Anni Ottanta: realtà e immaginario della dolce via italiana

Abstract

In Italy the 1980s are marked, from the outset, by the gravity of some events which take place throughout the Decade. But in the collective imaginary prevails the idea of a colourful, shallow and excessive period, dominated by the culture of the image and appearance, consumerism and the myth of pleasure and prosperity.
The feeling is that people, in these years, are obsessed by the fear of falling back into the shadow and heaviness of the “years of lead”. But just when they look for answers to existential questions outside themselves, in unbridled consumption and in all form of excess, there is who reassesses the “banality o everyday life”, that immense landscape that the traditional iconography and magazines have generally dismissed or ignored.
The American photographer Charles H. Traub, in the 1980s, took a series of photographs in Italy, in which we can see an image of a way of life that clearly no longer exists. Traub has captured the spirit and the essence of those years so important to understand the contemporary Italy. Not the superficiality or extravagance, but the irony, a healthy dose of “bad taste” and, above all, the lightness, the soft and pleasing way of living life, which now seems a distant memory.