In Memoriam: Frederika Randall's review of Mario Sironi exhibit at the Vittoriano

Frederika Randall, an exceptional person, writer, and friend, died Tuesday, May 12 at her home in Rome, where she lived with her husband and loving and intellectual companion, Vittorio Jucker. Born in Western Pennsylvania, Frederika lived the last 35 years of her life in Italy. Her keen eye and judgment made her a valued public intellectual (a term she asked us not to use - you can't complain now, Frederika), publishing trenchant cultural and political commentary in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her bio of herself here explains her life journey and also her lifetime of significant accomplishments and awards. She was a translator of the nearly-untranslatable, bringing to life authors as diverse as the 19th-century Ippolito Nievo ("Confessions of an Italian") and 21st- century Giacomo Sartori ("I am God").

In Frederika's memory, we are re-posting several of the posts--which remain popular--she wrote for RST. We re-posted  "Liberation Day: The Politics of  'Bella Ciao'" just 3 weeks ago (not knowing how precarious her life was at that point) for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Ten days ago we re-posted her review of a Renato Guttuso exhibit. Here we re-post her 2014 review of a show at the Complesso Vittoriano featuring the 20th-century Italian artist Mario Sironi. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing. She will live on in our--and all her friends' and family's--memories, and in the eclectic body of work she left to the world.

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Sironi, Self Portrait

You have a great artist in your midst, perhaps the greatest of these times, and you don’t know it. Picasso, addressing feckless 20^th-century Italians, was talking about Mario Sironi. It was a peculiar tribute, coming from a man who belonged to the Communist party until the day he died. While Sironi, on the other hand, was a believing Fascist even before 1921, when he began working as graphic artist for Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d'Italia and the review Gerarchia. He even adhered to the Republic of Salò, the German-backed Italian puppet state of 1943-45, and that was much more of a minority camp than Fascism ever was.

For a taste of this political outlier—and yes, great painter—I recommend Sironi 1885-1961 show at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome until February 8, 2015. There are ninety paintings, graphic works and sketches for murals neatly organized to follow the artist’s life path: born in 1885, studies in

engineering, a nervous breakdown, art school, meeting Boccioni and Balla, Futurism, the Novecento, bleak urban landscapes, a brief Metaphysical phase, Fascist illustration, publicity for automaker Fiat, an Expressionist turn, followed by the huge murals commissioned by Mussolini for new Fascist public buildings in Milan and Rome.

Things looked bad for Sironi when the Liberation came on April 25, 1945. He took the road out of Milan toward Como and Switzerland, like many Fascists who feared partisan reprisals, and not wrongly. On foot, his dog on a leash by his side, Sironi was stopped at a partisan checkpoint, and only when the poet and children’s writer (and partisan) Gianni Rodari stepped in, was he saved from being shot. After the war, Sironi continued painting, and the vein of melancholy that colors everything he produced seems to have deepened into something like despair. There was no place for a man like him in a postwar Italy where all the artists and intellectuals were anti-Fascists.

This exhibit, the first in Italy dedicated to Sironi in twenty years, was curated by art historian Elena Pontiggia, who provides a very useful biographical framework to hang the artwork on, both in a short film and the good wall quotes.




This doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that not many of Sironi’s greatest paintings are on
display, or that this show is much smaller than that of 1994, which had 400
artworks. But Pontiggia does bring out a crucial fact: that Sironi was a life-long depressive, a man of melancholy who it would seem should have been quite unsuited to the Fascist regime’s celebration of might and right.

Even as a young man Sironi would close himself up in his rooms, seeing no-one, drawing obsessively. “He’ll copy a Greek head 20 or 25 times!!!” reported  Boccioni (exclamation marks his). The Futurists disapproved of antiquated art.

Urban Landscape, 1922

Yet Sironi’s most powerful works are those that don’t celebrate Fascism, modernity, or industry. His urban landscapes, some of them painted in the early 1920s, others after World War II, are haunting, and haunted. When in 1922 he produced one of several paintings titled Urban Landscape, Sironi was staying alone in a cheap hotel in Milan, too poor to bring his new wife there to live with him. Dusty white and brick-colored industrial buildings, a great black swath of train track, a tiny tram and a tiny truck. The only thing that looks animate in the composition is the lowering green and grey sky.

The Yellow Truck, 1918

In another cityscape shown here, an ashy black truck stands immobile where two utterly empty streets of factories and warehouses intersect. There is no life or movement in the painting, just beautiful volumes. Once again, only the sky is alive, with big brushstrokes of smoke and cloud.

The Yellow Truck, 1918, is another work from this period. Big rough brushstrokes, in part painted on newsprint, it suggests a Futurist enthusiasm for the vehicle itself that is utterly absent in urban scenes done even a few years later.

Urban Landscape, 1920

In another urban landscape painted in 1920, a hard brown wall hides what seems to be a construction site. Again, the night sky is roiling overhead. Sironi is no longer celebrating the dynamism of the machine that was Futurism’s trademark. The only thing that’s dynamic is the air. When it comes to the work he did in the 1930s, Fascism’s heyday, the show tries to persuade us that although he worked for the cause, his murals and wall decorations (here, sketches for his mosaic Justice Between Law and Force in the Milan Court of Assizes) were never propaganda for Fascism. But like so many efforts to rescue Sironi from his politics, this doesn’t really ring true. Fascism was not just Blackshirts and castor oil; it was a political creed based on just the kind of myths that Sironi produced in his large allegorical murals. They embody a kind of immobilism, an image of the best of all possible worlds that need never change. Sironi was happy to accept those mural commissions because he wanted to make art for the people, not for bourgeois sitting rooms. But that, too, was a thread of Fascism.

Urban Landscape, 1922

My Funeral, 1960

After the war, Sironi continued to paint, and there are several more gloomy cityscapes here, often painted in a thick impasto of brown, blue and white, that are very striking. He died in 1961, not before producing a small tempera work, My Funeral, in which a tiny hearse in one corner of the picture is followed by a tiny handful of mourners. “Let us hope that after so many storms, so many gales, so much bestial suffering,” he wrote, “that there will nevertheless be a port for this miserable heart to find peace and quiet."  

Fifty years later, his reputation as an artist has been largely detached from his role as a Fascist, but you couldn’t exactly say he rests in peace.

Frederika Randall, Rome

In Memoriam: Frederika Randall's review of Renato Guttuso exhibit at the Vittoriano

Frederika Randall, an exceptional person, writer, and friend, died Tuesday, May 12 at her home in Rome, where she lived with her husband and loving and intellectual companion, Vittorio Jucker. Born in Western Pennsylvania, Frederika lived the last 35 years of her life in Italy. Her keen eye and judgment made her a valued public intellectual (a term she asked us not to use - you can't complain now, Frederika), publishing trenchant cultural and political commentary in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her bio of herself here explains her life journey and also her lifetime of significant accomplishments and awards. She was a translator of the nearly-untranslatable, bringing to life authors as diverse as the 19th-century Ippolito Nievo ("Confessions of an Italian") and 21st- century Giacomo Sartori ("I am God").

In Frederika's memory, we are re-posting several of the posts--which remain popular--she wrote for RST. We re-posted  "Liberation Day: The Politics of  'Bella Ciao'" just 3 weeks ago for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Here we re-post her 2013 review of a major 20th-century Italian artist, little known in the US, Renato Guttuso. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing; a review that ends with the words "memento mori." She will live on in our--and all her friends' and family's--memories, and in the eclectic body of work she left to the world.


RST has admired the work of Renato Guttuso since we first came across it, perhaps a decade ago.  So we were disappointed when we learned that a major exhibition of the artist's work was to take place in Rome when we weren't present.  Our solution was to commission a review of the show from Frederika Randall, translator extraordinaire, writer for The Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale, and former arts reporter for the Wall Street Journal.  Frederika has also written for RST on the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli and on the partisan anthem Bella Ciao.   The Guttuso exhibition closes February 10. 

Self-Portrait, 1936

The painter Renato Guttuso was famous  in the 1970s, when he served as something like the Italian Communist Party’s  (PCI’s) official artist. He won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1972 and, beginning in 1976, held office as a Senator with the PCI. He was a figurist, unlike most of his contemporaries who were devoted to abstraction. Not everyone in the art world admired him; the Party’s imprimatur was a double-edged blessing. His “realist” style looked suspiciously like socialist realism to those who adhered to the abstract creed. But Guttuso, who died in 1987, and the PCI, whose demise came in 1991, now belong to history, and the time is right to take a fresh look.

I recently spent a fascinating hour and a half doing just that at “Guttuso”,  one hundred paintings, drawings and theatrical sketches on show until February 10 at Rome’s Complesso del Vittoriano--the big white monument in Piazza Venezia, the one the Romans used to liken to a set of dentures, before there were implants. The earliest work in the show is an accomplished water-color of a Sicilian garden that young Renato, born to free-thinking middle-class parents in Bagheria near Palermo in 1911, made when he was twelve.  One of the last ones, painted two years before his death, is an indifferent sketch of a reclining nude, in the slightly smutty rear haunch view with garter belt that the artist favored when his powers  were declining.

Crucifixion, 1941

With perhaps those two exceptions,  there is little realism on display at “Guttuso.” One of his gods, instead, was Picasso, whom Guttuso first studied in reproductions during  the  Fascist 1930s and who later became the Italian painter’s great friend when he spent time in Paris after the war. Early works like La fuga dall’Etna (Flight from Etna, 1938) or the harsh, doleful Crucifixion of 1941, with their tangle of limbs and loins, human and animal, although they resemble no particular works by Picasso, share Cubism’s restlessness, and have all the human and political urgency of a Guernica. His Crucifixion, steeped in the cruelty and suffering of war and of late Fascist Italy, brought Guttuso some attention, not all favorable: the Church abhorred the picture and actually ordered Catholics not to look at it.

Blue Window, 1940

But politically engaged paintings were only part of his production.  A convinced anti-Fascist, Guttuso would take part in the Roman resistance in 1943, yet through the 40s and 50s he also continued to paint portraits, landscapes and still lifes, often deploying the fruits and vegetables of his native south, sometimes with jarring elements thrown in, such as the pair of sharp scissors that accompany a bevy of lemons. Color became a powerful element in his compositions:  La finestra blu (Blue Window, 1940) [right] being a particularly successful example. Guttuso  designed stage sets and costumes and even illustrated books. The moody artichokes and raffia-covered flask of wine he drew for the cover of English cookbook writer Elizabeth David’s 1954 classic Italian Food, and the ink-drawn illustrations of its opulent ingredients, so exotic to early post-war Britons, were the first glimpse many outside Italy had of his art, albeit only as book illustration. My own copy, bought in 1970, was in many ways my introduction to Italy, which I’ve never stopped seeing though Guttuso’s sharp, expressionist optic.

Blackbird, 1940

His small, early paintings, some of them, like the marvelous Il Merlo (Blackbird) of 1940 [left] veering toward abstraction, are the surprise of the exhibit, but they did not represent Guttuso’s highest aspirations. “I’ve always believed a painter’s honor depends on painting large pictures,” he said. And indeed he is best known for his large narrative paintings: “history paintings” as the genre was once aptly named.  Large pictures, but not murals, he specified. Works of art in their own right, not works of illustration, pedagogy or exhortation.

Togliatti's Funeral, 1972

Togliatti’s Funeral, 1972, a battlefield of red flags and black and white figures representing the great pantheon of Communism assembled in honor of the departed PCI secretary, is perhaps the best-known of these, its style a cross between history painting and graphic art. Caffè Greco features De Chirico and Buffalo Bill in the crush of a Roman bar;  Beach, set at the people’s beach of Ostia, is a tumble of brown Roman bodies with a trim, spry Picasso drying himself on a green towel. 

These most ambitious of his paintings don’t always manage to transcend  muralistic description. One, however, is truly outstanding:  his great portrait of the Palermo street market, La Vucciria, of 1974. Three meters by three, a challenging square canvas. Into those nine square meters Guttuso has spilled a great cornucopia of cardoons and fennel, tomatoes and eggs, octopus and squid, swordfish and tuna, lemons and melons, cheese and sausages, a side of beef showing all its ribs and a butcher carving away at it. Nature’s merchandise is so exuberant and so vital it saturates every inch of the space, except for a narrow corridor down the middle, where a small huddle of shoppers move through the scene on a vertical axis. The figures, none of which engage the viewer or each other, are cryptic, slightly ghostly. As a proper still life should, this one makes us think of mortality.

The Vucciria market, Guttuso said, was one of his first discoveries when he moved to Palermo as a student in the early 1930s. “When I began to paint, among my first subjects were those colors, those planes of light.” But his great painting of the market was not done until 1974, when he was living in Varese, Lombardy, “under the pallid light of the north.” He said the picture was “a great still life” imbued with all the noise, the energy and the violence of “the markets of poor countries.”

La Vucciria, 1974

          In order to paint from life, Guttuso had an agent ship him the eggs, the cardoons, the tuna, by air from Palermo to Milan. He then persuaded a local butcher to loan him a side of beef “for no more than two hours” so he could sketch it into the composition. The minutes ticked by, and then the hours. The butcher was counting how long his beef would survive without refrigeration.  Guttuso, meanwhile, was molding those ribs and haunches into his most powerful memento mori.

Frederika Randall

Liberation Day: The Politics of "Bella Ciao"

RST attended three April 25, 2015 Liberation Day ceremonies.  At 2 of them, and possibly 3 (we left before the end of the 3rd one, televised by RAI 1), the "Bella Ciao" anthem was sung.  To further understanding of the importance of the song and its place in Italian culture, we are republishing a revealing 2010 piece by writer and translator Frederika Randall.  Following her commentary, Randall presents the song's lyrics in Italian and English.

Frederika Randall returns as guest blogger with this post, that begins with a curious but telling incident at a Rome public school. Randall has written about Italian society, the arts, literature, film and culture for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and now reports on politics for the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale. She lives in Rome.


The G.G. Belli is a middle school in Prati, named, as state schools in Italy are, for famous men--in this case, the great 19th C Romanesco sonneteer Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. (Just about the only schools honoring famous women are those named after female saints and martyrs.) On an ordinary day, not much happens at the G.G. Belli beyond the usual stuff that happens in a school full of budding teenagers. But May 27 was no ordinary day.

The school orchestra had been invited to the Education Ministry in Trastevere, to give a special concert for several illustrious members of the Berlusconi adminstration including the Undersecretary for Education, a certain Giuseppe Pizza (I had to look him up, a former Christian Democrat politician, I learned from the Corriere della Sera, who never merited a single dispatch by the national wire service ANSA in his first forty years of service.)

And so the kids performed their program and after they had finished, they played, by way of an encore, a few bars of Bella Ciao, a rousing partisan song dear to the Italian Resistance, and a piece of music known around the world.

Bad choice.

Minutes later, the Belli’s principal was fit to be tied. She immediately dashed off a letter to the teaching staff, students and parents calling the encore rendition “a deplorable act” and suggesting it had been prompted by some unnamed adults.

So what was wrong with playing Bella Ciao?
Only a few years ago the anti-Fascist Resistance was practically sacred in Italy, for it was the resistance movement that had battled the Nazi invaders and the Fascist dictatorship and gave birth to the Italian Republic in 1946, and the constitution in 1948. But for some on the right, Berlusconi among them, the Resistance smacks of disobedience, of insurrection, of the Communist brigades among the partisans who fought Mussolini and who some once feared would inherit power after the war. Berlusconi--who regularly campaigns on an anti-Communist platform despite the fact that the Italian Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, before he entered politics—not only governs with the support of the former neo-Fascists, he has often had kind words for Mussolini, who he seems to think has an underserved bad rep. A lot of people on the right don’t like Bella Ciao. In parts of Northern Italy, where the extreme rightists-separatists of the Northern League govern, the song was banned this year on April 25, Liberation Day.

We can only guess that the Belli school principal had all these facts in mind when she chastised the kids for playing Bella Ciao. The performance had “cast a lingering shadow of discredit, placing the entire school in difficulty,” she warned. “We must never forget our duties toward our hosts,” she added, urging the parents to send letters of apology to the ministry. God knows these are grim days for school budgets, but her reaction seemed, well, a little excessive.

The parents thought so, too.
After a flurry of organizing on Facebook, a little group of kids and parents (see above left) turned out one morning to sing Bella Ciao in front of the school as the students were going in. For a video of the event, see http://tv.repubblica.it/copertina/bella-ciao-al-belli:-un-coro-contro-la-censura/48424?video
******

Prequel: In the summer of 2008 my husband and I were traveling through Montpelier, Vermont when we heard a busker playing Bella Ciao on the street. “It’s a beautiful old Italian partisan song,” the musician told Vittorio, who’s not only Italian but old enough (just) to remember the Resistance. They sang it together, Vittorio in Italian and the busker in English.
Strange to say, there is some uncertainty about the origins of the song. Although there’s general agreement on the lyrics, they do vary slightly from rendition to rendition. Those below come from Wikipedia, which also offers several English translations. Mine, below, is an attempt to provide a singable text that follows the meter of the Italian. To that end—sorry about that--some of the Italian words have been preserved.

Most musicologists believe Bella Ciao was adapted from a work song of the mondine, the women who worked in the rice fields of northern Italy, standing knee-deep in cold water, picking out tiny weeds. But recently, an amateur musical historian noticed that the melody of Bella Ciao was astonishingly similar to a klezmer song called Koilen, recorded in 1919 in New York by a Gypsy klezmer performer from Odessa named Mishka Tsiganoff. It was theorized that perhaps the song had made its way to Italy via returning Italian immigrants in the 1930s. Although an Italian origin is more likely, it does seem odd that a work song (and a stirring resistance melody) would be so melancholy, so minor key, as this one.

And now, for the good news: for the first time in many years, the National Association of Italian Partisans not only didn’t shrink in size as its members aged and died, but actually grew by some 20,000 members, many of them young people from 18-30 years of age.
So maybe there is a future for the Resistance after all.

Bella Ciao [this version is devoted to the Iranian dissidents]



Una mattina mi son svegliato,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
e ho trovato l'invasor.
O partigiano, portami via,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
O partigiano, portami via,
ché mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
tu mi devi seppellir.
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
sotto l'ombra di un bel fior.
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
Mi diranno «Che bel fior!»
(E poi diranno «Che bel fior!»)
«È questo il fiore del partigiano»,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
«È questo il fiore del partigiano,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
morto per la libertà!»
(che e' morto per la liberta')

--Anonymous


And here, in English is that “beautiful old Italian partisan song”

Early one morning, as I was waking
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Early one morning, as I was waking,
I found the foe was at my door.

O partigiano, please take me with you
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
O partigiano, please take me with you,
For something tells me I must die.

If I should die then, as a partigiano,
If I should die in the hills, in the hills up there,
If I should die then, die in the hills there,
Then you must dig for me a grave.

Up in the hills there, dig me a grave then,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella cia, ciao, ciao,
Up in the hills there, lay me to rest there,
There in the shade of a flowering tree.

So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
Will see a splendid flowering tree.

The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.
It’s the flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.

--tr F. Randall

Tufello: A Rebel Community

Vigne Nuove--we started here - no "new vineyards" in sight. 

On a sunny day in mid-May, we got on the Honda Forza 300 and headed north to Vigne Nuove.  The name refers both to the quartiere/neighborhood of Vigne Nuove, and to one of Rome's largest public housing projects (above), this one from the 1970s. Our plan was to have a look at the housing project (which we did--we plan a full report in a future post), then walk south into Tufello, an older, more human-sized enclave just to Vigne Nuove's south. If you're not on a scooter or in a car, Tufello is accessible, at its southern end, by the relatively new Jonio stop (one beyond Conca d'Oro) on Metro's "B1" line (though some refer to waiting for a Metro B1 as "waiting for Godot"). Vigne Nuove means "new vineyards." We're not sure when it got its name, but the area obviously was at one point an agricultural area with vineyards, and ruins of a 1st-century AD villa have been found there. And "Jonio" is also spelled "Ionio" as in the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece.

"Welcome to Tufello, a Free and Rebellious Quartiere" - note the "Welcome" is expressed in BOTH the masculine and
feminine plural (very PC), instead of using the masculine plural to refer to both males and females - the classic use.

Tufello's "charm" comes in part from its geographical confinement; it's essentially a triangle with one angle at the top, bounded on the south by Viale Jonio, on the west by via Giovanni Conti, and on the east by via delle Vigne Nuove. At its center is Piazza degli Euganei (see below).

Just north of that piazza, off via Monte Massico, we encountered several apartment buildings--probably dating to the late 1940s or 1950s. The courtyards were less than elegant--not unusual for "public" spaces in Rome.  A few of the apartments had air conditioning, but here, as elsewhere in the city, clothes are dried by hanging them in the sun.

A sparse, uninviting courtyard.  Dianne checks the map. Yes, a print map.

This interior space had nice pine trees, but was overgrown

On one of the buildings, an ode to "Fabio," now deceased, "nel paradiso degli eroi" ("in the paradise of heroes").

Tufello has a cultural center, the C.C.P., or Centro di Cultura Popolare, offering a Yoga experience.

At the end of several blocks of this older housing, a new, more modern building:

Some new investment in the area

The main piazza has a large, somewhat awkward, modernist market, surrounded by the standard array of shops, many of them closed in the early afternoon, when we visited.

Many of Rome's neighborhoods have a "favorite son"--always a young man rather than a woman, and usually a political figure from the Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead), a period in the 1970s and early 1980s characterized by deep political divisions and violence. The identity of the favorite son defines the political identity of the neighborhood.

Tufello's walls tell the story.  In posters and wall art, the quartiere remembers Valerio Verbano.  Verbano was born into an anti-fascist family in 1961, and became an active militant during his high school years in the Rome neighborhood of Nuovo Salario.  He was a Communist and a member of Autonomia Operaia ("Worker's Autonomy" - loosely translated - perhaps "Power to the Workers" might be better).  In April 1979, Verbano was arrested and charged with fabricating explosive devices--basically, Molotov cocktails--in an abandoned building in San Basilio.  He was convicted and served 6 months in prison.

These signs appear on a gymnasium building (palestra). 

"Valerio Verbano--Militant Communist, Assassinated by the Fascist Skunks
An Idea Never Dies"

On February 22, 1980--three days from his 19th birthday--Verbano was shot and killed by three armed and masked men who had come to his home at via Monte Bianco 114, tied up his parents,and waited for Valerio to come home from school. Though the case was investigated many times over the years, it has never been solved--which may explain Verbano's prominence on Tufello's walls 40 years later. The Monte Bianco address places Verbano's home just south of Viale Jonio.

While much of the area's wall art and postering deals with Verbano, a good portion is more broadly political, marking the neighborhood as anti-fascist, militant and, after almost 80 years, still linked to the anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi partisans (partigiani) of World War II.  This wall immediately below links Verbano and Carla to the partisans.

"ieri partigiani"--yesterday, partisans

Identifying the enemies: money and Nazis--and something else

"Antifa Tufello"--anti-Fascist Tufello
Again, red and black flags

Cuore is heart, ribelle is rebels or rebellious. Not sure what a good translation would be
other than a literal "Rebellious heart". 

And the poster below reveals that Valerio is more than an idea; every year, on the anniversary of his death, the community marches in his memory, and for what he presumably stood for and against: against the "racism of the state," against the "war on the poor," "connecting the resistance."  A significant level of distrust of government here. (Tufello was cited in one of Conor Fitzgerald's novels as a neighborhood "where the police have not disturbed the criminal status quo." 

"1980...The Revolt Goes On...2019"

Bill

I've written many posts on "heroes" celebrated on Rome's walls, from both the left and the right. Here are some of them:
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-story-of-zippo.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/09/piazza-vescovio-anni-di-piombo-and.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2011/12/gabbo-death-and-life-of-gabriele-sandri.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/10/sites-of-anti-fascism-trionfale.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tale-of-two-suburbs-balduina.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2019/10/villa-certosa-hidden-rome-neighborhood.html

Best Posters of 2016

"Best" Posters has become a yearly feature of RST, and here we are once again, offering the "best" of 2016, all found in Rome in April, May and June.  Though the internet has doubtless eroded the presence and influence of posters in Italian culture, they nonetheless have a role here that they don't have in the U.S.--except perhaps in times of political upheaval like the late 1960s.  I am tempted to claim that postering is more common in societies with a significant leftist heritage--they were a significant feature of the visual landscape in China in 1979, for example, when we were there--but I can't say for sure that's true.

Postering also appears to aggregate in specific places.  Some locales in Rome--especially outlying suburbs--are more likely than others (e.g. the Centro) to have large numbers of posters.  We found an especially rich lode in Serenissima, on Rome's outer eastern side.

What makes a poster "best"?  Design.  A compelling message.  A story we haven't heard, or, if we do know the story, the sense that the poster reveals something quintessentially Italian or Roman.  In 2016, as was true in 2015, some of the best posters are those done by the far-right fringe.  They're angrier, and that can make for more compelling posters.  And most of the centrist political posters--ubiquitous during the run-up to the Rome mayoral election--are pedestrian.

Still, the left can produce some decent posters.  The one below at least goes beyond Vota Communista ("vote Communist").  It's both weird and refreshing to see that Italian Communism still exists; it all goes back to the important role played by Communists in the Partisan movement that battled the German occupation during World War II.  Today, according to the poster below, the enemies of the Communists are petty politicians (politicanti), the European Union, NATO, and the banks.

Enough! (vote Communist Party).

This poster (below), which appears to be part of the student mainstream at one of Rome's great universities--La Sapienza--strategically links the current generation of anti-fascists with the partisan wartime resistance:

Yesterday partisans, today anti-fascists.
What's with the German?

Resistance is also the theme of the poster below, authored by an organization (we presume) called Partizan.  Although the poster would seem to be appealing to thoughtful people ("Thinking people must resist"), the gas-masked figure looks anything but thoughtful.

Casa Pound, a right-wing bad-boys organization named after the American poet, Ezra Pound, who cozied up to the Mussolini regime in the early 1940s, is perhaps the most frequent posterer in Rome, helping to keep the form alive.  The Casa Pound folks are opposed to immigration, and beyond that they're big on not surrendering to the powers that be.  They appear to relish physicality and to locate their heroic heritage in ancient Rome.

Alcuni Italiani Non Si Arrendono!
"Some Italians Don't Surrender!"

"What is written with the blood of the fathers is not erased with the saliva of the politicians."

A close-up of the upper left portion of the above poster:

Scary dudes

The Blocco Studentesco ("Student Block"), responsible for the poster below, is a 2006 offshoot of Casa Pound, focusing on school issues.

Not quite sure what's doing on here.  "They Aassault/We Laugh!" Joyous resistance.

Once in a while the poster left gets its act together and posters against Casa Pound.  This poster grounds its opposition in an open immigration ideal--in Italian multiculturalism.

And mostly in English

As in the United States and England, there's strong opposition in Italy to international trade agreements that presumably cost workers jobs.  The message below is significant: No al TTIP refers to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed trade agreement between the EU and the United States that's been in the works since 2014.  The anti-TTIP folks are concerned that the nation states of Europe will be victimized by transnational corporations--especially, according to the poster's graphic, American companies

"Let's liberate ourselves from the 'Liberators'"

 Also under attack are austerity measures advocated by wealthy, creditor countries (like Germany) and imposed on poor, debtor countries (like Greece, Spain, and, to some extent, Italy). A decent graphic here (Piano B [Plan B]), but the poster's too busy to be visually arresting.

One of our design favorites is this poster, of uncertain political ideology.  It reads Roma non si vende"--"Rome is not for sale."  And it communicates this message with a delightful image of the Coliseum in a shopping cart.

Another top-design candidate is this anti-immigrant political poster ("We'll Stop the Alien Invasion"):

The poster below is austerely anti-design.  And yet its message--Siamo Già Tra Voi ("We are already among you") and signed "(hashtag) Enemies of the City," is compelling in its mystery and threatening tone.

The "What Happened to Dino?" poster that we found near Porta Metronia was mysterious, too, because we had no idea who Dino was.

Do you know what happened to Dino?

The most common poster in April was, understandably, the one below, announcing Liberation Day: 25 April.  It's not obvious why the date April 25 was chosen in 1946.  Although Liberation Day in general celebrates Italy's liberation from the horrific German occupation--and honors the resistance to the occupation--the country was not actually entirely free of the Nazis until May 1, 1945.  According to some sources, April 25 is important because on that date the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (CLNAI) proclaimed in a radio annoucement the death sentence for all Fascist leaders (Mussolini was killed 3 days later).  Others note that April 25 was the day Turin and Milan were liberated from the Nazis.  More than you needed to know.

Bill
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