A colpi di cuore. Storie del sessantotto

American Historical Review, 2018

This is my contribution on the Forum of the American Historical Review on 1968. It reassess the significance of the "1968 years" in Italy from a political and historical point of view.

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...

Carte Italiane, 2008

Journal of Italian cinema & media studies, 2021

The Italian film I dannati della terra (The Damned of the Earth) (Orsini and Filippi 1968) is a prominent example of the connection between the European cinema of intervention and the Third World struggles of the 1960s. Set as a 'film within a film', the movie tells the story of a leftist filmmaker, Fausto Morelli, who faces the challenge of finishing a film about the liberation struggles of sub-Saharan Africa by building on the documentary footage that was bequeathed to him by his student and friend, the young Abramo Malonga, an African (Bantu). This article recovers overlooked and little-known documents about the film to show that it is the expression of an active cinematic Third Worldism forged in previous years between the legacy of the Resistenza Partigiana (Italian Resistance) and the Third World struggles of the 1960s. At the same time, the article analyses the ways in which the film 'dialogues' with experimental trends of the contemporary avantgarde artistic scene in order to challenge the viewer to debate the 'open ideological hypothesis' of the film and take an active part in the political struggles of the time.

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...

Modern Italy, 2012

1968 was and remains an emotion-laden topic in Italy, and yet few historians have used emotions to parse the history and memory of this period. This paper draws on a collection of interviews with former activists in the student movement and the New Left to explore the ways in which expressions of feeling in life history narratives can flag up possible lines of difference in women’s and men’s stories. It draws on three emotive themes – rebellion, violence and liberation – to explore the interaction between gender, feeling, narrative, and what the author calls the ‘third person in the room’: meta-narratives of 1960s activism that can exert a powerful weight on the interview, blending and blurring the lines of individual and collective experience.

Modern Italy, 2012

The decade spanning from 1968 to 1980, known also as the anni di piombo, is among the most difficult and traumatic periods in Italian post-war history. One of the most memorable years of this decade was 1977, when a new student movement stood up against the established order. The so-called Movement of ’77 manifested itself among others in Bologna, where it had a predominantly creative and joyful character. Nevertheless, the protests were violently struck down when left-wing student Francesco Lorusso was killed by police forces during clashes, resulting in an urban guerriglia. This incident worsened the relationship between the historical left and younger generations of (more radical) left-wing activists, and marked the beginning of the end of the Movement of ’77. The chapter on 1977 was, however, never really closed, and a ‘counter-memory’ has continued to divide the local community ever since. In this article, we shall see how different memory communities in Bologna have dealt with this ‘collective trauma’, focusing on the former Movement of ’77 and the way it has used public commemorative rituals to rebuild a collective identity for itself in subsequent years.

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.

The plurality and diversity of local situations in the history of Italy finds effective confirmation in the different responses to the crisis generated by the protests of 68 in different situations by different institutional subjects