Anni interessanti Momenti di vita italiana, 1960-1975

The volume accompanies the exhibition organised by the Istituto Luce Cinecittà and presented at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere from 13 May to 16 October 2022.

The title, borrowed from Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, the autobiography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, is used in this narrative in images of a fifteen-year period of Italian life, from the 1960s to the early 1970s, just before they became “the years of lead”: a cross-section of Italian society through the lenses of reporters and agency photographs collected in the major Italian archives (Istituto LUCE, CSAC, Fondazione Dalmine, Farabola).

After the commitment to reconstruction characteristic of the fifties, a choral effort that making scooters, textiles, cars, typewriters, design, cinema and Italian fashion well known everywhere, the road ahead for Italy appeared to be downhill and full of optimism: happy years, light as the music at 45 rpm that seemed to be its soundtrack. Just below the surface, however, flowed the disquiet of those who saw the slowness in introducing reforms, such as gender equality, the reform of the law codes and divorce, which in the rest of Europe were already part of the common experience and but here divided the country.

It is an Italy that displays two parallel narratives: a country that had become prosperous and engaged in collective holiday and consumer rituals, but at the same time restless, where old unresolved issues coexisted with new contradictions. Visual and audiovisual culture was the lingua franca: photography, cinema, TV and music were a kind of quadrilateral embodying the most vivid part of the representations by which society tells its stories.