Tiburtino District, Rome, 1949–1954. Plan. As published in Casabella continuità 215 (April–May 1957). 78 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1) BRUNO REICHLIN TRANSLATED BY ANTONY SHUGAAR. REVISED BY BRANDEN W. JOSEPH In film or in literature, “Neorealism” is not a label selected by a group or movement to describe a more-or-less clearly defined formal and ideological program propa- gated through manifestos and journals. Instead, the term was coined by critics and used to designate a set—at first glance a fairly disparate set—of intentions and works that appeared bound together by shared traits that could be traced, at least in theory, to movements and works that had previously been designated by the term “realism.” In architecture, however, the idea of Neorealism cannot be described as the successor to any movement of “Realism” that could be construed as a historic antecedent. Only the occasional left-wing critic has claimed to iden- tify a realist impulse in the most radical forms of “functionalism,” although it has subsequently become clear that the so-called “Neorealist” Italian architects almost entirely ignored the work of Georg Schmidt, Karel Teige, and others, even if the political propensities of many of the Italians might have led us to suppose that they had an understanding or felt a certain indulgence toward “socialist realism” in architecture.1 Italian architectural criticism derived the term Neorealism from literature and film once the works and authors laying claim to the term already enjoyed a certain popularity among critics and the public, and those who were designated Neorealist architects accepted the description with varying degrees of conviction and enthusiasm. In the following I will attempt to provide—and I will try to do no more than this—an inventory and analysis of the “rhetorical figures” (appropriate to an architectural discourse) that produced effects of form and meaning sufficient to legitimize the extension of the term Neorealism from the domain of literature and film to that of architecture. In order to avoid weighing the demonstration down beyond reasonable measure, I will allow myself, when writing about literature and film, certain ellipses that may seem disorienting, as well as an exceedingly opportunistic array of references. In Italian literary criticism, the term Neorealism was, it seems, first used by Grey Room 05, Fall 2001, pp. 78–101. © 2001 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Arnaldo Bocelli in 1931 in reference to Alberto Moravia’s novel The Time of Indifference of 1929 and Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte of the following year.2 In this essay, Bocelli contrasted the formalism of the authors close to the journal Ronda to the “contentism” of authors such as Moravia, Alvaro, Jovine, Vernari, Brancati, and others. While in Moravia’s The Time of Indifference the term Neorealism was applied to a pitiless portrait of a decaying, ideal-less bour- geoisie, which the author captured right down to the banality of its conversations and idiosyncrasies, in Alvaro it designated a description of the social and moral condition of the world of rural Calabria, described in detail, without any conces- sions to folklore or the myths of country life. Here, clearly, the term derives from an imported notion of realism that first appeared in the nineteenth century with the French author, essayist, and critic Champfleury and progressively served to designate the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers, as well as the paintings of Gustave Courbet and so on.3 As though to minimize the debt to their French cousins, Italian writers used the term “verismo” (as opposed to “realismo”) to designate author Giovanni Verga’s vast fresco of the “defeated” members of nineteenth-century Sicilian society. The novelist described in detail the customs and lifestyles of the various social groups, paying particular attention to the syntax, vocabulary, and modes of argumenta- tion typical of each class and profession. In the same way, Federico De Roberto’s historical novel The Viceroys would also be called “verist.”4 In Marxist inspired literary and artistic criticism, realism had been accorded a central role since Karl Marx expressed his great admiration for Balzac and—as Friedrich Engels related in a letter to his friend, the author Margaret Harkness—described him as a “master of realism . far greater . than all the Zolas, past, present, or future.”5 But let us return to Neorealism. A surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals: these are the identifying characteristics of a literary production that put the sycophants of the culture of the fascist regime on their guard and laid the foundations for the novels and accounts of the Italian Resistance and Reconstruction. Italo Calvino recalled that, for the younger generations emerging from the war, Neorealism was not a school but a climate, the experience of a collective state of mind shared everywhere in the trains, that were starting to run again, crammed with people and bags of flour and drums of oil, [where] every passenger would recount to complete strangers 80 Grey Room 05 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 the adventures which had befallen him. The result was that those who began writing in that period found them- selves dealing with the same subject matter as these anonymous storytellers: not only did we have the adventures that each one of us had endured person- ally or witnessed, but there were also tales which came to us already formed as narratives, with a voice, a cadence, a facial gesture to accompany them. However—and Calvino’s emphasis is quite important—“Characters, landscapes, shoot-outs, political messages, dialect words, swear-words, lyric passages, vio- lence and sexual encounters, all these were but colours on our palette, notes on our scale.” Because, he continues, “there were never such obsessive formalists as ourselves; we claimed to be a school of objective writers, but there were never such effusive lyricists as us.”6 These observations about the formalism of those who claimed to be writing in the service of content go straight to the heart of Neorealist poetics. They apply even more strongly to the architecture which, as opposed to other arts, finds itself, so to speak, hampered by the fact that its raison d’être is undeniably utili- tarian. But let us pause for a moment longer on this Neorealist “climate.” In a recent conference, Gianni Rondolini stated that: The image of Neorealism . is the Italy of the Liberation, of the immediate post-War period. Destroyed cities, poverty, and a disintegrating social fab- ric. In this raw material grew the great experiment that in time informed every means of expression: radio, newspaper supplements, films, and books. In the face of a mutilated society there was a desire for a sincere art, capable of giving a voice to the defeated: an art to serve reality, to revive itself in a “Neorealism of the image.”7 At the same conference Alberto Farassino went even further; Neorealist cinema, he claimed, “was not an elitist trend confined to the world of ideology, but a mat- ter of everyday life that passed from film to reality, and vice-versa. Something that was propagated by the popular press and not by intellectuals.”8 It fell to the cre- ators of a Neorealist cinema to “retouch” the stories where they were a bit too seductive and to undercut certain legends. “The term ‘Neorealism’ was born with Ossessione (1943),” recalled Luchino Visconti in an interview in 1965. “It hap- pened when I sent the first rushes of my film from Ferrara to my film editor Mario Sarandrei in Rome.” A few days later Sarandrei wrote back to say: “I don’t know how to define this type of cinema other than the term ‘neorealist.’” After causing a scandal at its opening on May 16, 1943, the film received Mussolini’s approval.9 Reichlin | Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 As in literature, the themes and language of Neorealist cinema had been in gesta- tion even before the joint action of the Allies and the Italian Resistance brought the collapse of Fascism. Attesting to this are the screenplays by Luigi Comencini and Cesare Zavattini that put an end to “imaginary story lines” and “films with white telephones”; or the article by Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis written in the midst of the war, in 1941, which established from the very title a connection between Verga’s “verismo” and a courageous program for the rejuvenation of Italian cinema. In “Truth and Poetry: Verga and Italian Cinema,” Alicata and De Santis proclaimed a “Faith in truth and in the poetry of truth, faith in man and in the poetry of man.”10 In a later essay they supplied more concrete details on the tasks they had given themselves: We also . want to take our cameras into the streets, the fields, the harbors, and the factories of our country. We too are persuaded that one day we shall create our finest film by following the slow and tired steps of a factory worker returning home at the end of the day, narrating the essential poetry of a new and pure life that contains within itself the secret of its aristocratic beauty.