11 May 2022
The Gothic line
“For me, an imagined Gothic line splits Italy in half. I straddle it. The spiritual dilemmas, those of the soul, are projected onto its geographic features.” Ottiero Ottieri's ...
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The Gothic line
“For me, an imagined Gothic line splits Italy in half. I straddle it. The spiritual dilemmas, those of the soul, are projected onto its geographic features.” Ottiero Ottieri's book is a diary written during the 1950s and published for the first time in 1963, filled with stories and personal experiences relating to the factory world of the Italian post-war period. The existentialist musings in Ottieri's diary interweave with a critique of those years' industrial system and, brimming with notions and questions still to be explored, are still very relevant today. The author's political and social remarks are never restricted to the theoretical plane, but are applied to the factory world, a world that Ottieri knew first-hand, through his time spent working at Olivetti, and to which he returns in his following books, too, such as in the autobiographical novel Donnarumma all'assalto (Donnarumma on the attack), one of the most interesting works of Italian industrial literature.
La linea gotica. Taccuino 1948-1958 (The Gothic line. Diary 1948-1958)
Ottiero Ottieri
Guanda, 2012