Gabriele Pedullà is a professor of Italian literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His works include Machiavelli in Tumult (2018) and In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema (2012).
Italy’s Francesco Rosi produced an unforgettable series of political movies. They feature mob bosses and oil tycoons, corrupt politicians and conspiring spooks, showing how Italian elites used every dirty trick available to exclude the Left from power.
For centuries, detractors of Niccolò Machiavelli have presented him as the founding father of political cynicism. But the Italian thinker was really a republican idealist whose support for popular rule can inspire struggles against the oligarchies of today.