Private 1968 and the margins: The Vicolo Cassini’s community in Macerata,Italy

Introduction

Macerata is a provincial town in the Marche region in central Italy, about 30 km northeast of Rome near the Adriatic coast, with a population of about 40,000 inhabitants in the 1960s and 1970s. Perched on top of a hill surrounded by cultivated fields and scattered farm houses, in those years, it was witnessing the gradual disappearance of its rural world and sharecropping tradition. The town, which had been a Catholic stronghold from medieval times, was mostly known for its ancient Faculty of Law. At the beginning of the 1960s, a new Humanities Department was opened, while the town began to attract middle-class students from Southern regions. In Turin, Italy’s most industrial city, the mass emigration of Southern workers between the mid-1950s and 1960s was one of the main causes for the characteristic radicalism and length of the Italian movement. ¹

But in a little town like Macerata this influx of upper middle-class Southern students did not represent a force of change but, rather, of further conservationism. At the end of the 1960s, therefore, there was little sign in Macerata of what was happening in the rest of the world. Most of the local youth seemed to conform to the steady traditionalism of the local Catholic culture, and the year 1968 passed unnoticed in the local university and secondary schools. Yet the widespread and heterogeneous manifestations of the Italian ‘long’ 1968 (Mangano, 1990) reached Macerata too.

One of the reasons for the ‘missing history’ (Passerini, 1997) of the Italian 1968, it has been argued, is the ‘possessive memory’, in terms of historiographical and media centrality, of the main left-wing protagonists from its urban epicentres (Foot, 2010; Hilwig, 2009). Accounts have often been romanticised through a stereotypical heroism, while most other histories of the margins – both geographically and in personal terms – have for a long time been left aside. ² So too, political themes have been given precedence over the personal and everyday life dimension, such as the impact of 1968 on family life and cultures (Hilwig, 2001).

In this article, I will concentrate micro-historically on the ‘private side’ of a local 1968 lived at the geographical margins in the province of Macerata. My study is based on oral history research conducted between 2005 and 2007 with about 30 local militants, and uses material from their private archives (Serenelli, 2008). ³ I will focus on the years 1968–1970 and on an avant-garde group of radicals – the Vicolo Cassini community – who gave birth to and were later protagonists of the local 1968 movement. Macerata is also close to the town where I was born and where both my parents participated in the movement. ⁴ In exploring a local memory which engages with, but also differs significantly from, the dominant narratives and myths of the Italian 1968, I will argue for the relevance of ‘places’ and peculiar subcultures in the manifestations and representations of a movement that, as Peppino Ortoleva (1998) argued, was generally characterised by the dialectic between ‘local’ and ‘global’.

1968–1970, the Vicolo Cassini community

While the year 1968 at the University of Macerata passed unremarkably, with young assistant professors trying unsuccessfully to mobilise the students, something was happening among the younger cohort. At the edge of town just outside the city walls, the parish Immacolata was taken over by a young ‘revolutionary’ priest inspired by the Second Vatican Council, ⁵ and became the gathering point for most members of that generation. There was even a countercultural commune from the Netherlands, which was briefly set up in a little alley in the centre of town, while the mushrooming local ‘Beatles’ bands were the most widespread example of new cultural attitudes among the local youth. Across Italy’s main cities, the end of 1968 saw the student movement break out from the campuses to align with the emerging working-class struggle, leading to the formation of the New Left groups. In Macerata, the first outbreak of the student movement happened some 3 years later. The year 1968, on the other hand, was marked here by the beginning of the countercultural movement, when a vanguard group of 10 high-school and first-year university students – both male and female – started to gather in a tiny studio rented by an art student for work purposes.

Gradually, the bohemian studio in Vicolo Cassini became the ‘place’ for a radical political and personal rebellion against society and for the experience of new cultural modes and alternative lifestyles. As stated in their home-made journal, the studio became the place where ‘the rational, bourgeois lady who responded to the name of “authority”, seemed to be flushed away, [ ... ] with a glug glug noise ...’ (N.a., 1970: 5–6). The pre-political phase of the Italian movement, which in the main urban centres took place between 1965 and 1967, in Macerata was happening then. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Zen Buddhism, the Living Theatre, the Italian artistic avant-garde movement Arte Povera and the countercultural magazine OZ, ⁶ all became the – mostly American – cultural models, which they sought to reproduce in their own lives.

Vicolo Cassini’s ideology and cultural output

The Vicolo Cassini group, formed by the studio’s ‘owner’ and more or less 10 regulars, soon adopted a hippy lifestyle. The main door was left open for everyone willing to join, and the rent was shared, according to hippy ideologies such as the belief in the natural goodness of human beings, the anarchic refusal of rules and the priority of self-liberation within a collective environment. All these ideas were interpreted according to their Catholic cultural background. In both the home-made journal and in the memories of the most committed regulars, emphasis was placed on brotherhood, commitment and equality. The enemy was identified as bourgeois society – with its central tenets of authoritarianism and privatism of the family institution. The purpose was the collective experience of liberating ‘trips’ (as in the jargon still used in memories) such as the drop-out adventures of Dean Moriarty, the main character of Jack Kerouac’s On the road, and a debunking ‘buffoonish revolution’ against the sleepy conformism of the local society, as it was theorised in a situationist article by Ian Channel (n.d.), ‘loosely translated from the English underground journal OZ’ (p. 6). At least for the most ideologically committed fellows, the main objective was the collective search for new ways of life. ⁷ Vicolo Cassini, in short, was a clear example of the ‘artistic critique’ centred on the individual revolution of the self (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999), elaborated by the 1968 movement, even more so as, in the Vicolo, the collective practice of art was put at the centre of the liberating process.

Three Super8 films, produced in Vicolo Cassini and preserved by Tardo (first-year university student and future leader of the New Left Manifesto group) are the most eloquent documents of this avant-garde provincial youth’s ‘ideology in action’ (Le Goff, 1978). Two of the films are set in an external environment, one on a nearby beach, the other in Macerata. The first records the collective creation of an Arte Povera–style sculpture with material scavenged from beaches, and symbolises the rupture of cultural norms through an infantile game on a climbing frame. The second film, the only one featuring a girl among the actors, revolves around small provocations against the establishment, such as throwing rubbish in front of a ‘no littering’ sign, and expresses the will of leaving, such as the final scene of the actors running away from the camera, quoting the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night. The third film, shot inside Vicolo Cassini, is the most artistic and radical, and was clearly influenced by the Living Theatre, which was performed live at the 1969 Pesaro Festival a few months before the film was realised. Based on an invented plot, it shows a primitive man, a sort of Jesus Christ with Buddhist symbols painted on his skin, who first discovers and then fights against the chains of official culture, represented by books and newspapers wrapped around his body. Once stripped naked, the man is free.

These amateur artistic experiments are of great value in historical terms. First, they show the relevance of American counterculture in the development of the Italian 1968, the appeal of which in the province was stronger than that of the internal dynamics of the national movement. This could also be read as a collective desire to participate in the modernisation process: as a way of escaping the oppressive and lethargic environment of the rural province through a sort of ‘reversed American dream’ (Portelli, 1996). Second, they highlight the radicalism of the cultural changes implied by their production, especially within the socio-cultural context of a small town characterised by a conservative Catholic mentality. Female interviewees, for example, stressed their struggle to go out after 6 p.m. without being accompanied by one of their relatives, while the sense of the local socio-cultural traditionalism is generally conveyed by remarks such as that no respectable woman could be seen in male-dominated public places such bars. Vicolo Cassini was locally defined as a place of ‘sex, drugs and perdition’ (Tardo, personal communication, 9 April 2005), and the collective memory of its everyday life and internal dynamics by its various protagonists can tell us a lot about its legacies – and the local legacy of 1968.

‘A new way of being together’. Everyday life and group solidarity

Memories of everyday life are particularly subjected to dynamics of selective forms of remembering and forgetting, with repetitive and routine aspects being easily moulded by processes of later attribution of meaning (Jedlowski and Leccardi, 2003; Ludtke, 1995). They too are imago, in Marita Sturken’s (1998) definition of visual memories of the past, shaped by forms of ‘re-enactment’ that ‘heal’ and re-signify the past on the basis of collective and individual identities in the present. It is significant, for example, that despite the collective emphasis on Vicolo Cassini’s fame among the Italian radical underground centres, most of the former protagonists reject its definition as a ‘commune’. Rather, the Vicolo is described as a sort of ‘rising community’ (Arendt, 2009) where, for the first time, a ‘new sense of comradeship’ and ‘generational identity’ were experienced. This is perhaps also due to the fact that only the most central of its protagonists, the studio’s owner Osvaldo and Tardo, who had a rented house in the same alley, used to stay in the Vicolo day and night. According to one testimony, the Vicolo also hosted several girls form the local province who had escaped from home. However, most of Vicolo Cassini’s ‘inhabitants’ still lived at home with their parents and, in particular the women, attended the group only a few hours a day. Yet, in spite of this apparent gap between ideology and reality (Hilwig, 2001), Vicolo Cassini was collectively described as the ‘space’ for the discovery of a new ‘generational identity.’ This stems, in particular, from the various recollections of its everyday life. Protagonists’ memories concentrate on Vicolo Cassini’s alternative sociability as ‘collective subject’ both through images and narrative forms, such as the exclusive use of the ‘we’ pronoun (Jedlowski, 2000: 59), as Andrea and Sara, Osvaldo’s right-hand man and on-and-off girlfriend respectively, put it:

We used to go on these trips to the Biennale in Venezia, or the Spoleto Festival, and there was a strong sense of comradeship. [ ... ] This was crucial: we used to do everything together, in a way that had never been like this before. [ ... ] Here [in Macerata] there was nothing for young people to do. Therefore, this experience for us meant the achievement of a liberated ‘space’ unlike anything that existed before. (Andrea, personal communication, 26 May 2005)

In the vicolo I made friendships that are still going on. I think that I’ve always related to my comrades with the idea that we were sharing something very strong that kept us united. It wasn’t important to define it then, but I’d call it a sort of ‘desire’ rather than something real. We discovered that we were alike and were sharing something very profound that gave us a new generational identity, [ ... ] which we found there for the very first time. (Sara, personal communication, 16 May 2006)

Yet, besides this collective and for the most involved protagonists nostalgic stressing of the sense of ‘togetherness’, the memories and meanings of everyday life in the Vicolo are very different along gender lines. ⁸ In male memory, the focus is mostly on the Vicolo’s artistic activities, on collective journeys ‘on-the-road’ and on the ironic challenges towards the outside world. By contrast, female memories concentrate on the inner space of Vicolo Cassini and little events of its everyday life. This is the only phase of the local movement the women described through the conspicuous use of family metaphors, that is, in the comparison between their male comrades and their own fathers. In male memories, on the other hand, similar to many other cases in Italy and elsewhere (Fraser et al., 1988; Hilwig, 2001), though in striking contrast with the later phase of the local movement (Serenelli-Messenger, 2010), the family was effectively – even though perhaps not practically – left behind.

[Everyday life at Vicolo Cassini was that] someone would write with a typewriter, someone was just sitting, someone was cleaning the room, there were some girls ... We used to bring some wine at night. Hence ideas would be born. We would write. And then paintings, other things, stones which would be assembled in particular ways. We used to go out together to collect stones along the riverside ... (Fernando, personal communication, 7 July 2005)

In Vicolo Cassini we used to be like boys and girls are today. We enjoyed being together. We listened to music ... normal stuff, it was just a way to be together. Indeed even eating a slice of pizza, or cooking together was a way to challenge the traditional family lifestyles and fixed routines. [ ... ] I felt equal, I didn’t feel discriminated against. This is perhaps because I had in mind my father as a frame of comparison. Therefore, at that stage, I certainly couldn’t feel treated as unequal by my male comrades. (Patrizia, personal communication, 22 April 2005)

Male and female memories also put different emphasis on the quantity of female presence in the Vicolo, with males highlighting the presence of girls. Girls were (quite patronisingly) described as ‘active, participative, complicit’ (Tardo, personal communication, 9 April 2005), as if to stress the novelty of the Vicolo as the space for unsegregated gender mix. Instead, women highlight their small number, as in Sara’s remark: ‘we were just a few girls’ (personal communication, 16 May 2006). In doing so, they express their ‘distinction’ (Dei, 1999) from the average female youth in Macerata, but also reveal their sense of minority and relative weakness within the group. This is also an effect of the powerful forces of Catholic socialisation – with its segregation of women, as referred to above – acting upon them. The examples of rivalry and lack of complicity among women, which Luisa Passerini (1989) has regarded as characteristic of female experience of 1968, are many. Women do appear subordinate and not yet self-identified as collective ‘subjects’, which is generally achieved through the later encounter with feminist discourse. Women do appear subordinate and not yet self-identified as collective ‘subjects’, which is generally achieved through the later encounter with feminist discourse (Passerini, 1991). ⁹ But in Macerata, in spite of the delay in their feminist militancy, the women did not emphasise these aspects of gender and internal relationships. Rather, they regard the internal space of Vicolo Cassini as a ‘protective’ vehicle of emancipation:

I remember this episode that is emblematic of my perception of Vicolo Cassini. One day it was raining, but as soon as I reached the Vicolo I closed my umbrella, even though I wasn’t inside yet. This means that I perceived the space surrounding the Vicolo as ‘home’: a sort of protective, closed space where I used to feel safe as soon as I walked in. (Sara, personal communication, 16 May 2006)

Female identities are therefore not reconstructed in opposition to 1968 (Foot, 2010). Perhaps this is due to the isolation of this provincial avant-garde group within the local context and the particularly segregative environment for young women. It may also be an effect of the peculiar dynamics of this provincial movement and its underlying structural characteristics, such as the role of kinship and family ties. In fact, most of the women in the Vicolo were either relatives or girlfriends of the male protagonists, such as, for example, the only girl featured in the film mentioned earlier on. The very birth of Vicolo Cassini, as well as of the political groups in the later phases of the movement, was based on these family ties and established friendships. This is very likely the main reason for the striking peculiarity of these local narratives: both men and women, unanimously, reinforced their image as 1968 radicals through the emphasis on collective identity and solidarity of the group.

Memories of the Vicolo and its everyday life were very different outside of the core group of its main protagonists. In the case of the most marginal members – and of members who later elaborated a strong critical discontinuity from 1968 – the group loses its image of generational solidarity and is broken by fear of speaking, embarrassment and even boredom. This is probably another effect of forces of conservationism within the local society, but it is also where the gap between the utopia and the reality of the Vicolo is most explicitly laid bare:

I don’t remember much of Vicolo Cassini, just this big room with two sofas and two bunk beds, and some coloured, knitted covers, with people smoking all the time. They smoked, and smoked, and talked, and we were all sitting there ... But I’ve always felt a sense of lack of concrete alternative perspectives, it wasn’t clear what we were supposed to achieve, and how. At that time I used to blame it on myself, I felt a fish out of water, shy, insecure, unprepared, and was unable to speak. (Edvige, personal communication, 14 November 2005)

Descriptions of Vicolo Cassini’s everyday life, therefore, engage ambiguously with the different representations of the group. For those at the top of the hierarchy and the most involved with its hippy ideology, the image of group solidarity was only implicitly contradicted by its gendered memories and experiences of everyday life. Women were certainly more marginal and less involved in the Vicolo’s outside activities. Yet, it was not important for them to represent the Vicolo critically in light of their later feminist experience. Instead, what was important was the novelty of the generational rebellion that took place within and outside Vicolo Cassini, with its iconoclastic and spontaneous features. The marginality of the province and of these radicals within the local context, as well as some characteristic features of the local movement, appears to fuel the image of 1968 as ‘collective’. Yet, if the strength of the group reinforces the sense of being part of the 1968 movement, its meaning lies in the collective representations of the forms in which the Vicolo became part of 1968.

Breaking out? ‘Universal love’, laughter, youth and protest

In Vicolo Cassini everything was communal. As Sara explains:

The idea was that ‘we are all friends, comrades.’ We were a group of different people, but the ideology was that we were all equal, so that relationships were based on a sort of horizontal model, while outside relationships were vertical, hierarchical. Then there was the issue of rules. [ ... ] Another characteristic of the Vicolo was the idea of total freedom: there were no rules. Rules there existed only to be disregarded and broken. (Sara, personal communication, 8 November 2005)

As in most hippy communes, anarchy was the basic ideology for the project of self-liberation within a collective body (Abrams and McCulloch, 1976; Miller, 1999). The refusal of ‘one-dimensional’ forms of social oppression – as most of them would read in books by Herbert Marcuse (1970) and David Cooper (1972), a couple of years later – applied in particular to personal life. Indeed, most of the articles contained in the home-made journal concentrated on the spiritual dimension. ¹⁰ However, like other hippy communes, in Vicolo Cassini, there was also a practical application of the spiritual concept of ‘universal love’, as revealed by the members’ poetry and made clear by the emphasis on the naked body in their cultural production.

Sexuality and new experiences of the body were cornerstones of the revolution within the personal dimension, but they are also one of the most difficult and theoretically least explored areas of oral history research. In the case of Macerata, modesty is comprehensibly enhanced by the still active social control of the small community as well as by the interviewer belonging to the same community and to the generation of their sons and daughters. Perhaps due to their later feminist militancy, and possibly because of the gender of the interviewer, women are the most open and willing to speak:

I don’t know exactly what used to happen [inside the Vicolo] with regard to sex. I wasn’t such a regular so as to participate in such a thing! The hippy ideology of free love was certainly there, but I can’t tell if ideology had such a strength to prevail on the ‘sound’, traditional culture. I remember we used to smoke ether, and maybe it could have happened then. (Fernando, personal communication, 7 July 2005)

However, as both these memories show, respondents leave the issue of sexual practices within the Vicolo voluntarily unspoken. In both male and female memories, references to the practice of sexual freedom are only indirect and never reported as personal experience. No mention, for example, has ever been made of the shooting of the third film discussed above. Even the most open memories, both by males and females, tend to talk of sexual experiences in the Vicolo as the first ‘innocent’ discovery of the other gender within a non-segregated space. As Dino explains: ‘in the Vicolo it wasn’t certainly a scandal if a 17-year old couple spent some time together in a locked room’ (Dino, personal communication, 7 July 2005). This is not dissimilar from Peppino Ortoleva’s recollection of his first sexual encounter during the occupation of the University of Turin (Passerini, 1989: 108–09), which too was regarded as the liberated place of new sexual opportunities, since Italian youth rarely had private space before the 1960s. Yet this innocent discovery in Macerata’s memory has a specific meaning: not that of a groundbreaking personal revolution, but that of a later reinsertion of these new forms of sexuality within the mainstream of the local conservationism. ‘Silence’ here is then most likely an expression of the ever-present taboos of traditional society, illustrating a slower pace of change as opposed to Italy’s urban areas.

Furthermore, as in the case of most accounts of the Italian 1968 movement, Vicolo Cassini’s ‘private revolution’ is mostly conveyed through the collective concentration on episodes of external visibility and ‘carnivalesque’ provocation in the public sphere. A standard series of ironic provocations against the establishment set up by the group has become part of a sort of internal mythology. Directly recalled only in male memories, as most of the protagonists were men, these episodes were understood as the practical version of the situationist ‘buffoonish revolution’ theorised in the article by Ian Channel, mentioned above:

I’m sure I told you when we took part in the band competition in Montecosero! Note that was half way between ideological contestation and ironic, playful game. We were a group of ten-fifteen from the Vicolo, and I remember D. who was wearing an aircraft helmet from WWI! [ ... ] We signed up with the very complicated name of Sgravens Fegreè Bantusio and our song was based on the repetition of this motif: ‘under the bed ...’, and went on with singing about masturbation. We started and the public was getting nervous, someone kept insulting us on the speaker, then there was a kind of a riot, and the police came [ ... ]. I participated with the awareness that it was just a joke, I certainly didn’t think that we were acting to make the world better! Maybe it was just a way of expressing our being ill at ease with the conventional world. Another episode of this kind was the participation in the Marguttiana street art exhibition. Osvaldo would make paintings and give them out for free (and they were the best paintings in the whole exhibition!), and it was such a mess! [ ... ] And that was a protest against commercialisation of art. (Fernando, personal communication, 7 July 2005)

Besides recollections of anti-establishment activities that in reality were also playful and not just ideologically oriented, memories of radical rupture and ‘distinction’ from external society in Vicolo Cassini have a central role. Much attention is dedicated to memories of ‘carnivalesque inversion’ (Gobbi, 1988) through the body, such as sporting long hair, jeans and miniskirts. Even greater emphasis is placed on radical artistic experiences such as the collective male trip to the 1969 Pesaro Festival where the Living Theatre performed a group striptease, involving members of the audience, which ended with the intervention of the police. Like in many memories of the ‘spontaneous’ phase of the 1968 movement (Myerhoff, 1971; Passerini, 1989: 109–14), in Vicolo Cassini too laughter is crucial. While irony is emphasised as the main means of rebellion in the public sphere, the repetition of a fixed canon of funny provocations against the establishment might also work implicitly as a form of periodisation of the local movement by underlining the ‘bright side’ of a still spontaneous, subjective and open phase (Passerini, 1989: 176–80).

Yet, not only is the focus on these ‘public’ events the only way of talking of cultural changes and forms of revolution in the personal sphere. They are also generally subjected to other forms of irony – or rather, auto-irony – aiming at presenting them as innocent, playful, and ultimately, ‘adolescent’ kinds of protest. This is evident, for example, from recollections of other alternative behaviours such as the collective use of drugs. Mostly male romanticised accounts suggest the innocent and ingenuous nature of this practice, such as ‘we would just have a few fags’, ‘we used to smoke a bit of ether’ (Tardo, personal communication, 7 July 2005) and ‘we would drink a bottle of wine together’ (Fernando, personal communication, 26 May 2005). Auto-irony, in narratives of 1968, generally works as a complex means of framing the distance between the past and the present. In the case of Vicolo Cassini, it is a means of repudiation only in isolated individual cases, but collectively memory is linked with nostalgia (Shaw and Chase, 1989) and a complex and contradictory way of re-enacting the past. Here, auto-irony is used in the mild tones of an indulgent smile, revealing a specific contextual meaning of these crucial body cues and behaviours. ¹¹

This is shown, finally, by the specific use of the metaphor of ‘youth’. ‘Social change’, ‘liminality’, ‘utopia’ and ‘state of desire’ – all concepts behind the anthropological and historical association between ‘youth’ and 1968 (Ortoleva, 1998; Passerini, 1994, 2002) – are too implied in the use of this metaphor in the case of Vicolo Cassini. ‘Youth’ also underlines the spontaneous character of its forms of protest. Yet ‘youth’ here is declined in the specific forms of an age of adolescence, in turn associated with a transitory and yet non-defined identity. Within this framework, therefore, Vicolo Cassini’s forms of protest are reduced to a playful, but ineffective, ‘adolescent game’. This might unveil the profound meaning of those indulgent forms of auto-irony as a later comment on the 1968’s utopian nature. Yet it also makes Vicolo Cassini a quite ambiguous revolutionary ‘space’.

Collective ‘silence’ on the practice of sexual freedom and concentration on ‘public’ rather than ‘personal’ forms of revolution; the ambiguous meaning of irony, auto-irony and laughter and the specific use of the metaphor of ‘youth’, all converge to provide Vicolo Cassini with a new collective meaning. On the one hand, it is still presented as the ‘youthful’ place of a (still) unprompted personal and political attempt to create a ‘real alternative to today’s oppressive society’ (N.a., 1970). On the other hand, it is now re-enacted as a romanticised yet transitory and innocuous age of ‘adolescence’ implicitly ‘healed’ of its most radical connotations (Sturken, 1998).

The shift to politics. Internal relationships and the end of the Vicolo

Memories of the past not only reflect present identities and collective contexts, but can also be traces of peculiar experiences of macro-events at micro-historical level. This becomes clear from recollections of internal relationships in Vicolo Cassini and descriptions of its end. Besides the strong sense of group solidarity, it is no mystery that there was a certain discrepancy between reality and the ideology of sharing, equality and ‘universal love’. As Dino (2006) puts it: ‘This sort of hippy “commune” was namely inspired by ideals such as absolute freedom, love, “everything is shared”, “we all are equal”. But beyond this declared ideology there were terrible fights’. First, like many other anarchic groups, these forms of ‘organic community’ were particularly subjected to the emergence of charismatic leaders (Abrams and McCulloch, 1976: 166). In the case of Vicolo Cassini, the leader was undoubtedly Osvaldo, the owner of the studio and the group’s artistic mind, described as ‘fascinating’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘magnetic’ unanimously by women and men. ¹² Yet some descriptions of Osvaldo were also in negative terms. Tardo, ironically, accuses him of artistic plagiarism; Fernando, more seriously, points out important power and relational issues, such as his lack of sense of responsibility towards his youngest and most vulnerable ‘followers’, who took him as a model but were abruptly ‘abandoned’ when the Vicolo came to a sudden end (Ginsborg, 2002; Zablocki, 1980). ¹³

In order to ‘awaken’ these followers, Tardo and Fernando one day carried out a spectacular protest. They painted and displayed an anonymous daze bao revealing the rigid hierarchy by which, beyond ideology, Vicolo Cassini was governed. The daze bao showed a huge pyramid representing the social classes in ancient Greece (they were, after all, studying classics), and the names of all the Vicolo’s regulars were associated with the one they thought they belonged to. For most of the former followers of Osvaldo, who generally avoid mentioning this episode, the formation of a hidden hierarchy was the inevitable effect of the utopian nature of their project. Instead, in the last issue of the home-made journal, clearly written by Osvaldo and his entourage, the emergence of forms of leadership was blamed on the individuals’ commitment and personal autonomy, rather than on the group’s internal dynamics. Two rival factions, therefore, were formed, the first led by Osvaldo, the other by Tardo and Fernando, revealing that the formation of a ‘freed’ collectivity out of individual ‘liberation’ was perhaps much less a ‘natural’ process than it was thought (Ginsborg, 2002).

A second problem for the Vicolo was represented by the more and more frequent arrival of the so-called tourists, ¹⁴ encouraged by the ideologically indiscriminate openness of Vicolo’s front-door. As the last issue of the home-made journal states in its hippy style:

People would come night and day every five minutes someone showed up at the most strange times (3 ‘o clock in the morning) a new brother would come Sometime the situation was unbearable [when] the so called “tourists” joined in without any ideological commitment They came just because they thought it was fashionable and then went out to speak bad things about us. (N.a., 1970: 5)

Aside from these elitist remarks about the ‘intrusion’ of ‘tourists’, revealing an effectively restrictive concept of group (Laffan, 1997), after 1969, there was an intensification of control by the police. Indeed, the third and equally threatening reason for the deterioration of the relationships inside the Vicolo, beyond its implosion from within, started with Cauco, a high-school student at the Art Academy in Rome, who – awoken by the participation, with his Roman schoolmates, in ‘everyday, violent street fights with the police’ – became increasingly critical toward the forms of rebellion carried out in the Vicolo (Cauco, 2006, personal communication, 6 July 2006). In the North, the factories were in turmoil, and the student movement was transformed by the rise of New Left political groups. In Macerata too, there were signs of a new atmosphere. At the beginning of 1969, a series of strikes took place promoted by the teaching staff of Technical and Professional Schools. By the end of the year, secondary students began to strike autonomously, and a local student movement was formed, albeit not in the University, with the first mobilisation of the students from the Art Institute (most of whom attended Vicolo Cassini). The end of 1969, therefore, when in the rest of Italy the movement had reached the most remote centres and widespread social sectors besides workers and students, marked a new phase in Macerata’s radicalism.

In the general memory and historicisation of the Italian experience of 1968, the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan on 12 December 1969 was a turning point. It was indeed the first episode of the ‘strategy of tension’, ¹⁵ associated with a ‘loss of innocence’ of the ‘original’ movement and the beginning of a new phase of organisation and violence (Foot, 2010). Perhaps as an effect of this national narrative, Piazza Fontana is frequently mentioned as a step forward in the process of acquisition of political consciousness. For Cauco, for example, the caesura was clear-cut. He went in the Vicolo and confronted Osvaldo with words that became mythical among the local militants: ‘I stopped masturbating when I was a child’ (Cauco, personal communication, 6 July 2006) – implying that it was now time to abandon Vicolo Cassini’s ‘childish’, self-indulgent and ‘pre-political’ forms of protest.

However, the rest of Vicolo Cassini carried on for nearly another year. At the end of 1970, under the strain of the internal problems discussed earlier and the increasing political radicalisation of most of its followers, the utopian experiment came to an abrupt end. This extreme decision was taken by Osvaldo, who ‘one morning came and changed the lock to prevent closure by the police and the eviction by the studio’s owner’ – as it is explained in the last issue of the journal (N.a., 1970: 5). A few months later, the leaders of the two factions that for a while coexisted in the Vicolo, on the one hand Osvaldo and on the other Tardo and Fernando, briefly converged in their leading role in the first university occupation between December 1970 and January 1971. ¹⁶ This marked the beginning of the local political movement, when its new leaders, after being approached during the university occupation by older militants from bigger centres such as Bologna, gave birth to the local sections of extra-parliamentary groups. The rival formations of the main New Left groups, Lotta Continua and Manifesto – the first theorising spontaneous action and the second more closely inspired by Marxism–Leninism – were led by Osvaldo and by Tardo together with Fernando, respectively.

In Macerata, therefore, the 1968 youth rebellion evolved from countercultural to a mainly political movement in a similar way as in the major urban centres a few years earlier (Echaurren and Salaris, 1999; Flores and De Bernardi, 2003). It is at this point that the collective meaning attributed to Vicolo Cassini can be understood in relation to the whole dynamics of the local and national 1968. Was the ‘end’ of the Vicolo and the beginning of extra-parliamentary forms of militancy interpreted here, like in the dominant narrative of the Italian movement, as the ‘failure’ of 1968’s original character? Was the collective entry into the New Left militancy experienced too as a ‘loss of innocence’ and ‘return’ to ‘old’ ideologies and forms of organisation (Viale, 1978)? Or did the foundation of New Left groups with the help of older militants from other cities mark, instead, the end of an age of ‘adolescence’ and the achievement of more ‘definite’ identities and means of revolt?

In this respect, a crucial role is played, again, by the dialectic of biological metaphors such as maturity and youth. The phase in which 1968 students used to write graffiti slogans such as ‘do not trust anyone over thirty’ on the Paris walls had long passed, and the search for advice from older militants was regarded in the traditional sense of handing down experience along pre-determined paths. However, in Macerata, this did not achieve the negative meaning of ‘loss’ or ‘return’. Instead, strong emphasis is placed on the New Left national networks (mostly in Rome and Milan), and particularly, on the few direct occasions of contact with the national leaders. Here, the closure of Vicolo Cassini and the New Left militancy marked a beginning rather than an end. Perhaps this was also due to a new phase in personal life-stories, as most of them – especially women – left home and got married, while the house of Tardo in Vicolo Cassini became the new base for the communal life of the New Left group. Yet the biological metaphors of ‘youth’ and maturity are specifically used with reference to the political movement. As Tardo very clearly puts it: ‘I got out from the university occupation and I was a man [sic] of the movement’ (Tardo, personal communication, 9 April 2005). It was as if a new personal and collective identity was finally achieved with the alignment to the dynamics of the national movement and the collective perception of bridging the gap with the rest of the nation.

Conclusion

Dominant narratives of 1968 interact but do not apply to the specific experience of 1968 in the marginal case of the Macerata province. Here, the political 1968 happened at a later stage and was coincidental to the national spread of New Left political formations. Vicolo Cassini meant the first discovery of a new generational identity as the initial spontaneous phase of the local movement, but its end is collectively represented as a beginning rather than a defeat.

This is not true for all the former participants, especially those who were the most involved in the ‘artistic critique’ of the Vicolo. Some of Osvaldo’s closest ‘followers’, for example, remember it as the most important phase of their 1968: ‘as far as my personal life is concerned, I did my revolution there, in Vicolo Cassini, rather than afterwards when “revolution” had become a political term’ (Sara, personal communication, 8 November 2005). A few of them, the youngest and most intensely grasped by its hippy ideology and fascination with Oriental religions, went on through the path of personal revolution by joining the underground circuit in the city of Bologna and falling in drug and prostitution circles, in most cases with a tragic end. Osvaldo’s closest follower Carlo, for example, and his sister Mara, the only girl who featured in Vicolo Cassini’s Super8 films, both died from drug abuse and exhaustion during their peregrinations as members of a Hari Khrisna group. ¹⁷

For the majority, however, the real 1968 began with the political movement. This is mostly shown by the peculiar use of biological metaphors (adolescence, youth and maturity) and from the ways in which Vicolo Cassini is recalled. Within the tiny context of a deeply Catholic and still rural province of sharecropping tradition, Vicolo Cassini showed the widespread nature of the Italian movement and its link with deep processes of change (Marwick, 1998). As we have seen, individual experiences of the Vicolo varied profoundly along gender lines, yet these differences were undermined by the unanimous concentration on group solidarity as a vehicle of ‘distinction’ and emancipation, particularly in the case of women. The sense of group in this case was perhaps enhanced by structural characteristics, such as the role of family and kinship ties at the basis of the moment, and by the sense of isolation within the local cultural traditionalism. Yet, in spite of the emphasis on episodes of ironic and spectacular rebellions, both the focus on the inner solidarity and the ‘adolescent’ image of Vicolo Cassini implicitly undermine the very content of this revolution of the personal sphere. On the one hand, there is not much analysis in collective memory of subjective and relational dynamics, especially in women’s narratives, despite their following feminist militancy alongside the New Left groups. On the other hand, while most attention is dedicated to exterior forms of rebellion, these are described as part of an ingenuous, ‘adolescent game’. This de-radicalised image of the Vicolo may also be conformed to present cultural norms and collective identity of the local context, while the little attention paid to subjective and relational dimensions (Beck and Beck-Gerneisham, 2001) might hint at the still modernist nature of this (phase of) 1968. In Macerata, the New Left militancy – and its ‘social critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999) – marked the ‘real’ beginning of the movement rather than its involution and ‘loss of innocence’, and this collective view is not challenged by the collateral feminist double-militancy (Pasquali, 1982; Voli, 2006) of the women inside the political groups. Perhaps as an indirect consequence of the ‘possessive memories’ of 1968 by its main protagonists from the main Italian cities, this also explains the ultimate reason behind the emphasis placed on group solidarity. Being part of the 1968 generation, beyond its (utopian) forms of revolution, was the real collective meaning of Vicolo Cassini, so much as ‘participation’ to the national movement and emancipation, through the political militancy, from the marginality of the province, is the real legacy of this 1968.

In the interplay between marginal and dominant narratives, therefore, 1968 is revealed as an extremely complex phenomenon. Not only the distance from the present, but also its local dimension can tell us much about its legacy today.