Realizzato all’indomani della contestazione francese del maggio 1968, l’Igloo di Mario Merz, intitolato Objet cache-toi, era una peculiare combinazione tra il linguaggio della protesta—il titolo derivava da un graffito apparso in quel periodo sui muri della Sorbona—e la dematerializzazione dell’arte post-minimalista. L’articolo prova a comprendere le strategie di opposizione alla civiltà dei consumi e al feticismo delle merci messe in atto dall’Arte Povera e da Merz in parallelo al movimento del Sessantotto, ponendole a paragone con una particolare tipologia del modernismo artistico in Italia e le interpretazioni storiografiche degli slogan sessantotteschi. Created in the aftermath of the French protests of May 1968, Mario Merz's Igloo, titled Objet cache-toi, was an unusual blend of protest language—the title was inspired by graffiti that appeared on the walls of the Sorbonne at that time—and the dematerialization of post-minimalist art. This article compares Arte Povera and Merz's strategies of opposing consumerism and commodity fetishism with a specific strand of Italian artistic modernism and the historiographical interpretations of the 1968 slogans.

In this article, I explore the work of Joy Nwosu, an ethnomusicologist, musician and film scholar, who in 1968 published Cinema e Africa nera: L’immagine dei neri nel cinema bianco e il primo cinema africano visti nel 1968 (Cinema and Black Africa: The Image of Black People in White Cinema and Early African Cinema as seen in 1968). I approach Nwosu’s study, now over fifty-five years removed from its original date of publication, in order to examine the work as an example of what scholar and activist bell hooks articulates as an “oppositional gaze,” or a critical viewing practice enacted by Black women spectators. Specifically, what would it mean to acknowledge Nwosu’s study as a foundational moment of postcolonial Italian Cinema Studies thus challenging the historiography of the field? I will first outline the sociopolitical contexts of Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera, including African decolonization and its reception in Italy. I then consider the study’s significance in relation to a body of scholarship on Italian cinema and media studies attendant to racial discourse and representation, most notably those produced within the last twenty years. I argue that Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera directs us to reconsider Italian film history proper, advancing a critical race and decolonial analysis prior to the formative emergence of these fields almost two decades later.

These field notes—in contrast to a typical journal article—employ a creative structure and approach to explore the goals and activities of a new humanities lab. The notes begin by remembering the tragic death of a young migrant agricultural worker in the Agro Pontino region of Italy, Mr. Satnam Singh. This untimely loss of life is then contextualized within the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” migration from India to the Global North and read through the notion of “the Cybercene”—a transformational ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene. Via the theoretical lens of the relatively new field of multispecies humanities, the Agro Pontino is shown to be an ecocultural space replete with colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era co-becomings. The second section briefly describes two more projects to illustrate the lab’s four basic theoretical premises: namely, i) the analysis of natureculture, ii) the use of situated decolonial epistemologies, iii) the search for a material turn, and iv) delimiting anthropocentricity. These foundational premises, newly developed methods such as “multispecies thick-mapping,” “naturalcultural discourse analysis” and the use of the Cybercene as an ecocultural rather than a techno-scientific organizational principle are offered as exciting avenues for future analyses of profoundly entangled naturalcultural identities and multispecies affects, interests and destinies.

Towards the conclusion of the film La grande bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013), the protagonist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), responds honestly to the question of why he never wrote a second novel: “Io cercavo la grande bellezza. Non l’ho trovata” (I was searching for the great beauty. I never found it). Sorrentino’s entire film, however, disputes Jep’s claim. Once viewers reach this point, they have already spent an hour feasting their eyes on the visual spectacles that Jep’s journalistic vocation and Rome’s nightlife have to offer. While most of these spectacles are just that—shows empty of significance, magic that is “solo un trucco” (only a trick)—other moments, often the most banal, become marvels, creating a transformative experience for the protagonist and other characters, Romans and tourists alike. In so doing, Sorrentino taps into the great tradition of Rome’s constant search for beauty and artistic creation that go beyond human abilities, a quest that found expression in both ancient poets and Renaissance authors. Indeed, Sorrentino’s oneiric digressions and depictions of transformation evoke the imagery and language of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , whose many characters equally find themselves transformed and transported when confronted by visions of the divine. Similarly, Jep’s multiple encounters with scenes that themselves are the intersection of art and the ineffable, recall Vasari’s ekphrastic language in his Lives , specifically those moments in which the artistic creations of his illustrious artefici reach the sublime. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sorrentino’s film La grande bellezza and its visual discourse on the gaze, spectacle, and transformation, by putting the film in dialogue with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Vasari’s Lives . Of the countless authors who have treated this subject during Rome’s (and Italy’s) illustrious history, these two in particular put the same emphasis on artists or creators as heroes, underscoring man’s ability to surpass nature and rival the divine in his creative process. Both authors, however, offer different perspectives on art and the gaze that Sorrentino echoes within the film. The connection between physical dangers and the act of looking stem from Ovid, while the attention to artists’ abilities to both trick the eye and rival God in their creations, are evocative of Vasari’s rhetoric in his Lives . Ultimately, this discussion of La grande bellezza in the context of the Metamorphoses and the Lives enriches the visual text and confirms that Sorrentino’s film is as much a reflection on Rome’s mythos as it is the personal journey of the protagonist.

This essay considers chess as a particular mode of exchange in Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili that draws upon the game’s global nature and long history of representing cross-cultural exchange, as seen in the 13th century world that Calvino evokes in the framing of his work as an exchange between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. This focus lends itself to both an examination of Calvino’s overarching medievalism in his late novel and a look to his self-reflection in the essay on Exactitude in his Lezioni americane , where the evocation of chess in his earlier novel takes on heightened significance in Calvino’s defining of his own writerly identity. I will argue that the representation of the game is essential in analyzing not only Calvino’s thoughts on language and systems of communication and control in this late period, but also his look to the cultural other that vacillates between essentializing and the forging of global affinities.

This article analyzes Bembo’s evolving outlook in his understanding of pre-Petrarchan authors during the redactions of his Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua. It compares and contrasts all passages where Bembo’s views on the early poetic tradition manifest themselves and their revisions both in the autograph manuscript and in the 1525 editio princeps. The comparative analysis presented shows that Bembo was progressively perfecting the historicizing perspective presented in his work, and that he did this thanks to the acquisition of new knowledge and new sources and his own growing interest and attentiveness to the earlier poetic tradition.

The article argues that Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (2016) and Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (2012) describe walking as an activity which allows one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. This analysis resounds with Robert P. Marzec’s invitation to study how literature has represented the privatization and the capitalist and neoliberal organization of space, revealing forms of internal colonization which epitomize a pillar of colonial ideology. Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi reconfigure walking as an epistemological, ecocritical and postcolonial practice which allows one to cross paths with people who are marginalized in Italy, especially migrants. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s and David Pinder’s reflections about space and representation, the article suggests that Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi show how the direct experience of a place through walking is germane to understanding the effects of economic exploitation present in human-land relations.

In Annie Vivanti’s Naja Tripudians (1920), London has been struck by a moral contamination that, spreading out from the center, has reached the sleepy rural village of Wild-Forest, where it will infect and eventually consume Leslie and Myosotis Harding. Though their father is a contagious disease specialist, he proves entirely incapable of protecting them from this contagion—and not only because it is home-grown. Perhaps more significantly his failure has to do his reliance on strategies of isolation and confinement, which not only prove ineffective in shielding his daughters from danger but also render them paradoxically more susceptible to the contagion. Although the novel was written during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, critics have given little attention to the figures of immunity and contagion that structure the novel. By attending to these discourses, I argue that this novel can be read as anticipating in important respects Esposito's reflections on immunity. Though many have seen Naja Tripudians as a morality tale, I argue that the novel is better understood as a kind of 'anti-morality' tale, warning against the immoral things that result from resisting immoral things. The immunitary logic of the novel seems to suggest, in the end, that the preservation of moral virtue requires that we expose ourselves to the source of contamination, perhaps that we even behave a little badly ourselves.

Carmelo Bene (1937–2002) was an Italian theatre artist who radically transformed the practice and conception of Western theatre from a series of points of view. He dramaturgically re-conceived famous plays, innovatively worked on voice, and reached to film and music, as well as engaged his theatre vision with philosophy. This introductory essay on Bene’s philosophical thought and theatrical praxis seeks to arouse interest in his work among English readers, so as to spark interdisciplinary conversations across a variety of fields including Italian studies, critical theory, European theatre, film studies, performance philosophy, and aesthetics. To elucidate some of the distinctive and exemplificatory traits of Benean anti-representational theatre, special attention is paid to one of his readings, Lectura Dantis (1981), and to one of his plays, Pinocchio, ovvero lo spettacolo della Provvidenza (1998) – both of which are among the most significant performances in Bene’s career.&nbsp