10 - Narratives of a ‘City Under Siege’ : Bodies and Discourses of the 1977 Movement in Bologna
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
Summary
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.”
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- Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures , pp. 225 - 244Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022