The Beats in/and Italy

"The Beats in/and Italy" is a collaborative project developed by  Stefano Morello ,  Cristina Iuli , and their students in the first-ever course at the intersection of Digital Humanities and American Studies in Italy. Offered in Fall 2022 by the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici (DISUM) of the University of Eastern Piedmont, the undergraduate course explored the Beat Generation's relationship with Italy and Italian culture, examining post-war cultural transfers between Italy and the United States. In addition to studying the transnational poetics of various countercultural authors, the course introduced students to various digital humanities tools and methodologies and prompted them to analyze how fictional and autobiographical texts, when read alongside archival materials, shed light on and generate new knowledge about the places and imaginaries that shaped these authors' poetic sensibilities. In the class, students became co-creators of knowledge, as they conducted text-mining and geoparsing activities and used ArcGIS to create an interactive digital map, as well as a series of storymaps detailing the experiences and depictions of Italy by a dozen authors from 1949 to 1972. 

The resulting collaborative project consists of an interactive map that provides a comprehensive but not exhaustive account of the presence and depictions of Italy by several authors associated with the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Bob Dylan. Alongside a map that visualizes both the representations of and visits to Italy by these authors, students also developed a series of storymaps that interpret the data and delve into specific aspects of the Beats' experiences of Italy and Italian culture. In the months following the Fall 2022 term, the instructors built upon the students' preliminary findings to build this public-facing project.  

The following narrative is an expanded and reworked version of the students' final storyboards, presented here as a cohesive storymap. For a complete list of credits and to access the unedited storymaps created by the students, please refer to the  Credits  section.

This project enacts a pedagogical approach that recognizes and uplifts student contributions in the process of knowledge creation. Our guiding premise is anchored in the belief that every educational setting—be it undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, one-on-one mentoring, or informal learning spaces—is a fertile ground for ideas, more or less embryonic, that can propel and inform academic research. With this in mind, we are keen to promote an approach to higher education that fosters a democratic process of knowledge creation, one that invites the engaged, driven, and constructive participation of all stakeholders. In line with this vision, our project not only relied on experiential learning within the classroom, but also harnessed and nurtured the budding ideas that surfaced therein. As a result, we were able to effectively formalize and spotlight our students' contributions, thereby reinforcing our commitment to fostering a collaborative and inclusive learning environment.

In developing a taxonomy of spatial categories, we built upon, refined, and extended the classifications proposed by the Institut für Kartografie und Geoinformation at ETH Zurich for their  Literary Atlas of Europe , which were later theorized by Barbara Piatti in "Mapping Fiction: The Theories, Tools, and Potentials of Literary Cartography." Our point layers consist of the following categories: "Setting" points, which indicate locations where the narrative action of a literary text unfolds; "Event" points, which correspond to significant experiences or encounters occurring in Italy; "Projected" points, which encompass locations evoked in the narrative as dreams, desires, or memories, but are never physically visited by the narrating subjects or characters; and "Italian America" points, which were devised to represent places associated with the early 1900s transatlantic migration from Italy to the United States, a phenomenon that significantly influenced the authors' perception of and connection with Italy. The latter category includes the ancestral towns of the authors, as well as prominent locations and events in the Little Italys of the United States

This project targets a wide audience that includes academic researchers, K-12 and undergraduate students, as well as users beyond formal educational settings. We hope this resource will serve as an engaging tool to explore the intersection of literature, geography, and digital technology and that it will inspire further research and learning as well as innovative pedagogies in the humanities.

The authors associated with the Beat Generation shared a common desire to reject and subvert existing dogmas that hindered free thought and being, stifling art as a means to express an (allegedly) "authentic" human subjectivity.

The majority of writers associated with the Beat Generation made at least one trip to Italy between 1949 and 1972, resulting in representations of the country that reveal both fascination and frustration. In general, they engaged with Italy sharing the notion of the country as a powerful symbol of pre-modern Mediterranean culture, art, and history, and simultaneously a conservative and oppressive society that clashed with their aesthetics and politics. Further, some of the Beats, such as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and Philip Lamantia, had Italian roots and saw Italy as a way to explore their ancestral heritage and gain insight into their identities. 

The predominance of male authors in this study reflects the historical gendered nature of the Beat movement's travelling and transgression, as articulated in Joyce Johnson's 1983 memoir, Minor Characters. Between 1949 and 1972, our main period of inquiry, extensive travels to Italy were predominantly undertaken by male Beat authors, due to social and cultural constraints of the time. Notable exceptions include Diane Di Prima and Joanne Kyger, who respectively attended the Castelporziano Festival in 1979 and travelled to Italy in 1966. However, detailed accounts of their journeys, and the presence of other female Beat authors like Joyce Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, Patti Smith, Hettie Jones, Anne Waldman, Dana Greene, and Ruth Weiss, remain scarce, limiting their inclusion in our analysis.

Despite the diverse motivations that led them to travel to Italy and be attracted to the country, the Beats harbored ambivalent feelings towards it. While they deeply appreciated Italy's past, they were not afraid to mock, criticize, or repurpose it as needed. Their relationship with modern Italy, especially its petit bourgeois intellectual classes, was considerably more controversial. These authors’ depictions of Italy in their work reflect a complex negotiation between idealization and critique, as they grappled with their relationships to both the real and imagined geographies of the country.

Italian writer, translator, and journalist Fernanda Pivano played a pivotal role in attracting and popularizing the Beat Generation in Italy during the mid-20th century. Her interest in American literature and culture led her to form strong connections with influential Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. Pivano's translations introduced their voices to the Italian audience, igniting a fascination with the rebellious spirit and countercultural themes inherent in Beat literature. By conducting interviews, organizing events, and engaging in literary criticism, Pivano further facilitated a dialogue between the Italian public and the Beat authors, helping to establish their cultural presence in the country. 

Co-researched by Alessandro Bolchini

Co-researched by Elisa Bosso, Louisse Romaine Geronimo, and Maysa Khlaifia

Co-researched by Angelica Busa and Jeanine Ilenia Contreras Landig

For Gregory Corso and the other Beat poets, these events served as opportunities to export their poetics, philosophy, and political beliefs through collective poetry performances.

Finally, in the unpublished poem  "Gripes & old loves in Rome"  (1990), Corso expresses his alienation from Italian culture and sociality and offers a self-reflexive journey through his past and present experience of Rome.

Co-researched by Annalisa Faraci, Adele Ferraris, and Greta Massara

Co-researched by Michela Marmonti and Alessio Pezzella

Researched and authored by Nicholas Pasin