Adorno, Kracauer, Ortega y Gasset: these are just a few of the thinkers who, at the turn of the 20th Century, expressed critical views on cinema and the way it affects its audience. Most poets...

Edoardo Sanguineti’s second novel Il Giuoco dell’Oca was written between 1963 – the year of the publication of Capriccio italiano – and 1967, and it was conceived as the ideal second step (“stazione”) of a...

In his lengthy 1960s correspondence with architectural historian Bruno Zevi, from Bogotà architect Angiolo Mazzoni lamented that, unlike many of his colleagues who worked under Mussolini, not only he had to move to Colombia but...

In Carlo Emilio Gadda’s modernist works, dress never constitutes a merely instrumental element of narrative. Rather, it serves to reflect the social habitus of a character, or its very habits of being. In her Atlas...

In 1972, the Dutch visual poet Herman Damen published an outstanding critical text illustrating the daring and multifaceted expressions of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry as follows: ‘a living poesia visiva uses all available information and participation...

Artist Toti Scialoja (1914-1998) was a man of many talents: while a poet, first and and foremost, he quit writing after a negative review and for years devoted himself to painting and set design. He...

Take the language of comic strips and give it to one of the most charismatic avant-garde singers. Pair her with an abstract painter who doubles in graphic design. Wrap up by putting a comic-loving semiologist...

There is a photograph, taken around 1920, of the Olivetti manager Domenico Burzio. Olivetti was the first Italian company to make a typewriter, and it went on, after World War II, to embody the spirit...

Cultural history is full of examples of the fascinating interactions between art and literature. The verbal representation of an image known as ‘ekphrasis’, famously seen in Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles or John...

In 1986, the Venice Biennale gave much attention to a renewed interest in the relationship between art and science: a thematic umbrella under which the latest developments in the field of communication technology were featured....

In June 2011, a group of artists who identified themselves as ‘lavoratori e lavoratrici dello spettacolo’, occupied an historic theatre in Rome – the Teatro Valle – with the aim to prevent its privatisation or...

Once upon a time there was the storyteller – the aedo, the bard, the cantastorie. He – or she – was a performer and a magician, an author, an actor, a shaman, repeating the stories...

The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini (Firenze, 1975) presents a new form of writing which combines the metrical structure of a highly poetic and rhythmic prose as in a ballad, with theatrical/cinematic direct speech and...

Why is collaborative writing regarded with distrust in the Humanities, while in the Sciences articles by multiple authors are standard practice? A possible answer can be found in an essay by Donald Pease that explores...

‘How dangerously blurring would it be […] if the Nazi heart had the cheek or the hypocrisy even to beat for Franz Marc or, in another field, for Bartók […]. The fact that it is unfortunately...

Gianni Toti (Rome, 24 June 1924 – 8 January 2007) was the Italian poet, author, journalist, photographer and filmmaker who created ‘Poetronica’, a fusion of poetry and electronics. The poet demonstrated the potential of electronic language by...

by Florian Mussgnug When the members of Gruppo 63 assembled for the third time, in 1965, to discuss the fate of the experimental novel, Gillo Dorfles agreed to open the debate with a series of...

In the 70s and 80s, Italy was a fertile ground for the experimentation of video as art practice. At the time, the most relevant Italian video art centres – which included art/tapes/22, Centro Video Arte...

Cinema has influenced modern and contemporary culture in many ways, for example by contributing to reshaping language, reinforcing or dismantling sexual biases, addressing politics and family order, fostering fashion trends, and triggering new aspirations or...

Co-authorship in fiction is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that entails different types of collaboration. In my opinion, it can be seen as a planned and deliberate collaboration between two (or more) authors leading to...

In the 21st century social media has created great opportunities for collaborative writing (Rettberg 2013 and 2014). Collaboration and interactivity have become common and ordinary practices on the web. Communities of users around the globe...

In 1962, the journal Questo e altro, in a position article, questioned the traditional boundaries of literature: Quali sono oggi i confini della letteratura, tra l’arcadia e il proclama, il laboratorio e la denuncia, il...

[translated by Georgia Wall] In the catalogue accompanying the 1990 exhibition Roma anni ’60. Al di là della pittura, the founder of Rome’s Tartaruga Gallery, Plinio De Martiis, declares, ‘if you went to certain galleries,...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1977 student movement in Italy. Unlike 1968, the events of 1977 continue to linger in a grey zone suspended between personal testimony and historical analysis, between militant...

The definition of difficult heritage I use here is indebted to Sharon Macdonald’s important study of the heritage of Nazi Germany, according to which difficult heritage is ‘a past that is recognised as meaningful in...

Dario Fo (1926-2016) absorbed a wide range of arts into the field of theatre. Trained as a painter and architect, he entered the world of theatre and radio broadcasting in 1951. He wrote, acted, directed,...

Monday 13 February, 12-2 pm, a Tate Modern Workshop at Tate Exchange Join us in London, at Tate Modern, on Monday 13 February for an interactive workshop on Italian Futurism. The event is part of...

A work by Mario Schifano shown at the recent exhibition Roma Pop City 60-67 at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) is a creative remaking of a famous photograph portraying five members of the Futurist...

(translated by Kate Willman) Augmented Reality (AR) is a medium based on geolocation, computer vision, the use of specific apps (Aurasma, Blipper) and a mobile device (smartphone, tablet). In the last few years, it has...

If one were to choose an iconic piece of Futurist painting that best encapsulates the potentialities of interartistic exchange, Luigi Russolo’s La musica would be hard to beat. The painting is part of the permanent...

(translated by Kate Willman) Before Luchino Visconti’s film Bellissima, before directing the actors on the set, shooting, editing and cutting for censorship, all of which took place between June and December 1951, there was the...

My launch of Futurist Women: Florence, Futurism and the New Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 – 2016) was held in Senate House, London, on 7 June 2016, with Katia Pizzi as chair and Simona Storchi as...

“Le storie sono sempre convergenze di diverse nature” (“Stories are always convergences of different natures”), stated Aldo Nove illustrating the idea behind Fabio Vacchi’s opera Lo Specchio Magico (Urban Art Dance Opera), which premiered at...

Memory is continuously shaped in the present, and increasingly so through the use of new media. Indeed, the proliferation of new media technologies, products and aesthetics is inextricably linked to changing ways of remembering. Digital...

There is a famed and frequently quoted passage in Epic and Novel in which the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, uses the terms «novel-ise» and «novel-isation» in order to refer to the overpowering embrace that the...

Throughout his career, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) experimented across a variety of artistic media, including poetry, fiction, cinema, drama, and painting. Yet it is in his early cinema – the so-called “national-popular phase”, including Accattone...

In the opening article of the architectural magazine Quadrante, edited by the writer Massimo Bontempelli and the art critic, curator and collector Pier Maria Bardi and published in Milan between 1933 and 1936, Bontempelli provocatively...

Autofiction – blurring the lines between an author’s real-life experiences and invention – is an example of a frequently intermedial and interartistic practice that has particularly flourished in recent years. It has experienced a surge...

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen some films. Some on the television and computer. Others on the big screen, in different cinemas, in different cities. One afternoon, in a seat near the back of...

The idea of the digital age has to be fundamental to any meaningful discussion of contemporary interartistic and intermedial practice. However, it is not without its problems: Should we only talk about artistic practices with...

Art is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. This is why critical debates about contemporary culture matter, not only to specialists. This is why we are fascinated by “-isms”, by new names for our...

The essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) which opens Clement Greenberg’s volume Art and Culture (1961) remains one of the most influential discussions of modernism and its relationship with popular culture. Greenberg’s championing of avant-garde movements...