The Trails of a Counter-Narrative: the Representation of the Years of Lead in Loriano Macchiavelli's Sarti Antonio Series

The expression anni di piombo(Years of Lead) refers to a dark page in Italian history that covers the period from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s, and was characterized by students’ and workers’ protests, terrorist attacks and political violence. Scholarship about the Years of Lead has either focused on authors who were writing in the 1970s and 1980s, and thus lived through and represented those years from an ‘internal’ perspective, or it has looked at the ways that contemporary writers have reconstructed this period and their various motivations for doing so. In this context, however, critics have rarely addressed the case of Loriano Macchiavelli, whose work might be regarded as epitomizing both an internal perspective and a kind of overview of this key period in recent Italian history.