1. Authoritarian City: Milan and Turin for Luciano Bianciardi and Paolo Volponi

Taking the Leap: Two Writers Moving North

In 1954 Luciano Bianciardi left his hometown of Grosseto in Tuscany to join Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s newly founded publishing house in Milan (currently one of the most important publishers in Italy). In Tuscany he had been working as a school teacher and librarian and had acquired a certain notoriety as a political militant and contributor to major national newspapers. Depictions of Grosseto may be found across Bianciardi’s oeuvre. They sketch a tableau of provincial life, with its human types and routine social interaction taking place in the streets and squares of the old centre; and resurface as memories of youth and an alternative to hectic metropolitan life in the works of the Milanese years, L’integrazione and La vita agra. Both novels are heavily autobiographical. They retrace Bianciardi’s relocation to Milan and provide an account of life in the big city as hyper-competitive, isolating and alienating. In L’integrazione Luciano, the main character and author’s namesake (as will be the case again in La vita agra), moves to Milan with his brother Marcello. The two siblings reflect different attitudes in the way they adjust to life in the big city (Marcello being more pragmatic and disillusioned from the start; Luciano soon wanting to go back to a more tranquil life in Tuscany) and eventually come to embody two opposite tales of urban self-realization: Luciano becomes the ‘integrated’ one to whom the book title alludes, fully compliant with the lifestyle of an ambitious Milanese. Marcello struggles to make ends meet with precarious forms of employment, writing anything from romance novels to articles for newspapers and magazines, encyclopaedia entries and translations (something which reflects much more closely Bianciardi’s actual experience in Milan). L’integrazione establishes a clear dichotomy between Grosseto’s village-like atmosphere, allegedly more in tune with nature and its cycles, and the alienating bustle of the big city. Memories of small-town life indulge somewhat in nostalgia and in the celebration of a romanticized past, especially when emphasizing the sense of community and human solidarity that seems impossible to retrieve in Milan.

La vita agra narrates Bianciardi’s experience in Milan as he gradually lets go of his plans and ideals. Themes touched upon in the previous novel reach fuller artistic maturity here. La vita agra is a more iconic portrayal of big-city life and its pitfalls than L’integrazione, in which Bianciardi focuses mainly on his work days at Feltrinelli. Bianciardi had somehow reached a professional and personal standstill as he started questioning his Socialist ideals and commitment as an intellectual after the incident in the Southern Tuscan mine of Ribolla in which forty-three miners lost their lives in 1954. He knew some of them personally and at the time of the incident was researching their working and living conditions for a reportage series that he co-authored with Carlo Cassola.¹ The tragedy had a profound effect on him and influenced his decision to accept Feltrinelli’s invitation to move to Milan and join his publishing house.² One can therefore imagine that he set out for Milan harbouring hopes that the big city would bring renewed inspiration and professional recognition. In La vita agra Luciano arrives in the Northern capital with the main purpose of vindicating the miners by blowing up the head office of the Montecatini industrial group, which owned the Ribolla mine and is headquartered in Milan. As the novel proceeds, however, Luciano’s subversive plans gradually wane while he finds himself more and more settled in a life of routine with precarious employment as translator. The excerpt below, from an article which Bianciardi wrote for Il Contemporaneo, sums up the trajectory of the main character in the novel: a rebel against the status quo in the early days of his arrival in Milan who loses sight of his ideals and eventually gives in to the logic of the capitalist city:

Persino quel che mi pareva chiaro, la posizione del nemico nei palazzoni di dieci piani, fra via Turati e via della Moscova a Milano non mi è parso più tanto chiaro. Perché qui le acque si mischiano e si confondono. L’intellettuale diventa un pezzo dell’apparato burocratico commerciale, diventa un ragioniere.³

[Even what had seemed clear to me, the position of the enemy in the ten-storey blocks of flats between via Turati and via della Moscova in Milan, no longer seemed so clear to me. Because here the waters mix and merge. The intellectual becomes a piece of the commercial bureaucratic apparatus, he becomes an accountant.]

The Luciano who sets foot in Milan for the first time can clearly locate his ‘enemy’ in the high-rise office buildings of the areas around the via Turati and via della Moscova. He plans to blow them up but, as we shall see, because he needs to work long hours to keep up with the cost of living in the big city, he becomes just another pawn in the ‘commercial bureaucratic apparatus’ that he had once intended to overthrow.

Scholars and biographers of Bianciardi have iterated the importance of Milan in the existential and professional trajectory of the writer and his antagonism towards the culture of profit embodied by the Northern capital. In this regard, some studies have also explored the idea that for Bianciardi the disillusionment of the Milanese years prompted a seemingly unresolvable fracture.⁴ Bianciardi’s controversial relationship with Milan and the implications of the boom in terms of emerging consumerist culture and lifestyles have been at the heart of many studies, which have also highlighted the writer’s opposition to neo-capitalism and the contradictions of his stance in the context of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.⁵ The fact remains that Bianciardi’s success as a writer is quite controversially tied to Milan as La vita agra is by far his most read and cited book. After the publication of La vita agra Bianciardi gradually withdrew from public life, perhaps seeing in his own success the self-fulfilling prophecy of the commodification of intellectual work. A downward spiral into depression and alcoholism eventually led to his death in 1971.

Paolo Volponi left another Central Italian town, Urbino in the region of Le Marche, driven by a similar restlessness and a desire to see the more advanced North beyond the narrow confines of his provincial world. He moved first to Milan, where, crucially, he met the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, head of the famous typewriter manufacturers, who entrusted Volponi with a job assignment in Rome. In 1956 Volponi moved to the Olivetti headquarters in Ivrea, in the metropolitan area of Turin, where he was appointed head of the social services division. The Ivrea experience was a crucial one: Volponi stayed there from 1956 to 1966, even after Olivetti’s death in 1960. The landscapes, colours and sounds of rural Marche and of the Appennines which had imbued his early poetic production gave way to novels inspired by the industrial world.⁶ Volponi, like several other intellectuals of the time, was drawn to Olivetti’s ambition and charisma, in particular the entrepreneur’s aspiration to restructure Italian industry, starting with his own company, so that the rights and wellbeing of the workers would form the core of its ethos. Olivetti wished to ensure better working conditions, welfare services such as nurseries, a good work–life balance and the pursuit of intellectual interests (the Ivrea factory had a library and rooms for film screenings).⁷ A recurring theme in the literary criticism on Volponi is utopia, to be understood precisely as the possibility of creating a more humane industry in which technical know-how is infused by Humanist knowledge and sensitivity, as Olivetti envisaged.⁸

Nevertheless, Volponi’s books seem to tell an altogether different story. They provide a pessimistic account of the industrial environment, emphasizing in particular its alienating effects. This is clearly the case in Memoriale, which tells the life story of Albino Saluggia, the first-person narrator and author of the biographical memoir alluded to in the title. Albino is a Second World War veteran who returns from a German prison camp to his place of origin in the countryside near Candia, in Piedmont, and goes on to find employment in a big company just outside the city of Turin, which is clearly inspired by the Ivrea-based Olivetti. The narrated facts take place between 1948 and 1956, thus during the transition period that leads to the economic boom proper. Albino is an outcast, somebody who does not fit in and whose neurosis belongs more broadly to a social class and economic system. If Volponi depicts a hostile, alienating factory environment, it is, however, because he measured it against a possible alternative. He was critical towards certain aspects of industry, not towards industry per se. Quite the contrary, he believed that, if managed wisely, industry might produce the conditions that would free individuals from the need to work unsocial hours to support themselves and their families.⁹ Even after Olivetti’s death, Volponi strove to take forward the entrepreneur’s ideals of a democratization of the industrial system, a robust assistance-plan for the workers and a more harmonious integration between the factory and the urban fabric.¹⁰

Volponi left Olivetti for Fiat in 1971, having gradually grown apart from management, who in his view had proved unable or unwilling to carry forward the projects of the late Adriano Olivetti. Le mosche del capitale was written after the conclusion of his two-year controversial experience at the Italian flagship car-manufacturer, where he served as an adviser to the leadership on issues concerning the integration of the factory into its urban environment. At Fiat, Volponi was confronted by a very different, more conservative corporate environment. He eventually resigned as he felt that his proposals had gone largely unheard.¹¹ In Le mosche del capitale Bruno Saraccini (in whom one may recognize the author himself) quits the MFM company (Olivetti) after he is denied promotion to Managing Director. He then takes up a new job at Megagruppo (Fiat), bringing with him his progressive views on working conditions and legislation. He is soon confronted by the reality of everyday work at Megagruppo, where the workers demanding more rights and a more humane work environment are discriminated against and risk being fired. He resigns and goes back to MFM in a lesser capacity. The novel gives an unapologetic portrayal of industrial power as always opposed to the collective good in its relentless pursuit of profit. Autobiographical and allegorical elements intertwine in the dehumanizing corporate environment, where characters have no real depth or dimension outside their role in the workplace and objects become animated and can speak. Alienation is no longer a condition restricted to the work environment, as in Memoriale: it has spread to colour everything in the novel with its dull, despairing quality. As a theme, alienation also speaks of the crisis undergone in those years by the working class as a self-conscious and traditionally identifiable entity.¹²

Bianciardi and Volponi therefore provide a particularly insightful commentary on the Northern urban industrial society of the 1960s and 1970s from a perspective informed by direct knowledge of its industrial system. While Volponi worked as an industrial manager at both Olivetti and Fiat, Bianciardi was part of the group of intellectuals who contributed to establishing the Feltrinelli Publishing House in its very early stages, an experience he narrates in L’integrazione. At the same time the two writers originally came from the small-town environment of Central Italy and were, in this sense, outsiders who arguably perceived the social and urban changes underway all the more acutely.

La vita agra and Memoriale are rooted in the complex transition of the Italian boom years, during which radical innovations in the lifestyles and values of the Italian people overlapped with the persistence of more traditional, conservative attitudes. In 1960 the issue of Fascist legacies in the Republic once again came under the spotlight when the transitional government, led by Fernando Tambroni, looked to form a tactical alliance with the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI) founded in 1946 by former members of the Italian Social Republic. This sparked protests and demonstrations.¹³ Despite achieving only modest results at the national elections, the Far Right could count on the support of powerful sectors of Italian society, specifically amongst the Civil Service, landowners, police and army, and was therefore able to influence the agenda of the Christian Democrat governments.¹⁴ The climate of the Cold War made an overtly authoritarian shift in Italy seem like a realistic possibility. All this explains the widespread feeling, particularly on the Left, that the struggle against Fascism did not conclude with the Resistance and the transition to the post-war Republic.¹⁵

In the novels examined in this chapter, the ghost of authoritarianism lingers as an insidious threat, lying just beneath the level of consciousness. Allusions to the past are made through characters who have only pretended to disavow their Fascist views and now feel legitimized to embrace them again, as well as through the recurring war imagery. Bianciardi and Volponi detect the threat of an authoritarian revival in the industrial architecture that is the expression of political authority and the kind of urban layout that fosters individualism and productivity. In 1929 George Bataille was already pointing out the connection of architecture to power and how the ‘architecture of the majority’ disenfranchises the less powerful.¹⁶ This chapter refers to Lefebvre’s analysis of social space in capitalist societies to make sense of the writers’ apprehension of the modern big city and the descriptions of besieged public spaces that, in the novels, prompt the feeling of a corporate takeover of everyday life. It also draws on Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power and its spatial organization, particularly in the concluding section of the chapter, which explores textual descriptions of forms of social control which aim at increasing efficiency and productivity.

Colonization of Space: Industry and Urban Space

When Bianciardi moved to Milan, the city was being radically transformed by industrialization and a dramatic wave of immigration from the poorer areas of the country. For those coming from the impoverished regions of rural Italy, the psychological and cultural process of adjustment to the urban-industrial society of Northern Italy was anything but straightforward. As Ginsborg points out:

For the immigrants from the rural South the first impressions of the northern cities were bewildering and often frightening. What struck them most were the wide streets full of traffic, the neon lights and advertisement boards, the way the northerners dressed. […] these were cities which seemed not just of another country, but of another planet.¹⁷

This experience is replicated by Marcello and Luciano in L’integrazione. As they arrive for the first time in Milan, the absolute dominance of automobiles, which form a seemingly incessant stream down the city’s streets, and the marginal space which is allocated to pedestrians make a deep impression on them:

Non c’è dunque motivo di meraviglia se di quest’altra città, nuova, grande, importante, a noi che ci arrivammo con un balzo solo di cinquecento chilometri, prima e più di ogni altra cosa sembrassero differenti le strade. Ci sorprese anzitutto la scarsa parte che di ogni strada toccava a noi pedoni. (I, pp. 10–11)

[There is therefore no reason to be surprised if in this other city – new, large and important – more than anything else the roads seemed different, at least to those of us who reached it with a journey of only five hundred kilometres. Above all, we were surprised by how small a part of each street fell to us pedestrians.]

L’integrazione, Bianciardi’s first Milanese book, opens with praise of the act of walking for leisure, an activity that has traditionally cemented community life in Grosseto, where people find one another, socialize and seemingly inhabit their urban environment more fully through this passeggio [walking at a leisurely pace]: a custom that even today may still be observed in the old centres of any small city or village in Italy. In the first few pages of the book, the emphasis on the slow pace of life in Grosseto is linked to the idea that people in the Tuscan town still live in a harmonious relationship with nature and the cycle of the seasons (I, pp. 14–15). The dichotomy between Grosseto and Milan is established here once and for all. As life in the Northern capital takes its course, Grosseto becomes for Bianciardi a distant reverie and the image of an old Italy that seems about to be swept away by economic progress.

At the beginning of La vita agra Luciano lives in the Brera quarter, which in the book is called Braida (also Braida Guercia and Braida del Guercio), an allusion to the Braidense National Library, located in the Palazzo di Brera. In this chapter the toponyms Brera and Braida will be used interchangeably. The area of Braida has a bohemian spirit and is chiefly frequented by young, and mostly penniless, would-be intellectuals, ‘pittori capelluti, ragazze dai piedi sporchi, fotografi affamati’ [hairy painters, girls with dirty feet, penniless photographers] (VA, p. 94; HL, p. 91). In the novel Braida plays an important role in protecting a sense of identity that is under threat in the wider city, for it provides Luciano with familiar co-ordinates that makes him feel safer, if not completely at home. Bianciardi describes Brera as an ‘island’ and ‘citadel’ to which to retreat from urban threats which, in the novel, are often symbolized by the rise in road traffic:

Era una strada tranquilla e tutta nostra; il traffico quasi non ci si azzardava, ma anche in via della Braida, che pure è centrale e frequentata, le auto sembravano riconoscere che questa era zona nostra e rallentavano più del dovuto, e i piloti non s’arrabbiavano né facevano le corna se un pedone uscito dal caffè delle Antille traversava senza guardare, obbligandoli a una secca frenata. Per tacito consenso insomma quella era la nostra isola, la nostra cittadella. (VA, p. 14)¹⁸

[It was a quiet street, and entirely our own; traffic hardly ventured into it, but even in the Via della Braida, which is a busy, central street, drivers seemed to recognise that this was our part of the world and slowed down more than was absolutely necessary, and did not get angry or make rude gestures if a pedestrian coming out of the Antilles crossed the road without looking and forced them to jam on their brakes. In short, by tacit general consent, this was our little island, our citadel.] (HL, p. 14)

Luciano claims ownership over this part of Milan, seemingly still untouched by urban progress, through the repetition of the possessive pronoun nostra [our/ours]. Car drivers seem to recognize that this is not their territory and show respect: on the rare occasions on which they venture into the Via della Braida, where traffic is normally very light, they slow down to give way to those who come and go from the many bars and cafés in the area, refraining from honking, making angry gestures and from all the repertoire of their usually aggressive behaviour. Luciano reacts to the complexity and perceived dangerousness of city life by seeking refuge in a well-defined area of Milan, the artistic and bohemian Brera. His preference for spaces within Milan which he perceives as safe and protective expresses a rejection of the capitalist way of life that is rampant in the Northern capital. Later in the novel he moves out of Brera into an apartment on the periphery, where he feels confused and threatened by the hostile environment and hectic pace of urban transformations unfolding all around him.

Luciano is aware that Brera, with its bohemian, artsy spirit, reflects a false image of the city of Milan.¹⁹ As he puts it, ‘non si capisce Parigi standosene barbicato a Montmartre, né Londra abitando a Chelsea’ [you don’t know Paris if you never set foot outside Montmartre, or London from living in Chelsea] (VA, p. 94; HL, p. 91). He is able to grasp the real essence of Milan for the first time only when he moves into a flat further out of the centre with his girlfriend Anna. Life in the periphery unveils to Luciano the real city beyond the elitist, somewhat artificial Brera. It is at this point in the novel that his metamorphosis into one of the city’s ‘grigi abitatori’ [grey inhabitants] (VA, p. 94; HL, p. 91) really begins. In the novel the peripheries, which in those years accommodated an increasing number of people from the lower-middle class and petty clerks working in industry in the city, are a bleak, melancholic place. In the following extract, for example, the description of a disused freight yard close to the apartment that Luciano and Anna share with a married couple from the Alto Adige is reminiscent of some pages from Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Milanese crime novels (examined in the next chapter), with their noir atmosphere and the presence of destitute humanity and lowlife. Bianciardi effects explicit dehumanization since the human element is degraded to shadows and larvae: ‘Di notte si riempiva di larve indistinte in quella scarsa luce frammezzo alla nebbia che si abbioccolava sugli sterpi. A sostare nella strada vicina, le vedevi, contro i lumi opposti e lontani, muoversi, sparire, incontrarsi, dividersi ancora, scomparire’ [In the dim, foggy light that hung over the whole area at night it was haunted by shadowy ghosts. If you stopped in the neighbouring street you caught glimpses of them against the distant lights opposite as they moved, vanished, met, separated again, and again vanished] (VA, p. 100; HL, p. 97).

Opening up to the city beyond the confines of Brera confirms Luciano’s inability to adapt to metropolitan life and towards the end of the novel prompts his elaboration of an alternative idea of society, one based on the rejection of modern urban lifestyles and the false needs created by consumerist culture.²⁰ Halfway between serious and facetious, this ideal model of society is a fusion of the anti-urban philosophical and artistic traditions with the hippie counterculture of the 1960s; it envisages the return to a pre-urban condition through self-organized forms of collective that abandon private property and live as close to a state of nature as possible. The ‘intellectual resentment’²¹ towards the city in Western culture finds one of its first and most famous advocates in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his celebration of the noble savage and rural values.²² Anti-urban sentiments reverberate through the Romantic literary tradition, which rejects modern urban life by praising the mystic and instinctive qualities of nature that have allegedly been sacrificed to the materialist parameters of modern city life.²³ The imagery of the city as a site of corruption and alienation imbues many Modernist texts. This critical view of the modern city – which arose at an earlier stage elsewhere in Europe, especially in England and France, due to the prior development in these countries of industrial capitalism and commercialism and therefore of the modern metropolis – is embodied most notably by the work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Although they are reworked and adapted to the peculiar context of 1960s Milan, Bianciardi employs some of the traditional motifs that have been applied to the description of the metropolis in literary and artistic traditions and in the sociological analysis of the effects of rapid urbanization. These include, in particular, individualism and the feelings of detachment and alienation which result from the overstimulation of metropolitan life and its distancing from nature.

Let us now go back to the depiction of central Milan in La vita agra. Just outside Brera, heavy traffic means that one needs to pay close attention to avoid being run over. For this reason, one may overlook the tower blocks of the city’s business district, which Bianciardi describes as ‘un blocco militaresco, coi suoi ponti levatoi, le sue muraglie imprendibili, i suoi camminamenti coperti, le sue aree bertesche’ [a fortress complete with drawbridges, impregnable walls, covered passageways, and aerial corridors] (VA, p. 32; HL, p. 31). La vita agra was written in the same years that witnessed the creation in Milan of the Velasca and Pirelli Towers (1960 and 1961 respectively), which sparked debate about the diverse interpretations of Modernism in architecture.²⁴ The ‘Pirellone’, as the Pirelli tower is colloquially known, is certainly one of the iconographic symbols of the boom. It also features in the initial sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film La notte [The Night] (1961), with the surrounding skyscrapers and highways reflected by its glass surfaces, all indicators of Milan’s rapid industrial growth.²⁵ The war rhetoric of besieged public spaces in Bianciardi’s description of these buildings suggests that capital has increasingly colonized everyday life, thanks to the mobility and ubiquity of information and financial flows that sustain the global economy, of which these skyscrapers are a tangible concretization.²⁶ Capitalism, as Lefebvre puts it, ‘has subordinated everything to its own operations by extending itself to space as a whole’.²⁷

Through the spectacular action of blowing up the Montecatini Building, which is Luciano’s intent at the beginning of La vita agra, he aims to erase from Milan’s cityscape a symbol of capitalist wealth and exploitation: the skyscraper with its density of offices. Albino, the first-person narrator of Memoriale, somehow echoes Luciano’s self-appointed mission when he says that he intends to unmask the deception and injustices of the industrial system from within. Albino’s position, however, is more complicated, since, as will be discussed later, his point of view as narrator is overtly not entirely reliable. Luciano’s declaration of war on the new Milan is reaffirmed through the military metaphors scattered through La vita agra to suggest that modern metropolitan life is replete with risks and dangers. In the following extract, for instance, the act of sharing a cigarette with the friend and room-mate Carlone is the pretext for Luciano to remember the war and a particular night under the Allied bombing of Foggia, in Southern Italy, while serving in the Italian Army during the Second World War:

Carlone e io, vecchi compagni contubernali del numero otto terzo piano, amici come soltanto sono amici due uomini quando intorno c’è il pericolo. Come una notte di settembre, vicino a Lecce, quando scendevano rossi i bengala, grappoli dell’ira, uva della collera, insomma the grapes of wrath perché erano bombe inglesi, e fu Dodi a destarmi e mi vide le mani tremare e mi ci mise una sigaretta e la fumammo vicini accosto al muretto del vigneto, mentre di lassù scaricavano tonnellate di tritolo addosso ai tedeschi della Goering in fuga verso nord. Così ora con Carlone la sigaretta scambiata è un pegno di amicizia a difesa contro quest’altra collera grigia della città che si stringe attorno a noi e minaccia quest’isola nostra. (VA, pp. 24–25)

[Carlone and I, old friends who shared a third-floor room at No. 8, united by friendship of the kind that exists only when danger threatens – as on that September night near Lecce when the red flares came down, followed by the grapes of wrath – they were in fact British bombs – and Dodi woke me, and then noticed that my hands were trembling and put a cigarette in my mouth, and we smoked it together sitting up against the vineyard wall while they unloaded tons of the stuff on Georing’s [sic] Germans fleeing north. Similarly now, exchanging cigarettes with Carlone was a pledge of friendship and an act of defence against the grey wrath of the city that oppressed us on all sides and threatened our little island.] (HL, p. 24)

The bombing raid is compared to the bourgeoning city that, in its seemingly relentless expansion, threatens to incorporate areas which still conserve an intimate, almost village-like atmosphere, such as Brera, which Luciano calls ‘our island’. Once again the Brera microcosm embodies for Luciano a counter-space of resistance to the official city. A cigarette smoked in good company is a way to pluck up courage, in the present as well as during the war. In a similar way, Luciano’s sentimental bond with his girlfriend Anna is so strong and exclusive because the two lovers grab onto it as a defence against the solitude and precariousness of big city life. The urgency of love is justified by the existential uncertainty of the current ‘tempi di guerra e di rivoluzioni’ [times of war and revolution] (VA, p. 62; HL, p. 61).

Bianciardi’s descriptions of the roadworks that proliferated across Milan in those years are a further example of the perceived takeover of public space in the novel. Alongside new buildings and housing estates, the post-war era witnessed the construction of the underground, the first line of which was inaugurated in 1964. Ermanno Olmi’s film Il posto [The Job] (1961) immortalizes the works for the metropolitana in the Piazza San Babila and emphasizes the rise in car traffic and noise, for instance in the sequence that features the two young protagonists struggling to cross a congested thoroughfare. The periphery south of the city centre, where Luciano and Anna go to live, is a constantly changing landscape of roadworks as groups of workers arrive every day to dig new holes:

Intanto sono arrivati gli operai coi picconi e scavano la fossa. […] Aperta la buca, se ne vanno. Il giorno dopo altri operai provvedono a rimettere a posto la terra scavata, che risulta sempre troppa e fa montarozzo, sicché bisogna far venire il rullo compressore a schiacciarla, e poi un’altra macchina a stendere altro asfalto, bitume e ghiaino. Gli scavatori intanto si sono spostati un poco più in là, sempre sul marciapiede, e scavano una fossa nuova, che sarà riempita puntualmente il giorno dopo. (VA, p. 168)

[Meanwhile a gang of workmen has turned up with picks and begun digging a trench. […] When they have dug their trench they go away. Next day another gang turns up and puts back in the trench the earth dug up by the first gang. But there’s always too much of it, and it won’t all go in, so they send for a steam-roller to force it in, and then another mechanical monster comes along and spreads asphalt, bitumen and gravel on top. Meanwhile the trench-diggers have moved along and are digging another trench, again on the pavement, which will be duly filled in next day too.] (HL, p. 163)

Luciano is bewildered at the apparent senselessness of the excavations, which are repeatedly done and undone. He argues that no one really understands what these works are for and even tries an experiment to validate his theory: pretending to be a roadworker, he digs a hole in the street at night. Nobody seems to notice or pay any attention to him and the following day other workers are already undoing his work and filling the hole again, just as they normally do.²⁸ Luciano’s frustration at the frenzy of construction which has turned Milan into a città-cantiere [a city of building sites], with deep holes in the pavement and the constant noise of pneumatic drills, clashes with the blasé attitude that is generally exhibited by the Milanese population. They pay no attention to this ‘dissennato scavare’ [senseless excavation] (VA, p. 169; HL, p. 164), interpreting it as a positive sign of progress.²⁹

Excessive roadworks produce a feeling of oppression and limit the ability to move around the urban environment, giving the impression of a city that is almost under siege. The construction site outside Marcello’s place, at the end of L’integrazione, resembles the ‘complicato tracciato delle trincee e dei camminamenti’ [a complicated layout of trenches and passageways] (I, p 107). In Fruttero & Lucentini’s La donna della domenica the diggers are compared to the claws of a monster that destroys the built environment for the sake of destruction alone (DD, pp. 226–27). David Harvey’s theory of a ‘spatial fix’ may help us to make sense of the relentless demolition and reconstruction of the built environment described by Bianciardi. Harvey explains the interventions of capitalism in the built environment as a way of resolving the recurring economic crises caused by a cyclical surplus of capital by allowing new forms of capital flow. These solutions, however, are always temporary, for ultimately capitalism relies on these recurrent economic crises for survival – one of the contradictions inherent in the capitalist economy.³⁰ When Lefebvre writes that state power ‘endures only by virtue of violence directed towards a space’,³¹ he points to the kind of imperialistic control over space that ensures continuous economic growth along the lines of Harvey.

In Volponi’s Memoriale and Le mosche del capitale industry has conquered urban space. The latter has turned into a sort of appendix to the industrial system whose interests it serves. In Memoriale urban descriptions are marginal since few depict Albino’s reprise from work at the factory and therefore his outings in the city. The urban setting assumes more relevance in Le mosche del capitale, even though it is still squeezed by the dominant space of industry. In Le mosche del capitale Salisborgo C. and Bovino, where the industrial plants of the fictional companies MFM and Megagruppo are respectively located, are clearly Ivrea and Turin, seats of Olivetti and Fiat. It may be argued that Le mosche del capitale adheres to the image of Turin as a città-azienda [a one-industry town] in the shadow of the giant car manufacturer, an image that will be put aside by Fruttero & Lucentini in favour of a more composite representation of Turin.³²

Albino lives in the countryside and commutes to the city to work at the factory. He therefore has little time left for a leisurely exploration of the urban space. Initially, he expresses indifference to, and even rejection of, city life and its values due to his preference for the simplified lifestyle of the country, with its rhythms dictated by the seasons and the times of day. In the mid-1950s, at the time when Memoriale was written, Italy was still largely an agrarian country with a considerable number of people, like Albino’s family in the novel, still employed in agriculture:

Io non potrei vivere in città, pensavo, dove mi sento solo e dove vedo benissimo che la gente è cattiva, troppo furba e interessata. […] Trovare una strada è una fatica e così sapere dove andare. Io amo la campagna che dice prima, con strade e viottoli, che cosa si deve fare e che si fa vedere tutta, onestamente. (M, pp. 13–14)

[I couldn’t live in the city, I thought, not in the city where I feel alone and where I can see that people are mean and tricky, interested only in what they can get out of you. […] It is hard work to find a street in the city and to know where to go. I love the country with its roads and lanes that tell you what you should do, the country that reveals itself at a glance, openly and honestly.] (MM, pp. 7–8)

To Albino the countryside discloses itself without deception, shows itself for what it is. The city, by contrast, with its intricate networks of roads may confuse and mislead. Clearly, here Albino chooses the safety of what is known and familiar. One should bear in mind that, over the years of Adriano Olivetti’s leadership, Ivrea expanded considerably to accommodate the factory workers and their families. The population of Ivrea approximately doubled in those years from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand.³³ Gradually, however, Albino’s resistance gives way to a more open disposition. As his factory life proceeds, the stimuli and opportunities that the urban environment has to offer become a welcome distraction from the repetitiveness of work:

La sera uscivo lentamente dalla fabbrica perché non avevo voglia di correre ancora a prendere il treno, a ricacciarmi in questa altra fabbrica […] andavo adagio verso il centro della città; passavo un momento in biblioteca, sceglievo a lungo ma senza riuscire a trovare un libro che mi piacesse e camminavo fermandomi davanti a tutti i negozi. […] Dopo andavo al cinema. (M, pp. 163–64)

[In the evening I would walk slowly out of the factory because I didn’t want to run to catch the train and plunge myself into this other factory […] I would walk slowly toward the center of the city. I would go into the library for a minute and browse slowly among the books without ever finding one I liked. Then I would continue my walk, stopping at all the shop windows. […] Afterwards I would go to the movies.] (MM, p. 120)

The commuter train is a continuation of the factory experience: an oppressive environment that one may imagine packed with workers who have just finished their shift and are heading home, weary, before starting all over again the next day. Instead of getting on the train, Albino takes his time and wanders through the city. The colourful variety of the streets, the different shops and the cultural offerings, the public library and the cinema provide a respite from the repetitiveness of his job. Albino’s walking unhurriedly and without a clear direction also expresses a distancing from the relentless rhythms and efficiency-mindedness of the factory.

Volponi’s work has frequently been placed by critics within the context of the Italian romanzo industriale [industrial novel] that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the works that belong to this genre and, most notably perhaps, those of Ottiero Ottieri and Volponi have focused on the theme of the alienation and mental illness which derive from the distancing from nature, repetitiveness and apparent lack of meaning of industrial work.³⁴ Bianciardi’s ‘anger trilogy’ addresses similar themes, expressing frustration at the commodification of intellectual work in the consumerist society of the 1960s.³⁵ The Italian romanzo industriale became established as a genre within a relatively short period of time.³⁶ This can be roughly circumscribed by the publication in 1957 of Ottieri’s Tempi stretti [Tight Times] and Bianciardi’s Il lavoro culturale [Cultural Work] and then by that of Goffredo Parise’s Il padrone [The Boss] in 1965.³⁷ Industrial literature somehow exhausted its raison d’être in the 1980s, when class divisions were redefined and the (white Italian) working class joined the ranks of the lower-middle classes in conjunction with further transformations in the job market, the development of other sectors of the economy and the delocalization of industrial production.³⁸ The romanzo industriale needs to be seen not only as a type of novel that addresses factory life as its main topic, but also as one that undertakes a revision of language and style in order to explore more effectively the socio-economic changes of those years and their repercussions on the working class.³⁹ The debate on literature and industry reached a mature conceptualization with Il Menabò, a literary magazine founded by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino, and specifically with its 1961 issue, which was entirely dedicated to the question of how literature can most effectively document the new reality of industrialization.⁴⁰

One of the peculiarities of the tradition of Italian industrial literature is that many of the writers who wrote about the industrial environment were themselves involved at different levels within Italian industry.⁴¹ In this regard Volponi is certainly an emblematic figure. The co-operation between writers and industry was made possible thanks to a group of innovative industrialists like Vittorio Valletta, Oscar Sinigaglia, Enrico Mattei and Adriano Olivetti, who entrusted many writers, including Leonardo Sinisgalli, Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Ottieri and Volponi himself, with important roles in their companies.⁴² Volponi’s oeuvre critcizes a model of industry that is founded on the exploitation of the working class at the hands of the capitalist elite; it is not against industrial progress per se.⁴³ Volponi believed that industry should incorporate not only technical knowhow but also a more human-centred approach. In this sense his disillusion, perhaps most evident in Le mosche del capitale, reveals more broadly the failure of the project to reform Italian industry championed by Olivetti. After the entrepreneur’s death, his company experienced financial problems due to poor strategic choices and the newly unfavourable situation of the Italian economy, whilst his Socialist projects and initiatives gradually lost momentum.⁴⁴

The theme of spaesamento [uprootedness] is central in Memoriale and Albino’s illness, as it is more generally in Volponi’s work. Fabrizio Scrivano focuses on the movement of the characters’ leaving behind familiar places and stresses the non-compatibility of spaces in Memoriale, particularly in terms of the dichotomy between the countryside and urban-industrial environment.⁴⁵ Owing to the hypertrophic growth of industry, a further incompatibility and lack of balance emerge between the space of production and the space of leisure. The imposing size of the factory building suggests that, even though architectonically separate from the city, seemingly not an integral part of it and almost a foreign body, the factory dominates the mindsets of the city dwellers:

La fabbrica in quel posto è costruita e in quello stesso posto resterà; non entrerà mai nel paese, non avrà mai un mercato davanti, una fiera, dei crocchi di persone, i fiori le fontane, un porticato. Davanti non si fermerà nessuno, solo chi starà male o chi lavorerà o non avrà un lavoro. (M, p. 262)

[The factory is built in one place, and it will always remain in the same place. The factory will never come into town. It will never have a market or a fair in front of its doors. It will never be surrounded by people, or flowers, or fountains, or arcades. No one will stand in front of it – only those who are not well, those who work in the factory, or those who want to work there.] (MM, pp. 194–95)

In the space of economic production one does not find recognizable urban features such as local markets, fairs, green spaces, fountains and the kind of user-friendly architecture which ensures that people are able to orientate themselves and fosters social interaction. Everything here has a function and there is no place for the leisure activities that normally take place in a town or city. There is no room for idleness. Volponi goes further to suggest that the factory has replaced the traditional urban environment and is organized like a town in its own right:

Pensavo anche a quello che l’ultima volta mi aveva detto l’impiegato dell’Ufficio Personale: ‘Deve far conto che la fabbrica sia un paese, del quale un uomo deve accettare le leggi’ […]. Come potevo considerare la fabbrica un paese? A Candia avrei potuto vivere in tanti modi ma in fabbrica nell’unico modo comandato. (M, pp. 238–39)

[I also thought about something the clerk in the Personnel Department had told me the last time: ‘You must pretend that the factory is a town, and a man must accept its laws’ […]. But how could I pretend that the factory was a town? In Candia I could live in many different ways, but in the factory there was only one way to live: under orders.] (MM, p. 177)

The workers live in the factory and for the factory. They must embrace its ideology and comply with its regulations. For Albino, this means leaving behind the freedom he enjoys in the outside world to live according to his own nature.

During the course of the novel Albino develops tuberculosis, whilst his mental condition deteriorates. He experiences several episodes of sickness that keep him off work, at home or in medical rehabilitation centres to recover. In his vulnerable mental and emotional state he becomes the victim of fraud at the hands of Palmarucci, with whom he engages in conversation on a train journey back home. Having learnt about his health issues, Palmarucci introduces Albino to the fake healer Dr Fioravanti, who pretends to cure his tuberculosis with injections of an allegedly miraculous serum. Palmarucci has moved to the North from his hometown of Gubbio in Umbria. As he begins to spend more time with Albino, establishing with him a bond of trust, the two men share their impressions of the urban environment where they now live and work. In the half-drunk monologue quoted below, with only Albino as his audience, Palmarucci launches into praise of small-town and village life:

Stanno tutti dentro la fabbrica, che non si vede nemmeno. È messa fuori, come da noi i carceri o i cimiteri. A passarle davanti mette paura. In giro ci sono sole donne, vecchi e malati. La domenica poi, non c’è più nessuno. Non ho nemmeno capito da che parte siano le chiese. Meglio un paese; un paese qualunque delle mie parti. (M, p. 219)

[Everyone is in the factory, and it is not even in the city. It is outside the city where we put our jails and our cemeteries. When you walk by it frightens you. The only people you see around are women, old men, and invalids. On Sunday there isn’t a soul to be found. I don’t even know where the churches are. A small town in my part of the country, any small town, is better than this.] (MM, p. 161)

Palmarucci looks back with regret at his hometown, which, like many other people in those years, he had left behind to move to the richer North. He recalls with nostalgia the occasions for socializing and the livelier town atmosphere. Now, as he looks around, the streets are empty with everyone at work at this time of day, as if the factory had sucked the life out of the city. The factory is compared by Palmarucci to a prison, a space of containment and re-education. According to Foucault, as the scale of production increases factories become highly hierarchized, disciplinary places that ensure ‘an intense, continuous supervision’.⁴⁶ Prisons, buildings which are normally located outside city centres, as removed as possible from our everyday experience and immediate consciousness, by virtue of this very displacement acquire an amplified and almost transcendental power to orientate individuals’ behaviour and attitudes. It is not their visibility, but the certainty of punishment which lies behind their walls that transforms the conscience of individuals and, in the minds of those who developed the idea of this kind of administrative apparatus, provides a hold on the conduct of potential criminals.⁴⁷ Palmarucci also compares the factory to a cemetery, a site that elicits feelings related to illness and death and, at least since modern times, has also been pushed out to the edges of the city. Here one has another example of the absolute dominance of the factory over the lives of urban dwellers, despite its peripheral location and its presence not being visible to Palmarucci and Albino on this particular occasion.

In Le mosche del capitale Turin’s fictional counterpart Bovino is described as ‘la città sottomessa’ [the subjugated city] (MC, p. 125); by now we know that it is subjugated to the logic of capital. The adjective bovino [bovine] itself evokes dullness and unconditional obedience. The identity of Turin is bound to the presence of Fiat, Italy’s giant automotive manufacturer, which dominated car production in the post-war years. In the novel we are mostly given glimpses of Bovino from the windows of the company headquarters that dominate the city from their vantage point, a view from on high that reverses Bianciardi’s street-level gaze in La vita agra. The principle, however, remains the same: as Lefebvre argues, the verticality of buildings refers symbolically to an implicitly authoritarian power:

The arrogant verticality of skyscrapers, and especially of public and state buildings, introduces a phallic or more precisely a phallocratic element into the visual realm; the purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator. Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power.⁴⁸

In the novel the economy grows and fosters urban expansion at the price of the increasing exploitation and marginalization of the lower classes. Urban geography and housing distribution reproduce these relations of power. The working classes live in tower blocks and cheap houses in less-sought-after areas of the city, in a kind of proletarian trend towards suburbanization that Turin shared with Milan and other Italian cities in those years.⁴⁹ A number of housing estates sprang up in the two Northern cities to accommodate immigrant and unskilled workers and became, often infamously, known as places of crime and social isolation. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, which analyses common ideas associated with the periphery. In the boom years one may observe the general trend of the displacement of working-class people from the central areas of the main cities in order to make them available ‘for luxury housing and administrative offices’.⁵⁰ One should bear in mind, however, that several factors, including gender, sexuality and ethnic background, concur to shape the social geography of the city and, therefore, parameters based strictly on wealth and socio-economic factors prove insufficient to account for the complexity of urban space. That said, there is no doubt that city centres concentrate wealth (as the realm of the privileged classes), power (through the presence of institutional buildings) and tradition (monuments as signifiers which convey meaning related to the collective identity and national history of a particular social group).

We have seen examples of how the space of industrial production, the space of capital, moulds the environment in which the characters of Bianciardi and Volponi live. Bianciardi’s use of vocabulary relating to military sieges points to the imperialist-like expansion of capital into everyday life through its network of architectural and communication infrastructures. Rampant car traffic and the pervasiveness of road works, which constantly re-shape the urban landscape, limit freedom of movement and force people to the same itineraries and places within the city. In Volponi’s novels one finds the same kind of tension as the urban environment recedes to the background and is devoid of features which are not relevant to economic growth. There emerge a non-compatibility and imbalance between the space of work and leisure, since the former dominates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. Albino’s internal conflicts leave way, in Le mosche del capitale, to characters who have been flattened out by their becoming just a cog in the capitalist machine.

Industrial Architecture

The high-rise buildings which sprang up in Milan following the extraordinary development of tertiary industry and are immortalized by Bianciardi in La vita agra have become a trademark of the city as financial capital. Bianciardi’s futuristic, dystopian descriptions convey the idea that these megastructures are the spatial concretization of industrial capitalism and political bureaucracy, with their inherent degree of violence and social inequality. Once again, these buildings, projecting upwards, are a reminder of the power of economic and political elites:

Raro perciò che ci si avveda del torracchione irto in cima di parafulmini, antenne, radar. Solo a tratti, quando fa specchio il sole su quel lucido, ti accade di levare gli occhi verso il torracchione di vetro e d’alluminio, di vedere una strada privata ingombra di auto in sosta, stranamente tacita in quel quartiere centrale, di girare attorno all’isolato, scoprendo un’intera cittadella – tre o quattro torracchioni simili, di vetro, di alluminio, di pietra lustrata. (VA, p. 31)

[That’s why you rarely notice the big tower with all those lightning conductors and antennae and radar apparatus on top. Only rarely, when the shiny mass happens to catch and reflect the sun, do you raise your eyes towards the huge glass and aluminium structure and notice a private street crowded with parked cars, strangely quiet in that central area; and if you walk round the isolated block you discover a whole citadel – three or four similar towers built of glass and aluminium and shiny stone.] (HL, p. 31)

The torracchione which Luciano intends to blow up – and which arguably embodies the fusion of the Pirelli Building and the Montecatini head office in the Via della Moscova, the latter designed by Giò Ponti and completed in 1938 – is a hostile and uncanny entity. Its smooth, impenetrable surfaces almost belie its human manufacture. With the lighting conductor on the top, it is reminiscent of another grotesque, sinister building, the Villa Pirobutirro in Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore [The Experience of Pain] (1963).

Heavy car traffic diverts attention so that, quite remarkably, one may not immediately notice these skyscrapers looming threateningly, forming what in the familiar siege language Bianciardi describes as a citadel. The office blocks and skyscrapers are the main target of Luciano’s personal war on the new Milan, for they concentrate wealth and power and concretize capitalist relations of power. Luciano envisages ‘i cervelli, lo stato maggiore’ [the brains, the general staff] (VA, p. 32; HL, p. 31), that is, the oligarchy of industrialists and technocrats with full decision-making power in their hands who work behind the translucent windows of these multinational corporations. Their course of action has deep repercussions not only for the population in Milan but also for the rest of the country, as shown by the Ribolla mining incident. Ignoring health and safety concerns, guided only by the goal of profit, just a few days before the accident the head office had been insisting that not a man, not a ton of lignite, not a working day be wasted (VA, p. 38; HL, p. 37). A trait of the capitalist city is, for Lefebvre, its being the centre of decision-making.⁵¹ This ‘domination of and by centrality’ may refer to both the dominance of the so-called Alpha cities,⁵² major urban centres that are essential nodes in the global economy, and to the perceived greater importance for financial or institutional reasons of certain urban areas over others. In the case of Italy, this is especially true for Milan, which has been a major industrial centre since Italy’s first industrial revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century and which, with the post-war economic boom, consolidated the role of financial capital of the country that it has maintained up to the present day.

The emphasis on the changing scale of the built environment and on modern building materials (glass, metal) hints at feelings of alienation and inhumanity, at the idea that urban space is no longer the domain of the human and humanity has somehow been surpassed. Changing urban proportions affect the way in which city dwellers perceive the built environment and may undermine their ability to relate empathetically to it.⁵³ Feelings of anxiety may, therefore, be projected onto buildings, which are assigned their own strange and unsettling qualities.⁵⁴ Milan’s Stazione Centrale provides an interesting example. As the main gateway through which masses of people and material goods entered and left Milan in the boom years, the Stazione Centrale became ‘a monument to the industrial city’.⁵⁵ In Silenzio a Milano [Silence in Milan] (1958) Anna Maria Ortese lingers on the exact measurements of the height and surface area of the Stazione Centrale and on the description of the construction materials. The impressive height of the arrival hall and the steel canopies make it resemble a cathedral or a mountain to those who arrive here for the first time and are struck by this kind of grand, almost awe-inspiring architecture.⁵⁶ The opening scene of Visconti’s film Rocco e i suoi Fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers] (1960) features a Southern family arriving in Milan Stazione Centrale. Like Ortese, Visconti also lingers on the stone and marble entrance hall of the station, emphasizing the contrast between architecture which conveys the values of economic progress and power and the family’s humble condition. In his crime story ‘Stazione centrale ammazzare subito’ [Central Station Kill Immediately] (1969) Giorgio Scerbanenco describes the Stazione Centrale as ‘un pianeta a sé’ [a planet unto itself] and ‘una riserva di pellerossa nel mezzo della città’ [an Indian reservation in the middle of the city].⁵⁷ The exoticizing and pejorative term pellerossa, literally ‘red skin’, further cuts the station out of the space and time of the rest of the city, conveying the idea of a place that was increasingly regarded as ambiguous and even disreputable. In the 1960s the station became a focal point for travellers and commuters, a place of socialization for the groups of immigrants and workers who gathered in the cafés of the adjacent square,⁵⁸ but also a transit site that provided a suitable environment for crime and illegality. In La vita agra the station is the arrival point of the ‘treni del sonno’ [sleepy trains] which every day, in the early morning, carry crowds of workers from the hinterland into the city. By means of another military metaphor, Bianciardi describes them as ‘battaglioni di gente grigia, con gli occhi gonfi, in marcia spalla a spalla’ [battalions of grey, swollen-eyed people, who march shoulder to shoulder] (VA, pp. 53–54; HL, p. 52).

The fabbrica of Memoriale possess a similar estranging quality. Some descriptions, like the one quoted below, emphasize, for example, the analogy with the human body. Here the fabbrica is a gigantic organism with grotesque anthropomorphic traits and fragmented body parts: ‘Aspettavo soprattutto di entrare nel corpo della fabbrica, di arrivare di fronte alle macchine, alla bocca del rumore’ [I looked forward above all to entering the interior [corpo] of the factory and coming face to face with those machines, with the source [bocca] of all that noise].⁵⁹ Other, more frequent, descriptions borrow elements from the natural world so as to suggest that the fabbrica exists in an immutable reality to whose eternal laws the city and its inhabitants are subjugated. Memoriale is dominated by this presence: the factory is ‘grande più della stessa città’ [bigger than the city it has conquered] (M, p. 7; MM, p. 3). The novel repeatedly stresses the imposing and threatening size of the factory, which looms over the pavement and obstructs the view of the surrounding countryside:

La fabbrica, grandissima e bassa, ronzava indifferente, ferma come il lago di Candia in certe sere in cui è il solo, in mezzo a tutto il paesaggio, ad avere luce. Nemmeno in Germania avevo visto una fabbrica così grande; così tutta grande subito sulla strada. (M, p. 19)

[The huge low building hummed indifferently. It was still, like the lake in Candia when it alone in all the countryside reflects the light. Not even in Germany had I seen such a large factory. Huge, sitting squarely on the street.] (MM, p. 12)

Like the calm water of the lake in Candia, indifferent to Albino’s ruminations when in his many sleepless nights he observes the reflections of moonlight playing on its surface, the fabbrica remains deaf to his protests and anguish. It shares with nature the indifference to human suffering.

Further analogies are made to institutions of Italian public life. In continuation of the previous extract, the fabbrica is compared to a church and a courthouse; its governing body to judiciary power and ecclesiastical authorities. The factory is immovable and imperturbable, like these powers, which may see themselves as representatives of an objective and absolute law, but may indeed be unfair or corrupt. One may read here distrust towards the judiciary system and its collusion with political power, as well as a rejection of the ideology of the Catholic Church, which was still exerting a dominant influence over the Italian society of those years. The passage also contains another element of uncanny anthropomorphizing, the incessant noise of industrial machinery resembling someone with shortness of breath after running a lap:

La fabbrica era invece immobile come una chiesa o un tribunale, e si sentiva da fuori che dentro, proprio come in una chiesa, in un dentro alto e vuoto, si svolgevano le funzioni di centinaia di lavori. Dopo un momento il lavoro sembrava tutto uguale; la fabbrica era tutta uguale e da qualsiasi parte mandava lo stesso rumore, più che un rumore, un affanno, un ansimare forte. (M, p. 19)

[But the factory was immovable, solid, and silent, like a church or a courthouse, and from the outside you knew that the interior was just like a church; you knew that in a high and empty space a thousand different kinds of jobs were getting done. After a second the work seemed all the same. The factory was the same in all parts, and it emitted the same humming noise from every side. It was more than just a hum. It was like a panting sound or a loud gasp.] (MM, p. 12)

The opening scene of Le mosche del capitale has echoes of these descriptions. It captures the city dwellers asleep and unaware while the capitalist machine, here embodied by a gigantic calculator, is relentlessly at work, fuelling economic expansion and urban growth. Bovino has taken on its own life or, more appropriately, the life of capital. The feeling is that of a lurking threat coming from the ubiquity of capital:

La grande città industriale riempie la notte di febbraio senza luna, tre ore prima dell’alba. Dormono tutti o quasi, e anche coloro che sono svegli giacciono smemorati e persi. […] Il sonno si spande senza alcuna innocenza, e non per fisico gravame, ma come ulteriore dato e calcolo delle compatibilità favorevoli al capitale. Tutta la città gli è sottoposta; così ciascun dormiente, ciascuno nel suo posto e letto, nel proprio sonno come in quello più grande e generale che si svuota di vapori. Il calcolatore guida e controlla, concede rincorre codifica assume imprime. (MC, pp. 5–6)

[The large industrial city fills the moonless February night, three hours before dawn. Almost all of them are asleep, and even those who are awake lie there oblivious and lost. […] Sleep spreads without any innocence, and not as a physical burden, but as a further piece of data and calculation of the combinations favourable to capital. The whole city is subject to it; so each sleeper, each in that bed where they belong, in their own sleep as in the larger and more general one that exhales an enormous breath. The computer guides and controls, enables, searches, encodes, accepts and imprints.]

This is a numb sleep, without memory or dreams, not innocent but culpable, as if the whole urban population were to be held accountable for letting capital perpetrate its injustices in the name of modernization and profit. Even those who are awake are almost in a stupor. Capital does not need critical and engaged people. The characters in the novel are devoid of any personality traits that do not revolve around the spheres of industrial work and productivity. The urban setting is perhaps more relevant to the narration than in Memoriale; it is, however, a city that is almost abstract and rarefied, where traditional urban features have become scarce and fainter. It is Turin and yet it could also be any place or no place at all.

The perceived lack of legibility of the urban landscape, which signals a loss of control over it, brings about a crisis of representation. Through the character of Astolfo (head of Megagruppo with Donna Fulgenzia, respectively inspired by Umberto and Gianni Agnelli), in Le mosche del capitale Volponi voices the idea that literature is inadequate to portray the transformations of the city in the advanced phase of capitalist development: ‘Astolfo dolente e ispirato gli mostra la città dalla vetrata centrale del suo ufficio all’undicesimo piano. Recita che è brutta e che abbrutisce anche l’industria. È così brutta e sfatta che non è più raccontabile’ [Sorrowful and inspired, Astolfo shows him the city from the central window of his office on the eleventh floor. He says that it is ugly and that it also makes the industry look ugly. It’s so ugly and untidy that it beggars description] (MC, p. 122). Astolfo, looking down from his office on the eleventh floor of the corporate building, reaffirms the dominant, objectifying kind of gaze that in the novel is cast on the city below from on high and from the perspective of the ruling classes. He claims that the city is ugly and shabby and that cannot be narrated, or rather that it is not worth narrating. He seems to think that it is redundant and dispensable. One may find, in Astolfo’s monologue, echoes of the idea that the metaphor of the city as a legible text has been surpassed in advanced industrial societies. It would, therefore, take a new artistic form, one able to break with traditional modes of representation, to convey the new urban reality.

Milan’s skyscrapers in La vita agra and the corporate buildings in Memoriale and Le mosche del capitale signify and concretize deeply unequal relations of power at the heart of Italian society in the 1960s and 1970s. The imposing verticality of these buildings and the perception of them as being out of scale convey the impossible fight of Luciano, Albino and other characters against political and economic power. These coercive architectures (and the dominant organization of space, as we shall see below) have the effect of disenfranchising the characters of Bianciardi and Volponi as well as the many users of space that are reduced, as Lefebvre puts it, to ‘passivity and silence’.⁶⁰

Discipline and Productivity

Hinting at Foucault in their introduction to Bianciardi’s collected oeuvre, Massimo Coppola and Alberto Piccinini maintain that the emergence of advertising-driven consumerism in post-war Italian society betrays a new form of bio-political control: ‘Nella sua opera Bianciardi si misura con i nuovi dispositivi di controllo biopolitico, che coincide con l’affermarsi, proprio in quel tempo, della società dei consumi’ [In his work Bianciardi comes to terms with the new biopolitical mechanisms of control, which coincide with the emergence, at that time, of consumer society].⁶¹ Foucault argues that at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an evolution in the Western penal system can be registered which coincides with the rise of disciplinary power: in other words, of rationally organized and hierarchical methods of surveillance that develop in conjunction with ‘an extension and refinement of punitive practices’.⁶² Discipline exercised on a societal scale entails ever more sophisticated forms of bio-political control of the human body and of people’s behaviour and conduct.⁶³ In La vita agra control and economic productivity, core values in Milanese society, form an indissoluble pair: continued productivity to preserve the status quo requires new forms of social control and the orientation of what people do, buy and consume. Bianciardi explicitly links increased industrial productivity and new levels of consumption when he writes that ‘faranno insorgere bisogni mai sentiti prima. […] Purché tutti lavorino, purché siano pronti a scarpinare, a fare polvere, a pestare i piedi, a tafanarsi l’un l’altro dalla mattina alla sera’ [needs previously unheard of will arise. […] Provided, that is to say, everyone works hard and is always ready to lift his feet, wear out shoe leather, kick up the dust, and pester his fellows from morning till night] (VA, p. 158; HL, p. 153). The new benessere relies on a growth in productivity. It fosters competition and forms of labour exploitation which are intrinsic to capitalism. People in Milan are expected to contribute to economic growth and the prestige of Milan as a great international city through their work and by paying taxes, which disproportionately hit the poorer.

In his analysis of disciplinary power, Foucault shows that this has an essential spatial component, for it relies on the rational principle of the segmentation and distribution of space and of individuals within it in order to enable supervision.⁶⁴ The disciplinary discourse reverberates in La vita agra through an urban layout which fosters a rational, purpose-oriented way of moving across the city, where automobiles – fast-moving vehicles that can transport one quickly from one point to another – have an uncontested central role.⁶⁵ Bearing in mind Foucault’s idea of apparatus, or dispositif, as any set of practices and strategies that aim to train, control and therefore ‘normalize’ the behaviour of individuals,⁶⁶ it can be argued that the way in which movement is organized and regulated in La vita agra links modern Milan to the functioning of the apparatus. On the one hand, Bianciardi argues that modern transport only guarantees a false freedom of movement, for it funnels people to specific areas and itineraries within the city, chiefly the journey from home to work and vice versa. This limited freedom comes at a price that not everyone can bear, for not everyone can afford a car or the cost of commuting by public transport. On the other hand, the dominance of car traffic marginalizes specific categories of city users such as cyclists and pedestrians, relegating the latter to ‘una fettuccia di marciapiede’ [narrow pavement] (VA, p. 31; HL, p. 30) with cars zooming past on all sides. Mobility in Milan is production-oriented and elitist. Modern street planning, influenced by theories on the rational distribution of space developed primarily by Le Corbusier, privileges efficient, fast mobility while limiting the walkability of the city.⁶⁷ As Michel De Certeau argues, the act of walking becomes a way of subverting established and imposed itineraries, for instance by creating shortcuts or opting for alternative routes.⁶⁸ By re-working official and accepted routes, one may reclaim urban spaces and enable a different experience of the city. Similarly, in La vita agra, walking is a way truly to appropriate urban space, which as such is viewed with suspicion and actively discouraged by authorities in the city.

In the novel street planning follows a principle of spatial rationality and regulation that influences the behaviour of car drivers and passers-by. The latter, portrayed as perpetually walking at a hectic pace, oblivious to the world around them, assume the contours of the blasé metropolitan crowd that has populated early sociological studies and the literary imagination with its fluctuating physiognomy, at least from Baudelaire onwards. Among the Milanese crowd one may pick out the secretaries, a new professional figure in the post-war era, from their nervous, steady walk, their heels tapping rhythmically on the pavement.⁶⁹ Once again, one can assume that they are on their way to work or, conversely, that they have just left the office and are heading home. Behind the wheel, car drivers undergo a sort of animalistic mutation. Their cars, described as ‘lupi’ [wolves], become a sort of grotesque prosthetic extension of their body (VA, p. 165; HL, p. 159). Bianciardi assigns to cars monstruous animalistic traits, for example when he compares a few vehicles that have been parked with their wheels on the sidewalk to ‘grosse bestie ferme lì per orinare’ [big beasts stopping there to urinate] (I, p. 17). In La vita agra Luciano even observes that it is possible to determine the day of the week by the particular way in which car drivers unleash their anger and vent at other drivers or pedestrians: ‘rabbiosi sempre, il lunedì la loro ira è alacre e scattante, stanca e inviperita il sabato’ [always angry traffic, but on Monday its anger is lively and explosive, and on Saturday it’s tired and morose] (VA, p. 164; HL, p. 159). As seen above, Luciano’s emotional connection with Brera also relies on the relative lack of road traffic in the area, which contributes to its aura of safety and comfort.

The Milanese do not walk: they march at a round pace. Luciano’s incompatibility with metropolitan life is betrayed by his own way of walking, which, on the contrary, is slow and meditative, hence unconventional.⁷⁰ This kind of wandering is apparently inefficient and, as such, cannot be accommodated in a disciplinary spatial regime that requires productivity. In other words, Luciano’s unproductive way of walking is a direct challenge to the urban-industrial society where he lives, a society that is reluctant ‘to consider the uneconomical or unjustified’.⁷¹ Unlike the stream of seemingly robotic passers-by hurrying to work, Luciano pauses, goes back and observes his surroundings. This ‘odd’ demeanour makes him resemble something of a maverick and ends up attracting the attention of the vice squad: ‘Sorpreso in atteggiamento sospetto, diceva appunto al telefono quel maresciallo del buon costume, dopo che mi ebbe fermato, caricato sul furgone nero e portato in questura’ [Caught acting in a suspicious manner was what the vice-squad inspector said about me on the telephone after he had stopped me, put me in a black maria and taken me to the police station] (VA, p. 107; HL, p. 104). Walking for leisure is penalized in an urban system that encourages conformity by prioritizing work and productivity over other, perhaps more creative and unconventional pursuits.⁷² Merlin Coverley also argues that cities have become ‘increasingly hostile to the pedestrian’ and that ‘walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city with its promotion of swift circulation’.⁷³ Luciano observes that after living in Milan for some time people turn into automatons or ghosts as they move about the city deprived of vitality. He once again likens labour productivity and this kind of fast, efficient road mobility when he claims that the fact that he ‘cannot walk’ has led not only to his arrest but also to the termination of his job at the company where he works at the beginning of the novel (inspired by the experience at the Feltrinelli Publishing House): ‘una volta mi arrestarono per strada, soltanto perché non so camminare. E poi mi licenziarono, per lo stesso motivo’ [I don’t know how to walk even, and once I was arrested in the street for just that reason. In the end I lost my job for the same reason] (VA, p. 107; HL, p. 104).

Disciplinary power activates a mechanism of self-regulation and instils passivity, relying on the fact that its technologies of power operate constantly, as in the archetypical model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon discussed by Foucault. This is a circular building with a guard tower in the centre and prisoners placed in cells around the perimeter: from their position the invigilators can virtually see the inmates at all times, whilst the latter cannot see what lies outside their cells. As Foucault puts it, the principle of the constant visibility of the inmate by the invigilator ‘assures the automatic functioning of power’ without direct action but through mind conditioning,⁷⁴ for the inmates are aware that they could potentially be watched at all times.⁷⁵ Foucault’s panopticism as a model of permanent control draws on this interdependency of spatial order and the visibility of the subjects to be supervised. As such, the Panopticon is ‘an architectural apparatus’⁷⁶ that can be implemented in different contexts (not only prisons but hospitals, workshops and schools)⁷⁷ and potentially in any situation in which individuals need to be trained and supervised. As a generalizable model, the Panopticon responds to the need of power to rationalize space in order to exert more easily and consistently its control and ultimately become ‘coextensive with society’.⁷⁸ Panopticism inaugurates ‘generalized surveillance’:⁷⁹ the focus moves from enclosed institutions to disciplinary mechanisms spread throughout the social body, giving rise to a disciplinary society. The corporate tower that Luciano intends to blow up at the beginning of La vita agra is yet another version of the Panopticon. It is equipped with surveillance cameras that are able to acquire information about everyone entering the building. Luciano is aware that he is being ‘observed’ while inspecting the building and the surrounding area, trying to figure out how to effect entry. The security guards at the entrance – described as ’ex-carabinieri e secondini di Portolongone allontanati dal corpo per eccesso di rigore, bluastri in faccia e con gli occhi cattivi’ [former carabinieri from Portolungone who had been dismissed for excessive severity, and they all had bluish faces and evil eyes] (VA, p. 32; HL, p. 32) – recall a Fascist squad threatening to confront any intruder.

Similarly, the factory in Memoriale is a panoptical institution that exerts a disciplinary power over its workers. An analogy with Bianciardi’s hasty passers-by may be found in the workers that leave the fabbrica after work. Tired and numb at the end of their shift, they part hurriedly, oblivious to what is going on around them: ‘Improvvisamente la gente cominciò a uscire [...]. Molti si buttavano sulle biciclette e sui motorscooter; altri andavano a piedi di qua e di là sui marciapiedi, sicurissimi per una direzione che sembravano aver preso a caso’ [Suddenly a mass of people started streaming out of the building […]. Many of the men rode off on their bicycles or on their motor scooters while others, very sure of themselves, sauntered off in directions that seemed to have been chosen at random] (M, p. 23; MM, p. 15). Discipline is an essential value in the factory’s work environment. It maintains workers in a passive state and ensures that they continue to carry out their tasks on the assembly line without questioning the orders they receive from their superiors. Indeed, Foucault asserts that:

discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection.⁸⁰

On several occasions factory life is presented as a continuation of the experience of war and particularly of Albino’s period of internment in the German labour camp.⁸¹ The analogy between war and industry is, indeed, a major thread in the novel. Albino observes, for example, that ‘mai come durante il lavoro io ho pensato alla prigionia’ [while I worked I thought about the prison camp] (M, p. 22; MM, p. 14). In the introductory meeting between Albino and the hiring manager on the first day of work, the latter once again likens the factory and military experience: ‘[T]u hai fatto il soldato per molti anni e conosci il valore della disciplina e dell’ubbidienza. Queste due virtù sono basilari anche nella fabbrica’ [You’ve been a soldier for many years so you must know the values of discipline and obedience. These are also two basic principles of the factory] (M, p. 30; MM, p. 20). The manager points out that discipline and obedience are essential qualities in a soldier as well as in a factory worker and that, as a former soldier, Albino will find it easier to adjust to the rhythms and requirements of industrial work. For Albino, the factory environment becomes a new battlefield on which to prove his real value once and for all. By throwing himself wholeheartedly into his new job, he intends to demonstrate that he is better and more efficient than his colleagues. This over-commitment, however, soon leads him to physical and mental exhaustion and to numerous admissions to hospital on the advice of the company doctors. Albino lives in a state of acute internal conflict: he alternately praises and fiercely opposes, and even loathes, industry and its mechanisms. This conflict almost reaches madness, since ‘la fabbrica mi sembrava un edificio senza senso e sentivo che una parte del mio cervello stava facendo violenza su di me per trattenermi in quel luogo ostile e innaturale’ [the factory seemed like a meaningless building, but I still felt as if a part of my brain was forcing me to stay in that hostile, unnatural place] (M, p. 23; MM, p. 15).

Albino suffers from paranoid neurosis and may therefore be seen as a typical example of an unreliable narrator who is bound to cast doubt on the truth of the narrated facts. While this is certainly true to an extent (for instance, Albino’s belief that the company doctors diagnose him with fake illnesses and prescribe periods of leave deliberately to penalize him and keep him away from work is clearly delusional), there are more complex issues at stake with the point of view he brings as narrator of the story. Albino embodies an urban-industrial malaise that is rooted in neo-capitalist societies.⁸² His experience is generalizable. A disclaimer at the beginning of the novel informs us that the narrated facts are not relatable only to a single and specific city, but are instead generalizable because ‘la città industriale non ha identità’ [the industrial complex has not been identified]. In other words, Memoriale could be set in any city in the era of global capitalism, in which differences are flattened out between places which are more interconnected than ever before. Later in his memoir, Albino iterates this point:

Il problema è quello dell’industria in generale, tutta, dalle sue città e quartieri ai treni e ai pullman che la servono, alle sue fotografie sui giornali, ai suoi operai, tanti come un esercito, come il mio lago, che batte la testa sempre sulla stessa sponda. (M, pp. 176–77)

[This is the problem of all industry in general, from the cities where it grows to the trains and buses that serve it, from its image in the newspapers to its workers, vast as an army, an army like my lake, always beating its head against the same shore.] (MM, p. 129)

Albino shows awareness of industrial capitalism as a transnational phenomenon and of the system that sustains it: technologies, cities across the globe and the means of transport and communication through which material goods and transactions reach different places, the publicity and mass media and the countless low-wage workers who keep this system running. It is interesting to note the presence of another military metaphor when Albino refers to factory workers as an army in disarray with no clear direction, like the waves of Lake Candia that keep breaking monotonously on the same shore.

The end of Memoriale appears to confirm the idea that Albino’s malaise is more generally rooted in society. After all the issues he has created with his neurotic behaviour and the efforts the factory doctors have made to facilitate his recovery, despite the fact that he has even denounced their supposedly persecutory behaviour to the head of the company, Albino is fired for prompting the kitchen staff to join the other workers on strike. We readers are left with the doubt that Albino was right after all: if there is no real conspiracy against him, it is nonetheless true that industry does not work for the good and in the interest of its workers. Quite the contrary: Albino’s illness and obsession feed on the environment of the factory and blur into the kind of alienation that is typical of such repetitive, isolating work. The relentless background noise of industrial machinery in particular embodies the spellbinding power of the fabbrica. The workers move in unison with the constant hum of the machines, as if hypnotized:

Il rumore mi rapiva; il sentire andare tutta la fabbrica con un solo motore mi trascinava e mi obbligava a tenere con il mio lavoro il ritmo che tutta la fabbrica aveva. Non potevo trattenermi, come una foglia di un grande albero scosso in tutti i suoi rami dal vento. (M, p. 62)

[The noise fascinated me. All parts of the factory throbbed in unison and, driven by this beat, I was compelled to adapt the rhythm of my work to that gigantic pulse. I couldn’t stop myself; I was like a leaf of a great tree whose every branch shook in the wind.] (MM, p. 43)

Albino’s awareness of the alienating quality of his factory work grows as the story proceeds. Hence it does not come as a complete surprise that at the end of the novel he takes a clear stance against it, since he finds himself in agreement with the demands for improvement of the factory’s working conditions outlined in the flyer distributed by members of the FIOM union during the workers’ industrial action. Albino is frustrated in his hopes of finding in the factory a means towards a better life and compensation for his existential sense of non-belonging. His disillusion mirrors Volponi’s own frustrated aspirations for improvements in Italian industry, especially after Olivetti’s death and the failure of his reform project. As seen above, Volponi believed that industry should provide not only economic stability for workers and their families and the fulfilment of their basic needs, but should also address their cultural and intellectual development in order to lead to a real improvement in their lives.⁸³

Social malaise reaches a climax in Le mosche del capitale. Here people live confined to either their home or the workplace. The action takes place almost exclusively in indoor spaces; and even as the characters, primarily the industrial managers, move through the urban space, they do so by car in order to reach their destination quickly and efficiently. One may argue that Bovino is reminiscent of Foucault’s plague-stricken town as ‘a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism’.⁸⁴ Foucault argues that the plague regulations and containment measures implemented in sixteenth and seventeenth-century towns when an epidemic broke out betray more broadly an ancestral fear of contagion, understood as any potential element of chaos and challenge to the status quo.⁸⁵ A similar utopia/dystopia of the ‘perfectly governed’, ‘immobilized’⁸⁶ city is realized in Le mosche del capitale. Any potential threat to the dominant order has been neutralized and the city of Bovino has turned into a disciplined, aseptic space with docile, passive citizens. The beginning of the novel is particularly emblematic in this regard since, as seen above, it captures the inhabitants of Bovino in a dreamless sleep which resembles lethargy.

Fascist Legacies

Le mosche del capitale contains several references to the question of Fascist legacies in post-war Italian society. The issue is raised, for instance, through the character of Radames, a security guard at MFM. In a speech replete with Fascist and imperialist tropes, Radames calls for the necessary infiltration of authoritarian elements into the Italian public administration, police and judicial and school systems in order to exert control over democratic institutions:

Dobbiamo cioè tendere a moltiplicarci, a fare entrare le nostre credenze e le nostre volontà in tutte le branche vitali dell’organizzazione nazionale, soprattutto in quelle dei pubblici poteri e della pubblica amministrazione … di tutti i bracci secolari dello stato, dalla magistratura all’esercito, dai carabinieri alla finanza … Magari fino alle scuole ai collegi ai centri alle organizzazioni sportive. […] potremo con grande forza e nuove capacità, davvero uniti, andare a conquistare e mettere ordine in altre regioni e in altri territori. (MC, p. 92)

[We must, therefore, tend to multiply, to make our beliefs and wills enter all the vital branches of the national organization, especially those of the public authorities and the public administration ... of all the secular arms of the state, from the judiciary to the army, from the carabinieri to finance …. Maybe including schools, colleges, centres and sports organizations. […] We shall be able, with great strength and new abilities, truly united, to conquer and bring order to other regions and other territories.]

Through Radames’s speech, which indicates the hard-line approach which the industrial leadership should take in order to erase ‘ogni principio di opposizione e di intralcio all’industria’ [any principle of opposition or hindrance to the industry] (MC, p. 91) and ‘tutti i nemici, di cui è pieno il mondo, anche le nostre case, le nostre città, soprattutto le nostre fabbriche’ [all the enemies of which the world is full, even in our homes, our cities and especially in our factories] (MC, p. 90), Volponi denounces the abuses perpetrated by the Italian political and industrial elites in those years. Industrial management at Fiat and other companies aligned with the repressive measures taken by the Christian Democrat governments: for example, the creation of anti-strike rewards and practices of discrimination against members of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro; CGIL), Italy’s largest union. In this regard Crainz asserts:

L’iniziativa delle direzioni aziendali – alla Fiat e altrove – si coniugava al quadro politico dei primi anni cinquanta che abbiamo già delineato: nelle fabbriche più che altrove si coglie il clima generale ‘degli anni della libertà congelata’, gli anni in cui sull’eguaglianza prevale ‘la regola della discriminazione’.⁸⁷

[The initiatives of the company management – at Fiat and elsewhere – combine with the political framework of the early 1950s that we have already outlined: in factories, more than elsewhere, the general climate ‘of the years of suspended freedom’ manifests itself, the years in which ‘the rule of discrimination’ prevails over equality.]

In Memoriale, too, one may find examples of characters who are supposedly converted former Fascists but actually still harbour feelings of nostalgia for Italy’s totalitarian past. Albino’s line manager Grosset claims, for instance, that their colleague, the engineer Pignotti, only pretended to repudiate his pro-Fascist ideals until it was sufficiently safe to embrace them again. According to Grosset, Pignotti aspires to rule the factory and would be willing to use violence on the least pretext to maintain discipline:

Pignotti ci farebbe lavorare con le bastonate se appena potesse. A che punto siamo ricaduti in pochi anni. Il caro ingegner Pignotti subito dopo la liberazione sembrava il più mansueto degli agnelli […]. Si vede che tutte le vecchie ambizioni lo hanno ripreso. Vuol comandare, vuol comandare a tutti i costi. (M, p. 171)

[Pignotti would beat us to make us work if he could. What have we come to in such a few years? After the liberation, our dear Pignotti was as meek as a little lamb […]. I guess all his ambitions have come back. He wants to be boss, he wants to be boss at any cost.] (MM, p. 125)

As pointed out in the Introduction, some of the discriminatory practices that had been widespread under the Fascist regime persisted in the post-war Republic, particularly aimed at left-wing political dissidents. The thesis of the survival of a ‘Fascist mentality’ in the Republic, to use Dondi’s definition,⁸⁸ is based on the evidence that a real process of de-fascistization, that is, a political purge of Fascist individuals, was never accomplished, since ‘after 1960, neo-fascists, whether members of the MSI or its friends, found positions in the heart of the state, in the secret services, in the military hierarchy, in a fashion that would condition Italian life for decades to come, blocking even the most timid move to the Left’.⁸⁹ Indeed, on the one hand it proved difficult to achieve a consensus on how the cleansing process was to be carried out, due to the presence in the Italian territory in the aftermath of the war of a mosaic of military and political forces with their differing views and aims.⁹⁰ On the other, the initial willingness of the political parties, and particularly the Christian Democrats, the Italian majority party throughout the 1950s, to carry out the purge grew more cautious as it became clear that a substantial portion of Italian society, including key officials, had in various degrees been involved with the regime.⁹¹ The failure of the cleansing process, i.e., the removal from institutional positions of individuals who had in various ways collaborated with the Fascist regime, was accompanied in the post-war years by the substantial inability or unwillingness on the part of the leading sectors of Italian society to instigate critical reflection on the past in order to come to terms with Fascism and the collective responsibility of Italians in its rise and consolidation. The general tendency, which suited the needs of the reconstruction and recovery of Italy’s war-battered economy, was instead to try and forget: a removal process that Ruth Ben-Ghiat labels ‘collective amnesia’.⁹² A further tendency was to externalize responsibility through a narrative of victimization that saw Fascism as a foreign body and a temporary hiatus in the path of the liberal progress of the Italian nation, a thesis most notably advanced by Benedetto Croce.⁹³ The climate of the Cold War then meant that the Christian Democrats could be excused for the inability to ‘break decisively with fascism’.⁹⁴

In Le mosche del capitale there is a strong perception of the authoritarian threat that, as Dondi points out, has ‘scored the path’ of the Italian post-war Republic and its parliamentary parties.⁹⁵ Radames’s authoritarian, imperialist views reverberate through the image of the industrial managers who march defiantly through Bovino’s central streets towards the end of the novel. A historical fact, the so-called ‘march of the forty thousand’ took place on 14 October 1980 and was part of a strategy of intimidation carried out by industrial management at Fiat in response to a series of strikes organized by the workers. The episode led the CGIL to make concessions that were favourable to the Fiat management. In the extract below, the industrial managers march in a threatening procession like an army ready to be deployed, thereby reaffirming their power: ‘I quarantamila passavano per il centro ben coperti e compatti nel grigio degli abiti e nel blu delle scarpe […]. Quarantamila capi silenziosi e disciplinati, ben pettinati e calzati’ [The forty thousand passed through the centre, well-clothed and compact in their grey suits and blue shoes [...]. Forty thousand silent and disciplined bosses, well combed and shod] (MC, p. 262). The episode presents an exception to the sensation that, in the novel, the characters live in indoor confinement. Here, there is appropriation of the urban space. Nevertheless, it is the kind of forcible appropriation that is intended to intimidate and put the workers back in their place, thereby reaffirming a principle of restraint and limitation.

Bianciardi and Volponi express criticism of the transformation of Milan and Turin in the 1960s and 1970s, which are depicted as sites of social inequality, anomie and authoritative power. In shaping a certain image of post-war urban transition in Italy, they draw on traditional themes which, in the literary imagination, have been applied to the description of the modern metropolis. In this sense they describe a universal experience that pervades many literary and artistic representations of the city. Urban descriptions are also revealing of the writers’ specific criticism of the bourgeois capitalism of the North and of neo-liberal, consumerist, post-war Italian society, which betrayed their aspiration for social change and for the creation of a more egalitarian society after the reconstruction period. They present the city as a symbol of capital and the paradigm of a model of civilization that has gone wrong. There emerges a portrait of the city in which impressive buildings point to the authority of state and industrial elites and the urban layout affects the behaviour of urban dwellers, enhancing their productivity and acquiescence. What the writers see as menacing and disturbing may be a reflection of the persistence of authoritarian, reactionary practices in post-war Italy aimed at those questioning the new politico-economic status quo. The writers portray urban and industrial environments where people are exploited and have their rights curtailed to accommodate the pursuit of wealth by the dominant classes. They connect political authoritarianism and economic capitalism, for the latter allies political and industrial elites and relies on the repressive intervention of state power to maintain the dominant social order.

While the work of Bianciardi and Volponi has certainly ideological implications, it does not align with a dominant left-wing political agenda.⁹⁶ The new trend towards experimental writing in Italian literature of the 1960s, which privileged form and style over content, definitely called into question a certain way of addressing political commitment.⁹⁷ The example of Bianciardi is emblematic of the growing dissent regarding the hegemonic views of the Communist Party among Italian intellectuals, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the popularity enjoyed by La vita agra, by far his most successful book, Bianciardi chose the path of disengagement, devoting himself to writing books on the Italian Risorgimento and contributions to sports magazines, thereby rejecting the label of left-wing intellectual and identification with the anti-capitalist protest movement of the 1960s and 1970s.⁹⁸ Bianciardi’s gradual disillusionment with socio-political commitment is reflected in the events narrated in La vita agra.

The rejection of modern metropolitan life results in a subjectivist withdrawal into protective microcosms, such as Brera for Luciano and the small bedroom facing Lake Candia for Albino, perceived as spaces of resistance to the official urban–work environment. With its bohemian feel, Brera/Braida presents a direct challenge to the Milanese values of efficiency and economic profit. Escape is, however, temporary and illusory: Luciano is forced out of Brera into the ‘real’ city to lead a life of work and routine, with difficulties in making ends meet, whilst Albino is drawn back to the factory for which he entertains an intense love–hate relationship. The all-pervasive, unfathomable industrial city of Le mosche del capitale appears to seal victory for a model of capitalism that pursues profit by any means necessary at the cost of growing income inequality, the erosion of workers’ rights and social isolation. Urban descriptions (and the general lack of them as characters seem to enjoy little freedom to move across the urban fabric) bear witness to Volponi’s disillusionment with the current state of affairs and the persistence of a reactionary ideology.

One may argue that the anti-urban stance assumed by Bianciardi and Volponi has a conservative, elitist element to it. By retreating into Brera, for example, Bianciardi identifies with the traditional spaces of cultural value to Milan’s intellectual milieu. Cities are ever-evolving and transformations in their social and physical fabric should not be dismissed too hastily as negative. One should not forget that metropolitan life is also a liberating experience since it encourages less rigid and more diluted modes of identification, which often come with a perceived greater freedom for self-expression. There is no doubt, for instance, that metropolitan life granted more freedom and wider possibilities to young people and women who left behind essentially patriarchal, traditional rural societies to move to the big city.⁹⁹ Similarly, it is the big-city environment that provides Bianciardi and Volponi with the material for their successful novels. In Grosseto, Bianciardi mainly wrote preparatory works to La vita agra. Volponi, born in Urbino in Central Italy, moved to Ivrea to join Olivetti in his effort to reform Italian industry and drew on this experience for his industrial novels. In their novels this tension translates into a dialectic dynamic of imaginative escape and actual staying in the city which ultimately provides the source of literary imagination. The same may be said about the characters who, notwithstanding their conflictual relationship with the city, are also drawn back to it and find in it opportunities for encounters and personal and professional development, even though these are essentially negated by the nihilistic view that prevails in the end. With their contradictions, Bianciardi and Volponi embody the common existential experience of feeling ‘at once aroused by the city and submerged and powerless in its vastness’.¹⁰⁰