This article examines the relationship between De Roberto’s I Viceré and Faenza’s film adaptation focusing on the two texts’ different ideological positions and narrative strategies. Both texts depict the mechanisms employed by a ruling caste to remain in power through a period of acute social change. The novel, through a multifocal narration, gives agency to individuals for shaping their environment and presents them in their alienating subjective deformation of reality, casting the historymaking process and any interpretation of it in an ambivalent light. The film focuses on the family saga and on the ongoing trasformismo of the Italian political system bringing to the fore its resonance with the present. The characters, particularly Consalvo as the principal voice, are represented as victims of a larger socio-political mechanism.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Pagliaro, A., (2025), "De Roberto and Faenza: Ideological Shifts in I Viceré", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Pagliaro, Annamaria. "De Roberto and Faenza: Ideological Shifts in I Viceré." Quaderni d'italianistica 34 (1): 2013. 241-266. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v34i1.19881. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.