Anna Maria Ortese and Roberto Rossellini in the Underworld

The product of centuries of systemic violence and active marginalization, the lumpenproletariat haunts modernity and its afterlives, from the dark corners of the industrial metropolis to present-day slums. Ascetic Images explores the Neapolitan version of this enigmatic social group as it enters the works of writer Anna Maria Ortese and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini in the post–World War II era. An exercise in critical narratology of film and literature, the book reconstructs the "ascetic images" inscribed in their texts—the traces of the traumatic experience of the urban underclass, obscured by dominant discourses. Looking especially at Ortese’s "The Silence of Reason" (1953) and Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), Achille Castaldo proposes a method of close reading that reveals the narrative articulation of social invisibility and gestures toward the political crises of the present as marginalized groups are increasingly pushed beyond the limits of our fragile social awareness.