Luciano Ligabue's Radiofreccia: regionalism and globalization.

Credo che la voglia di scappare da un paese con 20.000 abitanti vuol dire che hai voglia di scappare da te stesso ... e credo che da te non ci scappi neanche se sel Eddy Merckx. (1)

(Ivan Benassi, Radiofreccia)

Toward the close of the last century, Luciano Ligabue, a popular rock singer, surprised his fans and others by publishing a collection of short stories about his native Emilia, Fuori e dentro il borgo (1997), and then by drawing from it a successful feature film, Radiofreccia (1998). (2) Both the book and the film were warmly welcomed by critics, the former earning the literary prizes of Fiesole and Procida, the latter receiving several film awards, including three David di Donatello for best new director (Luciano Ligabue), best sound (Gaetano Carito), and best actor (Stefano Accorsi). The success was also financial: in just over three months Radiofreccia earned more than seven billion lire and it placed seventh at the box office among Italian films in 1998. The script of Radiofreccia, by Antonio Leotti and Luciano Ligabue, draws mostly from Fuori e dentro il borgo's short-tale "Il girotondo di Freccia." The film recounts the story of a group of rive young men, Bruno, Boris, Lena, Tito, and Ivan (the protagonist, nicknamed Freccia after a birthmark in the shape of an arrow on his temple). With the help of his friends, Bruno starts an independent radio, Radio Raptus, which is then renamed Radiofreccia at Freccia's untimely death. The film actually opens in 1993 on the radio's last day, goes back in time to the 1970s through a flashback introduced by Bruno's voice-over, and closes by returning to the film's introduction, seventeen years later, with an adieu party. Radiofreccia takes place in the small town of Correggio in the Po Valley, a part of Italy which has attracted the attention of directors like Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Federico Fellini. Through this film, Ligabue brings new light to the region, transforming Correggio itself into a sort of protagonist, characterized by a communal space (the bar as the borgo's center of life), and by two salient social and historical trends of the time (the spread of heroin use among the young, and the birth of independent radios). Given Radiofreccia's concentration on a particular borgo, I shall adopt the critical framework suggested by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, who, in their work on cinema and the city, insist on the role and significance of space in film. Accordingly, I shall consider the representation and organization of space in Radiofreccia and its ideological and political implications both from within and from without. (3) More precisely, I analyze the film's discourse on the borgo, its portrayal of regionalisms and anglicisms as voiced by the inhabitants of Correggio and their newly born radio, and finally its own position within Italian culture and cinema, comparing Radiofreccia with other works set in Emilia Romagna, especially novels by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, (4) and films by Federico Fellini. (5)

I. Space in Radiofreccia

In this section I examine how Ligabue organizes the space of Emilia in Radiofreccia. Not only does the director employ Correggio and its environs as the film's setting, but he also focuses on specific places, such as the bar and the radio, and uses special cinematic techniques to highlight them. The bar of Radiofreccia, a reconstruction of the former Bar Laika, is a site frequented by a variety of young people, including such characters as Virus, who boasts that, in due time, piece by piece, he could eat an entire cinquecento; and Omero, a pimp who sells tickets for a lottery with a woman as prize. Frequented by such strange patrons, Correggio's bar is reminiscent of Stefano Benni's Bar Sport, which featured similarly eccentric persons and bizarre objects such as the pastry Luisona. Ligabue, however, will focus on the bar not simply as a comic, surreal stage, but also as a place of growth (comparable to the privileged places of Tondelli's fiction: local trains, discos, beaches, and radios). Indeed, Ligabue has affirmed in several interviews that his film is about "la linea d'ombra" (Conrad's "line of shadow"), that is, the transition through a liminal area to adulthood (Leotti and Ligabue 153). (6) Generally, the bar (as well as the radio, as we shall see later) provides Radiofreccia's young protagonists a site to discuss their problems and to build and exhibit their own identity. (7) The bar is where we first meet Kingo, who arrives dressed, of course, as Elvis. Freccia remarks, "Oh, Kingo, non so se lo sai ma sei vestito da Elvis" ("Kingo, I don't know if you know it, but you're dressed like Elvis"), to which Kingo replies: "Oh, 'mico, non sono vestito da Elvis. Sono vestito da Kingo ... E diverso!" ("Oh, my friend, I'm not dressed like Elvis. I'm dressed like Kingo ... There's a difference!"). (8) In line with 1970s Italian singers and artists like Equipe 84, who practiced a "poetics of the cover," looking for originality through imitation (Barbolini 79), Kingo employs American culture as a means to stand out in the crowd and express himself originally. Of course, in so doing he runs the risk of being "colonized," so to speak, by a foreign power, or of losing his self in an impersonally globalized megaculture. Another significant episode at the bar happens one evening when Bruno, Boris, Jena, Tito, and Freccia sit at the table discussing their future. Boris is very critical of their approach to life. First he mocks Bruno, calling him boring and uninteresting: "Dai ... avrai comunque le tue trecentomila al mese, cambierai la centoventisette ogni tre anni, ti sposerai Ilaria perche quelli come te sposano sempre quella che hanno conosciuto alle medie ..." ("Corne on ..., you'll still get your three thousand lire a month, you'll change your centoventisette [an ordinary automobile] every three years, you'll marry Ilaria because guys like you always marry the girl they met in middle school..."). Later, Boris criticizes Freccia for his tendency not to make commitments: "Non hai mai creduto in niente. Niente Dio, politica ... per carita ... Pci, Dc, bombe o non bombe ... e lo stesso" ("You never believed in anything. Neither in God, nor in politics ... for goodness' sake ... Pci, Dc, bombs or no bombs ... it's all the same'). That night, on the radio, Freccia replies to Boris with a significant monologue, which will later be heard again as the final words transmitted by Radiofreccia:

   Buonanotte ... qui e Radio Raptus ... io sono Benassi, Ivan ... Eh
   ... forse li c'e qualcuno che non dorme ... Beh, che comunque ci
   siate oppure no, io c'ho una cosa da dire. Oggi ho avuto una
   discussione con un amico. Lui e uno di quelli bravi. Bravi a
   credere in quello in cui gli dicono di credere. Lui dice che se uno
   non crede in certe cose non crede in niente. Beh, non e vero.
   Anch'io credo. Credo nelle rovesciate di Boninba e nei riff di
   Keith Richards. Credo al doppio suono di campanello del padrone di
   casa che vuole l'affitto ogni primo del mese ... Credo che ognuno
   di noi si meriterebbe di avere una madre e un padre che siano
   decenti con lui almeno finche non si sta in piedi. Credo che un
   Inter come quella di Corso, Mazzola e Suarez non ci sara mai piu,
   ma non e detto che non ce ne saranno altre belle in maniera
   diversa. Credo che non sia tutto qua, pero prima di credere in
   qualcos'altro, bisogna fare i conti con quello che c'e qua. E
   allora mi sa che credero prima o poi in qualche Dio. Credo che, se
   mai avro una famiglia, sara dura campare con trecentomila al mese,
   pero credo anche che, se non lecchero culi come fa il mio
   caporeparto, difficilmente cambieranno le cose. Credo che c'ho un
   buco grosso dentro, ma che il rock and roll, qualche amichetta, il
   calcio, qualche soddisfazione sul lavoro, le stronzate con gli
   amici ... ogni tanto questo buco me lo riempiono. Credo che la
   voglia di scappare da un paese con ventimila abitanti vuol dire che
   hai voglia di scappare da te stesso ... e credo che da te non
   scappi neanche se sei Eddy Merckx. Credo che non e giusto giudicare
   la vita degli altri perche comunque, non puoi sapere proprio un
   cazzo della vita degli altri. Credo che per credere, certi momenti,
   ti serve molta energia. E allora vedete un po' di riempire le
   vostre riserve con questo. (9)

I have quoted this monologue at length because, more than any other speech or image of the film, it provides the audience a real insight into Freccia's character and into Ligabue's conception of place as inextricably connected with identity. (10) The film's protagonist claims to be happy living a regular life, doing ordinary things, such as watching soccer, listening to rock and roll, dating and going out with friends. But he also proves himself a rebel, an idealist not satisfied with what he has, who ends up trying to escape the borgo, at first through drugs, and afterwards through a woman from Carpi with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love. Unfortunately, as Freccia himself foresees here, those who try to leave a village of twenty thousand inhabitants are doomed to fail, because their identity is rooted there, and they cannot escape from themselves.

Ligabue's interest in the geographical space of his region is displayed cinematically by his use of special shooting techniques. The director has himself admitted that several takes in Radiofreccia are intended to emphasize the land of Emilia, so as to make its presence as strongly felt as the story and characters. (11) One particularly effective shot occurs in the initial part of the film, when Freccia is shown dead in the ditch. The camera first dissolves from Bruno to a bird's-eye view of a lawn, zooms in on it with circular movements, and then moves toward Freccia's body at soil level as if to crush it into the earth. In this way both Freccia and the earth become subjects of interest. A concept especially significant for the organization of space in Radiofreccia is circularity. When Antonello Grimaldi, the assistant director, asked Ligabue for an adjective to describe his film, he replied "circolare" ("circular") (Bertoncelli 94). Ligabue later elaborated on this: "La realta e che il film che avevo in mente era proprio cosi: e non un cerchio solo, tanti cerchi che si aprono e si chiudono nella sceneggiatura, un andare a spirale sui cinque ragazzi e poi, alla fine, sempre a spirale, arrivare a Freccia--perche questo e un film corale che pero alla fine e un film su Freccia" ("the reality is that the film I had in mind was exactly like that: not only one circle, but many circles opening and closing in the screenplay, a spiral motion around the five guys and then, finally, also in a spiral fashion, concluding with Freccia--because this is a choral film, which is still in the end a film about Freccia") (Bertoncelli 94). From the beginning of the film, the camera accomplishes various circular movements by turning, for instance, around the town of Correggio, around Bruno in the radio, around Freccia's corpse, and, later, around Tito when he leaves his house thinking he has killed his father (Bertoncelli 94). The circle is also portrayed within the various "marker cards" which Ligabue has playfully used to divide his film: for instance, one displays a little crown, one a tire, one a life saver, and another the rim of a toilet (Bertoncelli 95). A circle can be seen as a symbolic line separating two different worlds, inside and outside. In Radiofreccia the eponymous protagonist, played brilliantly by Stefano Accorsi, has a certain fixation on enclosed spaces. While Freccia and his friends are stealing material for the new radio, he mockingly advises an old woman to close the shutters and mind her own business: "Te sta' dentro che qua fuori e un brutto mondo!" ("You, stay inside! Out here there's an ugly world!"). Later, after catching a "pesce siluro" ("giant catfish"), Freccia decides to return it to the pond, telling it, "Torna dentro va', che qua fuori e un brutto mondo" ("Go back inside. Go on. Out here there's an ugly world"). In both cases Freccia characterizes interior space as a safe retreat from the evils of the world, a sort of maternal womb in which, however, full growth and mature development cannot occur, and which therefore symbolizes a desire to avoid becoming an adult. Ligabue's organization of space around a circle that symbolically separates two worlds reminds us of Fellini's Amarcord, where a sort of imaginary ring, a sign of divine perfection, encloses the borgo and divides good people (the riminesi) from bad ones (outsiders, in general educators and fascists) (Gaudenzi 163). (12) In Radiofreccia a comparable political distinction becomes clear when the group of friends from Correggio, with Bruno at their head, attempts to create its own enclosed territory by establishing an independent radio. After accomplishing this goal, in the episode entitled "La regina del Po," Freccia and his friends drive in a sort of round trajectory and mark the area covered by their newly born creation, Radio Raptus, by stopping to empty their bladders. The first to do sois Freccia, which prompts this remark from Boris: "Sta facendo come i cani ... Vuole segnare il territorio" ("He's doing what dogs do ... He wants to mark his territory"). Boris' association of urinating and dogs may remind us of an amusing scene in Fellini's Amarcord, where the grandfather, relieving himself in a field, advises his son Teo to pee as often as dogs do. Such instances of male bonding do indeed provide an element of humor, which Ligabue exploits to underline the connection between space and identity for his characters. The world covered by Radio Raptus is, of course, rather small. A reminder of its smallness is the sign for Brescello which Freccia and his friends encounter on their excursion. (Brescello is the town of the legendary Don Camillo and Peppone, characters created by Giovanni Guareschi, a local author who became famous after writing Mondo piccolo: Don Camillo (1948) literally "Small World" set in postwar Italy.) (13) Ligabue's clever allusion to Guareschi, while recalling the literary heritage of the region and the comic world of Don Camillo and Peppone, also makes the audience realize that time has passed. What the director presents in Radiofreccia are new memories, the memories of a new generation trying to grow up and abandon the dichotomy of Church and State, the choice between Catholicism and Communism. For this generation language and sounds have become important tools for expressing identity and independence.

II. The Language and Sounds of Space in Radiofreccia

During the 1970s, the period depicted in Ligabue's film, the Italian language was being used more and more outside the home, at work and in social life, while, at the same time regionalized forms of it were increasingly created (De Mauro 49-50). In general, the language of Radiofreccia is a hybrid jargon, a regional Italian often including not only juvenile idioms and medium-low colloquial expressions reminiscent of contemporary Italian rock music, (14) but also dialect inflection which the director has in part attained by employing several actors from Emilia Romagna (e.g., Stefano Accorsi, Enrico Salimbeni, Francesco Guccini, who play, respectively, Freccia, Tito, and the barman). (15) Tito, for instance, while spending the night with Freccia at the radio, jokingly refers to him as "semo" ("silly"), a regional equivalent of the Italian "scemo." On another occasion, after a night out at the disco Il Plutonio, Tito explains the group's lack of success in meeting girls: "Secondo me siete voi che portate sfiga" ("I think it's you guys who bring bad luck"), where "sfiga" is a colloquial, juvenile term. Another element in Radiofreccia which shows the borgo and its language as hybrid is the presence of Anglo-American culture. The United States in particular, with its rock and roll and its westerns, provides the youth of Correggio with powerful musical and visual icons. Freccia loves songs like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kingo is infatuated with Elvis Presley, and Bonanza, as the naine suggests, enjoys playing the cowboy. The apotheosis of hybridity is reached when dialect and American music fuse together. Two scenes, one near the film's opening, another near its close, show Freccia's funeral (from opposing perspectives, the latter being through a reverse, high-angle shot). In these scenes, the orchestra conductor accompanying the event has a notable way of initiating the music. He counts, "on, du, tri, quatar," before signaling for the orchestra to start playing I Can't Help Falling in Love, the song with which Elvis ended his concerts. This subtle use of dialect functions to lighten the tone of Freccia's funeral, an effect that the director deliberately sought (Leotti and Ligabue 153). There is, however, more to Ligabue's use of local language in Radiofreccia. His decision to place side by side dialect and American culture seems to be influenced by the work of writers like Tondelli, who has on several occasions drawn broad comparisons between the Po Valley and the American West. (16) This decision also seems to indicate a desire to endow dialect with the same kind of unconventional value that American culture held at that time. In drawing attention to local identity, Radiofreccia does seem to take at least a subtle political stand, even though the director has denied intending to make a political film. (17) Ligabue's work is admittedly not so overtly political as films which depicted and revisited urban terrorism and university upheavals in the 1970s, such as Ettore Scola's Trevico-Torino (1972), Mimmo Calopresti's La seconda volta (1995), and Marco Bellocchio's Buongiorno, notte (2003). In Radiofreccia the province's regionalism intersects with the globalizing influence of Anglo-American popular music and film to create a unique world which seems to offer itself as an alternative to the status quo and to oppose, at least partially, the standardization of Italian culture propounded at that time by national institutions such as state radio and television. (18) The political undertone of Radiofreccia is particularly discernable in the film's highlighting and treatment of the birth of one of the most democratic means of communication in modern Italy, independent radios, (19) through which, Eco reminds us, regionalized forms of language obtained a new status. (20) Ligabue's film hints at the different status held by local language and standard Italian when Boris criticizes Bruno's perbenismo ("eagerness to conform"). More precisely, Boris predicts that when Bruno reaches adulthood he will live the boring life of a conformist, telling jokes in dialect at the bar and speaking Italian at work with his boss ("le barzellette al bar in dialetto e l'italiano davanti al capo"). In other words, Bruno will abide by the rules of the status quo, treating dialect as an inferior idiom not to be used professionally or for serious matters. For such tasks the right language would be the Italian of RAI, an idiom which is indirectly devalued in Radiofreccia. When Jena, a sort of loser, in response to Bruno's decision to create a radio, naively says that he likes RAI, his friends mockingly reply, "Lo sappiamo, Jena, 10 sappiamo ..." ("We know Jena, we know...").

Radiofreccia not only puts significant emphasis on language, but it also stresses musical sounds and the general shift in the relation between young people and music which occurred in the 1970s. (21) The film is somewhat anomalous in that a large part of its budget paid for the copyright of foreign songs (including Run Through the Jungle by Credence Clearwater Revival, Don't Stop by Fleetwood Mac, and Rebel Rebel by David Bowie). (22) In Radiofreccia, the music of both foreigners and Italians provides for its young protagonists their own personal territory, a safe harbor and a comfortable means of expressing their concerns about the grown-up world and its hypocrisies. (23) (Some, like Freccia, prefer American and British rock, while others, like Bruno, are fond of rock-jazz and the music of Italian singer-songwriters.) As Bruno expresses it, songs are even better than friends, because they never betray you: "invece le canzoni non ti tradiscono. Anche chi le fa puo tradirti. Ma le canzoni ... le tue canzoni ... quelle che per te han voluto dire qualcosa ... le trovi sempre 1i, quando tu vuoi trovarle" ("in contrast songs do not betray you. Even the person who performs them can betray you. But songs ... your songs ... those which meant something to you ... you'll always find them there, whenever you want to find them"). Music becomes especially necessary to explore and articulate that part of the self which cannot be expressed in either words or images. While explaining to Freccia how rewarding it is to speak on the radio, Bruno says, "quando non ce la fai piu con le parole allora usi la tua musica, quella che hai scelto tu ... quella che continua a parlare di te ..." Cwhen you can't go on with words, then you use your music, which you yourself have chosen ... which continues to say something about you..."). In Radiofreccia, Ligabue himself relies on sounds to highlight certain moments, as when he uses his own guitar playing to intensify crucial points of the narrative (e.g., the conflict between Tito and Boris about the former's sister; and the fight between Tito and his father, after the former discovers the latter has been sexually molesting his sister). The desire to communicate one's identity through language and sounds and to rise up against the evils of the grown-up world is voiced by Correggio's newly born radio. In the film's opening, Bruno's voice-over informs us of the radical quality of the new phenomenon of independent radios, associating them directly with the bombings and student protests of the 1970s: "negli anni settanta ci sono le bombe, c'e il movimento studentesco e ci sono le radio libere." (24) Among the earliest independent radios were Radio Libera in Florence, Radio Emmanuel in Ancona, and Radio Milano International. Some of the earliest, like Radio Alice in Bologna, were strongly political and aimed at revealing the darker sides of the state, while performing a sort of counter-information against RAI. Others, like Radio Parma, were founded by local businessmen to be exploited for their advertising potential. The historical development of independent radios is generally reflected in Ligabue's portrayal of Radiofreccia, alias Radio Raptus. From the beginning, the director stresses the democratic nature of the radio, which is sustained through the help of everyone (e.g., the audio-library is assembled communally from the record collections of its listeners). The radio also aims to benefit all young people in the borgo, and provides potentially edifying moments of confession and truth, such as when Bruno invites Freccia to talk about his drug addiction, live, on the radio. "Ci sono i buchi. E in mezzo a tutto questo c'e il nostro bisogno di saperne di piu. Stiamo viaggiando senza cartina ... o con una cartina illeggibile. E secondo me e arrivato il momento che questa cartina ce la facciamo noi ... E una volta fatta la facciamo circolare" ("There are the needle marks. And in the midst of all this there is our need to know more about it. We are traveling without a map ... or with an illegible map. And I think the time has come for us to make this map ourselves ... and once it's done let's pass it around'). To that end, Freccia confesses on the radio how he first shot himself with heroin, how he became addicted to it, and how he has, he hopes, broken the habit. This is one of the most poignant moments of recollection in the film, which highlights the difficulties that some young people went through in the 1970s and the value that the radio acquired for them. Idyllic Radio Raptus unfortunately lasts only a fleeting moment in time. Little by little it becomes subject to market forces and loses its independence. The radio becomes a job for Bruno, who starts using it to advertise products (e.g., salami Ruini) and to broadcast music of his father's generation (e.g., the liscio of Castellina Pasi). After seventeen years, before the radio "comes of age," the decision is reached that it must close. With its closing, Radiofreccia is turned into a sort of myth. Most importantly, closing the radio before its eighteenth birthday represents a reaffirmation of youthful idealism and a refusal to submit to the compromises of maturity. The frame which introduces and closes Radiofreccia shows, however, that, with the exception of Freccia, the characters of the film have undergone a certain development. They have passed the linea d'ombra and, in so doing, have left behind their ideals. In this light, with pessimistic undertones, the film depicts the bittersweet passage from youth to maturity, from the time of Hollywood phantasies to the time of compromises. Such a disenchanted perspective of reality recalls not only Tondelli's Camere separate, where the protagonist painfully conquers maturity, but also the closing sequence of Amarcord, where the escapist ideals of Gradisca are exchanged for marriage to an Italian carabiniere.

III. Radiofreccia in Space

In this section, I consider the position of Ligabue's film within Italian cinema and culture. Radiofreccia could be classified as a buddy film, a genre, popular especially in the 1970s, which focuses on the adventures of two or more males, usually excluding noteworthy female roles. In Ligabue's film, women are either absent (Bruno's girlfriend), ignored or exploited (the girl who reluctantly accompanies Freccia and his friends on their tour around Correggio), regarded simply as sexual objects (Boris and Tito lustfully look at girls while spying on another radio), or generally criticized (the most significant example being Freccia's mother who appears from the very beginning in a negative light). (25) Such treatment of women reproduces the gender politics of the 1970s, more precisely, the prevalent view of women in rock and roll culture. (26) In Radiofreccia, the sexism of rock and roll is actually pointed out b,y the second young man who interviews for a job at Radio Raptus: "E il sessismo degli Stones che e pvopvio tvoppo di destva ..." ("It is the sexism of Stones which is really too far to the right..."). Although this character's criticism may be slightly undermined by his lisping delivery and odd appearance, the director does at least alert his audience to the excesses of male chauvinism. Radiofreccia's representation of a group of males has several illustrious filmic predecessors and contemporaries, such as Fellini's I vitelloni (1953), (27) and Marco Ponti's Santamaradona (2001). While Fellini largely criticized and made fun of young people who want to extend their adolescence, Ponti and Ligabue portray them under a more positive light. Ligabue's characters, in particular, are somehow the victims of their parents (who are either absent or unable to fulfill their role), of women (who are generally selfish and unreliable), and of the historical context (e.g., the drug culture and the capitalistic exploitation of human beings). Ligabue's treatment of young people in Radiofreccia seems to be influenced especially by books like Tondelli's Altri libertini and Un weekend postmodemo, works which emphasize the challenges of growing up and coming to know oneself. In both Ligabue and Tondelli, the young have, like their creators, a love for music. Just as sounds in Tondelli's writings become a fundamental and structural element, (28) so do they accompany some of the crucial moments in Ligabue's film, and become one of its themes. In addition, Ligabue and Tondelli both focus on a younger generation with a meaningful attachment to the same regional setting, Emilia, which is represented by these authors in a slightly new way. Neither is it the site of poverty and social abuse, as it was for Neorealism, nor is it the fat, lunatic, and eccentric Emilia of authors like Fellini, Zavattini, and Cavazzoni; instead we see a libertine and nocturnal Emilia of discos and bars. (29) Influenced by American and British cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, (30) both Tondelli and Ligabue present a melting of the provincial and the foreign into a sort of hybrid, postmodern society. (31)

By making the landscape of Emilia one of the film's protagonists, Ligabue draws not only on Tondelli's work, but also on a contemporary trend in Italian cinema to emphasize place and its language, (32) a phenomenon evident in the work of directors like Sergio Rubini, Alessandro Piva, and Carlo Mazzacurati. Recently, Davide Ferrario in Dopo mezzanotte (2004), which is a homage to silent film and set in the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, affirms through a voice-over that places are very expressive and should themselves become film protagonists. Nowadays there is a cinema barese, milanese, toscano, etc., and regions like Emilia Romagna and Piedmont have actually established organizations to encourage and facilitate the setting of films within their borders. This contemporary trend towards regionalism has been seen by some as a response to outside pressures, as an attempt by each region to define itself so as to avoid being lost in the sea of European expansion and larger globalization. (33) Ligabue's film on a small town would thus seem to coincide with a contemporary interest in regional culture as opposed to national, European, and global forces of centralization. In this context, Radiofreccia has at times been criticized for its overwhelmingly positive treatment of the early signs of American globalization. Yet, to be fair, we must realize that Ligabue aims principally to offer a nostalgic view of a coming of age in the seventies (when America was perhaps seen with a more favorable eye), nota contemporary analysis of global politics. Moreover, as Ligabue's own songs often show, the singer has a sympathy for only a certain vision of America, the one of Bruce Springsteen who speaks through his music of common people and antiheroes (De Rossi 50). (34) In fact, Radiofreccia seems to parody America to a certain extent: the film explicitly laments the corrupting but inescapable influence of capitalism on the media; and it presents, in the figure of Kingo, a gentle caricature of an Italy overly influenced by Anglo-American rock, of young people who, in their search for an identity, are running the risk of losing their own self. As mentioned in the first section of this article, one of Radiofreccia's main themes is "growth," moving into adulthood. The individual's search for personal identity is structured in the film through an interplay between self and other (e.g., Kingo), past and present (e.g., parents and their children), and truth and fiction. Truth receives significant attention in the film's self-reflexive discourse on cinema, which is principally carried out through the character of Bonanza. During the long flashback which narrates the story of Freccia and Radio Raptus, Bonanza is shown playing the parts of several film characters (a 007 agent, a robber, and a cowboy). In the last of these performances Bonanza and Freccia enact a sort of Emilian epic, a Western duel a la High Noon in front of the bar. (The mannered close-ups and soundtrack underlining the action with gunfire recall the style of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western, a successful commercial genre of the 1970s.) (35) The showdown between Bonanza and Freccia ends with the former's victory, foreshadowing, in a way, the latter's death. While apparently playing on the idea of a similarity between the Po Valley and the American West, the scene also seems to parody young people like Bonanza who imitate film characters in their search for an identity. Ironically, Bonanza himself, in a sort of Pirandellian way, underlines the importance of recognizing the mask of cinema on two occasions. In the film's opening, which sets the tone and introduces important themes, including the difficulty of growing into adulthood, Bonanza warns his audience, "Oh, non ve lo ripeto piu, eh ... La vita non e perfetta. Le vite nei film sono perfette. Belle o brutte ma perfette. Nelle vite del film non ci sono mai tempi morti ..." ("Hey! I am not going to repeat it again! ... Life is not perfect. Lives in films are perfect; whether beautiful or ugly, they're perfect. In the lives represented in films there are never dead moments..."). Bonanza's admonition, delivered to the audience in the film's introduction, had, years earlier, been directed nearly verbatim to Freccia, as we shall see in the film's long flashback. This is especially poignant, since Freccia's eventual death will represent a refusal to accept a life of "dead moments." Thus, the two media, cinema and radio, function in Radiofreccia to suggest the same idea: first we are told, through Bonanza, that cinema is only illusory, that the audience must not be deceived into thinking it possible to live a perfect life; then, through Bruno, we are informed that the dream of the radio is finally over, that he and his group will no longer be able to broadcast their voices and music. In other words, youthful idealism has given way to the compromises of adulthood.

In conclusion, I would like to consider Radiofreccia as a characteristic commercial enterprise of contemporary Italian cinema. Ligabue's work is a significant example of how Italian films have evolved over the last two decades. They are often no longer the experimental product of major auteurs such as Fellini and Antonioni, but more commonly the creation of novice directors, (36) or unspecialized, multi-task performers (e.g., directors-actors), or non-professionals, like the musician Ligabue. Another element which Ligabue shares with contemporary filmmakers is his use of literature in cinema. Whereas Italian cinema in its beginning often sought authority in literature (by representing excerpts, for example, from Dante's Divine Comedy, as Iannucci has reminded US), (37) now it seems that literature is seeking help from cinema, or that the arts in general are working together in order to survive and adapt to evolving capitalism. In a world where reading is undertaken by an ever-smaller percentage of the population, film becomes for the writer a way to open the door to commercial gain--as with Carlo Lucarelli's Almost Blue and Niccolo Ammaniti's Io non ho paura (2001) and Come Dio comanda (2006). In several interviews about Radiofreccia, Ligabue has emphasized the fortuitous character of the undertaking, which he has characterized almost as a game that was initiated by publishers who had asked him to write some kind of book and then continued by the producer Domenico Procacci, who expressed an interest in turning his book into a film (Bertoncelli 75-89). (38) Regardless of the original impulse, the final product represents a successful pairing of word and sound with image, which has increased Ligabue's visibility. (39) With Radiofreccia Ligabue has given more prominence to his book (upon which the film is based), to his own image (since in Radiofreccia he himself appears briefly a couple of times, once in a picture and another time as a disc-jockey), and to his music (which gains in authority by its association with the songs of big rockers). In this light, Ligabue's Radiofreccia thus becomes a typical postmodern product that displays not only the regional and global sides of our hybrid culture and points to the illusions of security that media like cinema and radio provide, as demonstrated earlier in this article, but also shows the inextricable connections between economics and aesthetics.

COSETTA GAUDENZI

University of Memphis

WORKS CITED

Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London, New York: Verso, 1995.

Barbolini, Roberto. "Dagli Appennini alle Honda. Raccontare tra la via Emilia e il rock." Intorno alla via Emilia. Ed. Franco Nasi. Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera Press, 2001.65-80.

Bertoncelli, Riccardo. Una vita da mediano: Ligabue si racconta. Firenze: Giunti, 1999.

Bondanella, Peter. "Italian Cinema." The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 215-242.

Calamante, Federico. "Ligabue. Fuori e dentro il film." Duel. July / August (1998): 33-37.

De Mauro, Tullio. L'Italia delle Italie. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1987.

Depaoli, Massimo. Il linguaggio del rock italiano. Ravenna: Longo, 1988.

De Rossi, Patrizia. Certe notti sogno Elvis. Roma: Giorgio Lucas Editore, 1995.

Eco, Umberto. "New Developments in the Mass Media of Contemporary Italy." Altro Polo: Intellectuals and their Ideas in Contemporary Italy. Ed. Richard Bosworth and Gino Rizzo. Sidney: Frederick May Foundation for Italian Studies, 1983. 109-125.

Gaudenzi, Cosetta. "Memory, Dialect, Politics: Linguistic Strategies in Fellini's Amarcord." Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 155-168.

Hall, Stuart. "The Question of Cultural Identity." Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 595-634.

Iacoli, Giulio. Atlante delle derive: Geografie da un'Emilia postmoderna: Gianni Celati e Pier Vittorio Tondelli. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2002.

Iannucci, Amilcare A. "Dante, padre del cinema italiano." Incontri con il cinema italiano. Ed. Antonio Vitti. Caltanissetta-Roma: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 2003. 22-44.

Kaplan, Ann E. "The Politics of Feminism, Postmodemism, and Rock: Revisited, with References to Parmar's Righteous Babes." Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought. Ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 323-34.

Keating, Michael. The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, Ma: Edward Elgar, 1998.

Kurz, Jan and Gino Moliterno. "Private Radio." Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. Ed. Gino Moliterno. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 491-492.

Leotti, Antonio and Luciano Ligabue. Radiofreccia: la sceneggiatura, le foto, e altro ancora. Roma: Fandango, 1999.

Ligabue, Luciano. Fuori e dentro il borgo. Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997.

--. "Altri libertini: un libro cosi rock." Tondelli e la musica: colonne sonore per gli anni ottanta. Ed. Bruno Casini. Firenze: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998. 88-90.

Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Marrese, Emilio. "Radiofreccia." Repubblica, 17 October 1998.

Monteleone, Franco. Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia. Venezia: Marsilio, 1992.

Musso, G. and R. Venturelli, eds. Infiltrazione ... musica: il rock nel cinema degli anni '70: rassegna settembre / novembre 1981. Genova: Cineclub Lumiere, 1981.

Panzeri, Fulvio. "La musica della pagina. Il suo ritmo." Tondelli e la musica: colonne sonore per gli anni ottanta. Ed. Bruno Casini. Firenze: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998. 9-22.

Pasquali, Augusto. "Dalla musica di scena allo spettacolo rock." Musica in scena: Storia dello spettacolo musicale. Ed. Alberto Basso. Vol. 4. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1997. 359-399.

Rancilio, Gigio. "Radiofreccia." L'Avvenire, 8 October 1998.

Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. Opere: Romanzi, teatro, racconti. Ed. Fulvio Panzeri. Milano: Bompiani, 2000.

Tornabuoni, Lietta. "Radiofreccia." La Stampa, 23 October 1998.

Vitti, Antonio. "Un profilo dell'identita del nuovo cinema italiano tra crisi, televisione e omologazione culturale." In Search of Italia: Saggi sulla cultura dell'Italia contemporanea. Ed. Antonio Vitti and Roberta Morosini. Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2003. 235-256.

Zagarrio, Vito. Cinema italiano anni novanta. 2nd ed., Venezia: Marsilio, 2001.

NOTES

(1) "I believe that the desire to escape from a town of twenty thousand inhabitants means you want to escape from yourself ... and I believe you can't escape from yourself, not even if you're Eddy Merckx" (all translations are mine).

(2) Barbolini has characterized Emilia as a land of contradictions: of industrialists and rock stars, of tractors and Ferraris, of ballo liscio and heavy metal (67-8). Ligabue seems to participate to a certain extent in such a world of contradictions by wearing multi-faceted masks: performing as a singer, a writer, and a director. After Radiofreccia, Ligabue has kept expanding his artistic experience as a film-maker (directing Dazeroadieci, set in Rimini and projected at the Cannes festival during Critics Week in May of 2002, though to little critical acclaim), and also as a writer (publishing in 2004 La neve se ne frega, already a bestseller, through which he experiments with science-fiction, a genre radically different from the regional Fuori e dentro il borgo).

(3) "[C]inema operates and is best understood in terms of the organization of space: both space in films--the space of the shot; the space of the narrative setting; the geographical relationship of various settings in sequence in a film; the mapping of a lived environment on film; and films in space--the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as a cultural practice; the spatial organization of its industry at the levels of production, distribution, and exhibition; the role of cinema in globalization. Thus, one of the major contentions of this book is that cinema is primarily a spatial system and that, notwithstanding the traditional textual emphasis of much Film Studies, it is more a spatial system than a textual system: that spatiality is what makes it different ..." (Shiel 5-6).

(4) Ligabue wrote regarding Tondelli, "Io credo di essergli debitore per tutta la curiosita, l'entusiasmo, la voglia di cantare che mi ha trasmesso" ("Altri libertini: un libro cosi rock" 90).

(5) For contemporary film directors, Fellini has become a symbol, or, as Marcus points out in After Fellini, a sign of the time when cinema counted (3). In this essay, I ergue that Radiofreccia offers more than what Barbolini identifies as an echo of Amarcord (78). Fellini's influence on Radiofreccia goes beyond comic gags (e.g., the shot of buttocks during Freccia's funeral recalls Fellini's take of the countrywomen sitting on their bikes on a Sunday morning), and beyond surreal moments (the hippopotamous scene in Radiofreccia, which stands for all aspects of life Freccia cannot control, and which recalls the rhino of E la nave va), to include also the treatment of space and language.

(6) In an interview with Calamante, Ligabue has also pointed out that, be cause of its interest in young people's growth, Radiofreccia has much in common with John Milius' Big Wednesday, a film released in 1978 (34).

(7) In Radiofreccia the bar substitutes for the home, which is instead portrayed as a site of misunderstandings (especially for Freccia and Tito). Thus, in this film the bar acquires the same value of refuge and point of reference that it had, as De Rossi has suggested, in Ligabue's earlier songs (22).

(8) "E diverso" is uttered in the film but does not appear in the published script.

(9) "Good evening ... this is Radio Raptus ... I am Ivan Benassi ... Uh ... perhaps there's somebody out there who's not sleeping ... Well, whether you're there or not. I have something to say. Today I had a discussion with a friend. He's one of the good guys. Good at believing what they tell him to believe. He says that if you don't believe in certain things you don't believe in anything. Well, that's hot true. I do believe. I believe in the reverse-kicks of Boninba, and in the riffs of Keith Richards. I believe in the double ring at the doorbell of the landlord who wants his rent the first of every month ... I believe that each of us ought to have a mother and a father who treat us decently, at least till we can stand on our own. I believe that an Inter [soccer team] like the one with Corso, Mazzola and Suarez will never come again, but this doesn't mean we won't have other teams that are great in different ways. I believe this is not all there is; yet, before believing in something else, you have to face what is here. And so I know I will believe sooner or later in some God. I believe that, if I ever have a family, it will be hard to make it with three hundred thousand lire a month; yet I also believe that if I don't become an ass-kisser like my foreman, things won't easily change. I believe I have a big hole inside me, yet rock and roll, a girlfriend or two, soccer, some satisfaction from work, joking around with friends ... every now and then these things fill that hole. I believe that the desire to escape from a town of twenty thousand inhabitants means you want to escape from yourself ... and I believe you can't escape from yourself, not even if you're Eddy Merckx. I believe it's not right to judge other people's lives, because, in any case, you can't know shit about other people's lives. I think that in order to believe, at certain times, you need lots of energy. So be sure to recharge with this."

(10) Freccia's discourse on place recalls Marc Auge's definition of it as a site concerned with identity: "[A] place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity" (77).

(11) In a biography edited by Riccardo Bertoncelli (Una vita da mediano: Ligabue si racconta, 1999), the director makes clear the importance of space in Radiofreccia: "E perche il contesto fosse forte come la storia e i personaggi, ho deciso di far sentire in continuazione la terra, il suolo. Per cui nel film c'e molta macchina da presa a terra, per date l'idea della superficie; o a picco, per schiacciare i personaggi a terra, come nella scena della banda al funerale di Freccia. Un richiamo continuo al posto del racconto, perche lo spettatore capisca senz'altro dove siamo: non e Roma, non e Milano, e Correggio" ("In order to have a context as strong as the story and the main characters, I decided to stress continuously the earth, the soil. For this reason, in the film I use the camera a lot at the soil level, to give the idea of the surface; or from a bird's-eye view, to crush the characters to the earth, as in the scene of the band at Freccia's funeral. There's a continuous allusion to the place of the tale, so that the spectator understands without any doubt where we are: neither in Rome, nor in Milan, but in Correggio") (94).

(12) As Shiel reminds us, "in the study of culture, it [the spatial turn, that is, a new emphasis on space] has helped us to understand how power and discipline are spatially inscribed into cultural texts and into the spatial organization of cultural production" (5).

(13) Barbolini identifies another allusion to Guareschi's work, suggesting that Radiofreccia's soccer game recalls the match between the two soccer teams, Dynamo and Gagliarda, trained by Don Camillo and Peppone (77).

(14) See Depaoli for a discussion of the use of language in Italian rock.

(15) Calamante has pointed out that "molti degli attori sono originari dell'Emilia e sono stati scelti anche con il desiderio di dare una precisa forza linguistica alla storia. Sono voci di una terra" ("many of the actors are natives of Emilia and were chosen also with the desire to give a precise linguistic strength to the story. They are voices of a land") (33). Ligabue asserts, "Anche se non siamo riusciti ad avere fino in fondo una caratterizzazione linguistica fortissima, il film e strettamente legato a questi posti [in Emilia]" ("Even if we were not able to obtain in every respect the strongest linguistic characterization, the film is closely connected to these places [in Emilia]") (Calamante 34).

(16) In an interview for TV Parma with the critic Giuseppe Marchetti, Tondelli affirmed, "Ho esordito con Altri libertini ... Li forse l'idea forte era quella di vedere tutta la provincia ... Idea che per altro mi e rimasta molto dentro in tutti questi anni, e che poi e quella piu importante di Weekend postmoderno: cioe di vedere tutta la provincia emiliana ... di vedere questa provincia, come una grande provincia di stampo americano...." ("I started off with Altri libertini ... Perhaps the most important idea in it was to see the whole province ... An idea which has stayed deep inside me all these years, and which is the most important one in Weekend postmoderno: that is, to see the whole of Emilia ... to see this province as a large province ofAmerican stamp ..." (Iacoli 110, emphasis not mine).

(17) In an interview released to Repubblica on October 17, 1998 to Emilio Marrese, Ligabue explained, "Non ho voluto parlare di politica ... perche non e al momento in cima ai miei interessi, e perche quegli anni sono stati gia troppo rovinati dalla politica ..." ("I did not want to speak about politics ... because at the moment it is not at the top of my priorities, and because those years have already been too ruined by politics...").

(18) Something analogous happens in Fellini's Amarcord, where language and sounds are employed to assert a subtly political discourse against leveling systems of culture like fascism (Gaudenzi 155-68). For example, Fellini employs dialect inflection or dialect words to distinguish the riminesi from the outsiders; and the anarchic hymn played by the gramophone set at the top of the bell tower expresses local opposition to Fascism.

(19) According to Monteleone, with the advent of independent radios in the 1970s, "La radio ritorna ad essere, come nei tardi anni quaranta, un mezzo di forte carica simbolica per chiunque voglia affermare la propria autonomia o rivendicare una funzione rivoluzionaria nella societa" ("Radio returns to being, as in the late 1940s, a medium loaded with strong symbolic power for whoever wanted to affirm his or her own autonomy or carry out a revolutionary function in society") (393).

(20) "Independent broadcasting stations have replaced the standard Italian of State radio with local accents. This came as a surprise to local audiences: announcers speaking the same way as the people of your own town or city effectively destroyed the authoritative image of radio as being a kind of 'official' voice" (Eco 116). De Mauro refers to "L'italiano 'radiolese,'" a regional idiom employed by some young people in the second half of the seventies, which was spread especially by private radios (50).

(21) For a discussion of such change see Pasquali (399).

(22) In contrast to the typical 10 million lire, almost 600 million were spent on the sound track for Radiofreccia (Rancilio, Avvenire, 8 October 1998).

(23) In Radiofreccia, the conflict between generations is exemplified by the in sane relationships within the families of Freccia and Tito. These familial problems, as portrayed by Ligabue, recall the negative view of the family found in the polemic lyrics of 1970s' rock musicians like Kandeggina Gang and Jo Squillo, as described by Massimo Depaoli (77).

(24) Kurz and Moliterno observe, "Independent radio stations were only effectively established [in Italy] in 1975, [...] it was only in July 1976 that the Constitutional Court confirmed the legal right of regionally confined stations to broadcast providing the contents were not against the constitution itself" (491).

(25) Early in the film Freccia voices the first criticism of women by recalling what his late father used to say of his mother: 'Tua mamma e come una gatta: si fa viva solo quando vuole lei ... se ne frega se hai bisogno te" ("Your mother is like a cat: she shows up only when she wants ... she doesn't care if you need help'). Freccia's selfish mother is played by Italian actress Serena Grandi, who has in the past performed some porno roles. She hardly speaks and is first shot while having sex with her new lover, careless of her son's presence. Ligabue's decision to insert such a sequence into the opening part of Radiofreccia sets the tone for the film's critical view of women, and has both thematic and narrative implications. Freccia's mother helps make the narrative of Radiofreccia circular since, towards the end, her son will meet his own gatte who will actually lead him to his death: first a temptress initiates Freccia to the use of heroin one night in the parking lot of a disco; and then a beautiful woman from Carpi who, after playing for a while with our protagonist, leaves him for a richer man. The main exception to such negative portrayals of women is the real estate agent Marzia, a sort of angel who "rents" Freccia an apartment for free and tries, in vain, to help him to overcome his drug addiction.

(26) In the 1970s world of rock and roll, women were mainly seen as sexual objects to look at and play with, a situation which started to change towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s when artists like Madonna became a means of bringing a kind of feminism to popular culture (Kaplan 326-27).

(27) Lietta Tornabuoni calls Radiofreccia a "Versione aggiornata e ottimista de I vitelloni di Fellini" ("Updated and optimistic version of Fellini's I vitelloni") (La Stampa, 23 October 1998).

(28) In an interview with Generoso Picone, reported in Panzeri's "La musica della pagina. Il suo ritmo," Tondelli pointed out, "Il mio desiderio e quello di produrre un testo che abbia un andamento interno analogo a certi ritmi musicali" ("It is my desire to produce a text which has an internal movement similar to certain musical rhythms") (16).

(29) See Iacoli's analysis of Tondelli's use of Emilia in Altri libertini: "una terra nottambula e libertina, appunto, che va a sovrapporsi all'immagine-cliche di un'Emilia grassa e lunatica, quella di Fellini, Zavattini, Guareschi, Cavazzoni, del primo Celati, di una possibile linea dominante, tra surreale e ironico, nel ritratto di questa terra da parte del suoi autori" (91).

(30) For instance, Radiofreccia reminds us of films like George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973), from which it seems to draw certain elements of the story (the radio, the deejay, and the last night of youth for a group of American boys, who are about to grow into adults) (Leotti and Ligabue 153).

(31) Tondelli wrote, "E occorso del tempo per capire, dentro di me, che pur essendo figlio di una piu vasta cultura occidentale, pur essendo un inguaribile estimatore di musica pop e rock, pur essendo un consumatore di cinema americano e di letteratura della beat generation, sono anche profondamente emiliano" ("It took time for me to understand, inside myself, that although I was the offspring of a wider Western culture, although I was an incorrigible fan of pop and rock music, although I was a consumer of American cinema and Beat Generation literature, I am also deeply an Emilian") ("Un racconto sul vino" 788).

(32) Zagarrio has pointed out that what unites recent films is "l'uso del di aletto e dell'accento, il 'paesaggio' urbano dentro cui le figure del giovani protagonisti si muovono, la scelta di un regionalismo non stereotipo ne folklorico" ("the use of dialect and accent, the urban 'landscape' within which the figures of the young protagonists move, the choice of a regionalism neither stereotypical nor folkloric") (174).

(33) Stuart Hall, for instance, observes, "National and other 'local' or particularistic identities are being strengthened by the resistance to globalization" (619, emphasis not mine). In a more particular study of the new regionalism in Western Europe and the arts, Keating points out, "Regionalism has revived in art, music and literature, reflecting the declining prestige of officially-sanctioned national cultures" (84).

(34) Apropos America, Ligabue commented in an interview reported by De Rossi, "L'America per me e un sogno e basta. Ed essendo un sogno non coincide con l'America vera ... Io ci ho giocato un po' col mito dell'America, nel senso che in Lambrusco coltelli rose e popcorn, e non so quanti l'hanno capito, c'era comunque molta ironia" ("To me America is a dream, and that's it. And as a dream, it does not coincide with the real America ... I played a little with the myth of America, in the sense that in Lambrusco coltelli rose e popcorn, and I don't know how many understood me, but there was a lot of irony") (50-1). In "Le strade blu dell'Ameribassa," a short-tale in Fuori e dentro il borgo, Ligabue writes: "Prendete una fetta della via Emilia. Precisamente quella porzione che, solcando il centro di Reggio, si estende ai lati per una decina di chilometri verso Parma e Modena. Cercate di abbracciarla idealmente guardando verso il Po. Ora, se avete voglia, possiamo procedere a rete muovendoci fra le strade blu, quelle piu nascoste, quelle dove l'America non ha lasciato solo merda ma anche qualche profumo" ("Take a slice of the Via Emilia. Precisely that portion which, furrowing the center of Reggio, extends at the borders for about six miles towards Parma and Modena. Try to embrace it in your mind, facing the Po river. Now, if you will, we can criss-cross over the roads in blue, the most hidden ones, those where America left not only crap but also some perfume") (120).

(35) Ennio Morricone, who employed an unusual sound-track composed of gunfire, ricocheting bullets, cries, etc., received international recognition for his collaboration with Leone (Bondanella 228).

(36) Vitti remarks, "Fra il 1985 e il 1995 in Italia hanno esordito 600 registi" ("In Italy, there were 600 new film directors between 1985 and 1995") (237).

(37) See for instance, Iannucci's "Dante, padre del cinema italiano."

(38) "Ogni anno scrivo una cosa per l'agenda [Smemoranda], perche sono amico di Gino e Michele, sono persone splendide con cui sto bene ... Fatto sta che a un certo punto, nell'arco di due settimane, si fecero avanti quattro o cinque case editrici anche importanti che volevano un mio libro. In realta non avevano la minima idea di che libro potesse essere. Volevano un libro e basta, i cantautori stavano scrivendo libri e, siccome piu o meno andavano bene, loro ne volevano uno da me" ("Each year I write something for the daily agenda [Smemoranda], since I am a friend of Gino and Michele, who are wonderful people, and with whom I have a good time ... The fact is, at a certain point, within a period of two weeks, four or rive publishers, even important ones, came forward and asked for a book from me. In reality they had no idea of what the subject might be. They wanted a book, that's it. Singer-songwriters were writing books and, since more or less they were doing well, they wanted one from me") (Bertoncelli 75).

(39) As Musso and Venturelli observe, "Il cinema ha offerto al divo della musica rock l'immagine in azione, che puo surrogare l'irrepetibilita del concerto dal vivo con la qualita del suono e dell'immagine ..." ("Cinema has offered to the rockstar image in action, which can replace the unrepeatability of a live concert with the quality of sound and of image ...") (8).