Glimmers. Stories of Alternative Publishing in Italy

The independent press is an agitated and seductive field which gives rise to a number of cultural attitudes and aesthetic features. Magazines are often collective objects and projects, but personal and intimate in the reading experience. This essay reviews some of the publishing stories that drove the cultural and artistic scene in Italy from the 1970s until the threshold of the new millennium. These were more or less ephemeral, more or less wacky adventures. Some, which seemed to have no future and were produced in domestic or unofficial spaces, lasted for a decade; others flared up, kindling the souls and the scene only briefly, but endure in the collective imagination. This essay outlines a rich yet discontinuous scene and offers a rendering of it by fragments, each of which, in chronological order, illuminates one or more exemplary magazines in terms of the responses and impulses given to the cultural conditions of their very existence. The common thread running through all of the publications observed here is the questioning of the institutionalized practices of production, distribution and consumption and the urgency of creating an alternative to the official circuit.