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To Laura, Matthew, Renato and Alessio. My new world.
Preface
This book is the result of a long journey, forged by collaborative projects and countless exchanges. At the same time, like all monographs, it is driven by a desire to shed light on a specific topic. In this case, the topic is multifaceted: the perception and influence of American culture in Italy throughout the decades between the country’s unification and the fall of Fascism. It is more than a study aimed at filling a scholarly gap in the field, however. As my interest grew, I took stock of the relevance of studying a period during which Italian culture—in its myriad of local and individual variations—experienced an epochal move from one hegemonic, foreign model of modernity to another: from France to America. The educated elite in nineteenth-century Italy were steeped in French culture: they spoke French and viewed Paris as a beacon of intellectual and lifestyle fashions. Paris was—to paraphrase Walter Benjamin—the cultural capital of nineteenthcentury Europe.1
Of course, other metropolises—Berlin, Vienna, London—vied for cultural dominance, but few doubted that, in literary and artistic terms, Paris was the ‘place-to-be’. When America emerged, it was at a key juncture in Western history. The technological advances brought about by the diffusion of electricity and the combustion engine towards the end of the nineteenth century ushered in a new industrial revolution. It vastly sped up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Material and intellectual goods—cars, books, vinyl records, and so on—could be replicated in previously unthinkable numbers. Furthermore, much-improved levels of literacy together with large-scale social reforms produced a working class with increased time and money to be spent on leisure, all of which facilitated a cultural market of unprecedented size. The United States of America showed its skills in mastering and blending these two aspects: mass industrial production at the service of mass culture.
The odd use of the term ‘transnational’ throughout this book highlights the importance of understanding the interaction with American culture as an epochmaking phenomenon that Italy shared with other countries around the world. As transnational history is informed by a study of the circulation of goods, people, and ideas across national borders, the period under consideration here, 1861–1943, marks a fertile study case. Italy in those decades witnessed radical developments in its social and economic structure, and much of it was related to its interaction
1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ [originally titled ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’, 1935], Perspecta, 12 (1969), 163–72.
with the rest of the world. From the start, the ‘making’ of Italians—the citizens of a young nation state in the 1860s—was a complicated business. Among the many tensions, there was the gulf between a Francophile educated elite and a mass of poorly-literate individuals, many of whom turned their back on their country of birth in search of a better life. The former eagerly read the latest news from Paris; the latter dreamt of America.
Meanwhile, the world was shrinking. By the end of the nineteenth century, a peasant family from the Veneto or Sicily could hoard enough money to cross the Atlantic Ocean. By the 1920s, millions of Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films. In the 1930s, short-wave transmissions instantly brought the sound of jazz bands in Chicago and New York to every owner of a radio set. Technological advancement and social transformations allowed America to enter the lives of entire communities in previously unimaginable ways. America offered a model of modernity that flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be rejected, adored, or transformed for one’s personal use, but it could not be ignored. Richard Kuisel has recently argued that ‘Americanization’ should be considered as an early stage of the process of globalization that engulfed a large part of the world, Europe first of all.2 One could argue that French culture had played a similar role in earlier periods, but only for a limited sphere of people. The culture and lifestyle radiating from Paris during the nineteenth century—and well before—was an influential model, but only for those who could access it by reading, travelling, and purchasing material goods. An elite transnational model was slowly replaced by one that could reach all levels of society. The mass appeal of New York was greatly helped by the other great culture capital of America: Hollywood. During the interwar years, each and every Italian, regardless of his or her geographical or social origin, ineluctably felt the influence of America. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of the most nationalistic of all political regimes, Mussolini’s Fascism. This is another aspect that makes the Italian case particularly interesting. What were the effects of protectionist policies, censorship, and autarkic campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? The transnational and the totalitarian, in those years, came head-to-head.
This book aims at a cultural history—what Italians read, listened to, and watched—during Italy’s protracted entry into the modern world. It seeks to shed light on the cultural make-up of Italians, both as individuals and as a national community in contact and in dialogue with the rest of the world. When the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889, it was the tallest building on earth, at 312 meters high. It immediately became an international icon of France’s modernity. Just a few years earlier Gustave Eiffel had contributed to the construction of the Statue of Liberty, which the French people had donated to the Americans. It was just under 100 metres
2 Richard F. Kuisel, ‘The End of Americanization? or Reinventing a Research Field for Historians of Europe’, Journal of Modern History, 92 (September 2020), 602–34.
in height, but this was appropriate for a young nation that was beginning to stretch its limbs. The height matter was put to rest in 1931 when the Empire State building was erected, soaring to 443 metres. One could, of course, see this as a phallic articulation of nationalistic pride—and in a Freudian sense it was—but it is equally symbolic of where the economic and cultural centre of gravity of the Western world was moving. This book is about the cultural fallout of this shift across the Italian peninsula and its isles.
Acknowledgements
Many colleagues and friends have helped me in researching and writing this book. My warmest thanks go to those who kindly found the time to read and comment on different parts of the typescript. The mistakes and misjudgements left in the book are entirely mine, but their number has certainly been limited thanks to: Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Bosworth, Victoria De Grazia, Robert Gordon, Peter Hainsworth, Stephen Gundle, Axel Körner, Charles Leavitt, Martin McLaughlin, David Robey, Cinzia Scarpino, Sara Sullam, and Simona Storchi. I am particularly thankful to David Ellwood and Donald Sassoon for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript.
Others have helped on specific queries along the way. Again, their respective expertise has been most helpful. A big thank you to Walter Adamson, Silvio Alovisio, Gioacchino Balistreri, Raffaele Bedarida, Paola Bonsaver, Lucia Borghese Bruschi, Stefano Bragato, Alessandro Carlucci, Pietro Corsi, Luca Cottini, John Dickie, Massimo Fanfani, Giorgio Farabegoli, Valerio Ferme, Lidio Ferrando, David Forgacs, Emilio Franzina, Donna Gabaccia, Patricia Gaborik, Nicholas Gaskill, Margherita Ghilardi, Marie Kokubo, Stéphanie Lanfranchi-Guilloux, Paolo Leoncini, Thomas Leslie, Martino Marazzi, Mauro Maspero, Adriano Mazzoletti, Amoreno Martellini, Graham Nelson, Fabio Pezzetti Tonion, Paolo Prato, Matteo Sanfilippo, Matthew Seelinger, Anthony Julian Tamburri, and Roberto Vezzani.
An affectionate thank you goes to three younger colleagues whose suggestions, ad hoc research, and prose-style tips allowed me to enrich and polish my typescript: Alice Gussoni, Lachlan Hughes, and Joseph Kelly. Their assistance was guaranteed by financial support from the Oxford Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Pembroke College, both of which also funded a number of research trips abroad. Back home, a collective, warm thank you goes to both the kind, efficient staff of the many libraries at Oxford—a bookworm’s earthly paradise—and to the editorial team who turned my manuscript into a professional publication: Saraswathi Ethiraju, Cathryn Steele and Hilary Walford.
Finally, Caterina’s love, care, and tolerance allowed this book to interfere with our daily life for too many years. Un abbraccio e un bacio.
PART 2. AMERICAN CULTURE IN
List of Illustrations
0.1. Publicity poster of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: The Jazz Fool (1929). (courtesy of Rodney Rogers, New Orleans) 4
0.2. Charlie Chaplin comically facing Primo Carnera in a signed photo. (courtesy of Adriano Mazzoletti, Rome) 16
1.1. Print advertising the 1889 Exposition Universelle. (courtesy of Universitats Darmstadts) 33
1.2. Front page of the 1910 annual guide of Il café chantant. (courtesy of Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, CSC, Rome) 40
1.3. Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1877). (author’s personal collection) 41
2.1. US military uniforms and the slave market in South Carolina. (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome) 53
2.2. The Women’s Pavilion at Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. (courtesy of Centro Studi per L’arte del libro, Novara) 58
2.3. A slightly tarnished photo of Adolfo Rossi in 1883. (courtesy of Archivio di Stato di Rovigo) 61
2.4. Front page of L’Italia. Giornale del Popolo, of 29–30 April 1884. (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome) 64
2.5. Front page of L’Italia. Giornale del Popolo, 1–2 May 1884. (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome) 65
2.6. Cover of La Domenica del Corriere, 23 June 1901. (courtesy of Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome) 70
2.7. Chicago’s and New York’s early skyscapers at the end of the nineteenth century. (respectively, courtesy of Thomas Leslie and author’s personal collection) 71
2.8. The Library of Congress Building. (author’s personal collection) 72
2.9. Bill Cody with four Native American chiefs in a Venetian gondola. (courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Centre of the West, Cody WY) 86
2.10. A ‘Pellerossa’ attack on a Wells Fargo stagecoach as re-enacted in Bill Cody’s Wild West. (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 87
2.11. Italian copy of the Wild West programme, 1906. (courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Centre of the West, Cody WY) 89
2.12. Copy of commemorative postcard of Annie Oakley, c.1885. (author’s personal collection) 90
2.13. Front page of the first instalment of Buffalo Bill. (courtesy of Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ) 92
2.14. Front-cover of La Domenica del Corriere of 8 December 1901. (courtesy of BMSC, Rome) 95
3.1. Dante approves of Olivetti’s US-inspired typewriter in a publicity poster of 1912. (courtesy of Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, Ivrea) 110
3.2. Still from Luigi Maggi’s western Il bersaglio vivente, Ambrosio, 1913. (courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin) 116
3.3. The headed paper of Photo Drama. (courtesy of Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) 119
3.4. The newly built FIAT factory in Poughkeepsie, NY, 1909. (courtesy of Centro Storico FIAT, Turin) 126
3.5. From the official catalogue of the Esposizione internazionale di automobili, Turin, 18 January–2 February 1908. (courtesy of Centro Documentazione—Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile, Turin) 129
4.1. Front cover of the first edition of the libretto of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (1910). (courtesy of the Weston Library, Oxford) 141
5.1. Ernest Hemingway in the American Red Cross uniform with Nurse Agnes Von Kurowski. (courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston MA) 157
5.2. Map of all the centres run by the American Red Cross in Italy in January 1919. (courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD) 159
5.3. Front-page illustration of La Domenica del Corriere, 28 (14-21 July 1918), dedicated to the celebrations of The Fourth of July in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo. (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 161
5.4. Fiorello La Guardia surrounded by Italian and US officers. (courtesy of La Guardia and Wagner Archives, New York City) 166
5.5. The American Jazz Band, wearing Italian army helmets, presumably in Milan, 1918. (courtesy of C. B. Barlow, USAAS Section 563) 171
6.1. Josephine Baker’s iconic banana skirt, La Folie du jour, Folies-Bergère, 1926. (courtesy of Everett Collection/Alamy Stock) 181
6.2. Depero’s advertising image for Campari inspired by New York’s skyline (1931). (courtesy of Museo Campari, Milan) 184
6.3. New York skyscrapers, 1932. (courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) 185
6.4. Artist’s illustration of Palanti’s plan for a giant skyscraper to be built in Rome’s city centre. (courtesy of Bodleian Library, Oxford) 188
6.5. Carlo Levi’s front cover image for Mario Soldati’s America primo amore, Florence: Bemporad, 1935. (courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford) 190
6.6. Commemorative postcard celebrating the record-breaking crossing of the Atlantic by the Italian liner Rex. (author’s personal collection) 192
6.7. Detail from two articles published in La Domenica del Corriere, February and March 1930. (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 202
6.8. Three photos dedicated to America’s economic and architectural might in La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, 15/10 (October 1930). (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 203
6.9. A set of traffic lights featuring fasces decoration, next to New York’s Empire State Building, published in La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, 13/1 (January 1935). (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 205
6.10. Detail of the front page of Il Popolo d’Italia, 10 October 1918. (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 207
6.11. Mussolini’s signature appearing on the frontispiece of Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of 1925. (courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford) 217
6.12. De Pinedo’s and Lindbergh’s aviation feats in the Corriere della Sera, 24 May 1927. (courtesy of BNC, Rome) 225
6.13. Mussolini being instructed by Balbo at the commands of a Savoia Marchetti S.62, c.1932. (courtesy of BNC, Rome) 228
6.14. Vittorio De Sica in a still from Mario Camerini’s Il signor Max (1937). (DVD screenshot)
6.15. Advert for American beauty products appearing in La Rivista cinematografica, 1 (1921). (courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin)
232
238
7.1. Front page of the second issue of Giovanni Papini’s La Vraie Italie (March 1919). (courtesy of CIRCE, University of Trento) 254
7.2. Translations from French, English, and German, 1896–1953. (data from Viallet, ‘Statistiques et histoire des relations culturelles franco-italiannes’) 259
7.3. Cover of the first issue of Ugo Ojetti’s Pegaso (January 1929). (courtesy of Fondazione Alfred Lewin—Biblioteca Gino Bianco, Forlì)
7.4. Front cover of the first novel published in Mondadori’s ‘I Romanzi della Palma’ series, 1932. (author’s personal collection)
7.5. Front page of a 1928 issue of Corriere dei Piccoli, featuring a story of Signor Bonaventura. (courtesy of Bernd Zillich, Munich)
270
272
284
7.6. The head title of Lucio l’Avanguardista (Rob the Rover). (courtesy of giornalepop.com) 285
7.7. Front page of Topolino’s first issue, 31 December 1932. (courtesy of Leonardo Gori, private collection) 287
7.8. Front page of L’Avventuroso’s first issue of 14 October 1934. (courtesy of Donald at annitrenta.blogspot.com)
7.9. Copy of the twentieth instalment of the comics story ‘Ulceda’, by Guido Moroni Celsi. (courtesy of giornalepop.it)
7.10. The ‘Mickey-Mouse-inspired’ character of Formichino in the Corriere dei Piccoli of 9 June 1940. (author’s personal collection)
8.1. Front cover of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Jazz Band (1929). (courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin)
289
293
294
302
8.2. Ugo Filippini’s Black & White Jazz Band in October 1922. (courtesy of Adriano Mazzoletti, Rome) 307
8.3. ‘Fox-trott, ballo sovrano!’, article in Rome’s La Tribuna illustrata, 22–9 February 1920. (courtesy of Digiteca, BSMC, Rome)
8.4. Front cover of the music sheet of ‘Villico Black Bottom’. (author’s personal collection)
8.5. Carlo Benzi and Milietto Nervetti on their arrival in New York, in 1928. (courtesy of Adriano Mazzoletti, Rome)
8.6. Front cover illustration of Radiocorriere, 9/30 (23–30 July 1933). (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
8.7. Front cover illustration of Radiocorriere, 9/32 (6–13 August 1933). (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
8.8. ‘Pippo’ Barzizza as conductor of EIAR’s Orchestra Cetra in the late 1930s. (courtesy of Adriano Mazzoletti, Rome)
9.1. First page of an article signed ‘Metro Goldwin’ (sic) devoted to MGM’s film The Midshipman (1925), in Comoedia, 5/8 (August 1926). (courtesy of BNC, Rome)
309
311
313
322
323
326
339
9.2. Exhibitors Herald’s article of 21 January 1922 celebrating the eighteen-year anniversary of Fox Film. (courtesy of MHDL, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research) 341
9.3. American and Italian theatrical release posters of Archie Mayo’s The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). (courtesy of Mauro Maspero, Cantù)
348
9.4. Illustrations accompanying Vittorio Mussolini’s article ‘Emancipazione del cinema italiano’, Cinema, 1/6 (25 September 1936). (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 361
9.5. Benito Mussolini standing next to his son Vittorio during a visit to the construction site of Cinecittà, in 1936. (courtesy of Mitchell Wolfson Jr Collection, Genoa) 363
9.6. The advertisement page used by the Anti-Nazi League for the Defence of American Democracy to protest against Vittorio Mussolini’s visit. (author’s personal collection) 368
9.7. Signed photograph by Shirley Temple after her meeting with Vittorio Mussolini at Fox Studios, Hollywood, October 1937 (from Vittorio Mussolini’s memoir, Vita con mio padre; courtesy of BNC, Rome)
369
9.8. Goebbels and Alfieri during the former’s visit to the Venice Film Festival, 1936. (anonymous photo; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) 374
9.9. Two-page advertisement of Meehan’s Naughty Nanette (1927). (courtesy of Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, CSC, Rome)
378
9.10. Vittorio Mussolini and Mario Camerini accompany Angelo Rizzoli during his visit to the Cinecittà studios. (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 380
9.11. A selection of 1930s covers. (courtesy of Media History Digital Library, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research; and Cineteca, Bologna) 382
9.12. The impoverished Professor Bensi (Vittorio De Sica) and his butler (Camillo Pilotto) in a still from Mattoli’s Tempo massimo (1934). (DVD screenshot) 401
9.13. Poster advertising the film I quattro moschettieri (1936). (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 403
9.14. A stage photo taken during the production of I quattro moschettieri (1936). (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 403
9.15. Work at CAIR’s studio for the production of Le avventure di Pinocchio (1935). (courtesy of Archivio Romolo Bacchini at Wikipedia Common) 405
9.16. Still from the animation film Le avventure di Pinocchio (1935). (courtesy of Archivio Romolo Bacchini at Wikipedia Common) 407
9.17. Front cover of Lo Schermo of July 1938 dedicated to Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 408
9.18. FIAT’s Lingotto factory in Turin, designed by Giacomo Matté-Trucco and completed in 1923. (courtesy of Archivio Storico FIAT, Turin) 411
9.19. A 1938 photo from FIAT’s archive celebrating the arrival in New York of a Fiat 500 to be sold in the USA. (courtesy of Archivio Storico FIAT, Turin) 412
9.20. Front cover of Cinema illustrazione dedicated to the main cast of Matarazzo’s Joe il rosso (1936). (courtesy of CSC, Rome) 415
10.1. The November 1938 issue of Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia. (courtesy of BSMC, Rome) 426
10.2. Airmen of SAAF 7 Squadron toy with a part-dismantled Breda Ba.88 left behind by the Italian Air Force. (photo by Capt. Robert Abbot Fenner; courtesy of his sons Bill and Bob, and of Tinus le Roux) 429
10.3. Marcello Piacentini’s Torrione INA in Brescia (1932), and his Torre dell’orologio in Genoa (1940). (courtesy, respectively, of Wolfang Moroder and of Lidio Ferrando) 432
10.4. The Italian pavilion of Marcello Piacentini, Giuseppe Pagano, and Cesare Valle at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. (courtesy of La Photolith, Wikipedia Commons) 434
10.5. Bird’s-eye view of the initial project for EUR42 presented to Mussolini by Marcello Piacentini and his collaborators on 28 April 1937. (courtesy of BNC, Rome) 435
10.6. The model of the initial version of EUR42 showing the four central skyscrapers along the main axis of the complex. (courtesy of BNC, Rome) 435
10.7. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana of Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula, and Mario Romano in Rome’s EUR district, 1940. (author’s personal collection) 437
10.8. Detail of the top section of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome’s EUR district, 1940. (author’s personal collection) 438
10.9. The official poster promoting EUR42, featuring Adalberto Libera’s arch; and Eero Saarinen’s Gateway arch designed for the Jefferson Memorial. (courtesy, respectively, of BNC, Rome, and of Hendrickson Photography/Shutterstock) 439
10.10. Cover of a 1940 album dedicated to Fulmine, published by Vittoria. (courtesy of giornalepop.it) 456
10.11. Mondadori’s Tuffolino replacing Topolino’s characters, from May 1942. (courtesy of Donald at annitrenta.blogspot.com) 456
10.12. Detail from Radiocorriere containing the publicity of Rabagliati’s solo programme, Radiocorriere, 17/48 (29 November 1941), 12. (courtesy of BNC, Florence) 461
10.13. Osvaldo Campassi, ‘Coppie’, Cinema illustrazione, 13/38 (21 September 1938), 5. (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 466
10.14. ‘Falsa vita di Hollywood’, Cinema illustrazione, 13/47 (23 November 1938), 6. (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 468
10.15. Detail of the contents page of Bianco e nero, 3/2 (February 1939), 181. (courtesy of Cineteca, Bologna) 469
10.16. A cameo appearance of Gorni Kramer in Riccardo Freda’s Tutta la città canta (1946). (courtesy of Cineteca di Milano) 487
11.1. The Mussolini family: left, the cover of Time, 26/18 (8 October 1935), featuring Mussolini with his sons Bruno (left) and Vittorio (right) (courtesy of BNC, Rome); right, Edda Mussolini with a group of blackshirts during a cruise to India of the Naval League, on 21 February 1929. (courtesy of Archivio Luce, Rome) 495
11.2. Film still from Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), with Adriano Celentano, in the middle, singing ‘Ready Teddy’ in his makeshift English. (courtesy of Legenda, Cambridge) 501
Introduction
In the minds of many Italian intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, the word ‘americanismo’ conjured up disquieting images of modernity. It spoke of mass-produced goods, feverish consumerism, dumb conformism, and a relentless pursuit of materialistic pleasure. A parallel between American culture and modernity was also promulgated by the Vatican through its interpretation of ‘Americanism’ as a sinister, materialistic degeneration that risked engulfing the entire Catholic community in the USA.
These voices, however, represented only one side of the debate. Positive interest was growing. The political and military role of the USA on the international stage had started to attract attention, first in the Spanish–American war of 1898 and then, more prominently, during the First World War. America’s economic strength was praised not just for its capacity for mass production and technological innovation but also for the enviable lifestyle that, among the lower and middle classes, was by then far more affluent than that of their European counterparts. Americanism for many meant social mobility and emancipation from tradition, it meant new forms of entertainment and a cult of modernity in all its expressions, from skyscrapers to jazz music, cinema, and the radio. Among the most enthusiastic philo-Americans were the Futurists, who were the first in Italy to rave about jazz and to identify New York as the new Paris of the twentieth century. America began to loom more and more largely over the cultural horizon of many Europeans. In Britain, both newspaper editor W. T. Stead and literary author H. G. Wells saw America as envisioning Europe’s future, and as rising to the status of being the place where—in Wells’s words—‘the leadership of progress must ultimately rest’. American philosopher William James added a prophetic tone in one of his foundational lectures: ‘Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific.’ American entrepreneurs proved the most successful in grabbing hold of the new opportunities offered by technological advances and in leaving their mark on the modern world that was taking shape on both sides of the Atlantic.1
The progressive influence of American culture produced a shift from the expression ‘Americanism’ to ‘Americanization’, which implied a threatening,
1 W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World or The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York and London: H. Markey, 1901). H. G. Wells, The Future in America (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1906), 257. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1907), 14.
foreign presence. Paris, the most cosmopolitan of all European capitals, which had welcomed American culture and American intellectuals, was also the centre of a counter-discourse that presented America as a perverse excrescence of European culture. The values and traditions of the old continent had to be defended.2
In Italy, more than ‘americanismo’ or ‘americanizzazione’, the neologism that best characterized the response of much of the Italian intelligentsia to American culture was ‘americanata’. The term was coined in the late nineteenth century to describe a spectacular act born out of a ridiculous and childish desire to impress. This neologism became so trendy that it was even used as a headline for a series of articles on American faits divers published by Italy’s most popular illustrated magazine, La Domenica del Corriere, between 1908 and 1913. The term has also survived the test of time and is still present in the Italian language today. In its early usage it was part of the condescending, self-defensive attitude with which much of the Italian media described America.
At the turn of the century, Camillo Olivetti and Giovanni Agnelli—each the father of a manufacturing empire—travelled to the USA in search of lessons to be learnt. But these were isolated cases. In general, Liberal Italy’s educated elite preferred to stay at home and read about ‘americanate’ in the pages of La Domenica del Corriere. The view of America as a violent land of extremes, populated by poorly educated men and morally dubious women, even in its north-eastern, industrialized version, remained dominant. It was a sort of motorized, skyscrapered version of Buffalo Bill’s world: a ‘Wild East’
At the same time, unexpectedly, masses of semi-illiterate Italians began to leave Italy, fleeing the newly unified nation state, which, according to Risorgimento narratives, had made the dream of the Italian people finally come true. Economic historians can illuminate us on what went wrong, but a cultural look at the response to this demographic revolution yields surprising results. How was early migration discussed in the media? How was it represented through literary works? Outright condemnation and a sense of embarrassment were the recurrent tones in the press. At the turn of the century, if daily papers dealt with migration, it was mainly to report on some disaster, the sinking of a ship, overcrowded with third-class passengers, or the deadly collapse of a mine in some distant corner of the world. The implicit message was that migration had been a tragic mistake, which nationalists mixed with cries about the humiliation and degradation suffered by the noble Italian race. Literary works did not even do that. They mainly ignored the matter, to the point that Italy’s major expert on migration literature,
2 On this, see Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); and Seth Armus, French Anti-Americanism (1930–1948) (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
Sebastiano Martelli, has concluded that the great novel of Italian migration is yet to be written.3
It took the Italian government until 1901 before a raft of legislation attempted fully to regulate migration and tackle the exploitation and misery attached to it. By then about half a million men and women were leaving Italy, every year. The political class, the media, and literary authors had woken up late to a phenomenon that did not square with their nationalistic values. This generated the co-habitation of two images of America: the imagined promised land of popular belief, and the caricaturized depiction of the printed press.
After the First World War, it became impossible to dismiss America as a sum of its ‘americanate’. A condescending attitude was still at work, but the voice of those seeing something else became stronger and stronger. The multidisciplinary approach of this book will allow us to see how different cultural fields reacted in different ways and at different times to the rising presence of the USA as an economic and cultural superpower. By the 1920s, Hollywood had become the ultimate locus of all there was to love and hate about America. It had also become the capital of world cinema. And it established itself as a beacon from which the flickering image of America entered the eyes and minds of people in every corner of the world. The ‘Americanization’ of the planet, if nothing else, was partly a visual invasion, and America became an imagined country.
Cinema was a powerful new art, born out of French technology—the Lumière brothers won the first round with their cinématographe, beating Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope as the key hardware in the film industry—but quickly fallen into American hands. This happened thanks to US protectionist policies, followed by the collapse of European markets during the First World War. Film was a new narrative form that slowly began to fight for recognition as an art. It was also the most transmedial of all arts: photographic mainly, but based on literary scripts and performed by actors with the complement of sound that, by the late 1920s, no longer meant the occasional presence of a group of musicians performing live.
By a wise twist of fate, the first ever sound film was entitled The Jazz Singer (1927). If the 1920s are today remembered as the jazz age, it is because its syncopated rhythms, the pounding presence of the drum kit (jazz’s gift to world music), the popularity of its dance movements, became the music score of those very years. Even linguistically, the move from the pre-war ‘Belle Époque’ to the ‘Jazz Age’ is indicative of a major shift in Europe’s cultural balance. The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawn, also a jazz connoisseur under the pen name of Francis Newton, humorously wrote that ‘the social history of the twentieth-century arts
3 Sebastiano Martelli, ‘Dal vecchio mondo al sogno americano: Realtà e immaginario dell’emigrazione nella letteratura italiana’, in Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, Storia della migrazione italiana. Partenze, i (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), 433–55.
Fig. 0.1. Publicity poster of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: The Jazz Fool (1929). (courtesy of Rodney Rogers, New Orleans)
will contain only a footnote or two about Scottish Highland music or gypsy lore, but it will have to deal at some length with the vogue for jazz’.4
And a vogue it was. Jazz travelled far thanks to the technology of vinyl records and the radio, but it also travelled thanks to cinema, often smuggled as accompanying music for the comic shorts by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, or through Walt Disney’s early cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse. One of the early sound animations by Disney was Mickey Mouse: The Jazz Fool (1929), which the following year reached the first-run cinema theatres of most Italian cities with the title Topolino ama il jazz
Mention of Walt Disney takes us to another cultural field where his products fought valiantly and became part of America’s imaginary invasion of Italy: comics. By the mid-1930s, Mickey Mouse had become the main character of Italy’s most popular comics magazine, aptly named Topolino. But by then the ‘American craze’ for comics was already in full swing, led by a colourful collection of superheroes mainly licensed by the powerful King Features Syndicate. Italian teenagers found themselves catapulted from the starched and tame
4 Francis Newton, The Jazz Scene (Goring by Sea: McGibbon & Key, 1959), 14.
stories narrated in rhymed couplets by the Corriere dei Piccoli to the wild, scienceand sensual-driven adventures featuring Flash Gordon or Mandrake. As Umberto Eco has suggested, those narratives were part of an increasing presence of American culture in Italy, often in direct contrast with the nationalistic vision promoted by Fascism’s pedagogues.5
This brief, historical overview touching upon a number of different fields is an indirect argument for the need of a multidisciplinary approach in order to give an adequate sense of how American culture entered Italy. It is also an argument towards the need to pay attention to the economic and social context that generated those cultural artefacts and the one that received, replicated, and elaborated them.
When the USA emerged as an economic superpower at the start of the twentieth century, William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was still touring Europe with his spectacular Wild West show. The popularity of Buffalo Bill serves as a reminder that there was another America that populated the minds of Europeans up until the late nineteenth century, and it was an America in many ways opposed to the image of the USA as an urbanized, technologically minded, and pleasureseeking nation. It was a primitive land, violent and unforgiving, the vast theatre of romantic stories of individuals fighting for their survival. The popularity of the Western genre—in film as much as in literature and comics—allowed this image to continue into the twentieth century and coexist with the new vision of America as a modern civilization defined by the futuristic skyline of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. What did Italians make of these opposing images?
Mention of Italians brings us to another introductory caveat: there was no such thing as a homogeneous entity of ‘Italians’. Beyond the regional differences that still characterize Italy today, the cultural make-up of Italy’s educated elite—the less than 5 per cent of the population that entered the classroom of a GinnasioLiceo—was very distant from the semi-illiterate rest of the country. It was so distant that one of the most respected historians on Italian migration, Donna Gabaccia, has written of it as ‘two peoples who often seemed as different as two races’. This is particularly important in a study of Italy–USA relations, since one ‘race’ formed the vast majority of those millions who criss-crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life. And the other ‘race’ was the educated minority who wrote about America in periodicals and travel books.6
A literary narrative of a failed encounter between these two peoples can be found in Mario Soldati’s early masterpiece, his travel memoir America primo amore (1935). In the chapter entitled ‘Italo-americani’, the young Turinese intellectual forces himself to spend some time with a family of proudly Italian American immigrants from the South. Soldati boasts about having learnt English
5 Umberto Eco, ‘Il modello americano’, in Umberto Eco, Remo Ceserani, and Beniamino Placido (eds), La riscoperta dell’America (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1984), 3–32.
6 Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000), 19.
