LGBTQ culture in Italy

Two of the most important directors of Italian cinema, Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, were homosexual or bisexual. Luchino Visconti, an openly bisexual filmmaker, was one of the founders of Italian neorealism, which would later evolve into a niche and distinctly stylized form of cinema, frequently featuring homosexual characters and homoeroticism. His first film with homosexual undertones was Obsession (1943), in which he discreetly presented the loving relationship between two of the protagonists as an intense relationship. Other Visconti films with homosexual elements include Rocco and His Brothers (1963) or the more explicit The Damned (1969), a historical reconstruction of the Night of the Long Knives. Perhaps his most emblematic film was Death in Venice (1971), a cinematic adaption of the novel by Thomas Mann, in which a music composer, inspired by Gustav Mahler and obsessed with beauty and perfection, falls in love with a young Italian man.^[1]

Homosexuality was also a key influence in the productions of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who politicized the concept in antithesis to the bourgeois way of life. In his own words, he conceived his feature film Teorema (1968), in which all the members of a family fall in love with a character played by Terence Stamp, as "a religious story, a god who comes to a bourgeois family; beautiful, young, fascinating, angel and/or demon." His Trilogy of Life, which included The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974), he adapted classical texts using elements of explicit intercourse and fascist politics to show domination through eroticism. In his final and most controversial film, Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975), released two weeks before his death, he fused Mussolini's fascist Italy with the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, depicting graphic scenes of rape, sexual humiliation, coprophagy and torture.^[1]

While Visconti and Pasolini have made homosexuality a prominent feature of their curriculum vitae, other gay directors such as Franco Zeffirelli and Bernardo Bertolucci have been more covert. Among Bertolucci's films, his most openly homosexual was The Conformist (1970), in which a gay man renounces his sexuality during Mussolini's dictatorship, marrying a woman and joining the Fascist Party in an attempt to appear heterosexual. Set in the same period, Ettore Scola's A Special Day (1977) depicts the friendship between a woman played by Sophia Loren who is married to a fanatical and authoritarian member of the Fascist Party, and a homosexual played by Marcello Mastroianni who represents a foil to her husband.^[1]

In 1986, Ottavio Mai and Giovanni Minerba founded the Torino International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which has since been celebrated annually in Turin.^[2]

Various Italian gay authors of the early 20th century, including Umberto Saba, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Sandro Penna, Mario Soldati and Piero Santi, preferred to keep homosexuality a private matter and did not reflect it in their works. Those who dared to address the subject censored their own works or wrote them down never to be published. Examples include Aldo Palazzeschi, preferred to keep homosexuality a private matter and not to reflect it in their works. Those who dared to address the subject censored their own works or wrote them down never to be published. Examples include Aldo Palazzeschi, who published Reflections in 1908. The book was later reissued under the title Allegoria di novembre, toning down the homosexual content. His later work Interrogation of the Countess Maria was not published until fourteen years after his death.^[3] In the 1930s, Giovanni Comisso wrote Gioco d'infanzia (Childhood Game), an expurgated version of which was published in 1965.^[4] The original version was only discovered in 1994. Luigi Settembrini's novel The Neoplatonists, disguised as a translation from ancient Greek and written in the 1930s, was only published in 1977.^[5]

One of the first Italian novels to feature lesbian content was Sibilla Aleramo's The Passage (1919), in which she recounted her relationship with Lina Poletti, with whom she was romantically involved for about a year. Another of her works, Andando e stando (1921), describes the lesbian scene in Paris and Natalie Clifford Barney's salon.^[6]

Valentino and his partner Giancarlo Giammetti run one of the most prestigious fashion houses in the world. Giorgio Armani, another of the world's great couturiers and designers, is Italy's most commercially successful designer.^[7]