The long carnival of the Movimento del ’77 in Bologna. From political ebb and flow to creative drifting.

This thesis aims to study the Bolognese version of the Movimento del ’77: an Italian political and creative movement that emerged in 1977, after a decade of international mobilizations and countercultures. The city of Bologna, flagship of the Italian communism and the “Emilian model”, home of the oldest University in the Western world, experienced in the 1970s a major and versatile counter-cultural impetus: underground magazines (A/traverso), first free radio stations (Radio Alice), experimental theater, early Italian punk rock bands, graffiti and happenings of the Indiani metropolitani… Impregnated with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari among others, the movement spreads in a “rhizomatic” way. By invoking the Bakthinian concept of “carnival reversal” and applying it to the field of counterculture, our work attempts to redefine what characterizes the productions of the Movimento del '77. At the crossroads of politics and poetry, these creations are marked by the iconoclastic mechanisms of degradation and trivialization that are specific to the carnival and refer to its revolutionary potential. Finally, our research brings some nuance to a vision of the 1980s as the decade of political "reflux" and individualism. Despite the “years of Lead” and political defeats, these creative experiences have not been in vain. The ferments of the Movimento del ‘77 then spatialize and spread through the integrated province of Bologna, in a true "psychogeographical drifting" which resembles a post-political meditation.