After All, 'Tutti Spinaceto!' Adrift, on Nanni Moretti’s Back

Abstract

The portrayal of the city traversed on a scooter (sulla Vespa! – noblesse oblige), emerging from Nanni Moretti’s cinematic imagination, positions itself as a “motorised” device for a Situationist dérive. Beneath the apparent guise of erratic, solipsistic wandering, the narrative rescues from everyday invisibility an ideological interpellation—where unresolved material contradictions surface once filtered through a Situationist lens.

The supporting structure (the film), grounded in specific visual and sonic qualities—through the layering of a narrative (with its own time or concrete duration) and scenographic figuration—is reconfigured according to an alternative (in)disciplinary framework.

The proposed methodology aims for a subtitling exercise, critically comparing representations of the city – a journey from Rome to Lisbon, mediated by Le Corbusier's prodigious imagination (collectively appropriated in favour of a popular revolution) – that reveal, by contrast, hidden meanings within routine appropriation based on use-value. Through plausible connections with architectural history and theory, paradoxical urban representations are confronted, using the narrator-protagonist’s fictional anxieties as a pretext for dissensus.

The text ultimately seeks to help distinguish, through such defamiliarisation, differences in the political understanding of the subject and their place in the world.