A website for studying Italian history and culture from the post-war period to today in an innovative and interactive way. The Pirelli Post (http://thepost.pirelli.com) is online, a place for exchange and interaction between professors, students and enthusiasts of Italian history and culture who, thanks to the precious contribution of the Pirelli Foundation and its Historical Archive, can discover and share new and original research materials. On The Pirelli Post you can in fact consult testimonials, manuscripts, photographs, films and vintage advertising, as well as numerous articles taken from the Pirelli Magazine, which from 1948, the year of its foundation, to 1972 hosted the main names in literary culture and science, art and Italian journalism. The project is part of the five-year partnership signed last October by Pirelli with Princeton University with the aim of contributing to the dissemination of the study of Italian culture and history through the use of new media and new technologies. Technologies that transform The Pirelli Post into a real virtual laboratory capable of interpreting and re-elaborating the images, memories and testimonies of the main hubs of social and cultural life in Italy from the post-war period to today.
The Pirelli Post is also one of the teaching tools that the writer and journalist Gianni Riotta – to whom Princeton has entrusted the "Pirelli Visiting Professorship in Italian Studies" for 2014 set up as part of the agreement between Pirelli and the prestigious American university – will use to support the training process. The 2014 course, entitled "The New Italian Cinema" and held as a team by Gianni Riotta and Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (professor at the Department of French and Italian Studies at Princeton), explores the political, cultural and customary characteristics and dynamics of Italy from the post-war period to the present day also through the analysis of the masterpieces of Italian cinematographic production of that period. The last emperor (1987) by Bernardo Bertolucci, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1989) by Giuseppe Tornatore, Dear Diary by Nanni Moretti (1993), Life is beautiful by Roberto Benigni (1997) are some of the films chosen to explore the historical junctions to which The Pirelli Post website dedicates special sections introduced by contributions from Gianni Riotta himself and the Pirelli Foundation: among these, the economic boom of the 60s, terrorism and social tensions of the following decade, the 80s and Italy of television and consumption and the crisis of the Second Republic.
