As we have seen, the end of the Second World War left in Italy a feeling of bewilderment and hope. As Carlo Levi writes in L’orologio, after twenty years of fascism and more than five years of a dramatic war ‘[i]l corpo dell’Italia […] tornava a respirare; un sangue nuovo e imprevedibile circolava, in milioni di corpuscoli che trascinavano dappertutto, nei modi più loschi e illeciti, un ossigeno necessario’.1 In this very fertile scenery – where debris and relics were waiting to be removed and replaced by new roads and buildings, and where almost everybody was expecting a renewal of the political apparatus and its institutions – Rome became the place where one needed to be in order to bear witness to the Italian reconstruction.
In Rome, on 21 June 1945, Ferruccio Parri – one of the former leaders of the Resistance – was elected Prime Minister. His government of national unity brought together, despite their remarkable differences, all the political forces which had emerged in Italy after the official fall of fascism in 1943: Actionists, Communists, Socialists, Liberals and Christian Democrats. This government represented a special moment for the reconstruction of Italian democracy, a moment of suspension in which opposite forces coexisted under the same roof, uniting their strengths with the common aim of paving the way to the country’s reconstruction. However, after a few months,
centrifugal tensions started to force apart this fragile coexistence of opposites, and in November 1945 Parri’s government entered a deep crisis. After some days of uncertainty, in which political tactics and ‘ragioni di partito’ overtook national interests, Parri was forced to resign.2
Carlo Levi’s L’orologio offers a vivid portrait of this critical historical moment. Set in postwar Rome during the days of Parri’s fall, the book attempts to plumb the depths of this historical transition, at the same time offering a multifarious and composite depiction of Rome’s cityscape. Similarly to Parri’s government, Rome is represented by Levi as a field of tensions in which different forces and temporalities cohabit: the Christian and the secular city, classical monuments and the modern metropolis, ancient ruins as well as the more recent ones left by the passage of the war. In Levi’s portrait, Rome is a monad in which everything exists in potentiality.3 Thus, the protagonist’s question – ‘[c]ome si sarebbe potuta risolvere quella crisi che era assai più che un cambiamento di ministero, ma il segno della presenza di cose senza comunicazione, di tempi diversi e reciprocamente incomprensibili’4 – appears not only as a political question, but also an interrogation of the essence of postwar Rome. In this fleeting moment of expectation, in which the country is suspended in a fragile balance between a haunting past and an uncertain future, Levi captures the image of a fleeting and transient city where everything still seems possible.
Written between 1947 and 1949, and published by Einaudi in 1950, L’orologio narrates the story of Carlo, Levi’s literary double, during three days in November 1945. It begins with the day in which Carlo moved from Florence to Rome, having accepted a
2 For an analysis of this transition and the role played by the Action Party in the construction of a national
identity see David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46. Benedetto Croce and the
Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘Actionists’ (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).
3 See Joseph Farrell, ‘Introduction: Carlo Levi and the Reconstruction of Civilization’, in The Voices of
Carlo Levi, ed. by Joseph Farrell (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 11-26: ‘For Levi, the mobilisation of forces represented by the Resistance, and their coming to power in the 1945 coalition government headed by Ferruccio Parri meant that Italy was presented with an unprecedented and unrepeatable open moment when everything was thinkable and feasible, when civilization could be reshaped’ (p. 18).
post as director of an important newspaper directly linked to the Action Party, and it ends with Carlo’s return to Rome after visiting his dying uncle in Naples. At the centre of the story lies an event which will turn out to be crucial for the course of Italy’s future: the fall of Ferruccio Parri’s government, and the subsequent failure of a project of reconstruction and modernization based on the Resistance as the foundational act of the nation. As Joseph Farrell notes, ‘[f]or Levi the downfall of Parri’s government was a defeat, and a Restoration of a discredited ancien régime’.5
The aim of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand it analyses L’orologio as a crucial case study for a deeper understanding of Rome’s fleeting image in the immediate postwar period. In particular, I will undertake an investigation of how, under the pressure of this historical transition, Rome’s palimpsestic structure – characterized by the coexistence of heterogeneous historical layers – started a process of stretching out and of dilation of its unity which would progressively lead to the dismemberment of its urban fabric. While during the experience of Parri’s government everything still seemed possible, after its fall Italy appeared to take a precise road, characterized by a dynamic of continuity with the previous historical period.6 Although the traces produced by the long wave of the transition will be more visible in Pasolini’s and Fellini’s representations of Rome, written at least ten years after this event, in L’orologio Levi offers the last literary portrayal in which the classical legacy of the traditional city and the fleeting and transient aspects of the modern city appear to cohabit in a symmetrical way.
5 Farrell, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.
6 For an historical account of the theory of the continuità dello stato between fascist and post-fascist Italy
see, among others, Claudio Pavone, Alle origini della Repubblica, scritti su fascismo, antifascismo e
continuità dello stato (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995); Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano
(Roma: Donzelli, 2005); Norberto Bobbio, ‘La cultura e il fascismo’, in Fascismo e società italiana, ed. by Guido Quazza (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 209-246. See also Carlo Levi, ‘La serpe in seno’, Galleria, 301 (1996), 23-42, in which he opposes Benedetto Croce’s idea of fascism as a parenthesis in Italian history by highlighting the survival of fascist elements in postwar Italy.
The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I will concentrate on the concept of broken temporality. In my interpretation, Levi’s novel is first of all, as the title of the book alludes to, a meditation on time, and in particular on the temporal fracture caused by the interruption of a world that was ‘abituato a durare’ – that of fascism – and the beginning of a new, ‘euphoric’ as much as ‘uncertain’ historical phase. Thus, from the interstices produced by this temporal fracture, a marginal and peripheral world, formerly repressed and populated by beggars, street-vendors, and dusty roads (what, as we have seen, Walter Benjamin once called ‘the rags of history’), suddenly came to the surface.
In the second part of the chapter, I will stretch the analysis of the aesthetic of the marginal and broken temporality in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-
image.7 Notwithstanding the fact that Deleuze’s concept of the time-image originated
within his philosophical analysis of postwar cinema, I argue that traces of the same aesthetic dynamic can be found in Levi’s L’orologio. The polymorphous, elliptical and dispersive qualities of the time-image seem to characterize Levi’s representation of Rome’s cityscape, as expressed by the symbol of the watch – which is in fact a broken watch – that gives the title to the book, and by the polymorphic way in which the author describes the mutations of Rome’s city space, characterized by the prevalence of elliptical, curvilinear and rhizomatic lines over the vertical, rectilinear and homogenous ones which had defined the fascist city.
Finally, I will focus on the rise of a space of exclusion which emerges in Rome’s most remote periphery, that of the ‘borgata’. This hyper-marginal location, which for Pasolini became the paradigmatic space for understanding Rome’s modernity, finds its
first literary depiction in Levi’s novel. In light of this, Levi’s L’orologio seems to
provide the most evident example of that aesthetic of the marginal and the peripheral
7 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:
that, as we have seen in the previous chapter, constitutes the paradigmatic image of postwar Rome.
2.2. Broken Temporalities: The Broken Watch and the Advent of an Anachronistic