The Damned of Fiat and Olivetti
Barbara Burns talks to Erica Bellia, whose book Narratives of Industry and Decolonisation in Italy 1955-1965: An Allegorical Reading was published this summer in Legenda’s Italian Perspectives series.
BB. Your book focuses on Italy’s rapid transition following the Second World War from a predominantly rural, working-class economy to an industrialised nation, and explores the ways in which Italian writers, artists and intellectuals compared the exploitation of factory workers in cities such as Milan and Turin to colonial oppression in Africa and Asia. What are the conceptual parallels between industrial and colonial conflicts, and why is allegory so important in this context?
(Photo by Luana Rigolli, courtesy of the British School at Rome)
EB. Italy’s ‘economic miracle’ (1958–1963), whose glamorous Roman face was immortalised by Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), brought rapid industrialisation to cities such as Milan and Turin, and accelerated urbanisation and large-scale migration from rural areas to industrial centres, as well as from southern to northern Italy. In such a conjuncture, labour appeared simultaneously as a source of emancipation and of alienation.
At the same time, anticolonial struggles were reshaping the world. Italian writers and artists began to draw connections between these two forms of oppression and conflict: the colonial and the industrial. They often did so through allegory. Rather than functioning as a merely ornamental literary device, allegory became a way of thinking, a means of making one historical process or form of conflict illuminate another. This perspective enabled these authors to imagine new strategies of resistance by offering internationalist support and learning from decolonising movements around the world.
My book argues that this allegorical vision allowed writers including Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Ottiero Ottieri, and Pier Paolo Pasolini to situate Italy’s economic miracle within a para-colonial matrix, to represent Italy as simultaneously coloniser and colonised, and to imagine forms of resistance to both colonial and industrial oppression.
BB. Why was the Italian cultural sphere in the 1950s and 60s such a prominent mediator for anticolonial ideas, in comparison to that of other European countries?
EB. In 1959, Rome hosted the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, followed by several similar events. In 1962, Frantz Fanon’s seminal anticolonial work Les Damnés de la terre (1961) was translated into Italian even before an English translation appeared. These are just two examples of Italy’s proactive mediation of anticolonial ideas during the period.
Several factors help explain this. Geopolitically, Italy occupied a distinctive position during the Cold War. Although it was a founding member of NATO, with a significant Christian Democrat political hegemony, it also had one of the largest Communist parties in Western Europe. Compared with France and Britain, for example, whose longer colonial histories made them look like more compromised interlocutors, Italy was able to present itself to newly independent nations, many rich in natural resources but lacking industrial infrastructure, as a relatively ‘innocent’ and flexible partner.
There were also other ideological affinities. Italy’s own Risorgimento and unification process in the second half of the nineteenth century could be interpreted as a national liberation struggle, while many Italians recognised in anticolonial movements a continuation of the antifascist Resistance and its ideals of liberation. Alongside these expressions of solidarity, however, were more strategic political and economic interests, particularly concerning oil and other resources. This convergence of factors created an exceptionally fertile environment for the activation of anticolonial thought.
BB. You’ve chosen a striking cover image for your volume, featuring a piece of graffiti in 1960s Milan. What can you tell us about it?
EB. The cover features a photograph by Italian photographer Uliano Lucas, taken in the industrial suburb of Sesto San Giovanni in 1968. At its centre is a piece of graffiti proclaiming that ‘Vietnam is in the factory’. This slogan encapsulates the central argument of my book: the deep entanglement of industrial and anticolonial struggles.
Lucas’s composition is particularly striking. The graffiti is in sharp focus, while a Vespa or Lambretta passing in front of it is blurred in motion, suggesting a society in transition. Interestingly, the same graffiti also appears in Libero Bizzarri’s short documentary I muri di Sesto (1967), devoted to the walls and political murals of Sesto San Giovanni. There, too, another icon of postwar Italian modernity and mobility, the Fiat 500, is passing in front of it.
By 1967–68, the allegorical connection between industrial conflict and anticolonial struggle had moved beyond literature and intellectual debate. It had entered the language of political activism and everyday experience. My book reconstructs the genealogy of this connection and explores its meanings, showing how literature, cinema, music, theatre, and other forms of cultural expression became privileged sites where the industrial and the colonial could be imagined not as separate stories but as coexisting and mutually enlightening realities.
BB. What types of sources form the basis for your analysis, and which key tropes of anticolonial discourse do they have in common?
EB. I drew on a wide range of sources, including cultural journals, novels, poetry, and film. I wanted to show how pervasive this allegorical mode of thinking became during the years of the economic miracle, and how deeply it shaped the artistic, cultural, and political developments that culminated in 1968 and continued well beyond it.
Alongside these published materials, I worked on archives, including that of the Comitato Anticoloniale Italiano (Italian Anticolonial Committee), to trace the networks and practices that sustained this dialogue between industrial and anticolonial struggles. Although combining literary, visual, and archival sources posed methodological challenges, it also proved essential for capturing the breadth of the phenomenon and for revealing the central role played by the arts in articulating it.
A striking pattern emerges out of this diversity: industrial relations are repeatedly understood through a colonial lens, while anticolonial thought provides a framework for interpreting the transformations of postwar Italy. Labour alienation is read alongside colonial oppression; racial dynamics within the factory and the industrial world echo those of colonial societies; and even the psychosomatic disease associated with industrial labour find parallels in colonial experience.
BB. Could you give us an example of a specific work that utilises these allegorical strategies?
EB. I’d like to mention two examples that I find particularly compelling, albeit for different reasons. The first is Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960 (1961), an extraordinary experimental opera centred on the story of a migrant miner returning to Italy and passing through a series of episodes of oppression and resistance. Along the way, it connects labour exploitation in the mines with environmental catastrophe, colonial violence, and political repression. What makes Intolleranza so striking is that, although the factory itself is absent, labour exploitation is shown as inseparable from a wider constellation of violence brought together under the umbrella of ‘intolerance’.
The second example is Ottiero Ottieri’s 1959 novel Donnarumma all’assalto [The Men at the Gate]. Inspired by Ottieri’s experience working for the typewriter manufacturer Olivetti, the novel presents the top-down industrialisation of Southern Italy as a form of internal colonialism. Even in its most democratic and ‘enlightened’ guise, industrial modernisation appears as a project that reshapes social relations by producing new hierarchies and forms of alienation.
In this novel the connection between the factory and colonialism is made explicit. At the very moment when European colonial empires were being dismantled, works such as Donnarumma all’assalto identified analogous forms of domination within Italy itself, therefore at the same time alluding to the possibility of resistance. Framing the industrialisation of the South as a form of domestic colonialism challenged the triumphalist narrative of the economic miracle, exposed its social and cultural costs, and opened up the possibility of imagining alternative forms of development and modernity.
BB. What led you into this area of research?
EB. I have always been interested in questions of labour, both as a central aspect of human life, and as something crucial to Italian culture. After all, the first article of the Italian Constitution declares that ‘Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour’. Since my undergraduate studies, I have explored the relationship between literature and industry in the Italian context, focusing on the ambiguity in the perception of industrial labour as both a source of liberation and a site of oppression. My research has centred on authors such as Paolo Volponi, Ottiero Ottieri, Giovanni Pirelli, and Franco Fortini, among many others.
Having grown up in Sicily, I have also long been interested in the country’s so-called forms of ‘internal colonialism’ and in the migratory experiences that have shaped modern Italy, not least because I am a migrant myself. Then, about five years ago, I discovered a collection of family letters dating from the 1930s, exchanged between relatives who were in Eritrea as part of the Italian colonial project. Reading those letters and recognising my own family’s implication in this history made me confront yet another layer of Italy’s complex colonial experience and remediation of it.
As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang famously argue, ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’. Nor, I would add, an allegory. Colonialism is always material. If we rely too heavily on allegorical readings, we risk losing sight of those material histories and their ongoing effects. Remaining attentive to that material dimension, in the past and in the present, while also reflecting critically on one’s own positionality in relation to it, has become a guiding principle of both my research and this book.
BB. Did your work on this topic lead you in any unexpected directions?
EB. When I began this project, my intention was to continue my investigation of unexplored aspects of Italian industrial literature. I did not expect to encounter so many references to colonialism, anticolonialism, and decolonisation. Yet the more I read, the more I realised that these questions were central to the work of many Italian writers and artists in the 1950s and 60s.
This was particularly striking in the Italian context, where the country’s colonial past has often been described in terms of collective amnesia or aphasia. It surprised me that anticolonial struggles occupied such a prominent place in the cultural and political (very different) agendas of so many intellectuals at precisely this historical moment.
This apparent contradiction convinced me there was an important story to tell. I wanted to understand the different motivations that shaped Italian engagements with anticolonial movements during the Cold War era: where they reflected genuine political solidarity, where they were driven by strategic or ideological interests, and how those different impulses coexisted and informed cultural production.
BB. What’s next for you on the research front?
EB. At the moment, I am studying anthologies of African and African American literature published in Italy from 1945 to the present. These anthologies are among the few cultural spaces in which questions of race have been addressed explicitly and negotiated in a postwar context that often imagined itself as straightforwardly antiracist, despite the persistence of solid racial thinking.
Alongside this, I am researching another form of collective cultural production: congresses devoted to African literature and culture that were hosted in Italy during the Cold War. These events provide a fascinating perspective on the networks, debates, and political imaginaries that shaped Italy’s engagement with decolonisation.
At the same time, I have not abandoned the question of labour. I am extending my work beyond the industrial literature of the 1950s and 1960s to explore less visible forms of labour and resistance, and how literature and the arts make them perceptible. I am planning for these two strands of research – labour and anticolonial cultures – to eventually converge once again in a larger project with a more broadly Mediterranean focus. More soon!
full news feed • subscribe via RSS