8 - Fare la vita grigia: The Industrial City of Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi

Summary

Abstract

The economic boom of the 1950s resulted in mass migration into the industrial cities of northern Italy. For intellectuals, this decade was a period of disillusionment and resignation. Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi, in their respective fictions La nuvola di smog (1958) and La vita agra (1962), emphasize the grayness of their protagonists’ environment, which takes the form of smog, fog, dust, and smoke. This grayness or grigiore also alludes to the murky political situation that surrounds them and their desire to break free from it. The industrial city itself becomes a locus in which individual voices are squandered, ethics blurred, and men forced to renounce their ideals to ensure their survival.

Keywords: Calvino, Bianciardi, economic boom, industrialization, grayness

Conformity, mediocrity, boredom, sadness, loneliness, elderliness, and pensiveness: these are the characteristics evoked by the color gray according to contemporary studies by Eva Heller and Michel Pastoureau. In the Italian twentieth century, the color was closely associated with the atrocities of the Fascist regime and the slow, postwar reconstruction. This period of moral and political rebuilding was complicated by the transformative, societal phenomenon known as the economic miracle. From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, exports skyrocketed, families moved across the peninsula, and the Northern landscape changed rapidly from industrial and suburban expansion. Millions flocked to the cities, leaving behind their roots—both the land they had nurtured for generations and the social connections to their families and towns. The industrialist Adriano Olivetti, famed for his human-centered factories and their utopic balance between work and community life, encapsulated the velocity of this transformation at the inauguration of his newest Olivetti establishment in 1955: “In little more than a generation, we have abandoned a thousand-year tradition of farmers and fishermen.” During this economic boom, the color gray was immediately present on the urban visual plane: building materials such as metal, steel, and concrete were used to erect spaces of exchange and production like factories and warehouses. Gray was found in the dusty lodgings of workers, which should have provided relief from the doldrums of the workday.