Abstract
The expression anni di piombo(Years of Lead) refers to a dark page in Italian history that covers the period from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s, and was characterized by students’ and workers’ protests, terrorist attacks and political violence. Scholarship about the Years of Lead has either focused on authors who were writing in the 1970s and 1980s, and thus lived through and represented those years from an ‘internal’ perspective, or it has looked at the ways that contemporary writers have reconstructed this period and their various motivations for doing so. In this context, however, critics have rarely addressed the case of Loriano Macchiavelli, whose work might be regarded as epitomizing both an internal perspective and a kind of overview of this key period in recent Italian history.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations by the author, unless otherwise stated.
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- 3.
- 4.
Questura is the central police station, so questurino indicates the policemen based on these premises and most often assigned to bureaucratic work.
- 5.
Even if these two series will not be commented on here, it is quite important to mention them: the Years of Lead are also represented in the second novel of the Jules Quicher saga, Strage [Massacre, 1990] and in the third volume of the Benedetto Santovito series, Questo sangue che impasta la terra [This Blood Kneading the Earth, 2001]. In these works, Macchiavelli employs different strategies than in the Sarti series to evoke the Years of Lead, which is the reason why I will not analyse them here, as much more space would be required to examine them properly.
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Cf. the catalogue of novels concerning the theme of Italian terrorism during the Years of Lead made by Raffaele Donnarumma annexed to his article (2010).
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Jules Quicher investigates crimes such as the bombing attack that occurred at the Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980 and the Ustica massacre (the crash of a civil aircraft between the islands of Ponza and Ustica, probably as a result of a bomb attack on 27 June 1980).
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In Italy, there has been a disagreement about the use of the terms giallo (yellow) and noir to distinguish the different sub-genres of crime fiction. If noir derives from the American hard-boiled school, giallo (after the yellow covers employed by the publisher Mondadori for his crime collection in the 1920s) is used as a synonym for both crime fiction and detective fiction. In the case of Macchiavelli, the situation is complicated: the stories focused on Sarti Antonio have often been described as gialli, but on many occasions the writer has affirmed that he prefers the term noir, including in a recent interview with the author (24 May 2021).
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See also Carloni and Pirani (2020: 5): “Macchiavelli’s crime fiction proves to be provocative from the very beginning and, compared to each known model, absolutely anomalous. It is, as they say, a ‘committed’ detective story, because the investigation of crime is always an investigation into the social and political matrixes from which it originates”.
- 12.
‘I delitti del DAMS’ (the murders of DAMS) is an expression indicating a series of three unsolved murders that occurred between 1982 and 1983. The victims, Angelo Fabbri, Francesca Alinovi and Leonarda Polvani, were two researchers and one student of a well-known arts programme (called DAMS), offered by the University of Bologna. Because of this, one of the hypotheses circulating at the time was that of a serial killer hunting the members of the faculty.
- 13.
The Walther P38 pistol became one of the most iconic symbols of the Years of Lead as it was used by left-wing militants in armed actions as well as during street demonstrations.
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Acknowledgement
The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) (Grant agreement number 770151).
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Baroni, S. (2023). The Trails of a Counter-Narrative: The Representation of the Years of Lead in Loriano Macchiavelli’s Sarti Antonio Series. In: Dall'Asta, M., Migozzi, J., Pagello, F., Pepper, A. (eds) Contemporary European Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21979-5_8
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