Introduction

Abstract

The 1968 comedy Il profeta (The Prophet), starring Vittorio Gassman and directed by Dino Risi, tells the story of a non-conformist.¹ Pietro (Gassman) has rejected the fast-paced, modern consumer lifestyle of 1960s Italy to become a mountain-dwelling hermit. At the start of the film, Pietro returns to Rome as a counterculture figure, promoting vegetarianism, staging protests against traffic, and living with a group of young hippies in a camp. If Pietro is highly critical of modern consumer lifestyles, he nonetheless struggles to resist them, and the film shows him being slowly drawn back into the very consumer practices he had previously rejected. Although set in 1968, the film includes a flashback sequence describing Pietro’s life five years before, in 1963. The flashback sequence represents a wryly critical image of modernized, consumeristic everyday life in 1960s Italy: a routine and unfulfilling office job, a home filled with gadgets and TV dinners, overcrowded restaurants and beaches, chaotic state bureaucracy, the endless cacophony of traffic jams. The flashback sequence is accompanied by Pietro’s voiceover, which, with clipped irony, bemoans the drawbacks of modern life. He grumbles about his mindless office job with its constant surveillance, he moans about his expensive kitchen where his wife prepared him underwhelming meals to eat in front of the television, and he lists the stresses of Sunday trips to crammed beaches.