Abstract
ABSTRACT Starting from 1960, Renato Salvatori radically transformed his picture personality, hitherto anchored to characters conveying the optimistic drives of a country headed towards a prosperous future. After his encounter with Luchino Visconti, who cast him as the lead in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), Salvatori reshaped his cinematic persona and brought to life some of the fiercest incarnations of the Boom era. By focusing on Visconti’s Rocco, Ugo Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963) and Giuliano Montaldo’s Una bella grinta (1965), this essay highlights how Salvatori came to embody – through his complex and morally-degraded characters – the most controversial features of the sociocultural context of 1960s Italy: from the tragic uprooting of Southern emigrants in Northern Italy to the alienating effects of factory life, from the recklessness of the new entrepreneurial class that would build the foundations of modern-day Italy to the irreversible crisis of traditional models of masculinity.
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