Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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Western theatre, he turned to the noh, kabuki and kathakali theatres of Asia and came to
see theatre in quasireligious terms as a means to self-fulfilment and an arena for
individual and collective transformation. His ideal theatre was based on the figure of the
actor, on anti-naturalism, on dissatisfaction with narrative and on the search for some
form of communication deeper than that based on conventional notions of ‘meaning’ in
theatre.
Although born in the South of Italy, Barba moved to Norway in his youth, where he
worked as a sailor and studied religions before joining forces in 1960 with Grotowski at
his Theatre Laboratory in Poland. He travelled widely, visiting Kerala to study kathakali
at first hand, and in 1964 established with a group of Norwegian actors his Odin Teatret,
which moved two years later to the Danish town of Holstrebro.
The company lived in semi-monastic conditions, dedicated to professional, almost
athletic ‘training’ in the arts of the theatre. Barba’s prime desire was to experiment with
physical theatre, gestures, visual ritual and non-verbal techniques of communication.
Lighting effects were outlawed, as was any distinct stage which might set a barrier
between performer and spectator. The spectator was invited to identify with the drive of
the piece and open his emotions to its spirit. Improvisation, requiring of the actor ‘total
trust in the director’, assumed a central role in theatre making.
Unlike subsequent productions, the group’s first work, Ferai (1965), followed a script,
written by Jens Björneboe. Min Fars Hus (1972), on the other hand, was conceived as a
biography of Dostoievsky, but changed in rehearsal to an exploration of the encounter
between Dostoievsky and the inner being of the Odin group. Self-scrutiny provided
material for other works.
In 1974 the company decamped to Carpignano, near Barba’s birthplace, but after an
initial period of mutual incomprehension, Barba realized he could not impose his own
outlook on the host community and established a system of ‘barter’ in which the theatre-
producing group traded with the traditional culture. In 1976, Barba developed the concept
of Third Theatre, viewed as an alternative both to traditional theatre and the established
avantgarde, and in 1979, following a convention in Belgrade, set up the ISTA
(International School of Theatre Anthropology), a travelling series of conventions which
brings together various disciplines and acts as point of reference for the ‘floating islands’,
the associated theatre troupes inspired by Barba’s philosophy. These groups, or islands,
are to be rather than ‘produce’ culture, yet to have no fixed roots and limited contact with
the mainland, which they will visit spasmodically to explain and expose the culture they
themselves embody. Barba has resolutely remained outside any mainstream, but his
influence on experimental theatre has been profound.
See also: theatre directors
Further reading
Barba, E. (1995) The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, New York: Routledge, 1995
(a recent and comprehensive volume representative of Barba’s thought).
——(1997) ‘An Amulet Made of Memory: The Significance of Exercises in the Actor’s
Dramaturgy’, The Drama Review 41 (4):127–32 (details some of Barba’s most recent
experimentation with theatrical practice).
Entries A–Z 71
Watson, I. (1993) Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, London:
Routledge (an in-depth study of Barba’s history, theory and methods).
JOSEPH FARRELL
Baricco, Alessandro
b. 1958, Turin
Novelist, critic and playwright
After his early beginnings as a music columnist for the Italian newspapers La Repubblica
and La Stampa, Baricco has interspersed his career with experiences in different creative
fields. After two experimental and at the same time divulgative television projects,
respectively dedicated to opera and to literature, he published the novels Castelli di
rabbia (Castles of Anger) and Oceano Mare (Ocean Sea), both of which received
prestigious literary prizes. In 1994 he published a theatrical monologue, Novecento
(Nineteen Hundred), and then Seta (Silk), the first of his novels to be translated into
English. A constant concern with the analysis and investigation of different kinds of
media make Baricco a figure very much tied to contemporary industrial culture, although
he also yearns for a solitary and craftsman-like dimension to his writing and displays a
strong interest in oral culture.
ANDREA RICCI
Barilli, Renato
b. 18 August 1935, Bologna
Academic and critic
A pupil of Luciano Anceschi and a member of the Gruppo 63, Renato Barilli taught at
the University of Bologna while contributing widely to cultural journals such as il verri,
Quindici, Rivista di estetica and alfabeta, and to newspapers and magazines such as Il
Giorno, Il Corriere delta sera and L’Espresso. His intense interest in aesthetics, poetics
and rhetoric resulted in a number of impressive studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century European literature, among them La barriera del naturalism (The Barrier of
Naturalism) (1964) and Tra presenza e assenza (Between Presence and Absence) (1974).
He has published close analyses of the linguistic microdynamics of contemporary Italian
poetry, and also provided an informed and detailed history of the postwar neoavantgarde
movement in his La neoavanguardia italiana: dalla nascita del ‘Verri’ alla fine di
‘Quindici’ (The Italian Neoavantgarde: From the Birth of Il Verri to the End of Quindici)
(1995).
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 72
FRANCESCA PARMEGGIANI
Bartali, Gino
b. 18 July 1914, Ponte a Ema, Florence
Cyclist
Bartali is one of Italy’s cycling legends along with Fausto Coppi. Bartali’s major
victories were in the Giro d’Italia in 1936, 1937 and 1946, the Milan-San Remo in 1939–
40, 1947 and 1950, and the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948. Bartali’s accomplishments
in the Tour de France, the hardest race of all, are truly impressive. His two victories came
ten years apart, one before and one after the Second World War. In 1938 he also became
the first rider ever to concomitantly win the Tour de France and to finish as ‘King of the
Mountains’, the title reserved to the best scalatore (a rider particularly strong on uphill
courses); he repeated this exploit in 1948. To his three victories in the Giro d’Italia,
Bartali added four second place finishes, and he won the prize for best scalatore a total of
seven times (1935–7, 1939–40 and 1946–7).
See also: cycling
PAOLO VILLA
Bartoli, Cecilia
b. 4 June 1966, Rome
Mezzo-soprano
The recordings which Cecilia Bartoli made for Decca in the early 1990s brought her to
wide international recognition as one of the most musically and dramatically gifted
singers of her generation. She studied at the Accademia di S. Cecilia in Rome, but had
already made her stage debut at the age of nine as the Shepherd Boy in Tosca. Her mature
debut occurred in 1987 at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona. She attracted the patronage
of Katia Ricciarelli and other influential musical figures, and her appearance at a
memorial concert for Maria Callas at the Paris Opéra soon led to engagements at the
major European opera houses as Rosina and Cherubino. She made her Covent Garden
debut in 1992 in Le Comte Ory (under Chailly). Since then, the undoubted beauty of her
voice has attracted widespread critical praise in her key repertoire of Rossini and Mozart.
JOHN KERSEY
Entries A–Z 73
Bartolini, Luciano
b. 1948, Fiesole; d. 1994, Milan
Installation artist, painter and collagist
Emerging as a young artist in the 1970s, Bartolini was influenced by Alberto Burri and
arte povera (poor art). From early conceptual pieces in kleenex and cardboard, he moved
to installations of similarly modest materials, evoking dream images and mythological
themes. In the early 1980s he turned to painting and developed a vocabulary of
archetypal forms that included labyrinths, tantric motifs and a mysterious pseudo-
alphabet of angular shapes. Subsequently, during a stay in Berlin he shifted into a more
expressionistic mode, with agitated brushwork and murky colours that lacked the
refinement and the suggestive quality of his earlier work. His ongoing fascination with
the aesthetic qualities of paper and calligraphy also took the form of publishing books,
beginning in 1974 with a book entitled Soft.
Bartolini exhibited consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Italy and abroad,
taking part in the 1980 Venice Biennale, in the ‘Printed Art’ exhibition at the MoMA in
New York in 1979 and in Arte Italiana 1960–82’ (Italian Art 1960–82) at the Hayward
Gallery in London in 1982.
OLIVIA DAWSON
basketball
Basketball only became a popular sport in Italy in the late 1960s when, after a six-year
ban, American players were again allowed to play for Italian teams. The most successful
teams are Pallacanestro Olympia Milano, which dominated the European scene in the late
1980s; Pallacanestro Varese, which played a record ten consecutive European
Champion’s Cup finals in the 1960s and 1970s; and Pallacanestro Trieste, Virtus Bologna
and Pallacanestro Cantù. The Italian national team took the silver medal at the 1980
Moscow Olympics and also won one European championship. The greatest Italian player
of all times is considered to be Dino Meneghin, with 836 games played in a career of
almost thirty years. A peculiar feature of Italian basketball is that the name of the current
sponsor becomes the name of the team. Thus, Pallacanestro Olympia has been known as
Borletti, Simmenthal, Simac, Philips, and so on (see also volleyball).
PAOLO VILLA
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 74
Bassani, Giorgio
b. 4 March 1916, Bologna
Novelist and editor
A member of the Italian Jewish community and a passionate anti-fascist, Bassani spent
his youth in Ferrara and later moved to Rome, where he published his most important
novels while contributing to several prestigious journals and periodicals. In his novels
and short stories, from Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles) (1958) and Il
giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) (1962)—both made into
successful movies by, respectively, Giuliano Montaldo (1987) and Vittorio De Sica
(1971)—to L’odore del fieno (The Smell of Hay) (1972), Bassani tells stories of human
and socio-political marginalization, often inspired by his own youthful experiences in the
war years and mainly set in the provincial microcosm of Ferrara.
A pervasive sense of death, the melancholia of remembrance, the stillness of nature in
the Po valley and the familiar architecture of the city where his characters—and the
writer with them—endure history, are the constants of Bassani’s writing. Literature is the
metaphorical space in which reality can be experienced and where both the sense of the
inexorable passage of time and the disappointment of unfulfilled expectations in the
present can be mitigated. In fact, Bassani’s style has been characterized as ‘lyric realism’,
and despite the common appearance of themes such as the war, the Fascist persecution of
the Jews and the Resistance, is very different from the neorealist representation of factual
reality where ‘facts’ are assumed to speak for themselves (see neorealism). Reality is
always filtered through the inner world of the narrator, though this lyrical screening does
not soften its harshness; indeed, Bassani’s central characters are all, to varying degrees,
doomed to moral loneliness, social isolation and death. In Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini,
for instance, the distinctiveness of the Finzi-Contini family degenerates into racial
isolation. In Gli occhiali d’oro, the two main characters—the young Jewish narrator and
an old homosexual doctor—both symbolize political and psychological marginalization
and the doctor’s suicide, brought about by his painful experience of his own ‘diversity’,
also foreshadows the deaths of the Jews in the Second World War. In L’airone (The
Heron) (1968), Bassani recounts the last day in the life of a landowner who, searching for
an absolute, non-transient existence, realizes the emptiness of his earthly experience and
resolves to end it. In 1974, Bassani collected his major narrative works in Il romanzo di
Ferrara (The Novel of Ferrara), in which he refined his metaphor of the human condition
by also giving an editorial consistency and an enclosed form to the sense of a unique and
self-contained world where individual existence and collective destiny intertwine.
Besides writing fiction, which was both popular and critically acclaimed (he won the
coveted Strega in 1956 and the Viareggio in 1962), Bassani also published several
collections of poetry and critical essays. From 1958 to 1963 he directed the series
‘Biblioteca di letteratura’ for Feltrinelli, promoting the controversial publication of
Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard) (1958).
See also: Jewish writers
Entries A–Z 75
Further reading
Radcliff-Umstead, D. (1987) The Exile into Eternity: A Study of the Narrative Writings of Giorgio
Bassani, Cranbury: Associated University Presses.
Schneider, M. (1986) Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani’s Fiction,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
FRANCESCA PARMEGGIANI
Battisti, Lucio
b. 5 March 1943, Poggio Bustone, Rieti; d. 9 September 1998, Milan
Singer-songwriter
Regarded as one of the most influential singersongwriters of postwar Italy (see
cantautori), Battisti grew up in Rome where he taught himself the guitar. He soon
moved to Milan, where his talents began to be recognized when some of his songs were
performed by the Dik Dik and Equipe 84. His career really blossomed, however, when he
teamed up with lyricist Mogol (Giulio Rapetti) in 1966, and together they produced over
twenty best-selling albums, many of which are still regarded as landmarks of Italian
popular music. However, unlike many of the other cantautori, Battisti wrote songs which
were exclusively personal and apolitical and far removed from the protest movement of
1968. This led some in the early 1970s to accuse him of reactionary leanings. Deeply
offended by these accusations, he retired from public view in 1976. His artistic
partnership with Mogol was abruptly terminated in 1980, and from then on his songs
were co-written with his wife Grazia Letizia and, later, with Pasquale Panella. He
continued to release an album regularly every two years but, by the time of his premature
death in 1998, Battisti had completely withdrawn from the Italian musical scene and not
performed or appeared in public for over twenty years.
GINO MOLITERNO
Baudo, Giuseppe (Pippo)
b. 7 June 1936, Militello, Catania
Television presenter
From the mid-1970s, Pippo Baudo became one of the most important public faces of
Italian television. A reliable and utterly unflappable host of numerous editions of the
Saturday evening variety show Fantastico, as well as Domenica In, the Sanremo festival
and quiz shows, he spent most of his working life at the RAI. A Christian Democrat until
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 76
the dissolution of the party (see DC), he began his career in the 1960s and quickly won a
reputation for civility, cordiality and conformity. With his slicked-back black hair and
dark suits, the tall and thin Baudo resembled nothing so much as a slightly too-jovial
undertaker. In the mid-1990s he became, for a brief period, artistic director of RAI-TV,
but resigned when it became clear that the old-style variety formulas had had their day. In
1986 he married the opera singer Katia Ricciarelli.
See also: Canzonissima
Further reading
Calabrese, O. (1984) ‘Pippo Baudo’, in N.Ajello et al., Perche lui? (Why Him?), Bari: Laterza.
STEPHEN GUNDLE
Bellezza, Dario
b. 5 September 1944; d. 1996, Rome
Novelist and poet
A passionate non-conformist and something of a poète maudit, in all his works Bellezza
explores the limiting effects of a totalling mass culture. In earlier works, such as the 1971
poetry collection Invettive e licence (Invectives and Licences) and the 1970 novel
L’innocenza (Innocence), he offers an embittered response to the restrictions of social
conformity. In his predominantly autobiographical narratives, many of which continue to
deal with this issue, he investigates questions of alterity and the status of the poet in Italy.
These works include the novel Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom) (1972), the first
Italian work to deal openly with homosexuality and Morte di Pasolini (Pasolini’s Death)
(1981), a personal and literary inquiry into the tragic death of his close friend and mentor,
Pier Paolo Pasolini. Among Bellezza’s autobiographical works are the novels Angela
(Angel) (1979) and L’amore felice (Happy Love) (1987), both about his relationship with
the author Elsa Morante. In 1976 Bellezza received the prestigious Viareggio Prize (see
literary prizes) for his poetry collection Morte segreta (Secret Death). Ironically, five
months after his death from AIDS, he was awarded a government pension for his
contributions to Italian culture.
VIRGINIA PICCHIETTI
Entries A–Z 77
Bellini, Mario
b. November 1935, Milan
Architect and industrial designer
Bellini trained in the School of Architecture at the Politecnico of Milan. He received his
doctorate in 1959 and soon gained a wide reputation, first in the areas of furniture and
industrial design and later in architecture and urban planning. His subsequent
professional career falls into three main phases.
In his formative period during the 1960s, Bellini became very active in industrial and
interior design, engaging imaginatively with the new technologies and rapid
developments in microelectronics. During this time he achieved renown with his furniture
designs for leading firms such as Cassina, B & B Italia, and Vitra, and earned the first of
his seven Golden Compass Awards from Rinascente-UPIM in 1962. He also served as
vicepresident of the ADI (Association for Industrial Design) and was awarded numerous
other prizes. In 1963, he began what would be a long and fruitful collaboration with the
Olivetti Company as its chief industrial design consultant and subsequently created some
of his best work in designing Olivetti’s microcomputers, typewriters, calculators and
copying machines.
Bellini’s second phase, during the 1970s, was marked by a strong interest in
flexibility. This was the maturing of an interest he had already developed whilst working
on a prototype car in 1962–3, an innovative design that attempted to meet the needs of
the rapidly changing dynamics of modern life. With its modular design, the car was
expandable so as to hold twelve passengers while still supplying the essential features of
a house. This interest continued in his numerous designs for Fiat and Renault, and in his
proposal for ‘Kar-a-Sutra’, a vehicle he designed for an exhibition held at MoMA in New
York in 1972 which aimed at reenacting the basic domestic rites (sleeping, entertaining,
etc.) in a moving urban setting. Throughout the 1970s Bellini continued to explore the
notion of flexibility, as in the numerous office electronic machines he designed for
Olivetti.
Bellini’s formal training in architecture came to the fore in the 1980s, the third phase
of his career, which included a period as editor-in-chief of Domus (1986–91). During this
time he designed numerous buildings and urban projects in Italy, Japan and the Middle
East. In these projects, as well as in his theoretical essays, he confronted the major
problems besetting the contemporary architect and his designs often proposed poetic
solutions which allowed essential elements to express themselves in a composite image.
Bellini’s special approach to design as a poetic means of expression has continued to
earn him international renown. His work was given special prominence in an exhibition
held at The Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1987, where his innovative designs
were exhibited and where over two dozen of his works are now permanently housed.
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 78
Bellini lectures and practises internationally, while maintaining a special place in the
history of modern Italian design.
Further reading
McCarty, C. (1987) Mario Bellini: Designer, New York: The Museum of Modern Art (extended
essay and illustrated catalogue of the exhibition held at MoMA, June 24-September 15, 1987,
presenting some of Bellini’s most accomplished work in industrial design).
Ranzani, E. (1996) Mario Bellini, architecture 1984–1995, Berlin: Birkhäuser (an illustrated
anthology of Bellini’s architectural work in the years shown. Also contains a general biography
and an extensive bibliography).
FASSIL ZEWDOU
Bellocchio, Marco
b. 9 November 1939, Piacenza
Film director
A virtuoso provocateur, Bellocchio belongs to the generation of ideologically oriented
film-makers whose highly politicized cinema participated in the social revolution
associated with 1968. Graduating from Rome’s Centre Sperimentale di
Cinematografia in 1962 and later attending London’s Slade School of Fine Arts,
Bellocchio combines a solid professional training with a sharp eye for the incongruities
of the Italian body politic. Pursuing an engagement in radical politics, Bellocchio’s films
are dedicated to the caustic denunciation of the corruption and repression of Italian social
institutions. His controversial first film, I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket) (1965)
explores in a tragic mode the moral decadence of the family, while La Cina è vicina
(China is Near) (1967) and Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father) (1971) utilize
a more sarcastic tone in order to attack education and patriarchy generally. His later films
draw more openly on psychoanalysis and his Diavolo in corpo (Devil in the Flesh) (1986)
is one of very few Italian films which deal with terrorism.
DOROTHÉE BONNIGAL
Bene, Carmelo
b. 1 September 1937, Campi Salentina, Puglia
Actor, director and writer
Entries A–Z 79
The irrepressible enfant terrible of Italian postwar theatre, Bene has often provoked a
negative reaction from conservative critics, but he is nevertheless widely regarded as one
of the most powerful and innovative presences on the Italian stage in the postwar period.
Typically, Bene himself has suggested that Italian theatre can be divided into ‘Before
Bene’ and ‘After Bene’, and most critics tend to agree.
Born in a small town in southern Italy where he was educated by the Jesuits, Bene
moved to Rome and in 1957 enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Arts. Abandoning the
Academy without graduating, he made his stage debut in 1959 in a production of
Camus’s Caligula at the Arts Theatre of Rome. Although the production itself was fairly
conservative, Bene’s acting already displayed what would become the signature of his
theatrical style: an intense, almost maniacal egocentrism and exhibitionism whereby the
actor violently took over his character and confronted the audience with an experience
close to madness. Continuing in this direction during the next five years, Bene developed
his own version of Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’, writing, directing and acting in a series
of provocative spectacles which became the spearhead of the great wave of experimental
theatre of the 1960s. These included, amongst others, Spettacolo Majakovskij
(Majakovskij Spectacle) in 1960, with music provided by that other enfant terrible,
Sylvano Bussotti; an adaptation of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1961, together with an
eroticized Pinocchio and a disturbing Amleto (Hamlet); a desecratory Cristo ‘63 in 1963
(immediately blocked by censorship); and in 1964, a version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.
All these fully manifested what would remain the characteristic features of Bene’s unique
theatrical method: an extreme deformation and deconstruction of the original text (in
effect, a reduction of it to mere ‘pre-text’) and a strongly physicalized stage presence
with a major role given to the human voice. The voice became and remained the nucleus
of Bene’s provocative theatrical practice, and all his productions sought to explore its
possibilities to their ultimate limit, orchestrating everything from blood-curdling
screeches, screams and howls to low murmurs, sighs, yelps and whimpers.
In 1965 Bene published Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Our Lady of the Turks), a
‘scandalous’ semiautobiographical novel which he subsequently staged. In 1967, after
acting in Pasolini’s Edipo re (Oedipus, the King), Bene became attracted to the cinema
and directed himself in a number of films—including a version of Nostra Signora which
received the special jury prize at Cannes in 1968—before returning to the stage in the
mid-1970s. In the 1980s, while continuing to work on the stage, he also acted and
directed a number of his own plays for television as well as performing several oratorios
with full orchestra and singers. At the same time he became the theatrical director of the
Venice Biennale, although ongoing disputes with the administration eventually led to his
resignation in 1990.
After having been, wilfully and provocatively, the thorn in the side of the bourgeois
establishment for over three decades, Bene’s significance for postwar Italian culture was
underlined in 1995 when his collected works began to be published by Bompiani in its
series of literary classics.
Further reading
Baiardo, E. and De Lucis, F. (1997) La moralità dei sette veli: La Salomé di Carmelo Bene (The
Morality of the Seven Veils: Carmelo Bene’s Salomé), Genoa: Erga Edizioni (an analysis of one
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