This paper will compare two cases of performative medievalism in Italy – cases from opposite ends of the political spectrum – that used (and use) medieval imagery to describe and form identities of particular sectors of the populace. A first section considers Assisi’s festival of ‘Calendimaggio’ (the Kalends of May), its origin and subsequent role in keeping an Assisian identity alive after the depopulation of the city following the earthquakes of 1997-1998. Commonly presented as the revival of medieval spring celebrations and as the peaceful sublimation of a fourteenth-century blood feud, Calendimaggio was founded in 1927 by the city’s Fascist podestà, Arnaldo Fortini, in conjunction with the septcentenary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death. Supported by Mussolini, Fortini’s septcentenary co-opted St. Francis for the Fascist cause and brought about the first major rapprochement between the secular government of modern Italy and the Holy See. Originally a roving serenade by local youth, Calendimaggio was revived after the Second World War as a three-day medieval-dress pageant involving hundreds of the city’s present and former inhabitants, who each year re-embrace their belongingness to St. Francis's city by temporarily returning to his world. A second case study focuses on Pier Paolo Pasolini, author of many well-known films on medieval themes, including The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, which together form his Trilogy of Life. Despite an ongoing post-War appropriation of medieval imagery and spectacle by Italian neo-Fascists, in the 1970s Pasolini and various other prominent left-wing writers, musicians, filmmakers, and politically engaged maîtres à penser in Italy adopted the Middle Ages as a metaphor for narrating complex contemporary realities. A bard of longing for the past with a revolutionary perspective, Pasolini feared that the populace – the proletariat – was losing its identity through amalgamation to the middle class and its deceptive gospel of well-being. Pasolini’s films present the Middle Ages as an antidote to that ideology: a world of unspoiled straightforwardness, carnality, and innocence. For Pasolini the medieval past carried a “scandalous revolutionary force” undiminished by its right-wing reenactments.
Forging 'Medieval' Identities: Fortini’s Calendimaggio and Pasolinis Trilogy of Life
DI CARPEGNA GABRIELLI FALCONIERI, TOMMASO;
2017
Abstract
This paper will compare two cases of performative medievalism in Italy – cases from opposite ends of the political spectrum – that used (and use) medieval imagery to describe and form identities of particular sectors of the populace. A first section considers Assisi’s festival of ‘Calendimaggio’ (the Kalends of May), its origin and subsequent role in keeping an Assisian identity alive after the depopulation of the city following the earthquakes of 1997-1998. Commonly presented as the revival of medieval spring celebrations and as the peaceful sublimation of a fourteenth-century blood feud, Calendimaggio was founded in 1927 by the city’s Fascist podestà, Arnaldo Fortini, in conjunction with the septcentenary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death. Supported by Mussolini, Fortini’s septcentenary co-opted St. Francis for the Fascist cause and brought about the first major rapprochement between the secular government of modern Italy and the Holy See. Originally a roving serenade by local youth, Calendimaggio was revived after the Second World War as a three-day medieval-dress pageant involving hundreds of the city’s present and former inhabitants, who each year re-embrace their belongingness to St. Francis's city by temporarily returning to his world. A second case study focuses on Pier Paolo Pasolini, author of many well-known films on medieval themes, including The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, which together form his Trilogy of Life. Despite an ongoing post-War appropriation of medieval imagery and spectacle by Italian neo-Fascists, in the 1970s Pasolini and various other prominent left-wing writers, musicians, filmmakers, and politically engaged maîtres à penser in Italy adopted the Middle Ages as a metaphor for narrating complex contemporary realities. A bard of longing for the past with a revolutionary perspective, Pasolini feared that the populace – the proletariat – was losing its identity through amalgamation to the middle class and its deceptive gospel of well-being. Pasolini’s films present the Middle Ages as an antidote to that ideology: a world of unspoiled straightforwardness, carnality, and innocence. For Pasolini the medieval past carried a “scandalous revolutionary force” undiminished by its right-wing reenactments.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
