The 20th century

In 1961 there appeared the important anthology-manifesto I Novissimi: poesie per gli anni ’60 (“The Newest Poets: Poems for the ’60s”), edited by Alfredo Giuliani. In addition to the editor, the poets represented were Elio Pagliarani, author of La ragazza Carla (1960; “The Girl Carla”), a longish poem incorporating found materials and dramatizing the alienation of a working woman in the modern industrial world; the poet-critic Edoardo Sanguineti, author of disconcertingly noncommunicative works such as Laborintus (1956) and Erotopaegnia (1960) and thereafter a prolifically undeterred creative experimentalist; Nanni Balestrini, who would subsequently publish the left-wing political collage Vogliamo tutto (1971; “We Want It All”); and Antonio Porta (pseudonym of Leo Paolazzi), whose untimely death at age 54 cut short the career of one of the less abstractly theoretical of these poets. At a subsequent meeting held near Palermo in 1963 this group was joined by, among others, aesthetic philosopher Luciano Anceschi, founder of the periodical Il Verri; literary and art critic Renato Barilli; semiotician Umberto Eco, destined for later worldwide fame as a best-selling novelist and Italy’s intellectual voice; manneristic prose stylist Giorgio Manganelli; cultural critic, antinovelist, and vitriolic essayist Alberto Arbasino, whose Fratelli d’Italia (the title, meaning “Brothers of Italy,” alludes ironically, not to say derisively, to the Italian national anthem), first published in 1963, had a second, amplified edition in 1976 and a third, running to 1,371 pages, in 1993; and Luigi Malerba, an original and linguistically inventive writer with a taste for satire, whose first work of fiction, the witty and paradoxical La scoperta dell’alfabeto (1963; “The Discovery of the Alphabet”), was published in the same year as the Palermo encounter. Malerba after a time distanced himself from the group’s more extremist positions, and he proved to be one of the most interesting writers of his generation.

As with previous avant-garde movements, starting with Futurism, the members of the enlarged Gruppo 63, who insisted on the inseparability of literature and politics, proposed to subvert the inertia of a repressive tradition through a revolution in language. The traditional literary language, they claimed, was the medium of bourgeois hegemony, and a radical change in the language of literature would somehow shake off the oppression of the military-industrial complex and lead to a general social and political liberation. This does not seem to have happened, and with the passage of time the members of the group dispersed, going off in different individual directions as their concerns became less public and more personal. Although his link to Gruppo 63 is tenuous, the above-mentioned Andrea Zanzotto shared their suspicion of the “language of the tribe.” His poetry, from Dietro il paesaggio (1951; “Behind the Landscape”) to La Beltà (1968; “Beauty”) to Idioma (1986; “Idiom”), may suggest the automatic writing of the Surrealists (see automatism), but it reveals itself on close study to be a subtle combination of inspiration and calculation. The search for an authentic language led Zanzotto, a student of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to compose the verse collected in Filò (1976) and Mistieroi (1979) in petèl, the regressive dialect baby talk in which peasant mothers in the Veneto imitate their infants’ first attempts to speak. He first experimented in this direction when he was invited by Federico Fellini to collaborate on the screenplay of Casanova (1976).

Another isolated experimental poet was polyglot Amelia Rosselli, who was born in Paris and was a resident of London and New York City before living in Rome. A musician who developed a complex metrical theory based on notions derived from musical theory, Rosselli published a volume of poetry in English (Sleep [1992]) in addition to her work in Italian. After her suicide in 1996, the reputation of this troubled poet continued to grow. Poets who achieved prominence at the end of the 20th century include Alba Donati (La repubblica contadina [1997; “The Peasant Republic”]), the sculptor Massimo Lippi (Passi il mondo e venga la grazia [1999; “Let the World Pass Away and Let Grace Come”]), Franco Marcoaldi (L’isola celeste [2000; “The Sky-Blue Island”]), Paolo Febbraro (Il secondo fine [1998; “Ulterior Purpose”]), Alessandro Fo (Giorni di scuola [2000; “School Days”]), and Riccardo Held (Il guizzo irriverente dell’azzurro [1995; “The Irreverent Flicker of Blue”]). Poet and fiction writer Tommaso Ottonieri (Elegia sanremese [1998; “San Remo Elegy”]) was one of the sponsors of a symposium that announced (with a year’s advance notice) the birth of yet another literary group; its papers were collected as Gruppo 93 (1992).

Dialect poetry

A remarkable aspect of 20th-century poetry composed in Italy was the proliferation of cultivated poets who rejected what they saw as the pollution, inauthenticity, and debased currency of the national language. They chose to express an up-to-the-minute nonfolkloristic content, not in supraregional standard Italian but in a local dialect, seen as purer or closer to reality. Italy has always had a tradition of dialect poetry. The first “school” of poetry in Italy wrote in a polished form of Sicilian. For another, paradoxical example, one might point to the vernacular Florentine of the “plurilinguistic” Dante, far from the “illustrious vernacular” prescribed by his linguistic theories. During the 19th century two of the greatest writers of the period of romantic realism, Carlo Porta and Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, made the oppressed common people of Milan and of Rome, respectively, the protagonists of their works. Early 20th-century precursors of the modern boom in dialect poetry were the melancholy Salvatore Di Giacomo, who composed the words of many popular Neapolitan songs; the Milanese expressionist Delio Tessa; the Triestine Virgilio Giotti (pseudonym of Virgilio Schönbeck), a musical poet who evoked simple, everyday events and relationships; and two Veneto poets, the elegiac Biagio Marin and the antifascist Giacomo Noventa (pseudonym of Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi), who expressed in a literary variant of the Venetian dialect a virile nostalgia for the values of the world of the past.

The modern reevaluation of the dialect tradition owes everything to the indefatigable and multitalented Pier Paolo Pasolini who—after making his own literary debut at age 20 with Poesie a Casarsa (1942; “Poems at Casarsa”), written in his mother’s Friulian dialect—edited in 1952 (with Mario Dell’Arco) a groundbreaking anthology of poetry in dialect with an important historical and critical introduction. Other major dialect poets are Albino Pierro, a native of Tursi in the far southern region of Basilicata, who wrote intense lyric verse in an archaic, previously unrecorded language; Tonino Guerra, a screenwriter and collaborator of Fellini’s who wrote down-to-earth poems in the dialect of Santarcangelo di Romagna; Franco Loi, a native of Genoa, who put a personal imprint on his adopted Milanese dialect; Franco Scataglini, from Ancona in the Marches, whose verse, though contemporary in its sensibility, harks back to medieval models; and Raffaello Baldini, another poet from Romagna, whose poetry shows narrative verve and a gift for characterization. Remarkable among later dialect poets is Amedeo Giacomini, whose Antologia privata (1997) is composed, like Pasolini’s maiden volume, in the dialect of the northeastern Friuli region.