Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

by Laura Connolly

While spending my year abroad in Naples, I recognised Sophia Loren’s picture in restaurants and pizzerias throughout the city. Other than this, I didn’t really know much about her, either as an actress or cultural icon. Therefore, upon returning to Exeter fresh from my year abroad, I jumped at the opportunity to take a module on Italian stardom. I hoped to try to understand why she is such a huge part of the city, and why she is still so important to the Italian culture in a national and global context.

Loren represented a period in which Italy was undergoing huge cultural changes, due to the economic boom. It was becoming an industrialised country, with huge amounts of rural to urban migration. Whilst some people welcomed the modernity that came with this, others felt nostalgia for a more traditional Italy.

For Italians who feared the changes brought around by the economic boom, Loren allowed the audience to cast their mind back to a nostalgic view of Naples and a romanticised rural era. Her links to Naples helped her do this. Due to her background as a working-class woman from Pozzuoli, just outside Naples, Loren was classed as a popolana – woman of the people. She mirrored these roots in many of her roles; most famously in L’oro di Napoli as the pizzaiola. Her characters were often working class and southern, specifically Neapolitan, and embodied the traditional Neapolitan traits – passionate, fiery tempered and loud. Working alongside other Neapolitans like Vittorio De Sica and Marcello Mostroianni, this was a nostalgic celebration of Naples and its unchanging Neapolitan spirit.

Yet to suggest that Loren was only a source of nostalgia would be limiting to say the least. For many, Loren was a symbol of modernity and the urban. She was highly successful in creating a refreshing, modern female ideal. Loren used her Southern beauty and her status as a maggiorata, a woman with a voluptuous figure, to control the narrative. She controls her beauty and uses it as a source of empowerment, and as a hold over the men in her films rather than using it to please them. Her links to Naples added to her sexuality; Naples has always had connotations of the female body and overt sexuality, and so Loren’s cultural identity allowed her to cultivate and exploit this new femininity even more.

Loren also created a modern feminine ideal by using typical Neapolitan humour to subvert conventional female gender roles. Matrimonio all’italiana is the best example of Loren’s use of the Neapolitan beffa; a trick or joke. Loren uses the beffa in her films to trick the male characters and finish on top. Thus, Loren’s modern woman used not only her beauty but her intelligence and wit to beat the men.

Naples is important to Loren’s characters. She is an unruly woman, and Naples is an unruly city. The crazy chaotic nature that Naples is known for is reflected in Loren, and she is often embedded into shots of the city as she walks through. The public space was still considered a man’s domain, and yet in her films Loren wanders through Naples challenging the traditional stereotypes that a woman’s place was in the home, and seeming at one with Naples; the city where normal rules and order mean nothing.

Therefore it can be seen that Loren used various aspects of her Neapolitan identity to create a multifaceted identity, in which everyone could find something appealing. In doing this, Loren became accessible to all; thus consolidating her status as an Italian icon inside and outside of Italy to this day.