Make Art, Not Content
Plus, a Mario Tronti obituary and an autumn gallery preview
The Week in Italy is back! After an estate well-spent with friends, focaccia, sun, sea and spritzes I’ve returned to my desk, revitalised, rested and ready for a packed few months of cultural and political happenings. So let’s get to it. September kicked-off, as ever, with the Venice Film Festival, which runs until Saturday. The line-up has been strong enough. David Fincher’s The Killer, Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and Michael Mann’s Ferrari have all received positive reviews from critics. Offscreen, though, the discontent is palpable. The red carpet has been strangely devoid of stars; most of whom have chosen to boycott the festival in solidarity with the Hollywood screenwriters’ strikes. Even the few that have attended have – generally – used their platform to call-out the greed of the big industry bosses behind the slogan “make art, not content.” One key fact that’s been lost amidst all the U.S. focused coverage, however, is that local Italian cinema workers are also protesting. Members of Slc Cgil, Fistel Cisl and Uilcom Uil – which represent set designers, voice actors, sound engineers and more – have been mobilising since the spring to denounce “a far west of labour rights” that has been “unchanged since the 90s.” Leaving aside pay, the unions are demanding better training and education, stronger regulations regarding working hours and breaks, and better enforcement of contracts. Italian cinema has been in crisis for over a decade now. But after a record-breaking summer – with the highest box office takings for generations [including domestic productions] – the time is surely ripe to tackle these bad practices head on, on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of the best books I read this summer was Dario Ferrari’s La ricreazione è finita, a satirical novel set in the ‘70s which follows a ragtag band of wannabe radicals in Viareggio as they attempt to form a revolutionary vanguard organization (with dramatic, tragi-comic consequences). The novel itself is a blast, but that’s not my point here. Between chapters, I also came across the sad news that the philosopher Mario Tronti, one of the most significant proponents of the real world 70s workerist movement [operaismo] died last month. Tronti’s work was crucial to the development of Italian autonomism. It was he who first put forward notions like ‘class composition’, ‘mass-worker’ and ‘workers’ inquiry’ into the nation’s political lexicon, and his unique critique of state power remains internationally influential to this day. For decades, his voice – his ideas – were everywhere, from lecture theatres in Bologna and Rome to the picket lines of the FIAT factories and the Marghera Chemical Plants. Verso Books recently published an ENG translation of his seminal 1966 study Workers and Capital which is the place to start to really get your head around his theories. Yet readers with even a passing interest in the global labour movement are likely to enjoy this beautiful obituary by Sergio Bologna, which makes a convincing case as to Tronti’s existential and political relevance for the present age. Here’s one of my favourite passages:
When we talk about operaismo, and thus inevitably, about Tronti, what comes to mind isn’t university chairs, seminars, academic conferences, round tables, book reviews and compunctious listeners. Rather, what comes to mind is the worker assemblies, the tough pickets, the shoves given even among comrades, the chants of joy, the indictments, the jail cells, night-time vigils in front of improvised braziers, the passionate discussions, the production of ideas. The fact that someone always wants to bring us to our knees to do and live as he tells us. The desire for freedom, the refusal to bow our heads [Here’s the link to the full piece]
Zooming out - just a little - my friend Alex Sakalis published a great little feature for Italy Magazine in August which got slightly buried by the summer vacation. So in case you missed it, here it is. Sakalis takes the reader on a tour of Mazzorbo, one of the oldest inhabited islands of the Venetian lagoon. Founded in the 6th Century AD by refugees fleeing barbarian incursions, the community quickly developed into a powerful trading post that flourished for several hundred years before being eclipsed by La Serenissima itself. Sakalis’s potted history is fascinating in its own right. But true to form, he also finds a Jan Morris-esque way to root his essay in contemporary reality. Because it turns out, beyond the mudflats, there’s (still) plenty of interest on Mazzorbo to this day. Take Giancarlo De Carlo’s elegant social housing, for example, which gave new life to the local community in the 80s-90s. Or Gianluca Bisol’s successful experiment cultivating Dorona grapes against all odds to make some of Italy’s finest wine. Or how about the (modest) fine dining scene, which has miraculously put little Mazzorbo on the gourmand’s map? If you’re planning a trip to Venice, but can’t stand the jam-packed streets around San Marco, you could do a lot worse than follow Sakalis’s footsteps into the “eerie tranquillity and accidental beauty” of the northern lagoon. To find out more about the island, click here.
Arts and culture: back to the galleries
This autumn is as crowded as ever as far as art exhibitions go, and I don’t have space here to offer a full overview. There are, however, a few obvious highlights. Parma’s Fondazione Magnani-Rocca is currently hosting a retrospective of Umberto’s Boccioni’s youthful pre-futurist, fauvist-like paintings. This is a rare opportunity to see some of the artist’s greatest work gathered in a single place, and it should, to my mind, be at the top of your list if you’ll be in the area over the next few months. Elsewhere, some of the bigger museums are offering more intellectual(ised) curatorial experiments: Venice’s Accademia has a new show called Titian “1508” which seeks to reposition the Renaissance artist’s genius as part of a Europe-wide exchange between Dutch and Italian painters, while Milan’s MUDEC is hosting a van Gogh exhibit that (provocatively) aims to destabilize the artist’s reputation as an “outsider” by instead emphasising his debt to the “orientalist” Japanese-inspired fashion of his age. Bergamo and Brescia - the twin capitals of culture for 2023 - will also be filled with shows. The Museo di Santa Giulia is hosting a retrospective of the surrealist painter Lorenzo Mattotti’s work, which looks a lot of fun, and the Accademia Carrara is offering an ambitiously curated collection of several dozen masterpieces of 19th Century Romanticism. Of course, these are just a few personal picks. For a more expansive list check out ArtTribune’s guide here [Italian only I’m afraid].
Cesare Pavese’s trio of novellas La Bella Estate [The Beautiful Summer] is a classic of Italian literature. The plot follows Ginia, a poor 17-year old seamstress who, shortly after migrating to the metropololis of Turin, finds herself under the wing of a group of bohemian artists. Over the course of one summer the group upends Ginia’s long-held assumptions about class, sexuality and freedom with dramatic (read, erotic) consequences. Adapting Pavese for screen is no easy task. The few who have tried to capture his nuanced and sensitive narration on film have ended up regurgitating a kind of parodic melodrama. It seems, however, that the Roman Director Laura Luchetti has pulled-off something exceptional with her new adaptation. Reviews in Italian have been exuberant. Critics have celebrated her “phenomenological precision,” her skill of capturing the “female gaze” and her “virtuosic cinematography” among other things. I’m a big Pavese fan, so I’ll be checking this out as soon as I can in my local cinema. If you’re reading this from outside of Italy, though, I’m afraid you’ll still have to wait a few months for the international streaming release.
Recipe of the week: Mozzarella, prosciutto and fig salad
And suddenly it’s September! The afternoons are still roasting, sure, but the nights are closing in and those long august twilights now seem but a fever dream. On the plus side, this is probably my favourite time of year vis-à-vis produce. The peaches are ripe, the first crisp grapes are ready, there are plums everywhere, and the tomatoes are at their absolute prime. Best of all, to my mind, are the figs. I know what you’re thinking, and we’ve been here before. What’s to love about these sweet, jammy, slightly-bland mush balls? I get the point. But balanced with savoury favours - with cured meats and umami-ish cheese in particular - these parcels of late summer truly come into their element. This week, to celebrate the rientro, and the arrival of this still-balmy autumn, I prepped-up a simple salad of mozzarella, prosciutto and purple figs [something vaguely akin to Jamie Oliver’s suggestion here] which I served with a little schiacciata. For my money this is the perfect change of season meal: a unique, light, satisfying dinner that captures all the pleasure and melancholy of these last few summer-ish days.
About Me
My name is Jamie Mackay (@JacMackay) and I’m an author, editor and translator based in Florence. I’ve been writing about Italy for a decade for international media including The Guardian, The Economist, Frieze, and Art Review. I launched ‘The Week in Italy’ to share a more direct and regular overview of the debates and dilemmas, innovations and crises that sometimes pass under the radar of our overcrowded news feeds.
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