Nanni Moretti’s La stanza del figlio/The Son’s Room (2001) reveals the effects of a child’s death on the protagonist Giovanni (a psycoanalyst played by Moretti) and his family. This film appears after Aprile/April (1998), which narrates both the birth of the director’s son Pietro as well as the Italian electoral campaign in 1996 in the month of the title. The arrival of a biological son followed by the death of a fictional one in Moretti’s oeuvre suggests greater implications for the parent-child relationship in Italy. This phenomenon also comments on the relationship between generations of Italian directors. An examination of Moretti’s earlier autobiographical film Caro diario/Dear Diary (1994) gives insight into this director’s relationship to other artists and also suggests implications for the future of Italian filmmaking.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Carolan, M. A., (2025), "Moretti’s Children: The Next Generation?", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Carolan, Mary Ann McDonald. "Moretti’s Children: The Next Generation?." Quaderni d'italianistica 34 (2): 2014. 113-132. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v34i2.21038. 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/.