Democratic Italy in the ‘Seventies

The 1970s in Italy were notoriously a period of social upheaval, widespread social conflict and political violence. Thirty years after the fact, the “era of collective action” remains the topic of heated debates in the public arena transforming all historical reconstruction or literary work on or set in the 1970s a conflictive political gesture. What could well be a polemic among scholars or literary critics often turns into a tearing debate over the state of Italian democracy today, its uncertain viability, and the inherently conflictive nature of the Italian polity. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Rome among left-wing radicals active in the 1970s, and comparing their narratives with the Italian historical and literary texts about the period, the paper will argue that such “texts” should be understood as peculiar ironical expressions of what the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has defined “cultural intimacy”, whereby negative representations of “national character” parado...

One of the (many) paradoxes of our present age of “actually existing democracies” is, at least in our part of the world, i.e., the West, that the basic ideological consensus of dominant political actors regarding the present (economic reform, international governance and development, etc.) is matched by the unending strife about the past. Indeed, it would seem that the (relative) transparency of “what is to be done” now is haunted by the opaqueness of what was done then. In other words, whatever the challenges laying ahead and however engaging our present predicament may be there still seems to be quite a lot of loose strings to trip over. In Italy, the ongoing debate about the legacy of the social upheaval of the 1970s – the so-called “era of collective action” – is an apt illustration of this paradox. The tension between the memories of those events and the present Italian context transforms all historical reconstruction into a conflictive political intervention. Hence, what could...

NeMLA Italian Studies

"The legacy of Italy’s experience of political violence and terrorism in the period known as the anni di piombo [years of lead], c. 1969-83, continues to exercise the Italian imagination and that of its filmmakers to an extraordinary degree. The resurgence of terrorist activity on the national as well as the global stage during the first decade of the new millennium contributed to a political and cultural return to the widespread, enduring political violence that culminated in two emblematic events: on the left, in the kidnapping and murder by the Brigate Rosse (BR) of Democrazia Cristiana (DC) president, Aldo Moro, in 1978; on the right, in the devastating bombing of the Bologna train station by a neo-fascist group in 1980. In the cultural arena, cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the events of the 1970s. Each year sees the release of one or more films addressing the atrocities and traumas of those years. The persistence of the cinematic return and the strength of feeling surrounding the reception of recent films addressing the events and legacy of political violence bear witness to the degree to which the anni di piombo are deemed to impact on present-day conditions, and to the contentious nature of the representation of political violence."

Cold War History, 2012

This volume from the ‘Italian Perspectives’ series includes papers presented at the 1999 conference ‘Italy in the 1970s: Culture, Politics, Society’ as well as several commissioned pieces. The editors’ stated aim is to bring a multidisciplinary perspective to bear on the 1970s in order to challenge the ‘monolithic view’ (p. ix) that the decade was characterised only by violence and terrorism. Authors have been encouraged todiscern analogies or differences between contemporary conditions and those pertaining in the decade under review, and some have discussed the legacy of the 1970s for the 1990s and the new century.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2020

Lo stragismo fascista ed il terrorismo rosso riassunti in una cronologia ragionata. Con alcuni approfondimenti.