SOURCE: Nerenberg, Ellen. “Love for Sale or That's Amore: Representing Prostitution During and After Italian Fascism.” Annali D'Italianistica 16 (1998): 213-15.

[In the following essay, Nerenberg asserts that Pratolini's ambivalent representations of prostitution in Fascist Florence in Cronache di poveri amanti indicate sympathy for the economic servitude of prostitutes and at the same time a moralistic view that prostitution is a sign of a depraved social order.]

I. DA CHE IL MONDO è MONDO: SHOOTING HISTORY'S GAP

Elisa è riuscita finora a sgusciare tra le maglie, ma v'è cascata Chiccona, alla quale è stato rilasciato il foglio di via per Lucca, la sua città; v'è cascata Ada, a cui il medico delle carceri ha riscontrato una sifilide di secondo grado—e Rosetta, veterana del mestiere, recidiva specifica, che si è così assicurata per sei mesi il vitto a Santa Verdiana. Insieme ad esse, numerose altre delle venturiere. È il pogrom delle prostitute, una calamità che si abbatte ad ogni cambiamento di governo, da che il mondo è mondo. Anch'esse come gli ebrei, sono esperte da secoli di persecuzione. Impercano appena, e non rinunciano. Giocano d'astuzia per sfuggire alla rete. Si deve pur mangiare, almeno una volta ogni ventiquattro ore, noi e chi ci sta sulle spalle! Le più giovani e presentabili si decidono al gran passo che significa perdita di libertà, catene ai piedi, ugualmente come nel carcere. È il destino a cui Olimpia si è rassegnata già da diversi mesi …¹

The pogrom of the prostitutes that appears toward the end of Cronache di poveri amanti (1948), Vasco Pratolini's epic novel set in 1925-26 Florence, underscores their integral presence in the novel. In addition to chronicling the lives and loves of the cornacchiai, as he calls the inhabitants of the novel's focal Via del Corno, located just off Piazza Santa Croce, Pratolini narrativizes the transition from early to second stage Fascism. The year 1926 was pivotal in the Fascist consolidation of the state, achieved throughout the 20's by such legal processes as multi-party elections, the promulgation of the leggi fascistissime, and finally the arrival in 1929 of the Rocco Code, the new penal code. In an ever fascistizing Italian State filtered through memory, prostitutes are a stand-in for all Italians: some evade the clutches of the state's strong arm, the police; others flee in exile; the captured socially miscreant serve prison sentences. While all this subdues public outrage over the immorality of prostitution, the menace to public hygiene cannot be contained. (One wonders just how many clients has Ada already infected.) But depicting the prostitutes as a vilified and persecuted social underclass does not suffice, for Pratolini distills out of their tale that persecuted archetype, the Jew. Historical particulars, Pratolini appears to say, hardly matter: “da che il mondo è mondo,” since time immemorial, literally, since the time the world has been the world, when governments change, this kind of pogrom is sure to follow.

“Da che il mondo è mondo” betokens historical stasis. In these pages I address this glossing over of historical specificity and use it to reveal a curious lack of historical change or rupture in the representation of prostitution following Fascism. Such representation in Pratolini's novel illustrates one way in which the historical equilibrium implied by the locution “da che il mondo è mondo” takes shape. To sketch the outlines of this problem I examine the novel's use of prostitution both in relation and contradistinction to the Merlin Law, enacted finally in 1958 but introduced some ten years earlier. Indeed, Pratolini casts back much further in history than the experience of the ventennio for the root of the problem of sex for sale. Whereas following the ventennio the male subject was free to return to the customary liberties and entitlements of civil society (suspended or deprived by Fascism), the female subject was turned back to a social order that did not seek nor guarantee her emancipation.² A review of Cronache di poveri amanti in the light of the public discourse on prostitution helps lay bare the preferential treatment of male subjects in the new republic and thus interrogates the notion of a radical rupture from Fascist practice. Pratolini uses prostitution in this 1948 novel to articulate a relationship to politics; and prostitutes, prostitution, and the places of its transaction ideate Cronache's plot, character, and theme. The literary pratice of Neorealism and its undergirding politics are at stake in an analysis of prostitution's variable sign. By blurring historical contexts and merging different types of discourses in its portrayal of prostitution, Cronache—a novel written and published in the blossoming of postwar Neorealism, a politico-literary practice Pratolini is thought to espouse—reveals not the disruption of juridical and discursive practices of Fascism so much as the continuation of those practices.³

Prostitution is both a fixed and mutable sign.⁴ Public morality has always disparaged the “oldest profession” and has always used its concern for public hygiene as the chief reason to control or quash it. Thus, while Fascism, for example, left its particular imprint, its vilification of prostitution reveals no radical difference from the arguments against sex for sale that preceded the Regime. However, distinct from this fixed and enduring complaint develop changes in the public discourse concerning prostitution in Italy that correspond to the era of postwar reconstruction and which bear that historical inflection.

Pratolini uses prostitution in multiform ways and in the interests of diverging ideologies. As part of the cadre of cultural practitioners active in the immediate postwar and whose artistic expression strove toward political engagement, Pratolini acknowledges prostitution as a form of labor, and in those moments when he sees it as labor performed by women of the disenfranchised underclass, the narrative makes authorial sympathy and identification patent.⁵ On the other hand, however, by using prostitution as the emblem of Fascist depravity, this writer also condemns it. Ugo represents a significant facet of this problem. A principal player in the novel, he overcomes the allure of the sale of sex and in so doing rejects the kind of consumer capitalism that, Pratolini seems to say, goes hand in glove with objectionable politics, which is to say, Fascism.

II: DA CHE IL MONDO è MONDO: RATIFYING THE MERLIN LAW

One of the first legal battles to be waged in the newly formed Constitutional Republic of Italy concerned the state regulation of the sex trade. Although nearly all industrialized nations had abandoned regulationist practices after the Great War, the state-sanctioned case chiuse (brothels, though literally, “closed houses”) remained open for business until 1958. In fact, laws concerning the public solicitation of sex for money were among the most enforced (and transgressed) in Florence in the immediate postwar period.⁶

Despite the sweeping reform of this historical moment (enfranchisement granted regardless of sex, a new form of government decided by national referendum in 1946, a newly drafted Constitution), the plight of Italian prostitutes shows that women were still bound up in the exaggeratedly patriarchal discourse characteristic of but not limited to Fascism.⁷

During its twenty-year tenure, the Fascist government considered and acted upon the social problem of prostitution three times: in 1923, 1931, and again in 1940. Of primary concern during the first campaign was public hygiene and the risk the (male) citizen incurred by frequenting prostitutes. The state promulgates several laws during the historical period that Pratolini draws from for the novel's setting. For instance, the Regio decreto (law) n. 846 of March 1923 required of all prostitutes proof—documented and certified by a physician—that they were free of all contagious venereal diseases.⁸ The machinery surrounding the integrity of public health gathered steam during the 20's, as the Regime consolidated its power, until finally, with the promulgation of the new penal code in 1929, the “knowing transmission of a venereal disease” was transformed from a misdemeanor offence into a crime “against the race.”⁹ Significantly, the June Public Safety Law Against Prostitution offers another meaningful transformation; this law did not change but, rather, reconfirmed the regulationist stance of the Cavour and Nicotera Laws (of 1860 and 1905 respectively), endorsing the brothels already tolerated (and administrated) by the state.¹⁰

Practices and attitudes codified by the 1931 law did not wither away in the face of Fascism's collapse. Mary Gibson concludes her excellent study of prostitution in Italy between 1860 and 1915 by commenting on the absence of change in the public debates concerning the Merlin Law and the proposed end of state-regulated prostitution. “The parliamentary debates over the Merlin [L]aw,” she observes, “rehashed for the most part the same positions assumed by regulationists and abolitionists almost a century earlier.”¹¹ The protracted and difficult fight for the abolition of the case chiuse began in August 1948 and continued until the Merlin Law was ratified in February 1958. As one of the first tasks of the Italian Republic, the abolition of the case chiuse resounds with meaning: the formative period of the actual Italian State and the Merlin Law precisely and significantly coincide.¹² Lina Merlin, an intrepid socialist senator from the Veneto, wrote and introduced this hotly contested legislation. She sought to abolish the state-run brothels, rehabilitate and relocate the some 4,000 prostitute residents, render criminal any act of pandering, create a special branch of the police dedicated to the enforcement of the law and composed solely of women, and restore fundamental and constitutional rights to prostitutes. In Merlin's vision, prostitutes alone would not solely safeguard public hygiene; rather, clients, too, would be compelled toward both a heightened sense of civic duty and examination and treatment. It was a too-tall order and, over the ten years required to quilt together the requisite multilateral support, the Merlin Bill lost its original focus and force. What emerged from the debate was a vitiated version of what had been proposed a decade earlier: gone was the presumption of equality between men and women and in its place was a moralistic and paternalistic (Tamar Pitch goes so far as to say Lombrosian) tone.¹³ The focus of the law ratified in 1958 became prostitution, not the abolition of the case chiuse, a significant shift that runs counter to the general Zeitgeist of liberation, resistance, and reconstruction that Neorealist cultural practices helped shore up. The shift also served to drag the discourse on prostitution back to its previous register composed of issues concerning public hygiene and morality. The Merlin Law travels a trajectory that reaches from a committed and progressive (perhaps even radical) starting point to a dulled and condemning terminus. And the representation of prostitution in Cronache takes a similar path.

III: DA CHE “LE DEMIMONDE” è “DEMIMONDE”: OR, LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES.

The Albergo Cervia is the second class hotel in Via del Corno to which the prostitutes bring their clients. The dispassionate description dominating the initial characterization of the hotel and of prostitution offers what is generally considered quintessential Neorealism.¹⁴ This sort of characterization cedes to a stylized, lurid, and sensational portrayal that belies its patent (explicit and avowed) political aesthetic, namely, to show things for what and as they were with no spectacular mythologizing. This progression, from a nude, Neorealist narrative mode to a highly stylized one, signals Pratolini's ambivalent position. The author's initial detailing of the prostitutes' expenses (how much they pay Ristori, the proprietor, how much they charge their clients, how many clients they service each day, how many times they change linens, how large their rooms are and what they are like, and so forth) likens them to the other subsistencelevel residents of Via del Corno for whom prostitution is simply another way of keeping body and soul together. The prostitutes

Non possono dire comunque che via del Corno le giudichi e le rimproveri. All'occasione esse ricevono saluti cortesi e sguardi di solidarietà. I poveri e i lavoratori hanno imparato a proprie spese che la vita si suda in tanti modi, e quella è in fondo la maniera più disgraziata e umiliante. La stessa Clorinda, che fra le donne di chiesa è la più bacchettona, non trova da ridire: le prostitute le danno indubbiamente meno fastidio dei martelli di Maciste e dello Staderini.

(737; emphasis added)

Initially we see how the prostitutes resemble their proletarian neighbors.¹⁵ However, the egalitarian tone soon changes key; from prostitution as “women's work” and therefore worthy of recognition as labor, Pratolini manipulates it into the example of Fascist handiwork, achieved at the Cervia.¹⁶

Were it not for the Albergo Cervia there would be no direct conflict between Fascist and anti-Fascist factions in Via del Corno, a microcosm of Florence, itself a regionalized, miniature Italy. Osvaldo and Ugo are exiled both from home and political party, and find new lodgings and society at the Cervia, where they naturally have more extensive social contacts than their previous circumstances would have yielded. Ristori, the hotelier, notices their newfound fraternity and says to Ugo, “Vedo vi siete affiatati, anche se le vostre idee non collimano a perfezione” (741).¹⁷ The Cervia provides the politically uncharged territory where, with liquor and women, they transcend ideological differences.

The Cervia epitomizes Ugo's descent into depravity, Fascism, and petty capitalism; when he leaves the company of Fascists and whores and finds the love of a ‘respectable’ woman he regains his political purity and proletarian consciousness. When he lived at the Caressis' he was thrifty and did a day's honest work, frequented Party meetings with Maciste, and kept company with the residents of via del Corno. Conversely, as a Cervia resident,

Ugo ha tolto la confidenza a via del Corno. Pare serbar rancore non a Maciste soltanto, ma alla strada intera. Rientra in albergo quando è già buio e la mattina sgattaiola furtiva. Se qualcuno lo incontra e lo saluta, egli risponde portandosi due dita alla visiera del beretto comperato da poco … Ora tiene alle sue dipendenze un garzone a cui affida un secondo carretto di frutta e verdura e lo indirizza nei Quartieri opposti a quelli che batte lui. Compensa il garzone con dieci lire al giorno; personalmente ricava un utile al disopra del doppio. È quanto ogni sera regala ad Olimpia. “La succursale l'ho aperta per te,” aggiunse. “Ti verserò quanto il secondo barroccio mi rende, se tu mi resterai fedele ogni sera, dalle dieci in là.” Ugo è persuaso, in cuor suo, di avere un'amante che non gli costa un soldo, se non un “ammortizzamento di capitale.”

(792)

Freedom of circulation distinguishes Ugo and his enterprise and creates structural correspondences to Osvaldo and the Cervia prostitutes. In the main, the actions of the cornacchiai (save the ones just mentioned) are geographically circumscribed by the Via del Corno cosmos and the choral effect of the narrative, about which I will say more below, derives from their cheek-by-jowl proximity. (Carlo Lizzani's 1954 film of the novel makes this patent.)¹⁸

In the preceding citation we see Ugo “scurry” away from Via del Corno in search of capital. The free movement of his pushcart through Florence suggests the free circulation of capital and its drive toward cluster or accumulation. Although he later expresses regret over the transformation of his labor, Ugo's work in travelling sales, unlike that of the craftsmen whose workshops line the ground level of the buildings on the street, is not geographically ordained. He ranges freely so that he might sell; the success of his ambulant commerce implies regular consumption of his goods, most likely by women of the different neighborhoods he travels between whose task it is to buy and prepare food.

Ugo is a bounder. Significantly, as he falls further from socio-political grace he unroots, socially, and “takes off” economically. When his goal becomes profit, for example, it happens that he moves from his fixed address to the Cervia, a hotel for transients. Even though he might leave Via del Corno altogether, he chooses the Cervia instead, a hotel marking the permanence of the temporary. In a correspondingly convenient and “temporary” arrangement, he invests his profits in a “lover who costs him only ‘a loss of capital’”: a prostitute.

Were Ugo simply to dissociate himself from his previous household and political comrades in order to devote himself to Olimpia, one of the cadre prostitutes at the Cervia, the development would say little about the way Pratolini deploys prostitution as corrupt and capitalistic. Instead, by showing that it drives Ugo's motivation for expanding his base of economic operations, Pratolini flags sex work as a chief contributing factor in the downfall of a good (“red”) man.

The kind of entrepreneurial capitalism Ugo engages in to secure Olimpia's time is the very sort he will disparage after Maciste's murder and his politicospiritual conversion. Ugo's speech to Gesuina (the embodiment of, Gesù!, true consciousness) reveals the operant system of binaries: good woman/bad woman (one could easily say Madonna/Maddalena), good politics/bad politics, etc. He tells her:

Io che mi batto per la causa dei lavoratori, che mi riempio la testa, e la riempio agli altri, di proletariato, di capitalismo, di sfruttati e sfruttatori, come privato cittadino che sono? Un commerciante! Uno che, sia pure in piccolo, vive di ciò la roba che questi ha maturato col suo sudore. … Che razza di lavoratore sono? Cosa produco? Io che avevo un mestiere fra le mani, l'ho abbandonato …

(957)

Ugo's progress from Olimpia and the Albergo Cervia to Gesuina exemplifies the shift in Pratolini's evaluation of prostitution and shows how Ugo's female companions function as agents of his social and ideological bias. Ugo's petty entrepreneurship subtends his political disavowal: he abandons political principle for the opportunity of greater earnings with which he can secure a lover who costs him no emotional expenditure, merely “a loss of capital.” Although saying Pratolini equates petty entreprenuership with Fascism is too reductive, it is clear that it paves the way for bad politics and false consciousness.

The events leading up to the Night of the Apocalypse show Ugo the error of his ways. The nocturnal trip through Florence on Maciste's motorcycle during the Night of the Apocalypse provides him with his purifying journey. When he learns of the Fascists' plot to execute several high-ranking Communist Party members, Ugo overcomes and subdues Osvaldo and, with Olimpia's help, keeps him prisoner in her room (which concretely illustrates the intersection of opposed political ideologies).¹⁹ Ugo declines Osvaldo's offer to “fashion himself a new virginity” (“rifarti una nuova verginità” 810) with the Fascists, choosing instead a new virginity (which is to say a new beginning) with his communist comrade, Maciste. Together they leave the street behind and, when Ugo returns to Via del Corno, wounded from the foray, it is into Gesuina's and not Olimpia's care that he enters. He tries to explain this renewal to Gesuina while he recuperates from his wounds at the Signora's. She at first retreats, observing that Ugo “non ha avuto un pensiero per Olimpia!” (862). But Olimpia does not worry him for

È una donna che si sa cavare dagl'impicci da sola. … Era una donna con cui avevo dei rapporti, da tre mesi. Lo dico senza intenzione di offenderla. Tra di noi c'era una specie di contratto: io ti do tanto, tu altrettanto … Ora, dopo quello che è successo, il contratto è scaduto. E Olimpia l'avrà capito fino dal primo momento … Olimpia avrà capito che quanto è successo mi ha fatto ridiventare l'Ugo di prima. … Quello che ero prima non avrebbe accettato di fare contratto con una donna che batte il marciapiede.

(862-63)

Significantly, Gesuina, “una ragazza ingenua” (863), cannot grasp Ugo's meaning. As if the economic discourse of the use-exchange value relation is simply over her head he adds, “Dovrei usare delle parole difficili per spiegarmi” (863). Thus, at the moment Ugo purges himself of false political consciousness and the habit of prostitution, he similarly disengages from the language of economics: the overt contractual language that Olimpia traffics in and understands (“io ti do tanto, tu altrettanto”) cannot be spoken with Gesuina. Significantly, the narrative makes a diegetic feint, withdrawing into as much description of Ugo and Gesuina's discussion as mimetic presentation of it.²⁰ Gesuina is not immediately won over, but Ugo is politically born anew and needs a “good” woman to complement his regained political righteousness. The narrative then fills with conventionally romantic tics: moonlight, hushed voices, heartfelt exchange. Rather than the language of commerce and economics, Ugo now speaks the language of “free” love: “Parlarono a lungo entrambi, col cuore sulle labbra.” Ugo's and Gesuina's is a meeting of souls; no bartering or contracts would be appropriate, and their first night together, occurring several nights later, is characterized by metaphors of newness and youth.²¹

Pratolini builds into the narrative parallels between Ugo and Osvaldo that grow increasingly apparent: both are travelling salesmen, both live in the Albergo Cervia, both seek the sham domesticity of sex for hire, and the politics of both, during the course of Cronache, are in an uncertain state of becoming. Ugo's progress in the novel, like some puritan's allegory, helps him to heroically purge these defects, whereas Osvaldo shows what happens when he cannot.

Pratolini does not merely invert Ugo to create Osvaldo's character. In addition to the shared characteristics enumerated, both men have also fledgling politics. Pratolini's deliberate vagueness concerning political affiliation suggests the “dumbing down” of simple economics to which Ugo resorts for Gesuina's sake. Rather than name Carlino and Osvaldo as PNF members, or label Maciste and Ugo “Communists,” he is satisfied by the simple “black” and “red.” Though indeterminacy will produce additional consequences, it more immediately fuels the nostalgia of the novel. Pratolini's reluctance to precisely name the politics involved evokes a kind of impreciseness attendant on the adolescence so characteristic of a certain vintage Neorealism (Vittorini of Il garofano rosso, Calvino of Il sentiero dei nidi del ragno, Pavese of La luna e i falò, and so forth); like adolescents, Ugo and Osvaldo seek definition, but not necessarily one that sharply distinguishes them from their cohort.²²

Like Ugo, Osvaldo has fallen from a previous state of political engagement, only from the other side of the spectrum. When he refuses to join the squadristi in the attack on Alfredo, Carlino evicts him and, politically, casts him out. Like Ugo, rather than leave Via del Corno, he takes up residence at the Cervia. Like Ugo, Osvaldo is a travelling salesman (with Alfredo, in fact, for a client), though he appears to sell to his clients his image as a dutiful Fascist as much as his paper products. Osvaldo's lapel pin signs his political allegiance and currency, and his commercial success seems owned in equal parts to youthful entrepreneurial exuberance and his demonstrated political conformity.

Simile a Colombo, egli ha toccato terra felicemente, scoprendo clienti nuovi e caricandoli di partite con l'audacia che un giovane deve avere, ed anche un po', sì, in virtù del dischetto che porta all'occhiello della giacca e che in provincia accresce di giorno in giorno il suo ascendente. Il distintivo è a forma d'uovo … con il bianco-il-rosso-e-ilverde smaltati in verticale: un fascio in mezzo … Osvaldo non fa nulla per ricordare ai suoi clienti di essere un fascista: porta il distintivo perchè lo ritiene suo dovere.

(723)

We find prostitution, finally, at the end of this laundry list of shared attributes and structural similarities: resembling Ugo's arrangement with Olimpia, Osvaldo contracts to spend each night with another of Cervia prostitutes, Elisa.

Here, however, similarities end; as soon as reflection on prostitution is required, Ugo and Osvaldo separate. Ugo clearly understands that his relationship with Olimpia is as fiscal, as it is temporary (it is fiscal because it is temporary, temporary because it is fiscal); indeed, he has pursued her precisely as to avoid any involvement beyond a commercial one. Although Osvaldo recognizes the firm (and paid for) distinctions between “free” love and its prostituted version, he lulls himself into either believing or wishing it were otherwise. This next long citation reveals Osvaldo's inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the sex of prostitution and conjugal intimacy. Osvaldo is drawn into the spectacle of prostitution as a voyeur, and the complacency so characteristic of the scene of prostitution becomes a kind of conjugal intimacy of fantasy, one that would certainly inhibit a good Fascist marriage, if indeed such a thing existed. Osvaldo and Elisa spend every night together and

Ogni mattina egli si desta allorchè Elisa lascia cautamente il letto, ma continua a fingersi addormentato. Socchiude un occhio: la vede adattarsi il vestito, infilarsi le calze seduta sulla sedia, la vede prendere in mano le scarpe e andarsene in punta di piedi. Elisa è bella, docile, averla accanto gli dà un senso di completezza, di fiducia. Le batte precipitosamente il cuore nei momenti più belli, ed anche questa è una cosa che ad Osvaldo garba. Tutto di Elisa gli garba: vorrebbe richiamarla, vorrebbe ch'ella uscisse dopo di lui, vorrebbe lasciarla in letto magari rimboccarle i lenzuoli. È ad una pace coniugale ch'egli aspira. E ciò gli costerebbe appena qualche lira di più. Ma appunto per questo non la trattiene. Egli si rende conto, adesso, svaniti i fumi dell'ubriacatura, che ogni gesto di Elisa è una finzione. Nell'aggiustarsi il vestito, non sapendosi spiata, Elisa ha un'espressione spaventosa, fatta di stanchezza e di disgusto: un ghigno che la sfigura.

(795; emphasis added)²³

Diverging from Ugo, Osvaldo would like to change the terms of his contract with Elisa. He desires not the spectacle of their relationship, its fiction (“ogni gesto di Elisa è una finzione”) so much as “una pace coniugale.” An undetected Osvaldo observes Elisa who believes herself alone and thus, unafraid of censure (or worse, a consequent loss of capital), discloses her “true” feelings: disgust. Disgust for Osvaldo, for her work, perhaps for herself. Such an expression would understandably frighten Osvaldo: if her disgust proves great enough perhaps she will spurn him and he would lose that sense of “completion and trust” their relationship gives him. Finally, Osvaldo sees Elisa as disfigured because that smirk mars the beautiful face he has paid for. As the young Marx wrote, “Money's properties are my properties and essential powers … I am ugly but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women (Marx 1978, 103, emphases in original). Osvaldo expects Elisa to play a part, he is even certain he could engage her to play-act marital bliss for “qualche lira di più.”

When Osvaldo does not distinguish between the real and the fantastic he actually offers an almost hilarious instantiation of the evil of prostitution according to Richard Korherr, a German theoretician of race whose work became quite popular in Italy following its publication in 1927. Prostitution should be cordoned off from and regulated by the state for, Korherr believed, whores “publicly mock(ed) mothers as ‘slaves of husbands and children.’ (Cited in de Grazia, 45). Victoria de Grazia observes that “only by segregating illicit sex from public view and by drawing a sharp line between bad women and good ones might the state preserve the site and purpose of legitimate sex, namely in marriage, at the initiative of the man and for the purposes of procreation” (45).

The spectacle Osvaldo succumbs to suggests a blurring of historical contexts and discourses. Osvaldo capitulates not only to the routine spectacle of prostitution but also to what would have been the contemporary public discourse on prostitution. In other words, Osvaldo's “seduction” may well correspond to the way that Fascism sought to entice the Italian polity through a variety of spectacular practices, including the staging of sundry veritable spectacles and parades. Theatrics and the spectacular practices of advertising during Fascism, recent scholarship has argued, served to ratify the State through the creation of the mass spectator.²⁴ Although the degree to which the State succeeded in creating mass spectators varied, the attractiveness of spectacle for a State such as Italy during Fascism is unquestionable; equally indisputable is the fact that the State sought to capitalize on the power of spectacle.

Although Osvaldo is capable of recognizing the difference between the “finzione” of his relationship with Elisa and, say, sexual intimacy in marriage (which is to say, a scene of non-prostituted sex), he prefers not to. The show of a “pace coniugale” is preferable to the real life version for all the same hackneyed reasons that sex contracted for in prostitution may be preferable to its extraprostituted equivalent: because it is less complicated. The spectacle of prostitution poses danger in and of itself.²⁵ The ultimate hazard of prostitution is its lotus-eaters' seduction, the ease with which, as a young Marx observed, a modicum of desire is satisfied by the exchange of a few lire. (And, if we read the letters prostitutes wrote to Senator Merlin during the time of the debates over the Bill, it was never much money, anyway.)

Spectacle is integral for the transaction of prostitution in Cronache, which begins as a pantomime and ends in charade. Prostituere, in Latin, means to place before, expose publicly, offer for sale. As Staderini observes, however, “cotesto commercio non conosce crisi!” (732). Cronache's prostitutes perform their pantomime of seduction “In piazza Signoria, Orsanmichele, e le Logge del Porcellino, ove fattori e sensali tengono i crocchi delle contratazioni” (735), in the local markets not far from the Santa Croce neighborhood. The prostitutes silently lure their clients with the display of their available bodies from these open air markets down the several short streets to the Cervia.

Le prostitute si trascinano dietro l'uomo con lo sguardo, poi con il muovere delle spalle e del sedere. Il fattore le segue abbacinato, tumido in viso più del naturale. Se incontra un conoscente sarà il primo a salutarlo ed a accompagnarsi con lui per non destargli il minimo sospetto. Ammaestrate da ciò, le prostitute controllano il loro uomo con la coda dell'occhio, nel timore di perderlo lungo la strada; cercano vie traverse, per metterlo a suo agio. Davanti a via del Corno, avviene l'ultima scena della pantomima. La donna ha già infilato il portone dell'albergo, e riparata dietro la soglia spia le mosse del fattore. Lo vede guarda di qua e di là, che si ferma sulla cantonata, che imbocca la strada e poi si arresta, torna sui suoi passi e sbircia di nuovo l'occidente, quindi sfila lungo il muro e con tutta l'elasticità di cui è capace raggiunge di un salto l'androne.

(735)

Cronache is rife with theatrical elements and devices such as this pantomime of prostitute and client.²⁶ Ruggero Jaccobi believes that the spectacular component corresponds to the author's political engagement. Within a year, he asserts, Pratolini

scrive un libro tutto memoria, tutto affidato al musicale Io, che è Cronaca familiare, e tutto terza persona, che è Cronache di poveri amanti. Nell'uno avvicina Firenze a sé con un moto struggente, e nell'altro la stacca da sé con un'operazione epica, usando il termine appunto nel senso drammaturgico che gli ha dato Brecht.

(Jacobi 172)

Further, some critics believe that the representational immediacy Pratolini reaches for in Cronache (excepting, of course, the diegetic lapse of the sort discussed above) correlates to the kind of engagement Brecht's epic theater sought to achieve. In “Per un saggio” from 1949 Pratolini emphasized

the “elective affinity” between narrative strategy of the novel-as-chronicle and that of neorealist cinema, pointing out that film could provide the “unadorned chronicle” of the quotidian but is endowed with direct spatiotemporal immediacy that the novel could achieve only indirectly, through the mediation of words and the “complicity” of the reader.

(Re 96)

The socio-aesthetic aim, however, may not hit its mark. The clearest instance of Pratolini's use of the spectacle of prostitution is found in the serata nera, the most explicit example of how Pratolini talks through prostitution and uses it to signify Fascism.

The “serata” especially illustrates the symbolization of Fascism's debasement. It also offers a real spectacle: a show that the prostitutes put on for their guests, replete with costumes and “live acts.” All five cadre prostitutes are present: Olimpia, the “hostess” and Osvaldo's date, Elisa who is escorted by Ugo, the indecorous Rosetta, Ada, and Chiccona. The depravity escalates as the scene develops.

Ada e Chiccona strapparono un applauso a scena aperta: si svelò finalmente il perchè della loro intimità. Rosetta aveva preso a nolo un tutù dal vestiarista teatrale di via della Pergola: era un bebè macabro e ridicolo. Olimpia indossava una “rete” rimastale dall'epoca che ella chiamava delle maisons d'amour. Elisa era sfacciatamente nuda, e nello stesso tempo pudica come dentro un saio: si convenne ch'era la più bella delle cinque … a un certo momento Rosetta si era finta una neonata, e Chiccona l'aveva presa sulle ginocchie per allattarla. Ada, eccitata dal vino, aveva assalito Ugo a morsi e baci. Respinta, era caduta in convulsioni.

(793)

The perversion in the scene assumes Pasolinian proportions, beginning with Rosetta's “macabre” impersonation of a baby, extending to the peculiar (and suggestive) onset of Ada's convulsions, and culminating with Chiccona urinating on Osvaldo's head. Ada's convulsions suggest illness, more precisely, epilepsy. This fit also recalls Lombroso's taxonomy of female deviance which he begins setting in motion in the 1880's. Ultimately it is Osvaldo who solidifies the connection between depraved behavior and Fascism when he instructs Chiccona to continue saying “Non me la sono mica presa a male! Almeno Chiccona ha inteso farmi complimento! I camerati, invece, me lo fecero per spregio!” (794; emphasis in original)²⁷

Ada's convulsions and the presence of Olimpia from the maisons d'amour suggest both the timelessness of prostitution (in the “oldest profession,” a whore is a whore is a whore) and the enduring predictability of female criminal behavior which appeared well before the advent of Fascism and lasts well after. With the name Olimpia Pratolini evokes the rich literary, spectacular, and iconographic history of the representation of prostitutes.²⁸ Olimpia's history as prostitute-icon operates in tandem with Ada's seizure. The problem with prostitution is the threat it poses to public health; Pratolini reminds us that in the pogrom of the prostitutes Ada is diagnosed with secondary syphilis (whose symptomology does not include seizures or convulsive episodes). But Ada's convulsions recall, too, one of Lombroso's first studies on epileptic pathology, which remained influential in Italian criminology until well after the Second World War. In Una donna nelle carceri fasciste, Cesira Fiori ascribes the poor treatment of epileptic inmates to a pervasive suspiciousness that they were “born criminals” of the sort that Lombroso tried to categorize. In Fiori's opinion, Fascism's greatest crime was to have arrested or thwarted the development of scientific inquiry in the educational system so that methodologies that had long since been debunked (viz., Lombrosanism) flourished in the absence of competition.²⁹ Tamar Pitch observes that Lombroso's biologistic and essentializing categories of women in general and prostitutes in particular persisted through the 1960s. As I observed above, Lombrosian moralism colored the final version of the Merlin Bill. This moralism is operant in Cronache di poveri amanti and illustrated by the banal representation of the “sickness” of Olimpia and Ada, and of Elisa's “cuore malato.”³⁰

Elisa with her heart “diseased” by prostitution and Ada with her prostitutes' malady (no venereal disease but epilepsy) are the preparation for the truly invalidated whore in Via del Corno, the Signora. She is centrally situated in nearly every aspect of the novel; the Signora is so pivotal, in fact, that at a certain point she becomes the proprietor of Via del Corno, threatening to evict everyone and erect a sign that reads “strada privata.” She also engineers Aurora's elopement, Nesi's downfall, and even, in a way, Gesuina and Ugo's meeting. The Signora, however, is propelled into a downward spiral of degeneration that is better understood in light of her prostituted past.

The Signora is a retired prostitute who lives in immense wealth and semi-infirmity. She gives great sums to the Fascio, but only because it is the political power of the day. As Ugo tells Gesuina, whom the Signora has adopted, “E riguardo alla politica … per la Signora rossi e neri sono la stessa zuppa” (864). Giulio warns Liliana of the Signora saying “Chissà dove mira! Non devi dimenticarti che è una vecchia maîtresse” (610). In her dotage, however, the Signora, becomes a kind of patron saint of Via del Corno, though she is not all that she appears. In fact, Pratolini's transformation of her into the Duce consolidates the correlation between prostitution's wickedness and the evil of Fascism's uncomplicated “seduction.”³¹ If the depravity of the Albergo Cervia is the metaphoric rendering of Fascist baseness, then the analogy of the Signora (the maîtresse, or Madam and thus director of the brothel) to Mussolini (the titular head of the Fascist State) is a logical one. The Signora is the acme of depravity, “un essere sensitivo, una creatura che ha posto se stessa al centro dell' Universo, un Dittatore che somiglia assai, nei suoi moti fisici ed intellettuali, a Colui che regge la Nazione” (938).³²

Writing on Cronache in 1958, critic Alberto Asor Rosa is candidly nonplussed by the Signora and misreads several of her most significant characteristics. “Il personaggio” of The Signora is for him intentionally “enigmatico e oscuro: lascia sospettare che dietro di esso ci siano dei simboli, dei profondi significati da svelare, che restano però nascosti, incerti” (Asor Rosa 140). But if the Signora perplexes, it is most likely owed to something critics would call a heterosexual imperative, or the blind spot of what poet-critic Adrienne Rich has termed compulsive heterosexuality. For Asor Rosa, who himself played no small role in the shaping of public reception of the “engagement” of postwar literature and writers, the Signora has one dominant valence only, that of “Il simbolo … di un Male che affonda le radici negli abissi più oscuri e ributtanti dell'istinto umano pervertito” (140). Surely what is truly “perverted” about the Signora, and what “remains to be unveiled,” is what the critic cannot bring himself to name, to wit: her lesbianism and her sexual voracity, both of which, according to forensic and thus legal and public discourse, derive from her past in prostitution. Such criticism is unsurprising if what the critic has been listening to is Lombrosian moralism filtered both through Pratolini and the public debates on the Merlin Law which, as I mentioned, grew more and more condemning of the prostitutes and not prostitution as such. Failing to acknowledge fundamental attributes of the Signora makes her final appearances in the novel seem unmotivated, dramatic but vacuous, perhaps titillating. Pandering, as it were.

The Signora loves no one or, put another way, her lesbian love is seen as “perverted” (from pervertere), turned away from its true object choice. The Rocco Code, as I mentioned, interdicted homosexual acts. Robin Pickering-Iazzi reminds us that “the representation of lesbianism as perversion, or disease, could avail itself of an existing discursive apparatus” shaped by physicians who treated venereal disease in the prostitute population from the 1880s onward (Pickering-Iazzi, 183-84). As Mary Gibson observes, lesbianism was widespread in the clinics where venereal disease was treated. Thus the study of sexual love between women and that of prostitution are historically twinned, born of the same historical moment (Gibson 194).

IV. DA CHE IL MONDO è MONDO: HISTORY, POLITICS, AND PROSTITUTION

In immediate postwar Florence History meets itself coming and going. When Pratolini begins his Trilogy, “Una storia italiana,” with Metello in 1952 (published in 1955),³³ he will telescope back only so far as the middle of the Nineteenth Century to look for the germ of what became the episode of Fascism from 1922-43. But in his investigation of the root of Fascism in Cronache, he casts back much further.

The notion of the “chronicle” provided Pratolini and others a much wider historical frame in which to place the phenomenon of Fascism. The chronicle, Fernand Braudel asserted in 1949, was able to capture “a history of gentle rhythms, of groups and groupings” instead of the “surface disturbance, the waves stirred up by the powerful movement of the tides” of history's grand events (Braudel 1980, 2, cited in Re 95). In 1947 Pratolini himself writes three chronicles, each referring to Dino Compagni's late thirteenth-century Cronica, and not with regard to genre alone.³⁴

In “Cronache fiorentine XX secolo,” which Asor Rosa believes appeared concurrently of Cronache, Pratolini declares that in the recent military engagement “Non era più Nazifascismo e Nazioni Unite che si battevano; erano fiorentini di due opposte fazioni che si ritrovavano ad uno dei tanti appunti nella storia.”³⁵ Moreover, in the same article, “A Firenze il fascismo s'impose allo stesso modo che si imposero i Guelfi” (137).

Perhaps the author has avoided identifying his “red” and “black” blocs in Cronache precisely because he believes they conform to an established set of opposing political forces, reaching down from the time of Compagni: the Guelfs against the Ghibellines, the Black Guelfs against the Whites, the Republicans against supporters of the Medici, competing factions that continue to ones of Pratolini's own time, Fascists against Anti-Fascists, Christian Democrats against Communists, Monarchists against Republicans.

But Pratolini's journalistic chronicle offers a corrective to such “antico sangue.” Evidently, love helps save Florence from its own internecine strife. As he states: “C'è anche amore in questa città: un grande amarsi col cuore e col sesso che compensa l'odio che ha imperversato lungo i secoli” (137). A concern for love stylistically consolidates Pratolini's chronicle-novel and satisfies ideological aims. In a more felicitous passage of his study, Asor Rosa observes that love is not limited to the lovers of the title but governs all the characters.

Ma Amore (capacità di sopravvivere e di salvarsi nella miseria e nell'oppressione) è anche quello di altri personaggi, come Maciste, come Ugo, che altrimenti talvolte riuscirebbero inesplicabili. Poichè in loro, il communismo, in cui credono, il sacrificio, a cui si offrono, non è in realtà che Amore, un grande Amore per l'umanità sofferente, per gli oppressi, per i poveri, per tutti coloro che schiaccia inesorabilmente sotto di sé.

(143)

For Asor Rosa it is simple: in Cronache, love is communism. Pratolini, despite rumors of his militancy, eschews such political classification; love, for him, is a balm for the factionalism found in Florence “da che il mondo è mondo.” If love can correct ages-old dissension, then, as Cronache makes clear, it should be sought out and revered, not deformed, as happens in its sale during the transaction of prostitution and, quite literally, during its enactment.

Love is what stands at the heart of the “problem” of prostitution. Love, the argument goes, should not be paid for or coerced. For Gayle Rubin, the difference between giving something freely and giving something in exchange for money lies in the complex system of feelings attendant on the act of giving. Glossing Marcel Mauss's influential essay on the anthropological importance of giving gifts she observes that “Gift giving confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. One can solicit a friendly relationship in the offer of a gift, acceptance implies a willingness to return a gift and a confirmation of the relationship” (Rubin 1975, 172).

The interpretants of prostitution's unstable sign may change but one thing regularly resurfaces: its censure and the “pogrom” of the prostitutes deriving therefrom. Training specifically on the historical moment in which it appears, Pratolini's ambivalent portrayal of prostitution in Cronache di poveri amanti, as women's work and Fascist machination, offers an analogy for the public discourse on prostitution that emerged following Fascism. Like the discussions in Parliament concerning the Merlin Law, Pratolini's representation of prostitution advances from politically engaged and aware to predictable and banal. From, as Asor Rosa would have it, “Communism” to the equivalent of Fascism. Prostitution in Cronache is equated with Fascism: through its spectacular enactment of it, love is deformed, it is “perverted” (as we see in the Signora's lesbianism and nymphomania), and commodified.

But Pratolini's argument against and manipulation of prostitution in Cronache reveals an evaluation of it informed not so much by Fascism or social issues following Fascism's fall as by the lessons offered by Florentine chroniclers who have come before him. Pratolini's blending of different discourses on prostitution shows how little different his “Neorealist” treatment of it is from, say, the complaint about prostitution dating from a century before, and even earlier. The incongruous and a-historical maneuverings in Cronache's portrayal of prostitution shed light on the author's understanding of History and of Fascism, no isolated or unusual event or even a phenomenon limited to the Twentieth Century. Written in 1946 but set in a Florence twenty years earlier, Cronache brings together elements pertaining to the discourse on prostitution belonging to these two precise historical moments and beyond: to Lombroso's taxonomy of female criminality dating from the 1880's, to nineteenth-century French painting, to the association of prostitution and the theater, to a political problem plaguing Florence and Italy “da secoli … da che il mondo è mondo.”

Notes

1. Vasco Pratolini, Cronache di poveri amanti (903; emphasis added). Henceforth page numbers are cited in the text and refer to this edition. Where there are translations, they are mine unless otherwise noted.

2. See Koonz; Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich; Palermo. Given the historical parameters and the “real world” conditions prostitutes lived in/under in newly Republican Italy, Karen Newman's objection to the critique of prostitution, while taken under advisement, can be pre-empted. She writes: “Reading women repeatedly as the object of male exchange constructs a victim's discourse that risks reinscribing the very sexual politics it seeks to expose and change” (47). For a critique of the “reinscription” of such victim's status see Ecstavasia

3. Fascism's boundaries begin to bleed at both ends. Although scholarship has theorized Fascism's genesis, ably untangling the snarled roots of its cultural and intellectual genealogy as far back as the last decade of the previous century, it has concentrated less on the spread of these roots past the fall of the Regime in 1943. In fine, most scholars have assumed that the fall of Fascism and the recuperation of democracy deracinated Fascism's force. On the other hand, some critics, like Romano Luperini and Ruth Ben-Ghiat have focussed on the continuities between Fascism and its aftermath. Luperini, for example, doubts such radical transformation that the dopoguerra period of reconstruction claims. He states that “The years 1926 to 1956 seem to be divided in half by the war and by the apparently neat passage from Hermeticism to Neorealism. In reality, there was no true rupture: one moves from an ideology of literature to a literature of ideology and rather than a solution of continuity there is an inversion of the same thematic …” For discussions of literary representations of Fascism avant la lettre see Dombroski, L'esistenza ubbidiente: letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, esp. 1-33 and 77-113. See Luperini 406-07. On the problem of periodizing Neorealist practice, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Politics of Realism” and “Neorealism in Italy 1930-1950.” For the politics of Neorealist aesthetics, see Re and Pickering-Iazzi, esp. 124-88. For the poetic/poets' response to the Neorealist agenda see Jewell, esp. 1-22. My focus on the way Pratolini's novel disavows the liberatory politics believed present in the season of Neorealism does not exclude readings of the novel that train on the author's oppositional practice outside of the relation of textual/sexual politics. For example, Ross has recently explored Pratolini's use of Florentine annual festivals, so numerous in the novel, as a means of staging a Bahktinian reading of Pratolini's “resistance” to Fascism.

4. The instability of the sign of prostitution has made it available as a staging point for the study of myriad phenomena in the visual arts as well as literary and cultural criticism and in an impressive array of historical contexts. For the lability of the sign of prostitution, see, for example, Teal; Rothberg, for an analysis of the prostitute as the figure for urbanizing Paris; Helsinger; and Lenz, for an analysis of the juxtaposition of theaters and brothels in Shakespeare's London. I am grateful to Keala Jewell for bringing Teal's article to my attention.

5. Although received knowledge of Neorealism placed Pratolini in its vanguard, recent scholarship has called into question the political engagement of his art. As Re observes, “Giuseppe Alicata uses [the term neorealismo] in his 1941 review of Pavese's novel [Paesi tuoi], and Eugenio Montale also employs it in his review of Vasco Pratolini's 1942 ‘slice-of-life’ novel Via de' Magazzini. In both of these works, however, a sense of political commitment and a passionate adherence to the social issues of the present are either negligible or absent altogether.” Re 12. However, the lack of attention to then-contemporary social issues may be deliberate and may not impugn the author's political commitment in the way that Re believes.

6. A report ending 2400 hours 21 March 1945 and submitted to the ranking Allied officer in Florence reads: “Public safety remains good. Various offences caused the arrest of 144 persons of which 106 were prostitutes.” The same weekly report filed 4 April 1945 reads “The smallest number of arrests in weeks was reported this week with only 78 arrests of which 64 were prostitutes.” Reported in Gli alleati e la ricostruzione in Toscana 469 and 472.

7. Prostitutes complained in their letters to Senator Merlin during parliamentary discussions of the proposed Merlin Law that they were unable to expunge their past in prostitution from their police records and, consequently, encountered serious difficulties relocating and finding work outside the sex trade; even though many wanted to leave the brothels they chose to stay with the work and shelter that the case chiuse provided them (Lettere dalle case chiuse 94, 96, 109).

8. “Appendice documentaria,” Lettere dalle case chiuse 163-203, esp. 163-172. See also de Grazia 44.

9. See Title X, Articles 545-55 in Codice Penale e norme complementari 200-02.

10. See “Appendice documentaria” in Lettere dalla case chiuse and Gibson.

11. Gibson 224. Gibson observes that the advent of penicillin took the air out of the argument concerning public hygiene. She adds that women's suffrage, too, contributed to the ratification of the Merlin Law. However, I maintain that ten years (and these ten years in particular) is no negligible amount of time in which to stage, time and again, the “same” arguments recycled from a century earlier.

12. For more on the coeval constructions of nationalism and sexual identity see Mosse; Nationalisms and Sexualities; Anderson; and Theweleit.

13. See Pitch; and Merlin's autobiography, La mia vita.

14. Indeed, Pratolini's itemization bears remarkable resemblance to the details the prostitutes outline themselves in their letters to Senator Merlin (cf. Lettere dalle case chiuse, esp. 119-20 and 143-44).

15. Cf. Asor Rosa 130, where he blindly accepts Pratolini's seemingly egalitarian evaluation. I will say more of Asor Rosa's participation in Pratolini's assessment of prostitution as well as the evaluation of the author as a practitioner in the Neorealist group.

16. Vittorini's 1956 short novel, Erica e i suoi fratelli (which also lies within the time frame of ratification of the Merlin Law), documents the hypocrisy of working class morality and offers an interesting comparison. The fourteen-year-old of the title, abandoned by her parents, becomes a prostitute in order to feed herself and her younger siblings; what results is general censure on the part of her neighbors who, although barely subsisting themselves, have managed not to “sink” to prostitution in order to survive. I thank Piero Garofalo for pointing out this passage.

17. The brothel appears as a refuge for the politically disparate in the literature of this time as well as cinema seeking to represent this era. Consider, for example, the brothel as social space in Vittorini's Il garofano rosso or Alberto Moravia's La romana (1947) or in the films like De Sica's Ladri di bicicletta (The Bicycle Thief, 1948) and Wertmuller's later (re)vision of it in Film d'amore e di anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1972).

18. For Lizzani's and Pratolini's responses to the film see Lizzani 23-28, and, in the same volume, Pratolini's “Testimonianza su ‘Cronache di poveri amanti’” 29-30.

19. This is based on an historical account of actual events in Florence in 1926 (see Ottavi).

20. This retreat performs an important function of signification and implies Pratolini's interest in the capacity of prose fiction to mimetically reproduce the real. In his review of Romano Bilenchi's 1935 novel Il capofabbrica in Il Bargello Pratolini comments that “‘The word is intended as ‘essentiality,’ without being the fruit of cerebral or forced virtuosity: Bilenchi's language gives back to the word its representational function by virtue of its Tuscan purity which stems from the best tradition’” (qtd. Rosengarten). At the same time, Ben-Ghiat, in “Neorealism in Italy, 1930-1950,” comments that it is just this kind of concern for “Tuscan purity” that makes her call into question Pratolini's relationship to Neorealist politics.

21. “… Lentamente si avvicinavano, scorgendosi appena sotto la scorza delle diverse esperienze, che a poco a poco cadevano come la borraccina raschiata dalla pietra, ed apparivano le loro anime, che erano ugualmente senza peccato. Ed erano piante giovani, desiderose di affondare le radici in una terra sana. Diciamo: amore” (869, emphasis added). This innocent state (“senza peccato”) is virginal indeed, even more so since it directly concerns the transition from the sale and purchase of sex to sex given “freely.”

22. Furthermore, the welter of detail required to distinguish between the many splinter factions that were constantly evolving under the Regime may have proved too cumbersome for Pratolini to manage in the narrative (cf. Ben-Ghiat, “The Politics of Realism”).

23. We may want to compare this kind of voyeurism to that in Bernardo Bertolucci's cinematic version of Moravia's The Conformist (1970).

24. Schnapp offers an exceptional reading of the controversial spectacle, “18BL … teatro di masse per masse” staged in Florence in April 1934. For advertising during Fascism see Pinkus and also Stone.

25. Dante, to use an early literary example, links spectacle, illusion, fraud and prostitution together in the figure of Thais in Inferno 18:126-36. That this figure derives (via Cicero) from Terence's play, The Eunuch, serves also to bolster the performative (i.e., spectacular) aspects of this scene. Thais's deceitful declaration (“Ho io grazie grandi apo te? / Anzi, maravigliose!” 18: 134-35) implies the contamination of both speech and the content it tries to express, something rendered plastically by the image of her immersion in shit. Significantly, Dante and Vergil, at the beginning of the following Canto, enter into the realm of the Simoniacs, those who have commercialized sacred things, creating a structural connection to prostitution in the Comedy. Thais is more than a spectacular figure from a spectacle (i.e., a play), for Dante, too, comments on the vision of the spectacle that her never-ending performance provides. The last verse of the canto states “E quinci sian le nostre viste sazie.” Pratolini makes a suprahistorical leap, linking Florence of the interwar and postwar period to the Florence of one of Dante's cohorts, Dino Compagni, a strategy that Re reminds us is redeployed in Pratolini's “Cronache fiorentine XX secolo,” published in Vittorini's journal Il Politecnico in 1947 (Re 94-95).

26. From beginning to end the novel is not unlike Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a popular drama whose dramatic apparatus includes a narrator in direct address to the audience, stage direction, “dialoghetti paralleli” (the unmediated speech between the lovers) like those in a Goldoni play. The novel itself brims with reference to performance: Via del Corno is described as a stage, there are references to the “comedy” of life, theatrical characters (e.g. Stenterello), the “chorus” of the cornacchiai, to the street theater like the annual scampanata or Carnival masques, to song and dance (see Jaccobi; and Ross).

27. Cinematic representation of Fascists routinely depicts them as sexual deviants, especially, it appears, in the 1970s. Cf. Pontecorvo's Kapò (1959), Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1975-76), Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974), Pasolini's Salò (1975), and Wertmuller's Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) (1976).

28. “Olympe” was in France one of the noms-de-guerre frequently assumed by upper-class prostitutes. Dumas fils gave the name “Olympe” to the mercenary courtesan, modern rival of the sentimental Marguerite in La dame aux camelias, and the name was used frequently in the popular literature and drama of the 1860s (such as Augier's Le Mariàge d'Olympe). Yet another critic points to two earlier theatrical instances of Olympias: Felicien David's opera, Herculanum, popular throughout the 1850s, and Zacherie Astruc's unpublished play Les dialogues des vièrges folles et des vièrges sages. See Bernheimer; Flescher; Millstone; and Clayson.

29. Fiori 82; see also Spackman, Decadent Genealogies, and Harrowitz. In La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, David cites an article from La stampa in December 1965 that claimed Lombrosianism was alive and well (“redignified”). For Lombroso's importance to Fascist criminal anthropology see Perrando.

30. Elisa's “diseased heart” nicely dovetails with the story of another prostitute, Bianca, in Pratolini's work, Le amiche (1939) who, significantly, dies of heart disease.

31. Prostitution offers the quintessentially consensual act (saving, naturally, the way in which women may find coercive factors in dismal socio-economic conditions). Seen in this light, Pratolini's elision of prositution and fascism paves the way for the notion of “consent” that will characterize the postwar critical evaluation of Fascism. The belief that the Italian public acquiesced to Fascism, consenting and therefore permitting its advent, will find its chief spokesperson in Renzo de Felice, whose Interpretazioni del fascismo appeared first in 1969. The belief that consent is a prerequisite to Fascism seems to be alive and well, judging from the clamor surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's recent study of National Socialism.

32. It is worth noting how Pratolini ensures the Signora's conflation with the Duce. Following her massive stroke, which the carnacchiai misinterpret as her desire to defenestrate herself, the Signora, greatly diminished, performs her own kind of pantomime for the street from her windowsill. “Ella si spenzola dalla finestra, agita le mani per scacciare gli importuni, segna col dito i due orizzonti, abbraccia le case con un gesto, si batte al petto, mugula risentita come dire ‘Questo è tutto mio! Sciò! Tutti!” (968, emphasis added.) The satirical dumbshow is completed when she is reduced to blowing bubbles for the delighted children of the street. Diane Ghirardo has commented on the architectural primacy of the balcony itself in the construction of the New Towns in the Agro Pontine, the triumph of Fascist rebuilding of the State that took place between 1928 and 1940. Discussing the central piazza of Littoria, she notes that the balcony and the tower, positioned above the square, provide a “stage for the theatrical presentation of the Duce. The tower is emblematic of the Duce's figure standing above … either in reality or symbolically through his representative, the gesture of the Fascist salute … corresponds to the gestural function of the tower … The tower … becomes itself the locus of memory, power, and order, and ever-present, starkly compelling backdrop for the virtual presence of the Duce” (Ghirardo 89).

33. The other two episodes of “Una storia italiana” are Lo scialo (1960) and Allegoria e derisione (1966).

34. The above-mentioned “Cronache fiorentine XX secolo” and both Cronaca familiare and Cronache all appeared in 1947. Critics tend to see the analogy between Compagni and Pratolini more readily than than one between Pratolini and another early Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani, for the reason that Compagni (and Pratolini following his lead) concentrates on the political factionalism of Florence.

35. Pratolini, “Cronache fiorentine XX secolo” cited in Asor Rosa 136. The attribution of emphasis is unknown.

The author thanks Philip Cannistraro, Noah Isenberg, Keala Jewell, Natasha Korda, Janice Kozma, Sean McCann, James Miller, Robin Pickering-Iazzyi, Benigno Sifuentes-Jaurefui, Anthony Valerio, and David Weisberg for their assistance.

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