Introduzione
Salvatore Lupo e Marcella Marmo
Da Rossellini a Visconti. Cinema e Risorgimento negli anni del miracolo economico
Pietro Cavallo
From Rossellini to Visconti. Cinema and the Risorgimento
in the years of the «economic miracle»
The Italian films on the Risorgimento are No more than thirty and only
very few of them are really significant. During the years of the «Italian
economic miracle» (1958-63) four films were produced which are worth
mentioning: Viva l’Italia (Rossellini, 1960), Vanina Vanini (Rossellini,
1961), I briganti italiani (Camerini, 1961), Il Gattopardo (Visconti, 1962).
Putting aside Vanina Vanini, which was a failure and was disowned by its
same director, Viva l’Italia and I briganti italiani were much influenced
by the climate of the period which coincided with the celebrations of the
Unity of Italy (1961). An atmosphere of optimism, which emphasized
how welfare was the result of the unification reached one hundred years
earlier with such a big effort. Different speech for Il Gattopardo, which
presents a critical view of the Risorgimento seen as «a failed or rather
betrayed revolution» (as Visconti himself once stated).
Ritorno al Gattopardo
Giuseppe Civile
Back to Il Gattopardo
In the essay, the author traces his first early approach towards the
book and the movie, in order to analyse the effectiveness of the ideas and
images that made Il Gattopardo a masterpiece. The essay then focuses on
the «historical» side of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, related to the period
of Italian Risorgimento. Adopting an historical point of view, the author
proposes a new interpretation of the novel’s analysis and remarks. Besides
the Sicilian and Southern soul of this oeuvre, the author underlines the
national relevance of the historical themes, like the end of the Old Regime.
A further point is an analysis of how Visconti perceived the Gattopardo
in his movie. In the end a general hypothesis concerning the reasons of
the immediate success of the Gattopardo during the italian 60s socioeconomic
miracle is put forward.
Un aristocratico marxista, Luchino Visconti: Il Gattopardo e il Risorgimento
Mario Franco
Il Gattopardo by Luchino Visconti:
a Marxist Aristhocratic Gentleman’s Nostalgia
A brief biographic note and the most important steps of Visconti’s
artistic career are reviewed in this essay. Visconti was an original and
complex author who revealed his talent also as a theatre and opera director.
The essay focuses on the relationship between literature, figurative arts and
cinema in Visconti’s work, stressing its political and social importance. The
essay focuses on how the ideas behind two films on Risorgimento (Senso
and more particularly Il Gattopardo) developed and how they have been
implemented, highlighting the literary references and Visconti’s decadent
perception of life and history.
Lo spettacolo della decadenza: Il Gattopardo di Visconti
Vincenzo Esposito
The Spectacle of Decadence. Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo
The essay deals with the epic grandeur of Il Gattopardo, Luchino
Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about
the decline and the following collapse of Sicilian nobility during Italy’s
Risorgimento. The Spectacle of Decadence is the account of Luchino
Visconti’s love for visual richness and attention to details (sumptuous
costumes, lavish interiors and dramatic landscapes) which also highlights
his ability to tell the story through the senses, in a sort of startling myse en
abyme, where the author (the «artifex») finds out his mirror image in the
tragic life of Salina, a decadent hero «amused to death».
Melodramma e tempi musicali in Senso e Il Gattopardo
Marina Mayrhofer
Melodramma as historical consciousness and musical movements
in Luchino Visconti’s Senso and Il Gattopardo
Italian opera in 19th century was profitable investiment of
revolutionary theories between groups of Risorgimento’s ideologists.
Verdi’s music played a leading role on the national unity’s eve. In
20th century it still was a cliché laying dormant a long time in joint
imagination which came back as a troubled subject in two films which
Luchino Visconti shot when the second world war memory was still
vivid: Senso (1954) and Il Gattopardo (1963). In Senso, Verdi’s music
is a sound icon of sentimental and patriotic emphasis which dissolves
into Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony anxious and decadent themes. In Il
Gattopardo, Verdi’ operas quotations become part of the Nino Rota’s
soundtrack and are played three times with different results.
Vorticoso e strisciante. Il falso movimento della Storia nel Gattopardo e in Senso
Silvia Acocella
Whirling and writhing: The false movement of History
in Gattopardo and in Senso
The pace of History is made evident in Il Gattopardo and Senso through
two distinct images: in Lampedusa’s novel it appears as a whirling wind that
sweeps away any progressive path, in Boito’s story, as a writhing worm that
unveils the horror of war. Visconti is attracted by the sense of emptiness
with which the two works communicate, and he turns what is implict in
the former and reticent in the latter into melodramatic explicitness. In
both cases, he stops before the final pages, before the surfacing of what
remains after death. The difference between the two works lies indeed
in these remains. In Boito’s, life resumes in an horizontal succeeding of
masks and lies, in Lampedusa’s, the eternal sleep dissolves everything,
leaving however, to the dust of cancellation, an untimely form of beauty:
the fall of the last surviving objects will become, for a moment, a dance.
Noble or disgraceful? Passions in the Italian Risorgimento, through
biographical writings, literary canon, later representations
This essay offers a comparison between biographical writings by
militants of the Risorgimento and the canon of patriotic literature.
Especially in the democratic area, biographies reveal a change in gender
identities and relations in the framework of a widespread aspiration to
personal freedom among young generations. Nevertheless Italian patriotic
literature was reluctant to represent women’s rebellion against patriarchal
rules, insisting rather on the icons of women’s chastity and sacrifice. Finally
the essay analyses the topic of the unbridled passion of a woman towards
an enemy of her Country through Senso, a novel by Camillo Boito, and
the film that Visconti based on it, developing the theme, nevertheless, in a
deeply different perspective.
Variazioni di Senso. La voce narrante in Boito e Visconti
Lorenzo Marmo
Variations on Senso.
The use of the voice-over technique in Visconti’s film
The essay focuses on the peculiar use of the voice-over technique in
Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954). The film is narrated by its leading female
character, Countess Livia Serpieri, but since the voice is not located in
an autonomous time-space, the conditions of its utterance remaining
unknown, it turns out to be a deeply contradictory and even paradoxical
narrative tool. Investigating Visconti’s film as a melodrama (understood
here not just as a genre, but as a mode of articulating the narrative and
stylistic elements of a filmic text), the absence of a complete flashback
structure is analyzed in connection with both the first-person point of
view of Camillo Boito’s short story upon which the film is based, and the
movie’s own dialogues. Such a comparative approach is particularly useful
as it allows us to fully grasp the different dynamics of subjectivity these
texts describe and to point out the conflict between the film’s historical
setting during the Third War of Italian Independence and its timeless
story of love and betrayal.
Da Sud a Nord a Sud: Noi credevamo di Mario Martone.
Un forum con Francesco Benigno, Salvatore Lupo, Marcella Marmo ed Emiliano Morreale
1857. Conflitto civile e guerra nazionale nel Mezzogiorno
Carmine Pinto
1857. Civil Conflict and national war in the Italian Mezzogiorno
The «Mezzogiorno» involvement in the Unification of southern italy
was the consequence of a long political conflict that lasted more than
sixty years. Pisacane’s Expedition was only the final step of a long battle
between legitimacy and liberalism. The article 1857. Civil Conflict and
national war in the Italian Mezzogiorno takes it to mean by framing
political, ideological and operational aspects of southern people involved
in the Sapri matter, both on the Borbonic and on the Revolutionary sides.
It was a war that in 1857 showed once again a deep interplay between local
tensions, social divisions and contrasting modernizer forces, and that was
evidence for the theory that set, at the starting place of the Two Sicilies
Kingdom’s closing stages, the inability to come to an end of the long civil
conflict that was crossing it throughout.
Dipendenza, sviluppo, crescita. Profili, concetti, evidenze
Adriano Giannola
Dependence, development, growth. Descriptions, concepts, evidence
The first part of the essay is devoted to clarify the notion of economic
dependence and its relation to development, as a distinct concept from
growth. A distinction between exogeneous and endogenous dependence is
proposed and it is shown that, contrary to prevailing opinions, exogenous
dependence is not necessarily detrimental to economic development.
Indeed, it may support development. Whether this happens or not
depends on a series of conditions. The second part of this essay is focused
on Italy’s Mezzogiorno and applies to it the conceptual tools developed
in the first part. Available data on the net trasfer of financial resources
from the North to the South are analyzed and interpreted. This leads to
criticize some common ideas on the role and the features of these transfers
and to the conclusion that such transfers have been declining in recent
years with negative consequences on the dependence of the South.
L’economia del Mezzogiorno postunitario. Ancora su dualismo e sviluppo
Salvatore Lupo
The economy of Southern Italy after unification.
Furhter reflections on dualism and development
This essay focuses on some recent econometric studies on Southern
Italy after 1861, and compares them with other researches more attentive
to qualitative elements. The article argues that at the time of unification
there were remarkable differences between Northern and Southern Italy
about the cultural and environmental pre-conditions of the development.
On the contrary, economic differences were much less important . In
particular, under the impulse of free-trade policies, the different parts
of the country reached international markets in a similar way in the last
decades of the XIX Century.