We Want Everything: The Italian 1970s

Catalog description

Long hair, colorful clothes, psychedelic music, free love, and stormy demonstrations: this is the image that the 1970s engraved in our collective imagination. Framed by two waves of strikes - victorious in 1969 and defeated in 1980 - the Italian seventies were a rebellious time. At the end of the economic boom, this decade experienced the outbreak of multiple contradictions that had accumulated in the postwar period, when a poor and rural country had rapidly turned into a modern industrial society. In these years, Italy appeared dramatically torn between tradition and modernity. This seminar will explore these transformations, focusing on the relationship between culture and help us to depict a diverse landscape beyond the dominant cliche of the years of lead. We will scrutinize multiple sources - novels, films, songs and political essays - as well as memorial and historical productions.