The Secrets of Italy by Corrado Augias

Author:Corrado Augias [Augias, Corrado]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4275-9
Publisher: Rizzoli
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

After Liberation, during the postwar period the city seemed to have lost the impassioned energy of those exceptional days. In his reportage-infused novel La pelle (The Skin, 1949),11 the controversial writer Curzio Malaparte illustrates the Neapolitans’ conditions and state of mind with the vivid, macabre colors of a prose that deftly mixes the blue of the sea with the red of blood—buffoonery and obscenity with tragedy, inventiveness, resignation, hunger, and abuse. In the chapter “The Virgin of Naples,” the author and an American lieutenant enter a tenement where visitors are invited to admire an actual virgin, laid out, legs splayed apart. For a dollar, they are allowed to test her virginity with their own fingers. All the book’s episodes have a similar tenor: Neapolitan women’s pubic wigs are blond because the American “negroes” like blondes; one scene describes a homosexual orgy with a strap-on; another scene portrays a group of monstrous dwarfs as if they were painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The overall impression is that of a city populated by thieves, ruffians, and whores where any- and everyone is ready to sell their body for a song or some basic staple. All traces of dignity are gone, and rather than returning to its usual flow, life in the city slithers along instead, in the most degrading way possible. Malaparte’s stories are based on his actual experiences, expanded by his vivid imagination, his expressionistic and lush prose, and the dreamlike distortions by which his writing reshapes reality. I do not know whether Fellini ever read his work, but many of their characters’ “monstrosities,” deformations, and excesses (at least from La dolce vita onward) reveal that these two men had a similarly attentive, distorted, realistic yet hallucinatory vision.

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