Conclusion

Through the analysis of an array of novels and travel accounts that take into account the two decades spanning the end of 1950s to the end of 1970s, Mapping Post-War Italian Literature examines how Italian writers responded to the profound social, economic and spatial transformations that were initiated by the economic boom of the late 1950s. The various literary voices that have taken centre stage across this book provide a multifaceted account of the processes at work in Italy’s urbanization and modernization from the mid-1950s onwards, illuminating some of the key issues and trends in Italian society of the time. Through literary analysis two major themes have been identified, the first being the ways in which, through their specific interpretations of reality, Italian writers apprehended and conceptualized the transformations that were underway. In this sense, the diverse literary genres taken into consideration in this study are lenses through which reality (the big-city environment, a small provincial town and the changing socio-cultural landscape of the country) is observed and discursively shaped. As pointed out in the Introduction, in the process each genre and each writer reverberate with internalized views of society. Second, throughout this book space is apprehended as the locus where the anxiety that encompassed the phase of post-war transition in Italy was projected and played out. Italy’s changing space is also a locus of complex intersections between past, present and future.

Each chapter offers a distinctive perspective on spatial changes over the period under scrutiny. Bianciardi and Volponi (Chapter 1) are writers on the left who see the modern city as the embodiment of capital. In their novels coercive architectures and the fabric of the urban environment impose a passive, disenfranchising experience of the city. Their urban environments have anti-social and atomizing effects. These descriptions of cities shed light on the complicity of political and economic powers and the kind of built environment that affirms it. The analysis links this stance to the reaction against enduring authoritarian tendencies in Italian society, opposed in particular by the Left. Historical research emphasizes the lines of continuity between pre- and post-war Italy, pointing to the failure to remove officials who had been involved in key positions in the state apparatus under the Fascist regime and who kept their positions in the transition to the Republic. Post-war Italian governments resorted to repressive legislation, which in some cases had been promulgated under the Fascist regime. The continuation of reactionary practices found its justification in the prospect of Communist infiltration during the Cold War. In the novels examined in this study, the threat of a revival of the past reverberates through characters who refuse to retract their Fascist ideals as well as through military metaphors that give to the burgeoning city, with its trenches of ubiquitous building sites and road works, the ambiance of a war zone.

Bianciardi and Volponi expose the connections between capitalism and the built environment by portraying a city subjugated to the economic parameters of utilitarianism and productivity (Volponi’s renaming of Turin/Torino Bovino in Le mosche del capitale is particularly telling in this respect). One may argue that there is more to metropolitan life. With its variegated social landscape and fleeting kinship system, it may, for example, entail individual emancipation from conventional social structures and foster self-empowerment. This perspective is not completely absent from the novels of Bianciardi and Volponi. Indeed, as is argued in Chapter 1, they are informed by a dynamic of rejection–attraction towards the city, which ultimately provides the writers with the material for their succesful novels. Rejection takes the form of a withdrawal into microcosms which are perceived as protective – Brera for Luciano and the room facing the countryside for Albino – which, while still connected to the city, are also presented as counter-spaces of resistance against the urban-industrial society of Northern Italy.

The mysterious, unsettling aspects of urban life emphasized by the novels in Chapter 2 hint at the perceived loss of control over an urban environment that has been transformed beyond the comprehension of its users. The theme of the uncanny helps to illuminate how the novels examined here relate to the past as well as to the hidden, undesirable implications of the boom. Scerbanenco’s Lamberti novels depict modern Milan as a hub for organized crime and illegal trafficking in which violence is commonplace. In Fruttero & Lucentini’s crime fiction the shifting social landscape of Turin – a city that is portrayed as elusive and deceptive – conveys a tension between the familiar and unfamiliar. Modernity is perceived as rupture due to its neglect and denial of the past. In Freudian terms, the desire to forget and the absence of a critical public reckoning with the past give way inevitably to the return of the repressed (for instance, in the concrete possibility of a Fascist revival in the post-war Republic). In the novels the past is often conveyed as nostalgia, for example in the idealization of a traditional model of the city, allegedly more ‘sociable’ and harmonious. Again, at work here are socially constructed views of what constitutes a desirable urban experience.

The chapter also explores the interrelation between urbanization and the development of Italian crime fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses how the selected writings highlight a link between urbanization and the evolution of crime through criminal activities which follow the expansion of the city and the geography of industrialization (and which show the efficiency of modern industry), as well as through the socio-anthropological implications of economic development. Particular emphasis is given to the periphery as a location that is traditionally perceived and depicted as eerie and dangerous. Whilst in Scerbanenco’s crime fiction all places in Milan seem equally dangerous, the more deprived areas of the urban periphery are especially linked to social isolation and violence. In Fruttero & Lucentini’s A che punto è la notte the criminal organization carries out its activities more discreetly in an abandoned industrial area on the outskirts of the city. Hence, one may argue that Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini conform to the idea of the urban fringe as bleak and dangerous, which, in this chapter, is problematized by challenging clichés and stereotypes commonly ascribed to the modern suburbs. At the same time, Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini accord literary dignity to the periphery by giving it centre stage in their stories and, consequently, by recognizing it as a legitimate part of the city.

The remaining two chapters continue the themes of the peripheral and marginal. Chapter 3, in particular, discusses attitudes towards the province in Italian culture through the analysis of Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera, set in a small provincial town in the Piedmont region. It explores and problematizes the notion of the provincial or smaller city as marginal and secondary to the big city. The fact that this is especially true in Italy, where the term ‘provincial’ is often used derogatorily, may be a way of concealing the centrality of the provinces for the Italian nation, with its long tradition of municipal autonomy and strong regional identities. In Le voci della sera a clue to the denied relevance of the provinces is the fact that the provincial setting acts as a magnifier of themes that reappear across Ginzburg’s oeuvre, particularly her view of familial and sentimental relationships, which this tale of provincial life brings into sharper focus. Furthermore, the provinces emerge as a place where individual and apparently banal stories are emblematic of the human condition and its predicaments, thereby challenging the hierarchical distinction from the city from an aesthetic and cultural dimension.

The analysis focuses on social conventions, conservative attitudes and gender roles in the provincial microcosm described by Ginzburg and how these may compare to social and gender relations in a metropolitan environment, questioning clear-cut distinctions between the urban and provincial. These issues are explored primarily through the perspective of female characters in the novel, which brings into sharper relief questions of marginality in space. Social expectations and assumptions disproportionately affect women and their existential trajectories in Ginzburg’s story as, with few exceptions that do not necessarily present an alternative model of female empowerment, they all embrace the role of wife and mother, devoting themselves to the domestic sphere. Paradoxically, however, women show more initiative than men despite their limited agency. Le voci della sera confirms the idea that one’s kinship network is generally more stable in smaller cities than in the big-city environment, for friendships and connections often last a lifetime. While, in the novel, some characters may be comfortable with this stability and familiarity, others, especially the younger generation, feel oppressed by life prospects that seemingly allow little room for change and compromise. Nevertheless, moving away, perhaps to the big city (a possibility which only male characters may entertain), does not offer an alternative solution. Ginzburg’s characters feel they would end up replicating habitual patterns, conforming to what society expects of them.

Chapter 4 is also informed by a gender perspective. It explores how Ortese’s take on travel challenges the male-dominated tradition of travel writing and its implications in terms of dominant ways of seeing and representing Italy. In the post-war years domestic Italian travel accounts produced critical perspectives that increasingly called into question reifying representations of Italy, codified especially by foreign observers. Albeit in different ways, all the texts examined in the chapter complicate stereotypical views of the Italian territory and identity. Piovene documents the socio-cultural complexity of the Italian territory beyond the conventions of the Grand Tour and the stereotype of the Bel Paese. Ortese and Arbasino go further by challenging the ideas of gender and sexuality implicated in dominant notions of the national space. Ortese does so, for example, by rejecting comforting, domesticated images of the natural landscape. Her nature cannot be possessed, either literally or through a reductive reification. Piovene’s agenda is to present Italy as steadily embarked on a path of progress towards joining other modern nations. His self-assured perspective is prone to essentialism and stereotyping. This emerges more starkly in relation to the traditionally marginalized Italian South. Piovene calls on the South to adopt a Northern-like attitude to progress in order to speed up the modernization process of the whole Peninsula. Ortese rejects the quasi-colonial juxtaposition of centre (North) and periphery (South); she is more sympathetic towards Southern people and the longstanding issues they face without falling into condescension.

By giving prominence to the gender and queer perspectives of Ortese and Arbasino, the chapter highlights an evolution in the point of view of the observer-narrator across the three texts under scrutiny: from Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia, with its neatly separated and contained chapters that present concrete, knowable destinations; to Ortese’s more tentative approach to travel, her privileging of the ‘micro’ and subjective in the switching and interweaving between internal and external landscapes; and, finally, the open-ended travel writing of Arbasino, in which place loses centrality and the subjectivity of the observer comes into the foreground. The confident traveller-observer who in Viaggio in Italia claims the authority of truth-telling is replaced by the more tentative, self-reflective viewpoint of La lente scura and Fratelli d’Italia, able to call stereotypes into question more effectively.

The heterogenous literary sources and critical approaches which inform this book help to capture the inconsistencies of Italy’s post-war development, not only from a socio-economic and political point of view – as is the case with most of the existing research in the field – but also with specific reference to the interiority of individuals.¹ While there are studies and commentaries on the socio-economic changes in post-war Italy and on the Italian literary production of the time (and how they interact with one another), they are generally not based on a close analysis of the literary texts. Furthermore, existing studies on post-war Italian literature generally address a specific theme or grouping of writers, rather than providing a wider account of the Italian post-war transition, as does this study, albeit through the perspective of literary geographies.² Indeed, previous studies focus on particular selections of writers who share a common ‘identity’ or interest, such as women writers, writers of the Neoavanguardia, or writers from a specific region. This book addresses the complexity of a transitional period through a diversified selection of writers rather than using the traditional organizing principle based on a coherent corpus of writings. By investigating diverse perspectives and forms of literary production, this book therefore mirrors more immediately the troubled intensity of the period under examination in such a way as to bring into focus the underlying cultural patterns and anxieties in Italian society of the time.

This focus on individual internalization of post-war changes highlights the difficulty of negotiating rapid transformation. Spatial re-organization of urban and rural places, such as that witnessed in Italy from the late 1950s onwards, may be difficult to accommodate until these changes again become part of an established landscape. Jameson claims that, in contemporary globalized societies, people have yet to develop the ‘perceptual equipment’ that can allow them to navigate postmodern space.³ In the present study this is seen, for example, through the periphery as an urban area that is constantly redefined and often perceived as alien and threatening. Another example is provided by the ubiquitous roadworks that, in La vita agra and La donna della domenica, bear witness to continued urban restructuring and leave the characters feeling frustrated and confused. The fact that the writers analysed in this book write in the midst of unprecedented social change may, therefore, account for their ambivalent or overtly hostile attitudes to urbanization and modernization. It may also account for the perceived fracture between the past, often connected with the values of social solidarity and simplicity of life (as can be seen, for instance, in Bianciardi’s nostalgic recollection of the slow pace of life in Grosseto or Ginzburg’s longing for the stability of the patriarchal family), and the puzzling reality of modern Italy. In the process the writers express the temporary loss of spatial co-ordinates, which is figured also as a loss of intellectual, emotional and psychological co-ordinates.

The emphasis on the individual perspective also exposes anxiety as defining the Italian post-war period behind the façade of progress and prosperity. In the novels analysed in Chapters 1 and 2, feelings of anxiety are projected onto changing urban spaces. By drawing on the imagery of the city as a site of alienation, these novels express the sense of estrangement and non-belonging which connect many experiences of the modern city so as to become a universal trait. At the same time they document specific historical circumstances and hence their criticism of the city betrays broader discontent with the recent developments in Italian society. Chapter 3 explores how transformations play out in the Northern provincial environment portrayed in Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera, particularly in regard to social and gender roles. Ginzburg’s point of view is controversial. On the one hand, she seems, to some extent at least, sympathetic towards her (particularly female) characters’ dissatisfaction with the static, conservative way of life in their provincial microcosm. On the other, her yearning for a particular patriarchal family and social order betrays her uneasiness with the modern views, particularly regarding women’s emancipated role in society, which were coming to the forefront of public debate at the time thanks to the activities of the Italian feminist movement. Anxiety resurfaces in Chapter 4 as the travel accounts examined there address Italy’s territorial fragmentation and problematic sense of national identity at a crucial moment in the country’s history. It reverberates through Ortese’s perception of the Italian landscape as ineffable and alien, Piovene’s reassuring guidebook to navigating Italy’s post-war transformation and Arbasino’s endlessly restless travel that privileges abroad over a certain intellectual provincialism at home. In some cases anxiety triggers an interrogation of accepted modes of representation, as shown, for example, by Ortese’s and Arbasino’s problematizing approach to the travel-writing tradition.

As argued throughout the book, anxiety may be an indicator of the incomplete process of cultural reckoning with the past in post-war Italian society. A further thread which emerges from the analysis of literary texts is the ambivalent perception of the post-war years as a rupture with both traditional lifestyles and the political and administrative continuity with the pre-war period. The unprocessed past can, on occasion, manifest itself as a lingering totalitarian threat, the yearning for a traditional urban model, the problematic sense of national identity and, generally speaking, through the persistence of enduring issues that weigh on Italian society, especially evident in the lagging-behind of the South. Very much like the places they portray in the midst of historical transition, the examined texts may be situated at the crossroads of two epochs in the Italian literary tradition. While they retain certain concerns of the modern era, they also anticipate some of the arguments of the postmodern discourse. As seen in the Introduction, the time frame of this book coincides with the slow gestation of postmodern ideas within the somewhat fractious Italian intellectual context of the time.

Throughout this study the analysis of perceptions and representations of space highlights issues such as power and gender relations, the psychological values of the built environment and dominant narratives of Italy that were codified by a largely foreign, reifying gaze. It also foregrounds ways of challenging imposed notions of space either discursively or through concrete spatial practices, for instance the act of walking as a way of reclaiming space, as shown in La vita agra. These issues are explored from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Space as the locus where these tensions play out opens up multiple strands of enquiry and, in so doing, additional avenues for further research. These include, for example, exploring more closely the link between mental health and the built environment; how further social and spatial changes were conceptualized by writers in later decades; and a more comprehensive study of the provinces in Italian literature across different epochs and literary genres.

This book provides an account of the complex post-war transition in Italy as expressed by different authorial voices and their complementary narratives. By capturing some key issues and dynamics in post-war Italian society, it contributes to the study and understanding of this crucial historical shift. What has been revealed by a close analysis of the responses to the changing spaces of post-war Italy by the diverse writers who are active in this period is the intensely disruptive experience of the post-war transition, not only in terms of literary or cultural history, but also of the everyday ontological and material experience of Italians of different class, gender and professional activity across the Peninsula. Hence, the time frame and collection of writers explored in this book, perhaps conventionally regarded as anomalous, are crucial to a critical understanding of Italian culture in the post-war years and beyond. One might even say that only by re-examining the Italian post-war transition through the microscopic approach used in this book can we move towards a fuller understanding of the crises of Italian nationhood that have characterized more recent decades.