Ennio Flaiano and His Italy

While film scholars and enthusiasts all over the world are familiar with Federico Fellini’s important contributions to postwar Italian and European cinema it is much less known, especially outside of Italy, that such success has much to do with the writings of his fifteen-year collaborator and scriptwriter, Ennio Flaiano (1910-72), journalist, novelist, dramatist, and theater and film critic. This book identifies the ways in which Flaiano’s distinctive travel diary ‘satirically registering the transformative journey from provincial Italian to global citizen’ captured and shaped the changing tastes of an entire generation of Italians on the film set, in the newspaper office and on the street. The book highlights Flaiano’s uneven yet steadily developing anticolonialist stance, his emerging postmodern autobiography, and his interrogation of notions of regional, national and cultural superiority.