ABSTRACT

Emerging from a detested dictatorship and devastated psychologically by participation in an immoral war, the country achieved a positive image, despite its perennially troubled political atmosphere, through the culture that the republic allowed to flourish. Harking back to a remarkable cinematic tradition, postwar Italian cinema in-corporated a new cultural style. The Neorealist cinema had a greater commercial and artistic impact abroad than in Italy, which remained dominated by Hollywood productions. In 1997, the unorthodox and highly political playwright Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for literature. Indeed, during the years of the economic miracle, increasing internationalization became the hallmark of modern science. The publication of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks after World War II was an Italian and European event. According to Italian Marxist thinkers, while in a Fascist prison cell, Gramsci painfully worked out a new brand of Marxism that did not ignore the Western, and Italian, democratic and cultural traditions.