Dai Quaranta ai Settanta

Book Presentation
Dai Quaranta ai Settanta
Un percorso di Scorciatoie: da Umberto Saba al Moro di Pietro Di Donato
(2024, Mimesis Edizioni)

by
Francesca Cadel

The author in conversation with:
Giuseppe Gazzola, Stony Brook University
Alessandro Giammei, Yale University

In ENGLISH

The volume aims to explore the long Italian postwar period through a range of literary texts, both well-known and lesser-known: from Scorciatoie e raccontini (1946) by Umberto Saba, to the first work that Pietro Di Donato (1911–1992) dedicated to Aldo Moro, titled Christ in Plastic (1978), and his unpublished screenplay Moro (the first draft was completed on October 30, 1979). The context of the Cold War in Italy and the Years of Lead will also be examined in chapters dedicated to Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, with particular attention to the concept of the misto (mixed), an important idea in both novels. In these works, the clash between the “red” and the “black” of American post-fascism is inevitably tied to the prominent corpses of transnational politics: from Marilyn Monroe to Malcolm X, from the Kennedys and Martin Luther King to Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Is it possible that Marilyn, little Marilyn, showed us the way?”

An appendix includes a conversation with Toni Negri and an interview with Wilson McLean, who illustrated Christ in Plastic with a splendid portrait of Aldo Moro.