Giuliana Pieri

Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Italian Fin-De-Siècle Interior

Abstract This essay challenges the traditional critical focus on DAnnunzios fictional interiors as autobiographical reflections of the poets own taste for interior decoration. By looking at DAnnunzios early novels (Il piacere, Linnocente, and Trionfo della morte) and in particular their descriptions of interiors and the careful staging of objects and evocation of spaces, it argues that the relationship of both female and male characters with their domestic surroundings embodies not only important aesthetic and psychological functions, marking out the tastes of a certain class, but also serves as social critique, highlighting the social and financial crisis of the upper classes in fin-de-siècle Italy and also marking DAnnunzios movement towards a new nationalism.

Milano nera: Representing and Imagining Milan in Italian Noir and Crime Fiction

Abstract This essay focuses on the way in which Milan and its periphery in particular have been represented by successive generations of Milanese noir and crime writers. Most writers have mirrored and reinforced the idea of Milan as a city of strong contrasts surrounded by an undesirable periphery, which traditionally has been viewed, from both a socio-political and aesthetic perspective, as the locus of isolation, alienation and criminality. Yet works by some contemporary writers (Dazieri and Biondillo) also show signs of a new acceptance and understanding of urban life in the post-modern city, which has influenced the relationship between centre and periphery. The transformation of Milan in the post-industrial era into a città diffusa, with its polycentric nature and easy access to all areas of the city, becomes, in the narrative of these writers, a metaphor for a new aesthetics and way of life in the post-postmodern age.

Claretta: Mussolini's Last Lover: Bosworth, R. J. B. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 320 pp.,

Richard Bosworths masterly new study of the life of Claretta Petacci opens with her body in Piazzale Loreto, on April 29, 1954, strung upside down next to Mussolini, her lover for nearly twenty ye...

28.00, ISBN 978030021427 Publication Date: February 2017

Abstract Our article maps the increasing prominence of interartistic and intermedial methodologies in modern and contemporary Italy, and advocates the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach for Italian Studies. We map some current trends in cultural, visual and comparative studies and explore the influence of these fields on the development of Italian Studies. We suggest that the future of our discipline is best understood in terms of an ‘interdisciplinary turn’, which entails a broadening of the object of study and opens up new perspectives on familiar and on previously unexplored objects. To conclude, we draw attention to three periods in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian culture that have been especially marked by interartistic experimentation: Futurism, the early postmodernism of the neoavanguardia and digital art. The perspectives we lay out in this article were developed during the first phase of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project, Interdisciplinary Italy 1900–2015: Art, Music Text.

Italian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract Gruppo 70 was an Italian neo-avant-gardist group of artists and critics, including Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari, Emilio Isgrò, Roberto Malquori, and Michele Perfetti, which opened up the genre of poetry to the performative and visual languages of mass communication. In this article we focus on some of the key debates revolving around the Gruppo 70, in order to explore what form of impegno developed in their theoretical writings and creative interventions, and how this impegno was negotiated in the works of artists such as Lamberto Pignotti and Ketty La Rocca in particular. More specifically, we are concerned to investigate the interconnections between impegno, media and gender in the shift from theory – the theory of impegno was principally developed by male artists and critics – to artistic practice, a field in which, as we shall see, the work of female artists developed a strong critique of mass society and technological culture but remained largely marginalised.

Technological Poetry: Interconnections between Impegno, Media and Gender in Gruppo 70 (1963–1968)

For many years Mussolini s personality cult was viewed in a variety of mainly political ways. It was seen as an instrument of power which served to justify personal rule and establish a way of conveying the meaning of Fascism to the multitude (Mack Smith 1981, 123). It was a tool for keeping leading Fascists in check and compelling them to engage in repeated public declarations of devotion to a leader whose popularity was greater than their own. It was also a system for regulating and organising the population since it was expressed in innumerable rituals and ceremonies. The cult was a factor of stability and a mechanism of social and political integration (Melograni 1976), but it was also linked to Fascisms efforts to enact an anthropological revolution in Italy, to transform the Italians into a people of warriors and conquerors (Gentile 2002, 242-245). For Emilio Gentile, the glorification of the figure of Mussolini established him as the prototype of the new Italian, the living and functioning model whom all were supposed to emulate (1993, 273). For this reason the cult became a predominant aspect in the activity of fascistising the young (Gentile 1993, 272). As secretary of the National Fascist Party through most of the 1930s, Achille Starace was personally responsible for the choreography of the regime and the deepening effort to detach the Duces image from any base in reality (Bosworth 2002, 260). Mussolini was presented in ways that were unreal not only in terms of the hyperbole that was involved but also in relation to the way he actually functioned on a day-to-day basis. The way charisma was inscribed on to the Duce meant that he had to be a spiritual vehicle of the nation and its revolution, R. J. B. Bosworth writes; in reality, he was a full-time dictator who was an assiduous bureaucrat whose spell-binding public performances were based on study and practice (2005, 352-353). In any event, the cult meant that Mussolini became a construction of what Dino Biondi (1973) called the factory of the Duce. That is to say, he was a figure who was experienced by millions in indirect form, via images and sounds, through ceremonies and practices. A whole apparatus was devoted to promoting and perpetuating attachment to a man whose personification of not just a political movement but of the nation itself was asserted as an article of faith. The study of the Mussolini cult thus necessitates attention to a wide variety of phenomena. Precisely because so many facets of his personality and activities were given a mass projection, the cult can be approached in relation to political leadership, the forms of modern politics, collective rituals and social practices, but also in terms of the arts, mass communications and mass culture, education and leisure. In some of these areas, a focus on Mussolinis individual qualities and personal odyssey are important; in others more attention needs to be paid to the processes of propaganda and indoctrination. In addition to political history, social history, art history and visual analysis, sociology, and theatre and performance studies can all provide insights into a cult that was multi-faceted and which spilled over into many different spheres.