As it is commonly known, in the last forty years the situation in the world has decidedly undergone a series of substantial modifications with a higher rapidity than the previous historical periods. This has inevitably modified the cultural production and its fruition everywhere, and of course also in Italy.

Masss–Media and Technology

A consequence of the economic boom and of the industrialization in the sixties was also the growth of a cultural "industry". When we think of it, a fundamental date comes to our minds: 1954, a year when television broadcasting began. After a first experimental phase, during which the diffusion of tv was limited, starting from the sixties television has entered the life of the Italians, taking partly the place before occupied by radio.

The consequences of this new reality are probably the same in all countries; we have any way to underline that, in Italy, television has given a notable push to free the country from its cultural provincialization and to a widespread use of the Italian language, against the dialects.

As far as newspapers are concerned, it is said that the Italians are the worse readers of dailies in Europe, a phenomenon deducible from the relationship between the number of sold copies and the number of inhabitants. Instead the reading of books that was thought to decrease because of television and the use of computers, not only survives, but it is growing. This is probably also due to the decrease in the prices of books imposed by new publishing houses that have begun their activity in recent years.

It must be, specified, however that only 18,4% may be considered usual readers, of which the majority are women and that most readers are concentrated in the center and north of the country.

As in most industrialized countries, technology has provoked great changes in Italy, in the course of the last two decades and very quickly in the last one, both in the habits of the people and in the system itself. The use of machines, computers and automation, which is now widely spread in all sectors of the Italian system, factories, hospitals, schools, public and private administration at all levels, has made life easier.

Cinema

After the neo-realism, that produced committed film up to the fifties, then light movies on the reality of the poorest classes, in the years of the economic boom it is the middle class that becomes protagonist of the so-called called "Italian comedy", that will have also enjoy great success in the seventies. The success of these films is due not so much to directors, but to actors like Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi and Ugo Tognazzi.

Two directors of the "old generation", Fellini and Antonioni, infused an imprint of absolute novelty in forms and contents on the Italian cinema of the sixties, a novelty that deeply influenced other authors and that also influenced the cinematography of other countries.

Federico Fellini follows an autobiographic and existential trend, beginning with "La Dolce Vita" (1960), and continuing with the intimism of "Julietta degli Spiriti" (1965) and with the oneirism of "Fellini–Satyricon" (1969); we must also remember "Amarcord" (1973), a melancholic story set in Rimini, his native town. Michelangelo Antonioni, another worldwide known director, rejects the traditional rules with movies like "Deserto Rosso" (1964) to focus the attention essentially on the static moments, deprived of dramatic force; later the director abandons this formal rigor with movies like "Blow up" (1967) and "Zabriskie point" (1970), where his existentialism focuses on the problem of the alienation of man towards the reality that surrounds him.

Contemporarily, many young directors, often at theirs first attempts, moved in opposition with neo-realistic trend of the fifties, generally limiting themselves, however, to the phase of destruction, without being able to formulate a new poetic. In this panorama works of quality may be remembered, like the ones made by such directors as Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Franco Zeffirelli. The second half the sixties were characterized by a trend of great commercial importance: the western "made in Italy", the so-called "spaghetti western"; Sergio Leone is the director that has tied his name to such kind of cinema.

In the seventies the Italian cinema entered into a crisis, also for the competition of television, which saw the diffusion of private nets; besides the American productions made the situation worse: many cinemas were forced to close. The productive system was not able to renew itself, in terms of ideas and quality, and in the period very bad low quality movies were made, apart some exceptions.

It is interesting to note, anyway, that just in this period a new generation of actors–authors appeared, that gave life to a cinema, often of cabaret derivation, all centered on the character, more than on the story: we can mention, for example to Carlo Verdone, to Massimo Troisi or Roberto Benigni.

When we consider another kind of movies, the horro ones, we must remember Dario Argento, that since his first work, "L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo" (1970), has proved one of the best authors of such type of cinema.

In the past decades the Italian cinema seems to have reached a good international level.

We have to mention the names of the Italian directors that have been honoured with the Oscar in these last years: Giuseppe Tornatore, Gabriele Salvatores and Roberto Benigni ("La vita è bella"

Literature

During the fifties, with the change of the political climate, the ideal motivations that were at the base of neo-realist fiction also disappeared. Existential themes became preponderant again, linked especially to the phenomenon of alienation and incommunicability of contemporary man, in a society produced by the capitalistic development.

The crisis of Neo-realism didn't flow into a unique trend of the novel, the intent to give an explanation to reality was pursued in very different ways: novel–essay (Sciascia), metaphoric invention (I. Calvino), language search (C. E. Gadda)…..

There was also then a return to intimist novel, that followed the tradition of psychological novel: as an example, we can mention Charles Cassola, that told "private" stories giving life to round characters.

In the sixties, influenced by the debate on the relationship between art and industrial society, a literary trend appearte that produced to novels describing the world of the factory and the condition of man in the industrial reality.

From the end of the seventies, the fiction Italian abandoned the experience experimental and has recovered the "story-telling" technique, producing novels where action is important again, together with psychological insight. It can be said that this means to shorten the distance between high literature and some kinds of mass literature: apparently the writer, as tired as the readers of serious stories, writes works that are easily read, but that are generally easily forgotten as well.

Besides today we have in the literary field the same phenomenon that takes place in the cinema: the works refuse excessive intellectualism and seek a spectacular component aiming at a wider public.. The weight of the cultural industry in the thematic and linguistic choices of the writers is greater and greater, successes is more and more ephemeral, readers more and more influenced by advertising campaigns or possible television or cinema versions. We are in a phase of fiction that has been defined "post-modern."

The term is used to define the culture proper to societies that have entered the post-industrial age: the basic principle is that , as the contemporary world ischaracterized by a multiplicity of languages, absolute truth cannot exist. The computer revolution is the qualifying element of postmodernism, in the sense that it not only modified the goods produced, but also the way of producing it.

Italian Post-modernism is based on the following principles: the reader should be set at the center of the work (as in "Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore" , by Italo Calvino, whose protagonist is a reader that starts ten times to read a book, without succeeding to finish it), the widespread use of quotations (as in the book by Umberto Eco "Il nome della rosa", a thriller set in the Middle Ages, liby now become a world best–seller), the remake (for example, Sebastiano Vassals wrote "La chimera", in 1990, a story in some aspects similar to that of "I promessi sposi", by A. Manzoni).

Also to be mentioned is that in the panorama of the Italian fiction there is a sector, more commercial, that adopts the forms of the "soap-operas": it is the case of "Va dove ti porta il cuore", by Susanna Tamaro.

At the opposite in the nineties there was a generation of young writers that followed the trend established by the well known film of Tarantino: "Pulp fiction". They have a preference for the cruel themes typical of the horror strips: they are called "cannibals" from the title of an anthology of their works entitled "cannibal Youth" (1996).

While novels are now sold in the supermarkets, different it is the destiny of poetry, which has always been a literary genre for intellectual élites. In Italy the panorama of the poetic expressions from the sixties till to-day is very varied. Against the obscurity already In the fifties there were already poets who rejected "Ermetismo" in favour of narrative form and committed content (Pasolini, Volponi…).

A different form of neo–experimentalism, on the contrary, refused political commitment, aiming rather at underlining the alienation of man and at denouncing the non-authenticity of the languages: they are the so-called "novissimi" poets, (Pagliarani, Sanguineti…), who formed group '63.

The reflux of the seventies sees a rebirth of the traditional forms, defined neophoric for the resumption of the cult of the beauty. Following symbolism, these poets propose a nostalgic return to lyric subjectivism.

Side by side, however, entirely alternatives experimental experiences are present. At the beginning of the eighties a conference was held in Fano on "Poetry of the metamorphosis", which underlined the need for poems that may express the change of perceptions in the present . In 1989 "Group ‘93" was formed , whose positions are difficult to define because in continuous evolution. However it may be said to represent a critic Postmodernism because, while it reflects a situation of post-modernity, at the same time it wants to criticize it.

Theatre

Also in Italy, on the wake of the theater of the absurd, a new theatrical experimentation begins in the sixties which it creates new forms of expression by rejecting the theater of naturalistic origin. It is a period marked by the activity of such capable directors as George Strehler, Luca Ronconi and Carmelo Bene.

The name of Strehler is linked to the Piccolo Teatro di Milano , which he founded in 1947 and directed up to his death (1998). In 1983 Streheler also assumed the direction of the Théâtre de l'Europe, founded by the European Parliament as an expression of the common cultural inheritance of Europe.

Ronconi has conquered international fame thanks to an experimental remake of the "Orlando Furioso", by Ludovico Ariosto, performed in Spoleto (1969) the first time and then in a lot of world capitals (Paris, New York…) In 1982, , he set "Ghosts" by Ibsen in Spoleto, in the crypt of a church which included both the space for the public and that for the actors. Later the director has continued and developed in an experimental sense the search on language and staging techniques.

An example of original experimentation is, then, the work of Carmelo Bene, founded upon the rewriting of classical texts, by Shakespeare above all. He takes the idea of a provocation theater rom the surrealist avant-garde, but, unlike the contemporary experimentations, it keeps the centrality of the main character.

We must also remember theatrical forms close to the intellectual experimentations of the neo-avant-gardes aiming at a relationship with the public, as the cabaret, from whose tradition the work of Dario Fo derives. Dario Fo appeared on the scene in the fifties as a comic actor, but in the course of the years he rejected the bourgeois theater, to give a more politicized connotation to his work, conceiving his activity of man of theatre as a service to the proletarians in their class struggle. His bright career was crowned in 1997 by the award of the Nobel prize for literature.

"Funny Mystery" is considered his masterpiece, (theatrical season 1969/70), where varied artistic traditions of the past converge, with an absolutely original result; the piece deals with several episodes linked to religious themes, told from a desecrating perspective: it is a grotesque deformation, with surreal caricatures, that gives a politicized vision, of history and culture, opposite to the official one.

Art

It is not an easy task to trace a synthetic and at the same time exhaustive profile of the artistic events of the second half of nineteen century in Italy: in our country, as in othersd artistic trends and artists appear and disappear continuously , in search of a new artistic way of expression.

Therefore , beside realistic works (as those of Renato Guttuso), we find varied and different experiences of abstract or informal art.

Within the informal one the"physical" painting of Alberto Burri must be remembered. The artist uses unusual material (tar, sands, enamels at the beginning and then jute sacks), which is pervaded, in his opinion, by expressive quality: a dirty, torn sack, for example, may silently express the kind of life that it has lived and by which it was reduced in such conditions.

Another important Italian contemporary artist is Lucio Fontana. The problem he faces is a spatial problem; in the sixties, at the end of a long artistic search, he comes to its peculiar production: white cloths wounded with cuts, that open a passage through a surface felt as an impassable limit.

Within the so-called "spatialism", sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro must also be remembered.

The artist is particularly famous for his "spheres" (one of them may be seen on the waterfront of the town of Pesaro, 12 km from Fano). They are perfect and smoothed objects on the surface, but broken, to underline an "inside", an "under-the-surface" which is not as polished and composite: perfection and imperfection (the world, wasted by man), but also the human necessity to know and to understand. In the same years Italian artists, more or less known, turned to different pictorial experiences, from pop-art to analytical painting, without reaching,however, the levels and the form of the European or Americans masters.

At the end of the seventies and as a reaction to the conceptual tendency, the "trans-avant-garde" movement appeared in Italy and became the prevailing artistic trend of the following decade. "Trans-avant-garde" artists consider the art of the past as a laboratory of images to be re-used: near and distant, abstract and figurative, experimental and traditional, cultured and popular languages freely cohabit in the work of art.

In these last years in Italy post-modern art, connected to the new technological possibilities, is becoming a leading phenomenon.

Though it allows historical traditions still coexist with modern tendencies, it makes more and more use of the possibilities offered by the new technologies.

It is not to be forgotten, in fact, that the use of computers in the making of art objects, is spreading and creating new trends that it is still difficult to define.