Bellissima: Feminine beauty and the idea of Italy
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXV; Issue: 513 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ehr/ceq066
ISSN1477-4534
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoCultural histories need to be based on a broad empirical basis, otherwise convincing arguments cannot be made. Stephen Gundle's book is a case in point. The author takes his readers through the last two hundred years of Italian history and shows that there was a link between the Italian nation and a specific kind of feminine beauty—dark-haired and olive-skinned women of a Mediterranean type who were recognisably different from other national stereotypes, notably French, English and American. Even readers who believe they know quite a lot about Italy can make interesting discoveries within it. For it is as surprising to learn that in the novel Il Gattopardo Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa composed his heroine Angelica with ‘actresses like [Gina] Lollobrigida and [Sophia] Loren in mind’ (p. 167), as it is to find out that Alessandra Mussolini owed her political success not only to her grandfather, the Duce, but also to her aunt, Sophia Loren. It is with facts such as these that Gundle is able to construct his most interesting arguments. In their light readers can begin to reconsider important Italian cultural and political events which they might not have linked before—be they novels celebrating nineteenth-century Sicily and twentieth-century movie stars, or, indeed, politics and pornography, for Italy was the first ever country in which a porn star won a seat in the national parliament: Illona Staller, also known as Cicciolina, in 1987.
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