We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
Abstract: Bologna is one of the most iconic locations of the 1977 Movement. In 1977, the city became a creative laboratory where a number of collective agents emerged: students, artists, feminists, and (proto-) LGBT activists. “Red Bologna” was also an arena of violence and tragic events. This essay examines a wide range of documents that have mediated— and “re-mediated”—the Movement, including narrative fiction, documentaries, comics, and memoirs. Ultimately, our goal is to discuss these materials as testimonies of an experimental form of sociality that has been generally assimilated with 1970s terrorism or dismissed as a generational rebellion for the sake of rebellion.
Keywords: Bologna, 1977 Movement, Mario Mieli, Andrea Pazienza, Pier Vittorio Tondelli
In her memoir Antologaia (2007), human rights and LGBTQIA+ activist Porpora Marcasciano returns to her time in Bologna in the late 1970s, when she visited the city with a few friends for a brief period:
A Bologna parte di noi fu ospitata da Valerie e parte da Cocò, la compagna di Marco Sanna, una femminista che lavorava e abitava in un consultorio dell’Aied [Associazione italiana per l’educazione demografica], situato in un grazioso villino di via Massarenti. Valerie invece abitava in una casa occupata in via Clavature, conosciuta come la “Traumfabrik”, la stessa in cui abitavano Andrea Pazienza e molti dell’entourage della Bologna alternativa. Bologna la rossa, la gaia, l’anticonformista; Bologna l’alternativa, la punk, la libertina; per alcuni Sodoma, per altri Stalingrado, per noi tutte un’oasi in cui rilassarsi e delirare.
In this passage, Marcasciano gathers together the people, places, and dynamics that made Bologna the epicenter of a political laboratory, the so-called 1977 Movement, which experimented with practices of sociality, community, and creativity foreign to traditional notions of power. The emergence of this leftist extra-parliamentary movement is directly connected to socioeconomic changes that occurred in Italy after the fast economic growth of the 1950s–1960s and the subsequent civil unrest of 1968: many workers’ groups detached themselves from trade unions, while young people, “in both the manual and intellectual sectors of the labor market were struggling with unemployment and felt that the overall organization of labor, politics, and society was deeply unfulfilling.”
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
