Ghost stories of the 1970s: Time, Conflict and Reason in “Le venti giornate di Torino”, “Piove all’insù” and “Città sommersa”

Author di Andrea Brondino

Time is out of joint.

W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

There is nothing to complain about Turin: it is a magnificent and singularly benefic city[1].

F. Nietzsche, Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, 14 October 1888,

in Lettere da Torino [1988], transl. by V. Vivarelli, Milano, Adelphi, 2016, epub

The 1970s (and) Now: Water Under the Bridge?

Forty-two years divide 1968 from Anteo Zamboni’s failed attempt to kill Benito Mussolini in 1926; more than the same amount of time has passed since 1978, the end (or rather one of the possible ends) of the lungo Sessantotto, and now. Every discourse about the Italian 1970s is therefore inevitably posthumous, even though this time distance is both real and illusory. The reasons why our sense of detachment from those years is concrete are obvious: the political context is completely different now ‒ the Soviet Union is a remnant of the past, just to name one macro-change. On the other hand, the 1970s are nearer to us than what a calendar would suggest[2]. In political terms, much of the present Italian ruling class, notoriously long-lived, was formed and emerged during those years. Moreover, some of the so-called mysteries of the decade have not been fully resolved; and even when they have been, legal truths do not completely satisfy the desire for further questions and answers. However truly felt that desire may be, anni di piombo are a goldmine for anyone interested in conspiracy theories, counterstories and alternative histories. In addition, some of the rights obtained during those years, especially within labour law, are now under threat or have been removed[3].

On the symbolic level, the first decade of the new millennium witnessed a rediscovery of the 1970s as a quasi-mythological reservoir of stories. The literary depiction of the long decade is inextricably linked to the revival of realism, as well as to a renewed interest in the representation of social and political issues[4]. It is common opinion that this proliferation of novels and films about the 1970s[5] hides an absence[6], that is, “the” novel of the 1970s (a stark difference with the literature of the Resistenza, a rather controversial political reference for post-’68 movimenti)[7]. A paradoxical failure in representation, then, lies at the heart of the question. Furthermore, while the 1970s is also the decade of the conquest of social, women’s, and workers’ rights, the thematic insistence on terrorism[8] tends to obscure this. The interpretation of the 1970s merely as the era of terrorism is suspicious, when not reactionary[9]. Nonetheless, terrorism is still an unavoidable reference, if not the most recurrent theme in the literature about the 1970s.

The following pages focus on three novels about political violence and the contradictions of the 1970s. The analysis of the case studies does not follow a thematic approach; instead, attention is paid to how those topics are translated into literary form. The novels apparently belong to different genres: Le venti giornate di Torino (1977) [Giornate] by Giorgio De Maria is a hybrid horror, in which noir, grotesque, and crime story overlap[10]. Piove all’insù (2006) [Piove] by Luca Rastello is a sui generis Bildungsroman written in the form of a long letter to the narrator’s partner, in which the destiny of the narrator/protagonist becomes emblematic of his generation[11]. With this analysis in mind, the conclusion of the article briefly readdresses the affinity between the 1970s and the ghost-story from a theoretical point of view; it also provides a further glimpse into the contemporary panorama by providing a succinct discussion of Marta Barone’s Città sommersa (2020) [Città][12]. This article aims to show that, though distant in time and purpose, and far from the temptation of conspiracies or pure demonisation of the decade, these writings share an affinity with the ghost-story, thus proving the resilience of fantasmizzazioni in the representation of the 1970s.

With fantasmizzazioni Donnarumma defines those literary texts where «i fatti della strategia della tensione e degli anni di piombo vengono trasposti in un clima così onirico, che la loro realtà risulta cancellata»[13]. Rather than cancelling the reality of terrorism and violence, however, the novels discussed in this article directly address these topics. They do this without mockery or without creating that numbing and «derealizzante»[14] effect that the fantasmizzazioni identified by Donnarumma, instead, produce. In other words, Giornate, Piove and Città sommersa testify to the hypertrophy of the ghost-story as a means to represent a conflict that is not yet fully resolved, whose details are still partially or largely unknown, whose historical and political outcomes are heavily debated and potentially contradictory. Yet, these novels avoid the rhetoric and outlandishness usually found in conspiracy narratives. They do not hint, for instance, to an obscure net of puppet masters. By steering clear of self-absolutory tones or a self-glorifying storytelling, these books give space, instead, to a series of truly critical and uncomfortable reflections about the 1970s. Despite and amidst ghosts, reason resurfaces. This suggests that the ghost-story has perhaps eventually settled into the contemporary imagination about the 1970s; but that this might work in favour of, rather than against, a better understanding of what happened and what began in that decade.

Le venti giornate di Torino: Monuments as Ghosts

The unnamed protagonist/narrator wishes to write a book about the Twenty Days of Turin, a fictional and apparently inexplicable moment of collective sleeplessness and fury, characterised by a number of killings by an unknown perpetrator. In order to discover the truth, the narrator begins to investigate the case by questioning fellow Turinese citizens, but is often faced by an unbreakable silence. Originally published in 1977, De Maria’s novel came back as a revenant in 2017[15]. A fully fledged ghost-story[16], Giornate can also be defined, for its Turinese setting and themes, as a «gotico padano»[17], to the extent one understands the Gothic as an «unstable genre»[18]: that is, a broad container which represents, beyond the virtually infinite variations of place and time, «some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters»[19]. Giornate comes out in a moment when the Gothic becomes part of mainstream culture[20]: TV-shows such as Il segno del comando (1971), or novels such as La donna della domenica (1972) by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini paved the way in this sense. If this 20th-century form of Italian Gothic found enormous success, it is not only because it gave a specific form to escapist fantasies of the Italian public, but rather because it obliquely represented the tensions and the mysteries of that era[21].

Giornate is not an exception: the monuments that kill the sleepwalkers who gather as a crowd in the centre of Turin during the Twenty Days are a transparent allegory of terrorists[22]. It is true that De Maria’s outlook is ultimately Apocalyptic, as the cover-image of the first edition suggested[23]; a paranoid religious fervour is visible in many pages of the novel. Nonetheless, the political remains a key element of the story, never lost sight of despite a plot that entangles itself in a series of spiritual tensions. Paraphrasing the words of the narrator: «tanto per intenderci»[24] this is not (only) a book for the fans of Gustavo Rol. Other figures are recalled by the text as it weaves its multi-layered intertextual web: it openly suggests certain references (like Musil, Kafka, and Salgari); more subtly points to others (the myth of Orpheus[25], Elio Petri)[26]; ultimately, it evokes an almost unlimited series of resonances, as Giovanni Arduino’s post-scriptum exemplifies[27]. Still to be written is the history of the reception of the novel. Certain hints might indicate a deeper influence than its publishing history could imply: for instance, a brief passage about Liala and semiotics[28] might have suggested something to Umberto Eco[29], whom De Maria met as a result of their common experience with the music group Cantacronache[30].

The city of Turin is a key character in De Maria’s novel: Giornate is also a twisted love letter to the author’s hometown. However, the suspicious[31] degree of geographical precision ‒ in reporting street names, location of churches and statues ‒ is counterbalanced by an «effetto nebbia», to quote Eco[32], of the time references of the novel. The original Italian subtitle, «Inchiesta di fine secolo», could suggest that the narrative is set near the end of the 20th century, in the 1990s presumably; an aspect which would bring Giornate closer to the sci-fi genre, making it an example of an anticipation novel. There are two other explicit time references in the novel. Firstly, the Millenarists: an obvious literary transposition of the hippies of the 1960s. They are seen by the narrator gathering and singing around a statue, «come si vedevano trent’anni addietro, ai tempi delle “contestazioni”»[33]. This would suggest that Giornate is happening in the 1990s. But the reader already knows that the Twenty Days have happened ten years before the start of the narrator’s story, in the month of July[34]; if one understands the attacks as an allegory of terrorism in the 1970s, Giornate should be set in the 1980s. Further muddying the waters is the appearance of the mayor Bonfante, a clear alter ego of Diego Novelli, mayor of Turin from 1975 to 1985. In Giornate, Bonfante is the current mayor and claims that he was only a member of the city council during the Twenty Days[35] ‒ Novelli also was a consigliere comunale throughout the 1960s. Is Giornate, then, set in the 1970s? It is probably impossible to find an unequivocal answer. The ambiguity of the temporal benchmarks of the book has two implications: firstly, that the subtitle may be misleading (in that case it would only bear clear Apocalyptic connotations); secondly, just like in any ghost-story, the linearity of time is denied and the narrative takes on an anti-chronological order in which the past, present, and future are disturbingly intertwined. In De Maria’s novel, the spectre of the 1970s already expands beyond its limits, casting its shadow over the previous and following decades.

Giornate may flirt with occultism and conspiracy theories, but it actually poses different questions and shows a different approach. Contrary to what is often suggested in certain literature about the 1970s[36], the eerie conflict between the statues of Turin is not an overly simplified allegory of a querelle within the bourgeoisie. As one dialogue between the narrator and a barber suggests[37], the bloodshed implies a wider, though perhaps silent, complicity. Giornate is the result of an incipient desire to rationalise events, clarify responsibilities and relations of force. One of the most haunting characters, the nun Clotilde, intimates to the narrator that he should cease his inquiry about the Twenty Days: «perché ostinarsi a cercare dove la ragione umana non potrà mai scorgere altro se non oscurità?»[38]. The narrator in fact meets an Apocalyptic end and fulfills Clotilde’s prophecy; but De Maria’s book ultimately ignores the nun’s threat and cannot be reduced to its final chapter only. The type of reason operating in Giornate is weak and haunted by ghosts; nevertheless, this “pessimism of the intellect” can, or possibly should, be balanced and strengthened by an «optimism of the will», a formula used by Bonfante[39]. The recourse to Romain Rolland’s formula, also dear to Italo Calvino (another of De Maria’s old friends), pairs with an unequivocal trust in fiction as a positive cognitive tool, as well as a way to bring order to reality. The fanatical youngsters who are in charge of the dystopian Library utterly display their contempt for literature and fictional stories: «A noi non interessano la carta stampata, i libri, c’è troppa finzione nella letteratura, anche in quella cosiddetta spontanea […] noi siamo alla ricerca di documenti veri, autentici, che rispecchino l’animo reale della gente, che possano, insomma, considerarsi per davvero dei soggetti popolari […]»[40]. De Maria’s horror tale shows instead a solid trust in the resilience of literary artifices and exemplifies a reaction to the dictatorship of the literal.

Piove all’insù: The Ghost of Fellow Compagni

Pietro Miasco is the protagonist/narrator of Piove all’insù, a novel framed as a fragmented series of e-mails written to his unnamed partner after she has been fired from her job[41]. The narrative starts at the beginning of the 21st century, most likely in the winter between 2002 and 2003, as the final chapter seems to suggest when it portrays Gianni Agnelli near the time of his death. In Piove, Pietro pieces together his childhood and youth as a «confession»[42]. In a succession of disjointed paragraphs, he recounts his summer jobs, translations from Ancient Greek, first loves, the figure of the father, and the discovery of sexuality. At the very center of the book, the chapter «Homunculus» focuses on the year 1977: here the narrator relives and analyses in hindsight his participation in Turin’s autonomous movements. The geographical center of the novel is the circolo Barabba[43], a meeting point where young Turinese Communists meet.

Both Donnarumma[44] and David Ward[45] rightly include Piove in the category of books which represent the 1970s as a generational conflict between fathers (rarely, mothers) and sons (almost never daughters). Pietro in fact builds his identity in opposition to his father, a military official; after his death, Pietro also discovers, in the only chapter written in the third-person and in the past tense, «Opzioni», that he had been involved in the stay-behind organisation Gladio, and even met Licio Gelli. The fathers, however, are already defeated, and the oedipal resolution, as well as its falsely conciliatory implications, are ultimately averted in the novel[46]: the generational conflict is not the real focus of Piove. Rastello’s book does not subscribe to the stereotype by which the political tensions of those years were nothing but the disordered expression of individual feelings, interests, contradictions[47]. As both Marco Belpoliti and Marco Revelli claim[48], Piove is a novel far from the rhetoric of the meglio gioventù[49]. The ’77 is not reducible to “a private affair”, and Piove is not the umpteenth reaffirmation of a pseudo-Fenoglian and overly simplistic reading of conflict, as Ward instead had suggested[50].

On closer inspection, the clash with the father hides a more subtle, but omnipresent tension between sexes and genders in the novel. A hint in this sense is given by Pietro’s surname, Miasco, which means “effeminate” and “faggot” in Portuguese. Pietro’s female friends make him wear make-up and disguise him as a girl[51]. Pietro lacks a proper understanding of this radical otherness[52], but his own cognitive failure is symptomatic of a broader defeat of the movements of ’77 with regards to the female question. It is not by chance that at the beginning the firing of Pietro’s partner is obnoxiously sweetened by her boss with the well-worn rhetoric of the mother who is now able to focus better on her children[53]. In the ’77 movements, Rastello sees the beginning of a paradoxical worsening of the condition of women (and, especially, women’s rights in the workplace) in the contemporary world, a topic that would be later developed in I Buoni[54]. In this sense, Piove is a novel about the heterogenesis of ends: from desire as a revolutionary weapon, to desire as the driving force of consumerism.

Piove’s focus is then the non-obvious political roots of contemporary individualism: for instance, the uncritical appreciation of the concept of desire in the ’77 movements. What Fredric Jameson called the third stage of capitalism[55], Rastello defines as the era of Thersites, symbolically dated back to 1977[56]; that is, the denial of seriousness and utopias, paired with the indiscriminate celebration of corporeity and the present time[57]. The artificiality of this eternal present is then rendered in the narrative through the use of the historical present, but continuously broken by the disjointed paragraphs and by a non-linear representation of time[58]. But Rastello’s critique of the movement also operates at other levels.

As Tirinanzi de Medici detects[59], alchemic references and science-fiction books (the titles of the chapters in Piove are drawn from Urania’s books) work as constant metaphors throughout Rastello’s novel. During Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, Eco wrote a famous article[60] in which he provocatively identified sci-fi literature and Walt Disney movies and comic books as the real models for the Red Brigades. Rastello is very careful to make distinctions between the movements of ’77 and ’68[61], as well as between terrorists and militants; nonetheless, Piove is the ironic confirmation of Eco’s cultural diagnosis. From the third chapter on, the summary of the Urania books is increasingly mixed with references to Pietro’s life and the Italian political situation. The summaries of the Urania novels, however, not only serve as uncanny mirrors of reality, but also testify to the mutual and uncritical pervasiveness of fiction and reality. The last images of the novel also contain an ambiguous sci-fi reference. Is Gianni Agnelli in fact represented as an alien leaving in a spaceship[62], or is he dying in a hospital bed? Similarly, the ambiguous influence of Disney on the movement’s imagination and language is measured in Piove. For instance the literary character of Alice, a symbol of the 1970s[63], briefly shows up in Rastello’s narrative in a very ironic passage[64], which seems to suggest, if read together with Eco, that the Alice reborn in the 1970s is more the child of the Disney adaptation, rather than she is of Lewis Carroll’s book. The grey political language of the 1960s has also vanished:

Non c’è tempo per processare il passato né mezzi per progettare il futuro: si maneggia il presente, goffamente e con uno strano coraggio che mescola i vocaboli e cambia i significati, e il presente è fatto di carne, e Mao non è più venerabile di Paperino, anzi chi cita Paperino non rischia mai la pernacchia[65].

The outcome of this seeming destruction of cultural hierarchies in political discourse is not liberating but gives way to a time in which lying is necessary, and the «relazioni fra noi sono sopraffazione e antropofagia, perché la legge del desiderio è un canone spietato e la seduzione è un potere non negoziabile»[66].

Together with sci-fi and cartoons, another sub-genre weaves through Pietro’s Bildungsroman: the ghost-story. The very word fantasma recurs eleven times in the text, and once on the back-cover. What makes Piove close to the genre are the constant appearances of Pietro’s old friends in the narrative. In this aspect similar to one of its most visible models (A. M. Ripellino, Praga magica, Turin, Einaudi, 1973), Piove is crowded by a multitude of vanishing figures: Tano[67], or Albertino[68], who teaches Pietro how to talk to girls, or Marianella[69], Pietro’s cousin, who finally dies of a heroin overdose. The ultimate ghost, however, spectre of all the failed hopes of the ’77 movements, is someone «nero come una vecchia di campagna»[70] sitting on a chair in the middle of Via Po, a long, iconic street at the very center of Turin. The lady actually is Roberto Crescenzio, a student accidentally killed on the 1 October 1977 during an act of terrorism at the Angelo Azzurro bar: burned alive, black as coal, he sits on a chair waiting for the ambulance. Roberto’s death is the beginning of the end of the Turinese movement[71]. For those who leave it, the era of Thersites begins: «non perché stiamo scopando, ma perché dichiariamo con enfasi la nostra adesione assoluta alla vita com’è. Facciamo il nostro ingresso, piccoli e spettrali, nell’impero del kitsch»[72]. Only Pietro’s hypothetical future children could wake up «l’armata di morti che hanno camminato nelle pagine di questa storia»[73].

The literary value of the novel has already been praised by many[74]. For instance, Marco Revelli[75] defined it as “the” novel about the 1970s. Beyond this singularly positive critical reception of a novel about that decade, what emerges from Piove is that fiction is the only form in which it is possible to represent and discuss the contradictions of utopian perspectives: Rastello’s book is a «grande romanzo e un atto di fiducia verso il romanzo»[76], far from the hybridisation of engagement with genres such as the historical novel, or noir. The same trust in fiction will inform I Buoni[77]; both of Rastello’s novels derive from enquiries carried out for newspapers, but in both cases the journalistic form cannot do justice to the complexity of the argument. While many other writers were rediscovering epics and realism, Rastello was stubbornly insisting on the metaphor of the writer as a vivisector: «Scomporre, smontare, interrogare le rappresentazioni date»[78].

These words may sound suspiciously close to the pseudo-illuminist rhetoric of conspiracy theorists (Sapere aude!). Piove however clearly derides the idea of a great plot behind terrorists and the movement, masterminded by a grande vecchio[79]. The killing commissioned by Pietro, announced at the beginning[80], is never explicitly revealed, but it is likely to be the murder of Roberto Crescenzio, for which Pietro, like many figures of the movement, felt collective responsibility. Even the final riddle represents the ultimate, exhausted attempt to rationalise the experience of the movements:

Ti lascio con un rebus. Se non trovi la soluzione te la dico io, domani. Dimmi: che cos’è che Adamo portò con sé dal Paradiso? Che cos’è ciò con cui i bambini giocano e che poi, crescendo, buttano via? Che cos’è la pietra che vale di più della mucca che ne viene colpita? Che cos’è che è dappertutto ma che nessuno riesce mai a vedere? Di che cosa sono più ricchi i poveri che i ricchi?[81]

If it is true that the solution of the enigma relates to the feminine,[82] just like the title of the last chapter, “Venere”, seems to confirm, the parable of Piove ends in the least placatory way with an allusion to one of the many open wounds of ’77.

Città sommersa and the Present Afterlife of the 1970s

A decade still very much alive in the early 2000s, the 1970s are arguably less in fashion now as a literary setting or theme. This visible trend can be related to several factors, i.e. the retreat of the political into the media and collective imagination[83] or to the rise of critical forms of participatory commitment[84]. One may argue that the recent years have seen the consolidation of a non-monolithic political sentiment, particularly sensitive to single issues such as climate crisis or racism. This is the development, rather than the reversal, of a fragmentation of impegno that had already started in the 1970s[85]. Moreover, the generation of writers which is slowly emerging in the current Italian cultural panorama was born at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s. For them, the 1970s are the inherited past: like Hamlet, «they can only come after the crime or simply after: that is, in a necessarily second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit»[86]. This lateness does not mean that the 1970s are exhausted, a buried decade; on the contrary, it makes the spectrality of their presence more widespread; their influence on our present more haunting. In this context, the fashionable (and often self-exculpatory)[87] representation of terrorism and political turmoil in the early 2000s leaves space to an unsettling, «strange simultaneity»[88], in which the 1970s are not really dead, nor alive, nor absent from the present.

The ghostly nature of the 1970s is partially due to lack of closure to the war against political terrorism brought on by the State in the nineties: the extended pardons granted to many incarcerated protagonists of the conflict in the 1970s can be seen to be motivated by a will to put an end to the whole story, to put the final nail in the coffin of the lungo Sessantotto. There is nothing less effective, if is true that «it is often a matter of pretending to certify death there where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream , of an execution»[89]. Giovanni De Luna refers to this same attempt to euthanise that era of conflict when he writes that «un intero decennio fu riassunto nella definizione spettrale di “anni di piombo”»[90]. More generally, Enzo Traverso argues that it is the entire history of the revolutionary left that has turned into a revenant, which realises verbatim (and at the same time reverses) Marx and Engels’ infamous incipit of their manifesto:

[…] the legacy of liberation struggles has become almost invisible, taking a ghostly form. As psychoanalysis explains, specters have posthumous existences, haunting our recollections of supposedly finished, exhausted, and archived experiences. They inhabit our minds as figures coming from the past, as etheric revenants separated from our bodily lives. […] The ghosts haunting Europe today are not the revolutions of the future but the defeated revolutions of the past[91].

All of these spectres, but in particular the ghosts of the 1970s, haunt the recent Città sommersa by Marta Barone. In this novel, the narrator investigates the involvement of her father, Leonardo Barone, in the Prima Linea movement. As the protagonist/narrator reconstructs the personal and judicial history of her father Leonardo, she also undertakes a sentimental journey that leads her to the discovery of the past as a founding element of her own adult identity:

Ma qualcosa doveva pur essere accaduto, in un momento recente di cui non mi ero resa conto. E poi capii. […] La mia vita. Cercando di ricostruire mio padre ero stata obbligata a volgermi all’indietro, a ricordare cose che credevo già di ricordare, a tentare di ricordare cose cancellate; ero stata costretta a esaminare il mio passato che mi sembrava dato tutt’intero, evidente. La storia di mio padre, dunque, come una grande conchiglia madreperlata, sotto la valva conteneva la mia: la mia, che già credevo di possedere e in cui invece trovavo una nuova linea, una nuova verità. La mia vita vera, qualsiasi cosa avessi deciso di farne[92].

Is Città, therefore, a Bildungsroman? Barone’s novel is also, undeniably, a coming-of-age novel. The narrator is at first a young Holden Caulfield who would like to remain unconcerned and unperturbed by issues such as where she was born, «what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap»[93]. None of this would matter to her, if only she could finish (or even properly start) a traditional novel:

Non scrivevo. Da anni, ormai, mi accanivo sulla stessa idea, che non andava mai oltre una serie di intenzioni, un prospetto di sentimenti. Sapevo di che cosa avrei voluto parlare, ma il come continuava a sfuggirmi. Volevo solo che la storia apparente fosse quanto più lontano possibile dalla mia. Così lasciavo vagare il romanzo immaginato che sempre mutava forma, galleggiandomi in testa con i suoi estenuanti contorni indefiniti, nebbia azzurra nella quale ogni tanto intrappolavo una “bella frase” che rimaneva lì, isolata e vana[94]. [emphasis added]

Shortly, her father’s ghost will chase her, and her story will intrigue her to such an extent that the Holdenesque adolescent disinterest in one’s origins ironically turns into a text that, à la Tristram Shandy, makes family history its main narrative subject.

While chasing and being chased by Leonardo’s “ghost”, the protagonist of Città interviews old militants, friends, terrorists; at the same time, she retraces and reinterprets Leonardo’s legal history. The oedipal pseudo-justification for her journey into her father’s past is avoided: can her investigation be a simple act of interest?[95] The autobiographic narrative is aware of, but ultimately ignores with ease, the meta-literary temptations of autofiction; when her mother warns her about her enquiry:

Ah!” […] “I fatti. Non saranno mai i fatti, lo sai, vero?”

“Certo che lo so. Ti ricordo che ho studiato letteratura.”

“E sai anche che ci saranno almeno cento versioni diverse di tuo padre a seconda di chi parlerà.”

Sì, lo sapevo[96].

The 1970s prolong their lives in the trials and relative documents: the narrator’s approach is not far from Carlo Ginzburg’s proposition in Il giudice e lo storico[97]. The legal sources are the “castle” where the ghost of her father keeps on living; in his statement of defence she can glimpse something new and true about him[98]. The words fantasma and spettro (and their derivatives) recur eighteen times; the very title refers to a legendary ghost-town in Russian mythology named Kitež. For instance, when the narrator reflects on the physical resemblance between her and her father, she claims that it is so impressive that it makes her a «fantasma vivente, […] un atto di negromanzia gentile, una presentificazione del passato che abbatteva il tempo e la morte»[99]. Literary memories, such as Shakespeare’s Banquo, also resurface: «È proprio vero che a un certo punto i morti tornano a cercarti, e ti devi sedere al tavolo con loro»[100].

In Barone’s Città (just as in Leonardo Sciascia’s L’affaire Moro?), the ghost-story leaks into and contaminates a tale of non-fiction. Is Barone’s novel a purely literary and hybrid exercise of style? It does not seem so; if it is true that the Italian collective imagination about the 1970s is haunted by ghosts[101], an a posteriori narrative delving into this era can hardly avoid them. In other terms: if realism now needs to «riconoscere che tra individui e grandi eventi si estende ormai una palude informe d’insensatezza o d’impotenza»[102], it may not be utterly surprising that the ghost-story (when detached from the conspiracy theory or the neo-noir great fresco) can work as an unconventionally realist means to represent and rethink current stalemates and relations of force.

Parole-chiave: Marta Barone, Giorgio De Maria, Luca Rastello, Resistenza, Sessantotto, Settanta, Torino.

Keywords: Marta Barone, Giorgio De Maria, Luca Rastello, Resistenza, 1968, Seventies, Turin.

  1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. ↑
  2. For a critical consideration of this aspect, cf. E. Palandri, The Difficulty of a Historical Perspective on the 1970s, in A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (eds.), Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society, and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, Oxford, Legenda, 2006, pp. 115-21. ↑
  3. See for instance the vicissitude of the 18th Article of the Italian Workers’ Statute. ↑
  4. The bibliography on this topic is very extensive. One should at least refer to R. Luperini, La fine del postmoderno, Naples, Guida, 2005; F. Bertoni, Realismo e letteratura: una storia possibile, Turin, Einaudi, 2007. Cf. also «Allegoria», n. LVII, 2008; A. Cortellessa, Reale, troppo reale: ritratto di una generazione traumatizzata senza evento traumatico. Ovvero: come mai gli scrittori si trasformano in reporter?, in «Specchio+», November 2008, pp. 17-18; H. Serkowska, Finzione cronaca realtà. Scambi, intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, Massa, Transeuropa, 2011; R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità. Dove va la narrativa contemporanea, Bologna, il mulino, 2014; Silvia Contarini, Maria Pia De Paulis, and Ada Tosatti (eds.), Nuovi realismi. Il caso italiano: definizioni, questioni, prospettive, Massa, Transeuropa, 2016. ↑
  5. For a rather thorough list of works, cf. C. Ghidotti, Narratori degli anni zero. Storia, critiche, poetiche, PhD dissertation, University of Bologna, 2015, pp. 267-69. ↑
  6. D. Paolin, Una tragedia negata. Il racconto degli anni di piombo nella narrativa contemporanea, Rome, Vibrisselibri, 2006, pp. 101-105, identifies the reason for this absence in the systematic removal of the tragic in the novels; cf. also R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura: il terrorismo nella narrativa italiana (1969-2010), in P. Cataldi (ed.), Per Romano Luperini, Palermo, Palumbo, 2010, pp. 439-65. ↑
  7. Cf. P. Cooke, “A riconquistare la rossa primavera”: The Neo-Resistance of the 1970s, in A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (eds.), Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society, and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, op. cit., pp. 172-84. ↑
  8. A theme that constitutes a more pervasive and subterranean obsession of contemporary culture tout court; cf. D. Giglioli, All’ordine del giorno è il terrore: i cattivi pensieri della democrazia, Milan, il Saggiatore, 2018. ↑
  9. Cf. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit., pp. 439-40. ↑
  10. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino [1977], Segrate (MI), Frassinelli, 2017, epub. ↑
  11. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, Turin, Bollati & Boringhieri, 2006. ↑
  12. M. Barone, Città sommersa, Milan, Bompiani, 2020. ↑
  13. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit., p. 453. ↑
  14. Ibidem. ↑
  15. For the reconstruction of the publishing history of the novel, cf. G. Arduino, Il diavolo è nei dettagli. La storia delle venti giornate di Torino, Segrate (MI), Frassinelli, 2017, epub; R. Glazov, Translator’s Introduction, in G. De Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin, transl. by R. Glazov, New York and London, Liveright Publishing Company, 2017, pp. 5-17. ↑
  16. Term also used by P. M. Prosio, In memoria: Giorgio De Maria, in «Studi piemontesi», XXXVIII, 2009, p. 1; cf. also R. Glazov, Translator’s Introduction, op. cit., p. 19; A. Vaccaro, Giorgio De Maria: il genio postumo del Weird italiano, in «Carmilla», 27 October 2018: https://www.carmillaonline.com/2018/10/27/il-genio-postumo-del-weird-italiano-lhanno-scoperto-gli-americani/ [last accessed 10 April 2024]. ↑
  17. Cf. F. Camilletti, Onryō a Pavia: gotico padano, parapsicologia e Techno-Horror in un romanzo di Mino Milani, in «Italian Studies», LXXVII, n. 1, 2022, pp. 80-94; DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2021.2012049. ↑
  18. J. E. Hogle, Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture, in Id. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by J. E. Hogle, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1-20: 1. ↑
  19. Ivi, p. 2. ↑
  20. The author is thankful to Fabio Camilletti for the suggestions and references provided. ↑
  21. Cf. F. Camilletti, Italia lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto, Bern, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 4-7; pp. 187-207. ↑
  22. Cf. P. Femore, Torino violenta in un romanzo, in «StampaSera», 30 November 1977, pp. 14-15. ↑
  23. Cf. R. Glazov, Translator’s Introduction, op. cit., pp. 22-23. ↑
  24. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino, op. cit., p. 58. ↑
  25. Ivi, p. 103: «Portai d’istinto il flauto alle labbra e mi misi a suonarlo, per quel poco che sapevo. Dal fondo della più nera disperazione forse sarei riuscito a cavare un suono capace di placare quelle forze: era il mio estremo appiglio […]». ↑
  26. Ivi, p. 92: «entità troppo al di là di ogni sospetto». ↑
  27. G. Arduino, Il diavolo è nei dettagli, op. cit., pp. 39-45. ↑
  28. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino, op. cit., p. 26: «Una voracità indifferenziata. Alcuni titoli di libri erano però sottolineati in rosso. Trovai accanto a un titolo di Liala quello di un trattato di semiologia. Poi un altro capitolo di descrizioni di posate e di argenteria […]». ↑
  29. U. Eco, Postille a Il nome della rosa, in Id., Il nome della rosa [1983], Milan, Bompiani, 1990, pp. 505-33: 529. ↑
  30. Eco also wrote the essay La canzone di consumo as a preface for Le canzoni della cattiva coscienza, written by De Maria and other members of Cantastorie; now in U. Eco, Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa [1964], Milan, Bompiani, 2011, pp. 173-86, epub. ↑
  31. Subtle changes to the actual map and location of statues in the Turin of the 1970s cast some doubts about De Maria’s, apparently indisputable, geographical accuracy; cf. R. Glazov, Translator’s Introduction, op. cit., p. 19. ↑
  32. U. Eco, Le brume del Valois, in Id., Sulla letteratura [2002], Milan, Bompiani, 2012, epub. ↑
  33. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino, op. cit., p. 44. ↑
  34. Ivi, p. 6. For the symbolic implications of July, cf. R. Glazov, Translator’s Introduction, op. cit., p. 23. ↑
  35. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino, op. cit., p. 39: «Allora ero consigliere comunale». ↑
  36. Cf. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit., p. 459. ↑
  37. G. De Maria, Le venti giornate di Torino, op. cit., pp. 81-84. ↑
  38. Ivi, p. 54. ↑
  39. Ivi, p. 42. ↑
  40. Ivi, p. 29. ↑
  41. Cf. A. Cortellessa (ed.), La terra della prosa. Narratori italiani degli Anni Zero (1999-2014), Rome, L’Orma, 2014, pp. 504-508. ↑
  42. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 10. ↑
  43. Cf. L. Rastello and M. Revelli, Il Settantasette, roba da fantascienza: intervista sul romanzo Piove all’insù, in «Zaptruder», n. XX, pp. 128-34; A. Chetta, Lo stradario della Torino di piombo: sangue e rivolta politica negli anni ’70, in «La Stampa», 17 February 2020. ↑
  44. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit., p. 459. ↑
  45. D. Ward, Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism: Stranger Than Fact, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, epub. ↑
  46. C. Tirinanzi De Medici, Fatti, politica, fantasia. L’impegno narrativo contemporaneo attraverso due casi di studio: Presente e Piove all’insù, in «Between», V, n. 10, 2015, pp. 20-21; DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/1708. ↑
  47. Cf. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit., p. 460. ↑
  48. Cf. A. Cortellessa, La terra della prosa, op. cit., p. 508. ↑
  49. Title of a movie directed by Marco Giordana in 2003. ↑
  50. Cf. D. Ward, Contemporary Italian Narrative, op. cit., p. 122. ↑
  51. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 136; p. 176. ↑
  52. Ivi, p. 176. ↑
  53. Ivi, p. 9. ↑
  54. L. Rastello, I Buoni, Milan, Chiarelettere, 2014. ↑
  55. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New York and London, Verso, 1991. ↑
  56. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 162; p. 237. ↑
  57. Cf. C. Tirinanzi De Medici, Fatti, politica, fantasia, op. cit., p. 19. ↑
  58. Cf. D. Ward, Contemporary Italian Narrative, op. cit., p. 117; C. Tirinanzi De Medici, Fatti, politica, fantasia, op. cit., p. 22. ↑
  59. C. Tirinanzi De Medici, Fatti, politica, fantasia, op. cit., p. 19. ↑
  60. U. Eco, Colpire quale cuore?, in Id., Sette anni di desiderio, Milan, Bompiani, 1983, epub. Cf. also M. Belpoliti, Settanta, Turin, Einaudi, 2001, pp. 43-46. ↑
  61. Cf. L. Rastello and M. Revelli, Il Settantasette, op. cit. ↑
  62. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 258. ↑
  63. Cf. M. Belpoliti, Settanta, pp. 235-71; A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (eds.), Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society, and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, op. cit. ↑
  64. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 32. ↑
  65. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 45. ↑
  66. Ivi, p. 91. ↑
  67. Ivi, pp. 36-37. ↑
  68. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 99. A leading figure at circolo Barabba; his emblematic biography is in A. Bonvicini and M. Capozzoli, Fate la storia senza di me, Turin, ADD Editore, 2011. ↑
  69. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 228. ↑
  70. Ivi, p. 160. ↑
  71. Cf. M. Capozzoli, Luca Rastello – IIa parte (Fate la storia senza di me), in «YouTube», 14 December 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Aj3x15PB4 [last accessed 10 April 2024]. ↑
  72. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 165. ↑
  73. Ivi, p. 240. ↑
  74. Cf. A. Cortellessa, La terra della prosa, op. cit., pp. 504-508; C. Tirinanzi de Medici, Fatti, politica, fantasia, op. cit. ↑
  75. Cf. L. Rastello and M. Revelli, Il Settantasette, op. cit. ↑
  76. C. Tirinanzi De Medici, Il romanzo italiano contemporaneo. Dalla fine degli anni Settanta a oggi, Rome, Carocci, 2018, p. 255. ↑
  77. Cf. A. Brondino, Realismo inconveniente, fraintendimenti e ‘realiability effect’ nella ricezione de I Buoni di Luca Rastello, in J. Brühne, C. Conrad von Heydendorff, C. Rok (Hg.), Re-Konstruktion des Realen: die Wiederentdeckung des Realismus in der Romania, Mainz, Mainz University Press, 2021, pp. 65-77; DOI: 10.14220/9783737013529.65. ↑
  78. L. Rastello and A. Pascale, Democrazia: cosa può fare uno scrittore?, Turin, Codice Edizioni, 2011, epub. ↑
  79. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 88. ↑
  80. Ivi, p. 37. ↑
  81. L. Rastello, Piove all’insù, op. cit., p. 259. ↑
  82. Cf. A. Fabra, Piove all’insù, in «Fantascienza.com», 23 September 2006: https://www.fantascienza.com/8335/piove-all-insu [last accessed 10 April 2024]. ↑
  83. Cf. D. Giglioli, Stato di minorità, Bari and Rome, Laterza, 2015, epub; Id., La città senza nome. Eclissi del conflitto e dispositivi di impotenza, in «Between», V, n. 10, 2015; DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/2029. ↑
  84. Cf. P. Antonello, Impegno 3.0. Verso una critica partecipativa?, in «Between», V, n. 10, 2015; DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/2115. ↑
  85. Cf. J. Burns, Fragments of Impegno. Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980-2000, Leeds, Northern Universities Press, 2001; Ead., A Leaden Silence? Writers’ Responses to the anni di piombo, in A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (eds.), Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society, and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, op. cit., pp. 81-94; P. Antonello and F. Mussgnug (eds.), Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, Bern, Peter Lang, 2009. ↑
  86. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International [1994], transl. by P. Kamuf, New York and London, Routledge, 2006, p. 24. ↑
  87. Cf. D. Paolin, Una tragedia negata, op. cit. ↑
  88. M. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester (UK) and Washington, Zero books, 2013, p. 9. ↑
  89. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx, op. cit., p. 60. ↑
  90. G. De Luna, Le ragioni di un decennio. 1969-1979: militanza, violenza, sconfitta, memoria, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2009, epub. ↑
  91. E. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York City, Columbia University Press, 2017, epub. ↑
  92. M. Barone, Città sommersa, op. cit., p. 257. ↑
  93. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, London, Penguin, 1994, p. 1. ↑
  94. M. Barone, Città sommersa, op. cit., p. 14. ↑
  95. Ivi, p. 244. ↑
  96. Ivi, p. 43. Cf. also p. 98. ↑
  97. C. Ginzburg, Il giudice e lo storico. Considerazioni in margine al processo Sofri [1991], Macerata, Quodlibet, 2020. ↑
  98. M. Barone, Città sommersa, op. cit., p. 43. ↑
  99. Ivi, p. 117. ↑
  100. Ivi, p. 123. ↑
  101. Cf. R. Donnarumma, Storia, immaginario, letteratura, op. cit. ↑
  102. M. Marchesini, Casa di carte. La letteratura italiana dal boom ai social, Milan, il Saggiatore, 2019, p. 204. ↑

(fasc. 52, 31 luglio 2024)