Word: vittorio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three novellas comprising The Watcher, all of which predate Cosmicomics, Peter Pan is grounded. This earlier Calvino may not have been quite ready for a tragic mask, but his wink is closer to a tic and his grin is spastic. The title story unwinds like an old Vittorio De Sica film in slow motion. A member of the Communist Party, Amerigo Ormea is assigned to be an election watcher at the Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables in Turin. As Amerigo officiously keeps the morons and vegetable cases from being recorded as Christian Democrat votes, Calvino demonstrates ironically that the Catholic Church...
...Deputy Fortuna's reckoning, 4,000,000 men and women living together illegally and their 1,000,000 children-one-tenth of the entire population-are "matrimonial outlaws." Among those who have had to resort to fancy foreign legal footwork to avoid being cast as bigami are Vittorio De Sica, who became a French citizen and got a French divorce to marry his second wife, and Carlo Ponti, who went the same route to wed Sophia Loren. Under the new law, Gina Lollobrigida can Italianize her 1968 Austrian divorce from Milko Skofic, and Maria Callas can shed Giovanni Battista...
...film progresses, Vittorio's political ambitions are pushed aside by the bedroom maneuvering of both Carlo and his secretary-mistress, hoping to become members of the aristocracy through forced marriages. In the end, Vittorio and his sister are trapped by their concern for reputation. Vittorio's social idealism is blindly sacrificed to aristocratic values...
Camillo's false asceticism contrasts with Vittorio's irrepairably compromised humanitarianism, but no resolution is attempted...
...does not see the contradiction. Such an honest self-appraisal is precisely the intersection the characters of China is Near seek to avoid. Vittorio, living in a mahogany palace discussing socialism, concerned with denting a new car in the same moment that he oversees Maoist slogans being painted on the wall-all these dichotomies that beg to be resolved are not resolved, and the final, apparent integration of the classes through marriage is facile and meaningless...