The political turmoil of the 70’s in Italy pushed directors towards more sociological movies. The desire for civilization has produced humans without any taste and depth. Where humans are lost in vices and morally bad behaviours.
In this movie, the beaches of Riccione are depicted as overcrowded places, where humans have covered every inch of land, even the water of the Adriatic Sea. The director smartly reverses the classic dichotomy of city/bad vs. Together with L’ombrellone (Weekend, Italian Style, 1965), again by Dino Risi, the movie represents the pain of a nation’s loss of innocence, thanks to wild industrialisation, violent gentrification and a sudden shift from old school values to a scattered modern life, which clashes with the wonderful Italian landscapes and summer settings. Italian summer is darker in the 60s, especially in Dino Risi’ Il Sorpasso ( The Easy Life, 1962) in which Vittorio Gassman and Jean-Louis Trintignant, a slacker bachelor and a diligent law student respectively, drive away from a deserted Rome to reach the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura ( The Adventure, 1960) depicts a mysterious summer set in the Aeolian Islands, where a stormy sea divides and hides secrets, and where the great late Monica Vitti plays the role of Claudia, a distressed woman in love with her best friend’s partner. The directors of the 60s analysed l’estate Italiana from a different angle, no longer showcasing a changing society in which the holidays were considered a status quo that every middle-class family should have pursued, but taking a more critical approach, often disenchanted. For many families, the year became divided between work in big cities like Milan, Rome or Turin and summer at the beach.Īlberto Lattuada’s cold and elegant depiction of the power of envy, La Spiaggia ( The Boarder, 1954), which takes place in the post WWII Italy where a large part of the population became part of the bourgeoisie, tells the story of a prostitute on holiday with her daughter in Liguria and how the local population judges her once they discover her profession.
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And no matter their class, everyone is seeking happiness after the dark times of WWII.Īldo Fabrizi’s La famiglia Passaguai ( The Passaguai Family, 1951) is a comedy about the Italian bourgeoisie of the time, struggling to adapt to new values and lifestyles of holiday during the vibrant, energetic 50s, when Italians were learning how to spend their holidays by the beach as a social construct. This great movie perhaps laid the foundations of many cliches around l’estate Italiana : there are people eating pasta on the beach, American cars are shown with pride, rich families live next to middle class families. Far from being a judgemental movie, A Sunday in August shows, in a typical Neorealist way, how interactions between classes, customs and behaviours were changing at the time WWII was a close memory, but people were looking ahead to the future. In Domenica d’agosto ( Sunday in August, 1950), Luciano Emmer portrays the life of a society in which members of the fallen nobility, the working class and the middle class spend a summer day all together in Ostia, near Rome.
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We see this best in Italian cinema, in which summer is the setting for many memorable stories and is often the main character itself.ĭuring the 50s, the representation of l’estate Italiana in Italian cinematography became, in the hands of capable directors, a way to describe the vices and virtues of a country full of contractions and its attempt at grappling with unexpected economic growth post WWII.
From post WWII Italy onwards–through the economic growth of the 50s, the dreamy 60s, the political 70s and the hedonistic 80s until today–Italian summer–or as we say l’estate Italiana – has always meant much more than holidays for Italians. Italian pop culture has played an important role in shaping both the realistic and stereotypical sentiment and iconography around Italian summer. I feel a deep nostalgia for the gelati by the beach, the smell of Karite butter my mother used to apply on her skin, the colour of the edicola where I would buy comics. In a country where three quarters is covered by beaches and seashore, where a man became famous worldwide singing just three words “O Sole Mio”, and where flocks of tourists have been spending their holidays (at least since the times of Goethe), summer is an essential component of the Italian DNA–a piece that I’ve missed when I’ve lived abroad in countries with cooler climates.
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