia Friedrich, “Ragazzi di vita,” Pier Paolo Pasolini (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982) 60-67; Joseph Francese, “Pasolini’s ‘Roman Novels,’ the Italian Communist Party, and the Events of 1956,” Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994) 22-39; Guido Santato, “Da ‘ragazzi di vita’ a ‘Una vita violenta’,” Pier Paolo Pasolini: L’opera, (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980) 199-220; Alain-Michel Boyer, “La préhistoire: Les romans de Pasolini,” Pier Paolo Pasolini: Qui êtes vous? (Lyon: La manufacture, 1987) 101-124; Luigi Martellini, “Il ‘ciclo’ romano: Ragazzi di vita – Una vita violenta – Alì dagli occhi azzurri e Storie della città di Dio.” Ritratto di Pasolini (Bari & Roma: Laterza, 2006) 61-76; Enzo Golino, “Narrando Narrando,” Pasolini: Il sogno di una cosa (Milano: Bompiani, 2005) 55-128; Giovanni Franzoni, “Pasolini e la violenza di classe nelle borgate di Roma,” Perché Pasolini, eds. Gualtiero De Santi, Maria Lenti, and Roberto Rossini (Firenze [Florence]: Guaraldi, 1978); and Neil Novello, “Godere, Roma, meta-scrivere: Le volontà della prosa,” Pier Paolo Pasolini (Napoli [Naples]: Liguori, 2007). The only full-length book to address Pasolini’s relationship to Rome is: John David Rhodes, Stupendous Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), which falls short in many respects, in large part, because Rhodes glosses over Pasolini’s Roman novels Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta. He focuses primarily on the films Accattone and Mamma Roma, as well as on the poem “Il pianto della scavatrice” from Le ceneri di Gramsci, leaving the rest of Pasolini’s Roman production in the shadows.

47

See: “I Ragazzi di vita non offendono la morale: Assolti Pier Paolo Pasolini in un processo letterario svoltosi in Tribunale,” Il Giorno: Edizione Mattino, 5 July 1956; “Persino il P.M. ha difeso i Ragazzi di vita,” Il Giorno: Edizione Pomeriggio, 5 July 1956); “I Ragazzi di vita non sono immorali: Assolto in tribunale un giovane scrittore,” Profilo di Milano, 5 July 1956; “Non costituisce reato: l’opera d’arte anche se ardita,” Il Corriere, 5 July 1956; “Arte e immoralità: Autore ed editore assolti,” Avvenire

143 while at least one cited Pasolini’s simple self-defense which contributed to his legal victory on July 4, 1956: “Ho inteso fare un’opera documentaristica. Ho vissuto tre anni nel quartiere popolare di Roma dove si svolge l’azione del mio romanzo e non volevo descrivere una Roma civile; il linguaggio usato, doveva quindi essere necessariamente un po’ crudo.” 48 Pasolini’s purported intention to depict realistically subaltern Rome’s everyday life, with all of its criminality, was a central component to his ultimate demythification of the city’s image. The text required vulgarity both in its content as well as in its linguistic form in order to maintain its documentaristic integrity and demonstrate the modern capital’s break with its oppressive Fascist past. The writer’s anthropological approach to studying the Roman underclass reflected in large part, as Pasolini states, his proclivity towards a mimetic realism. The author wished to document the unknown, squalid social conditions of Rome’s borgate, 49 and the best way to accommodate such a goal, was to mingle with the borgatari in the midst of their indigenous environment.

His ethnographic method, however, bears traces of the poetic style of the nineteenth century Roman poet Giuseppe Giochino Belli, who composed “un monumento

d’Italia, 5 July 1956; “Assolti Pasolini e Garzanti incriminati per un romanzo,” La Stampa, 5 July 1956; “Romanziere ed editore assolti al processo per ‘Ragazzi di vita’,” Il Messaggero di Roma, 5 July 1956.

48

See “Assolto perché ‘opera d’arte’: Ragazzi di Vita di Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Corriere d’informazione, 4 July 1956.

49

According to the scholar Antonio Vitti: “Il dialetto romanesco e il gergo borgataro rappresentano una lingua spontanea e viva da usare come contrasto alla lingua italiana. Le borgate romane sono una nazione, ricca della forza naturale e irrazionale della vitalità. I giovani borgatari vivono fuori da ogni coscienza sociale e attraverso il dialetto-gergale acquistano una fisionomia tutta propria.” Vitti, Il primo Pasolini 54. This astute observation emphasizes the difference between the outlying borgate and their inhabitants, which and whom Vitti insists composed another nation, separate from mainstream Italian society. This point is integral to one’s understanding not only of the uniqueness and traditional marginalization of Pasolini’s subject matter, but also of the spatial and environmental separation between the subaltern class within Rome’s urban environment.

144 di quelli che è oggi la plebe di Roma,” 50 known as the Sonetti romaneschi. Pasolini passionately read Belli’s sonnets after his initial arrival in Rome and often quotes them in Ragazzi di vita. 51 Much like Belli, who generated his poetic language and material on what he heard and observed amongst the Roman people, 52 Pasolini mixed with the underclass in the borgate and transcribed what he heard in the streets and squares onto a pad he kept tucked in his pocket. He was gaining an education in Rome. His friend later in life, Enzo Siciliano, remarks that Pier Paolo would meet up with Sergio Citti, whom he met one day along Rome’s Aniene River, to copy down stories and expressions, later to recycle in Ragazzi di vita: Pasolini e Citti… andavano in pizzeria a Torpignattara: un locale che si chiamava ‘L’aquila d’oro’. Sergio, a quel tempo, guadagnava più di Pier Paolo: faceva l’imbianchino, a milleottocento lire al giorno. Era lui che offriva la pizza a Pasolini.

Gli presentò Franco, suo fratello: poco loquace e malinconico.

Quelle cene, cui partecipavano spesso altri ragazzi, erano cene di racconti: le ‘magnate’, le bevute invase di parole e gesti. Pasolini teneva un taccuino aperto davanti a sé: chiedeva precisazioni linguistiche a Sergio col fare puntiglioso e cavilloso del glottologo di professione.

Finita la cena, Pasolini prendeva il tram per tornare a Rebibbia: spariva alla volta delle proprie avventure…. 53 Pasolini, just like Belli, however, was not an anthropologist nor an ethnologist, but a poet, who inevitably imbued his realist artistic productions based on the subaltern and 50

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. “Introduzione ai sonetti romaneschi.” Opere, ed. Edoardo Ripari (Roma: Carocci, 2007) 45.

51

Two chapter epigraphs are obvious cases of his admiration for Belli in Ragazzi di vita. Chapter five begins: “Panza piena nun crede ar diggiuno… G. G. Belli,” Pasolini 109, while chapter eight’s epigraph reads: “… la Commaraccia Secca de Strada-Giulia arza er rampino. G. G. Belli,” Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 217.

52

In Belli’s “Introduzione ai sonetti romaneschi”, the poet claims to create a monument to the “plebians” of Rome, by transcribing their language and lifestyle onto the pages of his poetry: “Io qui ritraggo le idee di una plebe ignorante, comunque in gran parte concettosa ed arguta, e le ritraggo, dirò, col soccorso di un idiotismo continuo, di una favella tutta guasta e corrotta, di una lingua infine non italiana e neppur romana, ma romanesca.” Belli, Opere 49.

53

Enzo Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini (Milano: Rizzoli, 1979) 214.

145 working classes’ experiences with expressionistic interpretations. With the hand of an aesthete and the mind of a humanist Marxist, Pasolini presents in Ragazzi di vita not necessarily a chronicle of Rome from the late 1940s and early 1950s, but a fictionalized and ideologized reality, which consequently demythified his image of the city in its opposition to all Fascist forms. His depiction of Rome does not simply replicate the physiognomy of the newly democratic Italian capital. The author, instead, develops his own, subjective vision of Rome filtered through his bourgeois education; his everyday, personal experiences in the city; and his studied, objective observations of its people and its urbanistic changes. Pasolini’s emphasis on the documentaristic and chronicled reality of Ragazzi di vita has led many scholars to accept his self-proclaimed realism; however, the author by virtue of as his poetic tendencies, as demonstrated by his continual success in that medium, inevitably personalized his highly passionate depiction of Rome.

Pasolini’s Rome, therefore, lies somewhere between the urban fabric’s gritty reality and the author’s imagination.

Ragazzi di vita tells a series of stories loosely threaded together through the events in the delinquent life of the young il Riccetto. Il Riccetto, a name that Pasolini devised from the physical appearance of the boys with whom he had sexual experiences in the borgate, 54 serves as a generic representative of his class and age group. His story consists of a series of tragedies, which ultimately contribute to his complete moral corruption and social alienation. Il Riccetto begins his life in a Roman borgata, Donna

54

According to Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini’s major biographer: “Pier Paolo, allora, aveva l’aria di un beatnik anzitempo. Desiderava piacere ai ragazzi di vita: metteva in gara la propria fisicità con la loro. Il compenso era una pizza, o un paio di scarpe. Bastava questo: e i ragazzi erano mascalzoncelli, o mostriciattoli che lui trovava bellissimi. Il tratto che li accomunava erano i riccetti cadenti sulla fronte, il sorriso ‘malandro’, una vitalità che scaturiva imprevista dal torpore: furono i tratti specifici che si riassunsero, anni dopo, in Ninetto Davoli.” Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini 197-198.

146 Olimpia, a decrepit mix of hovels and “grattacieli,” the palazzo building type rising approximately six- to ten-stories high, which Pasolini studied from his new home in Monteverde Nuovo in 1955. Il Riccetto initially lives in the hallway of Ferrebeton, an abandoned elementary school with his mother and several other families. One day, however, the school collapses, killing his mother and leaving him a homeless orphan. Il Riccetto is, thus, forced into a life on the streets (at least as Pasolini initially presents it), 55 during which il Riccetto participates directly and indirectly in crimes of various natures. The boy eventually spends a three-year stint in Rome’s juvenile reformatory, Porta Portese, before entering adulthood as a completely indifferent and amoral young man. Other young boys’ stories interweave with il Riccetto’s, explaining the plural meaning of the book’s title, and contribute to the image of overall depravity and depravation characterizing human lives in Roman borgate.

Descriptions of these squalid neighborhoods and their ruinous appearance occupy more textual spaces than narrations of events or of characters’ psyches. The portrayals of the Roman cityscape are in fact what unite the otherwise episodic narrative structure of Ragazzi di vita. The city is the only constant in the book, transforming gradually from its traditional role as a setting into the story’s true protagonist. Pasolini focuses his attention on the construction and deformation of the city’s periphery through the new, quickly and poorly produced borgate, bringing the changing form of the modern city to the reader’s eyes. The author does occasionally pass through Rome’s more familiar historical center; however, it is the centripetal and centrifugal peripheral neighborhoods, in all their

55

The reader later learns that il Riccetto has family in Tiburtino, but his relationship to his father and sister remains undefined. Whether he attempted to live with them, or completely avoided contacting them after his mother’s death, never enters the narrative.

147 inorganic and magmic chaos that capture Pasolini’s imagination and serve as the incohesive unifying element of the story.

Buildings under-construction, which stood with and against Rome’s picturesque crumbling ruins, generated a sense of violence being afflicted upon the Eternal City’s mythical and sublime urbanistic beauty. In an article composed in 1957, Pasolini remarks: Dico sempre a tutti, quando mi capita, che Roma è la città più bella del mondo. Delle città che conosco, è quella dove preferisco vivere: anzi, ormai, non concepisco di vivere altrove…. La sua bellezza è naturalmente un mistero: possiamo pure ricorrere al barocco, all’atmosfera, alla composizione tutta depressioni e alture del terreno, che le dà continue inaspettate prospettive, al Tevere che la solca aprendole in cuore stupendi vuoti d’aria.… Ma Roma sarebbe la città piú bella del mondo, se, contemporaneamente, non fosse la città piú brutta del mondo? 56 The ugliness, which accompanies the beauty, derives from “la fame, il dolore [che[ vi sono allegoria, la storia [che] è la storia nostra, quella del fascismo, della Guerra, del dopoguerra” 57 and exponentially augments when one approaches the capital’s borgate.

Mussolini’s attempts to reconstruct modern Rome according to the grandeur of the ancient city ironically devolved into decay. He developed the periphery, where his government displaced Rome’s working class during the sventramenti, with poor materials and even poorer planning. The perennial images of steel girders juxtaposed with halfway built primitive-like hovels contributed to the postwar demythification process. The city’s continual modernization stripped the city of its traditional association with inspiring ancient ruins, Renaissance villas, and Baroque fountains and churches – the monuments on which many different governments founded their version of Rome’s myth. It is as if 56

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Roma malandrina,” L’Unità, Roma, 28 October 1957; Rpd. in Walter Siti, ed.

Storie della città di Dio (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 105.

57

Pasolini, “Roma malandrina” 105.

148 the capital city, as construed in Pasolini’s modern literature, was being debased, reduced to ruin in order to descend to the level of the author’s human characters.

If one returns to Bakhtin and continues his quote emphasizing his interpretation of everyday life’s obscene nature, one discovers the form that time and space in everyday, “obscene” or “carnevalesque” life have taken in Western prose literature and film: In the everyday maelstrom of personal life, time is deprived of its unity and wholeness – it is chopped up into separate segments, each encompassing a single episode from everyday life. The separate episodes… are rounded-off and complete, but at the same time are isolated and self-sufficient. The everyday world is scattered, fragmented, deprived of essential connections. It is not permeated with its own specific systemization and ineluctability. 58 This fragmentation, scattering, and segmentation, of which Bahktin speaks, highlight the inorganic, unconnected, and unsystematic organization of everyday life in the plotlines of prose works. This messiness and incoherence, which shapes or even fails to shape the sequence of events, cannot help but effect the arrangement of space, as it is inherent to the Russian philosopher’s concept of the chronotope. The form of the city, by virtue of its being a topos or place, must then reflect the structural fragmentation of a prose work’s characters’ lives. Ragazzi di vita’s episodic, fragmentary nature thus conforms to Bakhtin’s conception of narrating events of obscene everyday life and deserves close analysis. It also reflects Pasolini’s position as an artist operating between Neorealism and Neo-experimentalism, as one finds the nascent cinematic narrative technique of fragmentation in Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), Michelangelo Antonioni’s I vinti (1952), or in the multi-directed L’amore in città (1953); while it assumes a new guise during the 1960s in New Wave films, including Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), Le streghe (1967), Capriccio

58

Bakhtin. “Forms of Time and Chronotope” 128.

149 all’italiana (1968), and Amore e rabbia (1969), 59 which present filmic collages of various directors’ visions within the structure of a single movie. Neorealist and New Wave fragmentation thus, in a certain sense, converged in Pasolini and his 1955 book Ragazzi di vita, while mixing with his predilection for the carnevalesque.

Gramsci, De Certeau and Freud As noted before, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita follows the picaresque existence of il Riccetto as he wanders Rome with his juvenile delinquent companions in search of food, prostitutes, and money. 60 In a sympathetic Neorealist fashion, Pasolini recognized and relayed the socioeconomic and political turmoil altering Rome’s appearance in his fiction as early as 1950, the year after he first settled in Rome. His focus, however, eluded the highly moralistic component shaping his contemporaries’ works, especially as he shifted away from the city’s working class and its environments, towards the spaces and lives of the Roman underclass. Pasolini viewed this socioeconomic group, composed of the unemployed and underemployed, as victims subordinated by and separated from, hegemonic culture and society. This Marxist interpretation of Roman society’s economic and political inequalities, inspired by Pasolini’s 1948 reading of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, spurned his cultural “discovery” of Rome’s “gruppi sociali subalterni,” whom Gramsci identified as largely socially and historically autonomous. Gramsci, and consequently, Pasolini, recognized and commented on the subalterns’ unique historical and cultural position in society, which Pasolini seems to have incorporated into the form as well as content of Ragazzi di 59

Pasolini, in fact, developed short segments for each of these films, respectively including “La ricotta,” “La terra vista dalla luna,” “Che cosa sono le nuvole,” and “La sequenza del fiore di carta.”

60

See Chapter 2, p. 122.

150 vita. Gramsci notes in his Quaderni: “La storia dei gruppi sociali subalterni è necessariamente disgregata ed episodica. È indubbio che nell’attività storica di questi gruppi c’è la tendenza all’unificazione sia pure su piani provvisori, ma questa tendenza è continuamente spezzata dall’iniziativa dei gruppi dominanti….” 61 Pasolini incorporates into Ragazzi di vita this purported subaltern tendency to disaggregate, and to be disaggregated, as well as to appear episodically in history and society in the way he disjointedly represents the life of il Riccetto as well as the neighborhoods of Rome.

The author achieves this disorganic effect by juxtaposing his boy-protagonist’s primitive and ambiguous childhood with the city’s quickly changing urban fabric through disjointed narrative techniques. Pasolini disallows fluid connections between time and space, from one chapter to the next, eradicating years of il Riccetto’s adolescence, and blurring spatial relationships among Rome’s peripheral suburbs. Much like Benjamin’s depiction of Moscow, 62 composed of brief reflections on actions and architectural fragments of everyday life, Pasolini’s Rome cannot be pieced together without the reader’s imagination and a map. He does not provide what Michel de Certeau claims is the “pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of texts the city,” 63 by viewing the urban from above. Rome, just as the French theorist asserts, is unlike New York, the verticality of which one may voyeuristically observe and describe from the top of a skyscraper; the Eternal City has “learned the art of growing old”, alongside and in spite of its sprawling modern periphery, requiring a horizontal 61

Antonio Gramsci, “Quaderno 25 (XXIII): 1934: Ai margini della storia (Storia dei gruppi sociali subalterni),” Quaderni del carcere. Vol. 3, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001) 2283.

62 63

See Chapter 2, p. 121.

Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” trans. Steven Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 92.

151 rather than a vertical examination of space. Pasolini provides in Ragazzi di vita precisely this, what de Certeau deems as the elementary form of experiencing a city, a view from “‘down below’, the thresholds at which visibility begins. [City-dwellers] are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.” 64 Pasolini’s first long narrative and image of Rome are thus derivations from the sporadic and often irregular movements of the boy protagonist’s meanderings through and across the city. The fragmentary presentation of il Riccetto’s life and of Italy’s capital intersect, inviting a reflection on the relationship between the boy’s and the city’s disjointed and chaotic growth during the 1950s.

A few of Pasolini’s contemporaries, including Pietro Citati, partially understood this: Per un talento come il suo, gli schemi del romanzo costituivano, evidentemente, una rèmora. Negli otto capitoli di Ragazzi di vita, un magma subumano e fangoso (giacché ogni scrittore mimetico è sempre attratto dal caos) si dispone entro uno spazio narrativo tanto frammentario che continuo. Per questa strada, Pasolini sarebbe giunto a dissolvere la struttura della narrazione. 65 Citati metaphorically ties the landscape and its inhabitants to the book’s structure using terms like “subhuman” and “muddy” to describe its organizational “magma;” nevertheless, the literary critic and witness to Pasolini’s time views the text’s structure as an impediment, rather than as an enrichment of the book’s total effect. While he may be correct in recognizing the reader’s initial disorientation upon the first reading of the narrative, it is worth considering that Pasolini, a writer with a degree in Philology and Aesthetics, had a higher artistic goal for his Ragazzi. The meeting of form and content is,

64

de Certeau 93.

65

Pietro Citati, “Le ceneri di Gramsci,” Il Punto, June 29, 1957.

152 in fact, the philosophical foundation of both Philology and Aesthetics as outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics. 66 Pasolini reconstructs Rome’s contradictory and fluctuating character in Ragazzi di vita, by documenting both the illegal as well as the partially state-funded explosion of public housing construction that began swallowing Rome’s surrounding countryside in 1949 known as abusivismo. 67 His narration begins in the immediate post-Mussolini years when the German then the Allied armies occupied the city. It was a time when apartment buildings emerged out of pre-existing buildings, such as Ferrobeton the elementary school in which il Riccetto and his mother reside, or from private speculation. The early pages of the text note the rise of modern apartment buildings within and around the formerly Fascist borgate, including Donna Olimpia: “Da Monteverde Vecchio ai Granatieri la strada è corta: basta passare il Prato, e tagliare tra le palazzine in costruzione intorno al viale dei Quattro Venti: valanghe d’immondezza, case non ancora finite e già in rovina, grandi sterri fangosi, scarpate piene di zozzeria.” 68 Such speculation was to

66

Aristotle outlines in the first section of his Poetics the essential kinds and qualities of poetry, which he judges according to the notion of imitation and the aesthetic of magnitude and order. Imitation requires a correlation between content and form, as the philosopher writes: “Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyambic poetry, and the music of the flute and the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conceptions modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects, the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.” Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. S. H. Butcher, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1970) I.2-3.

67

The historian Paul Ginsborg concisely recounts the nature of Rome’s housing boom in his History of Contemporary Italy: “Between 1948 and 1963 public housing schemes accounted for only 16 per cent of total investment in the construction of houses.… Throughout the great building boom of 1953-63, there was often open collusion between the municipal authorities and the building speculators. The ‘sack’ of Rome, as it came to be called, was dramatic testimony to this. Property developers like the giant Società Generale Immobiliari, whose principal shareholder is the Vatican, were allowed to fill up every available space in the city itself, and then to cover the periphery with apartment blocks of poor construction and even poorer aesthetics,” cit. 152. For richer investigations of Rome’s urbanistic expansion throughout the 1950s, see: Berlinguer and Della Seta, Borgate di Roma, cfp.; Ferrarotti, Roma da capitale a periferia, cfp; Insolera, Roma moderna, cfp.

68

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 8.

153 lead to an attempted governmental regulation of construction sites, under the Fanfani Law, which Italo Insolera recognizes not only as effecting the capital’s city’s urban structure, but also stimulating the economy for the unemployed underclass: “Protagonista dell’edilizia statale fu perciò Ina-Casa istituita con la legge Fanfani del 28 febbraio 1949,… incaricata di attuare un piano d’incremento dell’occupazione della mano d’opera mediante la costruzione di case per lavoratori….” 69 The author, however, never identifies Ina-Casa as the force responsible for the modern apartment blocks in Ragazzi di vita as he later does in Una vita violenta; nevertheless, its presence is palpable in the text.

In the following chapters, Pasolini captures the juxtaposition of new housing projects among the illegal shacks along the city’s periphery: Al Borghetto Prenestino, con tante case piccole come dadi o come pollai, bianche come quelle degli arabi, e nere come capanne, piene di cafoni pugliesi o marchegiani, sardegnoli o calabresi: giovinottoli e vecchi che a quell’ora se ne tornavano ubriachi e coperti di stracci; oppure ai villaggi di tuguri ammucchiati nelle aree di costruzione, tra le scarpate delle viuzze che davano sulla Prenestina. 70 Such peripheral slums and shantytowns, that developed either separate from or concentric to the capital’s city center, largely resulted from the introduction of the Fanfani Law, although as in all of Rome’s construction boom period, the unregulated existed alongside the regulated. By 1959, Ina-Casa had constructed 110,953 new apartments in Rome, which corresponded to 7.33% of inhabitable homes at that time, 71 while the numbers for the speculators are undocumented, but likely quite similar, increasing Rome’s appearance as an ever-growing oil stain (See Fig. 51). The inauguration of Rome’s postwar housing

69

Insolera 188.

70

Insolera 93.

71

Insolera 188-189.

154

Figure 51. Rome in 1960. The Oil Stain Expands. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2001).

155 boom, which coincided with the author’s arrival in Rome, provided ample material for Pasolini to assess visually the societal, developmental, and political changes occurring throughout the city.

As the twentieth century flâneur of underclass Rome, 72 Pasolini continuously investigated the conditions of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, idly wandering the borgate during his days and nights as an unemployed schoolteacher. His two major biographers, Nico Naldini and Enzo Siciliano, note the influence that his peregrinations along Rome’s poor periphery had on his Roman prose production during his first years in Rome. Naldini, Pasolini’s cousin, remarks that the writer’s second year in the Italian capital transported him “dai vagabondaggi nel centro verso le periferie, raggiunte con i tram in una successione di coincidenze,” 73 while Siciliano, a close friend of Pasolini, provides a more expressionistic picture of the author’s varied movements around the city: Gli autobus che attraversano il centro da Monteverde alla Stazione Termini, la Circolare rossa, i pisciatoi di Lungotevere: - Pasolini scrive di tutto: caldarrostai e piccoli giocatori di football, ragazzi che vanno a ‘rubbà’ per comperarsi un maglione celeste visto in una vetrina, o che calano sottoponte per farsi la marchetta col ‘froscio’. Intorno, il paesaggio si atteggia come in festoni di scena, come sulle tele della grande maniera italiana: - ruderi del Colosseo, del Teatro Marcello, cadenti palazzi umbertini dai pesanti cornicioni, si mutano nelle sigle di un dilavato rinascimento, mentre i cieli sono incendiati da bagliori indefinibili o percorsi di notte da allucinazioni. 74 As Naldini and Siciliano illustrate, Pasolini spent alot of time exploring the borgate, which were under continual construction during the early 1950s.

72

While Pasolini never described himself as a flâneur, he fits its definition as “idle man-abouttown.” He, also, was an inhabitant of one of Rome’s borgate, Rebibbia, between 1951-1954, an experience which permitted him to immerse himself in the capital’s peripheral culture more than any other writer of his time.

73

Nico Naldini, Pasolini, una vita (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1989) 151.

74

Siciliano Vita di Pasolini 185.

156 The young author viewed these spaces during his walks as the Italian and Roman governments’ attempt to incorporate and “civilize” Rome’s outlying areas and inhabitants; 75 he, also, paradoxically recognized them as concrete jungles intended to isolate the destitute from hegemonic bourgeois society. Neither construct speaks well of the current state of political affairs in Rome, or to the Italian image. The first sociologist of Rome’s borgate, Giovanni Berlingeur, and his colleague Piero della Seta, comment on this ambiguous state of incorporation and isolation characterizing the mixture of shantytowns and public housing in their study Borgate di Roma: Ma, innanzi tutto, che cosa sono le borgate? Giova dire subito che esse, nella vita amministrativa del Comune di Roma, non godono, per così dire, di un’esistenza ufficiale. Il Comune, ufficialmente, le ignora: in tutti gli atti della sua vita amministrativa, i fatti, i dati, i fenomeni della vita delle borgate non sono mai analizzati a sé, ma vengono scrupolosamente diluiti e dispersi nel fenomeno più generale della metropoli. 76 Rome’s government, thus, disregards these unofficial and incomplete pieces of the city that stand partially in the countryside and partially in the metropolis, so that they are both and neither rural nor urban, a subspecies of the concept of neighborhood, composed of disorganized construction agglomerates. Their marginality and indefinableness render these spaces simultaneously anonymous and out-of-sight, perfect stages for criminal, or carnevalesque, activities to occur.

The constant descent and recession into Rome’s underground and marginal spaces, which mimics Pasolini’s own actions, characterize the everyday life struggle of il

75

Vicenzo Cermani, in his introduction to Ragazzi di vita, recognizes that “lasciato a se stesso non può fare altro che adattarsi alla trasformazione della città, che non è una trasformazione soltanto esterna, ma una proposta attiva e totalizzante sul modo di essere e di comportarsi in un contesto ‘civile’.” Cermani, Ragazzi di vita vi.

76

Berlinguer and Della Seta 152.

157 Riccetto and his fellow ragazzi di vita. 77 They linger under bridges, wander around trash dumps, and sleep in unoccupied buildings. These spaces are zones avoided by bourgeois society and provide Rome’s underclass with areas in which they may act freely as they would no where else: “Quella volta sì che si poteva scendere giù per la scaletta, e tra i puncicarelli pieni di fanga e di carte sporche, sotto Ponte Sisto o Ponte Garibaldi, fare tutto quello che si voleva senza paura.” 78 The lack of enforcement of bourgeois decorum makes the Rome that the author presents hardly the typical literary image of the city par excellence. 79 It is not the “Cradle of Western Civilization”, the Stendahlian crystallization of love, nor the city that Walter Benjamin believed should have created the flâneur. 80 Pasolini’s Rome is, instead, a chaotic magma of fragmental peripheral neighborhoods, the center, and the countryside; streets and mud; monuments and trash; caves, ruins and construction: a place that the author correlates or intersects in one way or another with il Riccetto’s social and spatial positioning. It is a modern Rome, composed of a grotesque reality and stripped of society’s rules.

77

No direct translation of the term ragazzi di vita exists in English, although politicians and authors of Pasolini’s time occasionally used the similarly ambiguous term “teddy boys”. The ragazzi di vita, at least in Pasolini’s literary and cinematic productions, were apathetic yet vitalistic, male, juvenile delinquents who inhabited Rome’s poor periphery, often fatalistically condemned to a life of criminality, loneliness, sickness and death.

78

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 197.

79

In Andrea Giardina and André Vauchez’s rich investigation of Rome as the generating nucleus of myths, entitled Il mito di Roma: Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini, the latter of the two scholars identifies Saint Augustine as the first writer to recognize Rome as the city of all city’s after the empire’s fall: “Ma Roma era più di una città: era la città per eccellenza, insieme Urbs e Civitas, termine che secondo la definizione di sant’Agostino nel De civitate Dei (I, 15) disegna ‘una moltitudine di uomini uniti dai legami della concordia’.” cit. 12. For an exhaustive look at the perpetuation of the myth of Rome and the idea of it being la città per eccellenza, both within the Italian peninsula and beyond, this text provides an excellent and exhaustive history and analysis.

80

Walter Benjamin ponders the urban origination of the flâneur in The Arcades Project: “Paris created the type of the flâneur. What is remarkable is that it wasn’t Rome.” trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: The Belknap P of Harvard U, 1999) M1, 4.

158 Pasolini’s juxtaposition of Rome’s physical, with il Riccetto’s moral, debasement prevails from the beginning of the narrative and increases as the story chronologically progresses. Il Riccetto, as a young boy, spends his afternoons roving the city’s borgate, committing petty crimes, and occasionally playing with other ragazzi in the filthy Tiber River. Il Riccetto seems relatively ignorant of his socioeconomic condition and environment, taking joy in stealing from others and in splashing around in polluted waters. His Rome resembles the Moscow of Benjamin’s beggar children, for Pasolini’s focus is on the city’s loosely connected public spaces and is as disaggregated and episodic as Gramsci theorized a subaltern environment would be. Il Riccetto’s relationship to Rome’s official monuments is also always one of desecration and of distance, without cultural awareness or a grasp of history. The adolescent never seems to contemplate the origins of the buildings around him, for he lacks a basic formal education and his basic needs are more pressing than the mild pleasure and consolation offered from engaging with the artistic structures surrounding him. 81 More importantly, il Riccetto’s Rome is the new Rome, an emerging modern capital without a defined cultural identity nor a traceable past. 82 This Rome is, in fact, unlike the paradigmatic city of the past, or of the unconscious, as Sigmund Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents:

81

“People who are receptive to the influence of art cannot set too high a value on it as a source of pleasure and consolation in life. Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989) 31.

82

It is important to note that while il Riccetto resides in Rome, his story begins in the Giorgio Franceschi Elementary School, which armies and then war evacuees inhabited. The boy, therefore, may not be Roman, but one of the many migrants who came to Rome during the postwar period.

159 Now let us, by flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.83 Freud posits that the city is akin to the topography of the mind. There are existing buildings, which correspond to the present consciousness by occupying space and remaining in the range of sensory perception. Beneath, or historically behind these present structures, are the edifices, which once stood in their place, virtually imperceptible in space, but knowable through memory traces preserved in the unconscious. The mental apparatus of il Riccetto, as a child who has few memories and who subsists rather than lives, relies primarily on instinctual impulses, if one adheres to Freud’s theory. These instinctual impulses characterizing il Riccetto’s and his subaltern cohort’s position in such a history-rich city are better understood if one inverts Freud’s analogy.

The psychoanalyst assumes that Rome’s past compares with the structure of human memory, on the basis of a priori presumptions, which informs cultural knowledge. If one lacks collective experience and cultural knowledge, the individual a posteriori, or knowledge derived from experience, predominates and evidences consciousness. According to Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace” 84 and “consists essentially of perceptions of excitation coming from the external world.” 85 By eliminating the possibility of knowledge of a long

83

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 18.

84

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989) 28.

85

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 26.

160 pre-exiting past, and replacing it with an accumulation of recent experiences in newly developed areas, the new Rome and its underclass inhabitants form a different, but still relevant, place in Freud’s analogy. It is within the conscious, present, or modernist Rome.

This Rome, based on “excitation from the external world”, corresponds to Bahktin’s conception of the carnvelesque upside down, inside out negation of reality. Bahktin states in “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum” that negation, common in popular-festive imagery, has never an abstract logical character…. It transfers the object to the underworld, replaces the top by the bottom, or the front by the back, sharply exaggerating some traits at the expense of others. Negation and destruction of the object are therefore their displacement and reconstruction in space. The nonbeing of an object is its ‘other face,’ its inside out. And this inside out or lower stratum acquires a time element….

The object that has been destroyed remains in the world but in a new form of being in time and space; it becomes the ‘other side’ of the new object that has taken its place. 86 The Freudian memory-trace, thus, transforms into a destructive negation, a substantive rereading of topography. While for Freud the original Pantheon constructed by Marcus Agrippa “unconsciously” stands behind and within the current Hadrianic version, 87 for Bahktin, Agrippa’s building represents the present structure’s “other face”, the old destroyed by the birth of the new. Il Riccetto’s experience of Rome is therefore as much a Bahktinian carnevalesque version of the city, as much as it negates the Freudian unconscious one, both focusing on the instinctual present rather than on the Italian capital’s long illustrious past. Pasolini plays with Freud’s conceptualization of Rome, subverting the city’s historical tradition as his characters also likely do not have a subconscious.

86

Bahktin, “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 410.

87

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 18.

161 Subverting Rome Il Riccetto’s instinctual and carnevalsque mentality corresponds to, and reflects his episodic and disaggregate vagabondage around the capital’s newly constructed periphery. He physically and psychologically lives outside the confines of Italy’s status quo, which necessarily lead to his spatial and societal exclusion from the capital’s city center. The young boy’s placement behind, down, away, under, beyond, or outside of famous official buildings and urban spaces underscores Pasolini’s literary creation of an unidentifiable, hidden, yet grotesquely real Rome. In a passage describing the wanderings of young borgatari, Pasolini emphasizes these spatial relations: Le bambine gli andarono dietro, e giunsero insieme nel mezzo del monte, da dove non si vedeva più la strada, su uno spiazzo pieno di cave abbandonate, che si sprofondavano in mezzo come dei piccoli burroni.

Siccome dalla parte di San Pietro veniva su un temporale, pareva che fosse già quasi sera. 88 The young children’s movements into a rural, suburban area “where one no longer saw the street” and “a clearing full of abandoned quarries that sunk into the ground like small gorges” highlight the outward and downward construction of their “uncivilized” or “carnevalesque” spaces. Pasolini creates a horizontal stretch of land, pocked with holes, distanced from Saint Peter’s Basilica. There are no Freudian layers of history to trace, nor is there an absolute “vertical, extratemporal, hierarchical” system to measure these youths’ world, but a horizontal “movement forward in real space and in historic time.” 89

88 89

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 170.

Bahktin notes the restructuring of time and space in Renaissance literature, during which time, his paradigm for the carnevalesque, Rebalais, shifted his worldly orientation from the Medieval vertical to the modern horizontal: “At the time Rebalais the hierarchical world of the Middle Ages was crumbling.

The narrow, vertical, extratemporal model of the world, with its absolute top and bottom, its system of ascents and descents, was in the process of reconstruction. A new model was being constructed in which the leading role was transferred to the horizontal lines, to the movement forward in real space and in historic time.” Bahktin, “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 403.

162 Pasolini includes such hidden and grotesque faces of Rome alongside the Eternal City’s official, artistic side to generate his contradictory conception and representation of the modern capital.

The presence of quarries, mud, sun and trash does not preclude the elimination of all monumentality and historicity in the text, but in fact serve as an unconscious or carnevalesque negation of the latter. Pasolini’s primitive, instinctual characters and spaces need the civilized, structured reality of Rome just as that reality needs its opposite.

The two coexist, influencing the meaning of one another. Monuments appear sporadically throughout the text, and the first to materialize in Ragazzi di vita is the Basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura (Saint Paul’s Outside The Walls), a building purposely chosen for its placement outside the city’s traditional boundary, for it sits in a horizontal relationship to the rest of Rome. Saint Paul’s marginal position, however, does not detract from its significant religious and historical weight as one of Rome’s four Jubilee basilicas.

Pasolini uses this charged significance grounded in tradition to counterbalance the creation of a new reality by il Riccetto and his companions. In a veristic fashion, the narrator recounts how il Riccetto and his companion Marcello play behind the church, overlooking or unaware of the building’s sacred significance. No one discusses, admires, nor contemplates its imagery or architecture, because their lack of a priori knowledge prevents their recognition of Saint Paul’s as more than a structure in the background. The church’s official image is turned upside down, entered into the boys’ grotesque concept of reality, which ignores hierarchical constructs. The young boys swim in the deserted stretch of the Tiber, more aware of their fun-filled present than of the basilica’s illustrious past. The author’s description of the environment captures Pasolini’s parallel

163 contamination of the myth of the Rome and of the youths, as he, an author with a profound humanistic education, 90 has fully learned the monument’s significance: E era vuoto, senza stabilimenti, senza barche, senza bagnanti, e a destra era tutto irto di gru, antenne e ciminiere, col gasometro enorme contro il cielo, e tutto il quartiere di Monteverde, all’orizzonte, sopra le scarpate putride e bruciate, con le sue vecchie villette come piccole scatole svanite nella luce, proprio lì sotto c’erano piloni di un ponte non costruito con intorno l’acqua sporca che formava dei mulinelli. 91 The panoramic image, which moves from the tainted riverbed behind Saint Paul’s, to the construction sites and industrial center of Ostiense where Rome’s gas generator stands, to a recently completed neighborhood atop the Janiculum Hill, and then back to the unfinished bridge presents the contradictory, largely unidentifiable, multiple and fragmentary faces of Pasolini’s Rome. One has to have an intimate knowledge of the Italian capital to reconstruct the author’s creative cityscape, moving among the single, individual architectural elements that stand as synedoches for the areas in which they stand. Together with Saint Paul’s, behind which Pasolini presents this view, the writer succeeds in juxtaposing a piece of monumental, sacred Rome, with the city’s less picturesque industrial space and spoiled countryside. Pasolini recognized, in an almost proto-deconstructionist manner, that to understand Rome as a totality, one needs to observe contemporaneously its contrasting states of fragmentation, both as construction and as ruin, both modern and ancient, which he viewed as both miserable and

90

Pier Paolo Pasolini first studied Art History then Literature at the University of Bologna. He wrote his thesis on the poet Pascoli, while forming a poetry club with four friends during his tenure there.

As his friend later in life, Enzo Siciliano, notes in his biography on Pasolini Vita di Pasolini: “Sappiamo che Pier Paolo leggeva tutto il possibile, da Billy Budd a periodici come ‘Frontespizio’, ‘La ruota’, ‘Letteratura’. Seguiva il prof. Roberto Longhi sui Fatti di Masolino e Massaccio, discuteva con il prof.

Francesco Arcangeli.” Pasolini clearly had a rich humanistic interest and education. Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini 80.

91

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 14.

164 stupendous. 92 It is a city that has learned the art of growing old, that plays on all its pasts, 93 as acknowledged by the flâneur-intellectual Michel de Certeau; yet Pasolini’s Rome has also learned the art of progress, contrary to de Certeau’s belief. Rome is “composed of paroxysmal places” of the demythified present, just as it does in its legendary history. How else can one explain the borgate?

Such contaminated, violent environments, along with the architectural and urban deformation of Rome’s periphery, intertwine with and erode il Riccetto’s youthful innocence, creating an at times symbiotic relationship between the boy and the city.

Pasolini, in fact, dedicates nearly two pages to the description of il Riccetto’s living quarters in the borgata Donna Olimpia, where the boy resides with his mother, to highlight the demoralizing effects of his environment. Il Riccetto’s “home,” if one may call it such, is a space delineated by sheets hanging in a corridor of an elementary school, a public building that has passed from the hands of occupying armies during the Second World War, and into the hands of Rome’s dispersed, homeless population during the postwar period. The lack of a true home, a place of return and safety, emphasizes il Riccetto’s “down and out” socioeconomic situation while also stressing his spatial positioning. His life unfolds in public spaces, and he spends the majority of his time out on Rome’s city streets. Giovanni Berlingeur and Piero Della Seta recognized Pasolini’s veracious representation of the damaging effects that dwelling in the impoverished borgata Donna Olimpia had on il Riccetto and his neighbors, by dedicating several pages 92

The poem’s most famous lines regarding the city are: “Stupenda e misera città,/ che m’hai insegnato ciò che allegri e feroci/ gli uomini imparano bambini.” Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il pianto della scavatrice,” Le ceneri di Gramsci (Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 31-33.

93

Michel de Certeau notes in his essay “Walking in the City” that “unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.” de Certeau 91

165 of their sociological study to the text’s cultural import: “E non è possibile isolare le figure del Riccetto e dei suoi amici dall’ambiente in cui si trovano, da cui sono stati espressi, nel quale vivono le loro torbide avventure. Anzi, queste figure acquistano forma e rilievo nel quadro di una borgata, Donna Olimpia….” 94 Their “nurture over nature” interpretation of borgatari children assumes that Pasolini stresses a parallel relationship between behavioral and environmental development. The author partially maintains such a sociological position while il Riccetto has a fixed dwelling with his mother in Ferrobeton, but more importantly the two collide in moments of crisis. Il Riccetto’s destitution and physical marginalization intersect when the elementary school where the ragazzo di vita and his mother live suddenly collapses, killing the boy’s mother and seemingly leaving him a homeless orphan. 95 This moment represents one of the many violent traumas that simultaneously discombobulate as well as shape postwar, modernist Rome in addition to il Riccetto’s life.

Nel frattempo a Donna Olimpia bene o male avevano ammassato le macerie contro le Scuole, liberando il passaggio, ai morti erano stati i funerali, e, per intervento del sindaco, erano stati sistemati i senza tetto: sistemati per modo di dire, perché avevano ammassato una decina di famiglie in un solo stanzone in un convento di frati al cataletto, e le altre che qua chi là nelle borgate, a Tormarancio o a Tiburtino, nelle casette degli sfrattati o nelle caserme. A Donna Olimpia, un due domeniche dopo la vita era tornata come sempre. 96 Il Riccetto’s childhood, like Ferrebeton, is left in ruins, yet his life as well as the life of the city continue despite the trauma.

94

Berlinguer and Della Seta 320.

95

The reader learns only later from the gossip of other ragazzi di vita that the city government transferred il Riccetto to a borgata on the opposite side of the city, where his estranged father and sister live. Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 58. The loss of his mother, essentially his only true relative, as well as of his home, signal the definitive impossibility for il Riccetto to have a loving and innocent upbringing.

96

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 56.

166 The text’s immediate jump from this tragic episode to a completely unrelated scene, that excludes the prior chapter’s characters, actions, or places, leaves an indeterminate stretch of the boy’s childhood unknown to the reader. The reader has no idea of how many days, months or years have passed, nor how the storyline shifted from a hospital in Monteverde Nuovo to the Tiburtina Train Station. 97 Pasolini’s book fuses literary fragments, often avoiding the presence of Rome’s monumental historical center, to keep il Riccetto on the ever-changing, policentric modern periphery. The text, as a series of loosely connected chapters, changes characters as easily as it changes space and time. It is often difficult for the reader to understand one narrative’s relationship to another, except for between chapters three and four, when the author creates a logical bridge in the plot. Chapter three concludes with: “Mentre gli altri ridevano, Amerigo, senza troppo spostarsi da come si trovava, sfiorò col gomito il Caciotta: ‘Aaa coso, come te chiami,’ gli fece dolcemente con voce quasi afona, ‘te devo da dì na parola!’” 98 While chapter four begins with: “Amerigo era ubbriaco. ‘Scegnemo qua ar Forte,’ fece al Caciotta, che l’ascoltava deferente.” 99 This is the only case in Ragazzi di vita, in which Pasolini maintains the same characters (il Riccetto and his delinquent companions Amerigo and Cacciotta) the same place (Tiburtina) and the same time (night) from one chapter to the next, creating a brief yet fleeting sense of cohesion in the book. Chapter four, however, concludes with the death and funeral procession of Amerigo, an older ragazzo di vita, in Tiburtina, while

97

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 60-61.

98

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 82.

99

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 83.

167 chapter five opens with the unfamiliar companion of il Riccetto, il Lanzetta, who waits for the boy-protagonist in the borgata Maranella, once again emphasizing the text’s fragmentary organization. Ragazzi di vita’s departure from one story of one boy from one neighborhood at one time and shift to the story of someone else, somewhere else and at sometime else is as destabilizing as the organization of modern Rome’s “macchia d’olio” development. The episodic narrative’s form can, and in fact, should be read as a literary reflection of the city’s modern fragmentary and chaotic form. The typically intermittent events of a subaltern’s life, as described by Gramsci, and the fragmentary nature of his or her environment, as illustrated in Benjamin’s “Moscow” essay, provide the modernist urban paradigms for Pasolini’s episodic prose. Rome developed irregularly, both in the legal and urbanistic senses, and Pasolini’s literary vision of it in Ragazzi di vita confirms this relationship.

Pasolini, in fact, shifts the focuses of fragmentary narrative onto the construction of Rome’s peripheral neighborhoods as the text progresses, leaving il Riccetto’s life increasingly on the margins. In the author’s 1958 article, “La mia periferia,” Pasolini comments on this substantial, yet subtle, modification in content: “In Ragazzi di vita ciò che conta è il mondo delle borgate e del sottoproletariato romano vissuto nei ragazzi, e quindi il protagonista, il Riccetto, era, oltre che un personaggio abbastanza definito, un filo conduttore un po’ astratto, un po’ flatus vocis, come tutti i protagonisti pretesto.”100 A year earlier, he renders even clearer this allusion to Rome’s primary importance in an interview with Elio Filippo Accrocca of Fiera Letteraria, during which he openly admits that Rome is Ragazzi di vita’s protagonist: 100

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “La mia periferia.” Città Aperta. Vol. II, n. 7-8. April-May, 1958. Rpt. in Walter Siti, ed., Storie della città di Dio (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 132.

168 Roma nella mia narrativa ha quella fondamentale importanza di cui parlavo prima, in quanto violento trauma e violenta carica di vitalità, cioè esperienza di un mondo e quindi in un certo senso del mondo. Nella narrativa Roma è stata la protagonista diretta non solo come oggetto di descrizione o di analisi ma proprio come spinta, come dinamica, come necessità testimoniale. 101 Il Riccetto’s contaminated childhood is a means for Pasolini to chronicle what he perceives as Rome’s modern debasement, exemplified by the poor construction of the city’s underclass borgate.

Pasolini, in fact, dedicates long passages of the latter half of Ragazzi di vita to panoramic descriptions of construction sites, shantytowns, and slums, using the now adolescent il Riccetto’s movements through the streets to capture the subaltern neighborhoods’ characteristic fragments within their entirety. The incident of il Riccetto’s flight from an illegal gambling parlor in Pietralata one night encapsulates this idea as well as many of the elements typical of Pasolini’s underclass Rome: Passò davanti al bar, impedendo a un autobus, ch’era alla fermata, di riprendere la sua corsa, poi davanti allo spiazzo di terra con sulle gobbe due o tre carosielli, all’ambulatorio nudo come una prigione, ai prati carbonizzati, alle cassette rosa, ai tuguri, a qualche fabbrica così in disordine che pareva bombardata; e arrivò alle falde del Monte del Pecoraro, presso la Tiburtina, in quel punto tutto slabbrato di vecchie cave dirute. 102 The author manages to document and juxtapose, in a single sentence, elements of modern Rome, such as the bus, the carousels, and the factory, with elements of its quasi-third world countryside marked by burnt fields, decrepit hovels, and old stone quarries. It is a contradictory image of a city in flux, that is part urban and part rural, thee ambiguous and

101

Elio F. Accrocca, “Dieci domande a Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Fiera Letteraria, 30 June 1957.

102

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 107.

169 contrasting elements, which create a realistic, yet poetic interpretation of “gli anni duri” inflicting and transforming the physical nature of Rome.

Pasolini continues to document and conceptually connect Rome’s numerous borgate with occasional appearances made by the adolescent il Riccetto, whose story has become as marginal to the text’s narrative as he is to the city. The boy still engages in the same picaresque activities of his childhood: thievery, sexual encounters with prostitutes, and aimless wandering throughout Rome, until he is captured by the Carabinieri and sent to prison for nearly three years: “Lo portarono a Porta Portese, e lo condannarono a quasi tre anni – ci dovette star dentro fino alla primavera del ’50! – per imparargli la morale.” 103 His three-year incarceration, however, dissolves between the pages and il Riccetto intermittently reappears as a young man among other juvenile borgatari, whose collective lives have overtaken the text’s human narrative. Pasolini’s urban focus expands into the primitive spaces where these instinct-driven and violent youths conduct their lives. The new batch of ragazzi di vita spends the hot Roman summer afternoons disporting in the polluted waters of the Aniene, a secondary river which cuts through Rome’s northeastern borgate. “ ‘Tengo na fame che me cago sotto,’ gridò il Begalone. Si tolse la canottiera, in piedi sull’erba zellosa pestata contro la scarpata dell’Aniene, tra le fratte carbonizzate, si sbottonò i calzoni e si mise a pisciare come si trovava.” 104 The boys take additional pleasure in chucking the black mud at one another, and mingling with the trash floating in the water.

103

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 149.

104

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 150.

170 Such behavior and cruel environment derive from Dante’s Malebranca and Malebolgia in Canto XXI of Inferno, which Pasolini quotes in chapter six’s epigraph: “Traiti avanti, Alichino, e Calcabrina/ - cominciò egli a dire – e tu, Cagnazzo;/ E Barbariccia guidi la decina./ Libicocco vegna oltre, e Draghinazzo,/ Ciriatto sannuto, e Grafficane./ E Farfarello, e Rubicante pazzo.” 105 The gang of demons called to scout around the bolgia’s boiling tar, occupying the infernal eighth circle of fraudulent prostitutes, pimps and thieves find their human counterparts in Pasolini’s carnevalesque Roman ragazzi di vita. The boys present their bodies in grotesque manners, evoking images of the medieval legends of underworld diableries, which stressed the comic aspects of infernal images. 106 The heated tar complements the burning hot and industrially contaminated countryside of Tiburtina, as its demonically vicious inhabitants conduct their reckless behavior in a terrestrial space, befitting their crude condition.

Bahktin further asserts: “The image of the underworld… has a sharply defined popular festive character. Hell is a banquet and a gay carnival. We find here all the familiar debasing ambivalent images of drenching in urine, beating travesty, abuse.” 107 Pasolini’s borgatari and their polluted playpen are emblematic of such a carnevalesque tradition, though he has displaced them from the extratemporal, hierarchical underworld into the historical, margins of Rome.

105

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milano: Mondadori, 2001) XXI, 118123; Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 150.

106

Bahktin writes in his exploration of the grotesque that the medieval legends of the underworld, “containing grotesque bodily elements… determined the theme and imagery of the diableries…. The diableries… stressed the comic aspect of the images of Hell.” Bahktin, “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 389-390.

107

Bahktin, “The Material Bodily Lower Stratum,” Rabelais and His World 386.

171 The ragazzi’s primitive chants and devilish acts culminate when they torture the youngest boy, Piattaletta, under one of the Aniene’s bridges, an urban space typically reserved for illegal transactions and homeless dwellings.108 In this quintessential criminal environment, their violence reaches a height that is without comparison in the rest of Ragazzi di vita. One of the boys, il Roscetto, grabs the sobbing Piattaletta, “lo strinse di brutto, e aiutato dallo Sgarone e dal Tirillo, lo spinse contro il pilone, e gli legarono con uno spago i polsi a un uncino di ferro che sporgeva dal cemento.” 109 Il Tirillo, another ragazzo di vita, then lights a match to set the surrounding weeds on fire, the flames of which eventually move to Piattaletta’s dangling sock, ultimately reducing the boy to ashes. The burning of Piattaletta on a modern urban stake underscores the contaminated sense of play and morality guiding the ragazzi di vita’s lives, while accentuating the periphery’s primeval and infernal semblance. Their actions exist outside of modern codes of ethics, as well as outside of civilization, correlating to the violent primitiveness, with which Pasolini sought to endow his ragazzi. The primal “sacrifice” of Piattaletta against a cement pillar bestows upon the bridge an unintended function that surpasses its urbanistic value, debasing one of Rome’s modern, functional architectural structures to the grotesque reality of the city’s underclass.

108

The criminality associated with bridges in urban environments appears particularly in films from the period of High Neorealism through to the modern day. Some contemporary examples of criminal activities occurring underneath of Rome’s bridges, include: Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Ragazzi) (1946), which first depicts the two young protagonists meeting Giuseppe’s brother Attilio and his colleague under a bridge near Rome’s Permolio to receive black market blankets to sell; and second, at the films conclusion, when Giuseppe falls to his death after trying to defend himself against his friend, Pasquale’s, lashings.

Another example is Michelangelo Antonioni’s I vinti (1952), which shows a young smuggler, Claudio, running across a makeshift bridge to escape from the police who have caught him and his colleagues with a boat full of cigarettes. Claudio, in his fearful fugue, shoots a dockworker, and eventually jumps from the bridge, incurring fatal wounds that will take his life within twenty-four hours. Another memorable case appears in Bernardo Bertolucci’s first film, La commare secca (1961), in which a dead prostitute is discovered under a bridge, commencing a series of vignettes depicting the police’s investigation into her murder.

109

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 174.

172 The children of Pasolini’s Roman borgate do not ultimately confine their destructive and grotesque presence to the city’s periphery. Italy’s capital city continued expanding throughout the 1950s, incorporating outlying areas into its metropolitan system. Neighborhoods that once seemed to stand outside of Rome, almost as centripetal centers to it, eventually become connected as centrifugal suburbs to the capital’s city center. Rome grows and consequently changes its face, not only architecturally and urbanistically, but also in its “official” population’s composition. The ragazzi di vita increasingly rove the city center, due to the improvements and growth of Rome’s public transportation. 110 They spend their evenings among the monuments of antiquity and Christendom contaminating their mythical and sacred meanings with their lewd and often criminal acts. As Pasolini writes: Tutto un gran accerchiamento intorno a Roma, tra Roma e le campagne intorno intorno, con centinaia di migliaia di vite umane che brulicavano tra i loro lotti, le loro casette di sfrattati o i loro gratticieli. E tutta quella vita non c’era solo nelle borgate delle periferia, ma pure dentro Roma, nel centro della città, magari sotto il Cupolone, che bastava mettere il naso fuori dal colonnato di Piazza San Pietro, verso Porta Cavalleggeri, e èccheli llì, a gridare, a prender d’aceto, a sfottere, in bande e in ghenghe intorno ai cinemetti, alle pizzerie, sparpagliati poco più in là, in via del Gelsomino, in via della Cava, sugli spiazzi di terra battuta delimitata dai mucchi di rifiuti dove i ragazzini di giorno giocano a palla, in coppie tra le fratte coperte di pezzi di giornale abbandonati tra via delle Fornaci e il Gianicolo…. 111 It is as though the destitute have invaded the entire city. The impoverished underclass has found its way out of the borgate’s lots, hovels, and housing projects to mill once again 110

An anonymous article published in the newspaper Il Messaggero on February 10, 1955 celebrates the inauguration of Rome’s subway system, a major improvement in the city’s public transportation: “Sono passati 18 anni da quella notte di mezza estate quando l’ing. Sirletti, attuale direttore commerciale della linea metropolitana, ricevette una strana telefonata dal Ministero dei trasporti…. I romani videro grandi scavi lungo il percorso di via Cavour, al Colosseo, al viale Aventino, all’Ostiense.”

See: Sergio Lambiase, et al., Storia fotografica di Roma: 1950-1962: Dall’Anno Santo alla “dolce vita” (Napoli [Naples]: Intra Moenia, 2004) 124.

111

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 184-185.

173 amongst the areas cleared during Fascism for the hegemonic bourgeoisie. Mussolini may have once destroyed the homes of Rome’s subaltern population and deported the group from the city’s monumental centers to create his mythical Third Rome; but Rome’s marginalized inhabitants found their way back into the historic core. A synoecism has occurred between official, monumental Rome and its newly constructed, ahistoric periphery, for the subaltern class starts to reclaim its “right to the city,” the privilege of the center, the seat of social, political, economic, and cultural power. 112 Eventually il Riccetto, his cousin Alduccio, and their companion Begalone join this invasion of Rome’s city center, descending one evening from a bus next to the Colosseum, arguably Rome’s most recognizable monument. The young men chant a Roman slang term for prostitutes, whilst they “scesero giù sotto il Colosseo, gli girarono intorno, tagliarono sotto l’Arco di Costantino per il viale dei Trionfi.” 113 The young men follow in reverse order the ancient triumphal processional route away from the Sacra Via and the Roman Forum towards the Via Appia Antica, subtly subverting Rome’s glorious past. Likely as unaware of the road’s significance as he was of the Basilica of Saint Paul’s as a child, il Riccetto displays no knowledge of the ancient generals accompanying war plunder and slaves into the city under the flags of the Roman Republic and Empire. 114 The march away from the symbols of triumph in search for prostitutes at the Circus Maximus are signs of the young man’s a posteriori knowledge of Rome, gained

112

This idea serves as the basis of Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist urban theory of architectural and social co-development found in his 1968 work La Driot à la Ville. His concepts ideologically resonate with Pasolini’s literary and socio-political foundations, despite their later publication. See, Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, trans. and eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 61-181.

113

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 186.

114

Christopher Hibbert, Rome: Biography of a City (London: Penguin Books, 1987) 16.

174 from his experiences in the post-World War II period. This backwards march endows the area with a new, desacralized significance, as il Riccetto, Begalone, and Alduccio, in time, engage two streetwalkers on the Temple of Vesta’s steps. Pasolini designs his characters’ movements through the city so as to undo Mussolini’s myth of Rome, effacing Il Duce’s urbanistic risanamento projects meant to regenerate the glory of imperial Rome.

Upon failing to attract the women’s attention, Alduccio settles on a fifty-year old male prostitute whom he meets between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Garibaldi along the street Lungotevere. Once again, the historical resonance of the bridges’ names fails to evoke a response in the formally uneducated borgatari. The vision of the bridges, instead, remind at least il Riccetto of the twenty-something-year-olds who lined the river banks in the early post-war years, ready to prostitute themselves to whomever could pay. “Quella volta sì che si poteva scendere giù per la scaletta, e tra i puncicarelli pieni di fanga e di carte sporche, sotto Ponte Sisto o Ponte Garibaldi, fare tutto quello che si voleva senza paura.” 115 The space beneath the bridges, for Alduccio, however, reclaims its modern criminal connotation, as he views the area as ideal for consummating his clandestine encounter with the male prostitute. Alduccio attempts to lure the older man under a bridge, but the male prostitute refuses, fearing for his safety. Il Riccetto decides to intervene in their affair and conducts the men to a cave he remembers near his childhood neighborhood, Donna Olimpia. His suggestion enables the others to finish their business, while providing him with an opportunity to revisit his past.

Scesero a Piazza Ottavilla che quando il Riccetto abitava da quelle parti era ancora quasi in campagna, voltarono giù a sinistra per una strada che 115

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 197.

175 prima non c’era, o era soltanto un sentiero in mezzo a dei grandi prati con qua e là in discesa, come sui pendii d’una valletta, dei ciuffi, di canne alte tre metri e dei salci: ma na valletta, dei ciuffi, di canne alte tre metri e dei salci: ma adesso c’erano dei palazzi già costruiti e abitati e dei cantieri. 116 The full-grown borgataro returns to the ruins of the elementary school where his mother died, once a modern monument to Giorgio Franceschi, now a memorial to the surviving borgatari who lost friends and family in its collapse. Il Riccetto observes the rubble and notes how the borgata has changed, grown and integrated into “official” Rome, although the school’s debris still lies largely scattered where it originally fell. Its ruins seem to have more in common with the borgata’s trash than with the ancient structures commonly deemed as sublime in the city’s historical center. “Era ancora tutto un mucchio di macerie, come se il crollo ci fosse stato due giorni prima, solo che sulle brecole lavate dalla pioggia e brucate dal sole s’era depositato un po’ d’immondezza. 117 The site is, nevertheless, reminiscent of Ancient Rome’s architectural remains, which stand as a memorial to the violent trauma of history. The school’s collapse forever changed il Riccetto’s childhood; but unlike in his youth, the boy no longer cries. The many years he has spent living on the streets, without familial and financial security, have corrupted his sensitivity, and he stands overlooking the ruins as a lonely young man.

Pasolini’s contamination of the myths of youth and of Rome clearly correlate both in form and content in his first episodic narrative Ragazzi di vita. In an interview with Il Messaggero’s reporter Luigi Sommaruga, which Walter Siti republished in Storie della città di Dio, Pasolini discusses his unusual vision of the relationship between Rome and the ragazzi. The discussion begins with Sommaruga’s question:

116

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 197.

117

Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita 199.

176 - Se dovesse antropomorfizzarla [Roma] che sesso le attribuirebbe?

- Eh, ma le attribuirei un sesso né maschile né femminile. Ma quello speciale sesso che è il sesso dei ragazzi.

- E che età?

- L’adolescenza.

- Quali sembianze?

- Ma, le sembianze di un tipico ragazzo romano di borgata: cioè bruno, olivastro, con l’occhio nero, il corpo aitante. 118 Pasolini clearly envisioned the city and his ragazzi as emblematic of one another; however, it is difficult to determine whether it is the environment that defines the boy, the boy that defines the city, or whether a reciprocal relationship exists between the two.

What is clear is that il Riccetto, Rome, and Ragazzi di vita are all expressions of Pasolini’s social and aesthetic concerns, as many of the book’s pages iterate ideas that the author later published in politically-motivated articles during the late 1950s and into the mid-1960s. 119 The boy and the city document the writer’s perception of the underclass’ spatially and socially fragmentary existence and struggle, which the hegemonic middleclass seemingly chose to ignore and which he exposed the essence of in 1955.

The years 1955 and 1956 witnessed the rise of Pier Paolo Pasolini to social, political, and cultural prominence among Italy’s intelligensia. His entrance into major literary circles, which moralizing critics initially attempted to obstruct, quickly led to close friendships and collaborations with highly esteemed writers and film directors including Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Giorgio Bassani, Mario Bolognini and Federico Fellini. One can actually consider these two years as a significant turning point 118

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luigi Sommaruga, “Quant’era bella Roma,” Il Messaggero, 9 June 1973. Rpt. in Walter Siti, ed., Storie della città di Dio (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 162-163.

119

Walter Siti collected these articles, along with Pasolini’s short stories and the author’s interview with Sommaruga, in Stories della città di Dio. The ones of particular interest are: “Roma malandrina,” cit. 105-108; “Er morto puzzerà tutta la settimana,” L’unità, October 28, 1957, 109-111; “Il fronte della città,” cit. 119-123; “I campi di concentramento,” Vie nuove, 24 May 1958, 124-127; “I tuguri,” Vie nuove, 24 May 1958, 128-131; “La mia periferia,” cit., 132-138; “Gli alberghi di massa,” L’Unità, 7 March 1961, 139-141; and “L’altro volto di Roma,” Paese sera. 27 November 1966, 156-158.

177 in Pasolini’s professional life, as he shifted from being a minor literary voice whose work people judged according to established traditions, to being an iconoclast, the imitated rather than the imitator. This point manifests itself particularly well in Italian cinema, as directors called him to collaborate on several films, including Federico Fellini on Le notti di Cabiria (1957), Cecilia Mangini on Ignoti alla città (1958) and La canta delle marane (1960), Francesco Rossi on Morte di un amico (1959) and Carlo Lizzani on Il gobbo (1960). The author’s influence, in fact, persisted for decades after he wrote Ragazzi di vita, but it showed itself most strongly in the late 1950s early 1960s, after he published his second long Roman narrative Una vita violenta in 1959.

The following chapter shifts its focus onto the one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first cinematic collaborations, Le notti di Cabiria, while investigating Fellini’s engagement with underclass Italy in two earlier films La strada (1954) and Il bidone (1955). The discussion of Fellini’s early cinema, however, follows an examination of one of Vittorio De Sica’s less acclaimed Neorealist productions, Il tetto (1956), which presents a highly humanistic vision of the ways in which Rome’s poor sought to create a space for itself in the Italian capital. These films provide compelling contemporary cultural examples of art that attempt to engage with Rome’s housing crisis in ways that diverge as well as resonate with Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita. At the same, each work showcases the creative vision of the directors and their collaborators, while intensifying the image of Rome’s demythification and settlement into its role as a modern, and ambiguously modernist European capital.

178 Chapter 3 A Crossroads: Contradicting Cinematic Perspectives The Right to the City Henri Lefebvre, an urbanism theorist famous for his highly polemical essay “The Right to the City” (1968), viewed cities as spatial and temporal constructs of social relations based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the Social Contract. His oeuvre explores the reciprocal and hierarchical design of the modern urban fabric as an aesthetic expression of the collective’s political, economic, and cultural power distribution. This concept, based on materialist dialectics, investigates the semiotics of hegemonic versus alienated spaces. In a later article entitled “On the Contract of Citizenship”, Lefebvre expands on this notion: The right to the city… should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as urban dweller (citadin) and user of multiple services. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos…. 1 Lefebvre’s assertion recognizes a problematic issue permeating modern cities; that is, how cities architecturally and urbanistically reflect, as well as condition, social relations.

While the theorist generally used Paris as his model, he establishes in “The Right to the City” a useful paradigm for exploring other contemporary suburban environments within the context of social practices and divisions. In fact, a decade before Lefebvre formally expressed his philosophy on the expansion of existing cities, other Marxist intellectuals 1

Henri Lefebvre, Du Contrat de Citoyenneté, (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 1991); Rpd. in Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, trans. and ed., Writing on Cities: Henri Lefebvre (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 34.

179 began tracing the changing urban and social fabrics of formerly agrarian nations that were belatedly engaging in industrial development. France’s southeastern neighbor, Italy, was clearly one of them.

Post-bellum circumstances generated new socioeconomic issues between hegemonic and subaltern groups during the transformation of Italy’s urban and suburban areas. The fall of Fascism, followed by the establishment of a capitalist democracy, changed the role that the State and the Urban played in Italians’ everyday lives. As noted

by Antonio De Simone: Sono gli anni ’50, gli anni in cui l’Italia deve ricostruirsi fisicamente ed economicamente per giungere poi in ritardo sulla via dello sviluppo. Sono gli anni di un’Italia ancora prevalentemente agricolo-contadina in cui sta per innescarsi il meccanismo del capitale col suo processo economico e simbolico.… L’‘urbano’ sta al centro di questo processo di crisi e di transizione al progresso identificato con lo sviluppo. 2 Throngs of displaced, destitute, and marginalized peasants migrated from Italy’s traditionally poorest regions, swarming major cities, such as Milan and Rome, in search of opportunity. 3 High Neorealist cinema avidly participated in expressing this phenomenon, albeit indirectly or unconsciously, as it depicted the spaces and faces of an emerging and growing underclass swelling the population of the peripheries of major cities.

2

Antonio De Simone, “Lavoro critico e dialettica dell’‘urbanità’,” Perché Pasolini: Ideologia e stile di un intellettuale militante, eds. Gualtiero De Santi, Maria Lenti, and Roberto Rossini (Firenze [Florence]: Guaraldi, 1978) 180-181.

3

The historian of twentieth century Italy, Federico Chabod, laments the conditions facing the majority of working class and underclass Italians in his study, L’Italia contemporanea: 1918-1948: “Esiste una massa – la gran massa – che comprende non solo gli operai e i contadini, ma anche gli impiegati, la quale è costretta a vivere consumando meno di quanto dovrebbe consumare, spesso cadendo al di sotto del minimo indispensabile e vivendo in condizioni di vita primitiva.” (1950; Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1961) 183.

180 As discussed in Chapter 1, Lefebvre’s theory, which concentrates on Paris and its inhabitants, reflects the underlying theme of this current study, which places particular emphasis on Rome and its underclass. Cinematic classics such as Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, and Visconti’s Bellissima project the political, social, and economic challenges confronted by those who had settled, willingly or not, in Rome’s borgate. Even novels from that period, including Pavese’s Il compagno and Carlo Levi’s L’orologio focus on the striking urbanistic differences between the capital’s historical center and the city’s emerging modern outskirts. The latter text manages to insert an almost journalistic description of the mostly makeshift components of Rome’s “Abyssinian villages” 4 that had sprouted up in between and around areas zoned by the Italian state and building speculators for larger, more permanent apartment complexes.

Films that followed on the heals of the Neorealism triumvirate’s initial works, in particular, the collaborative L’amore in città, show a far more varied and bleak image of Rome’s borgate and the desperate sociopolitical and economic conditions leading to their occupation. Lizzani’s “L’amore che si paga” effectively sets the stage for later cinematographic shooting locations of prostitutes in and around Rome, and even perhaps for book settings, such as found in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, analyzed in Chapter 2.

Despite the borgate’s sporadic appearances in various Neorealist films and texts, Ragazzi di vita signals the true moment when these largely unknown peripheral environments in Rome entered public attention and gained notoriety. Few authors before

4

Italian scholars and artists have integrated the term “Abyssinian village” to describe the decrepit living situations along Rome’s modern periphery. This expression, along with the proliferation of the term “Third World” until recently, reflect Italy’s attempt to engage in colonial and post-colonial discourse, even though their only real contact with foreign protectorates and settlements occurred during spurious occupations of parts of Northern Africa, culminating with Fascism’s capture of Ethiopia in 1936.

181 Pasolini had attempted to depict the Roman borgate in fictional form, 5 and none dedicated the entirety of his or her work to a thorough investigative analysis of the geographical, urbanistic, and socioeconomic aspects of the borgate as Pasolini’s first book does. Following the publication and public trial of Ragazzi di vita and its author, Rome’s housing crisis and erratic oil stain development, 6 along with the plethora of socioeconomic issues pertaining to it, began occupying the printed media on a regular basis. 7 Il Messaggero, Rome’s major newspaper, published a number of such articles throughout the year 1956, including one entitled, “I ‘nemici’ di Roma.” The journalist of this piece asks his readers to imagine “di vedere Roma dall’alto…. Vedremo non solo la tremenda congestione del centro…, ma anche il disordine edilizio, che eleva grosse case alla periferia, dove l’Urbe avanza per mastodontici blocchi di cemento; e inoltre le baracche degli abusivi….” 8 The writer then identifies those involved in Rome’s chaotic

5

Examples of short stories or novels that depict or refer to the borgate before Ragazzi di vita include: Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista, Il disprezzo, as well as some of his Racconti romani and the Nuovi racconti romani; Carlo Levi’s L’orologio; and Carlo Emilio Gadda’s 1947 version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. The references to Rome’s periphery, however, occupy very little space, never forming the core of the texts’ central argument.

6

This terminology, describing the urbanistic mess of Rome’s post-Risorgimento development, emphasizes the formal failure of Rome’s and Italy’s governments to regulate the capital’s modern expansion. As Italo Insolera notes, “i piani regolatori a Roma sembrano essere esistiti solo per dividere le opere in due categorie: quelle dentro al piano e quelle fuori.” Insolera 54. This phenomenon prevented an organized modernization of Italy’s capital city from the moment it became the seat of the national government. The irregularity of urbanistic development prevails to this day as one can witness in a series of aerial photographs and architectural maps of Rome printed in numerous volumes. For an excellent collection of photographs, consult: Donatella Cicloni, Roma nel XX secolo: Fotocronaca dal cielo di una città in trasformazione (Roma: Kappa, 2006). For a composite collection of photographs and drawings, see: Roberto Cassetti and Gianfranco Spagnesi, eds. Roma contemporanea: storia e progetto (Roma: Gangemi, 2006).

7

Italo Insolera proclaims that “tra il 1951 e il 1957… l’urbanistica è diventata una delle grandi protagoniste delle cronaca cittadina, della vita civica, un argomento di massimo impegno per l’amministrazione comunale, i partiti politici, le associazioni culturali.” Insolera 218.

8

“I ‘nemici’ di Roma,” Il Messaggero, 29 January 1956; cited in Sergio Lambiase et al., eds.

Storia fotografica di Roma: 1950-1962: Dall’Anno Santo alla "dolce vita" (Napoli [Naples]: Intra Moenia, 2004) 141.

182

Figure 52. Vittoria’s Aerial View of Rome. L’eclisse, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962.

expansion, “gli immigrati abusivi” and the urbanistic expansion itself, as the two enemies against whom his readership should rise and protect the city. He vehemently rails against the lack of legal protection in the name of the city’s aesthetic interests, creating a clear dichotomy between his “official,” bourgeois, idealistic position inside Rome and the realities of what was occurring on the “unofficial,” underclass outskirts: Contro la speculazione edilizia ci sono delle leggi, che però offrono comode scappatoie e la città si riempie di monotoni blocchi di appartamenti che tolgono alla casa ogni isolamento e personalità, veri cellulari che avanzano nel deserto della campagna romana, piccole scatole mal verniciate che hanno abbruttito la nostra città. 9 Carlo Levi, likewise, observes the city from this perspective in a journalist short story he published that same year. “Roma a mezz’aria,” which ascribes a metaphorical reading of the borgate’s appearance in contrast to the rest of the city, takes an aerial position over Rome, imagistically similar to the one taken by Vittoria in Antonioni’s 9

“I ‘nemici’ di Roma” 141.

183 Boom-era masterpiece L’eclisse (See Fig. 52). The author’s approach is that of an ultramodernist, if not post-modern, flâneur; instead of exploring and contemplating Italy’s capital from aimless wanderings along the city streets, he observes and experiences the city from a flying helicopter. As one scholar comments: “the aerial view affords a modern perception par excellence – one which unmasks the no longer viable traditional forms of landscape representation and urban planning.” 10 Levi remarks on this new perspective in his first-person autobiographical narrative, claiming that from above, Rome reveals its hidden world, which before the cultural “revolution” initiated by Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, generally remained out of the eyes of the city’s highly moralistic middle-class citizens: Ed ora tutta Roma mi rivela il suo mondo nascosto sui tetti e sulle altane, nei segreti delle finestre, nelle famiglie meriggianti sulle terrazze comete pecore sui prati, nel variare infinito delle forme dei quartieri antichi dove le meraviglie dell’immaginazione architettonica mostrano il loro lato sconosciuto, il coperchio di quegli scrigni dorati e viola che raccolgano tutti i tempi della storia; e i quartieri moderni, giganteschi, sfavillanti e avidi come dentiere, e i ruderi dei Fori, residuo del bombardamento degli anni, e i parchi gonfi di fronde e di vitalità vegetale; e lì vicino ai palazzi ed ai monumenti ed agli acquedotti, le catapecchie dei poveri, la cintura che avvolge Roma come un provvisorio accampamento di popoli che aspettano in quei tuguri il momento di entrarvi. 11 This bird’s-eye view of various fragments of Rome, most similar to a cinematic montage such as seen in the opening sequence of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (See Fig. 53 and 54), exposes the borgate to a more modernist interpretative perspective than one finds in most previous literary texts. As Flaminio Di Biagi remarks in his guidebook to Fellini’s Rome: 10 11

Steimatsky 14-15.

Carlo Levi. “Roma a mezz’aria,” Rivista Pirelli, 4 August 1956; Rpt. in Gigliola De Donato, ed.

“L’elicottero,” Roma fuggitiva: Una città e i suoi dintorni (Roma: Donzelli, 2002) 33.

184

Figure 53. Helicopter Flies over Roman Aqueducts. La dolce vita, dir. Federico Fellini, 1960.

All’inizio della Dolce vita, quando l’elicottero vola sopra gli acquedotti: Si viene così a creare, per la gioia di spettatori – e di critici – di tutto il mondo, una triplice sovrapposizione tra: romanità classica (le armoniche rovine dell’acquedotto, solide, eterne, peperò ormai a secco, morte), cristianità (la statua precariamente sospesa del Cristo benedicente), e modernità (il rumoroso mezzo meccanico che sorvola il tutto veloce e minaccioso, come una violazione). 12 Whereas before, authors, directors and their characters experienced the Eternal City from the street-level, which de Certeau deems as the most elementary form of experience,13 Rome has gained a new form of verticality, a new modernist and urban point of view that was only once before afforded by standing atop a skyscraper. The Eternal City’s horizontal and vertical planes suddenly overlap, as Levi superimposes Rome’s other conflicting identities in his literary-journalistic work.

Levi describes the modern structures rising in and around Rome as false teeth that shine and loom large, making apparent that there is something inorganic about these buildings’ presence in the city. He juxtaposes their quasi-anthropomorphic impression 12

Flaminio Di Biagi, La Roma di Fellini (Genova: Le Mani, 2008) 57.

13

See Chapter 2, p. 150-151.

185

Figure 54. Helicopter Flies over the Developing Periphery. La dolce vita, dir. Federico Fellini, 1960.

with the ruins of the ancient imperial fora, which previous literary flâneurs of Rome, including Goethe 14 and Stendhal, 15 interpret as sublime in their Grand Tour-era travelogues. Levi continues this early nineteenth century convention by portraying ancient neighborhoods as infinite variations of shapes where “the wonders of architectonic imagination show their unknown side.” His notion of the sublime can be read through the philosophical key of Immanuele Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In this foundational work of Western thought, Kant posits that infinity reflects the mathematical conception of sublimity as it measures spaces’ magnitude; although the philosopher links the infinite sublime initially to its manifestation in nature, twentieth century authors influenced by this Enlightenment-era philosophy often adopted the idea and reinterpreted 14

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1816) accounts for his travels throughout Italy, including Rome, between 1786-87 and forms a cornerstone in his conception of Weltliteratur, or “world literature”.

15

Henri-Marie Beyle, who took the penname Stendhal, wrote three texts that exalt the artistic grandeur and mythical qualities of pre-modernized Rome. The first is an essay entitled De L’amour (1822), which paints Rome as the crystallization of Love. The second two texts that have become staples of Grand Tour literature include his travelogues, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (1817) and Promenades dans Rome (1853). In all three texts, the paratactic presents a means for the writer to observe and understand the Eternal City on a realist as well as sensationalist level.

186 it within modern, twentieth century cityscapes. It is important to note, however, that neither nature nor urban spaces contain the sublime in and of themselves; they require a person to contemplate them and imbue them with sublimity. As Kant further conjectures: “Hence nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity.” 16 It is important to highlight that the judgment of infinity and of sublimity, in Kant’s description, rests solely in the observer’s mind, or as he calls it, intuition. The sublime and its infinite do not emanate from actual physical objects contemplated by those who stand before them, but in the way that the judging person perceives them. What makes reading Carlo Levi’ according to the Kantian infinite sublime intriguingly problematic is the writer’s insertion of it within a fragmented map, a highly finite, representation of Rome.

The outlying borgate in Levi’s short story act as a belt that contains the capital city, enclosing the ancient center’s supposedly infinite architectural variations within its confines. The author, perhaps unwillingly, creates a contradiction in terms, hailing to the poetic style of Pasolini’s quasi-contemporaneous long prose piece. It is highly possible that Ragazzi di vita either subconsciously or consciously influenced Levi’s perception of Rome and its underclass neighborhoods, as the two men were good friends and read each other’s work; however, one should not forget that Levi literarily documented the Roman periphery before Pasolini had even moved to Rome. He offers a folkloristic portrayal of the borgate’s shacks as well as a less than mystical recognition of its palazzi in his 1950 novel L’orologio, discussed in the Introduction. Whatever his true source of inspiration

16

Immanuel Kant, “On Estimating the Magnitude of Natural Things as We Must for the Idea of the Sublime,” Critique of Judgment, ed. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002) 112.

187 was, most probably a combination of sources, it will have to remain an ambiguous conjecture as few studies, beyond the introduction to the collection of Levi’s short stories, Roma fuggitiva, have seen publication. This introductory essay, however, takes a puzzling position, declaring: “Morto pochi mesi prima di Pasolini, Carlo Levi non ha visto o non ha voluto guardare la Roma infernale del più giovane amico….” 17 This assertion seems to ignore the fact that Levi had visited the borgate and had in fact observed them, although perhaps not as intimately as Pasolini had. If the introduction provides any cue as to how to read Levi, it rests in the contrasts between his literary intentions and those of Pasolini, which furthermore indicates that some sort of tension existed between the two authors’ styles and interpretations of Rome.

Levi like Pasolini, nevertheless, recognizes the intrinsic socio-psychological differences between living within the city center or outside along the periphery within a modernizing urban fabric. Levi portrays the shantytowns’ populations as dwelling in a perpetual provisory state, waiting for an opportunity to enter the city and partake in its society. The space occupied by Levi’s “cintura” literally sits on Rome’s frontier, between the actual city and the surrounding countryside, emphasizing the sense of general marginalization from mainstream, bourgeois Rome. This literary depiction, apart from aligning itself with Ragazzi di vita’s imagery of the borgate, conforms to Lefebvre’s urbanistic theory regarding the relationship between center and periphery in urbanistic design: “If one defines urban reality by dependency vis-à-vis the centre, suburbs are urban. If one defines urban order by a perceptible (legible) relationship between

17

Giulio Ferroni, Introduzione, By Carlo Levi, Roma fuggitiva: Una città e I suoi dintorni, ed.

Gigliola De Donato (Roma: Donzelli, 2002) xxiii.

188 centrality and periphery, suburbs are de-urbanized.” 18 Levi’s perspective from the helicopter certainly empowers his perception of the conflicting relationship between Rome’s center and outskirts, thus de-urbanizing, in Lefebvre’s terms, the capital’s suburbs. This de-urbanization implies a stripping of one’s right to the city, which includes the elimination of direct access to the center’s political, social, economic and cultural benefits. Levi further emphasizes the marginalization of the underclass inhabiting hovels beyond the modern palazzine, viewing the apartment complexes as “un orrido muro inorridito davanti alle casupole delle borgate e alla campagna.” 19 They are clearly a demarcated boundary, no longer belonging to either the countryside nor the city.

A thematically similar journalistic piece, based on the interrupting aesthetic presence of building speculation in Rome, appears again in 1956 in Il Messaggero, expressing the capital’s citizens’ “Voglia di verde:” La speculazione ha travolto quanto di verde esisteva ancora nella nostra città…. I villini si trasformano in quelle costruzioni che gli urbanisti moderni chiamano palazzine. E così Monte Sacro… e così altre zone di quiete… si stanno trasformando anch’essi in zone intensive, in giungle di cemento armato. 20 The “garden city” type of urbanism, attempted during the early Fascist era and exemplified by neighborhoods such as Monte Sacro and Garbatella, 21 was by 1956 giving

18

Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” 79.

19

Carlo Levi, “Roma a mezz’aria,” Rivista Pirelli, 4 August 1956; Rpd. in Carlo Levi, Roma fuggitiva: Una città e i suoi dintorni, ed. Giuliola De Donato (Roma: Donzelli, 2002) 34.

20 21

“Voglia di verde,” Il Messaggero, 3 June, 1956; Rpd. in Sergio Lambiase et al. 146.

Italo Insolera delineates the initial plans for Monte Sacro and Garbatella in his chapter on the post World War I era: “Il quartiere di Monte Sacro fu costruito a partire dal 1920 dal ‘Consorzio città giardino’… cui si deve il carattere romantico della rete viaria e delle architetture…. Doveva essere una ‘garden city’ destinata al ceto medio, disposta su una duplice altura al di là dell’Aniene.” Insolera 108. As the urban historian shortly thereafter notes: “Oggi i villini sono quasi tutti scomparsi, sostituiti da palazzine che hanno riempito anche l’area dei giardini originali cambiando completamente l’aspetto di Monte Sacro: la struttura viaria. I servizi sono rimasti invece quelli dimensionati quarant’anni fa per cinquecento villini,

189 way to the chaos of the housing boom characterized by intense building speculation. This indiscrete change in construction politics, which overpowered organized planning, favored unbridled development degenerating into a modern “Sack of Rome.” Rome was becoming an entanglement of concrete and brick structures in which parks and the Agro Romano were quickly disappearing. Pasolini had already expressed such a concern in a 1950 article entitled, “Scompare la selvaggina nella campagna romana.” In it, the writer laments the dying migratory species that once populated Rome’s surrounding countryside due to “le bonifiche, il progresso agricolo e civile, e il deprecato disboscamento….” 22 Ginsborg later contextualizes the notion of the “sack”, a semantically charged historical expression for Rome’s demythification, noting: “Throughout the great building boom of 1953-63, there was often open collusion between the municipal authorities and the building speculators. The ‘sack’ of Rome, as it came to be called, was dramatic testimony to this.” 23 The historian then consequently cites the title of a 1956 article in L’Espresso, “Capitale corrotta: nazione infetta,” which had became the rallying cry for a journalistic inquest into governmental corruption related to the capital city’s development. 24 It is cioè all’incirca tremila appartamenti. Oggi ci sono almeno altrettante palazzine con più di seimila appartamenti.” Ibid., 109. The staggering increase in population has stretched the planned infrastructure for Monte Sacro, debasing it to the level of the borgate surrounding it. Garbatella, on the other hand, quickly succumbed to housing speculation in the early 1920s, which the architects Giovannoni and Piacentini initially projected as the southern counterpart of Monte Sacro: “Inizialmente si cominciarono a costruire le cosiddette ‘case rapide’ destinate ad alloggiare senza-tetto e baraccati: il livello di queste case era bassissimo….” Ibid., 109. Garbatella began in complete contradiction to what the planners had in mind, and by 1927, “l’Istituto case popolari inizia la costruzione degli ‘alberghi collettivi’, ufficialmente ‘unité d’habitation’ con servizi in comune, praticamente dormitori pubblici: vi vengono trasferiti i primi sfrattati dalle demolizioni attuate per gli sventramenti nel centro.” Insolera 110. The garden city, thus, never succeeded in grabbing a foothold in Rome’s modern urban development.

22

Pier Paolo Pasolini “Scompare la selvaggina nella campagna romana,” Il Quotidiano, 9 August, 1950; Rpt. in Walter Siti, ed. Storie della città di Dio (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 93-96.

23 24

Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 247.

Several sources quote the impact of this 1956 article, attesting to its importance in city politics.

These texts include: Ginsborg, A Contemporary History of Italy 247; Insolera 207; Lambiase et al. 148.

190 clear that by 1956, the year in which Vittorio De Sica released his late Neorealist work on the housing crisis, entitled Il tetto, the film was reflecting an issue that greatly afflicted Rome’s population, if not that of the entire Italian nation.

Building a Home in De Sica’s Il tetto Il tetto emerged at a time when the public and most directors had grown noticeably weary of Neorealism and called for the production of something different. As noted in Chapter 2, the dominant Christian Democratic Party, through its Undersecretary Andreotti, was pushing for a different, more optimistic sort of cinema that would counter the generally leftist agenda of Neorealist films. 25 The left, on the other hand, had fragmented, with some abandoning the Neorealist project and others sporadically pursuing it. The novelist Alberto Moravia, who ironically was currently working on his Neorealist masterpiece La ciociara (1957) during Il tetto’s production, parrots such polemics forged against the movement in his novel Il disprezzo (1954): Siamo tutti d’accordo che nel cinema bisogna trovare qualche cosa di nuovo… ormai il dopoguerra è finito e si sente il bisogno di una formula nuova… il neorealismo, tanto per fare un esempio, ha stancato un po’ tutti… ora, analizzando i motivi per cui il cinema neorealistico ci ha stancati, potremo forse arrivare a capire quale potrebbe essere la formula nuova. 26

Antonio Cederna who was an active journalist during the 1950s, likewise composed a pamphlet for the Partito Radicale (Radical Party) entitled I Vandali a Roma, which decried environmental destruction in the city.

25 26

See Chap. 2, note 6.

Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959. Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (1954; Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 902. This semi-autobiographical novel, which traces the dissolution of a marriage between an author/screenwriter and his wife against the background of making a film based on the myth of Ulysses, provides a wealth cinematographic polemics from the perspective of a screenwriter. Jean-Luc Godard benefits from the texts already highly filmic content to create his New Wave adaptation, Le Mépris (1963).

191 Roberto Rossellini, the so-called father of Neorealism, thirds these assertions, proclaiming in an interview, published in Cahiers du Cinéma, 27 that it was time for him and other Italian directors to move on from the movement: I think I am the same human being looking at things in the same way. But one is moved to take up other themes, interest is shifted somewhere else, you have to take other paths; you cannot go on shooting in ruined cities forever. Too often we make the mistake of letting ourselves be hypnotized by a particular milieu, by the feel of a particular time. But life has changed, the war is over, the cities have been rebuilt. It was the story of the reconstruction that had to be told…. 28 Italy’s cities perhaps were no longer war torn; however, the story of their urbanistic reconstruction and expansion had only just begun. As noted above, Ginsborg recognizes 1953 as the year in which the great building boom commenced, while Insolera credits the introduction of the 1949 Fanfani Law with fueling the state-funded reconstruction program in Rome, which lasted through the Economic Boom. 29 Construction, along with the cinema, thus returned as one of Rome’s two major industries; however in contrast with the immediate post-Risorgimento plans, which sought to exclude the poorest classes 27

Cahiers du Cinéma was an important French cinema journal that greatly contributed to the delineation of the cinéma d’auteur, or European art cinema. André Bazin, on of the periodical’s most influential critical writers on Italian Neorealism, reflected on the publication’s predominant analytical stance in a 1957 article entitled “De la politique des auteurs” (On the politique des auteurs): “Cahiers du cinema is thought to practise the politique des auteurs. This opinion may perhaps not be justified by the entire output of articles, but it has been true of the majority, especially for the last two years. It would be useless and hypocritical to point to a few scraps of evidence to the contrary, and claim that our magazine is a harmless collection of wishy-washy reviews,” Cahier du Cinéma, V. 70, April 1957; Rpd. in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma, V. 1, The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, trans. Peter Graham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 248.

28

Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut, “Entretien avec Roberto Rossellini,” Cahiers du Cinéma V. 37, July 1954; Rpd. Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume 1: The 1950s: Neorealism, Hollywood, New Wave, trans. Liz Heron (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 209. This proclamation against a movement he helped found drew criticism from a number of people, including Gianni Rondolino and Lino Micciché, who described it as a “tradimento.” See Gianni Rondolino, Rossellini (Firenze [Florence]: La Nuova Italia, 1977) 39; and Lino Micciché, “Per una verifica del neorealismo,” Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, ed. Lino Micciché (Venezia [Venice]: Marsilio Editori, 1975) 14.

29

See Chapter 2, p. 153.

192 from integrating into the city’s urban fabric, the intention was to develop neighborhoods and structures not only for the city’s bourgeoisie, but also for its subaltern residents. 30 This objective, nevertheless, appears to conflict with the narrative behind De Sica’s Il tetto, while Rome’s two major industries combine to create a striking humanistic depiction of the abusivismo underlying the capital’s expansion. 31 Shot between 1955 and 1956, Il tetto conceptually follows in Ragazzi di vita’s footsteps, for the construction of palazzine in Rome’s modern borgate and the expansion of illegal shantytowns serve as the film’s undeniable protagonists. The film’s architectural-urbanistic storyline revolves around a human narrative, as well, that of a newly married couple, Luisa and Antonio, who shortly after leaving Antonio’s overcrowded family home, discover that they are going to have a baby. Antonio, who is a

30

The neighborhood Testaccio, which the monarchy ideated during its first building program as a proletarian suburb near the city’s gas and electric generator, the Permolio, so prominently displayed in post World War II Italian cinema, was supposed to house the local industries’ working class, not to alleviate the problem of shantytowns emerging around Rome to house the city’s construction workers. Politicians believed that the bricklayers were transient residents of Rome and that the administration did not owe them affordable, decent dwellings: “Era considerato assolutamente ovvio che queste persone, che costruivano materialmente la nuova città, non dovessero diventarne cittadini.” Insolera 66.

31

Callisto Cosulich, in his recognition of Il tetto’s polemical position at the end of Italy’s Neorealistic period, writes: “Nel ’56 le speranze [degli italiani] si erano consolidate, le paure rimosse. Il tetto, stando alle parole dello stesso De Sica, ne avrebbe tenuto conto (‘sarà conforme al clima più disteso dell’attuale momento di ricostruzione…’). Tuttavia vi si faceva l’apologia dell’abusivismo (di un certo abusivismo: di sicuro non quello delle ville principesche accanto ai ruderi dell’Appia Antica) e questo lo si sapeva.” Callisto Cosulich, “Il colpo di coda del neorealismo,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, eds. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 48.

Gualtiero De Santi makes a similar note, recognizing the attention given to illegally constructed buildings by political conservatives: “Oggi Teodoro Buontempo ha assunto l’abusivismo come tema generale della politica sociale della nuova destra: ‘È come il vento, l’abusivismo – gridava a pieni polmoni qualche tempo fa -, come la marea. È una forza che non si può fermare: è una necessità vitale’.” Gualtiero De Santi, “L’ultima ‘querelle’ neorealista,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, eds.

Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 64. Nico Naldini, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cousin and biographer, translates the meaning of abusivismo into the larger panorama of historical phenomena: “Ad un occhio contenutistico questo film riserva la sorpresa di essere gremito di temi di grande attualità: tra i quali possiamo annoverare l’immigrazione, l’accettazione del ‘diverso’, l’abusivismo edilizio, i mostri della speculazione immobiliare partoriti dalla corruzione politica.” Nico Naldini, “La scena delle borgate,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, eds. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 51.

193 bricklayer laboring on one of Rome’s many construction sites by day, contrives a plan with his wife to build clandestinely a single-room shack in one night, before patrolling city guards can force them to demolish their illegal home. 32 The hovel’s existence sits at the plot’s nucleus, and the environment and spirit of Rome’s housing boom drive De Sica’s thematic basis. Rome’s modern construction sites and baraccopoli appear in nearly every outdoor shot in the film, and the montage of images during the film’s opening credits speaks to the impact that the transforming cityscape was having on Italian culture throughout the 1950s. This emphasis on Rome’s transition from the mythical Urbs into a modern capital with temporary and evolving structures inserts Il tetto directly into one of the fundamental discourses of modernity, expressed by Charles Baudelaire in 1863: “la modernité, est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l'art dont l'autre moitié est l'éternel et l'immuable.” 33 The fundamental constructs of modern art, in his eyes and as perpetuated at least through the development of Rome in the 1950s, explain part of Rome’s postwar participation in projecting a modernist aesthetics. A technical and stylistic investigation of the juxtaposition of such contrasting architectural structures will reveal not only the incongruity of what modern Rome, and by that same token, modernist Rome was becoming, but also the conflicts of interest that were transforming the city’s urban fabric into a contemporaneously mythical, or “Eternal”, and actual, or “Contingent” City.

32

A law declared that any shelter built on municipal property, without a door and finished roof, should be immediately demolished. I have not, nor have other De Sica scholars, been able to identify this law to which the film refers, however Howard Curle proposes a piece of planning legislation, law #1150, passed in 1942. Howard Curle, “A Home in the Ditch of Saint Agnes,” Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Howard Curle and Stephan Snyder (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000) 219.

33

32.

Charles Baudelaire, Constantin Guy: Le peintre de la via moderne (1863; Paris: Nilsson, 1925)

194

Figure 55. Beginning of the Pan across the Borgata with a Shot of the Italian Flag. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 56. The Pan Continues across the Borgata. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

195

Figure 57. The Anatomy of a Building. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 58. The Postwar Periphery with a View of Mountains. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

196 The establishing sequence with the opening credits begins with an image of the Italian flag, viewed from below, with the camera shifting even further downwards until it arrives at the level of a rooftop (See Fig. 55 and 56). The presence of the unified nation’s international symbol helps underscore the sense of modernity inherent in De Sica’s vision of Rome, which has by the mid-1950s shed its identity as the quasi-feudal Papal State and donned that as the capital of Italy. The director’s camera then moves from the flag and opens onto a modern borgata under construction, located to the north of Rome near Monte Sacro, 34 the style of which resumes the modernist anatomical architectural technique, “ossaturisme,” expounded by modernist architects, such as Theo van Doesburg 35 and Le Corbusier 36 , earlier in the century (See Fig. 57). The viewer, in fact, is confronted with barely completed seven-story buildings standing one next to the other, composing a palimpsest of wood and steel beams forming skeletal edifices. The materials used to construct the building, on which the camera sits, then emerge in the foreground, while groups of identical, newly erected, and uninhabited structures rise across the street (See Fig. 58). One immediately perceives that this section of Rome is quite unlike the 34

Bruno Reichlin identifies the area as the neighborhood of viale Etiopia. “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture: Part 2,” trans. Tony Shugaar, Grey Room, V. 6, Winter 2002, 118. The definitive draft of the screenplay, as composed by De Sica and Zavattini and reproduced by the Associazione Amici di Vittorio De Sica, places the construction site at viale Tirreno. Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, “Il soggetto definitivo,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 75. It is difficult to determine which location is correct, as Riechlin proposes viale Etiopia without providing his source of information, while it is quite possible that the director and screenwriter chose a different place to shoot if the initial construction site changed greatly between the film’s ideation and its actualization. Construction sites are, after all, urban spaces in transformation.

35

Theo van Doesburg, “Von der neuere Aesthetik zur materiellen Verwirklichung,” De Stijl, V.5 (March 1923): 10; and “Kernieuwingspogingen in der Fransche Architectur,” Bouwbedrif 1.4 (October 1924): 173-77.

36

Le Corbusier, “Des yeux qui ne voient pas…II. Les avions,” Esprit Nouveau Vol. 9 (June 1921); Verso un’architettura nuova, eds. Giovanni-Maria Lupo and Paola Paschetto, Vol. 2 (Torino [Turin]: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1983) Vol. 54-55, no. 3 and 6; and “Ce Salon d’Automne,” L’Esprit Nouveau, Vol. 28 (January 1925) 2333-2334.

197 historical center with its narrow winding streets (with the exception of the few avenues constructed under the monarchy and Fascism), for it is emerging along a grid plan, another clear sign of the neighborhood’s modernist influence. 37 The camera shifts to frame a rudimentary shack standing humbly at the other buildings’ foundations, before it pans across the borgata (See Fig. 59). De Sica emphasizes the area’s peripheral placement as he captures the close presence of the Alban Hills, the mountains flanking Rome to the east, in the background (See Fig. 58). A construction worker walks across the roof of another building, demonstrating through his movement the progress of postwar Rome’s great construction boom. The camera then cuts to an excavator, which carves into a mound of earth (See Fig. 60). The spectator views this action slightly from above, although more or less at ground level, so as to feel as if participating in the scene.

The amount of attention that De Sica pays to filming the borgata’s construction, assuming various perspectives, integrating nature into the cityscape, and demonstrating an acute awareness of detail creates a highly stylized and aestheticized image of modern Rome’s development. The director’s focus on movement, machinery, and modern construction techniques somewhat likens his cinematographic vision to Italy’s bestrecognized modernist ideology, Futurism, which celebrated progress (most often embodied in speed), technology, and the industrialized city (See Fig. 61 and 62). 38 F. T. Marinetti, in fact, proclaimed in a manifesto from 1915: “Vi lascerò come un dono

37

Bruno Reichlin writes: “The modernist grid is the inescapable figure of Italian architecture.” He then places it within the context of modern Rome’s building expansions from the time of the Risorgimento through to the Economic Boom. Reichlin “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture: Part 2” 118-9. See also: Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 8-22.

38

Francesco Iengo, Cultura e città nei manifesti del primo futurismo (1909-1915) (Chieti: Vecchio Faggio, 1986) 20-21.

198

Figure 59. The Shack Standing in the Middle of the Construction Site. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 60. The Excavator. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

199

Figure 61. Dynamised View of the Roman Forum. Filippo Masoero. 1934.

Figure 62. Tullio Crali. Incuneandosi nell'abitato. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 1939.

200 esplosivo quest’immagine: ‘Nulla è più bello dell’armatura di una casa in costruzione’.

Ad una casa ben costruita, noi preferiamo l’armatura di una in costruzione coi suoi ponticelli color di pericolo.” 39 Marinetti is clearly celebrating the aesthetic of urban industrial dynamism, which De Sica later transfigures into an industrial lyricism in Il tetto’s opening sequence. The perception of the images’ “beauty” and “danger” disappears in De Sica’s film, and Marinetti’s bombastic rhetoric certainly has no place in this late Neorealist production; nevertheless, the it would be difficult to extricate the fundamental principle guiding each cultural figures’ artistic perspective, which as Marinetti declares is “la nostra… passione per divenire delle cose.” The concepts and pictures point towards the future, of a Rome “becoming,” and eschew the Roma passatista, 40 to use Marinetti’s terminology, that is the one that has been (See Fig. 63).

The film’s aesthetic affinities with Futurism are limited; nevertheless, they find slight expression beyond the vision of a city “dei grandi casamenti popolari,” 41 and in the high-speed modes of transportation that intermittently appear. Rumbling airplanes pass above Luisa’s head in several shots (they are always heard, but never seen), while two trains dash past Natale, Luisa, and their cohort during the nocturnal construction of their home. Their decision to build their hovel alongside a railroad track indicates a less than tranquil future spent watching and listening to trains speed past their home. It is a tragic 39

F. T. Marinetti, “Nascita di un’estetica futurista,” Guerra sola igiene del mondo (Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1915) 121-22. Marinetti apparently published this particular piece in French five years earlier, in 1910, in Paris before adding it to his Italian oeuvre. See: Iengo 160-161.

40

Marinetti uses this terms repeatedly to refer to the museum-type city located throughout Italy and epitomized by towns that have hardly changed their Medieval or Renaissance forms. In an interview with Gubello Memmoli on October 30, 1913, he declares that he wants “l’Italia di Milano, di Genova, di Torino, non l’Italia di Roma attuale, di Venezia, di Firenze, di Pisa, ecc., un’Italia illuminata da luce elettrica e non dal chiaro di luna, un’Italia non da Baedeker, ma di grandi affari, di gran commercio…; un’Italia meno sentimentale, meno erotica, con meno mandolino, meno rovine, meno gondole….” Marinetti and Memmoli, “Con Marinetti in ‘terza saletta’,” Il giornale d’Italia, 30 October 1913, 3.

41

Marinetti, “Nascita di un’estetica futurista” 119

201 irony, especially when one juxtaposes this fact with the couple’s refusal to rent an apartment overlooking the railway tracks leading to Termini Train Station only one day earlier. Luisa insists that they will get used to it; however Natale is doubtful that anyone could bear the constant intrusion of noise. He essentially protests against a needless sensorial violence inflicted upon his family life. He believes that they should not have to suffer the constant aural disruptions of the city. A transformation in personal circumstances that occurs once Luisa announces she is pregnant, however, forces Natale to have a change in heart since he will not have his child living in the streets. The basic human need for shelter and the desire to provide for his family wellbeing bend his will, compelling the young newlywed to carve a space for himself and his wife within the unpleasant, nerve-wracking realities of Rome’s modern urban fabric.

One could also read the dialectical depictions of structures presented in the film as an aesthetic juxtaposition of mainstream society’s vision of residential Rome against the city of the working and subaltern classes. As one critic quips in response to the film’s final scene: “In fondo l’aspetto affascinante del film, è che si conclude con l’immagine della casa simile a quella che viene disegnata dai bambini, con una porta ed un tetto….” 42 This statement helps delineate a clear distinction between the complex steel and concrete jungle explored in every detail at the beginning of the film and the simple brick and mortar house the emerges at the film’s end (See Fig. 64). A point which Marinetti makes in his 1913 interview with Gubello Memmoli, in his tirade against Italy’s overall lack of

42

Paolo Portoghesi, “La città non finita del Tetto,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, eds. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 55.

202

Figure 63. Tato. Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo (Spiralata). Collezione Ventura, Rome, 1930.

urban modernization: “Meno pietre più acciaio…,” 43 resonates with Futurism’s consequent call for “la morte del muratore” as an aesthetic fact. 44 De Sica, instead, upholds the aesthetic and practical importance of the bricklayer, Natale, within this film.

Natale’s occupation helps the viewer contemplate the distinct aesthetics present in Il 43

Marinetti and Memmoli 3.

44

Iengo 163.

203

Figure 64. Natale and Luisa’s Brick and Mortar Home. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

tetto’s final scene by showing the man constructing his home with “stones” in front of apartment complexes, which he helps build during the days with “steel.” De Sica’s camera zooms out from a close image of the couple’s new shack to an overall cityscape, in which the just-completed “minimalist” structure stands enclosed in the middle-ground by a surrounding shantytown and modern palazzi reminiscent of those under construction in the film’s opening sequence. From one perspective, one could sustain that Natale and Luisa have succeeded in constructing a place, both architecturally and metaphorically, for themselves within the chaos of modern society. From another, one could argue that the impersonality and imposing presence of the larger structures, likely destined to be the homes of Rome’s wealthier petit-bourgeoisie, stand as a repressive reminder that the

204 couple has not yet earned its right to the city. There is, after all, the abusivismo of building speculators, greedily usurping land to construct massive apartment complexes to turn a profit, and then the abusivismo of the poor, an “abusivismo di necessità” as Paolo Portoghesi describes it, representing an “atteggiamento tipicamente italiano di soddisfare i bisogni elementari al dispetto della legge.” 45 De Sica, thus, visually and artistically contrasts the two major architectural elements composing Rome’s rapidly evolving urban fabric in the 1950s. By situating the dehumanizing forces characterized by the neocapitalists’ socio-political and economic environment embodied in the palazzi against the humanizing strength of solidarity found within the lower class, as demonstrated by Natale’s colleagues’ commitment to help him build his home, the viewer understands that a humanist message underlies all the images of bricks, concrete, and steel.

Most De Sica scholars, in fact, focus on the film’s human aspect rather than on its metropolitan aesthetics. De Sica is quoted as once stating: “Non posso mai essere soddisfatto di quel che ho fatto come attore e regista… Ciò che aveva valore per me è rimasto solo in me. I produttori non riescono a vedere alcuna poesia nei sentimenti degli uomini. Sono inquieto, disturbato.” 46 His camerawork and thematics in Il tetto, however, seem to give equal weight to the meaning of the modern city as they do to expression of one’s need for a family home. The narrative, according to the scriptwriter Zavattini’s designs, involves the drama of the impoverished newlyweds; yet the variety of Rome’s

45 46

Iengo 55.

Italo Moscati, Vittorio De Sica: Vitalità, passione e talento in un’Italia dolceamara (Roma: Ediesse, 2003) 25. This sort of statement conforms to the overall ethical underpinnings of Neorealism, according to Millicent Marcus: “Indeed, for many critics, neorealism is first and foremost a moral statement…, whose purpose was to promote a true objectivity – one that would force viewers to abandon the limitations of a strictly personal perspective and to embrace the reality of the ‘others,’ be they persons or things, with all the ethical responsibility that such a vision entails.” Marcus 23.

205

Figure 65. A Palazzo Rising. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 66. A Crane Sweeping across the Sky. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

206 modern architectural structures, and the concept of home, continually enter the frames and dialogue, arguably forming the nucleus of the film’s story. 47 The establishing sequence only emphasizes this matter in its overall lack of human figures.

If I resume the description of the establishing sequence begun above, one watches De Sica’s camera pan from the excavator to a skeleton of an apartment complex in construction and then it slightly shift upwards to emphasize the sense of the palazzo’s rising (See Fig. 65). Beyond the structure’s steel beams, the viewer perceives another building, a new church, also under construction, a point immediately perceived from the incomplete dome. A hut completes the scene, sitting in front one of the edifices under construction. It is not clear whether it is someone’s home, or whether it belongs to the building site; nevertheless its presence highlights the intermingling of quickly developed housing projects alongside shacks on and around Rome’s periphery. 48 The camera subsequently cuts to a low-angle view of a crane that is slowly turning across the sky, and then to a cement barrel being lowered into the ground (See Fig. 66 and 67). De Sica switches his focus to the same church as before, which stands behind a wall of materials amassed and lined along the road (See Fig. 68). As with the construction worker mentioned above, these materials highlight the sense of progress that characterized the height of Rome’s construction boom. Human suffering, generally a key element in De Sica’s Neorealist production, is completely absent. Only at the end of the sequence does the camera follows three workers as they carry materials along improvised tracks 47

The illusive house serves a similar narrative function as the missing bicycle in De Sica’s earlier film Ladri di biciclette, examined in Chap. 1.

48

Natale eventually occupies that shack in the film after he and Luisa decide to leave his parents’ overcrowded residence in search of a love nest. As such, De Sica once again emphasizes the structure’s ambiguous use-value, as it serves as both the construction site’s tool shed and as Natale’s temporary home.

207

Figure 67. A Cement Barrel Moving across the Sky. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

Figure 68. The Housing Boom’s Progress. Il tetto, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1956.

208 towards another building under construction. The men appear small in comparison to the buildings surrounding them, even though De Sica takes the shot at street level. Their faces are more or less hidden by shadows, since they have their back to the sun, negating their identities as individuals so that the viewer can concentrate on Il tetto’s true protagonist, Rome’s modern borgate. One could, therefore, argue that what is at stake is Rome and not its workers, which most previous analyses expound about De Sica’s work.

The person responsible for the film’s ideation was Cesare Zavattini who met two newlyweds caught in a precarious living situation in the early 1950s. He drafted a subject proposal and initially presented the project to Roberto Rossellini with whom the film lost impetus and never developed into anything. 49 Zavattini, a year later, re-proposed his idea to De Sica sometime between 1954 and 1955, and his long-time friend and colleague eagerly accepted the project, and even financed it, so as not to have to negotiate with the competing interests of producers. 50 The film, despite Moravia’s, Rossellini’s and many others’ anti-Neorealism declarations from previous years, bears thematic and stylistic affinities with High Neorealism, integrating non-professional actors, on-location shootings, and contemporary events. 51 The contemporary event, in this case, is Rome’s

49

The film, according to Gualtiero De Santi, was to bear the title Italia mia, but the director apparently lost interest in the project. Gualtiero De Santi, Vittorio De Sica (Milano: Il Castoro cinema, 2003) 103.

50 51

De Santi, Vittorio De Sica 104.

Some scholars, such as Bruno Torri, claim that De Sica concluded his Neorealistic cycle with Umberto D. Bruno Torri, “La più pura espressione del Neorealismo,” De Sica: Autore, regista, autore, ed.

Lino Micciché (Venezia [Venice]: Marsilio Editori, 1992) 51. Hart Wagner seconds that notion, asserting: “Although De Sica in 1951 returned to neorealism in the creation of Umberto D., this austere Kammerspiel on old age and dignity was to become the closing masterpiece of the movement.” Hart Wagner, “Pius Aeneas and Totò, il buono: The Founding Myth of the Divine City,” Pacific Coat Philology, 12 (October 1977) 64. Others simply ignore De Sica’s 1950s film productions after Umberto D., either glossing over Il tetto or leaving it completely out of the discussion. See: Lino Micciché, “La ‘Questione’ De Sica,” De Sica: Autore, regista, attore (Venezia [Venice]: Marsilio Editori, 1992) xv; Paolo Nuzzi and Ottavio Iemma, eds., De Sica & Zavattini: Parliamo tanto di noi (Roma: Editori Riunti, 1997). One, however, cannot

209 housing boom and crisis. As one scholar comments on the film’s subject matter: “Era una pratica in uso nella Roma delle borgate, a metà degli anni Cinquanta, da parte di chi non aveva denaro e non poteva sostenere le alte spese d’affitto” 52 to construct unlawfully a home.

De Sica’s and Zavattini’s interpretation of modern Rome focuses on the city’s underclass neighborhoods and structures in all their incompleteness: much like Pasolini does in Ragazzi di vita. Pasolini, however, did not particularly care for his contemporaries’ depiction of the borgate in Il tetto. He wrote in an article from 1958 entitled “I tuguri,” that “Il tetto di De Sica,” along with the other “vari prodotti minori del neorealismo… non ha almeno una immagine vaga di cosa siano i tuguri della periferia di Roma.” 53 Pasolini accuses Zavattini and De Sica of injecting the narrative with “preFascist humanitarian socialism” and of being afraid of the “real” Roman hovels that have appeared around the city. De Sica’s fear, according to the younger artist, rendered him incapable of denouncing the urbanistic and social conditions surrounding the phenomenon of these structures. Pasolini’s diatribe continues by condemning the work of essentially every other contemporary artist who assumes the borgate as their subject matter, for he deems that they lack the strength to confront the subject he so passionately depicts in his text:

ignore the stylistic and thematic affinities between High Neorealism and Il tetto. I would, in fact, argue that De Sica concludes his foray into Neorealism with his cinematic adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s La ciociara in 1960, a film which bears strong stylistic and thematic affinities with major works form the late 1940s.

52 53

Moscati 151.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “I tuguri,” Vie nuove, Roma 24 May 1958; Rpt. in Storie della città di Dio. ed. Walter Siti (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1995) 128.

210 Credo del resto che nessuno scrittore o regista avrebbe il coraggio di andare fino in fondo nel rappresentare questa realtà: la sentirebbe così atroce, così inconcepibile, che gli sarebbe lecito sospettare trattarsi di un ‘particolarismo’, di un fenomeno troppo speciale o marginale. Certi limiti di bassezza umana non si possono, pare, artisticamente toccare; certe deviazioni della psicologia coatta da un ambiente sociale abbietto, non si possono, pare, rappresentare. 54 Pasolini certainly desired to bring attention to the criminality lurking within Rome’s peripheral spaces, which Italian bourgeois society, in his opinion, would rather not see. 55 His criticism of Il tetto, as well as of other Neorealist attempts to approach Rome’s marginalized people and places, illuminates how he perceived very little moral goodness in the Roman borgate. De Sica and Zavattini, however, envision the borgate as imbued with the same sorts of humanism one would find in the rest of the city, according to their socialist perspective. Pasolini declares that the huts and shantytowns surrounding the Italian capital served as coves for illness, violence, criminals, and prostitution, precisely the opposite image that De Sica’s young married couple presents in Il tetto. Luisa and Natale are instead naïve and poor with aspirations to better their lives and that of their unborn child. Pasolini’s conception of the tuguri’s occupants is much less univocal, for he envisions them as embodying pure vitality, at the base of which lays a mixture of “male allo stato puro e di bene allo stato puro: violenza e bontà, malvagità e innocenza.” 56

54

Pasolini, “I tuguri” 128.

55

He continues: “Il pubblico borghese non ci crederebbe; la critica farebbe della facile ironia, attribuendo magari crudeltà e vizi psicologici a chi si occupasse senza veli e senza ipocrisie di tali argomenti.” Pasolini, “I tuguri” 128. Pasolini is still apparently reacting to the heavy moral criticism he received after the publication of Ragazzi di vita from nearly three years earlier.

56

Pasolini, “I tuguri” 131.

211 The clandestine creation of Antonio and Lucia’s one-room house, while skirting on the fringe of illegality, hardly extends to the extreme characterization of the crimes committed by Pasolini’s borgatari. Il tetto carries De Sica’s typical signification and justification for opposing the system and committing what mainstream society would consider a misdemeanor. The director incorporates similar circumstances in Ladri di biciclette, when the protagonist Antonio Ricci steals a bicycle in order to keep his job and feed his family; as well as in Sciuscià, when the young boys Pasquale and Giuseppe sell American blankets on the black market in order to upkeep their horse. De Sica’s films contextualize personal travails within the larger framework of social ills, such as the lack of employment or foodstuffs in the immediate postwar period. One can even view his early Neorealist production as a series of slices of reality that presented pressing socioeconomic issues afflicting all of Italy, for one can steal a bike or sell goods under the table in any town of any size. 57 The story of Il tetto, however, is arguably specifically Roman. While other Italian cities, in particular Milan, experienced growth and tremendous change in the postwar period, no city on the peninsula expanded quite as much or as irregularly as Rome did. According to Mario San Filippo: “L’abuso di... lottizzazioni private… è un fenomeno italiano, che ha investito tutta la penisola; ma a Roma ha avuto la sua manifestazione più clamorosa, predeterminando il futuro della città

57

When De Sica and Zavattini first screened Il tetto at the Cannes Film Festival of 1956, the film critic Lindsay Anderson remarked that they had “reached a point in their works in which they are exploiting rather than exploring the effects of poverty.” John Wakeman, ed., World Film Directors. Volume 1: 18901945 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987) 234. Her argument is misleading in the light of the fact that the film flopped in the box office and has not had a tremendous critical following. In addition, when Zavattini ideated the film, he intended for the film company to pay for the actual construction of a home for the young couple he knew: “I soldi della casa li mettiamo noi, e noi cinematografiamo tutta la scena.” Cesare Zavattini, “Preparativi: La casa di Natale e Luisa Zambon,” Il tetto di Vittorio De Sica: Testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiature, eds. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica (Roma: Pantheon, 1999) 71.

212 con lo sviluppo in ogni direzione e a macchia d’olio.” 58 Il tetto marks De Sica’s Neorealistic foray into Rome’s great expansion and one of his last collaborations with Zavattini, which as San Filippo notes, unfortunately created a disharmonious and lessthan-picturesque face for modern Rome. It is no longer the Rome from Ladri di biciclette or Sciuscià, but “one in which the war-battered is renovated and the new rises up beside the ancient.” 59 Fellini’s First Roman Periphery Federico Fellini, the other director whom Pasolini ostracizes for presenting a Neorealist cinematic interpretation of Rome’s borgate and housing boom, 60 provides a much more metaphysical and lyrical interpretation of modern Rome than the viewer encounters in De Sica’s Il tetto. 61 Like Michelangelo Antonioni, whose “Tentato suicidio” is difficult to align strictly within the Neorealist tradition, Fellini articulated a very individual, self-referential artistic vision in his cinema from his directorial debut with Luci del varietà (1950), 62 which greatly diverged from the larger socio-historical concerns of Italy’s early postwar period. Fellini never considered himself “un homo politicus,” 63 generally leaving political discourse out of his films and extricating his

58

San Filippo 120.

59

Curle 212.

60

Pasolini, “I tuguri” 128.

61

Howard Curle credits Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria, along with Il tetto, for acknowledging “the nascent economic boom that would lift at least middle-class Italians out of the deprivations of the war years.” Curle 212.

62

Fellini co-directed this first film with Alberto Lattuada. His first independent film, which stylistically and thematically resonates with Luci del varietà, is Lo sceicco bianco (1952).

63

Federico Fellini, Intervista sul cinema, ed. Giovanni Grazzini (1983; Roma & Bari: Editori Laterza, 2004) 14.

213 vision of Rome from the politicized tradition of mythifying the city as caput mundi.

Despite his disinterest in governmental affairs, the director did spend the late 1940s working as a screenwriter for the politically motivated Roberto Rossellini on such important Neorealist classics as Roma città aperta and Paisà. 64 His collaboration on such films closely ties Fellini to the immediate postwar cinematic production as well as to a critical reputation that, according to Peter Bondanella and Christina Degli-Esposti, “would be linked to the debate over the definition of Italian neorealism.” 65 Bondanella and Degli-Esposti further sustain that his early works, starting with Luci del varietà and ending with Le notti di Cabiria (1957), “played a crucial role in a polemical dispute over the definition of Italian neorealism, the cinematic movement within which he began his career.” 66 Fellini’s ability to combine his individual creative prowess with themes of social marginalization created a blurred affinity between his cinematic vision and that of the Neorealist movement, a fact which one perceives in the two films preceding the production of Le notti di Cabiria: La strada (1954) and Il bidone (1955). The prior, which depicts the circular vagabondage of two street entertainers, the brute Zampanò and the ingenuous Gelsomina, explores a largely anonymous Italy, its marginal spaces, and its

64

Fellini apparently earned critical acclaim in the cinema from the moment he entered it as a scriptwriter for Roma città aperta: “The extraordinary and completely unprecedented international acclaim for the film established neorealism as a seminal force in world cinema, made Rossellini a celebrity overnight, and earned Fellini his first international recognition – an unsuccessful but certainly welldeserved nomination for Best Original Screenplay from the American Academy of Motion Pictures in 1945. In the next year, Fellini received another Oscar nomination – this time for Best Story and Screenplay for Rossellini’s second and perhaps even more original neorealist classic, Paisà.” Peter Bondanella and Christina Degli-Esposti, “Introduction: Federico Fellini: An Overview of the Critical Literature,” Perspectives on Fellini, eds. Peter Bondanella and Christina Degli-Esposti (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993) 4.

65

Bondanella and Degli-Esposti 4.

66

Bondanella and Degli-Esposti 3.

214 carnevalesque cultures; while the second film portrays the machinations of Augusto, an aging swindler, who devises several money making schemes in and around Rome before ultimately losing his daughter’s trust, his colleagues, and his life.

Fellini himself, however, doubted his cinema’s ideological affinities with Neorealism, particularly from La strada onwards, stating in an interview: La strada era un film che raccontava contrasti più profondi, infelicità, nostalgie e presentimenti del trascorrere del tempo non puntualmente riconducibili a problematiche sociali ed impegno politico; quindi, in piena ubriacatura neorealistica, La strada era un film da rinnegare, decadente e reazionario. 67 In another interview, the director refutes critics’ aesthetic and thematic judgments of what constitutes a Neorealist film, contending: “When people saw a badly made shack, they mistook it for neorealism.” 68 Millicent Marcus continues Fellini’s line of reasoning, noting that the shack and vagrants typical of Neorealism indeed “are there in La strada – not only is Zampanò’s motor-trailer a moving hovel, but Gelsomina’s numerous family lives in a dilapidated hut whose roof repairs will be funded by the 10,000 lire earned form her sale to Zampanò;” 69 however, she recognizes that his film surpasses in many respects the social realism touted by Guido Aristarco and his leftist critical contingency at the journal Cinema nuovo. 70 Marcus gives further credence to the director’s self67

Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 87.

68

Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors, (1972; New York: Da Capo Press, 1987) 126. The author only printed his text in English and he does not provide any information regarding his translators, therefore, Fellini’s quote will remain in English.

69

70

Marcus 147.

Guido Aristarco was the editor of Italy’s Cinema nuovo, an influential cinema journal that had a strong intellectual following. Aristarco staunchly opposed Fellini’s lyrical, metaphysical cinema, composing two articles for the English language journal Film Culture. He declared in his first piece that the rising autuer’s cinema was anachronistic and that it celebrated the “tradition of the poetry of the solitary man,” which goes against his and supposedly the Neorealist movement’s Marxist belief in the power of the collective. Guido Aristarco, “Italian Cinema,” Film Culture 1.2 (1955) 30. The second article, disparaging

215 identification as an artist operating beyond the strictures of Neorealism, for she implements the subtitle “Transitions” to describe La strada’s movement towards a cinema d’autore in her study Italian Cinema in the Light of Neorealism. This designation implies that the directors and movies she examines in that portion of her text have transcended or shifted away from Neorealism in some way, although certain elements of that cinematic movement may remain and be traceable. 71 What La strada lacks in ideological affinity with High Neorealism, however, it makes up in content, for the film situates its characters not only on the margins of society, but more specifically along the periphery of Rome. 72 Flaminio Di Biagi, who has studied Rome’s presence in Fellini’s cinema from the Trevi Fountain to migrating sheep herds, 73 opines that “anche quando Roma non è affatto protagonista o comprimaria (o almeno scenario) dei suoi film, della Città Eterna si percepisce continuamente, in sottofondo, la ineluttabile presenza, se ne avverte il perenne Fellini’s cinema, decried: “We don’t say, nor have we ever said, that La strada is a badly directed and acted film. We have declared, and do declare, that it is wrong; its perspective is wrong.” Guido Aristarco, “Guido Aristarco Answers Fellini,” Film Culture, 4.2 (1958) 21.

71

It has become common practice for scholars to search and identify stylistic as well as thematic affinities between Neorealist films and their successors. Some have even begun describing several contemporary works as neo-neo-realist. The scope of this current study, however, is not to take one side over the other, but to address how various films’ content reflects or diverges from social, political, architectural, and overall artistic tendencies related to Rome’s 1950s housing crisis and boom.

72

Carlo Lizzani makes a valuable point regarding cinematic Neorealism’s content, arguing that the way Fellini captured Rome’s outcasts and outskirts in his films separated him from his cinematic predecessors on an aesthetic level: “Non era stato necessario essere dei teorici dell’estetica e della sociologia, per capire che non era sufficiente l’ingresso puro e semplice di determinati personaggi e di determinati ambienti popolari nei nostri film per fare una cinematografia nuova, quanto piuttosto lo spostamento dell’angolazione dalla quale questi ambienti e personaggi andavano visti.” Carlo Lizzani, Il cinema italiano: Dalle origini agli anni ottanta (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1982) 198. My examination of numerous Neorealist classics in Chapter 1 further supports the notion that the movement’s filmmakers sought to locate their works in Rome’s less than monumental locations.

73

Flaminio Di Biagi acknowledges that sheep are not architectural or urbanistic entities within the city; nevertheless he includes them in his investigation of Fellini’s Rome as they appear, according to his accounts, in “Roma, Le notti di Cabiria, La dolce vita, e Toby Dammit.” Di Biagi, La Roma di Fellini, cit.

96.

216 richiamo.” 74 The Fellini fanatic may readily agree with this statement, simply because so many of the auteur’s films do take place in the Italian capital city; however, Di Biagi has conceptually if not historically grounded his assertion in the auteur’s own actions and words, 75 as Fellini once commented that he ideated La strada while driving aimlessly around the Roman countryside: “Quel vagabondare pigro e molleggiato, forse mi ha fatto intravedere per la prima volta i personaggi, il sentimento, l’atmosfera di quel film.” 76 Di Biagi seems to intuit Rome’s ubiquity in Fellini’s films, even in those in which the city hardly appears, such as in La strada. The scholar further writes: “L’Urbe rimane costante riferimento. La sosta più lunga dei due artisti girovaghi di La strada è in realtà quella di circo a Roma, a San Paolo, dove Zampanò, estratto il coltello, viene arrestato dai carabinieri.” 77 It is striking that the only locale identified in a film that explores a purposely anonymous Italy as essentially an endless and nameless road is Rome’s outskirts. The morning after Zampanò’s release from prison, his moving hovel was supposed to arrive “davanti alla Caserma dei Carabinieri nella squallida piazzetta di periferia, malamente illuminata.” 78 Fellini, Pinelli and Flaiano, the three men who collaborated on the screenplay’s composition, thus apparently scripted the film to emphasize the poor, dark, and seamy side of the outskirts, reminiscent of nocturnal

74

Di Biagi 10.

75

Flaminio Di Biagi has developed a rather thorough and colorful investigation of Fellini’s personal and cinematic connection to various sites around the Eternal City. The author, however, does not document his research, often leaving quotations uncited, thus requiring other scholars who consult his work to conduct additional research in order to support or reject his claims.

76

Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 88.

77

Di Biagi 10.

78

Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano, “La strada,” Il primo Fellini (Rocca San Casciano: Casa editrice Licino Cappelli, 1969) 224.

217 scenes depicted in De Santis’ Roma ore 11, or in Lizzani’s or Antonioni’s vignette’s from L’amore in città, to which Fellini also contributed. 79 The final version of La strada, however, portrays the sequence in the bright morning sunlight, with Gelsomina sitting outside the prison awaiting Zampanò (See Fig. 69). Several-story white modern structures stand around a road under construction and an empty lot, visually situating La strada within the context of Rome’s great expansion (See Fig. 70). The borgata’s indistinctive architecture emphasizes the anonymous existence of Fellini’s two underclass protagonists who work and live on society’s margins.

The film’s inclusion of another example of Roman architecture, apart from the borgata, not only helps identify the Eternal City, but also further heightens the message of alienation so integral to La strada’s narrative. San Paolo Fuori le Mura, one of Rome’s four Jubilee basilicas, supposedly stands just beyond the Giraffa Circus’ tent where Gelsomina and Zampanò briefly stop during their travels and visibly next to Zampano’s prison. 80 As one can deduct from its name, Saint Paul Outside the Walls sits along Rome’s periphery, outside the hegemonic and official city center, thus toponymically underscoring the characters’ identities as outsiders. 81 The church, however, also lends significant religious weight to the sequence, as its presence connects the film’s subtext, in

79

Fellini’s film short “Agenzia matrimoniale” has very few external scenes, thus it does not coincide with the urbanistic and architectural scope of this current study. I thus excluded it from Chapter 1’s discussion.

80

One of the circus members states that Saint Paul’s is just beyond their establishment; however, the viewer does not see it until the circus disbands and Zampanò emerges from prison (See Fig. 69).

81

The same church arguably serves a similar purpose in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, a point which I discuss in Chapter 2, p. 162.

218 many ways, to one of the Eternal City’s mythical identities: its being the capital of the Catholic Church, the “Roma onde Cristo è romano.” 82 Gelsomina’s and Zampanò’s

Figure 69. Gelsomina Waits Outside the Prison near Saint Paul’s Basilica. La strada, dir. Federico Fellini, 1954.

82

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, V. 2, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milano: Mondadori, 2003) XXXII, 102.

219

Figure 70. Rome’s “Great Expansion”. La strada, dir. Federico Fellini, 1954.

vagrancy thus acquires almost a pilgrimage status in this particular sequence, appropriate considering the director’s highly parareligious cinematic vision.

Fellini’s Piazzas and the Acqua Felice Aqueduct Il bidone, the film that Fellini created after his first experience of tremendous critical and commercial success with La strada, assumes similar albeit less-theatrical metaphysical undercurrents in the auteur’s manipulation of Rome’s open spaces.

Augusto, the main swindler, is Fellini’s first character to undergo a midlife crisis and confront “the fear of aging and dying without having lived a meaningful life… His filmlong purpose is to redeem his past and to create something of value in the present.” 83 Fellini grabs hold of this spiritual decadence and translates it most meaningfully into the emptiness of a piazza before the antihero’s ultimately fall. Following an evening of 83

1996) 67.

Frank Burke, Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern (New York: Twayne Publishers,

220 drunken revelry at a former colleague’s New Year’s Eve party, Augusto stumbles alone across the city’s Piazza del Popolo in the early hours of the morning (See Fig. 71). A place normally where throngs of people gether, its emptiness, the wet basalt cobblestones, and the weak light create a sense of estrangement quite uncommon to the place. Two prostitutes, strolling side by side and appearing more as moving shadows than fleshy human beings, further contribute to the spiritual sense of emptiness in the atmosphere as they cross his path and bluntly invite Augusto to take them home. The scene, although reminiscent of one from Fellini’s earlier film Lo sceicco bianco (1952) in which the confused and desperate newlywed Ivan Cavalli temporarily renounces his search for his runaway bride to spend an evening with a streetwalker, lacks the comic

Figure 71. Augusto Moves across Piazza del Popolo. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

221

relief permeating the other movie. Ivan accepts the prostitute’s invitation, adding a component of Pirandellian unmasking to the film since he temporarily renounces the role of one who lives according to society’s demands of him, openly sharing his travails with two prostitutes and later sleeping with one of them on the first night of his honeymoon. 84 The loner Augusto, on the other hand, rebuffs the two women’s advances, not even engaging them in conversation, his shadowy figure slipping out of the camera’s frame.

Augusto functions as Fellini’s cinematic counterpart to the Italian poetic crepusculare antihero who lives in solitude and watches the reality around him disintegrate. 85 The practically dehumanized piazza with its four stone lion fountains and Egyptian obelisk standing in the middle detaches the space from its tradition a point of aggregation and socialization in Italian society. The piazza becomes in Il bidone a place of individual and subjective experience, a place where Augusto begins to confront his consciousness, easily associated with Giorgio de Chirico’s pittura metafisica. 86 This twentieth century painter, who created several pieces entitled Piazza d’Italia in which 84

Peter Bondanella examines in depth the correlations between Luigi Pirandello’s and Federico Fellini’s concepts of character in his essay “Early Fellini. Variety Lights, The White Sheik, The Vitelloni.”

Both artists believed that “character was flux, an everchanging entity beyond the grasp of human reasoning, precisely because its fundamental basis, the face behind the mask, was composed of raw emotions, instincts, and preconscious feelings….” Peter Bondanella, Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford U P, 1978) 224.

85

Fellini’s biographer Tullio Kezich notes that the film builds on the theme of l’arte dell’arrangiarsi, which was key to survival during the immediate postwar climate of food shortages and the black market, but by 1955 with the economic growth, it was a dying art. For that reason, he believes the film depicted the “decadenza e morte dei bidonisti. Perciò ha finito per essere crepuscolare anziché ilare e picaresco….” Tullio Kezich, Federico Fellini, la vita e i film (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2002) 166.

86

“In fact, de Chirico, perhaps because as an Italian he too has been particularly sensitive to Italian space and Italian light, can be used again and again to illuminate by analogy the images in Fellini….

In Fellini, the town square is never felt to be the social center of a community. De Chirico too seemed to be sensitive to the empty feeling of such spaces at unused times of day – indeed, to the very irrelevance of such vast structures to the intimacies of human life.” Peter Harcourt, “The Secret Life of Federico Fellini,” Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford U P, 1978) 248. Reprinted from, Film Quarterly, 10.3 (1966) pp. 4-13.

222 exaggerated shadows extend from large buildings into essentially empty city squares,87 ideally compels his viewers to contemplate his images beyond their immediate physical realities (See Fig. 6 and 7). This approach, which adopts psychoanalytic principles, is intended initially to estrange the viewer, a feeling with Fellini clearly attempts to replicate in his film. Both artists’ modernist interpretations of Italian urban spaces, and in Fellini’s case particularly Rome, imbue once objectively universal entities with spiritual subjectivity, demythifying and extracting them from any of their historical associations.

Carlo Levi, who was not just a writer but also a painter, likewise dedicates a few words to artistic renderings of piazze, particularly of ones located in Rome’s borgate, in a March 1955 journalistic short story. He acknowledges the periphery’s expansion from the time he first documented the borgate’s existence in his novel L’orologio as well as the social problems endemic to these urbanistic, formless and fragmentary behemoths. His narrative, entitled “La moneta da due centesimi,” appears practically contemporaneously with Fellini’s production of Il bidone and only precedes the publication of Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita by a few months. It, however, lacks the metaphysical, emotional, and even artistic charge with which both Fellini and Pasolini imbue their works. This firstperson narrative, presumably autobiographical as the narrating “I” does not identify himor herself, takes the reader on a flâneur-like stroll through Rome’s famed Villa Borghese and into an exhibition of artworks painted by city firefighters. In contemplating the

87

Harcourt provides more detail in terms of the sculptural objects, small people, or tiny locomotives passing in the distance within De Chirico’s paintings, although he never mentions their names.

He interprets the meaning of De Chirico’s figures and trains against urban architecture, noting: “the hugeness of the structures… gives a feeling that the little human things don’t really belong in such as space.

Sometimes this feeling is further emphasized by the presence of some stray object in the foreground, some object made bizarre by being torn from the context of its function.” Harcourt 248-249.

223 cityscapes appearing on the canvases, Levi comments on the unwavering sense of solitude that the dilettante artists portray in all of the capital city’s spaces: In tutti i loro paesaggi di case e di strade e di città non vi è un solo passante, non una figura umana, né un’automobile, né un bambino, né un animale: ideali strade deserte, senza semafori, senza traffico, senza rumori, paradisi di solitudine. Anche i villaggi di baracche della periferia sono deserti e solitari sotto il sole. Quella gente bisognosa e povera, e così abusiva, è scomparsa. 88 Levi, rather than separating the borgate from the city center, or even engaging directly with the unique impressions that their architecture make in comparison to the more famous and aesthetically pleasing structures of mythical Rome, demonstrates how detached bourgeois intellectuals tended to be from these peripheral neighborhoods. The author celebrates, rather than denigrates or mystifies, the solitude expressed in the firefighters paintings, an approach to piazzas that runs quite contrary to either de Chirico’s or Fellini’s more poetic depictions, as well as to the spirit of his own earlier writings, ranging from L’orologio and his socially committed masterpiece Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945).

Fellini, like Levi, contemplates Rome’s borgate from the distance of a bourgeois intellectual; however, like Pasolini he physically enters the space to generate social commentary within his art. The director transports his camera from one failed swindle in a modern café where Augusto attempts to cheat a man with an exponentially overpriced watch, to another in one of the capital city’s most squalid borgate, the hovels lining the Acqua Felice Aqueduct (See Fig. 72). This sequence of Il bidone portrays Rome’s subaltern class dwelling in miserable premodern living conditions, which stand quite in

88

Carlo Levi, “La moneta da due centesimi,” La Nuova Stampa, March 1955; Rpd. in Roma fuggitiva: Una città e i suoi dintorni, ed. Gigliola De Donato. (Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2002) 25.

224 contrast with the emerging prosperity in many other parts of the city. The writers describe the area in the screenplay as “una fila di baracche aggrappate alle rovine di un acquedotto, come un fungazione irregolare e miseranda.” 89 Augusto and his colleagues Picasso and Roberto have learned that these people lack the security provided by governmental public housing and thus understand that they are thus susceptible to exploitation. It is around this point that Fellini and his two screenwriters, Pinelli and Flaiano, construct the scene's moneymaking scheme. What is interesting to note is that the criminals, who supposedly occupied the makeshift homes dotting the outskirts, actually enter the borgata from the outside, or rather from the city center, creating an inverted intrusion. Augusto, Picasso and Roberto are not members of the borgatari

89

Fellini, Pinelli, and Flaiano, “Il bidone,” Il primo Fellini 266.

225

Figure 72. Shacks Lining the Acqua Felice Aqueduct. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955. community, but working- to middle-class conmen. Their actions contradict Pasolini’s assertion that Rome’s shantytowns were “covi di malattie, di violenza, di malavita, di prostituzione,” 90 as Fellini depicts them as the helpless victims of the swindlers as well as of the endemic lack of available housing. Il bidone’s peripheral inhabitants are migrants who have moved to the capital in search of economic opportunity within the last few years who live momentarily in squalor while they hope for and await the state’s assistance.

90

Pasolini, “I tuguri” 129.

226 Augusto and his colleagues arrive in the borgata in their fancy black car, dressed as civil servants, in order to defraud the zone’s residents of their meager savings by promising to arrange more suitable lodging in one of the city’s new public housing structures. The vehicle approaches the area from a dirt road running nearly parallel with the aqueduct, eventually snaking its way into the heart of the neighborhood, presenting for the first time in Italian cinema a shantytown in broad daylight (See Fig. 73). 91 The camera assumes a birds-eye view of the swindlers’ arrival, exposing the shacks’ irregular and shoddy construction emphasized by the stones lining the roofs in order to hold down the shingles.

A fire burns in the middle of the street, while laundered clothes dangle on a line that stretches between two houses and children run barefoot around the buildings, high reeds, and twisted fences that line the car’s path. The film’s frame then assumes a street-level perspective for the rest of the sequence, while men and women pour out of their homes upon hearing from Picasso that he and his colleagues have come to assign apartments (See Fig. 74).

Fellini, at this point, shifts focus from the physical environment to the human drama unfolding around Rome’s 1950s questione della casa as the shacks largely disappear beyond the borgatari’s bodies. In a mixture of frustration and excitement, individuals then the crowd begin yelling their personal predicaments as Dantean lost

91

Earlier cinematic cases in which Rome’s shantytowns appear include De Santis’ Roma ore 11 and Lizzani’s vignette “Amore che si paga” from Zavattini’s collaborative, episodic film L’amore in città.

These two films explore the areas as the dwellings of prostitutes at night, hardly allowing a detailed analysis of either the borgate’s urbanistic or social makeup. De Sica’s Il tetto, which I examined earlier in this chapter, enters one of Rome’s shantytowns one year after Fellini’s direction of Il bidone. De Sica may have taken cues from the younger auteur’s film since he shot Il tetto shortly after Il bidone’s premier at the 1955 Venice Film Festival.

227

Figure 73. A Shantytown in Broad Daylight. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

Figure 74. Picasso Feigns to Assign Apartments. Il bidone, dir. Federico Fellini, 1955.

228 souls awaiting their turn to voice their story: 92 - Uomo (accento meridionale): Commendatò, commendatò è proprio la provvidenza che vi manda, commendatò… Io mi chiamo Sor Antonio. Sò quattordici mesi che ho fatto domanda per la casa…

Una donna in nero, esce da una baracca e chiede urlando: - Donna: A chi la danno la casa? A sto farabutto?

Augusto e Picasso continuano ad avanzare circondati dalla folla urlante.

- Folla: Io ho chiesto da due anni. Noi da quattro, commendatore. Sò due anni che aspettiamo noi. Sò tutti una massa di ladri. 93 The imploring, desperate families hardly touch the hearts of Augusto and his colleagues who continue their con without showing any remorse or pity for the borgatari’s plight.

This scene, much like the two others in which the swindlers take advantage of impoverished farmers in Rome’s countryside, highlight the spiritual vacuity characteristic of Il bidone’s main, and in the end, arguably unrepentant protagonist. 94 Homes and Homelessness in Le notti di Cabiria A behind-the-scenes encounter during the filming of Il bidone’s Acqua Felice borgata sequence partly inspired Fellini’s Oscar-winning masterpiece, Le notti di 92

Few scholars have investigated in relative depth Fellini’s appropriation of Dantean archetypes in his cinema. The first is John Welle is his article “Fellini’s Use of Dante in La Dolce Vita,” Perspectives on Federico Fellini, eds. Peter Bondanella and Christina Degli-Esposti (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993) 110-118. Welle limits his examination to only one film, as indicated in the title, yet he provides ample material for extending his analysis beyond Fellini’s 1960 classic. The second scholar’s article is similar in scope as she restricts her analysis to the film 8½. Barbara K. Lewalski, “Federico Fellini’s Purgatory,” Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford UP, 1978) 113-120. Guido Fink, however, explores the overall thematic and structural similarities between Fellini’s and Dante’s works.“‘Non senti come tutto questo ti assomiglia?’ Fellini’s Infernal Circles.”

(Toronto & Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2004) 166-175. Since Fellini does not provide direct quotations from the Divina Commedia in his films, as Pasolini often does, it is a far more difficult a task for researchers to identify and align Dantean symbolism within Fellini’s oeuvre.

93 94

Fellini, Pinelli, and Flaiano, “Il bidone,” Il primo Fellini 268.

The film concludes with Augusto’s false contrition. He pretends that he did not take the money from the farmers whose daughter suffers from a debilitating illness, acting as though he finally could feel compassion for others. His new colleagues, however, discover that he has hidden the money on his person, and they beat him, leaving him for dead along the side of a road. When Augusto awakens, battered, laying down a hillside, Fellini leaves the viewer questioning whether or not this ultimate tragedy has actually convinced the swindler to repent his sins.

229 Cabiria. The cinematographer apparently met, according to Di Biagi, “una piccola prostituta miserabile e selvatica però bisognosa di affetto che fece da modello a Cabiria: abitava in una specie di assurda bicocca, con due ‘fori’ come finestre, ma all’interno curata.” 95 This woman, along with Giuletta Masina’s trial run as the homologous streetwalker in Lo sceicco bianco, 96 provided the director with the material he needed to begin preparing Cabiria’s story. 97 Le notti di Cabiria does not take place, however, within the shantytown along the Acqua Felice Aqueduct. This film, instead, explores a variety of peripheral locations demonstrating the topographical and architectural heterogeny of Rome’s outskirts, ranging from the ancient Tomba di Cecilia Metella on the Appia Antica (See Fig. 75) to the modern borgata San Francesco in Acilia located 95

Di Biagi 63. John Baxter provides a more colorful anecdote regarding Fellini’s interaction with the same harlot: “Filming the apartment swindle near the Felice aqueduct, the crew encountered a prostitute named Wanda who lived in a water cistern. Martelli laid camera tracks right up to her door and she angrily ordered them away. Fellini won her with one of the box lunches provided for the crew. Through her, he came to know something of a prostitute’s life.” John Baxter, Fellini, (London: Fourth Estate, 1993) 126.

Tullio Kezich’s account, however, is more melodramatic: “Fellini aveva messo in rapporto questa brutta storia con i racconti di Wanda, una prostituta incontrata durante Il bidone nella baraccopoli sotto l’Acquedotto Felice. Wanda vive a un livello sottoproletario in una baracca-pollaio e litiga con tutti. Ha anche tentato per ben tre volte il suicidio per amore, ma ne è sempre uscita con un guizzo di vitalità.”

Kezich 174-175.

96

Giuletta Masina was Fellini’s wife and favorite actress in his early cinema. For an elaboration of the scene from Lo sceicco bianco, see: Fellini, Pinelli, and Flaiano, “Lo sceicco bianco,” Il primo Fellini 28.

97

Many other serendipitous events inspired this film’s creation, some of which I will discuss at greater length throughout the chapter; however, I would like to acknowledge in brief those which other scholars have documented as important. First, John Baxter and Tullio Kezich cite the writer Tullio Pinelli’s discovery of a lurid newspaper story about a naïve young woman who was murdered and decapitated by her supposed lover near Lake Albano, where the director shot Cabiria’s ultimate abandonment by her thieving fiancé Oscar in the final scenes of Le notti di Cabiria. See Baxter 126 and Kezich 174. Another important source of inspiration was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, which Fellini avidly read, leading him to invite the young, author to collaborate on Cabiria’s dialogues and the film’s location identification.

Fellini’s friendship with Pasolini permitted the auteur to discover areas around Rome, especially borgate, “a lui finora ignoti come Guidona, il Tiburtino Terzo, Pietralata, l’Idroscalo.” Kezich 175. Pasolini, apparently, also enticed Fellini to include the story of La Bomba Atomica, a raucous, large and aging streetwalker living on the capital’s periphery. The director inserts this character into his own favorite sequence involving the mysterious philanthropist who doles out food to Rome’s most destitute citizens living in countryside caves. Fellini provides an ample description of his encounter with this charitable stranger in his interview with Giovanni Grazzini. Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 103-104.

230 nineteen kilometers from the city center (See Fig. 76). It is within this second sparsely populated area that Cabiria resides in an “L”-shaped, cinderblock hovel near her friend and colleague, Wanda, whose name derives from the abovementioned real-life prostitute.

The house strikes the viewer with its exposed materials and sense of incompleteness, as extra building slabs sit in Cabiria’s yard; yet in comparison to the home that Natale and Luisa clandestinely construct within a modernizing Roman suburb in De Sica’s Il tetto, Cabiria’s home, set practically in the countryside, is less in conflict with its surrounding environment. Trains pass the area during the scenes filmed in the borgata, but they appear in the distance, never directly next to the prostitute’s hovel. The ingénue prostitute’s profilmic house, however, just like that of De Sica’s newlyweds, was constructed for the cinematic production, and ironically also lacked a roof in order to enable the director to maneuver his camera seamlessly between the building’s interior and exterior during shooting. 98 The viewer does not notice that the roof is missing; nevertheless the structure’s condition and location are intended to reflect strongly the heroine’s precarious socioeconomic position, which at times seems better than that of many of the film’s other secondary, subaltern characters.

This dilapidated house, in fact, remains both a point of pride and shame for Cabiria throughout the film, as it is an expression of her economic independence as well as an extension of her poverty. She alternates throughout the film between bragging about her living situation if she wishes to avoid being categorized with the rest of Rome’s underclass, and fibbing about her neighborhood if she feels in any way threatened.

Cabiria introduces her ambiguous feelings about her residential circumstances during her 98

Kezich notes the invaluable contribution of Piero Gherardi, an architect who generated “l’idea di costruire la casa-dado di Cabiria senza il tetto, in modo da potervi girare esterni e interni con piena disponibilità per l’illuminazione.” Kezich 180.

231

Figure 75. The Appia Antica and the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 76. Acilia. La notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

232

Figure 77. Alberto Lazzari’s Hall of Mirrors. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 78. Alberto Lazzari’s Bernini-esque Spiral Column. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

233 comically awkward yet exciting interaction with a movie star, Alberto Lazzari. Played by the famous telefono bianco actor Amadeo Nazzari, Lazzari offers Cabiria the night of her life dancing the mambo with her in an exclusive nightclub before transporting her to his luxurious villa located on the Appia Antica. The wealthy and handsome celebrity invites her into the intimate recesses of his home, which radiates baroque modernism from its mirrored corridor, reminiscent of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (See Fig. 77), to the spiral metallic column inlaid in his bedroom wall recalling Bernini’s baldachin in the Basilica di San Pietro (See Fig. 78). 99 Fellini establishes a stunning contrast between Cabiria and her surroundings, as she continually shifts her weight in discomfort standing in her ratty coat, tight skirt, bobby socks and sandals while she absorbs the villa’s quasimagical splendor. Lazzari’s home, when placed in juxtaposition with the prostitute’s own physical appearance, creates the vision of an unattainable myth for Cabiria, for she could never possess such a residence, nor could she ever physically or emotionally possess Lazzari, who in being a star, represents the modern myth maker, the movies. Lazzari, in his lofty indifference, eventually inquires about her life, asking her where she is from, to which she initially responds, “Di Roma… piazza Risorgimento,” 100 a bourgeois neighborhood located next to San Pietro. This Pirandellian mask quickly falls, as Lazzari, likely not having paid attention due to his self-absorbtion, shortly thereafter questions Cabiria again about her residence. This time she starts to tell the truth. She relates that her

99

Gregg Lambert recently published an excellent examination of baroque aesthetics in modernist and postmodernist literature and art. Gregg Lambert, The Return of Baroque in Modern Culture (London & New York: Continuum, 2004). The scholar does not examine any Italian cultural figures, however Fellini’s cinema of visual excess, typical of his films starting from La dolce vita, as well as Carlo Emilio Gadda’s linguistic pastiche in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, analyzed in the following chapter, certainly qualify for examination in this light.

100

Federico Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria (1957; Milano: Garzanti, 1981) 44.

234 home is located on the road to Ostia just beyond the gas station. Lazzari appears surprised that she would travel so far to work on via Veneto, where he found her. Cabiria’s tone changes and she responds as though to demonstrate her good sense or to stand in defiance to the fancier escorts with whom she exchanged menacing glares earlier that evening: “Mica sto a via Veneto, io… Sto alla Passeggiata Archeologica… perché è più comodo.” 101 Cabiria continues to elaborate, although this time, she expressly creates a division between her and the other lowly streetwalkers working on Rome’s periphery: “C’è un’altra ragazza, ‘n’amica mia… che sta pure lei dove sto io… ma con quelle altre, mica ho niente da spartire… Quelle dormono sotto gli archi, a Caracalla… Io mi son fatta la casa, ho la luce, il pibigas… Io, sotto gli archi, non ci ho dormito mai….” 102 Cabiria willfully establishes a dividing-line between herself and the homeless, knowing both that her home provides her with a sense of protection not afforded to many other hookers and that in reality only a fine line separates her from them.

Fellini underscores this socio-psychological point in a mysterious encounter with a nameless yet magnanimous stranger wandering the Roman countryside before dawn.

The director apparently developed this fantastic and serendipitous sequence based on his own extraordinary yet brief acquaintance with “una specie di filantropo, un po’ mago, che in seguito a una visione s’era dedicato a una particolare missione: raggiungeva i diseredati nei punti più strani della città e distribuiva a tutti cibi e indumenti che teneva in una sacco…. Con lui ho visto cose da fiaba.” 103 The director charges his filmic

101

Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 46.

102

Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 46-47.

103

Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 103.

235 adaptation of his encounter with a surreal aura, in part because the stranger’s actions are so out of the ordinary; in part because Fellini’s cinematographic style tended to create an environment “che sarà sempre leggermente o violentemente deforme rispetto all’analogo ambiente della norma;” 104 in part because it is difficult to believe that citizens of a modern European capital would dwell in caves; 105 and in part because the scene recalls the metaphysical opening lines from Dante’s Commedia. The poem’s first tercet, in fact, reads: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che la diritta via era smarrita.” 106 Cabiria, too, emerges from a dark wood at the beginning of the film’s sequence, cursing her latest client in her mind for having pointed her in the wrong direction and causing her to lose her way (See Fig. 79). The Roman prostitute, like Dante, is not only physically lost, but spiritually so, and Fellini has designed Le notti di Cabiria to show the golden-hearted streetwalker’s voyage towards self-knowledge.

Cabiria undergoes a series of existential crises and revelations in a chain of elliptical 104

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Nota su Le notti,” By Federico Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria, ed. Lino Del Fra (Bologna: Cappelli, 1957). Rpt. in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte. Vol. 1., eds. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1999) 705.

105

It is a historical fact that impoverished migrants resided in caves around Rome during the 1950s, as Tullio Aymone records in his survey La cultura dei baraccati: Un’inchiesta del 1960: “Nelle caverne vivono otto famiglie in maggioranza calabresi. Alcuni sono compaesani che si sono aiutati nell’emigrazione…. Stanno in una caverna dove entro la grande oscurità scende acqua da ogni fessura. Il letto sgangherato, ogni cosa buttate senza ordine dànno l’impressione di una penosa miseria. Mi sembra quasi di stare in una abitazione preistorica.” Aymone 287. Fellini, however, does not record visiting them in his reflection upon the encounter. He, instead, relates that they traveled around the city over the course of two or three nights: “Sollevando la grata di certi tombini dove immaginavi ci fossero solo fango e topi, trovavi una vecchia che dormiva. Nei corridoi di un suntuoso palazzo di via del Corso, dove adesso c’è il partito socialista, c’erano dei vagabondi che dormivano fino alle cinque della mattina, fatti entrare di nascosto dal guardiano di notte. L’uomo del sacco conosceva tutti questi posti….” Aymone 103. A couple literary cases which depict people living in Rome’s caves include the section involving the Neapolitan conmen in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita 38; and Alberto Moravia’s short story “Ladri in chiesa” published in the 1954 collection Racconti romani. Alberto Moravia, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950.1959, Vol. 1, eds. Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 689-702. The presence of caves in Rome’s countryside returns in Pasolini’s film short La ricotta (1963), in which a starving movie extra descends in an out of a grotto in an attempt to eat his lunch.

106

Dante, Inferno I, 1-3.

236

Figure 79. Cabiria Emerging from a Dark Wood. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 80. Modern Urban Development: 1. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

237

regressions and progressions, and her encounter with the mysterious stranger serves to help her open her eyes to her possible fate. She like Dante is in need of a guide, and she discovers her Virgil in the nameless philanthropist, who distributes foodstuffs and supplies to the poor residing in Rome’s countryside grottoes. The stranger, at first, mistakes her for one of the indigent cave dwellers, but she quickly corrects him asserting her presumed superiority over those living in such inhuman conditions: “Io?... Qui? Ma io ci ho casa mia…” 107 The scene strikes attentive viewers even more when they mentally juxtapose the sequence’s shooting location with both Cabiria’s own modest, but human, dwelling and the recurring images of Rome’s numerous modern apartment construction sites which appear sporadically throughout the film (See Fig. 80 and 81).

According to Stuart Rosenthal, “symbolic potential is an important consideration in Fellini’s selection of settings.” 108 The director uses cityscapes to enhance the meaning of his characters’ experiences. The director, as such, manipulates Le notti di Cabiria’s environment to establish differentiating grades of residential squalor that intensify the film’s superimposed realistic and fantastic components according to Fellini’s desired expressive designs.

Cabiria, before catching a ride home with the charitable stranger, must first join him on a sort of pilgrimage to visit those socially and economically exiled to Rome’s grottos. The two strangers first come across a man named Giorgiano to whom the philanthropist distributes a mixture of items ranging from socks to soap. Cabiria and her

107 108

Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 68.

Stuart Rosenthal, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (South Brunswick & New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1976) 39.

238

Figure 81. Modern Urban Development: 2. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Figure 82. “La Bomba� in Her Cave. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

239 mysterious guide then wander towards another hole in the ground, in which resides a former infamous prostitute whom the heroine immediately recognizes as “Bomba.” 109 The stranger operates in silence, while Cabiria animatedly inquires into the streetwalker’s fate, in a manner quite reminiscent of Dante’s interactions with his Florentine compatriots in the Commedia (See Fig. 82). Cabiria exclaims to her metaphorical guide: “Io questa, la conosco sà!... (poi di nuovo all’altra) A Bomba, qua stai?...” The older woman shifts her gaze from the man with the sack to Cabiria, looking upwards from her cave to the higher ledge where Cabiria stands, and responds with a self-referential prophecy: “Magari, se ci avevo quello che ci avevo una volta, allora sì che tutti si ricordavano di me… mi venivano a cercare… ‘N’appartamento ai Parioli, ‘n’appartamento a Ostia, con le sette bellezze, e i soldi in banca… e l’oro, li bracciali, le sciccaje, gli anelli….” 110 This exchange quickly dampens Cabiria’s mood, deeply disturbing her, for she believed that her meager hovel somehow protected her from extreme indigence. She now comes to realize that her future may be no different from Bomba’s. Bomba had an apartment in an elegant quarter of the city as well as a beach home; Cabiria has neither. Her former self-assurance dissolves, leading her to question

109

Kezich provides a biographical anecdote recounting Fellini’s search for the actual prostitute named “La Bomba Atomica” described to him by Pasolini: “Le notti bianche del regista, alcune delle quali spese nell’inutile ricerca della “Bomba” (una mastodontica prostituta che Pasolini descrive come una variante della balena Moby Dick), si succedono uguali e diverse, con rientri a casa alle quattro del mattino che preoccupano Giulietta, la quale ha subito esecrato l’omosessuale Pier Paolo come corruttore della gioventù.” Kezich 176. Pasolini, likewise reflects on his and Fellini’s search for “Bomba” around Rome in an article he composed shortly after the film’s release. He depicts their picaresque adventure in both realistic and metaphysical terms, fitting of Fellini’s cinema: “Non trovammo mai la Bomba, per quanto battesimo tutti quei viali che girano e rigirano intorno alla Passeggiata Archeologica, coi gruppi di puttane rosse illuminate di striscio dai fanali.… La Bomba fu per molte notti la nostra meta: ritrovarla a battere fra i tronchi dei viali, o al Colosseo, o fra i portoni di via Cavour, aveva assunto un significato quasi simbolico.

In realtà non la volevamo trovare; e non la trovammo. La Verità deve rimanere nascosta, interna e ideale.”

Pasolini, “Nota su Le notti” 701.

110

Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 70.

240

Figure 83. “Viva Maria” at the Santuario del Divino Amore. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

her lifestyle and later make a pilgrimage to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore with her male as well as female companions from the Passeggiata Archeologica to repent her sins and ask for spiritual forgiveness.

The sequence entitled “Santuario del Divino Amore” marks the last moment when Cabiria boasts about having her own home before falling ingenuously in love with Oscar, a man she barely knows, which leads her to sell her shack. This decision will definitively uproot her, as Oscar steals her life savings and abandons her at the film’s end; however, her final tragedy partly results from her continual attempts to better her life, not only economically and socially, but also emotionally and spiritually. Cabiria, thus, embarks on

241 a pilgrimage, along with a few pimps, one procurer’s lame uncle, and several other prostitutes to the peripheral parish to seek spiritual guidance from the Virgin Mary, the protectress of Rome. 111 Pilgrimages of this sort were quite popular during the late 1950s, 112 and the expectation of miraculous deliverance is highly evident in these scenes.

Cabiria enters the sanctuary overwhelmed by the imploring crowd and the prayers chanted over the loud speakers; however, once inside, Cabiria embraces her candle, the sacred music plays, and a glimpse of a “Viva Maria” symbol moves her to entreat the Virgin’s assistance (See Fig. 83). The importance of the name Maria surfaces in the following sequence, when Cabiria assumes the name Maria while hypnotized. 113 Fellini leaves it unclear whether or not she subconsciously chooses this name, or whether it is in fact her true identity; however one cannot dissociate the selection from the two biblical Marias. Cabiria’s attempts to connect with the Virgin Mary are quite evident in the “Santuario del Divino Amore” sequence, but on a metaphysical level, Fellini and his screenwriters likely aimed to associate her with the New Testament prostitute, Mary Magdalene. She is the biblical symbol of the penitent sinner, a whore who reformed her ways to become one of Christ’s devoted disciples. Fellini manipulates the association between the two contrite prostitutes as well as the church’s appellation as the Sanctuary 111

Di Biagi identifies the location of the church, as “un santuario settecentesco, al dodicesimo chilometro sull’Ardeatina, modesto ma molto popolare perché dedicato alla Protettrice di Roma.” Di Biagi 110-111.

112

Giorgio Vecchio explains: “La religiosità popolare – con i suoi risvolti psicologici, emozionali e talvolta anche superstiziosi – si manifestava però anche in forme distinte rispetto alla consueta vita di parrocchia. Stranamente gli storici dell’età contemporanea hanno per lo più trascurato di esaminare a fondo la persistente forza di attrazione dei santuari, lasciando questi temi agli studiosi dell’età medievale o moderna. Eppure anche negli anni Cinquanta permaneva altissima la partecipazione ai pellegrinaggi rivolti ad uno dei numerosissimi santuari disseminati nella penisola….” Vecchio 321.

113

In the film version of the scene involving the hypnotist, Cabiria declares that her name is Maria, although the official screenplay shows that she uses Cabiria. Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 90.

242 of Divine Love, rather than carnal love, to underscore her heroine’s movement towards redemption.

The mystical atmosphere within the sanctuary, however, proves illusory, as the spell breaks whle Cabiria sits outside with her companions and realizes that her spiritual experience did not changed her. She asks her friend Wanda: “A Wanda, ma tu… nun te senti… cambiata?” 114 Wanda smirks ironically at her question and responds: “Ma che vorressi dì co sto cambiata?” 115 Cabiria then continues: Cabiria – (seguendo pensieri inesprimibili) N’antra. Come quanno, fatte conto, che te cambi la vesta, te metti quella bona, e cammini pe la strada sentendo dentro de te che sei diversa da quanno, pe ditte, vai a lavorà a la Passeggiata…

Wanda – (a bruciapelo) E tu, sei cambiata?

A questa domanda Cabiria è come colpita da un urto interno. Fa una faccia avvilita, come sul punto di piangere, e comincia ad accennare fittamente di no la testa.

Cabiria – No nun so’ cambiata.

Continua a accennare di no con la testa, mentre le scappa quasi da piangere.

Cabiria – No.. nun semo cambiate, a Wa… Semo rimaste uguale a prima…. 116 The viewer watches and listens as Cabiria comes to doubt that her participation in the Virgin Mary’s cult has had any palpable effect on her wellbeing. Her voyage to the Sanctuary of Divine Love seems more like a farce than a pilgrimage, 117 for she feels no

114

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le notti di Cabiria: Santuario del Divino Amore,” Per il cinema, Vol. 2, eds., Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 2001) 2167.

115

Pasolini, “Santuario del Divino Amore” 2168.

116

Pasolini, “Santuario del Divino Amore” 2168.

117

Fellini was a devout Catholic who manipulated Christian imagery to great effect in nearly all his films. Religious faith, however, was more of a personal, metaphysical experience than one tied to the Church, which he appreciated mostly for its theatrical ceremonies and spectacles. When asked in an interview for his opinion about the Catholic Church, he humorously responds: “Cosa posso rispondere? Ti ho già detto che mi piace, e come avrei potuto, nascendo in Italia, scegliere un’altra religione. Mi piace la sua coreografia, le sue rappresentazioni immutabili e ipnotiche, le preziose messe in scena, i lugubri canti, il catechismo, l’elezione del nuovo pontefice, il grandioso mortuario.” Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 71.

243 different from the woman she is when she struts at night alongside the Baths of Caracalla.

It is as though she expected that through physical movement, or through some sort of physical contact with the sanctuary, she could metaphysically change. The pimps and prostitutes jibe her for losing herself in such thoughts, and Cabiria, dissatisfied, frustrated, and inebriated, lashes out, renouncing her life as a prostitute: “Me vendo la casa, me vendo!... Vado da mi’ zia a Bologna.” 118 Cabiria has the revelation that her social place in Rome, that of a streetwalker, is intimately connected to her house which is physically placed on Rome’s margins. She does not immediately follow through with her renunciation of her lifestyle, as she appears once more time walking the Passeggiata Archeologica; nevertheless, she subconsciously realizes that she must strip herself of the building’s chains if she is ever to socio-economically advance.

This sequence shot at the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 119 along with the daybreak stroll with the stranger at the caves and the scenes depicting Cabiria’s nocturnal adventures along the Passeggiata Archeologica, faced harsh and continual censure by the Catholic Church as well as by Christian Democratic governmental officials. The former complained largely on the grounds that “un film sulle prostitute della Città Eterna, capitale della cristianità, non piacerebbe né al papa né alla curia.” 120 The clergy feared, on an ideological level, that Fellini’s film would not only debase the city’s image on an international level, but also strip it of its exegetical, mythical aura.

Their complaints worried the director for he feared the Church would not only prevent Le 118

Pasolini, “Santuario del Divino Amore” 2169.

119

Flaminio Di Biagi mentions the censure problems that the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore sequence underwent; however he does not specify the details. Di Biagi 111.

120

Kezich 176.

244 notti di Cabiria’s projection and distribution, but also burn the negatives. The auteur, as a result, enlisted the help of a cardinal in Genoa, whom he asked to watch the film and speak in favor of its religious message. According to Fellini’s account, a certain Padre Arpa arrived to the screening around midnight, and as the director was not allowed into the room he was not sure “se l’alto prelato vide davvero tutto il film o se dormì.” The auteur further surmises: “probabilmente padre Arpa lo svegliava nei momenti giusti quando c’erano processioni o immagini sacre. Fatto sta che alla fine disse: ‘Povera Cabiria, dobbiamo fare qualcosa per lei!’. E penso che gli sia bastata una semplice telefonata.” 121 Fellini, thus, succeeded in salvaging most of his film from Church censure; however, the combination of pressure from his producer Dino De Laurentiis and that eventually imposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy forced the director to expunge his favorite scene, the one involving Cabiria’s encounter with the philanthropic stranger, for over a decade. 122 Rome’s mayor, likewise, complained about the demythifying effects of presenting prostitutes roving around the Eternal City, despite the fact that such male and female professionals had been workomg in and around the Urbe for over two millennia. 123

121

Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 102.

122

De Laurentiis complained that the scene was too long and that it interrupted the film’s overall narrative flow. He admits in an interview recorded on the Criterion Collection’s DVD version of Le notti di Cabiria that he cut it surreptitiously from the negatives after the film’s first projection at the Cannes Film Festival, when the Catholic critics reapplied their pressure, because the movie gave the impression that the Church was not tending to its flock. In that way, the producer compelled Fellini to acquiesce to his demands, at least until Fellini’s reputation became so strong, that he could convince De Laurentiis to reinsert the segment.

123

For insightful, book-length studies on Roman prostitutes in antiquity, see: Christopher A. Faraone and Laura K. McClure, eds., Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006); and Thomas A. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and The Law in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford UP, 1998). For an analysis of prostitutes in post-Reformation Rome, see: Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge UP, 2008).

245 Christian Democrats particularly protested against the representation of Rome’s monumental ruins, the Terme di Caracalla, as an “arteria del vizio.” It did not seem to matter that “vi abbondano davvero prostitute e magnaccia e che i giornali abbiano dato ampio spazio agli omicidi di donne avvenuti per mano di un misterioso ‘martellatore della Passeggiata Archeologica’.” 124 Nor did Rome’s moralistic mayor, Salvatore Rebecchini, concede in his protests that Pier Paolo Pasolini had just vindicated himself and his book Ragazzi di vita in a legal trial, convened in part for the same objections; 125 or that Carlo Lizzani documented streetwalkers practicing their trade precisely in that same location in his 1953 film short “L’amore che si paga”. 126 The politician’s attitude seems, instead, to reflect the late 1950s moralistic zeitgeist, as Italian society became increasingly bourgeois.

The country, and by association its capital, faced greater economic stability resulting from increased international trade; formed a powerful international alliance with the European Economic Alliance (EEC); and also improved its public transportation systems. Rome, in fact, had just inaugurated its subway system the year before, a point introduced by Cabiria to demonstrate her modernity, when she proclaims that she takes it to work: “È comoda: da Acilia prendo la metro e so’ arivata!” 127 An important effect of this reformatory energy was, in fact, the Merlin Law, a piece of morally-inspired For a sociological examination of modern day prostitutes in Rome, see: Damiano Tavoliere, Prostitute: Racconti di signore che hanno scelto "la vita" (Roma: Stampa alternativa, 2001).

124

Kezich 181.

125

See Chapter 2, 142-143.

126

See Chapter 1, 95-102.

127

Flaminio Di Biagi surmises that Cabiria is referring not to the actual metro but to an intrametropolitan train that ran between Ostia and the Circo Massimo. Di Biagi 86. Whatever the case may be, the modernization of Rome remains the important point.

246 legislation enacted by the hegemonic Christian Democratic Party, which passed the commission in 1955 and came into effect on September 20, 1958, closing the nation’s brothels and forcing countless prostitutes onto the streets. 128 Without the protection of the bordellos, prostitutes faced greater risks of disease, violence, and exploitation. Fellini, who likely read or heard about the legislative discussions while preparing and filming Le notti di Cabiria, expresses a sense that change was in the air for prostitutes in Italy.

Fellini could not have consciously included the law’s influence in his film, as Parliament enacted the Merlin Law a year after his movie’s release; nevertheless, the viewer can perceive the culture that generated such legislation in Fellini’s early classic.

Fellini and Pasolini Cabiria, an orphaned and lonely woman, whose parents’ death and lack of financial resources have constrained her to move from the provinces to Rome’s periphery, continually confronts a society attempting to exploit her. She, like many underclass women in postwar Rome, resorts to prostitution in order to support herself, despite her dreams of living more comfortably and finding true love. Her career compromises her reputation within mainstream Roman society; yet, she keeps her pride intact when it comes to her financial independence and the possession of a home. The only point of honor that she constantly recalls in her unfortunate and dishonest life, filled with miserably failed love affairs (the two “boyfriends” she has in the film both steal her purse before leaving her), nights strolling the Passeggiata Archeologica, and superficial companionships, is that she owns a house. The small, concrete-block structure hardly

128

Vecchio 341.

247

Figure 84. Rome’s Desolate Countryside. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

compares to Alberto Lazzari’s sumptuous villa, which Cabiria exclaims is as handsome as he is, 129 but she did pay for it herself. The scenes including her one-room hovel depict a typical early Fellinian landscape: a bare desolate countryside without many signifiers to identify the city or location (See Fig. 84). 130 There are no paved roads, no systemized urban design, no basic infrastructure; Cabiria’s house seems haphazardly placed and illegally constructed in an area marginalized from the grand capital’s city center, recalling comments made by Carlo Emilio Gadda in his piece “Quartieri suburbani:” “La 129 130

“Lei è bello come la sua casa….” Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria 47.

It is only from Cabiria’s own mouth that the viewer understands that her residence, the borgata San Francesco, is one of Rome’s subaltern suburbs.

248 baracca s’insedia dove può, gioca sulla propria umiltà, sul miserrimo aspetto: più, anche, su quel senso del provvisorio che emana dalla sua struttura fatiscente, tentennante ed incongrua.” 131 Her home projects this impression of not belonging to any residential neighborhood, as it stands nearly alone in the midst of a field. The solitary impact that the home’s image makes, however, does not compare to the misery suffered by several of the film’s secondary characters. Cabiria, at least, lives better than most of her costreetwalkers, even though a fellow-prostitute Patrizia scoffs: “Che la chiami casa quella catacomba che c’hai?” 132 The credit for the film’s remarkable coordination between underclass landscape and social identity undeniably belongs to Pasolini’s influence. Fellini laughingly admits in an interview that he was once “convinto di essere benvoluto dalla ‘mala’,” 133 but in reality he needed outside help to understand it. As a result, he requested the young author’s collaboration on the final screenplay’s composition, for the auteur knew his bourgeois presentation of a prostitute’s life in Le notti di Cabiria would benefit from Pasolini’s firsthand knowledge of life in the borgate. 134 The director, after approaching Pasolini with the project, took him on several long drives outside and around Rome to 131

Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani,” Saggi, giornali, favole, e altri scritti, Vol. 1., eds.

L. Orlando, C. Martignoni, and D. Isella, Opere di Carlo Emilio Gadda: Vol. 3, ed. Dante Isella (1956; Milano: Garzanti, 1991) 1132.

132

Pasolini, “Santuario del Divino Amore” 2169.

133

Fellini, Intervista sul cinema 44.

134

Pasolini summarizes his first few years in Rome, during which time he lived in penury and squalor, for the 1970 preface of a book of poetry: “A Roma dapprima vissi a piazza Costaguti, vicino al Portico D’Ottavia (il ghetto!), poi andai nel ghetto delle borgate, vicino alla prigione Rebibbia, in una casa restata definitivamente senza tetto…. Per due anni fui un disoccupato disperato, di quelli che finiscono suicidi; poi trovai da insegnare in una scuola privata a Ciampino.…” Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Al lettore nuovo,” Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, Vol. 2., eds. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1999) 2517; Rpt. of Preface. By Pier Paolo Pasolini. Poesie.

(Milano: Garzanti, 1970).

249 stimulate his mind and seek his advice. These moments of consultation between Pasolini and Fellini formed a strong impression on the former, who documented his reflections on these excursions. One of the most interesting comments Pasolini makes is on what he perceived to be the original screenplay’s weakness: Nel copione che avevo letto sentivo il pericolo dell’errore che pure permane in quel capolavoro che è La strada: il coesistere di una realtà ‘reale’, vista con amore e pienezza… e una realtà ‘stilizzata’…: il coesistere di pura invenzione e un apriorismo stilistico; di poesia e di poeticità. Il problema era giungere all’amalgama: rialzare un po’ verso Cabiria l’ambiente, e abbassare notevolmente verso l’ambiente Cabiria. 135 Pasolini indicates that he clearly conceptualized Fellini’s cinematic style, grasping both what the director desired to infuse in Le notti di Cabiria and what the film’s screenplay initially lacked. Fellini, in Pasolini’s opinion, had a compelling storyline and poetic theme in mind, which unmistakably recalled Pasolini’s own Ragazzi di vita; 136 however, not having resided in a Roman borgata nor spent many evenings cavorting with the city’s underclass, Fellini, whose artistic vision vacillated between the real and the fantastic, was incapable of independently achieving a level of Auerbachian mimesis, 137 which would render his subaltern characters believable.

135

Pasolini, “Nota su Le notti” 705.

136

Pasolini alludes to his book’s influence on Fellini’s decision to request his assistance on Le notti di Cabiria’s script in an conversation with Jon Halliday: “Poi venni a Roma, senza pensare affatto a un mio ingresso nel mondo cinematografico, e quando scrissi il primo romanzo, Ragazzi di vita, alcuni registi mi chiesero di preparare delle sceneggiature. Il primo fu Mario Soldati…. Poi vi fu Le notti di Cabiria con Fellini, e poi parecchie altre….” Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Conversazioni con Jon Halliday [19681971]: 1. Il background pasoliniano.” Saggi sulla politica e società, eds. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1999) 1304.

137

Pasolini refers twice to the copy of Auerbach that he kept in his pocket while driving aimlessly around Rome with Fellini: “Io, gatto peruviano accanto al gattone siamese, ascoltavo con in tasca Auerbach,” Pasolini, “Nota su Le notti” 699; “Lui mi ascoltava accovacciato, acciambellato sul sedile rosso, come una chioccia… col guancione, l’occhio bistrato… con la sua retina, la sua pupilla nocciola, da farlo parere quasi buffo, e enormemente affettuoso se per caso fosse un po’ spaventato dal mio Auerbach.”

Ibid., 700-01. Erich Auerbach’s major work, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen

250

Figure 85. Prostitutes at the Passeggiata Archeologica. Le notti di Cabiria, dir. Federico Fellini, 1957.

Most scholars credit Pasolini for his linguistic consultation on the film, as well as the three sequences he helped script for Le notti di Cabiria: “Alla Passeggiata Archeologica,” 138 “Santuario del Divino Amore,” 139 and the tragic yet miraculous “Episodio finale,” 140 respectively where Cabiria works by night, where she attempts to redeem herself by day, and where she finally threatens to kill herself at dusk. Only one of

Literatur, (Mimesis: The Representation of Realty in Western Culture) was translated into Italian and published by Einaudi as Mimesis: Il realismo nella letteratura occidentale in 1956.

138

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le notti di Cabiria: Alla passeggiata archeologica,” Per il cinema, Vol. 2., eds.

Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1999) 2145-2148.

139

Pasolini, “Santuario del Divino Amore” 2149-2173.

251 the three scenes on which Pasolini collaborated takes place near the city center, “Alla Passeggiata Archeologica,” and it is only the first among four short scenes depicting Cabiria and her pandering friends nocturnally strutting alongside Rome’s largest ancient public bath complex (See Fig. 85). The film’s returns to this place serve several purposes: “All are scenes in which Cabiria reflects on preceding events, and several of them give indications of what is to come. All serve to underline some character attribute of Cabiria: high-spiritedness, combativeness, vulnerability, or wistfulness.” 141 Stubbs continues: Perhaps the most important function of the four scenes is to provide continuity to the work through repetition. The similarity of the four scenes is assured by the similarity of place and the similarity of Cabiria’s “uniform,” which she wears in all the scenes…. The four scenes tend to reassure viewers that they are following an orderly work, one that is not out of control. Yet… the fact remains that without a right chain of cause and effect growing out of the initial mystery to be solved or a question to be answered, the narrative is a loose structure. 142 No other filmic organization could better reflect the literary vision that Pasolini created for Rome in Ragazzi di vita. The pastiche of spaces traversed by Cabiria along roads both inside and outside Rome creates a similar feeling to the disorganic, macchia d’olio formation of the city found in Pasolini’s book. Fellini’s mythical sense of the capital, of Roma as an unicum, was dissolving, as Italy industrialized and opened itself to modernization. 143 Le notti di Cabiria marks the conclusion of one Fellinian cinematic era, in which 140

Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le notti di Cabiria: Episodio finale,” Per il cinema, Vol. 2, eds., Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli Pier Paolo Pasolini: Tutte le opere (Milano: Mondadori, 2001) 2174-2179.

141

John C. Stubbs, Federico Fellini as Auteur: Seven Aspects of His Films (Carbonsdale: Southern Illinois U P, 2006) 14.

142 143

Stubbs 14-15.

“Fino a che l’Italia non è diventata industriale e non si è aperta alla modernità, la capitale è rimasta un unicum, un mito.” Di Biagi 23.

252 the viewer can identify traces of Neorealism and narrative cohesion in the director’s films. La dolce vita, from 1960, revolutionizes Italian cinema, signaling the auteur’s entrance into postmodern aesthetics focusing on the vacuity and decadence of the Boom era’s bourgeoisie. His oeuvre becomes increasingly metacinematic, “more self-reflexive, ironic, and fragmentary in style in comparison to the luminous phenomenological explorations of La strada, Il bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria in the 1950s. By turning away from a realist cinematic vocabulary, Fellini’s films of the 1960s sponsored a powerful mythologization of modern urban life.” 144 The Rome he presents in La dolce vita, in what was really a film-event, generates new myths of the city, ones extricated from ancient and Christian tradition, and based on the spectacular potential of the capital.

One description situates it in cultural terms: La dolce vita represents a magisterial attempt on Fellini’s part to reinvent the modernist cultural sensibility in the terms of 1960s European cinema.

And yet Fellini’s phenomenology of spectacularization and media hysteria also provides one of the first holistic readings of the symptoms of modernism’s demise in contemporary culture. 145 It is interesting to observe such transformations in semiological charge assigned to various spaces and places around Rome in Fellini’s postmodern cinema. Via Veneto, for example, which was once the place where the homeless children Giuseppe and Pasquale shinned American soldiers’ shoes in De Sica’s Sciuscià (1946), converts into the chaotic hub of late night rendezvous for Rome’s cosmopolitan elite; yet within the expanse of those fourteen years, other artists had opportunities to attribute modernist characteristics 144

Alessia Ricciardi, “The Spleen of Rome: Mourning Modernism in Fellini’s La dolce vita,” Modernism/Modernity, V. 7.2 (2000) 201. Frank Burke seconds her assertion, stating: “It is especially interesting to see how a film made in a more humanist and modernist phase of Fellini’s career presaged postmodernity – not because of any authorial intent but because the film was exploring a contemporary world verging on postmodernity.” Burke 267.

145

Ricciardi 203.

253 to such places. Alberto Moravia, in fact, describes via Veneto’s aesthetic splendor in 1951, equating its grace with that found among grand avenues in other European cities: Via Veneto è una delle più belle strade del mondo, da reggere il paragone con via Tornabuoni o Regent Street o Les Champs Elysées. Le ragioni di questa bellezza non sono tutte evidenti, come sempre avviene quando si tratta di bellezza. Una delle principali è forse la forma della strada, a spirale e in pendio, graduale e maestosa, che fa di via Veneto la più trionfale e meglio esposta tra le tante salite di Roma. 146 The author has not misconstrued the initial ideological intentions of creating via Veneto, which was part of building speculation occurring outside the monarchy’s regulatory plan of 1883. Insolera notes that “la città che nasceva sembrava voler essere piemontese e haussmanniana, europea e XIX secolo,” 147 a city that wanted to express its participation in urban modernity and modernism as it transformed from being a provincial capital into a national one. Moravia concentrates on the aesthetic and expressionistic values inherent in the street’s form, recognizing the street’s, and by association the city’s, potential to communicate greatness through urbanism. He creates a celebratory aura for the road, albeit a less memorable one than that generated later by Fellini. The author pays close attention to the street’s structure and details, which is rather uncommon in his literature.

The following chapter, in fact, partially examines Moravia’s approach to Rome through an exploration of topography and toponyms in his 1957 novel La ciociara. I will reveal his surprisingly limited involvement in developing a stylistically or thematically modernist approach to the city, as well as his relative disengagement with the capital’s underclass. I will then explore the contemporaneous publication of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s

146

Alberto Moravia, “Via Veneto.” L’illustrazione italiana, n. spec. (Natale) 1951; Rpt. in Enzo Siciliano, ed. Moravia e Roma (Roma: Associazione del Fondo Alberto Moravia, 2003) 52.

147

Insolera 37.

254 Quer pasticciaccio di via Merulana as one of Italian culture’s best literary examples of Rome’s demythification and modernization in the postwar period.

254 Chapter 4 Rome before the Boom: Moravia and Gadda History and Becoming Friedrich Nietzsche believed that “becoming,” a process of the present that projects towards the future, marks humankind’s continual resistance to the past. He declared that the wave of becoming crashes upon and fragments the foundations of a standing civilization, often leaving destruction in its path. It has the annihilating properties of war, for it can leave said foundations in ruin; yet it can also create, but what it generates emerges as a pastiche of history’s scattered pieces. In The Use and Abuse of History, Nietzsche details the various ways in which, and reasons for which, humankind manipulates history as well as describes the significance that harnessing of the past has for an individual’s in addition to the whole’s wellbeing. He furthermore delineates what was happening to knowledge in the push “to become” once humankind in general stopped acting without premeditation: The moralist, the artist, the saint, and the statesman may well be troubled when they see that all foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever-flowing stream of becoming; that all creation is being tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net. 1 Nietzsche underscores becoming’s destructive power on Western thought, which he couches in the term “foundations,” and the movement of thinkers, embodied in “the moralist, the artist, the saint, and the statesman,” towards mediocrity as they succumb to becoming’s pressure. Great minds tend no longer to stand observing on the sideline, nor

1

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1949) 63.

255 have yet constructed “a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming,” 2 to overcome modernity’s “mad unconscious” rush. Modern humankind, however, is not wont to leave the past completely “in… ruin,” but endeavors to reconstruct its epistemes within an entanglement, deemed by Nietzsche as the “world-net” of history.

Nietzsche’s notions of history and becoming, which may seem highly antithetical, as the former encourages looking backward as the latter favors looking forward, together form a hermeneutical cornerstone in twentieth century Western thought. Gianni Vattimo, who examines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche’s thought, recognizes the importance that modern humankind’s engagement with history played in determining late nineteenth and most of twentieth centuries’ ontology. His seminal work on post-modernity, entitled La fine della modernità, places Nietzsche’s oeuvre and its focus on history at the center of modernity, and by association modern thought: “Una delle più diffuse e attendibili visioni della modernità è infatti quella che la caratterizza come ‘l’epoca della storia’, di contro alla mentalità antica, dominata da una visione naturalistica e ciclica del corso del mondo.” 3 Nietzsche, along with Heidegger and Benjamin, whose works Vattimo identifies as the roots of both modernism and postmodernism, understands that modern humankind needs history, of course in the right measure, not only in order to advance but also as a reminder to live. He clearly creates a tension among the past, present, and future, which people require in limited amounts and forms. Nietzsche furthermore articulates the individual’s need for history as the following: “The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped

2

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History 66.

3

Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milano: Garzanti, 1985) 13.

256 as that an excess of history hurts it…. History is necessary to the living man in three ways: in relation to his action and struggle, his conservation and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance.” 4 These three points serve as a useful rubric under which to examine postwar Italian narratives, and in this case, two modern canonical writers, Alberto Moravia and Carlo Emilio Gadda. Their breaks with the past, embodied in their rejections of the myth of Rome as well as their interpretations of modernity, brought each artist fame, especially through his strong reactions against Fascism’s misuse of ancient Roman history. It will, however, be beneficial to the reader to use history in one other sense omitted by Nietzsche: to contextualize the respective classics of these men, La ciociara and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, within the cultural atmosphere of 1957.

For all intents and purposes, Rome underwent few radical political and economic changes in 1957. Whereas 1958 marks a watershed in Italian history, as scholars generally agree that it signaled the beginning of the Economic Miracle, 1957 is devoid of major conflict or social transitions, serving simply as the last stepping stone before the nation’s arrival to economic prosperity. For example, the Christian Democratic party maintained its grip on Italy’s legislative power which it fully acquired in 1953, an event that lead to an overall stagnation in national politics for five years. 5 The “anni duri,” which characterized the early 1950s, neared their close, as Italy’s economy gained momentum through foreign financial assistance and the persistence of the construction boom. One of the few politico-economic achievements of the year, which had a lasting

4

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History 20.

5

Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 145.

257 and positive international impact, barely affected the rhythm of everyday life upon its enactment. On March 25, 1957, the Italian government decided to shift from an idealist phase to a functional one, by joining several other European countries in the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC). The signing the Treaty of Rome 6 demonstrated the Italian State’s willingness to adopt and enact capitalistic market tactics and goals to improve its economy in collaboration with France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg. Exports, therefore, began playing an integral role in the nation’s economic growth, concluding Italy’s period of “preparation for economic expansion.” 7 The postwar housing boom begun around 1948, which had largely fueled the improvement in living standards during the previous nine years, started to decrease in importance as other economic policies provided the resource capital that was once so desperately sought at the close of war. The nation’s shift in economic policy, however, did not correlate with intellectuals’ and the public’s continued interest in following Rome’s housing shortage and travails, as a number of texts and films depicting the city’s expansion emerged during that year.

Italo Insolera deems the early- to mid-1950s as a period during which the city’s political representatives learned to view urban expansion as fundamental to local policy. 8 The capital’s growth, and the controversy that oftentimes surrounded projected building or renovation plans, entered Rome’s newspapers on practically a daily basis, becoming

6

Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 160.

7

Donald Sassoon, Contemporary Italy: Politics, Economy & Society since 1945 (New York: Longman Group Limited, 1986) 30.

8

Insolera 219.

258 one of the protagonists of the Eternal City’s everyday cultural life. 9 The Roman government’s Office of Statistics published in 1957 rather striking data regarding the quantity of people residing in underserved and poorly constructed areas around the city, namely the borgate. This branch of the local government estimated that 13,703 families, with 54,574 people, inhabited substandard housing, including caves and shacks, along the capital’s outskirts. These peripheral neighborhoods, which first gained wide cultural recognition in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita and yet also appeared in numerous films such as Fellini’s Il bidone and Le notti di Cabiria, sat at the center of society’s attention, as their presence could no longer be ignored.

Apart from the housing crisis, few major events affected the everyday life of Italians in 1957, the year in which both La ciociara and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana earned wide acclaim. 10 A number of important literary and cinematic productions did, however, entered the public domain, perpetuating the Neorealist reaction against the Fascist and Ur-Fascist urbanistic ruin of modern Rome. Pier Paolo Pasolini, for example, achieved tremendous critical success with his collection of poetry Le ceneri di Gramsci, while Federico Fellini returned to the cinematic spotlight with Le notti di Cabiria. Pasolini’s eleven poems were very positively received by Italian critics, as well as provided the poet’s readers with an enriched gamut of demythifying impressions of Rome and its environs. Le notti di Cabiria, examined in the previous chapter, won Fellini

9

Insolera 218. For examples, see: Chapter 3, 181, 188-190.

10

The introduction of Carosello, a symbol of Italy’s emerging consumerist culture, went on air on February 3, 1957, presenting a series of four to five ten-minute film shorts before concluding with a advertisement, a custom that was to have a tremendous influence on the Italian bourgeois lifestyle. Popular religious festivities also flourished, as evidenced by the pilgrimage to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore in Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria. These events tended to reflect the highly moralistic cultural and political climate of the times, marking a small but interesting change in postwar social practices.

259 a second Oscar for best foreign film, as well as fourteen other international prizes for the motion picture’s rich imagery and Giulietta Masina’s complex performance as Cabiria. 11 Moravia and Gadda, likewise, won national as well as international plaudits for their novels published that year. La Ciociara, begun by Moravia in the late 1940s and only completed in 1957, was nearly awarded the Nobel Prize, and it certainly achieved notable public success after Vittorio De Sica transformed it into a cinematic sensation starring Sofia Loren in 1961. 12 Gadda, who did not initially receive large recognition for the revision and lengthening of his earlier version of Quer pasticciaccio at least earned the adulation of the newspaper columnists Emilio Cecchi and Raffaele Mattioli who created a literary prize, the Premio degli editori, 13 specifically for him and his novel. The general disdain by other critics and younger contemporary authors would later change to admiration as Calvino eventually declared Quer Pasticciaccio “il romanzo di Roma, scritto da un non romano.” 14 Each one of these artists’ profoundly affected the Italian image of Rome in the mid-late 1950s, reshaping it along a mixture of modernizing and demythifying lines.

Alberto Moravia and His Invisible City Alberto Moravia is a problematic literary figure when it comes to investigating and articulating 1950s Rome. Scholars insist that he and his oeuvre be included in any 11

“Awards for Le notti di Cabiria,” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050783/awards

12

Simone Casini, Introduzione, By Alberto Moravia, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti 1950-1959, Vol. 1, eds., Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) xlvi.

13

Piero Citati, “Prefazione: Ricordo di Gadda,” By Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) xiv.

14

Giorgio Pinotti, “Nota”, By Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 270.

260 discussion of modern Roman narrative, as well as assert that he be recognized as the twentieth century’s “author of Rome.” 15 To accept this convention without question would amount to ignoring the reality of his texts, be they articles, short stories or novels; for Rome, the city - a palpable, urbanistic, and architectural entity - practically never appears in his works. As the author himself describes it: “Roma è solo un fondale di teatro,” 16 a setting where his psychological, rather than physical, dramas unfold. His Rome is a compilation of topical references without detailed or specific descriptions so as not to detract from the characters’ internal struggles. It is as if Moravia selected the city at random, for he fails to express any sort of intimate connection with the places about which he writes. The reader senses a tangible distance between him and the city, and certainly a sensation of alienation, which derives, as he admits, from the circumstances of his youth. Moravia describes his lonely adolescence in a 1988 interview: A nove anni mi ammalai di tubercolosi ossea e stavo quasi sempre in casa…. Leggevo molto, sia a Roma che nei sanatori di Cortina d’Ampezzo o di Bressanone, dove i miei genitori mi mandarono per le cure di cui avevo bisogno…. Io non potevo andare molto in giro perché ero costretto a far uso di un apparecchio ortopedico. 17 Moravia’s health condition generally prevented him from visiting Rome’s city center, constraining him to remain mostly outside the walls with his nannies. When Alain Elkann, his friend and co-biographer, interrogates the novelist about his youth, both his physical and mental isolation become painfully evident:

15

Alain Elkann, in his book-length interview with Alberto Moravia, observes: “Tu… sei lo scrittore di Roma per antonomasia….” Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Vita di Moravia (Milano: Bompiani, 2007) 11.

16 17

Moravia and Elkann 30.

Costanzo Costantini, “L’Intervista: Alberto Moravia: La mia Roma,” Roma ieri, oggi, domani, V.2: 9 (February 1989) 20.

261 - Tu non andavi mai nella vecchia Roma? Piazza Navona, il Pantheon?

- No, mai, ero legato alle governanti che si limitavano a portarmi a Villa Borghese.

- Ma non ti portavano a vedere gli zampognari e i presepi a Natale, a vedere piazza San Pietro e la Befana a piazza Navona?

- Niente, i monumenti e le usanze romane li ho conosciuti soprattutto a partire dagli anni trenta. 18 This physical marginalization from the city center helps explain the writer’s proclivity for depicting intimate and private spaces of bourgeois interiors, reminiscent of his family home in Parioli, 19 in place of the parks, streets, and architectural facades of Rome. His childhood and adolescence lacked opportunities for him to familiarize himself with the city’s composition, and as a result his understanding of Rome is devoid of the vibrancy and specificity of the works of other twentieth century Italian authors.

Moravia’s choice to abstain from depicting, or his simple inability to paint, a clear picture of the city, does not mean, that he had no opinion on it. On many occasions, the author passes judgments on Rome that reflect the disenchanted views often expressed by his close friend, Pasolini. 20 In an interview with Costanzo Costantini, Moravia declares: “Io ho sempre sostenuto, e continuo a sostenere, che Roma è una città parassitaria perché prende e non dà, perché non è una città spirituale. Roma è la città meno spirituale del mondo. Roma è come l’Olympia di Manet: una grande cortigiana pigra, inerte, impassibile.” 21 His words resonate with Mussolini’s own youthful disdain for Rome, when he proclaimed in 1910: “Roma, città parassitaria di affittacamere, di lustrascarpe, di

18

Moravia and Elkann 38.

19

For a detailed study of Alberto Moravia’s relationship to home interiors, refer to: Joseph Venturini, Moravia "art déco" (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1988).

20

For a detailed investigation of Pasolini’s intense feelings about Rome, consult Chapter 2.

21

Constantini 23.

262 prostitute, di preti e burocrati, Roma….” 22 The former Fascist leader published his thoughts in an article entitle, “Contro Roma,” the very same designation given by Moravia to his own 1970s book project in which he and several other prominent authors denigrate Rome. The correlation between the two texts, given that Moravia always insisted that he was Antifascist, is startling and begs the question to what degree did ideas against Rome actually evolve during the twentieth century? Moravia’s Contro Roma of course offers several perspectives rather than one, ranging between unkind and scathing.

Moravia’s diatribes appear particularly mild in comparison to many of the others’; however, he like the young Mussolini strove to deny Rome a seat amongst the pantheon of modern European cities. At one point, Moravia writes: Roma non era, insomma, una capitale moderna nel senso che si dà alla parola in Europa. Era, senza dubbio, una città unica nel suo genere; ma ripeto, non una capitale. Nel dopoguerra si ebbe l’illusione che potesse diventarlo, se non altro perché le capitali si formano intorno al nucleo di un’esperienza di fondo e quest’esperienza, per la prima volta dopo l’Unità d’Italia, c’era stata ed era stata l’esperienza del fascismo e della guerra.

Ora tutto il problema di Roma non esiste se non teniamo conto del fatto che gli Italiani pensano che Roma dovrebbe essere una capitale e che Roma invece non lo è né sembra avviata a diventarlo nel futuro. 23 Moravia seems to have hoped that Rome, by the mid-1970s, would relent in its modernizing processes and accept its position as a singular world city. He, in fact, blames the monarchy along with Fascism and the postwar Republic for complicating and confusing Rome’s identity. Moravia furthermore expresses nostalgia for Rome’s former mythical image, recognizing the periods of unbridled building expansion as the culprit of

22

Mussolini, “Contro Roma,” cfp.

23

Alberto Moravia, ed., Contro Roma (Milano: Bompiani, 1975) 7-8.

263 Rome’s aesthetic undoing. 24 When Costantini asks him, “Come’era la Roma degli anni di guerra e del dopoguerra?,” Moravia responds: “Posso tuttavia dire che, nonostante il fascismo, Roma era ancora una città bellissima. Non c’erano ancora quartieri costruiti dalle giunte democristiane. L’orrore è cominciato con le giunte democristiane e con le speculazioni edilizie.” 25 Once the building speculation recommenced along Rome’s outskirts during the postwar period, propagating the massive conglomerations of borgate, Moravia’s sentiments start to echo Pasolini’s: “Roma è andata sempre in rovina, è la città per eccellenza delle rovine. Alle rovine antiche si sono aggiunte quelle moderne, in specie quelle democristiane, ma è rimasta tuttavia una città molto viva.” 26 He recognizes the debasing component of modernization, placing all of Rome’s ruins, be they ancient or modern, within a similar cultural construct.

Moravia’s disillusionment with Rome’s modern ruinous progress seems to stem from his belief in the existence of the Eternal City’s mythical past. He unequivocally states that Rome is a unique city, a point which one cannot discount given the extent to which its structures are steeped in history, legend, and myth; however, in Moravia’s opinion, Italy’s capital lacks the fundamental elements needed to place it on par with other major European centers:

24

Alberto Moravia rarely sympathized with the Christian Democratic government, which he considered to be as much of a totalitarian regime as Fascism was. The actions that the party took on Rome’s development throughout the postwar period symbolize, in the author’s opinion, the same initiative ideologized under Mussolini. In Vita di Moravia, the author states: “Invece con il regime democristiano al potere nessuno poteva prendere il suo posto e oltretutto la democrazia cristiana mostrava chiaramente che non voleva che nessuno ci riuscisse. Così ebbe inizio, come ho detto, un regime che in fondo non era molto diverso, secondo me, dal regime fascista. Il fascismo era stato un regime totalitario, adesso c’era un regime parlamentare, però l’inamovibilità dei democristiani trasformava questo governo in regime.” Moravia and Elkann 169.

25

Costantini, “L’Intervista: Alberto Moravia: La mia Roma” 21.

26

Costantini, “L’Intervista: Alberto Moravia: La mia Roma” 21.

264 Ma cos’è una capitale, insomma? Questo è il punto che vorrei chiarire se non altro per spiegarmi perché oggi mi sento così profondamente deluso di fronte alla Roma attuale. Una capitale, dunque, tra le tante cose, è o dovrebbe essere un modello per l’intera nazione. Cioè il centro di trasformazione in cui le energie grezze ma vitali della provincia vengono, appunto, trasformate da una potente e sofisticata macchina sociale in modi di comportamento esemplari. In una capitale tutto ciò che è particolare diventa universale, tutto ciò che è inconscio consapevole, tutto ciò che è rozzo, raffinato. 27 The Rome he increasingly encountered on a daily basis by 1975 no longer had what he believed to be the moral as well as the ideological strength to serve as a model for the rest of the country. Moravia asserts that the “particular should become universal” in a capital city. Such an entity should serve as an example, an urban archetype, or perhaps nothing short of a modern myth, for every other place culturally connects to it. This very idea, in fact, correlates with one of Nietzsche’s abuses, rather than uses, of history as discussed beforehand. The philosopher sustains that, “if we really wish to learn something from an example…, if it is to give us strength, many of the differences must be neglected, the individuality of the past forced into a general formula and all the sharp angles broken off for the sake of correspondence.” 28 Moravia desired modern Rome to be greater than it actually was, a paradigm rather than a parasite; nevertheless, he could not ignore the city’s differences, nor did modern Rome fortify him. If one reads his above-cited assertion through a Nietzschian lens, Moravia was too aware of the real Rome to expect the actualization of his fictionalized vision, as Mussolini so desperately aspired to do by reviving the image of the ancient imperial city. It was a false hope, one that appeared two decades earlier in his novel La ciociara, a book in which Rome, both the real and the literary, appears as an existential construct rather than an actuality.

27

Moravia, Contro Roma 9.

28

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History 22.

265 Moravia’s literature from the 1950s presents the disconnect between topography and the existential struggles that the author thought marked reality. Critics’ who have long held that Rome is the unifying narrative element of Moravia’s oeuvre fail to recognize the capital’s practical absence, and consequently the city’s role, in writer’s works. Simone Casini, however, one of the author’s major scholars, has discovered the true form of Moravia’s Rome, articulating it in an essay entitled, “Moravia e Roma: La città invisibile.” He observes: Ma rispetto a Roma, Moravia è troppo ‘dentro’, per poterla distinguere dalla stessa esperienza della vita e del mondo, per avere quella distanza critica e biografica, quel punto di vista esterno, quell’interesse documentario o figurativo che ebbero invece alcuni grandi romani d’adozione come D’Annunzio, Gadda, Pasolini, Fellini. 29 Casini persuasively argues that the author’s spatial relationship to the city blinded him to its form. The scholar further asserts that a writer can sometimes become so enmeshed in his or her subject that he or she can no longer see beyond it, nor objectively view it. This certainly happens between Moravia and Rome. Following the author’s recovery from his childhood illness, Moravia spent his life moving primarily among bourgeois corners, and literary circles, of the city. The middle class’ culture influenced his perception to the point that he is as much as product it, as his literary representations of it are products of him. Enzo Siciliano affirms this observation, adding that Moravia represents Rome, but does not describe it. 30 This statement implies that Moravia’s narrative literature focuses less on the spaces in which Romans live and more on their lifestyles and actions, or inactions. La Ciociara, a story that begins and ends in Rome, but that mostly unfolds in 29

Simone Casini, “Moravia e Roma: La città invisibile,” Scrittori e Città, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Firenze [Florence]: Edizioni LCD, 2004) 185.

30

1982) 156.

Enzo Siciliano, Alberto Moravia: Vita, parole e idee di un romanziere (Milano: Bompiani,

266 the mountains to the south of the city, is prototypical of Moravia’s self-described existential style. The author concentrates primarily on the psychology constraining or inciting the decisions and behavior of his female protagonist, Cesira, as they relate to the novel’s historical moment and atmosphere, while generally ignoring the spaces and places around her.

The Rome that fails to reach La Ciociara’s pages is both immense and mythological. It is an idea that materializes and then dematerializes as the myth of Rome.

Cesira, the novel’s heroine, continually inquires about or refers to Rome throughout her wartime exile from the city. She, like many other Romans in 1943-44, believed that no one, including the Nazis nor the Allies, would dare to invade or bomb their city, because Mussolini held it so dear and “a Roma c’è il Papa.” 31 This belief, so integral to Roman identity throughout the Second World War, and in particular during the German occupation, evokes the ironic title of Rossellini’s cinematic masterpiece, Roma città aperta, explored in Chapter 1. This film, which depicts a fictionalized, semidocumentaristic version of life under the Nazi troops who invaded the Italian capital in 1943, calls into question the truth and strength of the modern myth of Rome as an “open” or world heritage city under the pressures of war. Neither the Pope nor Mussolini managed to protect Rome’s citizens from Nazi martial rule, which led to the deportation of over two thousand Jews, 32 thousands of borgatari, 33 and the massacre of hundreds of

31

Alberto Moravia, La ciociara, 1957; Rpt. in Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti 1950-1959, Vol. 2, eds., Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 1132.

32

For a full description on Nazi atrocities committed against the Jews in Rome, see: Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1972); and Liliana Picciotto Fargion Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943-1945) (Milano: Mursia, 2002).

33

Within the last five years, two monographs have emerged to recount the partisan struggle against the Nazi’s on April 17, 1944 in the borgata Quadraro: Walter De Cesaris La borgata ribelle: Il

267 Resistance fighters at the Ardeatine Caves. 34 Roma città aperta closes with an optimistic image of children, who have survived the Nazi occupation, marching towards St. Peter’s dome. This vision encapsulates the hope present in postwar Italian cinema; however, but also finds expression in literature, as Moravia adopts it and slightly reinterprets it in his novel La ciociara.

The novelist integrates Rome’s highest architectural structure as a way of reflecting on past hope as well as on present devastation. Cesira contemplates its significance as she and her daughter Rosetta reenter the city as changed women after living nearly a year as refugees: Quella cupola, per me, non era soltanto Roma ma la mia vita di Roma, la serenità dei giorni che si vivono in pace con se stessi e con gli altri. Laggiù in fondo all’orizzonte, quella cupola mi diceva che io potevo ormai tornare fiduciosa a casa e la vecchia vita avrebbe ripreso il suo corso, pur dopo tanti cambiamenti e tante tragedie.35 Rome, Cesira’s home and thus her place of return and comfort, represents the solution to the months she and her daughter spent hiding in exile. She yearns for a literal return to normalcy that will obliterate the ruinous psychological effects of her once virginal daughter’s rape by a gang of Moroccan soldiers. Rosetta’s rape almost immediately alters the once angelic teenager’s state of mind, as she transforms from an obedient child into a rastrellamento nazista del Quadraro e la resistenza popolare a Roma (Roma: Odradak, 2004); Francesco Sirleto Quadraro: Una storia esemplare: Le vite e le lotte dei lavoratori edili di un quartiere periferico romano (Roma: Ediesse, 2006).

34

As Paul Ginsborg describes in A History of Contemporary Italy: “After the protracted German resistance at Monte Cassino, the Allied armies finally entered Rome on 4 June 1944. Rome, unlike every other major Italian city, did not attempt an insurrection before the Allied arrival. A major reason for this was the terrible massacre which the Germans had carried out at the Ardeatine caves on 24 March 1944.

After a brigade of the Roman urban partisans had blown up 32 German military police, the Germans shot 335 prisoners in reprisal. The Roman Resistance was not to recover from this blow.” Ginsborg 53. For additional information, consult: Federico Chabod, L’Italia contemporanea 1918-1948, (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1961).

35

Moravia, La ciociara 1417.

268 stubborn prostitute who rejects her mother’s attempts to console and protect her. Cesira cannot fathom the psychological trauma afflicting her daughter and desperately seeks to intervene in her daughter’s precipitation into a life of easy and meaningless sexual encounters. Once a saint, Rosetta becomes the sinner, and Moravia manipulates her mental transformation as a social metaphor for two acts of violence: rape and war.

When the author originally ideated the novel, he intended to entitle it Lo stupro, 36 in order to evidence the symbiotic relationship between the two acts. The provocative title did not last; however, the writer did interlace a series of references to prostitutes and sexual aggression throughout the book in order to evidence their connection. His imagery is less explicit yet interestingly reflective of Pasolini’s earlier descriptions of juvenile delinquents in Ragazzi di vita. The young Pasolini often refers to his ragazzi as dogs, or portrays them playing with the animals, so as to associate the borgatari’s bestial behavior with that of their pets. Moravia similarly inserts similes, which equate Rosetta’s responses to her first client with that of a dog that obeys its master. He relates her actions from Cesira’s perspective: Bastava che Clorindo si affacciasse sullo spiazzo, che lei subito piantava tutto quanto e accorreva. E lui non la chiamava con la voce, ma con un fischio, come si fa coi cani; e a lei, a quanto pareva di essere trattata come un cane; e si vedeva lontano un miglio che lui la teneva per quella cosa che lei non aveva mai assaggiato e per lei era nuova e ormai non ne poteva più fare a meno, come un bevitore che non può fare a meno del vino o un fumatore delle sigarette. Sì, lei adesso ci aveva preso gusto a quello che i marocchini le avevano imposto con la forza. 37 Rosetta’s association with a dog, furthermore, correlates with her descent from participating in working-class society to earning her living on the streets. She enters the 36

Casini, Introduzione, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti xlviii.

37

Moravia, La ciociara 1398.

269 subaltern class, like so many other Roman women at the end of the war, namely as a prostitute. 38 The corruption of Cesira’s image of her daughter coincides with the corruption of the World War II myth of Rome, while ironically juxtaposing with Moravia’s continued expression of faith in the city’s regeneration. The myth of Rome, thus, arguably, transforms into a sort of Pirandellian object of umorismo, swathing the author’s conception of the city in contradiction.

Mirrors and Masks As Luigi Pirandello summarizes in the conclusion of his treatise L’umorismo: “L’umorismo consiste nel sentimento del contrario, provocato dalla speciale attività della riflessione che non si cela, che non diventa, come ordinariamente nell’arte, una forma del sentimento, ma il suo contrario….” 39 Moravia, who refers openly to Pirandello time and again in his interviews, often strangely denies that the early twentieth century philosopher had influenced him in any way. While speaking with Alain Elkann, for example, Moravia states: “Pirandello ci fu un momento in cui l’ho sentito molto affine a me. Ma la vera

38

A number of postwar literary works interlace references to prostitutes in order to chronicle the harsh reality endured by so many Italian women during those years, while emphasizing the moral bankruptcy that ensued the fall of Fascism preceding the creation of the new Republic. Alberto Moravia’s novel La romana (1947) places its cultural focus on such women, while Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi del ragno (1947) and Carlo Levi’s L’orologio (1950) introduce prostitutes as secondary characters. A number of postwar films also depict prostitutes, such as the aforementioned Roma città aperta, Rossellini’s Paisà, and Giuseppe De Santis’ Roma ore 11. Christopher Wagstaff, in his recently published study Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach, writes: “Another theme running through early post-war Italian cinema is prostitution. No matter that sometimes it is investigated seriously, and sometimes merely exploited for audience gratification; it functions like a shorthand. Already Visconti has built the melodrama of Ossessione around it. Rossellini takes it up in Roma città aperta and Paisà, and then develops it in Stromboli and Europa ’51. Dozens of mainstream Italian commercial films make it the central theme of their narratives, and it is one of the favorite plot elements of the strappalacrime formula.” Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008) 135.

39

Luigi Pirandello, L’umorismo (1908; Milano: Garzanti, 2001) 224-225.

270 influenza ancora una volta fu quella di Dostoevskij…;” 40 or, “Pirandello è uno scrittore mediocre e un notevole narratore e uomo di teatro.” 41 These varying comments, ranging from mild to disparaging, stand in blatant contradiction to Moravia’s continual selfidentification with a fundamental component of Pirandello’s humorist theory. He engages in the “activity of reflection that does not hide from itself,” both his way of living as well as his way of writing. Both are suggestive of L’umorismo’s il guardarsi vivere. This notion emerges in another response given by Moravia to Elkann, in which the author insists: “ero un po’ trasognato, come se mi fossi sdoppiato e mi fossi guardato vivere,” 42 while frequenting English salons; or while reflecting on the shame he suffered as a child because of his tuberculosis, he asserts that he faced it “con la mente. In qualche modo, ero sempre al di fuori di me. Mi guardavo vivere. Lo faccio anche adesso.” 43 Moravia, whether consciously or unconsciously, continually alludes to the fundamental precepts of Pirandello’s philosophy, which clearly influenced the way he interpreted himself and the world.

Pirandello posited his interpretations on mirrors in his academic treatise L’umorismo, which recognizes the act of reflection as intrinsic to modern humankind’s sense of self: E per tutti però può rappresentare talvolta una tortura, rispetto all’anima che si muove e si fonde, il nostro stesso corpo fissato per sempre in fattezze immutabili. Oh perché proprio dobbiamo essere così, noi? – ci domandiamo talvolta allo specchio, - con questa faccia, con questo corpo?

40

Moravia and Elkann 30.

41

Moravia and Elkann 224.

42

Moravia and Elkann 57.

43

Moravia and Elkann 21.

271 – Alziamo una mano, nell’incoscienza; e il gesto ci resta sospeso. Ci pare strano che l’abbiamo fatto noi. Ci vediamo vivere. 44 Moravia, thus, contradicts himself in denying Pirandello’s influence on him and his work, for this very concept of mirroring or watching oneself live forms a crucial component of his literature. La ciociara, in fact, mirrors his own experience hiding as a refugee with his wife Elsa Morante in the mountains to the south of Rome. This novel recounts a fictionalized version of their war experience, and is Moravia’s mirror for understanding what he and his wife endured. Italo Calvino, pondering the surge of self-referential literature appearing after World War II, once asserted that “l’essere usciti da un’esperienza – guerra, guerra civile… stabiliva un’immediatezza di comunicazione tra lo scrittore e il suo pubblico… ognuno aveva vissuto vite irregolari drammatiche avventurose, ci si strappava la parola di bocca.” 45 La ciociara was Moravia’s novel about the war. 46 The one-room shed in which he and Morante dwelled for nearly a year transforms into the hut when Cesira and Rosetta idly pass their time. The interrupted train-ride to Fondi as well as the near escape from a fighter plane likewise echo Moravia’s experiences. The Second World War signals Moravia’s first and only real engagement with penury, and it resulted in a clear, albeit temporary, transformation in the themes, myths, and places he represents in his literature during the immediate postwar

44

Pirandello, L’umorismo 211.

45

Italo Calvino, “Prefazione,” Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 2002) 7.

46

Moravia announces in a letter to his editor dated December 24, 1956 that he had finished composing La ciociara, a book that should be called Lo stupro d’Italia. He reflects on the ten years he spent completing it, writing: “Così ho finito anch’io per fare il mio romanzo sulla Guerra, ma dieci anni dopo, con sufficiente prospettiva per mescolare la fantasia alla realtà e non trovarmi troppo a ridosso dei fatti.” Alberto Moravia, “Introduzione: Storia del testo,” La ciociara, ed. Tonino Tornatore (1957; Milano: Bompiani, 2003) xvii.

272 period. He diverges from his traditional bourgeois tendencies, to align his vision with the lower classes, including the urban working, the peasant, as well as the underclass.

The author, however, does not necessarily differentiate between those who have a job and a home, and those who have neither, respectively the working and subaltern classes. He positions Rosetta, after she turns to a life of prostitution, within the capital’s traditional working class neighborhood, Trastevere, perhaps in part because Moravia does not spatially differentiate the city, but rather socially divides it. 47 The young streetwalker, as such, stands on the edge between two social groups, as her actions resonate with those of many borgatare during the post-war years, such as seen in De Santis’ Roma ore 11 or Lizzani’s “L’amore che si paga;” yet her physical placement keeps her within the sanctity of the ancient city walls. Rosetta is thus a problematic representative of Rome’s underclass, as Rosetta demonstrates Moravia’s seeming inability or unwillingness to engage with the city’s destitute and their environments. The author generally remains within the comforts of the center, receiving his information about the borgate secondhand, either through the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, who submitted work to Moravia’s periodical Nuovi argomenti in 1954, or through his discussions with Pasolini, with whom he became close friends sometime between 1955 and 1956. Moravia did visit

47

Moravia discusses the afternoons he often spent wandering around Rome during the 1950s. He would depart from his home on via dell’Oca, near Piazza di Spagna, where he lived with Elsa Morante after the war: “Allora, uscivo da via dell’Oca, prendevo un autobus e andavo a via Veneto. Poi facevo tutto a piedi, via Veneto, il Tritone, piazza Venezia, tutto il Corso e tornavo a piedi a piazza del Popolo. Oppure facevo il contrario. Oppure me ne andavo in certi quartieri periferici, per esempio al Testaccio, oppure dalle parti di Ponte Milvio, oppure a Trastevere.” Moravia and Elkann 197. If one looks at a map of Rome, be it ancient or modern, one will note that neither Trastevere nor Testaccio have been or are peripheral neighborhoods. They both sit within the ancient city walls. Moravia, perhaps, is basing his spatial judgment on the fact that these two areas are traditionally popular neighborhoods, and thus socially marginalized from the rest of Rome. Whatever the case may be, the reader should consider how Moravia conceives of the inside versus the outside, or the center versus the periphery, in order to grapple with his literary engagement with Rome and its underclass.

273 the borgata Tormarancio in April 1947; however he historicizes and generalizes his impressions, communicating a lack of actual engagement with the area.

He recounts the socio-urbanistic context in which the borgate first appeared, remarking that these Roman slums had little in common with those of New York, Paris, and London for “Roma… non aveva industrie né commerci, le fece la passione archeologica del fascismo.” 48 The author also comments on the founding date of Tormarancio, the borgata which he uses as an exemplum, as well as on Mussolini’s fleeting curiosity about the area, which he glimpsed during the celebratory inauguration of E42. 49 Moravia additionally relates Tormarancio’s squalor to the legal trial involving the former head of the company responsible for its construction, who was sent to prison for embezzling public funds and not providing the borgata with any basic infrastructure. 50 Moravia occasionally shifts his focus from the historical context to generalized impressions, such as when he likens the area of Tormarancio to that of a concentration camp. He notes the identical residential barracks that line irregular streets, an image that leads him to expect to find barbed wire and observation towers surrounding the perimeter. 51 The author further describes the misery inflicted upon the borgata’s residents during various seasons, reporting: “D’inverno, col maltempo, questi spazi si

48

Moravia, “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” 56.

49

According to Moravia’s account, Il Duce saw the decrepit roofs of Tormarancio set within an insalubrious valley, and asked what it was: “Con caratteristica fretta, da qualcuno che aveva interesse a non fare approfondire la visita, fu risposta: ‘Niente, niente… sono fornaci di mattoni.” Moravia, “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” 60.

50

Moravia, “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” 59.

51

Moravia, “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” 57.

274 mutano in pantani, d’estate vi si fonda nella polvere.” 52 The large stretch of time indicates that Moravia’s “journalistic investigation” was more of an intellectualized compilation of other people’s impressions, rather than a personal exposé. He clearly had very limited firsthand knowledge of the borgate, composing this article and several of his 1950s Racconti romani and Nuovi racconti romani, which I touch upon in the Introduction, generally without imagination nor compelling imagery. 53 The Rome that the writer designs on the pages of La ciociara, in any case, greatly diverges from the usual middle-class interiors of Moravia’s novelistic settings. The book portrays a short but significant period in the lives of a working class mother and daughter whom the war practically relegates to the underclass. Moravia begins the book with Cesira and Rosetta’s flight from Rome before the Nazi occupation in September, 1943.

He then shifts the narratives focus onto their refuge in the mountains of the Ciociara region during the Allies’ fight for Rome. He ultimately concludes the story with the mother and daughter’s return to the city, once their lives and those of many other Italians had been forever transformed. Moravia endows Cesira and Rosetta with complex existential crises, developing them into personifications of the destruction wrecked upon 52 53

Moravia, “Ha quindici anni la Fossa di Tormarancio” 57.

To examine the ways in which Moravia engages with the urbanistic and architectural elements of Rome’s peripheral environment, I used his short story “Scherzi di caldo” as an exemplum. See: Introduction, p. 43-44, 49-50. For other Racconti romani that depict the borgate or substandard living conditions in Rome, see: “Fanatico” 389-394; “La controfigura” 431-438; “Il pupo,” 483-490; “Gioielli” 533-539; “Impataccato” 583-589; “La rovina dell’umanità” 619-624; “Il cane cinese” 660-666; “Ladri in chiesa” 689-695; “Faccia di mascalzone” 704-710; “Un uomo sfortunato” 711-716; “La rivincita di Tarzan” 753-758; “Romolo e Remo” 759-765; “Faccia di norcino,” 766-771; “L’infermiera” 779-785; ”Il tesoro” 786-792; “Il guardiano” 809-815: Moravia, Racconti Romani, Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 1, cfp. For Nuovi racconti romani that perpetuate this theme, see: “La raccomandazione” 1505-1512; “L’incantesimo” 1534-1540; “Un dritto” 1576-1583; “La serva padrona” 1598-1605; “Quant’è caro” 1658-1664; “Operazione Pasqualino” 1672-1679; “Il morso” 1695-1701; “La confidenza” 17091715; “Non sanno parlare” 1737-1743; “La cosa più bella” 1758-64; “Addio alla borgata” (1789-1795); and “Negriero” 1971-1977): Moravia, Nuovi racconti romani, Opere / 3: Romanzi e Racconti: 1950-1959, Vol. 2, cfp.

275 Rome and its society following the city’s 1944 liberation. The author’s central themes of deviance and aggression emerge from the beginning of the text, as he uncovers the desperate “illegal” behavior of ordinary Romans following the trauma of the war years.

According to his literary account, nearly everyone participated in the black market, for the enforcement of laws had disappeared under the war’s socioeconomic duress.

Everyone steals, some even kill, and others like Rosetta turn to prostitution. Rome had essentially become an infernal den of prostitutes, murderers, and thieves, as it does in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita. Moravia recounts through his first-person narrator: La vita è fatta di abitudini e anche l’onestà è un’abitudine; e una volta che si cambiano le abitudini, la vita diventa un inferno e noialtri tanti diavoli scatenati senza più il rispetto di noi stessi e degli altri…. Quel giorno soffrii le pene dell’inferno. Non mi pareva più di essere me stessa: ora ripensavo a quello che era successo con Giovanni e al pensiero di avergli ceduto proprio come una zoccola di strada…. 54 Moravia’s imagery pertaining to the dissolution of Rome’s postwar civilization hardly effects his stylization of the city. The author does not attempt to integrate a poetic Dantesque landscape reminiscent of the Inferno, as one finds in Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita and Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria; instead, he simply inserts the term “hell” as a metaphor to evoke the moral corruption degrading Rome at that time. Moravia’s cityscape is, in fact, rather limited. He occasionally mentions the names of streets and businesses, particularly within Cesira’s and Rosetta’s neighborhood, but he mentions the rest of the city in fleeting comments as simply distant landmarks while the two women either move across or towards the city.

Moravia’s choice of Trastevere as the residential quarter of his mother and daughter protagonists reveals how unwilling the bourgeois author was to engage with the 54

Moravia, La ciociara 1148.

276 areas of subaltern Rome. His relationship with the borgate, with the exception of his abovementioned 1947 article “Ha quindici anni la Fossa Tormarancio,” was nearly always one of distance. Allusions to the peripheral neighborhoods appear twice in La ciociara, as Moravia refuses to delve into the actual characteristics of these neighborhoods. The first time that the author refers to the borgate in his 1957 novel is within a simile, when Cesira and her daughter enter a filthy cave serving as a home and hiding place for several middle-class Romans: “Oltre le ossa c’era anche parecchia mondezza, come dire scatolame arrugginito stracci, scarpe vecchie, cartacce. Pareva di essere in uno di quei terreni di costruzione, a Roma, dove ci buttano tutti i rifiuti circostanti.” 55 This reference is superficial and indirect, suggestive and reflective of Moravia’s engagement with Rome’s margins. The author’s liminal stance as a cultural figure deeply enmeshed in Roman bourgeois society, and as a friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he shared the goal of creating a Gramscian National Popular literature, reveals itself in his second reference to Rome’s borgate. The novelist actually juxtaposes an agglomerated mention of the suburban neighborhoods with the individualized and recognizable dome of St. Peter’s Basilica: “Finalmente ecco apparire in fondo alla pianura distesa e verde, una lunga striscia di colore incerto, tra il bianco e il giallo; i sobborghi di Roma. E dietro questa striscia, sovrastandola, grigia sullo sfondo del cielo grigio, lontanissima, eppure chiara, la cupola di San Pietro.” 56 The difference in visual perspective exposes the writer’s discomfort with the borgate as well as his inability to extricate himself from his middle class environment. Moravia, in fact, never

55

Moravia, La ciociara 1277.

56

Moravia, La ciociara 1430.

277 persisted with his goal of composing National Popular literature after the 1950s, returning to his existential investigation of Roman bourgeois society by 1960 in La noia (1960), in which he reasserts his largely tangential, instead of imitational and intimate relationship to the borgate. La ciociara’s publication signals the conclusion of Moravia’s postwar hope for the revivification of Rome’s myth, while contemporaneously expressing the inevitable progression of the city’s demythification.

Gadda and Fascism Another author who generally focuses on subjects other than the Roman underclass and its squalid borgate, yet nevertheless profoundly influences Rome’s modern image of squalor, is Carlo Emilio Gadda. He, like Moravia, sought to demythify Fascist Rome, deconstructing its myths in order to confront and overcome the regimes horrors as well as his personal disillusionment. Once a fervent Fascist, Gadda took an Antifascist stance upon realizing that Mussolini and his party lacked the capacity to actualize their promises of modernizing Italy. Gian Carlo Ferretti, in his Ritratto di Gadda, explains why Gadda initially allied himself with the Fascist party: Il passaggio di Gadda dal partito nazionalista al partito fascista nel ’21, rientra almeno formalmente in quell’iter. Gadda scambia cioè il fascismo per l’ordine lungamente cercato, ma la sua decisione appare significativamente povera, se non priva… delle motivazioni e implicazioni di quel nucleo specifico. 57 Giuseppe Stellardi echoes this statement, adding: “Non c’è dubbio che il Gadda reduce di guerra, nei primi anni venti, vede in Mussolini e nel fascismo l’unica alternativa al caos, all’anarchica, alla dissoluzione definitiva del paese come entità etica e nazionale, oltre

57

Gian Carlo Ferretti, Ritratto di Gadda (Bari & Roma: Laterza, 1987) 15.

278 che al suo sfacelo economico.” 58 Scholars hotly debate the degree to which the Milanese author adhered to Fascism’s politico-ideological principles, agreeing rather that he based his decision on a psychological desire to mitigate the disorder and trauma he experienced during the First World War. They also dispute when and why Gadda became vehemently Antifascist. His texts La cognizione del dolore (1938-41), Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1946-47), and Eros e Priapo (1955-56), demonstrate the writer’s strong aversion to both the party and its leader, resulting from his disillusionment with Mussolini’s entrance of Italy into the war and his failure to actualize his promises of stability, continuity and organization. Gadda’s works, however, constantly underwent revision, during which time the author would make substantial changes that he would then accompany with letters and interviews to predate conveniently his switch in political allegiance. 59 His literary attention, however, for the duration of the 1930s focused largely on the composition of technical articles, relating to his first, though less preferred occupation as an engineer. This decision permitted him to continue his literary ambitions while maintaining a neutral stance towards Il Duce and his regime, facing little censure as Moravia had during the ventennio. 60 Rome and its environs do not enter into Gadda’s fictional oeuvre until after the fall of Fascism, at which point the city assumes an extraordinarily modernist and demythified form in his masterpiece Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Gadda first became familiarized with the capital during his intermittent residencies there from 58

Giuseppe Stellardi, “Gadda fascista?” Gadda: Miseria e grandezza della letteratura (Firenze [Florence]: Franco Cesati, 2006) 136-137.

59 60

Stellardi 140.

The Fascist regime prohibited periodicals from printing reviews of his novel Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935) while it censured from publication La mascherata (1941) and Agostino (1943).

279 1925 to 1931, working as an engineer for the Società Ammonia Casale, until he decided to pursue his literary vocation and move to Florence. 61 This opportunity provided him with first-hand knowledge of Mussolini’s urbanistic transformations of the Eternal City, which the political demagogue largely inaugurated at the end of 1925. What Mussolini delineated as his five-year plan for Rome included a reorganization of the city so that it appeared vast, powerful, and organized to the outside world. He wanted it to resemble the Rome of Augustus, and he urged his fellow Fascists to liberate the great structures of ancient Rome “dalle costruzioni parassitarie e profane… della Roma cristiana. I monumenti millenari della nostra storia devono giganteggiare nella necessaria solitudine.

Quindi la terza Roma si dilaterà sopra altri colli lungo le rive del fiume sacro sino alle spiagge del Tirreno.” 62 Gadda certainly understood Mussolini’s demand to clean the city of its so-called decadent architecture and urbanism to create a fictionalized, yet “authoritative” plan to actualize Fascism’s romanità and myth of a Third Rome, whether or not he witnessed Il Duce’s speech. 63 Mussolini’s intentions to generate a mythified connection between the modern and ancient cities resonate with Nietzsche’s interpretation of one civilization’s appropriation of another’s history: “As long as the soul of history is found in the great impulse that it gives to the powerful spirit, as long as the past is principally used as a model for imitation, it is always in danger of being a little altered and touched up, and brought nearer to fiction.” 64 Mussolini’s ambitions for Rome

61

Ferretti 20.

62

Mussolini, Opera omnia Vol. XXII, 48.

63

“Un’immagine di Roma, al bando da equivoci, che non è quella ‘autentica’ del passato, ma che viene reinventata dal regime, distruggendo e manipolando il tessuto urbano: una finzione architettonicourbanistica creata ad arte per attualizzare il mito fascista dell’Urbe.” Nicoloso 36.

64

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History 23.

280 clearly incorporated the nihilistic philosopher’s modernist theories, envisioning modern society’s adoption of the past for its own ambitions; nevertheless, his source of influence is not singular, but also integrated notions generated by Italy’s most famous avant-garde movement, Futurism. Il Duce’s emphasis on destruction in his modernization of Rome follows on the heals of F. T. Marinetti’s call to “impugnate i picconi, le scuri, i martelli e demolite senza pietà le città venerate.” 65 Gadda, however, ironically adopts means of destruction, or decomposition, to satirize Mussolini’s urbanistic vision by presenting a demythified version of Rome.

One of Gadda’s biographers, Aldo Pecoraro, declares that the author’s originality is found less in his texts’ plots, descriptions of time and space, and transmission of information, than in the “invenzioni espressive, mai fini a se stesse che, attraverso la distruzione di luoghi comuni e miti collettivi, portano alla luce segreti dell’animo e verità scomode a livello politico sociale.” 66 Gadda’s approach to Rome and its myth suggests Nietzsche’s as well as Pirandello’s theoretical deconstructions of modern society and its critical histories. As Pecoraro notes, Gadda destroys or discomposes “common places and myths,” an action which forms a cornerstone in thinkers’ philosophies. For example.

Pirandello writes: Tutte le finzioni dell’anima, tutte le creazioni del sentimento vedremo esser materia dell’umorismo, vedremo cioè la riflessione diventar come un demonietto che smonta il congegno d’ogni immagine, d’ogni fantasma messo su dal sentimento; smontarla per veder com’è fatto; scaricarne la molla, e tutto il congegno striderne, convulso. 67 65

F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto del futurismo,” Le Figaro, 10 Fenruary 1909; Rpt. in Marinetti e il futurismo, ed., L. De Maria (Milano: Mondadori, 1973) 8.

66

Aldo Pecoraro, Gadda (Roma & Bari: Laterza, 1998) x.

67

Pirandello, L’umorismo 191.

281 Nietzsche, on the other hand, saw humankind’s deconstruction of history as either a means for clearing a path for new social and cultural creations or for their progressive annihilation. He argued for a critical way of viewing history that would enable rational human beings to judge the past: Here we see clearly how necessary a third way of looking at the past is to man…. This is the ‘critical’ way, which is also in the service of life. Man must have the strength to break up the past, and apply it, too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it. Every past is worth condemning; this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. 68 Gadda certainly condemns as well as derides the Fascist past, disbanding its myths built on Il Duce and his notion of romanità. The writer’s ability to confront both the man and the myth, however, depended greatly on Italian society’s official distantiation from Fascism and Gadda’s consequent desire to satirize its failed promises. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana provides Gadda precisely with such an opportunity. The initial version composed between 1946 and 1947 as a serial novel for Letteratura offers readers for the first time Gadda’s impressions of Fascism’s impact on Rome. His novelistic image of Rome, however, should not be read without considering his later elaboration of the text into a longer, totalizing work, which he eventually published with Garzanti in 1957. Nor should one analyze his contemplation of the city and its modernization without considering his personal exploration of it and commentary on its state during his second residency there, beginning in 1950. One of his most compelling investigations into Rome’s demythifying and ever evolving urban modernization appears in his 1956 essay “Quartieri suburbani.”

68

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History 28.

282 Irony in the Suburbs Carlo Emilio Gadda, whom Pasolini greatly admired, 69 offers a highly sarcastic literary description of Rome in his article “Quartieri suburbani.” The text introduces various types of architecture and urbanism that appeared within Rome’s modern suburbs as a result of postwar socioeconomic transformations and greedy building speculations.

His commentary provides both a complementary as well as contrasting picture of the capital’s growth to Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, while offering a far more sarcastic image than De Sica’s humanistic Il tetto. Whereas the author of Ragazzi di vita focuses on the squalor of the muddy borgate, and the director of Il tetto at least celebrates the construction of a home, the writer of “Quartieri suburbani” presents a gamut of impressions, ranging from the imaginative to the derelict, integrating with great art Pirandello’s notion of il sentimento del contrario. 70 Gadda seemingly criticizes his contemporaries for noticing only the negative contours of the city’s development in their works. As he humorously writes: “Periferia è parola ghiotta, presso i novellatori e i romanzieri del decennio: mal si addice ai molteplici aspetti del suburbio.” 71 Gadda jokes that there are many influences informing Rome’s dilapidation and misery, represented by the disorganized architectural and urbanistic mass developments outside the modern city.

69

Most scholars draw connections between the choice of both authors to write novels in Roman dialect, and focus on Pasolini’s admiration of Gadda’s abilities to transcribe the linguistic oral reality onto the written page. For additional information on the linguistic relationship between these two authors’ works, see: Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Nuove questioni linguistiche,” Empirismo eretico (1972; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 5-24; Francesco Ferri, Linguaggio, passione e ideologia: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra Gramsci, Gadda e Contini (Roma: Progetti museali editore, 1996); Laurie Jane Anderson, Challenging The Norm: The Dialect Question in The Works of Gadda and Pasolini (Palo Alto, CA: Humanities Honors Program, Stanford University, 1977); and Giorgio Patrizi, Prose contro il romanzo: Antiromanzi e metanarrativa nel novecento italiano (Napoli [Naples]: Liguori, 1996) 81-182, 183-194.

70

Pirandello, L’umorismo 173.

71

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1131.

283 He, in fact, makes a pithy remark, by sarcastically rebutting, or feigning to find excitement and beauty in certain aspects of the city’s construction and expansion. The author likens the urban development to the arrival of spring: “Veder crescere case ci dà quella stessa gioia consolatrice che ci dà il rinverdire degli alberi a primavera.” 72 Gadda furthers his irony by commenting on the benefits that some of the wealthier inhabitants of Rome’s modern villini and palazzine enjoy, including paved drainage systems, hot baths, local cinemas, and a variety of other choices of entertainment. 73 He pretends that the idea of modernizing urban development, so highly interlocked with both the Fascist and UrFascist promises of progress and restoration, provides an optimistic slant to the city’s ever-changing, chaotic and disorganized environment. All of his observations are, of course, predicated on Pirandellian umorismo, a notion upon which Gadda deconstructs the literal constructions of modern Rome. As Pirandello notes: “L’umorismo, come vedremo, per il suo intimo, specioso, essenziale processo, inevitabilmente scompone, disordina, discorda; quando, comunemente, l’arte in genere, com’era insegnata dalla scuola, dalla retorica, era sopra tutto composizione esteriore, accordo logicamente ordinato.” 74 Gadda’s humoristic approach to the Eternal City’s transformations during the postwar period signals his ability and willingness to read critically contemporary urban history and its implications about Italian society.

Gadda is not so ingenuous, however, as to equate the positive aspects with the negative ones, but brilliantly combines them in a pastiche of meanings reflective of his

72

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1129.

73

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1130.

74

Pirandello, L’umorismo 58.

284 literary language. 75 He recognizes alongside the wealthy neighborhoods the zones that Pasolini contemporaneously rendered famous, describing in detail the borgate’s poor urban designs and their inhabitants’ similar lifestyles. The author realizes that not all modern neighborhoods are created equal, and thus, he differentiates between the ones constructed by and for the lowest classes and those built for the middle and upper classes, the latter of which he denotes as quartieri, or neighborhoods. The residential areas constructed for the hegemonic bourgeoisie carry prestige as well as an ironic sense of historicity, as they fancifully recall in the author’s mind mythical urbanistic developments from the past: “La rampicata dei villini e delle palazzine sulla groppa del colle, somiglia, in tinta rosa o limone pallido, certi borghi o città o acròpoli anticoitaliche (sicule, etrusche, umbre, lucane): col bene, questa volta, dell’acqua potabile, della luce, del gas: della ‘corrente industriale’.” 76 According to Gadda, these new neighborhoods not only evoke recollections of beautiful ancient structures but also exceed the originals in their modern comforts, for they offer all the luxuries of contemporary society. The contentment one feels living in, or even looking at such buildings, however, stings of the same sarcasm typical of the rest of his oeuvre; yet,

75

This study focuses on thematic content of Gadda’s Roman compositions, not on his texts’ form, thus his writing style will only tangentially enter the discussion. Most scholars within the last fifty years, since Gadda’s official recognition as one of the twentieth century’s literary greats, if not in the Western tradition at least in Italy, have dissected his linguistic mechanisms, ambiguities, and details creating what many believe is the greatest example of the modern maceronic, neo-baroque, or neo-experimentalism in Italian. For a lengthy excursus on these matters, see: Robert S. Dombroski, Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999); Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1996); Gianfranco Contini. Quarant’anni d’amicizia: Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda: (1934-1988) (Torino [Turin]: Einaudi, 1989); Raffaele Donnarumma, Gadda: Romanzo e pastiche (Palermo: Palumbo, 2001); Norma Bouchard, Céline, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of The 1930s (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000); and Enrico Flores, Accessioni gaddiane: Strutture, lingua e società in C. E. Gadda (Napoli [Naples], Loffredo, 1973).

76

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1141.

285 nevertheless, offers an alternative interpretation to Pasolini’s archaizing deprecations of Rome’s postwar urbanism.

Gadda’s ironic approach to the emerging bourgeois periphery, however, greatly diverges from an earlier observation made by Moravia in his novel Il disprezzo (1954).

While both writers generally situated their stories in Rome’s elegant, liberty-style architectural environments, rarely painting rosy pictures of bourgeois homes, Moravia’s interiors and exteriors often appear colorless and littered, rather than baroque as in Gadda’s case. Moravia’s literary atmospheres, furthermore, express vacuity and decadence, as a means to reflect his protagonists’ psyches, such as one perceives in his portrayal of Riccardo Molteni and his peripheral apartment in Il disprezzo. This novel, composed during the early 1950s and in reaction against Neorealism, 77 describes Rome’s ever-growing suburbs as modern accommodations reflecting the aspirations of the postwar petit-bourgeoisie. From his protagonist’s point of view, he states: L’appartamento si trovava all’ultimo piano di una casa di costruzione recente, liscia e bianca come se fosse fatta di gesso, situata in una viuzza in leggera discesa. Tutto un lato della strada era occupato da una fila di case simili alla nostra, lungo l’altro correva il muro di cinta del parco di una villa privata, dal quale sporgevano i rami di grandi alberi fronzuti. Era una vista bellissima, come feci osservare ad Emilia, e ci si poteva quasi illudere che quel parco di cui, qua e là, dove gli alberi si diradavano, potevamo intravedere i viali serpeggianti, le fontane e gli spiazzi, non 77

Alberto Moravia takes a moral stance against Neorealist cinema in his novel Il disprezzo: “Anche questa volta pensai: ‘Certo non dirà che il film neorealistico ha stancato i produttori perché non è redditizio… sentiamo un po’ che dirà’. E infatti, Battista, dopo un istante di riflessione, riprese: ‘Secondo me il film neorealistico ha stancato un po’ tutti soprattutto perché non è un film sano.… Battista, con quel silenzio aveva voluto sottolineare la parola ‘sano’, passò adesso a spiegarla: ‘Quando dico che il film neorealistico non è sano, dico che non è un film che incoraggi a vivere, che aumenti la fiducia nella vita… il film neorealistico è deprimente, pessimistico, grigio… a parte il fatto che esso rappresenta l’Italia come un paese di straccioni, con gran gioia degli stranieri che hanno tutto l’interesse a pensare, appunto, che il nostro sia un paese di straccioni, a parte questo fatto dopo tutto già abbastanza importante, esso insiste troppo sui lati negativi della vita, su tutto quello che c’è di brutto, di sporco, di anormale nell’esistenza umana… insomma è un film pessimistico, malsano, un film che ricorda alla gente le sue difficoltà invece di aiutarla a sormontarle.” Moravia, Il disprezzo 903.

286 fosse diviso da noi da una strada e da un muro, e noi potessimo scendere a passeggiarci tutte le volte che l’avessimo desiderato. 78 This image, apart from exemplifying a rare description of landscape in Moravia’s writings, juxtaposes Rome’s new residential structures with Molteni’s sense of social and personal accomplishment in having provided a home for his wife Emilia. He has clear petit-bourgeois aspirations. The struggling writer wants a happy wife and a happy home, a situation in which he feels that he is living like everyone else and which provides a sense of satisfaction and security. Moravia understood the importance of environmental determinism in developing an individual’s behavior, whereas Gadda manipulates the environment to express the larger underlying chaos determining the shape of modern society.

Although Gadda may not have recognized his subconscious reasoning for exploring the development and structures of the residential quartieri suburbani, he does comprehend the visual elements that drew his contemporaries to the more squalid structures of Rome’s borgate: La periferia otteneva, un tempo, le cure, e suscitava l’interesse, degli ‘investitori’ tipo 1890-1920, anche 1920-30: case popolari: gremite di popolo retribuente al cinque sei per cento il capitale investito. È la periferia dei nostri romanzieri, la periferia dei ‘casamenti’ paradigmatici a quattro o a sei piani, scialbati in color cenere, ove la tigna, da quando a quando, carezzava le zucche degli scolari col tirasassi sotto il cuscino.

Scala A, scala B, scala C, scala D, scala E. Gabinetti rapidamente decaduti a latrine turche in seguito alla sparizione del sedile, poi fatte inservibili da intasamento cronico e conseguente regurgito d’ogni ben di Dio. Rubinetti gocciolosi da disseccamento dalla guarnizione, stecche delle persiane una sì una no, quasi che il vento d’autunno le abbia dissipate nel nulla.79

78

Moravia, Il disprezzo 852.

79

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1136

287 Gadda’s description of urban living conditions reassumes a humorous tone, presenting peripheral apartment blocks as structures that communicate a sense of sameness and repetition, an aesthetics which Horkheimer and Adorno decry. 80 It is interesting to note that the Italian writer observes the same new apartment buildings in the Roman borgate as Moravia’s protagonist Molteni, who contrarily describes them as “una vista bellissima” in Il disprezzo. Gadda, however, prefers to contrast the care initially invested by speculators under the monarchy and the Fascist regime, with the current lack of infrastructure and ugly states of disrepair. Facades bear an ashen color and bathrooms do not have toilet seats, faucets drip while window shades disappear, causing the suburban structures to resemble “Turkish latrines,” rather than be the image of an industrialized and comfortable nation. The greatest irony of all, relating to Gadda and his description of the housing projects, is that he eventually decided to move into an apartment in Rome’s periphery. Scholars often correlate this choice with the author’s apparently faltering mental health, as it certainly was not for a lack of income after Quer pasticciaccio brutto’s critical success in 1957; 81 however, it would be a fruitless enterprise to attempt to guess the intentions guiding the decisions of such an enigmatic man.

Gadda’s intimate and direct experiences with Rome’s suburban neighborhoods perhaps led to his descriptions of the housing projects not only with his sense of sight but also with his senses of touch, sound, and smell. He comments continuously on the absurd and at times offensive feelings, noises, and smells that one endures in these buildings. He 80

Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry” 120; For an in depth, contextualized examination of their theory on the culture industry’s totalizing affects on uniformity, see: Chapter 1, p. 6165.

81

Giulio Ungarelli, ed. Gadda al microfono: l’ingegnere e la Rai 1950-1955 (Torino [Turin]: Nuova ERI Edizioni Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1993) 232; Gian Carlo Ferretti, Ritratto di Gadda (Bari & Roma: Laterza, 1987) 170.

288 first sarcastically remarks on the addition of rooftop terraces to the modern structures.

The author deems these architectural elements to be completely useless, since the Roman summer sun heats them to fifty-five degrees centigrade (one hundred thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit), rendering them urban islands of suicide. He also notes that they are likewise worthless during the wintertime, serving only to disperse the cacophony of flip-flopping sandals through residents’ ceilings as inhabitants walk across the terraces to hang their laundry. 82 Gadda continues his sarcastic interpretation of these buildings as he criticizes their relatively restricted space, both within individual apartments as well as within stairwells. Certain questionably extant statistical studies that he mentions note that ceilings have dropped two-tenths of a meter, while the stairwells have narrowed to the point that residents cannot carry furniture up or down them. Gadda also reminds the reader to notice these edifices’ scent, commenting: “Al sommo non bisognerebbe dimenticare lo sfiato, bocche aperte o finestre o addirittura un torracchio per lo sfiato. La cosiddetta tromba delle scale si comporta come la canna di un camino rispetto ‘all’aria viziata’ e a tutte le puzze della casa, cioè della palazzina di trentadue appartamenti.” 83 He then fancifully lists the variety of odors permeating throughout such buildings, including broccoli and dirty shoes. Gadda’s account of the so-called modern structures in Rome’s borgate may not be a story in the traditional scene, but his “Quartieri suburbani” certainly provides a colorful, alternative description to Pasolini’s poetic protagonist and to Moravia’s intermittent existential backdrop.

82

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1140.

83

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1142.

289 The essay “Quartieri suburbani” undoubtedly exposes the writer’s impressions of the architecture and urbanistic organization of the capital city’s poorest and perhaps ironically most modern areas. As discussed, his tone is often sarcastic or humorous, for he personifies the shantytowns that suddenly appear on Rome’s periphery and recounts the most unpleasant sensory effects that they have on visitors. Gadda, however, did not earn literary fame for his representation of the borgate as Pasolini had; instead, the originally Milanese author solidified his role as a major exponent of Roman culture with his murder mystery Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. This novel, which he initially composed during the immediate post-Fascist-era, received a facelift at the behest of the young publisher Livio Garzanti. The poet Attilio Bertolucci, who was also the father of Pasolini’s cinematic disciple, Bernardo Bertolucci, introduced Gadda to the ambitious thirty-two year-old in 1953. 84 Garzanti asked him to re-elaborate the novel originally published between 1946 and 1947, and Gadda undertook the task in the years 1955-57. This three-year span coincides with the initial appearance of Pasolini’s controversial novel Ragazzi di vita, with the caso letterario and the criminal trial that ensued, as well as with Pasolini’s increased participation in Rome’s literary and cinematic circuit. It is impossible that the two authors, working in the same city within the same professional milieu, had no impact on one another, as it was clear that they were at least acquaintances. 85 In fact, most scholars cite Gadda’s linguistic influence on the younger author, since Pasolini greatly admired his fellow writer’s pastiche of high and

84

Citati, “Ricordo di Gadda” xii.

85

Ferretti 169.

290 low registers as well as of dialect and Italian. 86 No one, however, has explored the reverse influence that Pasolini had on Gadda, particularly in terms of the older author’s increasingly demythified representation of Rome in the second version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.

“That Awful Mess” of Urban Renewal The restructured and expanded novel, published in 1957, presents an increased complexity of images that exemplify the author’s intellectual distantiation from Fascism as well as a more intimate knowledge of Rome. Rome, as in the book’s first redazione (version), remains the “Urbe” with a capital “U”, epitome and paradigm of all Western cities, and the urban heart of Fascism’s “Third Italy.” The open-ended murder mystery takes place in 1927, three years after the Aventine Secession, when Mussolini seized parliamentary power through violence and corruption, and four years after Il Duce first enunciated his building ambitions for the great capital of Fascism. He envisioned a remythification of Rome, an urbanistic vision that celebrated and evoked Rome’s legendary imperial past. As Mussolini himself stated on December 31, 1925 during the ceremony of installing his government in office: Questo deve porsi a contatto diretto con ciò che costruirono gli imperatori romani: bisogna far piazza pulita di quanto si era costruito nei ‘secoli della decadenza’ attorno ai ruderi che devono grandeggiare nella necessaria solitudine come trofei del passato, nell’impossibilità forse di allineare dei trofei del presente. Da piazza Venezia si deve vedere il Colosseo, da piazza Colonna il Pantheon. 87 86

For extensive information on this matter, see: Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Nuovi questioni linguistiche,” Empirismo eretico (1972; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 5-24; Michelina Tosi, La società urbana nell’analisi del romanzo: La struttura della società romana in Moravia, Gadda e Pasolini (Roma: Editrice Ianua, 1980); and Francesco Ferri, Linguaggio, passione e ideologia: Pier Paolo Pasolini tra Gramsci, Gadda e Contini (Roma: Progetti museali editore, 1996).

87

Insolera 118.

291

This quotation reveals the basis of Mussolini’s sventramento and risanamento programs in Rome. The Fascist leader planned and completed the demolition of large swathes of Medieval and Renaissance structures, particularly homes and small shops that surrounded ancient ruins within the city walls. Mussolini aimed to transform Rome into a monumental showcase, while he displaced the now homeless, poor residents of the city’s central areas “for free” into the capital’s first borgate. 88 The benefit of hindsight and the full elimination of Fascist censorship by 1957 permitted Gadda to present Mussolini’s urbanistic aspirations for Rome with more scathing irony and humor than he had in the first version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto.

The author repeatedly undercuts Mussolini’s plans for a moral and urban risanamento, more popularly termed sventramento, in his novel, juxtaposing mythical toponyms with abject contemporary reality: Ereno passati li tempi belli… che pe un pizzico ar mandolino d’una serva a piazza Vittorio, c’era un brodo longo de mezza paggina. La moralizzazione dell’Urbe, e de tutt’Italia insieme, er concetto d’una maggiore austerità civile, si apriva allora la strada. Se po’ dì, anzi, che procedeva a gran passi. Delitti e storie sporche ereno scappati via pe sempre da la terra Ausonia, come un brutto in sogno che se la squama.

Furti, corbellate, puttanate, ruffianate, rapina, cocaina, vetriolo, veleno de tossico d’arsenico per acchiappà li sorci, aborti manu armata, glorie de lenoni e de bari, giovenotti che se fanno pagà er vermutte da una donna, che ve pare? La divina terra d’Ausonia manco s’aricordava più che robba fusse. 89

88

Insolera assumes a rather sarcastic tone when he describes the sventramenti in his urbanistic study of Rome during Mussolini’s rule: “Gli abitanti delle zone sventrate, o delle baracche raggiunte dall’espansione dei quartieri signorili, venivano trasportati ‘gratuitamente’ nelle borgate dagli autocarri della milizia volontaria per la sicurezza nazionale. Lí giunti si trovavano dinanzi alle ‘case rapidissime’ costruite con materiali autarchici dall’Istituto case popolari, o case in muratura poco più solide e civili.”

Insolera 136.

89

Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, Romanzi e racconti II, eds.

Giorgio Pinotti et al. (1957; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 72.

292 Gadda delineates the ironic societal transformations through crimes, which seem to be surfacing in an inverse correlation to Rome’s, and by antonomasia, Italy’s, supposedly more austere civil moral environment. The writer utilizes popular journalistic discourse to initiate his commentary, jesting that a servant’s plucking of a mandolin in Piazza Vittorio used to be enough to fill half a page in a newspaper. Now that times have changed and the great moralization initiated by the left-unnamed Fascist party was proceeding at full speed, Rome and the country were seeing the opposite of the party’s planned and desired effects. Gadda juxtaposes his declaration, an ironic negation, of an explosion of crimes and filthy stories within “Ausonia,” a name initially given to Southern Italy by ancient Greek explorers, which evolved into an archaic-poetic designation for the entire peninsula. The mythical thus intertwines with the base in the novel, meeting in Italy, and rendering the nation and its capital as sites neither fully legendary nor criminal. As Gadda notes, the two have always coexisted, but Italy perhaps forgot who she truly was. This notion, which follows shortly after the discovery of the second and worse of two crimes committed in the same upper-class apartment building on via Merulana, formulates the ideological basis of Quer pasticciaccio brutto and the truth about Rome. The city’s legends and myths have always coexisted with its prostitutes, pimps, and thieves, though visitors and historians may prefer to remember the former rather than the latter.

Gadda extends his ironic depiction of the city into a series of rhetorical questions, which implicate Mussolini as well as the Pope in the perpetuation of a false, pristine image of Rome: Pensare che ce fossero dei ladri, a Roma, ora? Co quer gallinaccio co la faccia fanatica a Palazzo Chiggi? Cor Federazoni che voleva carcerà pe forza tutti li storcioni de lungotevere? O quanno che se sbaciucchiaveno ar cinema? Tutti li cani in fregola de la Lungara? Cor Papa milanese e co

293 l’Anno Santo de du anni prima? E co li sposi novelli? Co li polli novelli a scarpinà pe tutta Roma? 90 The author refrains from directly writing “Benito Mussolini,” tying the dictator’s identity instead to Palazzo Chigi, as though to avoid perpetuating the Fascist leader’s memory by including his name in the text. Palazzo Chigi and its balcony serve as the architectural embodiments of Il Duce throughout Quer pasticciaccio brutto, which historically became, for all intents and purposes, Mussolini’s headquarters after the dictator seized power in parliament as its President following the Aventine Secession.

Gadda hardly presents Mussolini as a man, but as a bombastic mouthpiece of bourgeois morality. The author virulently condemns Il Duce’s words and demonstrates their ultimate impotence: Giornalisti itecaquani lo andavano intervistare a palazzo Chigi, le sue rare opinioni, ghiotti ghiotti, le annotavano in un’agendina presto, presto, da non lasciarne addietro un sol micolo. Le opinioni del mascelluto valicavano l’oceano, la mattina a le otto ereno hià un cable, desde Italia, su la prensa dei pionieri, dei venditori di vermut. ‘La flotta ha occupato Corfù! Quell’uomo è la provvidenza d’Italia.’ La mattina dopo er controcazzo: desde la misma Italia. 91 According to the author, Mussolini failed in his colonial ambitions, just as he fails in inciting the capture of Liliana Balducci’s murderer in the novel. Il Duce is a man of empty words, not of action, sending officials in his stead to the Policlinico’s morgue to pay the State’s last respects to the young woman, while he barks from Palazzo Chigi: ‘Il bieco assassino dovrebbe essere già fucilato da sei ore’.” 92 This phrase’s intensity comes across in its brevity, as well as in the time the leader allots for the murderer’s trial and 90

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 73.

91

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 56.

92

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 87.

294 punishment, which have already passed. Such hyperbole, intended to communicate power, ironically diminishes in potency as it remains simply rhetoric. Gadda’s impression of Mussolini, and by association, his propagation of the myth of Rome, degrades especially when the author refers to the Fascist leader as “sto Pupazzo a Palazzo Chigi, [che strilla] dar balcone come uno stracciarolo,” 93 and the “chilo fetente d’ ‘o balcone ‘e palazzo Chigge.” 94 The author’s irreverence continues in the second half the novel, the section added to the version initially composed after the fall of Fascism, delving into new monikers for Il Duce. The former dictator becomes “il Truce in cattedra, a palazzo der Mappamondo, [che] avrebbe chiamato le direttive da impartire… alle sottostanti gerarchie: cioè a li vasi de coccio l’uno de sotto all’artro che se le bevevano a garganella in cascata, le sue truculente fessaggini;” 95 “Quer Tale appeso al muro: un grugno, perch’era nato scemo…;” 96 and the “Somaro…. Il Mascellone Autarchico,” who through his war for grain, would force his forty-eight million subjects to leave for Canada to “mendicar maccheroni ai pellirosse.” 97 Mussolini and his policies have no currency in Gadda’s novel, and when compared with the text’s first version published in Letteratura, one immediately perceives that the author’s condemnation of Fascism’s moral compass

93

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 90.

94

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 106.

95

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 161.

96

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 265.

97

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto 267.

295 heightened over the years. 98 As Gadda’s biographer Gian Carlo Ferretti notes, the author’s vehement exhortations seem to represent more an anti-Mussolini-ism rather than an Antifascism: Gadda in particolare, riaprendo anche un discorso sostanzialmente interrotto o deviato dalla totale furia asociale e aclassista della Cognizione, vede in Mussolini (come si è anticipato in parte) il massimo traditore e tralignatore, il principale responsabile della corruzione e degenerazione della miglior tradizione liberale-borghese, e al tempo stesso la suprema incarnazione di tutti i vizi di narcisismo retorico, profetismo istrionico, criminosa insipienza, brutale opportunismo, greve supponenza, che egli era venuto condannando e satireggiando in tante figure di vati, generali e borghesi. 99 Gadda expresses his disdain for the regime and its ideological goals, in fact, by parodying the Fascist leader, declaring him “that awful turkey with a fanatical face,” as well as by lampooning the Fascist municipal force, the Federazione Fascista dell’Urbe, phonetically reduced to Federazoni. The writer sarcastically muses on the extremism of their policies, asking how there could possibly be thieves in Rome, when the Black Shirts are there to arrest anyone caught kissing along the riverside or in a movie theatre. Gadda even condemns the lack of papal moral authority in Rome, jabbing at the ineffectiveness

98

Only two of the abovementioned quotes appear in the first version of the novel, and the language Gadda uses is far less ironic. The first appears as: “Penzare che ce fossino dei ladri, a Roma, ora?

Col romagnolo de Predappio a Palazzo Chigi? Cor Federzoni che voleva fa carcerà pe fforza tutti l’amorosi de lungotevere?... o quanno che se baciucchiaveno ar cinema?... tutti li cani in frégola d’aa Lungara?... Cor Papa e co’ l’Anno Santo?... E co’ gli sposi novelli?… Co’ li polli novelli… a scarpinà po’ tutta Roma?...”

Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Redazione di Letteratura,” Romanzi e racconti II, eds., Giorgio Pinotti et al. (1946-7; Milano: Garzanti, 2007) 346. The ellipses do not assume the function of filling in an obvious conclusion, but create the effect of tapering thoughts. The sentences in the 1946-7 version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto lack the punch of the second, more popular version. The other quotation that indirectly refers to Mussolini is: “Quello de Palazzo Chigi nun j’era parzo vero deddì la sua puro lui, de sopra de tutti: ‘Il bieco assassino dovrebbe essere già fucilato da 48 ore’.” Gadda, “Redazione di Letteratura,” 359. This pronouncement falls short in linguistic strength in comparison to the novel’s later edition, for Gadda does not contextualize it within state visits to the Policlinico’s morgue. It stands on its own, and in addition, the time frame for condemning the murderer to death is longer, effectively reducing the intensity of Mussolini’s sentencing.

99

Ferretti 127.

296 of the Church’s Holy Year in 1925 to inspire “honorable conduct” in its capital. As he quips: “Cor Papa milanese e co l’Anno Santo de du anni prima? E co li sposi novelli? Co li polli novelli a scarpinà pe tutta Roma?” 100 The author likewise ponders how thieves could exist alongside all the newlyweds and baby chicks wandering around Rome. This juxtaposition of marriage, a bourgeois institution, with displaced farm animals set within the city is meant to parody the former, highlighting the not-so-modern image of certain aspects of Italy’s capital city.

The pastiche of Rome’s complex and contradicting identities arguably finds its literary counterpart in Gadda’s novel. In a television interview with Alberto Ciattini in September 1962, Gadda discusses how the Eternal City inspired him to write Quer pasticciaccio brutto, a book not only unique within his own oeuvre, but also within the entire Italian canon. The two men convened to discuss the ideation of the novel at the Chiesa dei Santi Quattro (The Church of the Four Saints), where Liliana Balducci, the novel’s murder victim, regularly attended church services. Ciattini commences the discussion by stating: “Siamo un po’ nel cuore ambientale del romanzo Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana che lei ha scritto.” Gadda continues the conversation indicating where they are: - Direi di sì. Siamo ai Quattro Santi Coronati.

- Che ha una parte importante nei primi capitoli del suo romanzo.

- Sì, è un mezzo con cui mi sono immesso direttamente nel cuore architettonico di Roma e nell’ambiente che potremmo chiamare paleocristiano e romanico di Roma. […]

- Possiamo domandarle ora in che modo nacque in lei l’intento di scrivere Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana?”

- Il Pasticciaccio deriva soprattutto da una specie di innamoramento della situazione edilizio-urbanistica della Roma dei primi secoli, cioè della Roma che ci rivela costruzioni romaniche di cui abbiamo un esempio 100

Ferretti 73.

297 abbastanza notevole. Si tratta di quella specie di rocca, di fortilizio, che è oggi l’entrata ai Santi Quattro Coronati.101 Gadda’s inspiration for writing the novel, as he declares, derives precisely from the Rome that Mussolini disdained, the part that was post-imperial, medieval, as well as picturesque. 102 As an engineer, and an architectural dilettante, who admits that “una delle meno padroneggiate mie stravaganze, quasi un’anomalia psichica, ha timbro ingegneresco-edilizio-architettonico,” 103 the author took a great interest in exploring the city’s structures and organization during his two periods of residency there. It is unclear how much time he precisely dwelled in Rome during the 1920s, as his job often sent him abroad on business, but certainly after he permanently transferred to the city in 1950, at the behest of his friend Angioletti to work for the RAI, his familiarity with the Eternal City increased. 104 Gadda’s preference for the antique, as stated above, does not hide his undeniable interest in Rome’s urbanistic evolution that occurred through the city’s lifetime. One of Rome’s greatest architectural traditions, in fact, relates to the city’s palimpsestic style.

Architects and builders, for centuries, have recycled materials, known as spoglia, from older, ruined edifices and placed them within the foundations, structure or decoration of 101

Carlo Emilio Gadda and Alberto Ciattini, “Il seguito del ‘Pasticciaccio’,” Arti e scienze, September 4, 1962; Rpd. in Giulio Ungarelli, ed., Gadda al microfono: l’ingegnere e la Rai 1950-1955 (Torino [Turin]: Nuova ERI Edizioni Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1993) 147-148.

102

Antonio Cederna provides a partial list of the churches demolished under Mussolini’s regime between 1925 and 1942, for a variety of urbanistic reasons, including: the isolation of the Campidoglio; the construction of via dell’Impero (now via dei Fori Imperiali); the destruction of medieval neighborhoods; and the creation and enlargement of Largo Argentina. Antonio Cederna, Mussolini Urbanista: Lo sventramento di Roma negli anni del consenso (1979; Venezia: Corte del Fontego, 2006) 252-254.

103

Carlo Emilio Gadda, “Il difetto e la stravaganza che amiamo,” Epoca. A. IV, n. 119: 17 January 1953. Rpt. in Saggi, giornali, favole, e altri scritti, Vol. 1, eds., L. Orlando, C. Martignoni, and D. Isella Opere di Carlo Emilio Gadda: Vol. 3, (Milano: Garzanti, 1992) 1057.

104

Ferretti 158.

298 newer ones creating an urban fabric of pastiche. The Basilica of San Clemente, located near Rome’s Colosseum, is perhaps the best example of this practice. The twelfth-century church, which stands at the modern-day street level, serves as the top tier of a fourlayered structure. Under it sits a fourth century church, followed by a second century mithraium, 105 and finally at the lowest level, one finds a first century BCE patrician domus. 106 Gadda expresses his fascination with Rome’s urban pastiche in a second television interview with Claudio Barbati: Basta dare un’occhiata ad alcuni tra i più famosi edifici di Roma, per vedere come gli artisti abbiano saputo in ogni tempo utilizzare vecchie strutture e vecchi materiali, rielaborando, aggiungendo, deformando, fino a creare opere architettoniche nuove, in cui l’unità del disegno si articola in una molteplicità di linguaggi. 107 The author identifies “a multiplicity of languages” in Rome’s architectural palimpsest. It is a baroque or macaronic ars combinatoria that one can just as easily use to describe his writing technique. The success of Gadda’s representation of Rome in Quer pasticciaccio brutto, thus, hinges on the city’s long architectural tradition, from its beginnings, through its Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque transformations, to its modern, Fascist, and postwar interventions. Since Mussolini despised the combination of styles for their lack of rationality and order (a feeling with which Gadda certainly sympathized at one time), Gadda sees in Rome the physical, visible counterpart to his novel’s vehement and impassioned Antifascist rhetoric.

105

A “mythraium” was a temple dedicated to the rites of the cult of Mythrais, one of the secretive, monotheistic religions practiced in Ancient Rome..

106

A domus, without delving into all the sociological aspects of its meaning, was essentially an ancient Roman villa.

107

Carlo Emilio Gadda et al. “Carlo Emilio Gadda: Intervista a più voci,” Sulla scena della vita, eds. Claudio Barbati, Ludovica Ripa di Meana and Gian Carlo Roscioni, 5 May 1972; Rpt. in. Giulio Ungarelli, ed. Gadda al microfono 168.

299 Gadda’a interest in Rome and its Antifascist elements correlate with Quer pasticciaccio’s language just as much they do with the novel’s genre and title. This giallo, or detective story, narrates the occurrence and investigation of two crimes committed in the same upper-middle-class apartment building on via Merulana, a large avenue extending between the basilicas Santa Maria Maggiore (Saint Mary Major) and San Giovanni in Laterano (Saint John in Lateran). A traditionally popular, rather than elevated, literary form, this murder mystery reveals the criminal lurking within and around Mussolini’s supposedly “sanitized” Third Rome. The novel’s two major crimes are inextricably linked to their location, as confirmed by the text’s macaronic title and the protagonist’s, Francesco “Don Ciccio” Ingravallo’s, continual return to “il palazzo d’Oro, o dei pescicani” 108 at via Merulana 219. The first offence that the inspector investigates involves the theft of the countess Mantegazzi, who remains relatively unharmed from the event. The second crime, however, is far more grave. It concerns the murder and theft of Liliana Balducci, an acquaintance and possible love interest of Don Ciccio, who is found in her home with her throat slit and her body laying limp in a puddle of blood. Gadda ties his narrative together through the women’s common address, yet separates the two case’s investigations, for as Ingravallo claims, the crimes have no common connection except for “la topica, cioè casuale esterna ‘e chella gran fama dei pescicani pesci: e del loro oro del diavolo.” 109 The topical, nevertheless, is important to the novel’s development.

The author, who recognized the communicative efficacy of newspapers, interlaces references to other felonies and misdemeanors committed across the city using place-

108

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio 48.

109

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio 71.

300 names as identification marks for crimes. The street names serve as daily reminders of what is going wrong in the city, which in turn, undermine the Fascist ambition of restoring Rome to its so-called former glory. The articles, journalists, and vendors practically create a map of the capital’s crimes, sensationalizing some cases, and proving that no section of Rome was exempt from the problem: “E stamattina, con chell’ata storia della marchesa di viale Liegi… e poi ‘o pasticcio ccà vicino, alle Botteghe Oscure;” 110 “In quel torno di tempo i giornali avevano molto parlato del ‘tenebroso’ delitto di via Valadier, poi di quell’altro, ancor più fosco, di via Montebello;” 111 and “Li cronisti e il telefono avevano rotto l’anima tutta la sera: tanto a via Marulana che giù, a Sante Stefene. Sicché, la mattina, un subisso. ‘Orribile delitto a via Merulana.’ Gridavano li strilloni, co li pacchi fra li ginocchi de la gente…” 112 These quotations, extracted from the section of Quer pasticciaccio brutto that Gadda rewrote between 1955 and 1957, enhance the story’s representation of historical realities in comparison with the first serial edition, while debasing the “glorious” image which Mussolini attempted to establish.

Gadda’s interest in Rome’s urban fabric, and as shall be discussed below, in architectural detail, demonstrates the writer’s training, if not true secondary interest, in engineering and construction. He attended design courses at the Politecnico di Milano, according to his mother’s wishes, so that he could continue the family tradition of working in engineering; 113 nevertheless, the Gran Lombardo, a nickname assigned to him

110

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio 27.

111

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio 37.

112

Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio 72.

113

Ornella Selvafolta provides a detailed inquiry into Gadda’s architectural education, noting: “I programmi della scuola di ingegneria nel biennio preparatorio comprendono infatti corsi di disegno di ornato e di architettura elementare che si svolgono soprattutto sui modelli del passato e sulla grammatica

301

by Contini, had literary aspirations and abandoned his first career to pursue writing in the 1930s. This change in vocation did not affect his technical and detail-oriented way of thinking and his constant desire to create order out of chaos. In his essay, “Il difetto e stravaganza che amiamo,” he describes his flâneuristic desire to pass time strolling aimlessly, mentally envisioning urbanistic and architectural structures: Ho l’irrefrenabile desiderio di passeggiare muto, assorto, a capo chino, costruendo mentalmente un edificio: villa, casa, scuola, caserma, ospedale, fortezza speronata a pentagono, e mura e torri di castella, terme di Caracalla; anche opere idrauliche, portuali e marittime, canali, vicoli, dighe e sbarramenti di presa, imbrigliature di fiume, argini, strade alzaie […]. Costruivo mentalmente la struttura muraria… pensando con incredibile alacrità le dimensioni e le forme, insino ai particolari più minuti…. 114 The scholar Ornella Selvafolta investigated this interest in depth, visiting Gadda’s library to discover over eighty texts dedicated to the study of construction, architecture, and art.

In her analysis, she determines that Gadda appreciated mostly structures that still appeared alive and operating while demonstrating a conscious awareness of the past: “l’inclinazione è cioè per una modernità che deve sostanziarsi nel legame con la tradizione.” 115 Gadda’s predilection for architectural pastiche, thus, necessarily excluded the areas newly constructed under Mussolini and the Republic, those without historical grounding in history, which one might most readily note as the borgate.

Gadda never directly mentions the borgate in Quer pasticciaccio brutto; nevertheless, the structures and presence of Rome’s underclass gradually settling on

della composizione classica….” Ornella Selvafolta, “Libri di costruzioni, di architetti, e, a margine, di artisti,” Nella biblioteca di Carlo Emilio Gadda: Atti del Convegno e Catalogo della Mostra, Milano marzo-aprile 1999 (Milano: Libri Scheiwiller, 2000) 89.

114

Gadda, “Il difetto e la stravaganza che amiamo” 1058.

115

Selvafolta 89.

302 Rome’s periphery find their way into the text. The borgate, already noted as the major component of Rome’s disorganic modern development, often arose from pre-existing entities constructed along and around the city walls, places of transit, and military posts during the post-World War I years. 116 These areas, before being denoted as borgate, often bore the colonialist title villaggi abissini to connote their underdeveloped nature.

According to Donatella Cialoni, an art historian and photographer, these outposts “venivano tollerati dal potere politico, che limitava in genere i suoi provvedimenti alla città di rappresentanza ed attendeva che arrivasse una qualche conveniente proposta di edificabilità delle diverse aree per cancellare le baraccopoli e spostarne gli abitanti un po’ più lontano.” 117 Gadda certainly observed these areas, as evidenced by the fact he documented the presence of hovels and the illegal activities that occurred in and around them in his novel, as well as parodies them his essay “Quartieri suburbani.”

Gadda presents the borgate and borgatari as a sort of urban parasitic infestation that seems to auto-procreate. He first acknowledges the tenuous reasons for which peasants transfer to the capital from distant regions around the peninsula: the brother of a cousin of a mother of a maid says they know someone who can find them work. 118 The writer then artistically describes the difficulties that such people confront once that have arrived in the city. There is no work, nor anywhere to reside, so they live precariously and through expedients until the authorities discover that they are without papers and send them back to their hometowns. After two weeks, however, “eccoli qua: un’altra 116

Cialoni 205-208.

117

Cialoni 208.

118

“Certi poveri, i nullatenenti di nullo mestiere, ci arrivano o ci filtrano alla chetichella da più regioni d’Italia: tirati dall’amico, a cui pensano magari di associarsi per il commercio delle stilografiche, dal fratello, dalla cugina, dalla madre di una domestica che hanno conosciuto a Cremona: quando vi si prestano servizio.” Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1131.

303 volta: ad annidarsi in un’altra baracca, d’un altro quartiere della ‘periferia’: o a rannicchiarsi nottetempo nel ‘lettino in famiglia’: o da signora sola ‘inaffittacamere’ che a fine mese, faute de mieux, si contenta d’essere già stata retribuita in natura.” 119 There is no permanent way to expel the indigent from the city, for they always find their way back in. Gadda shortly thereafter shifts his attention to the migrant workers’ shacks, portraying them as incongruous, crumbling, tentative structures that establish themselves wherever they can. He even sarcastically personifies “the hut,” with the tragically stubborn dignity of a human being: La baracca s’è insediata dove ha potuto, la baracca ha figliato. Dice: Quale padrone dell’apprezzamento, quale proprietario terriero, quale società immobiliare, quale speculatore sulle aree fabbricabili oserà cacciarmi di qui? Le mie pareti di sacco, il mio tetto di lamiera non zincata, anzi arrugginita, albergano i sacri lari del povero, del disoccupato, del barbone, della libera amatrice. 120 The shacks that appear in this piece have far more character than the ones described in Gadda’s prose masterpiece; nevertheless, the presence of such structures in Quer pasticciaccio brutto’s supposedly sanitized, bourgeois Rome highlights the failed morality and myth that the government endeavored to actualize.

The plot of Quer pasticciaccio brutto eventually shifts away from the elegant palazzo on via Merulana to what Don Ciccio and his investigative collaborators recognize as the countryside, the Agro Romano, until they move even further out along the margins as they approach the Castelli Romani, the mountain towns surrounding Rome. Gadda’s identification of Rome’s outlying rural areas as borgate would have been a misnomer, as

119

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1131.

120

Gadda, “Quartieri suburbani” 1132.

304 these sections outside the city had not yet been urbanized. The author does, however, describe the state and presence of baracche, hovels, or as one can argue pre-borgate, that the poor constructed within the capital city’s walls. The first reference, which appears exactly as it does in the novel’s first edition, briefly details the location of the home of Liliana Balducci’s housemaid, whom Ingravallo temporarily considers as a murder suspect: “No, la servente no la gera de Marino, no la gera dei Castelli Romani… Abitava difatti, da epoca immemorabile, in una catapecchiucola delle più tignose a via de’ Querceti, a metà, soto el dedrìo dei Santi Quattro, con una sorella, una gemella, un poco più piccina di lei, poco, poco.” 121 This quotation offers a view into the lives of Rome’s urban underclass, whom Mussolini shortly thereafter ordered to be deportated as part of his sventramento program. Via dei Querceti and the Church of the Santi Quattro Coronati respectively run and stand between the Colosseum and the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, 122 two highly mythicized Roman monuments. The description of this decrepit hovel reflects the perennial decrepit state of many of Rome’s structures, a point which Pasolini denounced throughout his Roman career. This shack, however, provides a notable pre-Pasolinian and pre-Fascist sventramento image of the capital’s poor dwellings before the regime had an opportunity to enact its radical urban construction and demolition policies. It also stands as a reminder of the previous government’s urbanistic plans, which had cleared several sections of Rome for the 1911 Exposition, in celebration of Italian capital’s fiftieth anniversary. Areas, including Piazza Venezia, where the 121 122

Gadda, “Quer pasticciaccio” 38.

The Colosseum’s mythical charge should be readily recognizable to most members of Western Civilization, however the Lateran’s symbolism is a little more culture specific. This church complex once served as the seat of the papacy, and is currently one of the four Jubilee basilicas of Rome. It is a major monument of the Catholic, Second Rome.

305 Vittoriano stands, Piazza Colonna, the Passeggiata Archeologica running from the imperial fora to the Appian Way, all underwent monumentalization and restructuring during the monarchy. As adopted by Mussolini and his piccone, 123 a nickname he would eventually acquire, the government pushed the poor out of the city center: Nella fretta delle inaugurazioni e della sistemazione dei monumenti furono allontanate dal centro molte famiglie ed alloggiate con mezzi di fortuna nei diversi accampamenti a Porta Metronia e a San Giovanni. Si andarono così ad aggiungere a quelle che, nel censimento dell’11, risultavano abitare entro grotte, cantine, soffitte, botteghe, baracche e capanne. 124 Gadda, thus, documents the early ghettoization of the Eternal City’s poor. He most likely incorporated the maidservant’s home as a reminder that Rome, even during the 1920s, was a contradictory space, both an emerging, modernizing metropolitan center as well as a retrograded quasi-primitive town as demonstrated by the underclass’ inadequate dwellings. The author’s commentary on Rome’s socio-urbanistic problems were, thus, acknowledgements that not all the blame belongs to Mussolini and his aggressive Fascist policies; nevertheless, Gadda clearly presents an anti-Mussolinian agenda by demythifying the Urbs in as many social and urbanistic ways as possible.

The developmental changes that occurred, from the time of Fascism’s inception through the post-World War II period, appear throughout the text as sporadic indirect discourse interjections coming from an anonymous narrator. This narrator is well aware of the differences between the “Rome-between-the-wars” and “1950s Rome,” as he or

123

According to Emilio Gentile, the pickaxe, or piccone, became the symbol of the “frenesia con la quale Mussolini volle personalmente partecipare alla distruzione dei quartieri vecchi e pittoreschi.

Durante il ventennio, giornali e cinegiornali diedero grande risalto all’immagine del duce, ora in uniforme ora in borghese, che in cima al tetto di una casa sferrava il primo colpo di piccone per dare inizio ai lavori di demolizione.” Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra 72. Italo Insolera, on the other hand, takes a more acerbic tone calling Mussolini “il piccone demolitore che distruggeva Roma.” Insolera 127.

124

Cialoni 192.

306 she highlights the transformed topographical characteristics in a discussion following the arrest of Ines Ciampini, the initial murder suspect of the novel’s second edition: La ‘strada de campagna’ si riuscì a scoprire che doveva essere una strada (in quegli anni tuttavia romita e campestre) del Celio, fra silenti pini ad ombrello e campi di carciofi e qualche stalla, e diruti muri e un archivolto o due, camminata, al cader della notte, dai passi meravigliosi della solitudine, così cara agli amanti: forse via di San Paolo della Croce, con più probabilità via della Navicella o di Santo Stefano Rotondo.

L’archivolto era quello di San Paolo, se non l’arco di Villa Celimontana a lato Santa Maria in Dòmnica. La ritonna… ‘dove manco ce stanno più li preti’, non era, non poteva essere er Tempio D’Agrippa, dove i segugi s’erano riportati col pensiero, subito escludendo dato che non sorge ‘in campagna’. Era invece Santo Stefano Rotondo, precluso al culto, a quegli anni, in ragione di certi Lavori di riprìstino. 125 The two cases in which the narrator states “quegli anni” demarcate noted changes in Rome’s urban fabric. The first occasion refers to the characteristics of the Caelian Hill, one of Rome’s legendary seven hills, 126 which remained an underdeveloped, inner-city countryside, throughout the twentieth century. The co-presence of dialectical states, the urban and the rural, highlights the un-imperial, un-glorifiable state of Rome within the walls of which farmers cultivated artichokes and maintained livestock in stalls. The second occasion when “quegli anni” appears is in Gadda’s reference to Fascism’s refurbishment of Santo Stefano Rotondo, one of the most ancient central plan, or circular, 125 126

Cialoni 163.

Mario San Filippo provides a succinct, yet elaborate explanation of the seven hills or the Septimontium in his analysis of Rome’s millennial urbanistic transformations: “Il Septimontium doveva essere costituito dagli insediamenti arcaici del Palatino, Germalo, Velia, Fagutale, Calio, Oppio, Cispio.

Nell’antico Septimontium erano collegate le comunità dei singoli villaggi primitivi e il ricordo di quest’antico legame, ancora nei secoli repubblicani e imperiali, era tramandato da una solenne processione religiosa, che dopo tanto tempo ancora percorreva i luoghi dei villaggi primitivi. Probabilmente il nome Septimontium derivava da ‘i sette monti’ oppure da ‘i monti protetti da un recinto’ (saepta). In definitiva il Septimontium non coincideva con i sette colli ‘classici’: il Quirinale, il Viminale, l’Esquilino, (con le tre cima del Cespio, del Fagutale e dell’Oppio), il Celio, il Campidoglio, il Palatino (con le due cime minori del Germalo e della Velia), l’Aventino.” San Filippo 141. Christopher Hibbert takes a more traditional stance, asserting: “The seven hills of Rome are usually taken to be the Palatine, the Esquiline, the Viminal, the Quirinal, the Capitol, the Caelian and the Aventine. The Pincio and the Janiculum are omitted from the traditional list because they were never part of the ancient city.” Hibbert 315.

307 churches in Rome. It may seem counter-intuitive that Mussolini would have any interest in a remnant of Christian Rome; however, the structure’s age, datable to the fifth century, equated it with imperial antiquity and thus spared it from demolition. Gadda superimposes time periods just as seamlessly as his novel superimposes languages and Rome’s structures superimpose one another. Every element of the book, from the temporal to the linguistic and thematic, weaves disorder into a web of order. 127 His novel embodies Pirandello’s notion of umorismo: “L’umorismo, come vedremo, per il suo intimo, specioso, essenziale processo, inevitabilmente scompone, disordina, discorda; quando, comunemente, l’arte in genere, com’era insegnata dalla scuola, dalla retorica, era sopra tutto composizione esteriore, accordo logicamente ordinato.” 128 The novel, a work of literary art, provides Gadda with the structure to create order where his humoristic view of contemporary Rome necessarily portrays reality as muddled and disorganized.

The chaotic and magmic, beautiful and ugly Rome described by Pasolini in the Introduction’s epigraphic quotation from “Il fronte della città,” 129 finds a literary cousin in Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. Gadda’s novel manages to capture the Eternal City’s oxymoronic and ironic pastiche of architecture and urbanism through its language and style, while elevating one of the 1950s major socioeconomic and cultural debates into a work of art. His presentation of Rome arguably surpasses Moravia’s, despite the latter author’s prolific production of texts that take place in the city, earning him Calvino’s aforementioned praise as the rightful writer of Rome.

127

The literary critic Walter Pedullà argues: “Un mondo siffatto si destina alla disintegrazione, all’informe originario, al pasticciaccio cui si tenta di dare ordine, disegno, figura.” Walter Pedullà, Carlo Emilio Gadda: Il narratore come delinquente (Milano: Rizzoli, 1997) 294.

128

Pirandello, L’umorismo 58.

129

See Introduction, p. 1.

308 Moravia’s invisible city, largely detected through toponyms but never imagistically embellished, remains more on the margins of the pre-Boom and even post-Boom canon of literary and cinematic investigations of Rome’s rapidly evolving urbanism, and in particular, its borgate. Other major cultural figures, such as Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni and Lizzani, continued their modernist analyses of the capital’s architecture and space while presenting increasingly complex demythified interpretations of it. Other minor artists also appeared on Rome’s cultural scene during the Economic Miracle, often following in the footsteps of Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita and his later Una vita violenta (1959), creating films, novels, as well as paintings meant to evoke the Eternal City’s less than glorious, postmodern face.

309 Conclusion: Rethinking Rome

The Pasolini School The results of Rome’s modernization and demythification during the pre-Boom period produced an abject image of the city’s transformation in films and literary texts.

The ones selected for analysis in From Myth to Borgata investigate the beginnings of a thematic trend in Italian cultural in which artists expressed an aesthetic interest in the Italian capital’s periphery. The appeal of the borgate’s abject and seamy side arguably peaked during the early Economic Boom years, at which time Pasolini published his novel, Una vita violenta (1959), as well as directed his first two films Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). These works continue Ragazzi di vita’s project of proposing the regeneration of Italian society through the pure and archaic culture of the “subproletariat,” while progressively investigating the positive as well as negative effects that the Economic Miracle had on its lives. Pasolini, likewise, captures and poetically projects his increasingly ambiguous feelings for working class and subaltern Rome as the Boom years advanced. His leap into cinema permitted him to begin experimenting with visual interpretations of his internal conflict regarding Rome’s underclass, whom he presented within a collage of realism and subjectivity, betraying his awareness of both Rome’s virtues and defects as well as his passionate interest in culturally elevating its margins. Pasolini, however, became increasingly disillusioned with the borgate and the borgatari, as the former largely evolved into characterless, petit-bourgeois agglomerations and the latter increasingly adopted the values and ambitions of his opposition, the bourgeoisie. These developments ultimately generated in Pasolini an

310 aversion to the Roman subaltern mentality, leading the author-cum-cinematographer to shift his gaze from the capital city’s periphery to more distant locations.

Other cultural figures, nevertheless, continued Pasolini’s sociopolitical project following the tremendous success of his Ragazzi di vita and Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria, often requesting that he work with them as a screenwriter.1 Many directors solicited the young author’s assistance in their films, which explore Italy’s underclass or more specifically Rome’s borgate, as society had come to recognize Pasolini as the voice of the margins. Pasolini, in the pre-Boom period, had already co-scripted Mario Soldati’s La donna del fiume (1956) as well as Mauro Bolognini’s Marisa la civetta (1957); while after Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria, the writer prepared portions of or even the entire screenplays for the following productions: Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (1959) and La giornata balorda (1961);2 Gian Rocco and Pino Serpi’s Milano Nera (1961); Cecilia Mangini’s Ignoti alla città (1958) and La canta delle marane (1960); Franco Rossi’s Morte di un amico (1959); Paolo Heuschand and Brunello Rondi’s homologous film adaptation of Una vita violenta (1962); as well as the most famous of Boom-era films, Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). Pasolini also offered one of his own screenplays, La commare secca, to his young assistant Bernardo Bertolucci, who developed the text into his first independent film in 1962, launching Berolucci into the spotlight as one of Italy’s preeminent cinematographers. Pasolini, furthermore, collaborated with his close friend and linguistic assistant Sergio Citti, who eventually shot several movies of his own 1

For an enriched discussion of Pasolini’s involvement in Fellini’s film, see: Chapter 3, p. 246-

251.

2

Alberto Moravia also collaborated on this film’s screenplay, as Bolognini ideated it as a composite of several of his Nuovi Racconti Romani, the most obvious example being “La raccomandazione,” Opere / 3: Romanzi e racconti: 1950-1959 Vol. 2, eds., Simone Casini and Enzo Siciliano (Milano: Bompiani, 2004) 1501-1512.

311 and emerged as the underclass cinematic voice of the borgate. The two directors co-wrote Citti’s Ostia from 1970, in addition to Storie scellerate from 1973.

Pasolini’s influence on Italian narrative, however, did not end with the two films he directed at the beginning of the 1960s, nor with the series of credits he earned as a screenwriter. He continued his cinematic career, up until his premature death in 1975, producing sixteen other feature-length, documentary, as well as short films. He also published several poetry collections, an assemblage of various Roman writings entitled Alì dagli occhi azzurri (1965) as well as two other novels, Teorema (1968) and Petrolio (1972), which take place outside of Rome. His Empirismo eretico from 1972 presents an intriguing compilation of theoretical literary and cinematic essays that largely focus on the structural composition of both cinema and literature. One discovers within this text his philosophical and aesthetic elaboration on what he called “Cinema di poesia,” his Italian answer to the French Nuovelle Vague (New Wave). Pasolini’s novels, poetry as well as cinema stylistically and thematically have influenced many other literary voices over the last five decades, ensuring the perpetuity of his own poetic vision. Elsa Morante, for example, who was another major late twentieth century author, and whose influence and importance scholars are currently re-evaluating, situated sections of her masterpiece La storia (1974) in and around the borgate, including Pietralata where Una vita violenta’s anti-hero Tomasino resides. She also dedicated her novel Aracoeli (1982) to the memory of Pasolini, despite the dissolution of their friendship in 1973, due to his negative review her previous novel. Claudio Camarca, primarily a sociologist, also investigates the borgate in his fictional Sottoroma (1989), a book which he admits was

312 inspired by Pasolini.3 Camarca’s perspective is certainly much more postmodern and disorganic than the other author’s literature, concerned with pressing sociological issues plaguing modern Rome, some of which actually drove Pasolini away from Rome’s periphery. As Enzo Siciliano describes Camarca’s book: “È una trama fitta, densa, dentro cui la fisicità si disegna con una forza notevole inconsueta: droga, sesso, travestimento, motalità psichica, aleatorità di incontri, violenza, o quella incertezza, quella instabilità di sensazioni che sempre denuncia una profonda, irrecuperabile parcellazzazione dell’io.”4 Another author who has adopted the contemporary borgate as a literary setting is Niccolò Ammaniti. Winner of Italy’s prestigious Premio Strega in 2007 for his novel Come Dio comanda, Ammaniti stylizes the modern day grotesque yet conformist lives of Italy’s metropolitan youths in a collection of short novels and stories entitled Fango (1996). The first narrative’s epigraph opens with a reproduction of a 1972 brochure hailing the positive aesthetic architectural and urbanistic qualities of the Roman periphery. Its inclusion problematizes the short novel’s style and context, for the epigraph presents a balanced, premeditated image of everyday life in the suburbs which conflicts with the hybridized, almost schizophrenic style of Ammaniti’s “L’ultimo capodanno dell’umanità.” The quotation’s advertising intension, furthermore, provides the reader with an alternative, positive image of the capital city’s periphery, which for so many decades appeared practically as a modern inferno. The brochure reads:

3

Camarca also published an earlier prose piece on the borgate entitled: Marciavano i don Ciccilli: Lungo racconto romanazante (Milano: Longanesi, 1970). He, however, has never attained any prestige or large recognition for his works on Rome’s periphery.

4

Enzo Siciliano, “Presentazione,” By Claudio Camarca, Sottoroma (Milano: Garzanti, 1989) vii.

313

Figure 86. Nanni Moretti Investigates Spinaceto. Caro diario, dir. Nanni Moretti, 1993.

Al dodicesimo chilometro della Cassia, al numero 1043, sorge il ‘Compensorio residenziale delle Isole’. È un complesso architettonico formato da due moderni stabili (palazzina Capri e palazzina Ponza), esempio di un’architettura pensata e costruita a misura d’uomo con ampi spazi verdi e un panorama sulla lussureggiante campagna romana. Dotato di piscina olimpionica, campo da tennis in terra battuta e di un ampio parcheggio è il luogo perfetto per chi voglia rinunciare ai comfort moderni.5 This passage, which portrays the Roman borgate as an idyllic pastoral landscape, certainly does not resonate with the quasi-contemporaneous image provided by Ettore Scola’s urbanized western Brutti sporchi e cattivi from 1976, which imbues the modern baraccopoli with a comically carnevalesque interpretation; nevertheless, the brochures reprinting continues a trend, arguably inaugurated by Nanni Moretti in his episodic film, Caro Diario (1993), in which artists reconsider the aesthetic value inherent in Roman peripheral architecture.

5

Niccolò Ammaniti, “L’ultimo capodanno dell’umanità,” Fango (Milano: Mondadori, 1996) 9.

314 The director, in this semi-documentary, rides his Vespa around the city creating a movie about Rome’s modern structures, ranging from the early housing projects in Garbatella to the contemporary ones in Spinaceto. He remarks on how Roman society denigrates the modern borgata, in popular expression such as: “Mica che siamo a Spinaceto!” or “Ma dove abiti? Spinaceto?” Moretti decides visit the area and see for himself whether there is any truth in these comments. The camera follows his meandering journey into Spinaceto, a neighborhood inaugurated in 1965, where it frames recently constructed, large apartment complexes (See Fig. 86). The inquisitive cinematographer/ actor inspects the area from his motor scooter, forming a quick, but nevertheless interesting impression. As he approaches a lone man sitting on a wall, he momentarily slows his pace, and declares: “Di Spinaceto, pensavo peggio. Non è per niente male!” He then departs, leaving the modern day borgataro satisfied, and the viewer somewhat perplexed. This sequence provides a fresh interpretation of the borgate, one that dialogue’s with Pasolini’s and his Neorealist contemporaries’ images, yet evolves into something all its own. The director does not fail to express his film’s thematic debt to Pasolini’s legacy, by conducting a secular pilgrimage to the precise spot in Ostia where Pasolini was murdered. The sequence opens with Moretti rifling through a pile of newspaper and magazine articles from 1975, announcing the controversial writer’s brutal death. The shot than cuts to Moretti, again on his Vespa, who is slowly driving along the seacoast in search of Pasolini’s memorial. The less-than-monumental and uncared for statue stands almost indistinguishably in a field of high grass behind a chain-link fence (See Fig. 87), expressively and poetically transfiguring the urban decay within which Pasolini had situated his Roman novels and films.

315

Figure 87. The Pasolini Memorial in Ostia. Caro Diario, dir. Nanni Moretti, 1993.

The Borgate and the Boom Other film directors, apart from those who directly drew inspiration from Pasolini and formed what Bernardo Bertolucci termed the “Pasolini School,”6 developed artistic interpretations of Rome’s periphery throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These figures, largely Italy’s cinematic auteurs, provide an enormous range of images, from the metaphysical and surreal such as seen in Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Roma (1972), to the apocalyptic and pictorial in Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962). These postmodern cinematic classics, with their elaborate imagery and psychologically complex storylines beg at least two questions: first, what happened to the postwar demythification of Rome? Did it propagate into more modern narratives during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or did it slowly dissipate with the arrival of the Economic Miracle? And second, can one 6

Bernardo Bertolucci refers to a similar notion in an interview recorded on the Criterion Collection edition of Accattone; however, he never specifies who or what precisely composed this Scuola pasoliniana, a notion which I hope to a have clarified and defined to a certain degree.

316 speak of a modernist Rome? If scholars accept such films as Fellini’s La dolce vita and Antonioni’s L’avventura as indisputable representations of a thriving postmodernist culture in Italy, can one then deduce that a modernist Italian culture preceded it? These two inquiries are incredibly complex and require highly detailed, arguably book-length investigations. I will, however, endeavor to delineate the basic positions that have emerged within recent scholarly circles.

Most Italian scholars uphold the idea that the myth of Rome has vanished. In their view, it no longer forms a cornerstone of the nation’s political ideology, thus, it has disappeared from all of Italian culture since Fascism came to a close. One scholar rhetorically muses: Lo stesso culto del duce divenne, col tempo, un ostacolo della romanità.

Mussolini era l’incarnazione del romano e insieme la personificazione di grandi uomini come Cesare e Augusto. Gli italiani si erano scoperti romani per merito suo, ma avrebbe continuato a esserlo quando l’artista, il plasmatore delle masse, fosse scomparso?7 This position, which suggests a Nietzschian death of the myth of Rome, is difficult to accept. This fundamental myth of western civilization continued to evolve and flourish both within and beyond Italy’s borders, most notably in the United States’ movie industry. This myth-making machine has adopted the traditional myth of Rome, producing cinematic and television classics that celebrate the ancient city, such as: Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis? (1951), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1953), Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), or among the more the recent successes, Gladiator (2000) by Ridley Scott and HBO’s lavish television series Rome (2005-2007). Modern Italian forms of the myth of Rome have likewise

7

Giardina and Vauchez, Il mito di Roma, cit. 287.

317 emerged over the last six decades, largely inspired by the same myth-making industry, the cinema. Rossellini’s Roma città aperta plays on a myth that proved false under the political pressures and Nazi occupation during World War II. Fellini’s La dolce vita, with its hedonistic celebrations of Rome’s public spaces, has also notoriously changed the face of the city within the public imaginary. The Trevi Fountain, where the glamorous Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni take a moon-lit dip, or the via Veneto, where Rome’s social elite gather at night to parade before one another, are just two cases in which Fellini transformed Rome’s myth. The myth of Rome, likewise, has encouraged the mass tourism that feeds the city’s economy, as well as has compelled the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to declare the entire “Historic Centre of Rome, the Properties of the Holy See in that City Enjoying Extraterritorial Rights and San Paolo Fuori le Mura” as World Heritage Sites.8 This honor bestows international prestige upon, not to mention protection for, the Eternal City’s Ancient monuments, Medieval churches, Renaissance palaces, and Baroque squares.

The myth of Rome, however, continues to confront, and in some people’s minds, impede the city center’s modernization. The underground metropolitan system, for example, currently has only two lines, due to the fact that that ruins of varying significance constantly appear when the government commissions planning excavations.9 Fellini immortalizes this phenomenon is a sequence of Roma, which depicts construction workers penetrating an ancient villa which they discovered while digging the subway line. They enter the space, discovering marvelous frescoes in pristine condition, which suddenly disintegrate upon coming into contact with air (See Fig. 88). This image, along 8

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/91

9

A third metro line is currently under construction.

318

Figure 88. The Disintegrating Frescos. Roma, dir. Federico Fellini, 1972.

with the dreamscape composite that the director generates of traffic wrapping around the Colosseum (See Fig. 89) speaks to the issues confronting Rome as a modern city enmeshed in an existential battle with its glorious past. It figurates the questions whether Rome should become strictly a museum-city, a shrine to its monuments and history, or whether it should be allowed to develop into a functional capital, where people do not just visit but also live, The conflicts between myth and reality continue up to this day, with the conservationists, or mythologizers, winning the rights to preserve the Roman Forum as well as other points of archeological and art historical value, while the progressives, or modernizers, have managed to convince the city to construct a third metropolitan line (it is still currently under way). It is difficult to determine which stance is better for the city in the long run; suffice it to say, such a hybridized and contradictory nature is what has made Rome so fascinating to so many people over the centuries.

319

Figure 89. Traffic Chokes the Colosseum. Roma, dir. Federico Fellini, 1972.

Why the Demythification of Rome?

The topic of my research has actually evolved from my first impressions of the Eternal City, when I went to live there for the first time in 2000. I had never traveled to Europe before, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to explore a city I had read about in numerous contexts since my youth. I arrived at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, ready to enjoy a semester studying painting, sculptures, and architecture that I had only been able to access previously in books. The program I enrolled in had told me that I would be living in Trastevere, “The Georgetown of Rome,” where all the Romans go out at night to dine, drink, and take their evening passeggiata. I boarded the express train to Trastevere Station and prepared myself for the Urbs’ spectacular and theatrical wonders. What I witnessed from my window during that train ride, however, quickly changed my ideas about Rome. I saw inhabited shacks lining the railways, buildings with crumbling plaster

320 and paint, and a countryside littered with trash. When I emerged from the train station and into the modern section of Trastevere, I immediately gasped, not only because of Rome’s infamous smog but because graffiti covered buildings, metal doors blocked store entrances, and I found it practically impossible to cross the street with all the traffic. I felt as though I had entered a ghetto. It certainly reminded me of the ones I had seen in major U.S. cities, such as in Washington D.C. and Baltimore. I wondered where in the world I was. This could not be Rome? Yet, it was.

This is the Rome I came to know, and the Rome that I came to love. I have worked in Rome as a tour guide for the last eight years, researching every historical and artistic detail about the city’s famous mythicized elements. I wanted, however, to understand the other side of Rome; the side that was ugly and chaotic, unwelcoming and miserable. This dissertation is the fruit of that desire.

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