Europe’s faith in its classical tradition was irreparably damaged by the crisis of belief and culture caused by World War I. Yet in Italy, the social and financial unrest of the 1920s fueled the propagandistic exploitation of‘‘Roman’’ ideals by Benito Mussolini and his Fascist party. During the 20-odd years of this regime, the renovatio imperii (renewal of the empire) inspired not only imperialistic ventures in Greece and Africa, but the renewal of Roman festivals, a ‘‘Roman’’ calendar dating from the advent of Fascism, and a style of public architecture intended to evoke a ‘‘masculine’’ revival of classical monumentality. Under the Duce, ancient Rome was glorified as an exemplar of heroic militarism, and the valor of its history was revived both in oversized statues and buildings and in the practice of the ‘‘Roman’’ salute. The complex of buildings on the outskirts of Rome known as EUR - the site of a world fair, or Esposizione Universale di Roma, planned for 1942 but canceled by the war - offers a notable instance of the Fascist reworking of classical architecture. Still, the Roman enthusiasms of the regime led to achievements more lasting than displays of patriotic propaganda. Mussolini clearly identified with Augustus as an autocratic ruler establishing Italian prosperity at home and power abroad; and in 1937, the bimillennium of the emperor’s birth, Mussolini commissioned the restoration of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), which depicts Augustan achievements. He also sponsored extensive excavations of classical monuments and famously surpassed the emperor Trajan by draining the Pontine Marshes, a malarial wetland that by 1940 hosted a series of ‘‘Roman colonies’’: Aprilia, Latina, Pomezia, Pontinia, and Sabaudia.
During the early twentieth century, the mythical Mediterranean persisted in Italian poetry, bridging the late Romantic effusions of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) and the Hermetic seascapes of Eugenio Montale (1896-1981; Nobel prize 1975). Inevitably, the early Italian cinema exploited the Roman past, at first evoking its Romanticized depictions by Victorian and fin-de-siecle artists. The epic style of Mario Caserini’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) and Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and Maciste (1915) influenced D. W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance (1916). After World War I, the Italian movie industry declined, but in 1937 Mussolini founded Cinecitta (the Italian Hollywood, outside of Rome), whose productions were inaugurated by Carmine Gallone’s Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus), a Fascist-sponsored epic with a decidedly less republican vision of history than Petrarch’s Africa!
After World War II, Italy regained its standing as a major film producer and profited from the renewed fascination of moviegoers with the classical world. During the 1950s and 1960s, Italy provided inexpensive scenery and extras for what were called ‘‘sandal and spear’’ epics, and Hollywood producers bankrolled such iconic successes as William Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959) and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), which were ‘‘shot on location,’’ as it were. During the same years, Federico Fellini (1920-97) was portraying the Americanization of his adopted city in La dolce vita (The sweet life) (1959); but within a decade he, too, turned to the classical past as the inspiration of his poetic and dreamlike vision of the Roman past in Satyricon (1970) and Roma (1972).
Around 1960, the gifted poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) undertook an Italian translation of Vergil’s Aeneid that he soon abandoned, and a version of Sophocles’ Antigone that was never published. But the classical tradition was also central to his intense and well-publicized involvement with the theater and motion pictures. In addition to his original dramas, Pasolini translated Aeschylus’ Oresteia (1960) and rendered Plautus’ Milesgloriosusin Roman dialect as Il vantone (The braggart, 1963). After his first black-and-white films, based on his own fiction about contemporary Rome, Pasolini took on larger projects in color including Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969) - adaptations of Greek tragedy that anticipated Fellini’s more whimsical evocations of ancient Rome. But the ancient world was only one of various eras and cultures that inspired Pasolini, and his film career, cut short by his violent murder in 1975, ended with a so-called Trilogy of Life (1970-4) that drew on Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the Arabian Nights.
As if in reaction to the Romantic movement, Greek antiquity also exercised its fascination, albeit sporadically, over postwar Italian writers. The Lucianic tradition inspired the Dialoghi con Leuco (Dialogues with Leucothea) by Cesare Pavese (190850). Written between 1945 and 1947, this series of 27 brief dialogues - originally titled Uomini e d'ei (Men and gods) - evokes the works of Lucian and of his imitator Leopardi. In poetic exchanges, pairs of figures like Oedipus and Tiresias or Circe and Leucothea examine the meaning of mythological events in a sort of lyrical existentialism that, while grounded in ancient myth, holds implications for the contemporary human condition. The presence of Hermes signals Pavese’s own ‘‘hermetic’’ reworking of Greek mythology as a vessel for autobiographical symbolism, which is comparable to Dante’s Vita nuova (New life) as a figural rereading of the poet’s experience. Yet Dante’s cosmological framework is here replaced by an archetypal mythology that derives from the historic vision of Vico, the anthropological symbolism of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, and the collective imagination of Carl Jung.
An even more impressive monument to Frazer, and to the poet and mythographer Robert Graves, is found in Roberto Calasso’s Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1988). This rhapsodic prose poem unites the threads of Greek mythology in a poetic prose-poem whose opening pages emblematically echo Vico’s observations on Europa. Like Pasolini and Pavese, Calasso seems drawn to Greek antiquity because it is remoter than the Roman past and thus more susceptible to personal interpretation. At the same time, the twentieth-century revitalization of the classical tradition entails its relativization. Unlike the Roman heritage embraced by Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Pascoli, classical antiquity was now viewed as only one of many valid cultural paradigms. It is not surprising to find that Calasso’s later novel, Ka (1996), deals with the origins of Buddhism.
During the postwar period, Italo Calvino (1923-85) achieved worldwide fame for his innovative narratives. Yet when he was invited to deliver the Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1985, he abandoned Borges and French deconstruction in favor of the classical tradition. Not surprisingly for a writer concerned with narrative invention and structure, Calvino turned to ancient Greek rhetoric. Interrupted by his sudden death, his Six Memos for the Next Millennium actually consists of five lectures on literary criteria - lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity - that reflect the rhetorical categories of the second-century orator Hermogenes (Kirby 2000). Significantly, the very first lecture, ‘‘Lightness,’’ begins with a retelling of the myth of Perseus and Medusa, with quotations from Ovid and Montale.
World History
