Il mio libro ha l’obiettivo di presentare e analizzare la personificazione degli Stati nei secoli che hanno preceduto la Rivoluzione francese. La figura della Marianne costituisce l’esempio più celebre di personificazione della Repubblica francese. In contrasto con questo esempio ben noto e studiato, poche sono le ricerche dedicate al periodo premoderno, su cui non esistono studi completi e comparativi. Tuttavia, la raffigurazione di Francia svolge un ruolo ovvio come precorritrice di Marianne, e la continuità è ancora più evidente nel caso di Britannia, effigiata sulle monete fin dal 1666 ai giorni nostri. La personificazione in testi e immagini rappresenta, per molte entità statali della prima età moderna, un elemento rivelatore della loro auto-rappresentazione e del loro sviluppo costituzionale. Ciò vale per Hollandia come per Polonia, Austria e Hispania, e anche per Germania con le sue figlie, come Bavaria, Borussia o Helvetia. La figura di Madre Svea e quella di Russia sono apparse nel momento in cui la corrispondente entità politica è stata accolta nella comunità degli Stati: così come oggi una bandiera e un inno nazionale sono indispensabili alla vita di un nuovo Stato, in passato la personificazione era il simbolo della sua sovranità.

In che modo tutto ciò ha a che fare con l’Italia e Roma? Pur non costituendo un’entità politica unitaria fino all’esito delle battaglie risorgimentali, in quanto entità culturale e geografica l’Italia ha avuto a lungo una sua diffusa personificazione. Era spesso rappresentata nell’atto di compiangere il suo destino, con riferimento all’inizio delle Lamentazioni bibliche: un tempo aveva governato il mondo, ed ora era ridotta al ruolo di pedina nelle mani di potenze straniere.

Sebbene l’Italia non fosse un’entità politica unitaria, nella penisola esistevano grandi potenze politiche che diedero vita a significative personificazioni delle relative comunità. Venetia, in particolare, costituì un modello molto influente, valido persino nell’Europa settentrionale e orientale. La si vede raffigurata nella sala più importante del Palazzo Ducale, sede dell’autorità della Repubblica, nell’atto di regnare su terre e su mari. Intorno al 1584, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane e Veronese la immortalarono nei dipinti del soffitto centrale della Sala del Maggior Consiglio.

E che dire di Roma? A differenza di Venezia, la città non costituiva uno Stato. Era però la sede di un monarca universale, il papa, e dei suoi possedimenti secolari: lo Stato Pontificio. Anche il secondo monarca universale, l’imperatore del Sacro Romano Impero della Nazione Germanica, recava nel titolo un riferimento a Roma. L’espressione “Città Eterna” aveva un significato storico-salvifico: nell’interpretazione medievale del passo del profeta Daniele (2,37-41), l’Impero Romano era generalmente considerato l’ultimo impero prima del Giudizio Universale. Questo modello era radicato anche nell’antichità pagana: Roma era la città degli imperatori, ma in epoca repubblicana aveva già sottomesso gran parte del mondo allora conosciuto. Molto prima della nascita di Cristo, la res publica romana rappresentava sé stessa come una divinità trionfante, a cui una piccola raffigurazione della dea Victoria porge una corona d’alloro.

L’immagine di Roma era a sua volta ripresa e ispirata da quella di Pallade Atena. Questa dea, corrispondente alla Minerva romana, viene raffigurata in trono con elmo e armi e ha rappresentato un modello estremamente influente per le singole personificazioni nazionali, in particolare per quella britannica. Tuttavia, Britannia combinava il modello romano di ascendenza greca con un’altra raffigurazione della Britannia antica, ripresa da William Camden intorno al 1600 (ill.). Questa figura si trovava sul rovescio delle monete con busti imperiali e non era raro che fosse raffigurata in posizione sottomessa, ai piedi del suo sovrano o nell’atto di rendergli omaggio. Britannia e altre province romane documentavano così la dipendenza dei territori, rappresentati in forma femminile, dal loro forte protettore maschile.

Tuttavia, non si evidenzia alcuna continuità nell’uso delle allegorie delle province tra l’antichità e il primo periodo moderno. Il ricorso all’iconografia delle monete antiche avvenne solo nel Rinascimento, che in questo contesto merita pienamente il suo nome. Una condizione indispensabile per attingere a quel patrimonio è costituita da un’altra, fondamentale idea proveniente dal periodo antico, ma stavolta dall’ambito cristiano. Nel testo attribuito a San Paolo della Lettera agli Efesini 5:21-32, l’autore proclama che Cristo in quanto capo e la Chiesa in quanto suo corpo sono destinati a diventare una cosa sola, proprio come l’uomo e la donna nel matrimonio. L’idea del matrimonio mistico ebbe un impatto molto forte nel Medioevo ecclesiastico e secolare. Al momento della sua elezione, un vescovo non si univa forse alla sua diocesi in un matrimonio indissolubile? Lo stesso non valeva per il papa e la chiesa universale? E a proposito dell’altro monarca universale: l’imperatore non era forse lo sposo della sua res publica, l’impero, come affermava il giurista Cino da Pistoia intorno al 1300? Per poi lamentare, in veste di poeta, che la “gente” era rimasta vedova alla morte dell’imperatore Enrico VII, avvenuta nel 1313.
Siamo quindi ai tempi dell’amico di Cino, Dante, ed esattamente nell’Italia centrale, dove la ghibellina Pisa, favorevole all’imperatore, giocò un ruolo importante nella diffusione di questa metafora matrimoniale. In che modo tutto questo riguarda anche Roma? La città continuò a rappresentare sia il modello dell’impero eterno, che quello della sua capitale: non è un caso che, come altri pretendenti medievali, Pisa si considerasse una seconda Roma. Le stesse costituzioni dei comuni dell’Italia centrale, con i loro consoli e senatori, si richiamavano al modello romano. Tuttavia, nel Medioevo apparve un nuovo attore politico, ovvero il sovrano della città: che poteva essere l’imperatore stesso, ma altrettanto spesso un vescovo e, nei comuni, un podestà laico eletto. Nella stessa Roma convivevano tutte e tre le varianti: l’imperatore come capo dell’impero (romano), il papa come capo della Chiesa (romana), e il podestà, come per esempio Brancaleone degli Andalò (1220-1258), che di fatto fu il primo a far immortalare la personificazione di Roma sul metallo delle monete (fig.).

In questo contesto, la res publica personificata compare in veste di accusatrice di coloro che la maltrattano o la abbandonano al suo destino. Dante immagina Ytalia misera che saluta il suo compagno Enrico VII, in procinto di attraversare le Alpi per sposarla. Poco tempo dopo, alla morte di Enrico, Dante cita il libro delle Lamentazioni: “Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium”: la grande città di Roma è sprofondata come una vedova cieca, perché le mancano entrambi gli occhi. Con le sue parole, Dante si riferisce all’imperatore e al papa, ai quali Petrarca rivolge la medesima accusa, quella di aver abbandonato la loro sposa romana e di essersi stabiliti a nord delle Alpi: l’imperatore Carlo IV a Praga e i papi ad Avignone dal 1309 al 1377. In questo contesto Roma compare in diverse poesie, in Petrarca e nei suoi successori, tra cui Fazio degli Alberti.

Petrarca presenta la città come una vecchia matrona dai capelli aggrovigliati e ingrigiti, con un mantello strappato e il volto pallido, e ne elenca le glorie perdute: essa infatti è stata capo del mondo, regina delle città, sede dell’impero, rocca della fede cattolica, fonte di tutti le azioni degne di memoria (“Roma vero, mundi caput, urbium regina, sedes imperii, arx fidei catholice, fons omnium memorabilium exemplorum”). Roma invoca il suo sposo, Italia il suo salvatore. Ma l’imperatore teme il santo bacio della sua sposa e il bel volto di Italia – come se ci fosse qualcosa di più bello al mondo! Nel lamento di Petrarca, Roma come comunità politica e l’Italia come entità geografica tendono a identificarsi, aprendo così la strada alla personificazione politica della prima età moderna.

History that fades away? The long farewell of anti-fascism as civil religion

„Il lungo addio“, the final product in the form of a photographic history of the Dieter Bachmann era at Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2000-2003), was dedicated to all Italians who came to work and live in Switzerland. The photo book begins with a picture by Christian Schiefer showing the publicly displayed corpses of dictator Benito Mussolini, his lover Clara Petacci and a companion, who were seized by partisans a few days after the liberation while fleeing north and executed by order of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI), in which the later President of the Republic Sandro Pertini was also involved.

The end of the fascist dictatorship and liberation from German occupation could only be achieved with the support of the Allied Forces. However, the resistance struggle, in which a non-partisan committee of parties was involved, signaled the break of a generation with the regime as well as the dawn of a new era, even if 20 years of fascism had not left people’s mentalities unaffected and many authoritarian attitudes were passed on. Nevertheless, the Republic was proclaimed (beautifully portrayed in the film „C’è ancora domani“ by Paola Cortellesi) and a constitution was drawn up in the spirit of anti-fascism. Eighty years later and one hundred years after the murder of the socialist member of Parliament Giacomo Matteotti, Italy is governed by a radical right-wing coalition with Giorgia Meloni as the tactically shrewd Prime Minister who wants to secure political power for their parties through an announced electoral reform (for the historical parallel, see Emilio Gentile, Totalitarismo 100: Ritorno alla storia, Salerno Editrice, 2023). Are we observing the long farewell to anti-fascism as Italy’s civil religion? My stay at the ISR is dedicated to examining this question which requires some clarification before the actual research can begin.

Italy as an imagined Nation
The idea that Italy is challenged by a low level of mutual trust is a constant theme in its contemporary reflection (see the Italian debate around Robert Putnam’s book „Making Democracy Work“, Princeton 1994). The literature is legion denouncing a widespread lack of the „moral resources“ of a modern community of citizens, which would require a degree of shared commitment to overarching values to form a cultural community defined by those values. The notion of “many Italies” has been prevalent since the nation’s birth in 1861. Loyalty to family, local community, the church, and formerly political parties — though this has diminished — has traditionally been stronger than loyalty to the nation, shaping Italian social actions over the decades.

Despite their limited strength, the objective presence and effectiveness of national ideas in Italian political culture cannot be denied either. Italian political culture had different conditions for developing a civil religion understood as a “philosophy of the citizen” encompassing moral convictions, political options, social classifications, and perceptions, compared to the U.S., whose civil religion is a paradigmatic example of a democratically understood religious interpretation of national history. In this line of thought, in the process of political self-assertion, the Christian citizen abstracts from himself and adapts to roles within a liberal political system, which relies on preconditions it cannot guarantee itself. The contradictory role of Catholicism and the Church in Italian history — especially during the 19th-century unification process known as the Risorgimento — and in Italian society creates particularly challenging conditions for developing a civil religion. Unlike the U.S., Italy does not have over two hundred years of uninterrupted republican-democratic tradition, although this US-model shows evident signs of erosion. In the 163 years since national unity, Italy has experienced three different forms of government: a monarchy from 1861, a fascist dictatorship from 1922, and a democratic republic only since 1946.

Three historical moments were important in which a civil religion was debated: the Renaissance, the Risorgimento, and the mentioned Resistenza.

For the Renaissance, Nicolò Machiavelli is an important reference who advised Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of the Florentine Republic, to unify Italy through cooperation with Milan, Venice, and Naples, while challenging France’s ambitions in Italy. Machiavelli’s writings offer an early example of Italian identity, rooted in the illustrious political myth of ancient Rome. His reflections highlight a critical issue for Italy’s nation-building: the presence of the Papal States. Machiavelli developed a republican tradition critical of the Church, viewing religion’s influence on social integration and political legitimization as a significant obstacle to the unification of Italy.

The Risorgimento (1815-1861) refers to the period in Italian history when political and social movements led to its unification. This period concluded in 1870 with the capture of Rome, marking the completion of Italian unification. In all conceptions of the Italian nation, the reference to ancient Rome plays a central role as a source of a symbol of immortal civilization and the core of national identity. Every high point in national history is seen as a new manifestation of the glorious past.

Italian identity exemplifies the „invention of a nation“ based on a common cultural canon shared by a narrow intellectual elite. However, the initial conditions were particularly unfavorable characterized by large economic disparities, considerable cultural fragmentation, and the absence of a large national bourgeoisie. It became even more harmful during fascism which practiced a divisive totalitarian political religion, based on the glorification of war, of violence and submission. The organization of nationalist symbolism in an organic „national religion“, which had been lacking until then, was probably the real novelty of fascist ideology.

But after two years of a war waged in the wake of the German troops (1941-43), Italy was only able to avoid an early defeat in the Mediterranean with the help of its German ally. The Allied landing in Sicily in the spring of 1943 sealed Italy’s military defeat. During the two years of resistance built up by formerly illegal political organizations from the left to the center against the Republic of Salò and the German occupation, during this civil war that was also a class war and liberation war (Gian Enrico Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una nazione, Il Mulino 1993), an anti-fascist civil religion was formed. The cardinal point of this civil religion was the imagination of Italy becoming a constitutional democratic republic and the commemoration of those who shared the values of antifascism and gave their lives for the republican transformation of Italy, which is commemorated in particular on Liberation Day on April 25.

The examination of these rites of commemorations in Parliamentary speeches, from the Cold War to the crises of our days, is the research I will do after my stay at the Istituto Svizzero and during my sabbatical leave in Naples this fall.

CinePaesaggi – Modes of Appropriating Rural Landscapes in Film Practice and Research A Conference Report.

Rural landscapes are a social construction, just like urban landscapes. Both have long been connected discursively and through visible and invisible infrastructures. Our sensory perception and affective experience of rural landscapes and those (re)produced in the media are interdependent and never neutral. Our reception and imaginaries of rural landscapes are based on aesthetic, cultural, economic, political, social, and technical factors, and evolve within contexts of identities, norms, and values on individual, local, regional, and national scales. 

How do contemporary filmmakers deal with these complex relationships and create their poetic visions within Italian and Swiss landscapes? To what extent can the structures and interests of the film industry have an influence on which and how rural landscapes are mediatized? How does the video essay as a research by design method and output appropriate and explore landscapes? An interdisciplinary conference with Italian and Swiss guest speakers from the field of film production and research addressed these and other questions on 27 March 2024 at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia a Roma. The evening concluded with the screening of Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte (IT/DE/CH 2010).

Cinema’s power to change a tradition

Michelangelo Frammartino is a Milan-based filmmaker and lecturer who studied both architecture and cinema. His award-winning films Il dono (2003), Le quattro volte (2010) and Il buco (2021) are documentary and feature film hybrids. They are a cinematically unique long-term study of rural spaces, communities, and traditions on the border between Basilicata and Calabria and, above all, in central Calabria where his family comes from. Le quattro volte is a poetic vision of the revolving cycles of life and nature and the unbroken traditions of a timeless place; a story of one soul that moves through four successive lives, from the human to the animal, vegetal, and, finally, to the mineral. Starting from the tree episode exploring the Pita Festival in Alessandria del Carretto in Pollino National Park, Frammartino created the video installation Alberi. It was based on a forgotten pagan tradition of one man disguising himself as a tree in spring, maybe to ask for charity. The artwork had the power to bring the tradition back, while changing it: instead of a single man, groups of people now do a procession.

Connecting and creating with the locals

Michael Koch is a filmmaker and lecturer based in Berlin and Basel. He won the prize for best feature film at the Swiss Film Awards 2023 with his second feature film Drii Winter (2022), the tragic story of a young couple living in a rural landscape and community. It was based on a true story of a woman who lost her partner due to cancer. The filmmaker met her by chance. He understood that the way of dealing with this destiny was closely related to the rural landscape. It shapes the modes of life within it and has an influence on how people face the unpredictable. After ethnographic studies lasting a couple of years, Koch became convinced that his film had to be created together with the inhabitants of a specific landscape. He chose the remote Isenthal valley in central Switzerland. Despite the doubts of a funding commission, he worked with non-professional actors from the region. The small film team provided the necessary intimacy and 70 (!) days of shooting. The 1:1.33 format focused on the people and on the steepness of the mountains instead of celebrating them by means of a widescreen format. The fascinatingly detailed portrait also created lasting human contacts between Koch and his protagonists.

Cinematographic versus touristic landscapes

Niccolò Castelli is a filmmaker, screenwriter, film producer, and artistic director of Solothurn Film Festival. For his talk he was invited to reflect on the topic in his role as the director of the Ticino Film Commission. Funded in 2014 as the first film commission in Switzerland it supports any audiovisual project as a competence center while promoting the region as a location and land of cinema. TFC is financed by the Department of Finance and Economy of the Republic and Canton of Ticino, the Banca dello Stato and the tourism organizations of Canton Ticino. Castelli’s talk about the contested ideas of ‘beauty’ and the realities of filmmaking revealed the challenging position of the Ticino Film Commission, irrespective of stereotypes. It is an institution connecting audiovisual competences and visions with the realities and demands of the film industry and regional economies that strive for placemaking in a context where the importance of locations must not take second place to the funding of productions. Castelli mentioned the difference between film plots specifically located in a landscape versus those interested primarily in regional funding. He explicitly criticized the observation that regional film commissions are starting to compete and concluded by saying that the TFC aims for film productions that deal with the very identities of Ticino’s landscapes and that give something back to the region – not only in terms of the economy but in a constant dialogue between identity, storytelling, and new perspectives.

The “I” and “border thinking”

Silvia Cipelletti from Milan studied and worked at the Academia di Architettura at the Università della Svizzera italiana USI before joining the new USI Chair on the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Locarno Film Festival. Her PhD, entitled “Audio-visual Atlas of the Swiss-Italian Border Landscape”, is part of the SNSF research project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies”. Her videographic approaches are based on several research by design projects, for example, about the industrial landscape of ore extraction in Kiruna or the exploration of Gibellina and Nuova Gibellina. Her PhD project engages more broadly with the complexity of border and marginal landscapes. It underscores the intricate relationship between marginal landscapes and knowledge production. She bases her theoretical framework on Walter D. Mingolo’s study Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000), while using the video essay as a tool of knowledge production that always reflects and stresses the positionality of the “I” as a researcher.

Concluding remarks

The two filmmaker contributions showed forms of intense negotiations with peripheric rural landscapes and their communities. The film commission contribution revealed the challenges of not reproducing cliches promoted by tourist offices as funding partners. The research contribution at the intersection of landscape and cinema studies presented the video essay as an epistemological tool and border thinking as a critical concept with huge topicality.