Italy's
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Italian Art and Culture
Cinema
The Italian cinema industry was born in Turin in the early 1900s. The first movies were historical epics and adventure films. By the 1930s propaganda and escapist movies became popular.
The Cinecitta studios were founded in Rome in 1935. The first major movement was neo-realism which portrayed the working class and described the war and its aftermath. Famous directors of that time were Rossellini, De Santis and Vittorio de Sica.
The great directors dominated italian cinema during the1960s and the 1970s: Fellini, Antonioni and Visconti. A new generation of film makers, more concerned with political and social statements, started in the 1970s: Pasolini, Olmi, Rosi, Bertolucci and the Taviani brothers.
Classics by Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) (1963), and Dario Argento of the 70s were known as "gialli" (thrillers). They soon became representative of the mystery/crime genre and influenced that genre in other countries, as well. In cinema, the term giallo finally became synonymous with an emphatic, theatrical style, and violent visual element.
The 1980s started to see the decline of Italian cinema, even if some of the major Italian cinematographic masterpieces date from that period: The Ball (1983) by Ettore Scola, The Last Emperor (1987) by Bertolucci, The Night of San Lorenzo (1982), Cinema Paradiso (1989) by Tornatore.
In the mean-time Italian comedies and Spaghetti Westerns gained success in Italy and abroad.
The younger generation often translated the social struggle in their movies, such as La messa è finita (1985) and Caro Diario (1993) by Nanni Morretti.
Italy gave rise to many artistic and intellectual movements among which the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque. Famous artists of that time include: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Archimboldo, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Bernini, and Titian.
The current Italian generation of artists includes names such as Bettarini, Anselmi, etc.
Music
Music has always played an important role in Italian culture. Many music instruments and music terms were invented in Italy. The art of Opera was born in Italy and many of the existing classical music forms can trace their roots back to innovations of sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian music (such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata ). Italy's most famous composers include the Renaissance composers Palestrina and Monteverdi, the Baroque composers Alessandro Scarlatti, Corelli and Vivaldi the Classical composers Paganini and Rossini, and the Romantic composers Verdi and Puccini. Modern Italian composers such as Berio and Nono proved significant in the development of experimental and electronic music.
Literature
The first literary expression in Italian was the Canticles of the Creatures by St Francis of Assisi who, for the first time, wrote in the vernacular language instead of Latin. Authors like Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and Boccaccio, who all wrote in their native Tuscan, gave the first impulse towards a unified, standard Italian language. Dante's Divina Commedia is considered one of the literary masterworks produced in Europe during the Middle Ages. Other important literary figures include: Giacomo Leopardi, Vittorio d'Annunzio, Alessandro Manzoni, Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto and Ugo Foscolo, who has been compared to Goethe for his novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798).
Prominent philosophers include Niccolò Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Giambattista Vico. Italian Nobel prize winners in literature are nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, satiryst and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997. Other modern literary figures include: Italo Calvino, etc.
