4. Post-War Italian Travel Writing: Piovene, Ortese, Arbasino

Introduction: New Conceptions of Journeying

The ambiguous place that travel writing occupies within Italy’s literary tradition may largely be ascribed to the hybrid nature of the genre and its kinship with other forms of writing, such as journalism and the essay.¹ The marginality of travel literature links this genre to crime fiction, which, as seen, has also struggled to attain literary dignity within the Italian cultural panorama. Both forms of writing have indeed been considered less important than more canonical and allegedly prestigious forms of writing.² Theodore Cachey argues that the uncertain status of travel writing within the Italian literary canon may be linked to the centrality of the idea of ‘placelessness’ in the Italian literary tradition since at least Dante’s and Petrarch’s vernacular practices.³ The relevance of displacement means that ‘the entire tradition comprises a literature of travel, and more precisely a literature of exile/pilgrimage’,⁴ and that therefore there is no need for a specific travel category. This chapter focuses on post-war Italian domestic travel writing, that is, on travel accounts written by Italian authors travelling in Italy, a specific category of travelogues that in the context of the genre may be considered even more marginal, for it has received very little critical attention until recent years.⁵ Even among literary critics, there is a tendency to identify travel literature relating to Italy with the work of foreign authors. This means that the internal perspective of Italian writers has often been overlooked.⁶

From the Renaissance onwards, and particularly with the tradition of the Grand Tour, which enjoyed a great vogue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy became a privileged destination for international travellers as a major centre of classical culture. The Italian journey was considered almost an obligatory stage in the education of the European elite in a cultural context that was largely dominated by the study of the Classics.⁷ The travel accounts of the Grand Tour have shaped the image of Italy as a sort of open-air museum, drawing on the wealth of its historical and cultural patrimony. This mode of viewing has informed the foreign gaze on Italy but also the way in which Italians see themselves.⁸ This predominant perspective accounts for the enduring idea of Italy as the Bel Paese, one which conveys the view of a country frozen in the atemporality of its architectural and natural beauties. The dominant way of looking at Italy in travel writing remains largely reifying and travel narratives of the Italian Peninsula continue to be largely associated with the tradition of the Grand Tour and with the point of view of foreign travellers, more specifically, the point of view of the foreign male traveller of means, since travelling for leisure and education has traditionally been a privilege of the male elites.⁹

Nevertheless, Italian authors, too, have produced a large repertoire of written accounts documenting their journeys in Italy. Their travelogues began to appear as early as the eighteenth century.¹⁰ It can be argued that the evolution of Italian travel literature went hand in hand with the tradition of foreign travel writing. Italian domestic travel accounts failed for a long time to provide a real alternative to the dominant image of Italy codified by foreign travellers and in some cases even retraced the latter’s itineraries. In other instances, however, they included places off the beaten track of the Grand Tour.¹¹ Travel accounts by Italian authors flourished in the aftermath of the unification of Italy in 1861.¹² In particular, more comprehensive accounts began to emerge that took into consideration wider portions of the national territory as a reflection of the intellectual curiosity that accompanied the newly born nation and in response to the improvements in the road network.¹³ Abbott Antonio Stoppani’s book Il Bel Paese [The Beautiful Country] (1875) and Edmondo De Amicis’s Cuore [Heart] (1886) are arguably the foremost examples of the new quest for discovery and the educational mission with which this was often invested.¹⁴ Both Abbott Stoppani and De Amicis are crucial figures in the development of modern Italian reportage and journalism.¹⁵ The emergence of Italian landscape photography in the first half of the twentieth century, chiefly through the activities of the Italian Touring Club¹⁶ and the Alinari brothers, provided an additional boost to the establishment of a genuinely Italian travel imaginary. These photographs challenged the reductive rhetoric of the Grand Tour by capturing differences and variety across the Peninsula. It has been pointed out, however, that they still betray the persistence of a foreign, reifying gaze in their reflection of the political agenda of the Northern Italian elite who led Italy’s unification process.¹⁷

Italy’s political unification at the end of the nineteenth century gave the first significant impulse to the development of the national road network and rail system. It is, however, the boom years that witnessed a proper revolution in mobility thanks to substantial improvements carried out to the railway and road systems, for instance with the construction of autostrade [motorways], and to unprecedented motorization. These innovations fostered a change in the perception of distances within the country. As Ernesto Galli Della Loggia puts it, it seemed as if, in those years, Italy became smaller: ‘Grazie ad una imponente motorizzazione di massa, mutarono anche le proporzioni geografiche del paese. Ricoperta di autostrade e di distributori di benzina, l’Italia si rimpicciolì, e mentre cambiava il senso dello spazio cambiò anche la sua misura’ [Thanks to an impressive mass motorization, the geographical proportions of the country also changed. Covered by motorways and petrol stations, Italy shrank and as the sense of space changed, so did its size].¹⁸ In the 1950s and 1960s the journey increasingly featured in Italian literature and cinema as a recurring trope for the discovery and appropriation of the national territory but also as a metaphor for self-discovery.¹⁹ Journeying provided the occasion to investigate phenomena of modernization across the Peninsula, as shown by the many writers and intellectuals who committed themselves to documenting the country’s changing geography.²⁰ In those years journeying also carried other meanings. If, on the one hand, the rise of the socio-cultural phenomenon of the villeggiatura [holidays spent away from the city] in the newly developed vacation resorts points to greater leisure time and economic wellbeing, on the other the 1950s and 1960s also saw masses of poorer Italians (especially from the South of the country) being forced to leave their homes for economic reasons. Many headed towards what Piovene has described as ‘un aldilà fisico, il Nord, un paese straniero, dove si troverebbe la felicità’ [an otherworldly place, the North, a foreign country where happiness would be found] (VI, p. 663). As Donna Gabaccia points out, post-war mass internal migration did not represent an entirely new phenomenon, for Italians have been among the most mobile people in the world since the Middle Ages.²¹ What was new was the fact that Italian migrants moved in huge numbers to the North of the country instead of overseas, as had overwhelmingly been the case up to that point (and can be seen again today).²²

This chapter explores three examples of post-war Italian travel literature, including, first, Ortese’s collection of travel pieces La lente scura. Ortese is best known for her works of fiction, which were awarded prestigious literary prizes. She won the Viareggio Prize in 1953 with the collection of short stories Il mare non bagna Napoli [The Sea Does Not Bathe Naples] and the Strega Prize in 1967 with her novel Poveri e semplici [The Poor and the Simple]. For most of her career Ortese also worked as a journalist and reporter, publishing her articles in numerous newspapers and magazines. She was accustomed to moving around since, as a child, her father’s employment by the Italian government had meant that the family had had to relocate frequently in Italy and abroad (they lived in Tripoli from 1924 to 1928). Ortese’s restless approach to travel may, therefore, in part reflect this experience. The troubled road to publication of La lente scura may be seen as symptomatic of the uncertain status of travel writing within the Italian literary canon and book market. Ortese started to work on a project for a collection of travel pieces in 1952, which she then shelved, resumed and revised several times over the course of the following decades. Thanks to the philological and bibliographical work of Luca Clerici, who also has the merit of having recovered the group of reportages that now constitute the second section of the volume, the book finally came out in 1991 with the structure that it maintains to this day.²³ La lente scura includes pieces that were written by Ortese from the end of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1960s. While the book as a whole is taken into consideration, this chapter focuses mainly on the articles that were written and published after 1957. By this time economic growth had visibly taken off, anticipated as it was by a wave of modernization in Italian cultural life. In particular, the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956 and the discussions it prompted put an end to the almost totalizing influence that the Italian Communist Party had exerted over the mainstream cultural debate on the left. The new openness to sociological approaches and cultural trends such as psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, which in Italy had until then been met with resistance, was one of the effects of this cultural renewal.²⁴

Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia, the second text to be analysed here, is a monumental endeavour to document the transformations occurring throughout the national territory as Piovene travelled from North to South, one region after the other, between 1953 and 1956. Commissioned by the RAI, Viaggio in Italia was originally written for a series of radio episodes that were transmitted by Radio RAI. A member of an aristocratic family from Vicenza, Piovene was a novelist and a regular contributor to Italy’s most prominent newspapers, known for his elegant writing style and lucid analyses. He displayed chameleon-like attitudes in his political views. He went from supporting the Fascist regime to sympathizing with the Communist Party after the end of the war, gaining the nickname of ‘Conte Rosso’ [Red Count] due to his aristocratic origins.²⁵ Piovene also engaged with autobiographical and introspective elements, particularly in the novels set in the childhood environment of Vicenza, Le Furie [The Furies] (1963) and Le stelle fredde [The Cold Stars] (1970). When discussing the reasons which prompted him to embark on his journey across Italy, in Viaggio in Italia Piovene writes: ‘[S]‌ono curioso dell’Italia, degli italiani e di me stesso’ [I am curious about Italy, the Italian people and myself] (VI, p. 11). He therefore anticipates that travel will trigger self-exploration through the encounter with people and places. In a mirror-like effect, then, the investigative lens turns on the observer himself. Alberto Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia is the third and final text to be examined here. Arbasino was one of the leading exponents of the Gruppo ’63 and Neoavanguardia, which championed forms of stylistic experimentation that broke with the canon. Like Guido Ceronetti in more recent years, he belongs to a more disenchanted, cynical strand of the Italian journey, the origins of which may be traced back to Lawrence Stern’s Sentimental Journey (1768). Elvio Guagnini argues that this tradition, which moves the subjectivity of the observer into the foreground, may be seen as a reaction to the eighteenth-century type of encyclopaedic travel writing that sought to give a comprehensive account of observed reality (of which Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia is an emanation).²⁶ We shall see later that Fratelli d’Italia indeed offers interesting insights into the role and positioning of the writer-observer in travel literature.

This chapter explores how Ortese, Piovene and Arbasino relate to tropes and stereotypes codified in the tradition of travel writing on Italy and especially the implications of Ortese’s gendered perspective against the male-connoted voice, which has been dominant in travel literature from the Grand Tour onwards and is exemplified here by Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia. It also looks at Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia as a further reinterpretation of the traditional journey to Italy. Established and accepted ways of seeing Italy therefore intertwine, in this chapter, with issues of gender and sexuality within the context of the post-war years, which are ripe for a critical revisiting of traditional paradigms. The writers’ different approaches to travel are indicative of socially constructed notions and expectations related to gender, which in turn shape the experience of travel and its conceptualization. As in the previous chapters, the analysis here revolves around the idea of the Italian post-war period as a controversial transition. The difficulty of coming to grips with rapid changes certainly informs Ortese’s and Piovene’s travel writing and their very different attempts at grappling with them. A distinctive kind of underlying anxiety runs through the texts. According to Alberto Rodighiero, Fratelli d’Italia captures the nature of the Italian boom years as ‘ultimo ballo prima della caduta nel baratro’ [the last dance before falling into the abyss].²⁷ The characters’ frantic wandering and relentless socializing betray emptiness and disorientation. Unsurprisingly, death has a prominent presence in the novel. Raimondo, one of the chief members of the intellectual circle in the book, is dying from cancer and yet continues until the end to host glamorous parties and cultural events. Ortese, for her part, openly discusses feelings of uncertainty in her personal life as well as in the country’s historical phase as she sets out on her journeys. Finally, it will be argued that Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia betrays a more hidden kind of anxiety in its very pretence of completeness.

Arguably, Italy’s nation-building process was further hindered in the post-war period by the institutional failure to foster a vision of collective identity and belonging, corroborated by a critical public reckoning with the past. In the texts examined here the issue of Italy’s historical fragmentation emerges, for example, through the South as the half of the country which struggles to emerge from poverty. The difficult integration process of the South within the unified nation raises the question of the geographical margins and their representation, delineating patterns of belonging and exclusion within the dominant model of modernity. David Forgacs observes that Italy’s unification process involved the marginalization of certain people and places (chiefly Southern Italy) which have been defined as peripheral in relation to core social groups and locations established, by contrast, as central and important (the North as the birthplace of the political and cultural elite that led Italy’s unification).²⁸ The notion of margin therefore entails a way of seeing the Other, which is observed and objectified from an economically and culturally powerful centre.²⁹ This explains the process of ‘othering’ that has been inflicted on the South and that reverberates, for instance, through Piovene’s superior stance in his pages dedicated to Southern Italy. As we shall see, Ortese’s portrayal is more sympathetic and complex, while for Arbasino the notion of place becomes much more fleeting and less influenced by cultural assumptions.

Gendered Tropes in Travel Writing

The Undomesticated Nature of Anna Maria Ortese

In the introduction and concluding remarks to La lente scura, Ortese opens a window into her inner world and therefore into the interplay between travel and introspection. She evokes a time of great uncertainty when recollecting the years of her numerous journeys across Italy:

Non auguro a nessuna persona giovane e vagamente ‘dissociata’ come io ero, e inoltre priva di reddito e anche di minime certezze personali e professionali – di attraversare l’Italia in un dopoguerra subito privo di unità e memoria – come io l’attraversai. C’è da uscirne spezzati. Tutto vi sembra estraneo, meraviglioso e spietato insieme: siete in casa d’altri! […] vidi Roma, o altre città, come appunto le vidi: straniere, accese, inesplicabili! (LS, p. 452)

[I do not wish any young and vaguely ‘dissociated’ person like I was, and also without income and with minimal personal and professional certainties – to cross Italy in a post-war period suddenly devoid of unity and memory – as I crossed it. We have to come out broken. Everything seems foreign to you, wonderful and ruthless at the same time: you are in someone else’s house! [...] I saw Rome, or other cities, just as I saw them: foreign, intense, inexplicable!]

Ortese describes her younger self as vulnerable, somewhat detached from reality, without personal and economic stability. The society which she portrays and which has just come out of the war also projects a sense of lack, with its faltering memory and precarious national unity. The places she encounters in her journeying appear foreign, inexplicable and hostile to the extent that they evoke the feeling of being in someone else’s house. Ortese’s travel writing is permeated by a sense of lack and non-belonging which the act of travelling is unable to heal and perhaps ultimately exacerbates. One should not forget that the vast majority of Italians had travelled very little across their country until the greater prosperity and mobility of the post-war years provided opportunities for increasing numbers of ordinary people to travel further. Ortese’s perception of Italian places as foreign may, therefore, reflect the fact that knowledge of the Italian territory only began to improve with the development of adequate transport infrastructures, the amelioration of economic conditions and the advent of mass-media communication.

One may assume, however, that Ortese’s hesitancy in laying claim to the places she visits and her idea of travel as a fearful, destabilizing experience are also a reflection of her being a woman travel writer. Piovene, as we shall see, lays claim to the reality that he observes in the sense that he maintains he is able to grasp it through his rational, analytical approach. Ortese’s travel writing spans the years in which women’s emancipation from the roles of mothers and wives was still hardly conceivable and the feminist movement had yet to develop in Italy. In her study of women’s travel writing in the British colonies, Sara Mills argues that women travel writers found it more difficult to employ the ‘imperialist voice’ in their writings than their male counterparts for they conformed to the dominant conceptions of femininity of the time.³⁰ Ortese’s being a female writer in the Italy of the 1950s may, therefore, explain her own apprehensive approach to travel and the travel-writing profession in the years in which more Italian women were starting to join the labour force but whose path to emancipation and empowerment had only just begun.³¹ At least since the Grand Tour and before the advent of mass tourism in more recent times, travel had overwhelmingly been the prerogative of the wealthy young male.³² Women were normally expected to be in the company of a chaperon. Even today, a woman travelling on her own is often seen as taking an unnecessary risk.

Ortese’s approach to travelling is far from reconciled or conventional. It recalls more of a restless quest. Her aspiration to understand the places she visits, let alone to feel at home in any of them, remains unattainable. Ortese suggests that only when the tourist drops his or her role and identity (she fantasizes that this might happen if the tourist were to be mistaken by local people for someone else, a relative, an acquaintance or someone who belongs to their community) does it become possible for him or her to overcome the sense of estrangement and unfamiliarity conveyed by new people and places:

In una città, come nel mare, bisogna identificarsi, per vedere realmente. Bisogna che qualcuno si dimentichi per quale motivo siete venuto, e vi confonda con un familiare. Allora, mille particolari segreti vengono alla superficie, e in quei particolari si ricompone anche per voi il volto sfaccettato della città, si ricompone in un’immagine unica. (LS, p. 330)

[In a city, as in the sea, one needs to orientate oneself in order really to see. The reasons you came must be forgotten; you must be mistaken for a native. Then, a thousand secret details come to the surface and in those details the multifaceted face of the city takes shape for you, too, it takes shape in a singular and unique image.]

What Ortese says here is that one may attempt to understand a place and its inhabitants only by immersing oneself and blending in with the life of the community, a principle which also informs modern cultural anthropology, at least since it underwent a critical self-interrogation of its methodology in order to reject any involvement with colonialism.³³ Cultural relativism as one of the guiding tenets of cultural anthropology aims to avoid a superior, objectifying eye and therefore to give the observed back their voice. As for Ortese, it means setting off on her journeying without preconceived expectations. Given the power imbalance that is always involved in the relationship between the observer and observed, a certain degree of reification and cultural appropriation remains unavoidable. Nevertheless, here Ortese consciously rejects the standardized tourist experience and the acquisitive gaze that defines much of the Grand Tour tradition.

The themes of silence and incommunicability, meant as the difficulty to make oneself heard and understood, are a clear feminist element and a clue to Ortese’s gendered counter-discourse. Historically, the voice of women has been silenced; their agency curtailed. In La lente scura the experience of travel often provides the occasion for feelings of ineffability to emerge onto the written page. In the following extract, for example, Ortese describes the common occurrence of holding a conversation with fellow passengers during a train journey. After they exchange some information about themselves and their places of origin, Ortese is left baffled by the realization that places and the existences that populate them inevitably bear different meanings to different people. In other words, there is inevitably a gap in human communication, some lack of reciprocal understanding which Ortese likens to the experience of staring at a silent starry sky at night:

Ogni volta che sono in treno, qualcuno mi racconta la sua vita; qualche volta, io racconto la mia […]. Benché le storie di questi uomini e queste donne mi spieghino stranamente i paesi da cui essi provengono, o che attraversiamo, l’impressione finale è sempre di smarrimento, come dopo aver fissato un muto cielo stellato. (LS, p. 347)

[Every time I am on the train, someone tells me about their life; sometimes I tell my story [...]. Although the stories of these men and women are meant to explain to me the strange lands from which they come, or through which we pass, the final impression is always one of bewilderment, as after staring at a silent starry sky.]

The beauty of the landscapes Ortese portrays in her travel accounts, which she finds so immaculate as to almost seem unreal and intimidating, exacerbates this sense of estrangement: ‘L’estraneità rimane, e trova le sue origini nell’assurdità di questa bellezza, nella sua perfezione e incomunicabilità assolutamente al di fuori dell’umano’ [The feeling of ‘outsideness’ remains, it has its source in the absurdity of this beauty, in its absolute perfection and incommunicability that is beyond the human] (LS, p. 350). The contemplation of a beautiful landscape is normally experienced as pleasurable and enriching. Ortese, however, perceives it as absurd. By deeming it unknowable and not conveyable, she resists tendencies to the objectification and ultimately dominance of the natural world.

Ortese contends that a place like the Ligurian Riviera can only be contemplated from a distance and is not suitable for living. Only the rich and powerful possess enough conceit not to be afraid of manipulating and spoiling that beauty: ‘Tutta questa bellezza, toccando la perfezione delle cose pensate, mi sembra inabitabile. E forse, sotto questo aspetto, è anche comprensibile perché sia diventata preda dell’infinita avidità e disponibilità dei ricchi, disponibilità di mezzi e di aggressione’ [All this beauty, approaching as it does the perfection of thought, seems scarcely habitable to me. And yet, perhaps, in this respect, it is also understandable why it should have fallen prey to the infinite greed and leisure of the rich, the leisure to buy and to ravage] (LS, p. 337). This description has strong gendered connotations because it emphasizes the urge to dominate and possess. The final phrase, in particular, recalls the memory of war and colonization by hinting at the use of military force and technology to control what is identified as wild, natural and rich in resources that can be exploited. The chapter ‘Viaggio in Liguria’ [Journey to Liguria] again raises the issues of the marketization of the national territory and of the exploitation of natural resources for the purposes of economic gain. It does so through the character of Alessi, a former sailor with a heightened sensitivity and perception of reality whom Ortese meets in Santa Margherita, Liguria. From Alessi’s fragmentary account, we gather that he has gone through a traumatic event while out at sea, one which is still haunting him. He lived abroad for thirty years and now that he has returned to his birthplace in Liguria he feels uprooted. He observes the recent transformations in his environment and comments: ‘Hanno affittato e venduto tutto, anche le voci’ [They rented and sold everything, even the voices] (LS, p. 357). The theme of appropriation or denial of voice adds a distinctly feminist charge to Alessi’s account.

La lente scura evokes analogies between the exploitation of the environment and the exploitation of women. As eco-feminist critics point out, the connection between women and nature – a supposed archetype of the human imagination, as seen, for example, in the historical, tenacious identification of nature with a nurturing mother – may, however, reinforce the essentialist type of thinking that assigns fixed characteristics to the sexes. Similarly,Val Plumwood remarks that:

the framework of assumptions in which the human/nature contrast has been formed in the west is one not only of feminine connectedness with and passivity towards nature, but also and complementarily one of exclusion and domination of the sphere of nature by a white, largely male elite.³⁴

Our concept of nature therefore needs to be problematized in order to avoid perpetuating gender essentialism.³⁵ Ortese does so by challenging stereotypical notions of natural beauty in the dominant representations of Italy. Such notions are also central to what Pasquale Verdicchio has called the ‘national unificatory discourse’,³⁶ which has sought to depict the Italian landscape ‘in terms of national treasures’³⁷ at least since the unification of Italy and especially through the activities of the Club Alpino Italiano (founded in 1863) and Italian Touring Club. The concept of the Bel Paese at the heart of such representations is re-semanticized by Ortese in opposition to both the nationalistic rhetoric and the reifying descriptions of foreign observers. She gives a disquieting representation of the natural world, presenting it as harsh and punctuating it with references to silence and death.³⁸ This kind of wild, uncontrollable nature articulates a resistance to domination and possession.

Piovene’s Portrait of Italy as a Modern Nation

Piovene, too, distances himself from conventional modes of representation of the Italian Peninsula. The Grand Tour assigned special importance to the traditional città d’arte [art cities] of Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples and, like Piovene, generally followed an itineray from North to South. The encyclopaedic reach of Viaggio in Italia implies that all places are worthy of exploration and there is no hierarchy based on the alleged primacy of Romantic landscapes or cultural treasures. Quite the contrary: the architectural beauty of certain Italian cities is regarded by Piovene as a limitation and ‘perfezione conclusa che talvolta condanna alla sterilità’ [a complete perfection that sometimes condemns a place to sterility] (VI, p. 74). Milan, as a city that has constantly transformed and reinvented itself, a city whose history is never concluded, embodies modern values of dynamism and innovation. Piovene praises the whole Lombardy region, which he deems beautiful, but in a more discreet and less stereotypically Italian way, ‘meno esemplare, meno italiana, per lo straniero che avvicina l’Italia e la vuole conoscere nei suoi paesaggi resi tipici dalle convenzioni turistiche’ [for the foreigner who approaches Italy and wants to get to know it through the landscapes rendered stereotypical by tourist conventions it is less exemplary, less Italian] (VI, p. 73). For this reason it has remained at the margins of the mainstream tourist circuit and, writes Piovene, one may appreciate it more authentically. The chapter on Rome opens with a similar declaration of intent as Piovene refuses, deeming it superfluous and ridiculous, to itemize all the architectural and cultural treasures of the Eternal City as so many other writers have done before him. Piovene therefore takes a clear stance against the Grand Tour and Bel Paese rhetoric as he openly rejects established ways of seeing and conceptualizing the Italian Peninsula (the fact that Lombardy is not typically Italian is seen as a value) and documents the complexity of the latter beyond standardized itineraries, which tended to privilege specific places, especially within the same epoch and among groups of travellers of the same nationality.³⁹

The main reason why Piovene rejects romanticized views of Italy is that they clash with the image he intends to present of the country as a modern nation in the making. It is Piovene’s purpose to show that Italy is bound to find its own place in the project of a unified, modern Europe together with more developed countries if the remaining obstacles to its modernization and nation-building processes are effectively tackled and overcome. The chapter dedicated to Rome – a city so often portrayed and celebrated and which arguably embodies most clearly than any other the cliché of the Bel Paese – provides a further example of Piovene’s tendency to challenge enduring commonplaces. The chapter also contains interesting reflections on the difficulties of integrating a city with such an important history and tradition, and unique identity, into the project of the unified nation. Here, Piovene further criticizes the cult of the past, deeming it a hindrance for the modernization process, but also points out that the end of the Second World War undermined the allure of Rome’s imperial history, triggering the transformation of Rome into a modern city, ‘non interamente europea, come Londra e Parigi, ma la grande metropoli con caratteri misti, tra l’Europa e il Mediterraneo’ [not entirely European, like London and Paris, but a great metropolis with mixed traits, between Europe and the Mediterranean] (VI, p. 640). Piovene’s progressive stance can also be measured against the widely shared idea of immigration as a plague for the receiving city, as seen in the following example:

L’affluenza degli stranieri, non soltanto contemplativi, le dà un carattere cosmopolita di nuova specie; l’irruzione degli italiani da tutte le province sopravanza la vecchia società romana, popolare, borghese e aristocratica. Si compie così a Roma, con ritmo sempre più veloce, una fusione della società italiana. (VI, p. 640)

[The influx of foreigners who are not only there to admire gives it a cosmopolitan character of a new kind; the irruption of Italians from all the provinces transforms old Roman society, popular, bourgeois and aristocratic. Thus, there emerges in Rome a rapidly expanding melting pot of Italian society.]

Piovene sees immigration as a resource which may boost the renewal of Rome’s decadent society and accelerate the creation of a more variegated but unified Italian society. It is also interesting to note the derogatory reference to the contemplative, passive attitude of the tourist who, unlike the immigrant, does not contribute anything to the host community. Nevertheless, Piovene is not immune from some of the essentialist arguments around immigration and urbanism. For instance, he calls ‘muffe’ [moulds] the borgate [working-class suburbs] that were created in Rome during the Fascist period. He also champions a controlled transformation of Rome against what he sees as its post-war chaotic growth.

Piovene claims he is aware that, like any other ‘inventory’, his Viaggio in Italia contains omissions and gaps (VI, p. 5). He warns his readers that the book can only reflect the particular moment in which it was written, for the physical and social landscape of the country is changing so rapidly that it would take multiple journeys in the course of the following months and years to keep the observations up to date. It is tempting to see this rhetorical modesty as a pose, for Piovene still aims to compile a comprehensive survey of the social geography of post-war Italy. He is confident that his analytical method of observation can capture the fundamental processes at stake in post-war Italian society. These empirical observations give prominence to what Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick identify as the analytical, objective qualities of the reportage, in which the emphasis is put on the reality described by an allegedly unbiased observer. According to Youngs and Forsdick:

[travel writing’s] modes oscillate around the usually distinct fields of autobiography and science. The former lends to travel writing its subjective qualities centred on the character of the narrator and his or her interactions with the people and landscapes that are encountered. The scientific aspect gives to travel writing its objective quality of observation and reportage. The autobiographical draws also on the construction of the protagonist in the novel (especially the picaresque and the comic), which helps introduce elements of the fictional.⁴⁰

Youngs and Forsdick point to the varying shades of travel literature: on the one hand, the objectivity of the scientific approach to reality, which is typical of the reportage; and, on the other, the subjective involvement of the author that is usually betrayed by the presence of autobiographical or fictional elements. Viaggio in Italia embodies the former approach. Nevertheless, Piovene’s personal involvement emerges throughout the book as his personal opinions punctuate his descriptions of the places and people he observes.

Viaggio in Italia ultimately shows that objectivity is a construct. What the book offers is an interpretation of reality, a narrative perspective, albeit an undoubtedly knowledgeable and insightful one. The kind of superior viewpoint adopted by Piovene is problematic because, while it challenges representations of Italy stemming from literary conventions and the modern tourist experience, it also creates new stereotypes in its pretence of offering a comprehensive, reassuring guide to post-war Italian society and territory. Piovene’s factual, authoritative tone belongs to the tradition of travel books that rely on realist conventions, such as the reliability of the observer and the stability of travel destinations.⁴¹ More broadly, it belongs to a certain type of male, self-assured and supposedly objective gaze. As an established, well-regarded male intellectual who was commissioned to undertake his reportage by RAI, Piovene arguably identifies himself with objectivity. The fact that Piovene claims for himself a privileged standpoint becomes particularly evident in the almost colonial tropes that he deploys in his treatment of the Italian South, as will be shown later. His viewpoint could not be any more different from Ortese’s ‘lente scura’, as she calls her ‘filter’ on reality: a distinctive perspective on things which she describes as a blend of melancholy and protest.⁴² Melancholy is the reflection of her state of mind and of the personal difficulties she was experiencing at the time. Protest may point to the rejection of ingrained ways of seeing and narrating things. Ortese’s metaphor of the journey as inquiry and investigation is a means of contending with reality, not claiming to assert the truth. Piovene’s methodical approach to travel and travel writing is very different from the erratic, impulsive style of Ortese as well as Arbasino. Ortese’s journeys are often dictated by the contingencies of the moment and the volatility of her mood swings. Arbasino rewrites the Grand Tour, giving it an international dimension (not only Italy but Europe) and emphasizing the spontaneity of the characters’ trips.

Alberto Arbasino’s Inverted Grand Tour

In Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia the pretext for starting the journey may resemble that of the many intellectuals who set out to explore Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, often with the support of a newspaper, a radio or a television station. It may, alternatively, even seem like the pursuit of personal (and artistic) formation, as for the Grand Tour traveller. The book features a group of four intellectual friends who are planning a journey across Italy in search of ideas for a screenplay they have been commissioned to write. The film is titled L’Italia si chiama amore [Italy is Love]. Arbasino’s parodic intent is immediately evident in the film title, a satire of certain melodramatic and sentimental depictions of Italy, as it is in the title of the book itself, which echoes the opening line of Italy’s national anthem with jarring effect. The values of nationalism and sentiments of unity that the brotherhood of all Italians expressed in the anthem is meant to inspire are ideals upon which Arbasino’s intellectual characters can only look with condescending amusement. The main characters in the book are the first-person narrator, known by the nickname ‘Elefante’ [Elephant] and his friend Antonio (who becomes Andrea in the second edition of the book to return as Antonio in the third). Jean-Claude, who is French, and Klaus, ‘un tedesco mezzo americano’ [half-German, half-American] (FI, p. 97), flank them. The group of friends engage in frequent and rather verbose discussions, often on the subject of contemporary Italian culture, which make up large sections of the book. These conversational exchanges give us an idea of their personality. It is particularly interesting to note that three of the friends are homosexual (and Arbasino himself was openly gay), Jean-Claude and Klaus are foreigners and Elefante himself was born in Italian Switzerland. These elements arguably afford an original perspective, not least in terms of challenging the conventionally foreign, contemplative gaze on Italy. Jean-Claude, Klaus and Elefante reveal a much more disenchanted outlook on Italy than their fellow Northern Europeans who travelled to the country two centuries before them.

In fact, Arbasino is less interested in documenting the transformation of post-war Italy than in satirizing stereotypical representations of Italy. This emerges clearly, for example, in the discussions around the film project: ‘La storia bisogna poi che sia estiva, assolutamente, sentimentalissima, con tanti Vesuvi e tante gondole, e colori-colori-colori’ [The story must be summery then, completely, and very sentimental, with Mount Vesuvius all over the place and many gondolas and colours everywhere] (FI, p. 10). L’Italia si chiama amore turns out to be a parody which exposes romanticized images of Italy as a sunlit land of bright colours where people indulge in gondola rides and show a temperament as fiery and unpredictable as Mount Vesuvius. Arbasino aims to strip his journey to Italy of these clichéd narratives. This intention is explicitly declared by Andrea in the second edition of the book while talking about the film project that is still at an early and confused stage:

Utilizziamo a ogni costo il gran tema del Viaggio in Italia? […] A un patto, si capisce: questa vacanza come una trama narrativa, però in una forma che non si saprebbe davvero immaginare più dissimile dal tradizionale itinerario così geograficamente e sentimentalmente ordinato del Grand Tour.⁴³

[Shall we use the grand theme of the journey through Italy at any cost? [...] On one condition, of course: we treat this holiday as an episodic narrative, but in a form that one could scarcely imagine more dissimilar from the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour with its customary geographic and sentimental reference points.]

The idea of the screenplay is a narrative stratagem for Arbasino to engage with the Grand Tour, whose importance he does not intend to deny. On the contrary, Arbasino seems to argue that any piece of writing engaging with the theme of the Italian journey should incorporate a critical reflection on the Grand Tour.⁴⁴ That being said, Fratelli d’Italia appropriates tradition only to transform it through a process of dissecting the Grand Tour narrative and re-semanticizing it. The initial idea of travelling across Italy to find material and inspiration for the film is soon abandoned as the characters embark on journeys that are motivated by a whim, by erotic encounters or the occasional invitation to gatherings of intellectuals and members of the upper-middle class, to the point where the book soon turns into a portrait of this glittering world seen through Arbasino’s cynical lens. The improvised itineraries represent a negation of the geographically and sentimentally organized paths of the Grand Tour, which followed predefined stages and tended to confirm one’s expectations. In so doing, Arbasino inaugurates in the Italian context a spontaneous ‘on the road’ style that will inspire, among others, Pier Vittorio Tondelli in the 1980s.

Antonio and Elefante have extremely sophisticated tastes and are undeniably privileged, for they travel with ease and with the availability of means and money. Antonio is an established intellectual who earns well writing for Italy’s foremost newspapers, while the narrator is a university student who goes on to work in finance in Zurich. In this respect they may be seen as yet another embodiment of the young male traveller of means who embarked on the Grand Tour. The extract below, which sketches a brief sociology of the types one may encounter in a motorway service area, is, however, indicative of the broader democraticization of travel brought about by the mobility of motorization, which Arbasino captures in his book:

E che felicità le soste sull’autostrada: bere, lavarsi, verificare sulla realtà le ipotesi di studio, tra facce sempre più incredibili … Cani che saltano fuori a coppie dalle Flaminie, bambini d’una biondezza che non s’era mai vista, proletari in tuta che per la prima volta nella storia sociale d’Italia siedono a un ristorante praticamente di lusso per un buon pasto completo col loro vino e il loro caffè … anche se il contesto sociologico qui è un po’ balordo, tutto di tedeschi in sandali gialli e braghe corte, con la Volkswagen fuori …. (FI, p. 363)

[And what happiness one derives from those rest stops on the highway: drinking, cleaning oneself up, testing one’s hypotheses against reality, among ever more unbelievable characters … Dogs that leap out in pairs from the Flaminie, children with blonde hair the like of which you’ve never seen before, proletarians in overalls who, for the first time in the social history of Italy, sit down in a practically luxurious restaurant for a good, square meal with their wine and their coffee … even if the sociological context here is a bit silly, all those Germans in yellow sandals and shorts with the Volkswagen parked outside ….]

The service area is populated by people from different socio-cultural backgrounds and nationalities who are recreating their own modern, motorized version of journey to Italy. In Fratelli d’Italia the centrality of the car as the main means of transport bears witness to the widespread availability and affordability of automobiles in the boom years. The book conveys the sense of revolutionary freedom associated with cars – freedom randomly to choose where to go and to reach destinations that had never been so close at hand.⁴⁵ The above extract also suggests that, in the space of the motorway, social and cultural differences momentarily disappear. The working class, too, partake in the mobility revolution and share the sense of freedom that comes with speeding away along these long-distance routes. For the lower classes, food consumed in the service area becomes a luxury meal experience. Here, Arbasino’s sarcastic portrait of incipient mass tourism indirectly laments the loss of a more elitist kind of travel. Thanks to the considerable improvement in the economic wellbeing of the Italian population in the boom years, travelling for leisure within the Peninsula is within virtually everyone’s reach. The geographically and sentimentally fixed itineraries of the Grand Tour are appropriated and reinterpreted in a potentially infinite number of possibilities, no longer strictly defined by social background or economic means, although one may argue that mass tourism has ended up imposing its own dominant routes and travel experience.

The characters’ wanderings are often the occasion to look at the places visited with detached irony, especially when these are iconic locations in the sentimental topography of the Italian journey. Capri, for instance, is described as tedious and out of fashion: a clear example of how Arbasino challenges stereotypes associated with places:⁴⁶

Ma l’isola dell’amore, che stretta al cuore, col suo squallore da posto fuori moda, la gente che gira a vuoto con lo sguardo balordo: luogo di castigatezza, oltre tutto, perché le dissipazioni che fino a dieci anni fa si facevano in località eccentriche ora sappiamo benissimo che si commettono specialmente nelle grandi città industriali con più di un milione di abitanti; e qui si viene soltanto per riposarsi o per piangere. (FI, p. 62)

[But the island of love, which now excites only sadness, with its old-fashioned squalor, the people wandering around aimlessly with vacant looks on their faces – a place beyond reproach above all, because the dissipations which up to ten years ago were practised in such eccentric places, we now know very well that they are committed above all in large industrial cities with more than a million inhabitants and here one now comes only to rest or to cry.]

Capri, the ‘island of love’ par excellence in the collective imagination, a celebrated and sought-after travel destination, is here a place where nothing happens, one suitable for people who content themselves with an uneventful mass leisure holiday. Arbasino mentions, by contrast, the bustling, diverse prospect of life offered by the Northern industrial cities with more than one million inhabitants, which in the transformed landscape of Italy in the 1960s have become a pole of attraction for both the working class and educated people in search of new stimuli and opportunities. Arbasino’s emphasis on the present is a rejection of rhetorical celebrations of the past and the primacy assigned to certain places on the basis of their architectural and natural beauties. The following passage, which reports a commonplace conversation about the beauties of Italy between a group of old people, iterates this point:

I vecchi sostengono che Villa d’Este invece non è bella perché è stretta, ma uno intende Villa d’Este a Tivoli, l’altro capiva invece quella sul lago di Como, e così vanno avanti un pezzo prima di passare a discutere la Ca’ d’Oro e le Due Torri di Bologna. ‘Eh, le bellezze d’Italia …’ ripetono ogni tanto. ‘Non ce n’è da nessun’altra parte …’ (FI, pp. 20–21)

[The old ones argue that the Villa d’Este, on the other hand, is not beautiful because it is too cramped, but one means the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the other understood the one on Lake Como; and so they go on for a while before moving on to discuss the Ca’ d’Oro and the Two Towers of Bologna. ‘Eh, the beauties of Italy...’, they repeat every now and then. ‘There’s nothing like it anywhere else ….’]

Arbasino’s caricature portrait of those who go on repeating banalities about Italy’s historical and architectural patrimony is a further indication of his intention to debunk the clichéd rhetoric of the Bel Paese.

Fratelli d’Italia shows a tendency to reflect on travel and on its own status of travel book (a postmodern textual practice applied to travel writing),⁴⁷ both through the revitalization of the tradition of the Grand Tour, even though turned upside down, and through Arbasino’s ironic detachment. Jameson’s definition of the postmodern aesthetic as a cultural dominant that incorporates and re-articulates residual models and forms of culture may be applied to Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia, which appropriates the tradition of the Grand Tour in a manner that is both playful and provocative. The book comes to terms with the Grand Tour by re-codifying some of its aspects while discarding others altogether. For instance, foreign locations are assigned new prominence in a sort of inverted Grand Tour (Davide Papotti describes this as ‘Grand Tour alla rovescia’),⁴⁸ both in terms of the selected itineraries (not confined to Italy anymore, but transnational) and the unplanned nature of the trips, which are improvised and reflect the characters’ volatile desires. The following passage illustrates the spontaneous, impulsive patterns of mobility in Arbasino’s novel: dictated by whim or chance, deliberately unorganized (‘come viene viene’) and unpredictable (‘un gran avanti-e-indietro’):

Stavolta si era pensato di far tutta una cosa di Europa orientale. Un giro di capitali tzigane, andando su da Vienna e toccando Budapest, Praga, Varsavia, prima l’una o l’altra, come viene viene; prendendo dentro anche un po’ di Breslavie e di Cracovie; e finire a Berlino […]. Per tornare, poi, un gran avanti-e-indietro sull’autobahn, tutto sull’imprevisto e sul caso. (FI, p. 8)

[This time we had thought of doing a whole Eastern European jaunt. A tour of gypsy capitals, going up to Vienna and stopping at Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, in any order at all, taking them as they came; also taking in a little of Wroclaw and Krakow; and finishing up in Berlin […]. Then, on the way back, a great to-and-fro on the autobahn, everything improvised and by chance.]

The novel has a strong international feel. The characters share memories of previous trips to European countries: Poland, Hungary, Greece, to name but three. The last chapter is entirely set in London. Antonio and Elefante know some of the local people and street names and can generally find their way easily in Central London, a sign that they have been in the city several times before. In their wanderings in Italy and abroad Andrea and Elefante continue more or less purposefully to run into friends and acquaintances who compose a cosmopolitan, well-educated and well-travelled society. They are perfectly at ease in the cultural milieu of the main European capital cities and have a broader perspective which allows them to question commonplace representations of Italy.

The problematization of the Grand Tour in Fratelli d’Italia also relies on the themes of homosexuality and liberated sexual behaviour. The motivation behind travel no longer concerns personal and artistic formation (although at the beginning of the book the reader may be bound to believe it does, as the characters are about to set out on a journey to find material for a film screenplay) but rather, somewhat more prosaically, research into sexual fulfilment or the invitation to rather vacuous gatherings of intellectuals. The erotic encounters that often initiate the characters’ journeys delineate a sexual topography of places that are assigned to clandestine gay encounters. In this sense Arbasino takes a queer perspective on the Grand Tour and on Italy as nation. The notion of queerness presents a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of identity and (self-)representation defined by heteronormativity.⁴⁹ By aiming to embrace the full spectrum of differences within the non-heterosexual community, queer theory questions the idea of identity defined by social norms. Morland and Willox, for example, argue that:

certainly the primary challenge posed by queer theory […] is to hegemonic understandings of the relations between identity, sex, gender and sexuality. Whereas Western culture has attempted to ossify these relations in the name of patriarchy, and feminism has tended to want to reconfigure them while preserving their conventional descriptive force, queer theory politicizes sex, gender and sexuality in a way that severs the notion of identity from any stable reference points. In this way, queerness resists the regimes […] of measuring, categorizing, and knowing the truth of sexual orientation.⁵⁰

Arbasino’s re-writing of the Grand Tour tradition, as well as the sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan, rather than national, community, are thus expressions of his non-alignment to dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality in the Italian society of the time. Alterity is central to queer (non-)identity, as it is to Arbasino’s approach to travel and travel writing in Fratelli d’Italia.⁵¹ The main point of view in the book is that of a narrator who challenges the heterosexual, male-centred, objective perspective on which many works of travel literature, as exemplified in this chapter by Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia, have relied.

In this regard, too, Fratelli d’Italia illustrates the affinity that one may find between contemporary travel writing and postmodern aesthetics, which share some significant traits. Ian Chambers has pointed out that postmodern travel implies:

the dislocation of the intellectual subject and his – the gender is deliberate – mastery of the word/world. The illusions of identity organized around the privileged voice and stable subjectivity of the ‘external’ observer are swept up and broken down into a movement that no longer permits the obvious institution of self-identity between thought and reality.⁵²

This approach to travel entails a decentred perspective on observed reality, which ceases to be a means of self-affirmation. As the observer relinquishes his perceived control over reality, the latter also becomes less fixed. The following analysis shows precisely how, in Fratelli d’Italia, the notion of place is deprived of its centrality and stability and how its power always to evoke an elsewhere through resemblances and mental associations means that reality as the confirmation of one’s expectations, the self-identity mentioned by Chambers, is undermined once and for all.

Regional Differentiation, Fractured Modernity

The texts differ also in their attitude to the historical diversification of Italy, particularly in the redefining post-war transition. As mentioned, a certain anxiety manifests itself in all the texts, albeit in different ways. Ortese does not hide the hesitancy and mixed feelings with which she embarks on the travel experience. Piovene aims to alleviate preoccupations about Italy’s integration by presenting in his reportage a country projected towards progress and unity in line with other European nations. Arbasino’s frantic mobility is a way to escape everyday reality, but the seemingly unending journeying does not provide a real alternative vision.

Ortese’s Open-Ended Travel Writing

La lente scura consists of three chronological sections that include articles which were written at different periods in Ortese’s life and focus on various areas of Italy, not aiming to give a systematic overview of the country. The privileging of temporality over spatiality, or at least over spatial coherence, is immediately indicative of Ortese’s subjectifying of the national space. In challenging conventional understanding of regions or places within Italy as defined by their contiguities, La lente scura outlines a micro-historical and micro-geographical method in contrast to the codified itineraries of the Grand Tour and Piovene’s macro-approach. The book conveys instead an idea of fragmentation and almost disconnection through travel pieces that are, to put it in Ortese’s words, ‘tanto dissimili e perfino contrastanti tra loro’ [so dissimilar and even conflicting with each other] (LS, p. 15), traversed by lines of separation. For example, the River Po is described as ‘strada schiumosa e potente che divide l’Italia in due’ [a powerful, rushing waterway that divides Italy in two] (LS, p. 44), a boundary that can be crossed in one direction or the other, each time with the impression of entering a different country. In the chapter ‘Inglese a Roma’ [An Englishman in Rome], the North evokes to Ortese feelings of safety and domesticity as she crosses the Po on a train heading South towards Rome. The South is instead ‘agitato Mediterraneo’ [restless Mediterranean] (LS, p. 44), chaos and unpredictability.⁵³ Ortese’s interest in microhistory is also reflected in her approaching some of the chapters in the book from the individual perspective of emblematic post-war figures who devoted their life to a common cause. Examples are the Catholic priests Don Milani and Don Zeno Saltini, both involved in rearing and educating poor and abandoned children, and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who attained notoriety after the war. Ortese seems to suggest that their endeavours offer a possible alternative to the precarious cohesiveness of post-war Italian society. The bandit Giuliano, a central figure in the Movement for the Independence of Sicily, launched a direct challenge to the Italian state.⁵⁴

Ortese tells us that the chapter ‘Viaggio in Liguria’ encapsulates the themes of the book as a whole, its overarching mood. As she puts it:

E questo Viaggio in Liguria è proprio, per me, nella sua scrittura sbandata e ansiosa, spezzata, esitante, l’immagine dell’animo con cui cominciai a guardare l’Italia, dopo il ’60: spavento e già un deluso amore della ragione; la ragione (delle cose) non la vedevo più, come quell’Alessi che parla di continuo del suo comandante che lo perseguitava, e della terra ligure tutta comprata dal turismo. (LS, p. 17)

[And this Journey to Liguria is precisely, for me, in its drifting and anxious, fragmented, hesitant writing, the image of the spirit with which I began to look at Italy after 1960: fearful and disillusioned. I no longer saw the reason (for things), like that Alessi who constantly speaks of his commander who persecuted him, and of the Ligurian land all bought up by tourism.]

The choice of adjectives to define her writing style could not be more unequivocal: drifting, anxious, fragmented and hesitant. They also denote the feelings with which Ortese relates to the historical phase of transition. Internal and external perspectives, Ortese’s uncertain emotional state and the confusing field of possibility in the post-war years, mirror and blur into one another. Ortese presents post-war Italian society as lacking a unifying principle, a sense of totality and cohesiveness. She describes a kind of fractured modernity, a transition period experienced as rupture and a loss of references. Her travel writing evokes this sense of absence. As she puts it: ‘Cercavo qualcosa, strade e case, in cui riconoscermi e riposarmi; e questo qualcosa non c’era più’ [I was looking for something, streets and houses, in which to recognize myself and rest; and this something was no longer there] (LS, p. 452). She likens the tormented figure of Alessi to her condition of a female writer trying and failing to make sense of the rapidly changing landscape which she records in her writings.

While the book is pervaded by a sense of absence, loss and the search for something that seems to be always out of reach, it is also true that Ortese does not languish in uncertainty but actively seeks to make sense of the perceived rupture through her quest and her writing. As Sharon Wood argues, for Ortese ‘travelling and writing share a common function, which is to restore a sense of belonging, to minister to an irremediable sense of loss’.⁵⁵ Ortese’s writings do not convey an irredeemable nihilist. There is still room for hope, which she glimpses in the renewal of Italian society:

Non saprei dire che animo e che aspetto avessi allora. […] L’Italia era ancora molto povera, non offriva una vita facile. Tuttavia questa vita era simile a un campo pieno di confuse, grandiose possibilità; e la speranza – e il rischio – bastavano. (LS, p. 15)

[I cannot tell what mood I was in and what I looked like then. […] Italy was still very poor; it did not offer an easy life. Yet this life was like a field full of confusing, grand possibilities; and hope – and risk – were enough.]

This is perhaps the real key to reading the book: namely, as a document of years characterized by mingled hope and anxiety. Travel becomes for Ortese a means to affirm her agency by embracing these contradictions. Her writing is more tentative and less assertive than the dominant male travel-writing tradition, but for this reason it is also more able effectively to problematize established assumptions about Italian territory and identity. In this sense Ortese takes a stance against a masculine type of knowledge that claims to be exhaustive and erases women as dissident voices. This emerges, as noted above, in her representation of manipulated nature and in her connection to Alessi. The latter’s position of being harassed by a dominant male authority and his experience of trauma and oppression enable Ortese to identify with his perspective.

A further example of Ortese’s dismantling of stereotypes is her rejection of the simplistic opposition between the Italian North and South. The latter was arguably fully ‘discovered’ as a geographical and anthropological entity only in the post-war period, especially through Ernesto De Martino’s famous ethnographic expeditions and thanks to efforts to reduce the economic gap to the Northern economy on the part of post-war governments. These involved initiatives such as the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, which was set up in 1950 to stimulate growth in the South through public investment. Giuliana Minghelli observes that the concept of remorse gains prominence in the context of the post-war exploration of the national territory and specifically of its Southern margins, since ‘the rush to chronicle and emancipate the South [...] emerges as an unconscious journey for the modern “north” in search of healing’.⁵⁶ The inquisitive form of travel that takes hold in the post-war years offers an opportunity to problematize the prosperity of the North as a reflection of its historical supremacy over the South and its prominence in the process of political decision-making, at least since the country’s unification.

In her travel observations Ortese notices that the South, and cities like Naples in particular, are also being rapidly transformed by the accelerated pace of modernization. She detects inconsistencies in this process: while it brings undeniable benefits, it also sacrifices distinctive social and cultural features. It is an imposed model of progress that does not adequately take into account the particular socio-cultural context of the South and its peculiar history. The transformations occur so rapidly that, paradoxically, the perception is almost of immobility or, indeed, of going backwards in time:

Era tutto più fermo, come se il tempo si fosse messo a correre in modo da confondersi con l’immobilità, come se la ruota si fosse messa a girare vorticosamente in avanti – o anche questa era un’apparenza, e girava invece all’indietro? (LS, p. 212)

[Everything seemed somehow stiller, as if time had begun to race so quickly that it might easily be confused with immobility, as if the wheel had begun to spin forward so dizzily that one could no longer perceive the movement – or was that, too, an illusion and did it instead spin backwards?]

Ortese often plays with the categories of mobility and immobility when describing the impact of modernization on the rural South, as also appears in the following extract from the chapter ‘Verso Formia’ [Towards Formia] describing an agricultural scene seen through the train window:

C’era su quella campagna, non so se effetto del confronto con la corsa del treno, come un velo, un’ombra non materiale, non uscita dalle nubi del cielo, ma generata quasi dal tempo. Tutto così fermo, che si era tentati di aprire il finestrino e immettere aria su quella tenera campagna, quasi là non ve ne fosse e si trattasse di un sogno. (LS, p. 203)

[There was over that countryside, I don’t know if it was the effect of contrast with the train ride, a non-material shadow like a veil, not a veil made out of the clouds of the sky, but almost generated by time. Everything so still that one was tempted to open the window and let air into that tender countryside, as if there were none there and it were a dream.]

The speed of the train (a symbol of modernity and mobility) starkly contrasts with the apparent stillness of people and things outside, almost as if they were in a display cabinet or glass dome. The scene, however, is complicated by an element of doubt: Ortese wonders whether what she sees is an illusory perception and whether this part of Italy is actually frozen in time, therefore inviting the reader to question the same.

Ortese is sympathetic towards Southern customs and traditions and does not blame the Southern people for poverty or inertia. She projects instead an accusatory gaze towards the wealthy North for imposing its model of modernity on the rest of the country. As Wood has observed, Ortese shares the critical attitude towards modern urban society and abhors the dismissal of rural Italy and peasant civilization.⁵⁷ The peasant women travelling on the train are described as ‘donne-mulo’ [mule-women] and ‘donne-bestia’ [beast-women] (LS, p. 206). The animalization of these women’s strained bodies hints at the oppression of ordinary people, and women in particular, in a traditionally patriarchal and class-divided society. These women are left alone to carry the burden of poverty while the richer half of the country turns away from them. Once again, here Ortese likens the domination of women to that of the non-human world. Elsewhere in the book she lingers on the harsh, unaccommodating natural environment of the Mezzogiorno. In the long description of Montelepre, the birthplace of the bandit Giuliano in Western Sicily, and the barren mountains rising all around it, the key words solitudine [solitude] and silenzio [silence] resonate stronger than ever (LS, pp. 123–32). This kind of natural landscape is inhospitable and resists exploitation. Against the backdrop of this undomesticated nature as ‘Other’, Giuliano embodies the opportunity for the South to reclaim its power for self-determination, pointing again to the issue of breaking silence and finding a voice for all the oppressed.

La lente scura conveys an image of Italy as varied and fragmentary. It would be pointless to try and assemble the pieces of mosaic in a book that is purposefully unsystematic and unresolved, as it would be, one may argue, to force homogenization onto the different parts of the Italian Peninsula with their peculiar traits. With its fragmentary style La lente scura reflects Italy’s strong differentiation (LS, p. 206). On the one hand, one has geographical boundaries, such as the North–South divide. Ortese grasps the complexity of these distinctions and does not translate them into a simplistic, static analysis. On the other hand, one has a travel experience that is often improvised and tentative, but precisely because of this relates to people and places without expectations and preconceptions. Ortese’s travel writing entails exposure and vulnerability, not truth-claiming.

Piovene’s Essentialist Paradox

This chapter has already shown that Viaggio in Italia serves a clear narrative of post-war Italy as set on the path of progress and unity. Piovene’s endeavour brings to mind post-unification travel writers, whose detailed descriptions of Italy’s diverse landscape betrayed their enthusiasm for the new political phase of the unified country.⁵⁸ Similarly, the post-war years, when Italy seemed on the verge of fulfilling its potential as a modern nation, were characterized by new aspirations and a desire to explore the national territory.⁵⁹ This desire could be fulfilled through the wider availability of travel opportunities but also in the comfort of one’s own home, tuning in to the radio or television.⁶⁰ Through travel-dedicated programmes and documentaries, radio and television partook in an educational endeavour to enhance the knowledge of the country’s diverse geography, an endeavour which once again may be likened to the pedagogic contribution of post-unification writers to the newly born state and the formation of its citizens. Historically divided and separated into independent territories, in the aftermath of unification Italians were confronted with the necessity of thinking of themselves as a nation. The famous quotation, ‘Abbiamo fatto l’Italia, ora dobbiamo fare gli italiani’ [We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians], commonly attributed to Piedmontese stateman Massimo D’Azeglio, highlights exactly this issue. A similar educational intent imbues Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia, which points to the need for Italians to become familiar with their own country in the renewed economic and intellectual climate, to make sense of their historical differences and to feel part of a unified nation.

Viaggio in Italia challenges contemplative and reductive views of Italy by documenting the country’s differences and variations in all their complexity. At the same time, the book aims to show that, while diverse and regionalized, Italy is gradually becoming more cohesive and homogeneous.⁶¹ In Piovene’s somewhat edifying account, differences among Italian people are essentially superficial and as such cannot lead to proper conflicts and fractures. As he puts it, ‘l’Italia è varia, non complessa’ [Italy is varied, not complex] (VI, p. 661). According to Piovene, this explains why Italy has held together even though its unity has historically lacked a solid moral foundation. Such reflections are examples of how Viaggio in Italia seeks to challenge anxieties about Italy’s constitutional fragmentation and even fears of disintegration after the disastrous outcome of the Second World War and two years of civil war. The aim of the book to provide an authoritative and exhaustive guide to the Italian territory, as well as the fact that it was commissioned by Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, point to the need to alleviate uncertainty about the integration and future of Italy at this point in history.

While Viaggio in Italia seeks to demonstrate that Italy’s unification process has reached a significant milestone in the post-war period, it is also true that it does not support an uncritically optimistic view of the recent socio-economic developments but still presents us with a composite picture of post-war Italian society. On the one hand, the book aims to bring together the various parts that make up the Italian Peninsula and to make sense of their differences in an effort that resembles the commitment of post-Unification writers. On the other, it does not omit to highlight the controversies and issues that still remain to be solved in the creation of a truly unified, modern nation. One may also argue that Piovene’s thesis of the increased uniformity and unity of Italy is partly at odds with the content of the book itself, which crystallizes the cultural identity of people and places through reifying descriptions that emphasize their peculiar, individual traits. Piovene claims, for example, that the typical Milanese ‘ama l’ufficio con calore sentimentale’ [loves the office with a sentimental warmth] (VI, p. 84). He also believes that whilst the average Turinese may at first glance appear serious and austere, he (one can assume that Piovene has mainly a male type in mind) is actually a non-conformist, inclined towards unconventional political views. His multifaceted personality perfectly embodies the city of Turin, which for Piovene is the most hybrid of Italian cities. Piovene’s journeys are populated by similar types, seen and described through this objectifying eye. Another example is the figure of the clerk: the predominant professional figure in post-war Milan and Turin, according to Piovene the clerk presents distinct and unique characteristics in each of these two cities. Furthermore, he describes Roman people as ‘una realtà molto concreta e irriducibile’ [a very concrete and irreducible reality] (VI, p. 648). The Roman citizen is a contradictory individual, equally fond of and indifferent to the beauty of the ‘eternal city’. He considers everything transitory except for Rome (VI, p. 641). Piovene therefore takes an essentialist approach to travel writing, focusing on the differences between places and their inhabitants, which are portrayed as microcosms with distinct identities and seemingly fixed anthropological traits.

The book’s essentialism is particularly problematic when it comes to the depiction of the Italian South. While for some post-war intellectuals the reportage may be a way to engage critically with the historical divide between the North and South of the country, Viaggio in Italia takes a stand in favour of a Northern model of modernity and future for Italy. This requires, in Piovene’s words, a moral migration of the old South (VI, p. 664). In other words, it requires the modernization of the South to bring it closer to the North. Piovene believes that a new, modern South is already emerging and is destined to prevail. The archaic Southern culture is a burden to the rest of the country and he sees its demise as inevitable. He criticizes the sentimentalism of certain journalists and writers who go to the South to document the local traditions. Such claims may once again be related to Piovene’s commission by the national broadcaster RAI to produce his reportage at this particular moment, in which the Italian state has every reason to show an image of the country as unified and in the march towards progress.

The example of Sicily, which according to Piovene embodies more evidently the contradictions of the South as a whole, illustrates some recurring tropes in Piovene’s discourse on the Italian South. He detects the gradual appearance, in post-war Sicily, of a dynamic, Northern-like attitude towards work and innovation, which nevertheless struggles to prevail against the ingrained habits of indolence and lack of ambition. Furthermore, when he praises the proactivity and work ethic of the younger generation, he does so in a patronizing fashion. He claims, for instance, that ‘la Sicilia di oggi assomiglia a un adolescente, la cui vitalità porta l’improvvisato ed il meditato, il lavoro utile e lo sperpero, il metodo e il disordine’ [present-day Sicily resembles an adolescent whose vitality engenders both the improvised and the considered, both useful work and waste, both method and disorder] (VI, pp. 455–56). Piovene’s discourse on the South is shaped by dichotomies and oppositions such as centre–periphery and traditional–modern, as shown by the following example:

Tutti i contrasti del Mezzogiorno italiano, in questa fase di trapasso, appaiono qui stridenti. Da un lato il sogno dell’industria, l’attivismo tecnico, l’impulso turistico ed archeologico, lo slancio verso il settentrione e l’Europa; dall’altro la città e i villaggi stipati, dove anche il palazzo del signore è ingoiato dalle casupole, le petraie deserte, la brulicante povertà di alcuni quartieri palermitani, dei paesi gialli dello zolfo, del bracciantato di Ragusa. (VI, p. 505)

[All the contrasts of Southern Italy, in this phase of transition, appear here quite sharply. On the one hand, the dream of industry, technological dynamism, the tourist drive and the archaeological impulse, the effort to catch up with the North and Europe; on the other, the city and the crammed villages, where even the lord’s palace is swallowed up by the hovels, the deserted cobblestone streets, the teeming poverty of some Palermo neighborhoods, of the yellow villages of sulphur, of the Ragusa labourers.]

The opposition between emerging industrial dynamism (a quintessentially Northern value) and persistent poverty that is implicitly blamed on the Southern population shows how the South is associated by Piovene with an idea of immobilism, as if only an external force can activate those productive energies that now lie dormant.

Ongoing Journeys, Postmodern Flâneurie

With Arbasino place loses its relevance. In Postmodern Urbanism Nan Ellin writes that from the second half of the twentieth century onwards ‘the importance of place has diminished as global flows of people, ideas, capital, mass media, and other products have accelerated’.⁶² Ultimately, what matters in Fratelli d’Italia are the act of travelling and movement per se. The centrality of place in conventional travel literature is replaced by an account in which places are somehow interchangeable because nothing is as important as ongoing travel, not remaining stationary but changing perspectives on things:

Comunque per me il posto non importa niente; glie lo ripeto, a Antonio. Purché ci sia da far tanto. Basta muoversi e non esagerare a fermarsi in una città, quando è chiaro che non va bene. […] Ferrara o Varsavia, si capisce che per me è lo stesso. (FI, p. 14)

[Anyway, for me the place doesn’t matter; I’ll repeat it to Antonio. As long as there’s a lot to do. Just move and don’t stop too long in one city when it’s clear that it’s not good. [...] Ferrara or Warsaw, it’s all the same for me, you know.]

Papotti points out that this position may lead to a stateless (‘apolide’) condition of the writer, in which his or her identity is exclusively determined by the position of observer and narrator.⁶³ In the following extract, which illustrates an evening spent in a restaurant in Gaeta on the way to Capri at the beginning of the book, the style of the restaurant and the presence of specific objects evoke associations with different and distant places, such as the Tyrol, London and the Netherlands:

Ma dove siamo? L’aria fuori è grigia, col cielo coperto; qui dentro sui muri ci sono degli affreschi montanari, hanno delle stelle alpine in un vasetto davanti all’acquario. È Gaeta o è Tirolo? Quando suona l’ora, l’orologio del ristorante è a cucù, e i campanili fuori sembra che abbiano tutti un carillon tipo Westminster o tipo Olanda. (FI, p. 13)

[But where are we? The air outside is grey, with the sky overcast; here on the walls there are frescoes of mountains, they have edelweiss in a jar in front of the aquarium. Is it Gaeta or is it Tyrol? When the hour strikes, the restaurant clock reveals a cuckoo and the bell towers outside all seem to have a Westminster- or Holland-type bell tower.]

The ability to discern these affinities is indicative of the increased global interconnection between places in the post-World War Two world, the enhanced knowledge of and freedom in space made possible through the diffusion of modern means of transport, but also of the prominence given to the subjectivity of the observer, who is free to transcend conventional understanding of place and time.

Fratelli d’Italia is a document of the feverish mobility of the boom years. Arbasino conveys the rise in movement, for instance, through the accumulation of spatial elements, as in the following example, where the enumeration of natural and architectural features creates a frantic rhythm:

Prima che sia tardi ci si butta verso i meravigliosi odori di campagna e d’estate delle villette classiche e dei sepolcri romani, cascine del Cinquecento, ville fasciste, antenne elettriche, grotte, elicotteri, avieri, greggi di pecore, mucchi d’immondizie e in fondo la muraglia dei quartieri nuovi. (FI, pp. 352–53)

[Before it is too late one plunges into the wonderful countryside and the summer smells of the classic villas and Roman sepulchres, the sixteenth-century farmhouses, Fascist villas, electrical antennae, grottos, helicopters, airmen, flocks of sheep, piles of rubbish and at the end a wall of new neighbourhoods.]

The overabundance of stimuli and things seen conveys a sense of the dynamism and freedom of taking to the road, with a particular fascination for the autostrada that enables people to bypass provincial destinations and connects them with the rest of Europe:

Ma in principio di serata, meglio buttarsi sulle autostrade. Prendiamo quella dei laghi. Prima non si vede niente: qualche fanale giallo; e si va. Poi lumi natalizi, archi di cemento altissimi; e sotto, una costruzione cilindrica di cristallo che pare più grande e più ricca dei padiglioni americani alle esposizioni universali. Frecce, pensiline, sottopassaggi, e porte che si aprono solo in un senso, nell’altro no; cariche dei soliti divieti di sosta. (FI, p. 389)

[But early in the evening, it is better to hit the highways. Let’s take the one by the lakes. First you cannot see anything, just a few yellow lights; and then off we go. And then Christmas lights and very high concrete arches; and below, a cylindrical crystal construction that seems larger and richer than even the American pavilions at the universal expositions. Arrows, shelters, underpasses and doors that open only in one direction, not in the other, full of the usual no-stopping zones.]

Here one has a further example of the juxtaposition of objects rolling by as if in a fast-moving film reel to create the impression of mobility. Travel is again a way of establishing associations. A glass structure on the motorway recalls the dramatic national pavilions in universal exhibitions. The imagining of being somewhere else is also a way of denying one’s reality. This kind of hectic wandering is, indeed, ultimately an attempt to escape disillusionment and the ennui of everyday life. As it turns out, however, travel cannot offer a compensation. On the contrary, it becomes yet another source of restlessness and discontent. Travel is never a conclusive experience, as perhaps it was for the Grand Tour traveller who regarded the journey to Italy as a milestone in his (the gender is again deliberate) formation. Arbasino’s characters are bound to carry on travelling in search of an ever-fleeting and short-lived sense of contentment, somewhat like Ortese.⁶⁴

Albeit in different ways, all the authors challenge the clichéd narratives of foreign travellers in Italy. Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia does so by rejecting the reductive rhetoric of the Grand Tour and by documenting instead the socio-cultural differentiation of the Italian territory. Ortese problematizes the dominant travel writing tradition further through her gendered perspective. The latter emerges, for instance, through the representation of unconventional natural environments that unsettle nationalistic and contemplative narratives, as well as through the theme of the denial of voice. Arbasino may seem to embrace a more hedonistic kind of travel but his sarcasm betrays a critical, self-reflective perspective and the full adaptation of clichéd representations.⁶⁵ One may, therefore, detect the emergence of a new, critical voice in post-war Italian travel writing, one able to appropriate and problematize the tropes and classic themes that had long dominated travel accounts of the Italian Peninsula and thus to question established notions of national space.

The writers’ specific authorial perspective has been analysed in relation to dominant notions of space, gender and sexuality within the Italian context. The idea of self-discovery bears greater implications for Ortese and Arbasino, who give prominence to the point of view and individuality of the observer as they fluctuate and evolve through the travel experience. The originality of their travel accounts lies in their non-alignment with dominant and objective ways of seeing and in their translating of feelings of unease into different ways of apprehending reality, ways which run counter to the heterosexual-male-centred viewpoint long dominant in travel writing. In so doing, Ortese and Arbasino challenge mainstream discourses not only on space, but also on gender and sexuality in post-war Italian society. Descriptions of Italy as a ‘strange’ place may reflect the fact that until the post-war period travel had been the prerogative of privileged sectors of the Italian population and that, therefore, the majority of Italians still had little knowledge of their country. In this sense it can be argued that Italian travel writers are motivated to adopt a foreigner’s or outsider’s perspective – the tradition of the Viaggio in Italia being largely the domain of foreign authors – to account to readers for the ‘strange place’ that is a modern, changing Italy. While Piovene’s contribution to a better understanding of the complexity of Italian society cannot be denied, the authoritative viewpoint he claims for himself means that he is not immune to stereotyping and actually, in some cases, ends up recreating essentialist views of the places and people he encounters.

There emerges an evolution of the position of the observer: from Piovene’s stable, self-assured point of view, which still relies on realist conventions, to a less secure notion of space and a more anxious relationship between the observer and the observed reality with Ortese and Arbasino. In Fratelli d’Italia the emphasis on the action of movement per se means that the actual destinations are devoid of importance: indeed, they are almost interchangeable. Arbasino’s self-reflective, ironic attitude, his parodic revisioning of the traditional motif of the Italian journey and the observer’s more fleeting connection with reality are all features of postmodern travel writing. With Ortese travel becomes a more introspective and destabilizing experience. The examples of Arbasino and Ortese therefore suggest that for post-war Italian travel writers travel becomes not only a means for critical exploration of the encountered realities and of themselves, as intellectuals and Italians in a peculiar moment in the country’s history, but also a way to reflect on the tradition and value of travel itself in a postmodern tension towards self-reflexivity.