Italia 70 - The Sound of Political Dissent / Rome - Feminist Art, Violence and Spiritual Drones
Late ‘70s Rome was a city haunted by violence and murders, where feminist groups tried to change the tide of collective socio-political consciousness with witty slogans, protests and conceptual art. In the meantime, a cluster of experimental musicians scored these turbulent times by recording minimalist albums that aspired to a new ethereal and spiritual dimension.
The continuous pattern of a drone is resonating in the large hall of the squatted villa in the centre of Rome. The building, an XVII century abandoned palazzo, is yellow and covered in dirty marble, with broken statues and lush bushes of bougainvillaea scattered throughout the garden, where youngsters are listening to music. Some of them are sitting at the feet of the musicians, on multi-coloured Persian carpets, smoking Pakistani hash some hippies brought from a trip to the East.
It’s May 12, 1977, and the sun hits the performers, producing a religious experience of transcending sense: two hours of minimalistic drone music. Violinist Giusto Pio is gently playing the fiddle, Michele Fefrigotti and Danilo Lorenzini are playing drones on two Hammonds, and Franco Battiato is murmuring nonsense, elevating the live set to pure ecstasy. The band is performing the material that two years later would be included in Motore Immobile, an album of Minimalist Music, a genre that was quite influential in Italy in the second half of the ‘70s. Together with Franco Battiato’s early works – including the four masterpieces Sulle Corde Di Aries (1973), Clic (1974), Za (1977), and L’Egitto Prima delle Sabbie (1978) – Giusto Pio, and many others, produced a branch of experimental music, called Minimalism, that became a somehow weird juxtaposition to the dark times Italy was going through. This genre counterbalanced with ecstatic beauty the grim days of political terrorism the peninsula was experiencing because of Cold War.
In the 1970s Franco Battiato is in his minimalist and spiritual experimental phase. Photo: Roberto Masotti.
Whilst the music is playing, a group of youths is preparing signs for a peaceful sit-in in the streets of the capital: they are going to protest against the government’s choice not to support the Abortion Law. The fear in Italy is tangible, and the Strategy of Tension is working well: since January, a multitude of riots, acts of guerrilla and murders have taken place all over the country. On March 11th, the police killed a member of the far-left militant organisation Lotta Continua. On the 12th of the same month, a brigadier was killed by a member of Front Line, a Marxist-Leninist group from the North of Italy, while on March 22nd, another far-left activist from the South Italian group NAP killed a cop, an at that was promptly followed by urban guerrilla in Bologna, Venice and Rome. Italy was a fuse ready to blow up, and the time was about to come.
Like many other cities in Italy, Rome during the ‘70s is a place where utopias are consumed and burned out. It is a city filled with contradictions: it’s home to experimental music, contemporary feminist art, political turmoil, and terrorism. However, Rome, wasn’t really a European capital. It looked more like a Centre or South American city, a weird hybrid formed by a hyper-religious mentality, the Pope, conservative politicians, street guerrilla, and thousands of underpaid working-class citizens with many ambitions but little future.
Carla Lonzi (first left) and other members of the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile gathered in Jacqueline Vodoz’s Venice flat, 1976.
During the Years of Lead, it was the stage for a series of gory murders which escalated in violent reactions, making the Italian capital a focal point for hidden politics, weapon trading and innocent victims. Both sides of the terrorist spectrum were very active in Rome: neo-fascist groups such as Ordine Nuovo and far-left ones like the famous Red Brigades created a dark and toxic environment, scored by highly conceptual music and feminist art.
For a whole decade, new political subjects in the form of extra-parliamentary groups found their raison d’etre in the discrepancies between the middle and the working-class, creating riots, sit-ins and protests, as well as debates, culture and self-awareness. The student unions, together with factory workers managed to move the focus of the socio-political debate from the parliament to the streets, highlighting the differences between the middle and the working-class.
The feminists, whose group Rivolta Femminile also run a publishing house carrying the same name, were among the most influential clusters in the Roman political and artistic underground of the time. Their slogans and mottos are very smartly chosen by the group, usually in the form of witty statements: “In the family, the man is the middle-class and the woman is the working-class”.
The Feminist group Rivolta Femminile is one of the most active clusters in the Roman political and artistic underground of the Seventies.
Conceptually, Rivolta Femminile was promoting separatism and self-awareness. ”The feminine problem is the relationship of any woman – deprived as she is of any power, history, culture, and of a role of her own – to any man, to his power, his history, his culture, his absolute role,” says art critic Carla Lonzi, one of the masterminds of the group. The goal of the feminists is to free Italian women from the patriarchal stereotypes they are stuck in. In addition to Lonzi, the conceptual and theoretical works by Carla Accardi, Maria Mulas, Edoarda Emilia Maino, and Cecilia Capuana are of fundamental importance to transmit and spread this ideology.
In those days, Italian music as well was pioneered by female artists. Library music composers such as Daniela Casa with her Societa Malata and Vernissage, among others, provided the score for happenings and art exhibitions, while musicians like Maria Teresa Luciani defined the modern contemporary urban life in songs like ‘Cortili Cittadini’ and ‘Traffico Impazzito’. Franca Sacchi, a former student of RAI Studio of Fonologia (the Italian equivalent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop), in 1970, produced the masterpiece album EN, a crossover between minimalism, improvisation and electronic music.
Back to the sunny afternoon of May 12th, despite the minister of home affair’s ban on all the public manifestation in Rome, the Radical Party has planned a peaceful sit-in. It is expected to include members of the extra-parliamentary groups, of the trade unions as well as feminist groups, all gathered to celebrate women’s freedom. Something, though, does not go as planned.
The atmosphere is tense, though. Peaceful sit-ins have been forbidden, and the police is aggressive, possibly too aggressive towards the protesters. Soon they start beating up radical politicians, journalists, photographers, and random citizens as the ultimate solution to stop people from getting together.
During the May 12th, 1977 rally organised in Rome by the Radical Party, Police charged peaceful protesters on several occasions.
Several women are carrying signs with statements such as “We give birth to ideas, not just children,” “Marriage is not a career choice,” or “Where the capitalism exists you can find patriarchy”. Among these stand several students of the Pasteur Liceum. Eighteen-year-old Giorgiana Masi and her boyfriend are two of them.
Giorgiana is a short, petite girl, and the agitated crowd swallows the student. The sky is slowly getting darker as well, and the protestors’ spatial awareness is challenged, and definitely not helped by the tiredness of a day of rallying. Shortly after 8 pm, a loud bang. A scream follows, then havoc and disorientation. A girl lies on the ancient, cobbled street, it’s Giorgiana, killed by a bullet shot by a cop. Her only fault? Taking part in a peaceful protest. Nobody was ever charged for the killing, contributing to the feeling that by the late 1970s violence had slipped out of hand, in a country where the ruling class was incapable – or unwilling – to tame political dissent in a firm and democratic way.
From that day onwards, murders, attacks, kneecaps, and riots further increase, becoming part of the daily routine of a country that now looked far from the bon vivant and sun-kissed land that 1950s that the world had known with the Dolce Vita generation.
On January 4th, the head of security of FIAT automobiles was killed, on the 7th three young members of the far-right movement Italian Social Movement (MSI) were brutally killed in Rome, outside the headquarter of the group. Another cop died in Florence on January 20th, followed by a solicitor in Rome on February 7th, by a magistrate in Pisa on the 14th, and by an officer in Turin on March 10th.
This escalation reached its climax with the killing of three carabinieri and three policemen by the Red Brigades on March 16th, during the kidnap of the stateman Aldo Moro. His body will be found 54 days later, inside the trunk of a red Renault 4 in Via Caetani, 150 meters from the headquarters of both the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democracy party, just outside the Jewish ghetto.
The death of Aldo Moro represented a collective trauma for the entire Italian population. Moro – who, albeit according to the official version, was sentenced to death by the Red Brigades’ ‘people’s court’ for trying to establish a dialogue between the Catholic and the Communist Party – almost turned into a martyr to the eyes of many Catholics. His funerals were officiated by Pope Paolo VI, in a scene that has the intensity of a medieval function, with the strength of history in the making.
Following the murder of Giorgiana Masi, feminists gathered in Rome to remember the victim.
While reality was turning darker and darker, musicians were releasing escapist music, that sounded light-hearted only on a surface level, while, in reality, it was mirroring the hard times Italians were living in. Escapists soundtracks for a cruel world.
Released in 1978, Luciano Cillio’s masterpiece I Dialoghi del Presente perfectly captures this dichotomy in Italian history. In the same year, Lino Capra Vaccina self-releases Antico Adagio, an album praised by many for its avant-garde minimalist music. Michele Fedrigotti and Danilo Lorenzini with I Fiori Del Sole, embrace religious eschatology with the help of Franco Battiato. I Fiori del Sole is a minimalist album full of romanticism, where piano and organ are played and explored. The music is produced in order to free the listener from earthly passions and daily acts of violence.
Self-taught experimental composer Luciano Cillio recorded one album only before taking his life in 1983.
Roberto Cacciapaglia’s Sei Note in Logica is, perhaps, the summa of the minimalist movement of the ‘70s. It is a record that explores the whole genre, sounding as hypnotic as Terry Riley. The detachment from reality is now almost complete, as Cacciapaglia leaves the dangerous streets of Italian cities for the pure formality of the logic. By the end of 1979, Giusto Pio releases Motore Immobile, a record simultaneously deafening and spiritual, representing the perfect objectification of the utopias and the ideologies of the decade, an all-embracing monolithic experience.
The Seventies were times where ideologies were fighting against each other, hoping for utopias to happen and so did minimalist music. It portrayed the sound of a much sought-after calm, peaceful, abstract and ethereal world.