This article explores the trajectory of the Italian comic archetype, ‘The Opportunist’, and how it illuminates, and allows us to draws connections between, numerous junctures of modern Italian history. The caricature ‘Arlecchino’, deriving from the masked ‘types’ of the commedia dell’arte of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is an historic exemplar of the Italian ‘everyman’ who simultaneously evades and exploits the established order in order to ‘get by’, ‘get ahead’ and survive. Filmmakers of la commedia all’italiana such as Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and Lina Wertmuller, employed this caricature of the wily – yet ultimately harmless – petty crook in their work. They did so not in order to reinforce prejudices of Italians as self-serving and apathetic, but in order to examine what it meant to ‘survive’ 20 years of Fascism and the socio-political turmoil of post-war Italy. Examining how this caricature has historically evolved according to its ever-shifting social milieu illuminates not only certain defining moments of Italian history, but also how this archetype has contributed to popular understandings about Italy’s past and its people.

This essay explores the 1950s as a space of cultural transition through two bodies of iconic images: Tazio Secchiaroli’s 1958 reportage of Aiché Nanà’s striptease and Franco Pinna’s documentation of the rituals of mourning during his work in Salento with anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. Produced on the eve of the miracolo economico, these images are iconic condensations of the contrasting cultural horizons defining the national imaginary of 1950s Italy. Challenging the self-containment of these images, the essay journeys outside the frames into the surrounding historical, cultural and geographical landscapes. To explore how, through photography, Italy visually negotiated the persistence of the past and the advent of modernity, the author traces a genealogy of Italian photography from political action to paparazzismo and examines the significance of the ethnographic journey to the south. Pinna’s photography and de Martino’s ethnography emerge as sites where post-war Italy faces the intractable realities of death and the return of a ‘bad’ past. The essay investigates how ritual mourning engages the photographic image to reveal an amnesiac culture of the spectacle exposing Italy’s relation to history as a modern repressed.