Ennio Flaiano

1910–72

Flaiano was born in Pescara, on the same street as the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. He came to Rome in his teens and later planned to get a degree in architecture. Instead he wrote about the city’s café culture, its vulgarity, its paparazzi-driven vapidity. In the process he captured, with a gimlet eye, the cultural zeitgeist of the 1950s. His perspective was laconic, pessimistic, at times nihilistic. A great enthusiast of Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, Flaiano started out as a theatre critic. In October 1935, he went to fight in Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and his post-colonial debut novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, also published under the title The Short Cut) won the Strega Prize in 1947, but much of his subsequent energy was devoted to writing screenplays for some of the classics of postwar Italian cinema, including Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and 8½, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte. He collaborated extensively with Fellini and married the sister of Nino Rota, who composed the music for Fellini’s films. Flaiano was also a master of the aphorism, and wrote a column called Diario notturno (Nocturnal Diary) for the magazine Il Mondo. ‘A Martian in Rome’ was the piece which inaugurated that column, and it was collected, along with the other pieces he wrote, into a volume by the same name. The story, written in the form of a diary, is set in Rome and incorporates, in cameo roles, a series of actual cultural figures, including some of the authors in this anthology. Long considered a classic portrait of Roman life, Flaiano’s take on how ‘aliens’ arriving from afar are perceived and received continues to strike a chord. A book called Diario degli errori (Diary of Errors), an omnibus of acerbic observations and travel writing, was published a few years after he died.

A Martian in Rome

Translated by Philip Balma and Fabio Benincasa¹

October 12 – Today a Martian descended in his spaceship upon Villa Borghese, in the race-track lawn. So I will try to maintain, in writing these notes, the calm that I completely lost at the announcement of this incredible event, to repress the anxiety that immediately pushed me into the streets to mingle with the crowd. The entire suburban population poured into the city’s centre, blocking traffic completely. I must say that everyone’s joy and curiosity is mixed with a hope that yesterday could have seemed absurd, and is instead growing more intense with every passing hour. The hope that ‘now everything will change’. Rome immediately assumed the slovenly and homely appearance of grand occasions. There’s something in the air that is reminiscent of July 25th, of 1943; the same people hugging; the same old commoner women that walk by heading towards imaginary barricades, shouting the praises of freedom; the same army reserve officers that wore their uniforms, convinced they would be able, in their get-up, to make their way through the crowd and reach the riding track: which is instead guarded by police tanks and two regiments in fighting trim.