Introduction

The Economic Boom as Problematic Transition

In Italy the years after World War II brought about dramatic changes in lifestyle and in social and economic structures, one continuing symptom being the fact that the period of extraordinary growth which followed the reconstruction of the immediate post-war years is still remembered as the ‘miracle’ or the ‘boom’.¹ When thinking of those years, what comes to mind first are glittering images of good-looking young people speeding by in their brand-new Fiat Cinquecento cars and on Lambretta motor scooters, or of beaming housewives who have had their lives transformed by the new electrical home appliances which have conquered the market. These associations have sedimented in the collective imagination thanks to the many advertisements, photographs and video clips of the time and have become the iconographic symbols of the allegedly carefree prosperity and unprecedented mobility of the post-war years. In public opinion the economic boom is also associated with the golden era of Italian TV and cinema.² It is not rare for Italians today to compare the issues that beset present-day Italian society with the post-war period, when things were allegedly ‘going well’. Nevertheless, historians and scholars of contemporary Italy have increasingly pointed out the contradictions that marked the process of economic development in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the course of a handful of years, on the cusp between those two decades, Italian society was transformed dramatically. After twenty years of Fascist dictatorship, the disastrous outcome of the Second World War and the efforts of the reconstruction period, in the early 1960s Italy experienced a phase of extraordinary economic development, turning from a traditionally agrarian, impoverished country into one of Europe’s largest industrial producers, especially in the automotive sector and electrical appliances industry.³ The boom did not happen overnight. It was enabled by a particular set of circumstances, such as the development of international trade from the 1950s to the 1970s; the influx of American capital, machinery and ‘know-how’ through the Marshal Plan deployed in Italy after the Second World War; the discovery of new sources of energy (particularly gas and hydrocarbons in the Val Padana); and the low cost of labour, which made Italian industry competitive on the international market.⁴ That having been said, economic recovery still proceeded at a slow pace in the aftermath of the war and the reconstruction years. The concentration and intensity of the subsequent growth period, the boom being conventionally dated from 1958 to 1963, are, therefore, especially remarkable, even against the backdrop of Europe-wide economic development.⁵

The fact that growth occurred in such an extraordinarily short period of time and was followed by a downward trend in the global economy only a decade later certainly affected the course of action of Italian governments and their ability to tackle the major socio-political tensions of those years.⁶ The international oil crisis of 1973 put an end to the positive economic phase. Guido Crainz’s definition of ‘paese mancato’ [a country that never realized its full potential] conveys the idea of the missed opportunity for Italian post-war governments to deal with long-standing social issues by implementing structural reforms and building a robust collective dimension.⁷ This failure fostered attitudes of individualism and economic gain⁸ and may help to shed light on later phases of Italian society, in particular the conflicts of 1968, the mid-1970s and the 1980s.⁹ It can be argued that the post-war period contained the germ of some of the later developments in Italian society and was somehow a testing ground in which models and attitudes that persisted in the following decades were generated. The controversial legacy of the boom may be detected in Italy’s socio-political instability in the following decades, as well as in the widespread corruption of the Italian political and administrative systems, which was brought to public attention by the Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s.¹⁰

There is no doubt that the boom also brought advancements in Italian society, not only in terms of the increased wealth of the expanding middle class, but also in terms of a certain secularization of culture and society. Nevertheless, the fact that the boom was essentially unregulated and governed by the free play of the market accounts for many of the inconsistencies and discrepancies that marked the process of economic development.¹¹ Some of Italy’s existing inequalities and territorial imbalances became deeper, this being especially the case with the long-standing gap between the North and South, the latter historically the more deprived half of the country. After the war the leading Italian industries were overwhelmingly based in the North, while the Southern economy still depended primarily on agriculture and other traditional activities.¹² The boom also accentuated the discrepancy between private and public patterns of consumption due to insufficient public funding allocated to the social service sectors such as health and education.¹³ The picture, however, was multifaceted and reflected a society which, like all societies, was of course neither static nor homogeneous and reacted accordingly to the transformations underway. Guido Crainz suggests that it is more appropriate to speak of ‘plural Italies’ (‘diverse Italie’) rather than one monolithic, single Italy that underwent economic development.¹⁴ Dichotomies such as North–South are more nuanced than commonly assumed, as was the situation within specific areas of the country. Such complexity is mirrored in this book by the diverse literary voices and genres that explore different places within the national territory: the industrial cities of the North, the small-town environment of the provinces and the changing perception of the national territory.

While the boom unfolded in just a handful of years, the period on which this book focuses extends to embrace the 1970s as well, in order better to emphasize the impact of spatial changes and the fact that they continued to inspire the imagination of Italian writers in the following decades. The long-term perspective does not intend to negate the significance of the boom as an abrupt transition, nor to underestimate the swift changes that were brought about in the lifestyle and aspirations of the Italian people. On the contrary, the fact that radical transformations were concentrated in a short period of time, a peculiarity of the Italian boom as opposed to similar growth trajectories in other Western countries, is key to the understanding of the main themes and threads in this book, such as Italy’s controversial relationship to its own authoritarian history and a widespread sense of disorientation arising as the result of rapid transformation from the late 1950s onwards. The diffusion of more progressive ways of life gradually loosened Italians’ traditional reliance on the institutions of the family and Church, historically essential points of reference, and hence contributed to feelings of uncertainty.¹⁵

Italy’s economic boom was an ambiguous transition, marked by the co-existence of sheer innovation and aspects of continuity with the past, the latter especially visible in the machinery of state and administrative structures, which passed practically unchanged into the Republic.¹⁶ If economic growth inaugurated a new phase in Italian history, it also soon enough became clear that in the post-war Republic renewal went hand-in-hand with the survival of elements from the pre-war years. In the 1950s the state could still use repressive Fascist laws against its opponents.¹⁷ The persistence of practices of repression and intimidation, aimed especially at members of the Communist Party and left-wing activists, found a new justification in the climate of the Cold War and in the context of the anti-Communist alliance between the countries of the Western Bloc.¹⁸ Historians generally agree in their interpretation of a collective forgetting of Italy’s totalitarian past to suit the needs of the reconstruction process at the end of the war. As Mirco Dondi puts it, in post-war Italian society ‘forgetfulness and prosperity seemed to go together’.¹⁹ Giuliana Minghelli has labelled this attitude the ‘amnesiac culture of benessere [economic wellbeing]’.²⁰ Italy’s unresolved relationship with its past and the implications of its collective forgetfulness cast a shadow over Italian society in the boom years and beyond.

A Literary Perspective

The crucial shift in modern Italian history is addressed here through a literary perspective and, more specifically, through the analysis of the representation of post-war Italy’s changing geography in the works of several Italian authors, spanning a range of literary genres and written over the course of roughly twenty years, from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. Literature is a powerful tool for studying the changes occurring in society, thanks to its ability to disclose multiple layers of interpretation and meaning and to transport readers into the lived experience of subjects whose point of view may otherwise be inaccessible to them. The texts examined in this book are no exception. On the one hand, they provide original insights into post-war Italy’s urban renewal and, on the other, they challenge clichéd representations of the Italian territory and national identity, problematizing long-standing commonplaces and narratives. Literary works are not inert objects: the tension they generate reverberates through the diversified positioning of readers, sparking debate and encouraging further discussion – all the more so in the era of mass communication.²¹

The texts discussed in this book capture the dual nature of space as factual and symbolic by portraying concrete cityscapes and landscapes and by steering the imagination associated with them, which in turn shapes these places both discursively and tangibly. In this sense, the genres analysed in this book may be regarded as discursive constructions of reality. The views that the authors express inevitably reflect ‘collectively organized’ interpretations of society, which are internalized and embedded within their writings.²² It also goes to show that the dialectical relationship between literature, imagination and space is rich and fecund.²³ Literary representations of space prove especially fruitful for investigating the complexities of post-war Italian society, for they illuminate the interconnection of socio-political, economic and cultural changes, as well as the direct relation to the interiority of individuals. The question of the subject’s interaction with the environment is at the core of humanist geography and its definitions of place and space.²⁴ As Silvia Ross puts it, ‘the human experiential element of a given geography is […] as important as the inanimate surroundings’.²⁵ In this study the interplay between these two poles is illuminated and centrality assigned to the writers’ experience of space by examining their interiorization of spatial changes through the lens of different genres. These include crime fiction and travel literature, which have traditionally been seen as less important, have received limited scholarly attention in Italy (but whose renewed popularity, starting from the 1960s onwards, documents the redefinition of genre normativity in those years) and which therefore allow original perspectives on space and identity. By examining quite diverse authorial perspectives and forms of writing, the ambiguity and intensity of feeling in the period under scrutiny emerge more starkly, along with some of the underlying patterns of post-war Italian society.

The chapters that follow look at the rapid growth of Milan and Turin, the main industrial centres of the richer North, from the boom years onwards. They do so through a series of novels by Luciano Bianciardi and Paolo Volponi (Chapter 1); and the crime novels by Giorgio Scerbanenco and the writing pair of Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini (Chapter 2). Specifically, the works examined here include Bianciardi’s L’integrazione [Integration] (1960) and La vita agra [The Bitter Life] (1962); Volponi’s Memoriale [Memorandum] (1962) and Le mosche del capitale [The Flies of Capital] (1989); Giorgio Scerbanenco’s ‘Lamberti novels’ Venere privata [A Private Venus] (1966), Traditori di tutti [Traitors to All] (1966), I ragazzi del massacro [The Massacre Kids] (1968) and I milanesi ammazzano al sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays] (1969); and Fruttero and Lucentini’s La donna della domenica [The Sunday Woman] (1972) and A che punto è la notte [At What Point is the Night] (1979). Chapter 3 then goes on to explore the representation of the small-town environment of the northern provinces, where the changes are perhaps less dramatic but still significant, in Natalia Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera [Voices in the Evening] (1961). Finally, the fourth chapter considers the transformations in the socio-cultural landscape of the country through three examples of Italian domestic travel writing. It focuses specifically on Anna Maria Ortese’s collection of travel writings, which appeared in various newspapers between the end of the 1930s and the mid-1960s and were later collected in La lente scura [The Dark Lens] (1991). It also takes into account Guido Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia [Journey through Italy] (1957) and Alberto Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia [Brothers of Italy] (1963). Italy’s physical territory and the perception of distances within the country were transformed by widely improved road and railway infrastructures connecting places that had appeared distant and almost irreducibly different from one another, as well as by the mass production of automobiles and motor scooters by companies such as Fiat and Piaggio. Christopher Duggan reports that the number of private cars circulating in Italy increased from 342,000 in the 1950s to nearly five million in the mid-1960s.²⁶

The selection of literary texts and the emphasis on their representation of the changing geography of post-war Italy challenge narrations of the time frame under scrutiny as chiefly a period of achieved prosperity and growing optimism; and instead expose the less desirable consequences of modernization. Feelings of anxiety and unease that run through the texts may be related, on the one hand, to a rapid social change which is difficult to accommodate and, on the other, to the failure of Italian society to incorporate a moral confrontation with the past into its social and economic changes. This is not to deny that the post-war years also coincided with innovations in all aspects of Italian life, increasing wealth for larger sectors of the Italian population and cultural ferment. As Crainz puts it:

Le potenzialità che si dispiegano in quel torno di tempo non suscitano solo frenesie acquisitive: alimentano anche fermenti, aspirazioni, ansie e progetti riformatori, in un pullulare di energie intellettuali di straordinaria vivacità.²⁷

[The potentialities that unfold in that lapse of time do not only arouse acquisitive frenzies: they also feed ferments, aspirations, anxieties and reform projects, in a teeming of intellectual energies of extraordinary vivacity.]

The intellectual energies evoked by Crainz are the same ones mobilized by the writers analysed here as they engage with the transformations underway. Anxiety may, therefore, also be a creative force that enables the authors to question established modes of representation, especially in relation to space and identity. By encouraging alternative ways of seeing and imagining society, literature once again has something specific and valuable to contribute in this context.

The authors examined here are both well-known figures and less frequently discussed writers of the period under scrutiny who offer an insightful experience of how change in those years was perceived. Existing literary criticism has generally privileged a formal and philological type of analysis.²⁸ The work of defining literary and intellectual figures from the period, such as Alberto Moravia and Natalia Ginzburg, has been approached by modern scholarship in ways that privilege existential themes and distinctive literary styles. Very few studies have addressed fictional spaces, urban descriptions or the writers’ relationship with nature and the landscape.²⁹ A significant exception is the research which Marco Paoli has conducted on the representation of urban space in Scerbanenco’s crime novels: a study to which Chapter 2 of this book is certainly indebted.³⁰ One of the main arguments in existing studies dedicated to the writers examined here is the idea that they have allegedly not received adequate attention from critics and are generally more talked about than read.³¹ With the exception of Arbasino and Ginzburg, two major names in post-war Italian culture, and, one could argue, of Fruttero & Lucentini, a highly successful writing pair and prominent editors at the prestigious Einaudi publishing house, these writers are, for different reasons, considered to be marginal, discordant voices within the Italian literary tradition. This is particularly true in the case of Bianciardi, Volponi, Scerbanenco and Ortese, who have been labelled irregular and rebellious, also due to the difficulty of classifying their writings within the main literary trends of their time.³²

It is true that these authors show a non-normative approach to writing. They engage with ‘marginal’ literary genres (notably, crime fiction and travel writing) and with the popular press, as in the case of Bianciardi, while Volponi inaugurates the minor literary trend of allegorismo in the Italian literature of those years.³³ By employing formats such as the detective story and reportage, these writers have contributed to shifting the boundaries of the Italian literary canon in the post-war years. The authors’ non-identification with the canon therefore needs to be read less in terms of opposition to the literary establishment, for they are still part of a certain high, or at least official, culture, and more in terms of the inability to associate them with the dominant literary trends and aesthetics of the time. Arbasino, a leading exponent of the Italian Neoavanguardia [Neo-Avantgarde], may be seen as an exception, even though that movement, later formalized in the textbooks, sought precisely to break with canonical definitions of what constitutes literature. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on female authors, Ginzburg and Ortese, to counterbalance the exclusively male viewpoint of the previous two chapters. As a case study exploring the small-town environment of the northern provinces, Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera serves to problematize further the image of the North, which is often identified with major urban conglomerations (chiefly Milan) and treated in a rather monolithic way as the rich and more advanced half of the country.

Other Italian authors have engaged with the new realities of urbanization and industrialization. Amongst them one may mention Giovanni Testori, Ottiero Ottieri and Goffredo Parise, the latter two specifically concerned with the Italian corporate environment in the boom years. Testori’s cycle I segreti di Milano [The Secrets of Milan] depicts the Milan of the suburbs, the prostitutes and proletarians who work in auto-repair shops and small workshops; and it does so with a style that still relies considerably on realism.³⁴ The most visible absence here is perhaps that of Italo Calvino. Among his books, those that are more concerned with the transformations of post-war Italy are Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città [Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City] (1963), which narrates the difficulties that the main character Marcovaldo experiences in adjusting to big-city life after leaving the countryside; La speculazione edilizia [A Plunge into Real Estate] (1963), which addresses building speculation in the Ligurian Riviera; and La nuvola di smog [Smog] (1958), which tackles the issue of pollution, a rising concern in Italian society in those years. Calvino’s work has received a great deal of critical attention, to the point where his views have come almost to define – within Italy and outside – the literary response to that period. For this reason, this book seeks to foreground other authors and texts which have not been as extensively read or discussed.

Between Modernity and Postmodernity

The analysis of how literary texts capture Italy’s post-war socio-spatial transformations is supported by theories of space, which employ some of the formulations and arguments which have propelled the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in postmodern theory. The rejection of historical grand narratives centred on the idea of the universal and linear progression of history in favour of spatial categories for the study of reality has been identified by Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja, David Harvey and Umberto Eco, amongst other scholars, as one of the key features of the transition from the modern to the postmodern paradigm. Postmodern theories sought to offer a framework through which to make sense of the increasingly globalized and interconnected world that developed after the end of the Second World War with the unprecedented dissemination of information and communication technologies. Among the intellectuals whose work has led to the ‘rediscovery’ of space, one may certainly include Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, whose writing provides an important point of reference for the analysis in Chapters 1 and 2. The relevance which Lefebvre’s analysis of social space has gained in Anglo-American scholarship, especially after La production de l’espace was translated into English in 1991, has led a scholar such as Michael Dear to claim that Lefebvre was primarily responsible for re-orientating social theory away from analyses of time towards analyses of space.³⁵

Romano Luperini has pointed out that ‘la condizione postmoderna comincia a essere avvertita, in Italia, già durante il cosiddetto “miracolo economico”, ma si afferma in modo chiaro solo a partire dagli anni Settanta’ [the postmodern condition already begins to make itself felt in Italy during the so-called ‘economic miracle’, but it is only from the 1970s onwards that it clearly and distinctly asserts itself].³⁶ The time frame of this book coincides with the slow gestation of postmodern ideas that began to infiltrate Italian intellectual debate and literary production from the second half of the 1950s and witnessed a more systematic consolidation in the 1980s. The economic and socio-cultural changes of the late 1950s began to undermine the hierarchical opposition, traditionally championed by the Italian intellectual establishment, between highbrow and lowbrow culture. The expansion of a wealthier, cultivated middle class meant that access to money and culture was granted to larger swathes of the Italian population and had the effect of reconfiguring the cultural landscape and traditional ways of producing and apprehending culture. Literature was directly affected by these social changes and writers and publishers responded in various ways to calls to redefine the distinctions between niche and popular culture.³⁷ Scholars of contemporary Italian culture and society stress the predominantly negative connotations traditionally held by mass culture in Italy.³⁸ David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, for instance, have shown that since Fascism, and subsequently with the post-war Christian Democrat (Democrazia Cristiana; DC) governments – so in those years in which Italian civil society was under the sway of the two opposing institutions of the Catholic Church and the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI) – mass culture was denigrated as the product of passive indoctrination.³⁹ As Forgacs and Gundle argue, however, one should not underestimate the role of mass-media communication in increasing participation in the broader cultural debate, in raising socio-political awareness and in challenging conservative views on gender, sexuality and race.⁴⁰ They also stress that, in Italy, the mass media have contributed to fostering a sense of community and belonging.⁴¹ As much as there were attempts by post-war governments to control social and cultural life, it would therefore be as mistaken to think of Italian culture monolithically as it would be to consider the people on the receiving end as merely passive agents.⁴²

Umberto Eco was certainly one of the most acute observers of the post-war socio-cultural transformations, as well as a protagonist in the modernization of Italian culture through a prolific production of novels and critical essays. Already in Opera aperta [The Open Work] (1962), and subsequently in Apocalittici e integrati [Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals] (1964),⁴³ Eco tackles trends such as the hybridization of forms of culture and explores the extent to which the opposition between popular culture, as genuine and autonomous, and mass culture, as merely the expression of (American) capitalist ideology, was called into question from the 1950s onwards. Eco’s questioning of traditional cultural categories and deep-rooted assumptions about what constitutes good literature – especially his idea that mass culture can be an object of critical and literary analysis alongside subject matter traditionally seen as worthier of intellectual speculation – sparked heated debate amongst Italian intellectuals.⁴⁴ While postmodern thought was, therefore, met with resistance, if not open hostility, by an intellectual establishment that was still advocating an idea of elitist and classical culture as legitimate, the assimilation of postmodern ideas in Italy began at an early stage. Monica Jansen shows how the formulations of postmodern thinkers such as Jameson, Deleuze, Habermas and Lyotard found fertile ground within Italy’s philosophical debate. Gianni Vattimo’s weak-thought philosophy, in particular, was an attempt to re-orient Italian contemporary philosophy towards the relativism of postmodern theory and in opposition to dominant ideologies.⁴⁵ Italian architecture also incorporated postmodern ideas from an early stage, mostly through the Post-Modern movement of Charles Jencks.⁴⁶ Interdisciplinarity, another peculiarity of Italian postmodernism according to Jansen, could be witnessed in the cross-fertilization between different disciplines.⁴⁷ Literary journals such as Alfabeta and Il Verri testify, for instance, to the interaction between contemporary philosophy and literary criticism in those years.⁴⁸ The literary movements of the Neoavanguardia and the Gruppo 93 in poetry (the latter created in 1989) developed within this context as a peculiar re-articulation of postmodern poetics and stylistics.

While periodization inevitably has a degree of arbitrariness, some critics treat 1956 as the beginning of a new phase in Italian literature by highlighting the continuities between the 1930s and 1940s and the fact that Neo-Realism, developed in the latter decade, re-semanticized some of the traits of the Realism of the 1930s.⁴⁹ The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 had deep repercussions for the Italian political and cultural climate, prompting a new intellectual openness that pre-dated by just two years the economic boom of 1958. Fittingly in the context of this book, in 1956 Piovene concluded his documentary journey through the Italian Peninsula before publishing Viaggio in Italia the following year. The end of the 1970s, when this study concludes, marked a further turning point in Italian literary production and intellectual debate, for the following decade witnessed the consolidation of postmodern ideas in all aspects of Italian cultural life. Significantly, the first Biennale of International Architecture, held in Venice in 1980 and organized by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, was largely inspired by Jencks’s Post-Modern movement.⁵⁰ In 1979 Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne [The Postmodern Condition] appeared in France, while in Italy Italo Calvino published his Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore [If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller], which is widely regarded as one of the foremost examples of meta-literary fiction in the Italian contemporary tradition.⁵¹ As confirmation of the new trend, Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa [The Name of the Rose] came out the following year, in 1980. Le mosche del capitale, published in 1989, and La lente scura, published in 1991, may appear to be exceptions to the time period embraced by this book. However, La lente scura is a collection of travel pieces which had previously appeared in various newspapers and magazines. As for Le mosche del capitale, its publication was merely post-dated: Volponi had started to work on the book in 1975 and the story is set in 1970s Turin.⁵²

Whilst a coherent framework of postmodern theories was yet to be consolidated in Italy in the years surveyed in this book, the privileged status of highbrow culture had been shaken, paving the way for the far-reaching cultural turn. The texts examined here bear witness to this cultural transition and must have absorbed, if only osmotically and without full-blown critical awareness (at least initially), impulses and reflections that were organized more systematically during the following decades. One may argue that the texts are at the intersection of two epochs; and while they retain some of the central themes of modernity, such as anxiety and alienation, they also anticipate the contours of postmodern literature. Their attention to space, in particular, is a way of challenging dominant categories and hierarchies that have shaped the built environment and its use. Hence the emphasis on the appropriation of urban spaces, as well as on the unfathomable elements of the urban environment, may be read as a rejection of the functional and ‘clean’ space of architectural Modernism, which embodies the Western value of rationality. The physical fabric of urban and provincial territory is apprehended in the selected writings as the stage on which the tensions between tradition and change are tangibly played out, in terms, for instance, of the changing use of spaces, the construction and destruction of the built environment, the evolving infrastructure and new architectural styles. Space itself is, therefore, a key protagonist (and antagonist).

The examined texts are also innovative in their modernization of narrative styles and structures which, in the 1950s, had been defined by realism as the dominant aesthetic; and in the emergence of perspectives which increasingly called into question all-encompassing narratives and the illusion of the mastery of the writer-observer. The work of Ortese and Arbasino, for example, questions the socially constructed ideas of gender and sexuality with which space is imbued. Fratelli d’Italia plays with linguistic experimentalism and references to the past (one of the distinguishing features of Italian postmodern literature), re-articulating and re-inventing the tradition of the Grand Tour. This double nature, marked by the co-existence of elements of tradition and innovation, has been seen as specific to post-war Italian culture⁵³ and brings us back to the interpretation of the Italian boom years as a problematic transition in which conservative tendencies co-exist with new trends.⁵⁴ Whilst the presence of some features of postmodern culture is discussed with regard to selected writings, postmodernism is a highly diversified and somewhat controversial notion, which has, more often than not, been overused. In addition, and as already pointed out, the reception of postmodernism in Italy has been particularly problematic: unsurprisingly, in a context still largely dominated by an elitist idea of high culture, postmodern ideas encountered significant resistance. Nevertheless, this study is interested in exploring the unfolding, among the writers analysed in this book, of a tension towards a different understanding of modernity, an understanding which may be broadly associated with the framework of postmodern theories slowly infiltrating the Italian cultural debate during those years and, with more evidence, also at the cusp of the 1980s, the point at which this book ends.

One may argue that the progression of the chapters in this book follows the movement towards postmodern arguments in Italian culture, as the focus of the analysis shifts outwards from the centre of the important industrial cities of the North to the secondary, marginalized environments of a small Piedmontese town and Southern Italy in order to call into question dominant perspectives on the Italian Peninsula.

Structure and Approach

The chapters of this book explore how the selected writings conceptualize Italians’ changing experiences of space from the second half of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The post-war modernization process was experienced as a rupture at the level of everyday individual existence, for it had profound consequences on how Italians lived and thought. This book is concerned with how the built environment responded to and sought to accommodate these changes, as well as with its users’ apprehension of the changing space. The first three chapters deal with the big-city and small-town environments. The focus of the last chapter broadens to the level of the national space. Throughout this study space is regarded as the locus where anxieties about changing social structures, values, gender roles and relations play out. Anxiety may be a response to rapid transformations and changing urban conditions. It is also an epistemic category which is often evoked to make sense of urban experience. Hilde Heynen claims, for instance, that anxiety is ‘inherent’ in the modern city.⁵⁵ Anthony Vidler has explored the ways in which modern urban experience is conducive to the uncanny. In Freud’s first theorization of this concept, the built environment fosters the emergence of a feeling of uncanniness, since he recounts the uncomfortable experience of losing his way in the unknown Italian city of Genoa.⁵⁶ Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin have also argued that modern urban life induces new forms of neurosis.⁵⁷ At the same time, the rejection of urban lifestyles and values may be ideologically biased: a reaction to modernization that often manifests itself as nostalgia for cities of the past, which were believed to facilitate social relationships. The model of the harmonious built environment par excellence, the Renaissance city, resonates especially in Italian culture. In the novels analysed in Chapters 1 and 2, one perceives the absence of a more architecturally pleasant city and a more harmonious relationship between people and their urban environment, which are set against the perceived ‘lack of legibility’ and outright ugliness of post-Second World War cities.⁵⁸

The case study of Italy’s socio-spatial transformations over the course of roughly two decades is explored here though several different literary genres which present their own distinctive interpretations of reality. Chapter 1 examines how Bianciardi’s and Volponi’s novels engage with contemporary social issues by choosing the cities of Milan and Turin as the focus of their criticism of post-war, capitalist-driven urbanization. In their novels Milan and Turin are centres of power and wealth where political and economic elites have aligned to exploit the working classes and maintain the status quo. The urban layout reproduces these relations of power and fosters continuous productivity. Thus, it poses problems for social control. The writers perceive an authoritarian threat in a built environment that encourages uniformity and atomization. If, for instance, the act of walking is a way for urban dwellers to appropriate their environment, a type of spatial layout that limits the walkability of the city arguably prevents them from relating to urban space more meaningfully and creatively and from gathering to create a community. The chapter explores how Bianciardi and Volponi conceptualize the interrelation between the space of industry and the city, their representation of the architecture of capitalism and its disenfranchising effect, as well as the link they establish between disciplinary power, its spatial concretization and industrial productivity.

A focal point in the chapter is the work of Foucault and Lefebvre, which has been pivotal in deconstructing the idea of space as a neutral milieu and emphasizing instead its active role in upholding and perpetuating relations of power.⁵⁹ In Discipline and Punish Foucault traces the evolution of mechanisms of power, that is, of the techniques implemented by power in order to maintain the dominant social order, from the Middle Ages to contemporary society. He argues that these techniques of power have always existed, but in mostly isolated, fragmented form until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they were organized into a comprehensive disciplinary system aimed at controlling the population as a whole.⁶⁰ At that point in history, a shift can be registered to new forms of disciplinary power involved with the control of individuals and their conduct or behaviour. For Foucault, power has a fundamental spatial element. Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden fittingly point out that spatial issues permeate Foucault’s analyses of power and knowledge, providing the backbone for his research, even when this makes no explicit mention of geography.⁶¹ Indeed, as will be shown in more detail in Chapter 1, Foucault maintains that spatial organization is crucial for power over the social body to be exercised continuously and consistently through a rational distribution and partitioning of individuals in space. Foucault has also examined the role of architecture, most famously the model of the Panopticon, in regulating the conduct of individuals. The Milan described by Bianciardi, the factory environment of Memoriale and Bovino, the industrial city portrayed by Volponi in Le mosche del capitale, are all disciplinary environments which are organized in ways that maximize efficiency and instil quiescence in a social body that has been rendered malleable and docile.

The notion of space developed by Lefebvre is less theoretical and more implicated in everyday social and economic activities. He rejects the union of space and reason in the Western epistemologico-philosophical tradition, which, in his view, accounts for the idea of space as a ‘mental thing’, that is, an abstract category disconnected from lived experience.⁶² Lefebvre argues that this view has generated the ‘illusion of transparency’, namely, the idea that space can be fully comprehended and controlled by the power of reason by illuminating and conquering it.⁶³ Particularly relevant here is Lefebvre’s idea that, as much as power seeks to master space for its purposes, often having recourse to violent means, the latter is never fully controllable. Power therefore engenders forms of resistance. In a Freudian-like paradox, those elements which are repressed into the margins fuel the urban unconscious and come back to haunt us.⁶⁴

The Production of Space is concerned with the political and economic implications of space that reflect and consolidate relations of production.⁶⁵ Lefebvre applies Marxist tools to the analysis of how, throughout history, people have manipulated and shaped the natural environment for religious, social and economic purposes. His history of spatial modes of production culminates with the abstract space of modern capitalist societies. Chapter 1 of this book draws on some key notions in Lefebvre’s analysis of capitalist abstract space: the colonization of social space by capitalism, namely, how capitalist social relations are internalized and inscribe themselves into all aspects of everyday life;⁶⁶ and the logic of visualization based on the predominance of the eye as a means to apprehend, measure and simplify reality, an approach which began with the discovery of linear perspective in the Renaissance.⁶⁷ A geometrical and measurable space is useful to a mercantile, profit-oriented society and, indeed, its rise coincided with the development of commercial capital in the Italian city-states.⁶⁸ The centrality of this objectifying gaze contributes to the increasing process of abstraction or de-materialization of space in neo-capitalist societies.

By examining urban descriptions that evoke feelings of estrangement and uneasiness in the crime novels of Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini, Chapter 2 further explores the sense of disorientation induced by unprecedented transformations. The chapter explores the interrelations between crime and urbanization with a special focus on the periphery, an area often deemed dangerous, dark and gloomy. Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini mark a turning point in the tradition of Italian crime literature thanks to the vast popularity enjoyed by their novels. Up until the 1960s crime fiction in Italy consisted primarily of translations of foreign, mostly Anglo-American, authors.⁶⁹ The censorial attitude of the Fascist regime towards detective stories set in Italy, which could potentially convey an unpalatable image of the country, meant that foreign and fictional settings provided a safer choice for Italian writers.⁷⁰ The fact that Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini chose to set their crime stories in the concrete setting of the Milan and Turin of the 1960s and 1970s therefore introduced an important element of novelty. Following their example, Italian crime writers increasingly produced stories with a strong geographical connotation that gave rise to several local traditions.⁷¹

The chapter draws on the renewed interest in the unconscious and irrational in critical theory, as shown, for instance, by the reappraisal of the Freudian notion of the uncanny. Since Freud’s theorization in his seminal essay in 1919, the idea of uncanniness has denoted the feelings of unease and estrangement that arise when something familiar suddenly appears in a different light and turns unfamiliar and menacing. The uncanny is a key notion in the discussion in Chapter 2, especially through Vidler’s interpretation of it as the return of the repressed that becomes visible in the built environment and Mark Fisher’s treatment of the related but distinct notions of the weird and the eerie. Vidler argues that as the ‘quintessential bourgeois kind of fear’,⁷² the uncanny has been at the heart of architectural representations since the end of the eighteenth century: while the haunted house is a recurring theme in Romantic literature, with the rise of the modern metropolis at the end of the following century the uncanny moves from the home interior to the interior of the mind and acquires further connotations, coming to coincide with ‘metropolitan illness’.⁷³ The enlarged spaces and crowds of the big city marked a shift in sensorial and aesthetic perception. Something similar happened with the rapid transformation of Italian society in the post-war period and the rise, during that time, of a functional type of space that embodied the values of industrial productivity. Whilst the category of the uncanny pertains to urban experience tout court, Chapter 2 aims to contextualize it historically as the anxiety that marked the post-war transition in Italy, the rapid spatial and social changes and the uneasy relationship with the past. The texts hint at a gap in our understanding and representation of space, at the impossibility fully to grasp and master it.

Once again, the equation between space and rationality engrained in Western thought is called into question.⁷⁴ A product of the Enlightenment, the modern city was supposed to stand as the bulwark of society: the rational organization of people and functions of public life as opposed to the state of nature.⁷⁵ If it is true that mastering space is an illusion, the unpredictable which urbanists and social theorists of the eighteenth century sought to suppress continued to be part of urban life, challenging its rational principles.⁷⁶ Richard Lehan explores the forms taken by this archetypical struggle between urban order and disorder in the course of history: from the figure of Dionysus in Greek mythology to carnivalesque rituals; and from the mob of the modern metropolis, perceived as a threat, to the Freudian notion of the uncanny as the return of the repressed.⁷⁷ The city ultimately contains both principles, rational and irrational, and urban life is inevitably involved with a degree of uncertainty and unpredictability.⁷⁸

The city, crime literature and the uncanny are closely connected. Detective stories were born out of the big-city environment and the density of people and things that led to a rise in crime and the creation of an institutionalized police force.⁷⁹ The aesthetics of fear and estrangement at the heart of the uncanny is also at home in mystery and detective stories. The greater anonymity and sense of impunity that the individual experiences in the big city are, according to Benjamin, ‘at the origin of the detective story’.⁸⁰ The crowd permeates the urban fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The writings of Baudelaire, Poe and Dickens document the appearance of this somewhat disturbing and menacing entity in the context of rising Paris and London.⁸¹ In this regard, Lehan points out that the idea of the man of the crowd as threat also needs to be read in conjunction with the advance of totalitarianism at the turn of the twentieth century.⁸² The crowd, however, is not only menacing: it also can offer protection. For instance, the literary type of the flâneur – which enjoyed a great vogue in nineteenth-century Paris in conjunction with the rise of department stores, grand boulevards and the first gas street-lighting – finds in city crowds a source of vitality and inspiration.⁸³ For the flâneur the colourful bustle of the city streets has the same exhilarating effect as the panoramas, a stereoscopic form of entertainment and the forerunner of modern cinema, which developed in Paris in the same years.⁸⁴ The flâneur seeks the strange and unfamiliar as an antidote to the spleen of bourgeois life. The uncanny can, therefore, also become an inspiration for artistic experimentation and has, indeed, been a source of creativity, especially for avant-garde movements:

Expressionist artists and writers from Kubìn to Kafka explored the less nostalgic conditions of the modern uncanny, pressing the themes of the double, the automat, and derealization into service as symptoms of posthistorical existence. Symbolists, futurists, dadaists, and of course surrealists and metaphysical artists found in the uncanny a state between dream and awakening particularly susceptible to exploitation. In this way, the uncanny was renewed as an aesthetic category, but now reconceived as the very sign of modermism’s propensity for shock and disturbance.⁸⁵

Chapters 3 and 4 move away from the industrial cities, the heart of economic activity, to foreground more marginal and tangential perspectives. In Chapter 3 the analysis of Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera enables the problematization of common representations of the provinces, and specifically of the provincial city, beyond the opposition to the big city as supposedly the only one conducive to a ‘real’ urban experience. Chapter 4 addresses mobility as one of the defining aspects of the post-war years: not only the modern exaltation of movement, but also the mass internal migration of Italians from the impoverished areas of the country and the documentary reportage by writers and intellectuals who sought to make sense of phenomena of modernization across the Peninsula. This latter type of mobility, which was not constrained by social status or modelled on some pre-packaged idea of journey around Italy but was, rather, motivated by critical investigation and reflexive self-exploration, resulted in new ways of narrating the Italian national space and identity. Through the perspective of two female writers, Ginzburg and Ortese, in contrast to the selected male authors in the previous two chapters, Chapters 3 and 4 also tackle the issue of women’s agency in a built environment and social space which primarily accommodate the needs of men.

Ginzburg’s Le voci della sera allows us to particularize the image of the Italian North by moving out of the major urban centres to look at a small town in the Piedmont region. The specifically gendered connotation of the novel enables a discussion around space which takes into account the point of view of marginalized subjects, like women, whose agency has traditionally been limited and regulated. The analysis in Chapter 3, therefore, relies on ideas about gender as it looks at how certain stereotypes and social conventions, as well as human relationships, are influenced and shaped by the provincial setting of Le voci della sera. Ginzburg’s gender-specific perspective enables us to reflect more effectively on the alleged peripherality of the small town portrayed in the novel.

The chapter challenges the over-fixed opposition between big and provincial, or smaller, cities by showing how in Le voci della sera such a distinction is more nuanced and often played out around a dynamic of (more or less) imaginative escape from, and longing for, the provincial hometown. The relationship of Elsa and Tommasino creates continuity between city and province as it unfolds in both these environments. More subtle degrees of differentiation may prevent the risk of employing a monolithic notion of the provinces as an entity with fixed characteristics which is totally separate from, and subordinated to, the big city. This dichotomy fails to recognize, for instance, that smaller cities have often played an important part in propelling modernization in their national contexts and that, historically, capital cities have, therefore, not been the only places where innovations have originated and subsequently spread to the rest of the country.⁸⁶ In the case of some smaller towns, their development actually went hand in hand with that of major urban centres.⁸⁷ The qualities ascribed to the provincial town vary not only according to the specific national and regional context, but also historically across the modern era. One should also differentiate between the small town and the countryside, which a particular modern sensibility has perhaps too hastily constituted as a more salubrious, uncorrupted alternative to the metropolitan environment, which is often perceived as overstimulating and threatening. Hence it is noteworthy that existing critical studies on literary geographies tend to reproduce the supposed polarization between the country and city (overwhelmingly intended as the big metropolis) with little interest, at least in the Italian context, devoted to the intermediate space which is the provincial town.⁸⁸ Many studies tend to focus on the notion of margin, which is applicable to different domains (the city has its own margins), again testifying to how the province has found little room in Italian literary studies.

Differences between smaller cities should also be emphasized. One can think, for example, of those smaller centres that, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, have de facto been incorporated into wider metropolitan regions and now mainly serve as commuter villages and towns for those working in the city. Arguably they present a different situation from provincial cities which are not immediately connected to metropolitan areas and which may rely more on their unique characteristics and features to build a sense of their own identity. This is just one example of the almost kaleidoscopic distinctions and peculiarities which ought to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The predominant tendency is instead to classify cities either in terms of their size or of quantifiable parameters such as their population or GDP; and to do so both worldwide, with the so-called ‘alpha’ cities (New York, London, Paris, Tokyo) at the top, and in national contexts, where smaller centres are usually subordinated to the capital city.⁸⁹ Finch, Ameel and Salmela suggest that the way around the hierarchical scheme according to which cities are perceived and classified as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ is to focus on a different set of parameters, such as the specific functions of a town or city, the types of experience it enables and the urban networks to which it may belong.⁹⁰ The implications are important. In the first place, it means that there is no such thing as a canonical urban experience, or at least that this is not, as widely believed, the prerogative of people who live in big cities, for smaller and mid-sized cities evoke their unique kind of urban experience. A further implication is that cities may simultaneously be secondary, for instance in relation to the capital city of their country, and primary, in terms of their unique functions and peculiarities.

In questioning common views of the provincia [provinces], Chapter 3 also points to the fact that the boom was not an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon. Smaller cities that were mostly concentrated in the Centre-North regions of the country created diffused industrialization through a constellation of small- and medium-scale companies specializing in a particular trade and focusing on product quality. From the end of the 1950s onwards these often family-run businesses could rely on the increasing purchasing power of the Italian population as well as on the growing appeal and reputation on the international market of the label ‘Made in Italy’. While some towns and regions grew wealthier, territorial imbalances persisted and were actually exacerbated by uneven development. This was not only the case for the South, despite some awkward attempts by Italian governments at fostering socio-economic development there, but also for traditionally impoverished areas in the North, to the extent that some argue that the two halves of the country actually had more in common than is generally believed.⁹¹

The idea of the margin returns in Chapter 4. Chiefly referring here to the Italian South, it reminds us that the other side of the rapidly burgeoning urban centres of the North is the emptying of the countryside through poverty and emigration. It also reflects patterns of dominance, exclusion and subordination within the nation territory. The intermingled feelings of hope and disorientation which characterized the Italian post-war transition were a major factor in inducing Italian writers to take to the roads of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s with the aim of getting to know their country better. As Anna Maria Torriglia points out, the journey is increasingly conceptualized in post-war Italian literature and cinema as a figure of discovery and self-discovery for intellectuals and ordinary Italians alike.⁹² Many Italians, intellectuals amongst them, had in various ways supported the Fascist regime and were now eager to find new sources of identification and inspiration. Travel took multiple forms in the 1950s and 1960s. It did not involve only the journeys of exploration by writers and intellectuals discussed in Chapter 4, but also the mass internal migration of poorer Italians, mostly along the South-to-North trajectory. Paul Ginsborg reports that between 1955 and 1971 some 9,140,000 Italians moved to a place in the Peninsula outside their region of origin, with Milan, Turin and other cities in the North registering the largest number of arrivals.⁹³ In those years there also emerged a culture of villeggiatura, the annual escape from the city that for the first time was within virtually everyone’s means. Thanks to the expansion of the road network and railway system, travelling became easier and faster.

The chapter explores the (re-)discovery of the Italian territory in the aftermath of the Second World War through Ortese’s La lente scura, Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia and Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia. These three samples of Italian domestic travel writing provide different, yet complementary views on Italy’s changing geography and enable a discussion of the correlation between identity, gender, sexuality and space in travel writing. By looking at arguments developed in eco-feminist theory, such as the similarities between the subordination of women and nature, this section examines how Ortese’s gender-specific take on the Italian journey calls into question dominant ways of portraying Italy at the convergence between a contemplative kind of foreign gaze and nationalist rhetoric. Ortese’s point of view is less systematic and authoritative, but precisely for this reason more effective at subverting stereotypes than Piovene’s Viaggio in Italia, which in this chapter represents the dominant tradition of male travel writing with its supposedly objective perspective. Viaggio in Italia is an extensive documentary account of what Piovene observed and methodically noted down as he travelled from North to South, one region after the other, from 1953 to 1956. Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia is the account of four intellectual friends, showcasers of sophisticated tastes and a cosmopolitan lifestyle, who embark on yet another kind of journey. Continuing the exploration of the positioning of the author in travel writing and its implications in terms of gender and sexuality, the chapter examines the queer perspective on the Italian journey and the postmodern re-articulation of the tradition of the Grand Tour found in Fratelli d’Italia.

The travel writings of Ortese, Piovene and Arbasino are presented as examples of the critical investigation of the post-war modernization process and the problematization of dominant ways of looking at Italy, which have largely been codified by the Grand Tour. The latter is crucial to the understanding of the evolution of travel writing in Italy, for Grand Tour travellers have largely shaped the subsequent tradition of Italian travelogues and the very image (and geography) of Italy in the European imagination. Whilst it is true that attitudes towards Italy in travel literature remain for the most part foreign and contemplative, one can challenge the assumption that travel accounts of Italy are the exclusive domain of non-Italian authors. Italian domestic travel accounts developed at almost the same time as foreign ones but have attracted less critical attention. Luca Clerici provides the first comprehensive study of travel accounts written by Italian authors travelling through Italy from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.⁹⁴ Italian travel writers have had to come to terms with the inherited tropes of the Grand Tour in order to surpass them. Arbasino’s Fratelli d’Italia is especially emblematic in this regard as an example of the meta-appropriation of tradition.

Chapter 4 also hints at how travel writing provides an opportunity to reflect on Italy’s diversification and problematic sense of national identity. The nation-building process was still not fully accomplished in the post-war years and was, indeed, again at stake at later stages in Italian history: during the bloody sequence of domestic terrorist attacks which beset Italy from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s, known as anni di piombo [Years of Lead]; and with the fall of the so-called First Republic following the Tangentopoli scandal and constitutional crisis of the 1990s.⁹⁵ At the root of the country’s historical fragmentation lie strong territorial differences but also ideological divisions exacerbated by the inability of post-war governments both to promote a strong vision of national identity based on a critical public reckoning with the past and to tackle long-standing social issues.⁹⁶ This unresolved definition of Italianness and the willingness to explore the country in order to come to grips with its diversification characterize Italian travel writing of the post-Unification and post-war periods alike. Travel accounts of these two epochs share the sense of discovery and appropriation of the national territory, as well as an educational intent. In the post-war years mass media played a pedagogical role through the many travel documentaries produced for the radio and newly born television, a tendency of which Viaggio in Italia, written for Radio RAI, is clearly an example.