This monograph deals with four Italian sf novels of the 1960s: Dino Buzzati’s Il grande ritratto [Larger than Life, 1960], Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Il cavallo venduto [The Horse Sold, 1963], Emilio De Rossignoli’s H come Milano [H for Milan, 1965], and Lino Aldani’s Quando le radici [When the Root, 1977]. Buzzati’s novel is the only one available in English, having first been translated as Larger Than Life (1962) and then as The Singularity (2024). Comberiati devotes a section of the first chapter of his monograph to explaining the criteria for his selections, stating that, “to show the resistance of some authors to the culture originating from the Italian economic boom, I have analyzed works which went through this period” (47; my trans.). Since the Italian boom (or miracle) is generally conceived of as the period (1955-1965) when a mostly agrarian country became one of the most industrialized nations in the world, one might wonder why Aldani’s novel was included in the corpus, but Comberiati underscores the fact that its first six chapters were written in 1966, even though Quando le radici was only published eleven years later.
The aim of this monograph is clearly stated in its title, translated as “Italian science fiction against the economic boom,” which is undoubtedly a paradox. Notwithstanding a series of forerunners, sf arrived in Italy for good in 1952, when the most important publishing house, Mondadori, started publishing Urania, now Italy’s oldest sf magazine, thus making British, American, and French works available to Italian readers. And we are in the same decade in which the Italian boom began, so it may easily be argued that the huge socioeconomic change brought about by industrialization is intimately connected to the introduction of a literature based on techno-scientific imagination and its commercial success: no Italian sf boom without the Italian economic boom.
Interestingly, Italy was exposed simultaneously to the optimistic Golden Age sf of the 1930s and 1940s (not available in translation before, due to the cultural autarchy of the Fascist regime and WWII) and to the more cautious and monitory sociological sf of the 1950s. Hence, sf also provided Italian readers with cautionary tales about the ills that may be brought about by science and technology. Comberiati seems to suggest that the stream of sf narratives published in Urania and other magazines provided Italian writers with devices that enabled them to deal with the impact of industrialization, especially with its negative consequences.
Remarkably, three of the writers Comberiati examines are not famous for their sf works: Buzzati is generally known for his allegorical novel The Tartar Steppe (1940) and his fantasy stories; Scerbanenco is considered one of Italy’s paramount crime writers; De Rossignoli was a movie critic who usually wrote crime and horror fiction. Only Aldani was a “pure” sf author, as well as a non-academic theorist of the genre. This is not surprising, as other mainstream writers wrote sf stories and novels in the years of the Italian boom and its aftermath, including Primo Levi, Carlo Cassola, Mario Soldati, Luce D’Eramo, and Ennio Flaiano. Sf seemed then to be the obvious choice for any narrative meditation on the new Italy that was emerging from the fast-paced and contradictory growth of the 1950s and 1960s.
The criteria for Comberiati’s selection of novels and his theoretical framework are all discussed in the introductory chapter, “Davanti allo specchio: la fantascienza italiana di fronte al boom economico” [In front of the mirror: Italian sf vis-à-vis the economic boom]. Here Comberiati highlights the heterogeneity of the four writers of his corpus, as they “may clearly show the variety of Italian sf production tied to the economic boom, which is thus seen from very different points of view” (52). It is not just a matter of different styles and literary careers; it is also a matter of popularity, inasmuch as in those years Buzzati and Scerbanenco were much better known (and read) than De Rossignoli and Aldani.
The first chapter also deals with the issue of migration, which plays an important role in Comberiati’s monograph; in fact, the book is part of Spartenze, a series edited by Comberiati himself and Martino Marazzi, devoted to migration literature studies. The Italian economic boom triggered a massive process of internal migration between 1958 and 1963, and then again from 1968 to 1970: many individuals and families moved from Southern Italy and the islands to the so-called Industrial Triangle (the area delimited by the cities of Turin, Milan, and Genoa). Comberiati argues that, “if we consider the internal migration as one of the central elements of the economic boom, then we may understand the challenge consisting in describing it through the sf genre” (56), since “due to [a] powerful ideological charge, sf becomes a particularly precious instrument to understand the changes of 1960s Italy, precisely starting from the representation of migration” (57).
The second chapter discusses Scerbanenco’s Il cavallo venduto: the theme of migration lies at the core of this narrative, depicting a world ravaged by a devastating war, possibly with nuclear weapons. The city of Milan, surrounded by impassable walls, seems to be the only place where civilization has survived, so much so that all the survivors strive to enter it. Comberiati takes care, however, to reconstruct the complex story of this novel, Its first draft was written when Scerbanenco was interned in Switzerland from 1943 to 1945, where he had gone to escape the Nazi invasion of Northern Italy; he had thus experienced the condition of a refugee and the ravaged world in his novel is probably the war-torn Europe of WWII. There is a complex interplay of different historical times in this narrative, which superimposes the refugees of the 1940s onto the emigrants of the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, their destination is presented more as a prison (or an internment camp) than as a safe and welcoming haven, and this casts a sinister light on the futuristic Milan of the novel. Comberiati discusses its sociological and political implications at length.
Chapter 2 ends with a very useful section, “La ricezione del romanzo durante e dopo il boom economico” [The reception of the novel during and after the economic boom], in which Comberiati describes the reception of this text by Italian critics; interestingly, we are told that “when the book was published in 1963, no literary magazine wrote a single review of it” (93). This bespeaks the prejudice of the Italian literary establishment towards sf and helps us put this novel in its historical context. Since there is a rich section devoted to reception at the end of each chapter focusing on a single novel, one also must praise Comberiati for being so attentive to the previous interpretations of these texts, showing us how they have been open to a variety of readings conditioned by the contemporary cultural context.
Chapter 3 deals with Buzzati’s Larger Than Life, a relatively more famous novel than Scerbanenco’s, though its reviews were far from laudatory. To date it is considered a minor work, but it yields interesting results when read in the framework of posthumanism, as it deals with “Numero 1,” a gigantic computer whose thinking core is the digital reproduction of the mind of Laura, the deceased wife of Endriade, the scientist who designed the machine. Comberiati’s reading of the journey of Ismani, another scientist who should work with Endriade, and his wife Elsa to the secret base hosting the computer as a form of migration is not wholly persuasive, but the discussion of Numero 1 as a transhuman entity is much more cogent, and might have been strengthened further by considering Endriade’s endeavor as an act of male possession. Buzzati’s novel questions such dichotomies as body/mind, male/female, material/abstract, and is a text that surely deserves more critical attention. Moreover, the threatening Numero 1 bespeaks the uneasiness of Italian intellectuals toward new technological developments, but also vouches for Buzzati’s interest in cybernetics: he was a friend of Silvio Ceccato, one of the leading Italian researchers in that field. Comberiati proves that the relationship between writers such as Buzzati and science was not just one of rejection; there was also curiosity and the awareness that the new technologies were a challenge that literati could and should face.
De Rossignoli’s H come Milano is discussed in Chapter 4; since the novum in this novel is the nuclear bombing of the financial and industrial capital of the nation, reading this text means of course to realize, as Comberiati does, that the Italian boom took place in the context of the Cold War, which strongly conditioned it. But the Bomb may well be a metaphor for the disruption brought about by industrialization, as “the brutality of the change of [Milan’s] exterior form, as well as its deepest mentality, caused by the economic boom, can be compared by the author with the effects of a nuclear explosion, that has forever changed the former Milan” (159). The aftermath of the explosion and the groups of survivors met by the protagonist assume an allegorical meaning, and “propose[s] a complete reversal of the social hierarchy in which immigrants were placed in the lowest positions of Milanese society” (162). By putting the Milanese at the mercy of the terùn (a derogatory term used to define the immigrants from Southern Italy), De Rossignoli adopts one of the classical strategies of sf extrapolation, reminding readers of H.G. Wells’s Eloi and Morlocks; and his vision of a post-atomic Milan is tinged by the dark hues of horror fiction, the genre the author usually practiced. No wonder then that Comberiati compares the contaminated survivors in H come Milano to the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which would be released just three years later.
The fifth chapter focuses on Aldani’s Quando le radici, the most straightforwardly science-fictional novel of the quartet, as it was published in an overtly sf series (Science Fiction Book Club) edited by sf writer and translator Roberta Rambelli. Aldani presents his readers with an extrapolation of the Italian Boom: in his novel almost all Italians have migrated to the big metropolises, and the small, ancient towns in the countryside have been razed to make room for plantations and motorways (whose network was under construction when Aldani wrote his novel). Massive urbanization has been and still is one of the most remarkable and problematic consequences of industrialization and Aldani was particularly sensitive to this phenomenon. Once again, Comberiati’s attention to the dynamics of migration and its anthropological consequences allow him to read Quando le radici as a monitory tale and one of the first specimens of environmentalist sf in Italy.
The final chapter strives to take stock of the previous discussions, aiming at ascertaining whether the critical approach of the four writers to the Italian boom may nonetheless offer hints of a new post-capitalist society. Comberiati argues that the four novels should not be read as absolute rejections of science and technology; their stance is rather one of refusal of an inhuman science, not science per se (a position that characterizes other “respectable” writers who dabbled in sf, such as Tommaso Landolfi). He thus ends his monograph by suggesting that “the most interesting message of the four novels we have analyzed [is] a gaze that, from literature, may also involve the exact sciences in the elaboration of a different society, starting from a criticism of the extant one” (236).
To conclude, La fantascienza italiana contro il boom economico? succeeds in providing us with a new perspective on the Italian economic boom, which can enrich the current debate on that phase of our history—anxiously interrogated at a moment in which Italy is facing increasing de-industrialization and stagnation. There is a widespread belief that the roots of what is currently called “the Italian decline” can be found in that purportedly golden age. Moreover, this monograph might provide sf scholars interested in the world-wide diffusion of the sf imagination with precious insights about how a local culture may import sf materials and adapt them to its own needs and aims—provided that the book is translated into English or some other global language, of course.
University of California Press