Enzo Biagi and the Indulgent Memory of Fascism in Postwar Italy

The post-1990s public de-mystification of the long celebrated Italian armed resistance against Fascism and Nazism (1943-1945), resulting from the decades-long efforts by a few journalists of either obvious or latent “anti-anti-Fascist” leaning, has appeared to many professional historians as a politically motivated assault against the antifascist foundations of the Italian Republic. Over the years, this accusation claimed, a conspiracy of popular journalists and bestselling authors Indro Montanelli, Giorgio Pisanò, and Arrigo Petacco, among others, produced an indulgent domestication of the memory of Fascism that distracted Italians from the regime’s violent, undemocratic nature. Join us in person or virtually on Thursday, March 21, 2024, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET.

Speakers:
Giorgio Bertellini is Professor of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Indiana University Press, 2009) and The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920’s America (University of California Press, 2019), which won the 2019 American Association for Italian Studies book award, for the category “Film/Media” and the 2020 Italian American Association Book Award, and which received Honourable Mention for the Robert K. Martin Book Prize (2019-2020) from the Canadian Association for American Studies and was a Finalist for the 2020 LIMINA Award/Best International Film Studies Book. Professor Bertellini was recently named a Gugenheim Fellow, for a project in which he will study the ways Italian neorealist filmmakers creatively reworked the social imagery of Depression-era American photography and photojournalism in the postwar era.

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