Recent cisj items

The Writers' Assembly

Tue, 4 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Writers' Assembly

Editor’s Introduction, CIS 14.2

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editor’s Introduction, CIS 14.2

Last Gasp Attempts: Don't Believe the Hype, Don't Drink the Kool-Aid

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What are the risks of falling prey to protagonisms within the realm of cultural organization and curation? How might we reflect upon the work that we engage in as not aligned with the modes and motivations of cultural institutions around us? What does it mean for the objectives of shifting culture and society to be unaligned with those divisive factors that keep us focused on obtaining those few resources available in exchange for notions of integration into a system that has done little to demonstrate a care for what we represent? I have often reflected upon the notion of collectivity within curatorial practice and the ways in which the shifting away from the individual, the opacity provided by collective gestures, force institutions to have to dismantle those assignments of value that leave space for only those “chosen” to enter.

The “Oppositional Gaze” and the Italian Cinema: Joy Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera (1968)

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I explore the work of Joy Nwosu, an ethnomusicologist, musician and film scholar, who in 1968 published Cinema e Africa nera: l’immagine dei neri nel cinema bianco e il primo cinema africano visti nel 1968 (Cinema and Black Africa: The Image of Black People in White Cinema and Early African Cinema as seen in 1968). I approach Nwosu’s study, now over fifty-five years removed from its original date of publication, in order to examine the work as an example of what scholar and activist bell hooks articulates as an “oppositional gaze,” or a critical viewing practice enacted by Black women spectators. Specifically, what would it mean to acknowledge Nwosu’s study as a foundational moment of postcolonial Italian Cinema Studies thus challenging the historiography of the field? I will first outline the sociopolitical contexts of Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera, including African decolonization and its reception in Italy. I then consider the study’s significance...

Contro gli oggetti: attorno a un igloo di Mario Merz nel 1968

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Realizzato all’indomani della contestazione francese del maggio 1968, l’Igloo di Mario Merz, intitolato Objet cache-toi, era una peculiare combinazione tra il linguaggio della protesta—il titolo derivava da un graffito apparso in quel periodo sui muri della Sorbona—e la dematerializzazione dell’arte post-minimalista. L’articolo prova a comprendere le strategie di opposizione alla civiltà dei consumi e al feticismo delle merci messe in atto dall’Arte Povera e da Merz in parallelo al movimento del Sessantotto, ponendole a paragone con una particolare tipologia del modernismo artistico in Italia e le interpretazioni storiografiche degli slogan sessantotteschi.

Created in the aftermath of the French protests of May 1968, Mario Merz's Igloo, titled Objet cache-toi, was an unusual blend of protest language—the title was inspired by graffiti that appeared on the walls of the Sorbonne at that time—and the dematerialization of post-minimalist art. This article compares...

The Abunä’s Prayer for Fascist Italy: A Curious Episode from the Colonial Archive (Occupied Ethiopia, 11 June 1940)

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article presents a hitherto unexamined Italian Occupation-era sermon that highlights the relationship between the Italian colonial government in East Africa and a collaborationist faction of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. The text is a public prayer likely given by the Ethiopian Metropolitan of Aksum (or perhaps even the Nəburä əd [a clerical head]) in response to, and in support of, Italy’s declaration of war against Great Britain and France (June 10, 1940) on the outset of World War Two. The document consists of a short sermon (published bilingually in the original Amharic as well as in Italian translation) followed by a prayer, asking God to support Italy and the Italian Emperor (Vittorio Emanuele III) in its fight against France and Great Britain. It is an unequivocal piece of propaganda, issued by the Ufficio Diffusione Stampa dell’Impero, specifically by the Governo dell’Eritrea, Direzione del Personale e AA. GG., Sezione Studi, for the newspaper Corriere Eritreo...

Translating Black Feminist Thought: Marie Moïse, Rahma Nur, and the Politics of Visibility in Italy

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay examines how translation shapes Black Italian cultural politics, focusing on the circulation of Black feminist thought in translation as both linguistic transfer and political praxis. Central to the analysis is translator and activist Marie Moïse, whose translations and workshops foreground Black Italian voices and connect transnational Black feminist theory to local struggles. The essay also considers the “boomerang effect” of translation through Rahma Nur, whose recognition in Italy was mediated by the circulation of her work abroad. Drawing on Spivak, Venuti, and Edwards, it argues that translation is dialogic and recursive: it enables visibility, exposes structural inequalities, and opens space for Black Italian feminists to articulate positionality, critique erasure, and foster transnational solidarity.

On Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism: The Black “Boogeymen” of Childish Gambino and Ghali

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the socially conscious creations of Black “boogeymen” by two artists of widespread appeal and noteworthy success: African American actor, writer, producer, and rapper Donald Glover, and second-generation Italian rapper of Tunisian parents, Ghali. Contributing to ongoing conversations sparked by Afropessimists and Afrofuturists, I aim to show that Glover’s and Ghali’s respective artistic interventions recenter the historically dismissed Black presence in history and culture in the U.S. and Italy from the perspective of Black men. First, an analysis of song lyrics and audiovisual elements in both artists’ versions of “Boogieman” elucidates a shared Afropessimistic impulse imploring the listener to acknowledge and confront the structures of racism that have shaped negative perceptions of Black communities, particularly Black men. Next, through observations of the Afrofuturistic elements experimented with by Glover and Ghali, I illustrate the performers’ active...

“Traverser les signes”: Michel de Certeau in Italy

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the relationship between Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)—French historian, theologian, and anthropologist—and the contemporary Italian academic milieu, with a particular focus on his engagement with semiotics and mysticism. On the one hand, Certeau took an active role in the scholarly and research initiatives promoted by the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics in Urbino, where he revisited, developed, and articulated the central themes of his work. On the other, he found especially fertile ground for dialogue with Italian scholars on the subject of mysticism. Concentrating primarily on the network of relationships that emerged during the 1970s, the article also reconstructs the main trajectories through which Certeau’s thought was received and interpreted in Italy during his lifetime and afterward.

The Gut of Naples by Matilde Serao

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Gut of Naples by Matilde Serao

The Archive of Carmelo Bene

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Following legal disputes upon the death of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), his archive was dispersed, and no inventory of the materials has ever been published. My article is a first attempt to organize the documents that were part of Bene’s original archive, reconstructing over fifty manuscript documents that are organized thematically and for each of which is provided a description of the material. My reconstruction of Bene's handwritten documents includes records that were subsequently lost, and also presents material related to projects for works that, although never realized by Bene, are nevertheless of extreme interest for a deeper understanding of his artistic production.

Introduction: Black Italia and the Insurgent Politics of Knowledge Production

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The field of Black Italian studies encompasses a wide array of subfields, methodological approaches, and intellectuals. In this introduction, we advance a provisional definition, conceived not as a definitive or rigidly prescriptive formulation but rather as an opening intervention intended to stimulate further theoretical elaboration and critical engagement with this evolving field. Using an intentionally broad and porous definition that does not seek to impose labels, we understand Black Italia as an interdisciplinary field of study characterized by a set of intellectual, political, and artistic practices and approaches that broadly aim at (re)centering and excavating the Black presence in the Italian and Italian speaking contexts. This presence encompasses African, Afrodescendant and Afrodiasporic histories, experiences, and cultural and artistic productions that, despite their existence, have been historically overlooked and marginalized.

The Racial "Other" in Italian Folklore: Analyzing "The Three Oranges" and Its Adaptations

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the racialized construction of the false bride figure in “The Three Oranges” folktale tradition, tracing its iterations from Giambattista Basile’s “I tre cedri” (1634, “The Three Citrons”) through Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations. Focusing on tale type 408, this study argues that the figure of the dark-skinned, enslaved false bride functions as a strategic narrative device that encodes racial, religious, and social hierarchies. Drawing on Geraldine Heng’s framework of race as a structural mechanism for organizing human difference, this analysis explores how the racialization of the antagonist reinforces the moral legitimacy of the fair-skinned, rightful bride, aligning whiteness with virtue and Blackness with deception and disorder. While Basile’s tale embeds racialized metaphors within early modern Neapolitan society’s Mediterranean context, Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges) partially retains these tropes,...

Field Notes from the Multispecies Futures Lab: Entangled Lives, Bodies, and Ecocultural Systems

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

These field notes—in contrast to a typical journal article—employ a creative structure and approach to explore the goals and activities of a new humanities lab. The notes begin by remembering the tragic death of a young migrant agricultural worker in the Agro Pontino region of Italy, Mr. Satnam Singh. This untimely loss of life is then contextualized within the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” migration from India to the Global North and read through the notion of “the Cybercene”—a transformational ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene. Via the theoretical lens of the relatively new field of multispecies humanities, the Agro Pontino is shown to be an ecocultural space replete with colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era co-becomings. The second section briefly describes two more projects to illustrate the lab’s four basic theoretical premises: namely, i) the analysis of natureculture, ii) the use of situated decolonial epistemologies, iii) the...

"La lente bifocale": lineamenti metodologici di una possibile storia del "campo" poetico italiano degli anni Settanta del Novecento

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The quantitative and qualitative broadening of the Italian poetic field in the 1970s, which occurred in response to the profound coeval socio-cultural changes (mass schooling, proletarianization of culture, emergence of new political-poetic and social subjects), requires literary critics interested in reconstructing the poetic framework of the decade to substantially update their tools of inquiry. The idealistic, inductive and often "monofocal" approach most frequented by Italian academic criticism, accustomed to treating the text as an autonomous organism and ignoring its correlations with its historical and material context of reference, has so far revealed its inadequacy in accounting for the plurality of poetic and cultural experiences of those "hyper-historical" years, ending up by entrenching itself in an asphyxiated geo-editorial canon and in anachronistic trend categories that are hardly representative of the actual context of the decade under consideration. This paper...

“Le facce nere del festival”: Black Musicians at Sanremo in the 1960s

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the history of Black musicians at the Sanremo Music Festival during the 1960s, as the festival sought to reach international markets and bolster Italy’s recording and publishing industries. Over that decade, artists including Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Wilson Pickett, Shirley Bassey, and Eartha Kitt performed at Sanremo, raising critical questions about the festival’s role as a cultural venue where racial categories and hierarchies in Italy are constructed and negotiated. Drawing on musicological analysis and archives of some of Italy’s most prominent newspapers and magazines (La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Radiocorriere TV, and others), this article argues that the Italian public theorized a Black musicality distinct from a (white) Italian musical aesthetic. The dual performances of canzone italiana (Italian song) that characterized the festival during much of the 1960s enabled these comparisons, as performances translated...

Fictive Archive, Temporal Reparations, and Italy’s “Postcolonial Now”

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

By sketching out the theoretical contours of what Hal Foster terms a contemporary “archival impulse,” this essay highlights the analytical potential with regards to the coupling of archive and postcolonial literature in Italy. This focus leads to the examination of how the archive’s literary mediation with pastness enables new temporal trajectories, for which the recuperative impulse can also disturb normative historicist practices. In this essay, I will focus on the novel Timira : Romanzo Meticcio (2012) by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed and examine how its innovations in both narrative content and form generate essential potentialities for reframing the power relations between archive, fiction, and the political dimension of historicity. The approach adopted by both authors brings real-life details closer to literary invention and immerses fictions within concrete and factual objects, thus creating a new literary form that allows the emergence of new epistemological arrangements...

Petro-Modernity and the Racialized Politics of Extraction: ENI and the making of the African Anthropocene

Sun, 2 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Analyzing two ENI documentaries from the 1960s, Oduroh (1964) and Uomini del petrolio (1965, Oilmen), this article considers the historical and contemporary logics shaping Italy’s extractive relationship with Africa. Framed by the recent revival of Enrico Mattei’s legacy in Giorgia Meloni’s government current “Mattei Plan for Africa,” the essay reads these corporate films as crucial interscalar devices. The films reveal ENI’s strategy of using developmentalist narratives and specific visual representations to naturalize its largescale interventions. Oduroh shows the making of African subjects suitable for extractive work, while Uomini del petrolio documents the physical reshaping of African landscapes for resource exploitation. Together, these films exemplify what the paper identifies as the dual processes of cultural and material transformation necessary for establishing extractive operations in Africa. The article contributes to...

Introduction: Remembering Gianni Vattimo

Sun, 3 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the course of its existence, California Italian Studies has published essays by living Italian philosophers who were luminaries in the field, including Umberto Eco and Franco Cassano (now both deceased). Somehow, however, the pages of this journal never until now have hosted any contribution by Gianni Vattimo, the great Italian philosopher who passed away in September 2023 at age 87. Vattimo was a beloved teacher, a mentor, and a friend to several of the founding members of CIS , myself included, so it seems particularly appropriate for us to offer a posthumous homage to him in this open-theme issue of volume 13. I will offer just a few personal reminiscences here, as both Maurizio Ferraris and Simonetta Moro address in their respective essays the core tenets of Vattimo’s philosophy. Vattimo’s brief 1985 essay on myth and truth is included here because it so succinctly summarizes and illustrates the strand of his work for which he is most remembered today, namely il pensiero...

Italy and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination

Sat, 5 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Caput Mundi, Città Eterna, Theatrum Mundi: Rome as the Head of the World, the Eternal City, the stage upon which the world’s drama was set. These aphorisms speak not only to the centrality of Rome across European and even world history, but to the perennial pretention of the Eternal City to signify far more than its mere self: to be a holy city, a world-historical city, the fountainhead of Western or at least of Italic culture. This latest thematic issue of California Italian Studies, entitled “Italy and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination,” explores how the city and its representations have been continually shaped and reshaped over the centuries by a conviction that the indispensable significance of Rome extends beyond its local time and space, as well as by the time-honored habit of perceiving the city as a layered palimpsest of past Romes, all somehow vital and available in the present.

Out of or in Control?

Mon, 2 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today the term "control" is ubiquitous, appearing ever more frequently in public discourse and in newspaper headlines. The term, which originated in medieval Latin within accounting practice, has been applied over time to various fields. Yet "control" is articulated in many ways, and the same goes for its opposite. On the one hand, control and non-control are indeed united in an unbreakable relationship: it would make no sense to exercise some form of control over the world, over oneself, and over others if these areas did not also present something vitally uncontrollable – namely, something contingent, unpredictable, unknown, incalculable. An enhancing interplay between control and non-control is an essential element of any living and vibrant society. However, this relationship seems to be fraying today, and the two poles that constitute it tend to exclude one another, generating phenomena of obsessive control ("the society of control," "surveillance capitalism," etc.) or of...

The Vattimo Dictionary: Some Reflections

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Conversation is a term of which Gianni Vattimo was particularly fond. Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and one of his former students and collaborators, put it at the center of his obituary of the Italian philosopher in the Los Angeles Review of Books published on September 19, 2023, the day of Vattimo’s death at age 87. It was part of Vattimo’s particular way of thinking philosophy and the exchange of ideas, and it is very significant that this editorial project, The Vattimo Dictionary , began with a series of conversations with Santiago Zabala in various locations, both physical and virtual. One of these locations was the Vattimo Archive, hosted at the Pompeu Fabra University, of which Zabala is the supervisor, inaugurated in 2016 after Vattimo donated his papers, manuscripts, course materials, letters, notes, and photographic material to the Catalan institution. The first international presentation of this volume took place...

Marches on Rome: Historical Events and Creative Transformations

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper, part of a larger project on unconventional forms of historiography, investigates a handful of cinematic and literary representations of life in Fascist Italy against the background of the March on Rome and, more in general, of Rome as the stage for the public display and embodiment of Fascist rhetoric. These texts can be grouped in three categories: 1) Fascist-era texts by supporters and opponents that express fear and pride; 2) later texts by march participants that express disappointment in the experience and the outcome of the march; and 3) more recent re-scriptings of the march as farce. The paper focusses particularly on the work performed by the second and third categories. These are not histories in the conventional sense but rather what we might call, with Edward Hallett Carr, “imaginative structures” through which unexpected and unexamined aspects of the past emerge, and in which memory works at once with and against history. Taking as a point of departure...

Indro Montanelli: Our Man in the Baltic

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay looks at the four-year period Indro Montanelli spent as a journalist, writer, and Fascist government representative in Estonia, Poland, and Finland between 1937 and 1941: four years during which the map of Europe was permanently redrawn. Much of the research is new. It complements the two-volume life of Montanelli by Sandro Gerbi and Raffaele Liucci (issued as a single volume in 2014 as Indro Montanelli: una biografia (1909–2001 ), and Marcello Staglieno’s earlier biography, Montanelli : novant’anni controcorrente, from 2001. Montanelli was at times undoubtably a great journalist. The reports he filed from Helsinki on Finland’s 1939–40 Winter War with Russia acquire a bitter topicality today in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine (for the first time since 1945 a state-on-state war has come to Europe.) In Montanelli’s Helsinki dispatches it seems that history—the great unforeseen—was repeating itself already from Tsarist times. Montanelli was banished...

Myth and the Fate of Secularization

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophical thought about the presence of myth in the contemporary world cannot be founded upon an essential or metaphysical definition of myth. This is due in part to the fact that the dream of philosophy as a rigorous science has been definitively ausgeträumt. More specifically, though, it is due to the fact that the theme of myth itself appears to us today in an uncertain light. No satisfactory theory of myth—one that would define its nature and its connection with other forms of relationship to the world—exists in contemporary philosophy. Nevertheless, the term and the concept of myth, even if not carefully defined, have wide currency in our culture today. At least since the appearance of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, mass culture and its byproducts generally have been analyzed in terms of mythology; and the presence and place of myth in political thought have generally been conceived in terms of the now distant but still important work of Georges Sorel, Réflexions...

Gianteresio Vattimo, 1936–2023: In Memoriam

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the course of fifty years, Gianni Vattimo was a friend, teacher, and adversary for me. I must resist the temptation to speak here of my own memories of him in order to provide readers of this brief essay with what I think is destined to endure after Vattimo’s death, the essence of which can be found in the collection of his writings entitled Scritti filosofici e politici (Philosophical and Political Writings).

Renewal and Accoglienza in Tasso’s Rome

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Italy’s finest poet at the twilight of the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso (1544–95), has long been cast as the lionized icon of lonely genius, absorbed into a Romantic fantasy of torturous exile and withheld community. The figure of “mad Tasso,” however, misses key points in the historical poet’s dynamically social literary career, in which Tasso’s immersion in poetic communities prompted novel reflections about history, place, time, and belonging. Rome uniquely served as a catalyst for Tasso’s reflections on these very themes. A new kind of patria to which to direct the encomiastic voice of his late literary production, Rome became the subject of much of Tasso’s writings in the final three years of his life. With an eye toward the city’s classical heritage, Tasso composed a series of lyric, dialogic, epistolary, and epic experiments designed to immortalize the image of “Roma celeste” (celestial Rome) and the urban renovation projects that redefined its cityscape. This...

The Racism of Romanità: Mobilizing the Idea of Rome for the Fascists’ Anti-Semitic Campaign

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mussolini and his supporters regularly invoked the Roman Empire to justify the Fascist regime’s colonial projects in North and East Africa and the racist policies that accompanied them. But they also used the idea of Rome to justify anti-Semitic measures on the Italian Peninsula during the late 1930s. In the pages of his political and cultural journal Critica Fascista , Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai used the concept of Rome, primarily the idea that the Fascists were constructing a modern “Third Rome” after the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes, to mobilize support for the regime’s infamous “Racial Laws” among the Italian intellectual class. Bottai—who lived all his life in Rome, led a squad division during the 1922 March on Rome, served as Fascist mayor of the city in 1935–36, and was a key exponent of “Roman studies”—united the idea of Rome with Fascist anti-Semitism to sway Mussolini away a biological definition of race and the faction...

Giuditta Tavani Arquati and Anti-Catholic Motherhood in the Fight for Rome, 1867–95

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In October 1867, Giuseppe Garibaldi and his revolutionary forces attacked the city of Rome. As Garibaldi advanced on the city, a small group of Romans organized a simultaneous uprising in Trastevere but were brutally crushed by the Papal Zouaves. One of the most remembered casualties of this day was Giuditta Tavani Arquati (1830–67), who was killed fighting alongside her husband and child. For many left-wing Italians, Tavani Arquati served as a powerful model of female emancipation and anti-Catholic patriotism in the new nation. Following a brief overview of the connections between nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and women’s emancipation in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, this article examines the various novels, histories, memorials, and processions that drew upon Tavani Arquati’s legacy from the moment of her death until the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the conquest of Rome in 1895. In doing so, it highlights an often-understudied figure and offers a gendered analysis...

Basile de Luna e le origini della Carboneria nel Regno di Napoli

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to reconstruct the origins of the Carboneria order in the Kingdom of Naples, identifying them in the context of Europe-wide republican conspiracy. In this way the substantial political-ideological continuity after 1815 between Freemasonry and the Carboneria emerges into view. To better understand this phenomenon from the inside, this essay examines the individual experience of a significant, though now almost unknown, figure in the Neapolitan carbonaro world of the early nineteenth century and the document trail that he produced, now held in French and Neapolitan archives. Giuseppe Basile de Luna, maternal uncle of Carlo Pisacane, was at once a carbonaro , Bourbon secret service spy, and secret informer for Austria and France. The pages that follow will attempt to show how the Carboneria was born in Naples from the complex political, sociological and ideological processes through which southern Italian republicans, after their defeat in 1799, turned...

Spaniards and Sbirri: Violence and Diplomacy in the Streets of Early Modern Rome

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 1627, a series of violent conflicts erupted between the papal police, colloquially called the sbirri , in Rome and soldiers and servants of the Spanish ambassador. The epicenter of this violence was the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti, the location of the ambassador’s palace that soon gave its name to the square. After the initial skirmish between the police and Spaniards took place in late June, the next months witnessed daily street battles between the two sides with the ambassador’s men patrolling the streets that opened out from the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti all the way to the Corso, a huge swath of urban territory. Calling this area, “il Quatiero degli Spagnoli” (the Spanish quarter), the Spaniards robbed passersby and prevented the police and other papal officials from carrying out their duties in the area. The ambassador himself was quite active in defending his embassy and the surrounding area. His majordomo, his son, and other important...

Apocalypse at the Gate: Marching Toward the 1527 Sack of Rome

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Although the 1527 Sack of Rome by the German, Spanish, and Italian troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V shocked Europe, a violent invasion of the Eternal City had long been anticipated in prophetic, historical, and literary texts alike. These works envisioned a dramatic contest at the city’s gates and subsequent carnage within its walls. While the brutality of the historical event matched—or even surpassed—these expectations, contemporaries were dismayed by the weakness of the city’s defense and by the speed with which Rome was taken. This article traces the relationship between earlier compositions, which cast the Sack as catastrophic but inevitable, and the production of historical and poetical texts in the Sack’s aftermath detailing the progression of Charles’s armies across the Italian peninsula and into the streets of Rome. The invasion opened the floodgates to murder, kidnapping, torture, sexual assault (of men and women alike), theft, sacrilege, and destruction for much...

Marching into Rome: The Gateway to the Eternal City

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The entrance zone to Rome has, for millennia, been the setting for entries and marches, welcomed or contested. It is a symbolic precinct, and a palimpsest of toponyms, extant or remembered, connected with Augustus, Constantine, Pope Leo X Medici, and Mussolini. Drawing on new material from private archives, this article traces the interwar development of this zone, revealing an unknown story of the synergy among several projects: the restoration of Villa Madama (Raphael’s villa and papal welcoming center for the Medici), the coeval construction of the neighboring Foro Mussolini, and the siting nearby of the Palazzo Littorio (conceived as the Fascist Party Headquarters but subsequently realized as the Foreign Ministry). Fascist planners conceived this forum as a new gateway to Rome, and a staging ground for Fascist ideology and mass spectacle. It emerges that Raphael’s villa was a significant node of the plans; its site, form, function, and symbolism were tied to the forum, which...

XX Settembre 1870: Rome’s Capture as a Contested Public Memory

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Kingdom of Italy’s capture of Rome, on 20 September 1870, signaled the end of the Catholic Church’s temporal power and the completion of the Risorgimento , but the day is no longer officially celebrated and has been largely forgotten by the public except for its prominent use in street names. The political and cultural amnesia surrounding the significance of September 20th to national unity reflects the unresolved challenges that Prime Minister Camillo Cavour had articulated when advocating for a free Church in a free State in 1861. Declared a national holiday by Francesco Crispi’s government in 1895, Mussolini stripped the date of its status to enhance his own in 1930. Postwar efforts to elevate its official standing have all failed, and the date’s significance has been marginalized across the political spectrum albeit with dissenting voices. Paradoxically, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has reinterpreted its loss of temporal power as a providential act and, thus,...

Feminists in the Courtroom: Observational Filmmaking and Militancy in "Processo per stupro" (1978)

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The 1978 documentary Processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape) marked the first time a trial was broadcast on Italian state television. Directed by six feminist filmmakers, the film documents a trial for gang rape and exposes the secondary victimization experienced by women who take their rapists to trial. The encounter between feminism and the new technology of videotape enabled an unprecedented production of film language: in accordance with the idea that the feminist presence in male-dominated spaces would serve to monitor the men in power, the directors produced an observational documentary. Though determined to promote viewers’ autonomous reflection, they also strategically twisted the observational mode to show that reality is never objective and that it must be critically accounted for. After reflecting on the 1970s Italian feminist approach to images, this article addresses the impact of the editing strategies via the visual close readings of certain sequences. More...

Marvelous Rome: Sorrentino’s "La grande bellezza" and the Rhetoric of Ovid and Vasari on Art, Spectacle, and the Sublime

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Towards the conclusion of the film La grande bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013), the protagonist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), responds honestly to the question of why he never wrote a second novel: “Io cercavo la grande bellezza. Non l’ho trovata” (I was searching for the great beauty. I never found it). Sorrentino’s entire film, however, disputes Jep’s claim. Once viewers reach this point, they have already spent an hour feasting their eyes on the visual spectacles that Jep’s journalistic vocation and Rome’s nightlife have to offer. While most of these spectacles are just that—shows empty of significance, magic that is “solo un trucco” (only a trick)—other moments, often the most banal, become marvels, creating a transformative experience for the protagonist and other characters, Romans and tourists alike. In so doing, Sorrentino taps into the great tradition of Rome’s constant search for beauty and artistic creation that go beyond human abilities, a quest that found...

Tempesta’s Rome Recut: Renewing an Urban Icon

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 1662, Roman editore Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi published an updated version of Antonio Tempesta’s famous 1593 bird’s-eye view of Rome. In many ways, this move was standard practice: important images of the city were commonly copied or reprinted, and Tempesta’s original had been reissued multiple times. De’ Rossi’s version of 1662 was more than an incrementally revised restrike, however. In the title, he claimed it to show Tempesta’s prototype “recut, embellished, and enlarged” (rintagliato, abbellito ed accresciutto), and for once this language seems to reflect more than a rhetorical flourish. This essay shows, rather, that it was a meaningful reflection of process—one that leads, in turn, to many new questions. What was the lasting value of Tempesta’s view: what made it worth painstakingly refashioning for the present? Where did resemblance leave off and rupture begin? This essay seeks answers to these questions in interfamilial feuds and in the cut-throat world of Roman...

"Just as Capable": Pro Suffragio, the Egyptian Feminist Union, and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome, 1923

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In May 1923, women from more than forty countries descended on Rome to promote, articulate, and celebrate women’s global fight for suffrage and equal rights. The previous fall, board members of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) had traveled to Rome to oversee progress on the congress. Little did the organization’s American president Carrie Chapman Catt or the local Italian planning committee know that they would soon witness the Fascist seizure of power in Italy. For members of the Federazione Nazionale Pro Suffragio Femminile, the IWSA’s Italian affiliate, and the Egyptian Feminist Union, the Rome 1923 congress presented a pivotal moment to gain support in the aftermath of regime change. While the IWSA sought the participation of all women irrespective of their geography, race, and religion, its majority Protestant North Atlantic membership consistently marginalized Italian, Egyptian, and other Mediterranean women based on ethnoreligious and Orientalist prejudices...

Cambio della guardia

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cambio della guardia

“Molteplicità del possible”: Italo Calvino’s Memos Between the Old and the New Millennium

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This thematic issue of California Italian Studies , entitled “Calvino’s Memos : Between the Old and the New Millennium,” is comprised of comparative and interdisciplinary scholarly articles as well as more informal “Notes from the Field”—including excerpts from works in progress, artists’ statements, and commentaries—inspired by or related to the ideas and writings of Italo Calvino, in particular (but not exclusively) the lectures known and published posthumously in Italian as Lezioni americane —in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). The publication of this issue of California Italian Studies coincides with and celebrates the 100th anniversary of Calvino’s birth (October 15th, 1923). Calvino’s Memos were originally lectures prepared, beginning in January 1985, after he was invited in 1984 to be the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. For all the Norton endowed lectures, Harvard stipulated that poetry was to be interpreted...

“Un luogo della pura rappresentazione”: Theater and Architecture in Italo Calvino’s Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) and Aldo Rossi's Quaderni azzurri (Blue Notebooks)

Thu, 7 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The writer Italo Calvino and the architect Aldo Rossi were among the most prominent intellectual stars to emerge from Italy onto the international scene in the post-1968 period. Although there is no concrete evidence that the two men knew each other's work, or that they thought of themselves as part of the 'postmodernist' movement of those years, their respective career trajectories seem to parallel one another in sometimes striking ways. More importantly, Calvino and Rossi were erudite and voracious readers who shared a very wide-ranging set of literary and cultural references, as becomes apparent when the dense textual network of the Lezioni americane is mapped onto that of Rossi's notebooks (now known as the Quaderni azzurri ), in which the architect recorded many of his readings as well as his reflections on the latter. This essay focuses principally on texts left unpublished by Calvino and Rossi while alive (and still not translated into English today), namely the unfinished...

Un re in ascolto: Luciano Berio and Italo Calvino's Collaboration as a Memory of the Future

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

These “notes from the field” examine Italo Calvino and Luciano Berio’s collaboration for the opera (or “azione scenica’) Un re in ascolto ( A King Listens ). My specific approach to the collaboration is through the notions of “expanded music” and “extended voice,” which I use to capture several different stages or “moving parts” of the collaboration. Convergences as well as divergences emerge, and hence experiments amidst novel acoustic spaces and scenarios, within and beyond the classical stage. Calvino first wrote the libretto for Berio as a fairytale about a king, turning it eventually into a favola dell’ascolto, inspired by the article “Ascolto” co-authored by Ronald Barthes and Roland Havas. In the introductory part of my article, I touch briefly on this libretto and the ways in which it evokes different dimensions and layers of listening, including an uncanny “acousmatic” dimension. I go on to consider the “Trattamento” (a later pluri-dimensional proposal by Calvino),...

Calvino and Cinema: Revisiting a Difficult Love, in Dialogue with Duccio Chiarini about his Documentary, “Italo Calvino, lo scrittore sugli alberi”

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Rightfully deemed one the most cinematic of all Italian writers, Italo Calvino has been an endless source of inspiration for contemporary directors and visual artists. Calvino, however, had an ambiguous relationship with the world of cinema. Despite being an avid moviegoer for most of his life, he displayed both a fascination with and a certain disdain for film. While cinematic adaptations of his literary works have been rare, and not always successful, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, many artists are seeking to bring his life and work to the screen. This essay revisits Calvino’s “difficult love” for cinema and engages in a critical conversation with director Duccio Chiarini about the making of a documentary film on Calvino conceived for a wide, public distribution. The interview discusses the challenges of creating a portrait of a polyhedric writer while balancing creative impulses, material conditions, production demands, and other contingencies that shape a film project....

Calvino Makes The Shell

Fri, 7 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1965 Calvino wrote “The Spiral” and positioned it as the final story of his Cosmicomics . Both the story and its title-word seemed to him a landing point for his corpus, and, during the years that followed, he never changed his mind. “The Spiral” also marks the exact midpoint of his journey because Calvino made his debut as a writer in 1945, with the war just ended, and his death came unexpectedly forty years later in 1985. In turn, the essay “Calvino makes the shell” presented here is the central chapter of, and has given its title to, my new book on Calvino ( Calvino fa la conchiglia , 2023, pp. 366-385). The aim of this book is to consider Calvino’s whole self-construction as a writer: his texts, his life, his encounters, his places, his travels, his readings, his ideas—in a word, the development of a style unique in the world of literature. In this essay, “spiral” is a key word and image in a key story. “The Spiral” is, in fact, autobiographical, even if...

Inhabiting Zenobia

Thu, 6 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On November 3, 2022 a video projection entitled Inhabiting Zenobia , created and edited by Costanza Ferrini, took place as part of Light Year , a series of monthly projections of video art and experimental film on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. Begun in June 2015, this series offers, on the first Thursday of every month, free projections with thousands of viewers in attendance in loco and many more worldwide following these events via live streaming online. The aim of Light Year is to build bridges by bringing together artists and spectators from all over the world, creating synergies between various forms of public art, video art and experimental cinema. Inhabiting Zenobia (Light Year #91) consisted of multiple large-scale video projections on one of the anchor walls of the Manhattan Bridge and, simultaneously, in the Drey Gallery (East York, Toronto) and the Scope BLN Gallery (Berlin). Through the video works or fragments presented, Inhabiting Zenobia ...

Molteplicità e ritratto: sovrapposizioni autoriali fra Italo Calvino e Giulio Paolini

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1996, the Italian artist Giulio Paolini was invited to design the cover of the book L'occhio di Calvino by Marco Belpoliti. The book was one of the first to study the role of images in Italo Calvino's production, becoming an ideal background for Paolini's cover: a collage portrait of the writer while he was proofreading one of his texts. This image raised one of the major questions which was already addressed twenty years before, when Calvino and Paolini first collaborated: the crisis of authorship and the multiplicity of the self, which Calvino will also stresses in his Six Memos for the Next Millenium . This article tries to explore the specificity, the limits and the legacy of their theory of authorship by analizing the portraits of Giulio Paolini in comparison with Belpoliti's and Calvino's texts.

A Jazz Cosmicomics: Geometry, Perversion, Resonance

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Italo Calvino has a widely recognized and significant position in Italian literature and culture as one of the masters of twentieth-century Italian letters, recognized for his intensely visual imagination and geometric formalism. This position, however, might actually understate Calvino’s significance, because his influence has been at least as significant outside of Italy as inside, and larger outside of literature than inside ( Invisible Cities , in particular, has had an enormous influence in art, architecture, urban planning, design, and even social services offered in urban spaces). A useful model for thinking about transcultural and transmedial influence might be the notion of resonance , in which a sound (Calvino’s writing in this case) reverberates in an increasingly large and complex cultural space — such a model might be particularly attractive when it comes to Calvino, since it has the potential to reframe the attention to the visual and the geometric. This article...

Le Norton Lectures di Calvino. Il racconto inedito di una biblioteca di apocrifi