All roads lead to piazza vittorio: Transnational spaces in agostino Ferrente’s documusical

This article begins by tracing a period in recent Italian history (2001–06) characterized by deep geopolitical paradox: an era that was shaped, on the one hand, by strict governmental reform of Italian immigration policy and, on the other, by the country’s significant influx of ‘non-national’ settlement. On the backdrop of such a tumultuous environment, wherein the construct of ‘nation’ is evidently manifold, I consider Agostino Ferrente’s L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006) – a documusical that recounts the establishment and progress of an international orchestra in Rome’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhood – in terms of both existing sociopolitical and constructed filmic spaces. Utilizing Hess and Zimmermann’s notion of the ‘transnational documentary’ as a firm starting point, I examine Ferrente’s representative negotiation as that between the documentation of a Leftist initiative and the film-maker’s ‘othering’ of the project’s immigrant musicians, through the tenacity of the concept of nationality and the ‘eternal’ city of Rome. Specifically, I argue that this enables us to excogitate the ‘transnational documentary’ not through postnational ideology, but rather within a nation in which national identity is still inherently – albeit fluidly – a part.