CRASSH

Alberto Lattuada’s short film Gli italiani si voltano (Italians Turn Around, 1953) is at first glance merely a frothy contribution to Cesara Zavattini’s earnest neorealist anthology film L’amore in città. The film consists of a series of (mostly moving) shots of women walking down the streets of postwar Rome, their bodies available for the (mostly unwanted) ogling of Italian men. The film’s title puns Italy’s nascent ‘turn-around’—the stuttering of its economic recovery—with the men’s (gli italiani) rubbernecking stares. The pun of this metonymy (Italians turn around/Italian men turn around) cues an awareness of the film’s metonymic handling of Rome’s urban fabric. An attention to the places that the film allows us to see reveals a serious element of implicit (perhaps even unconscious) urban critique that is obscured by the film’s seemingly frivolous tone. Throughout the film, which is meant to celebrate postwar, post-Fascist progress, we are presented with ominous material traces of Fascist urbanism and its violent refashioning of Roman urban space. Where the film shows us recent, postwar construction, the implications are no less unsettling. This paper will offer a close spatio-historical reading of the film’s locations. In doing so, however, the paper intends to ask what we do when we place undue, micohistorical significance on a film’s locations. What kind of knowledge is produced through such analysis? I intend to argue that Gli italiani si voltano’s desultory mobility enacts a spatial experience common in everyday Roman life, an experience in which our ability to navigate the city in a particular way involves us unwittingly in a material critique of modern Roman urban development. The possibility of this critique is a powerful latency lying in plain sight—in film as in city space—and available to us, if we but incline our attention in its direction.