Since the 1950s, the beach and the road have forged the archetype of an all-Italian way to comment on the myth of the holidays. Equally frantic and alienating, from Il sorpasso and Swept Away to Cario diario and Call Me By Your Name, soundtracks have been crucial in portraying these scenarios.

Why is summer so melancholic? Its wind of apparent renewal embeds itself in our memories, never leaving us. It is the perennial combination of hate and love of a season that knows how to show itself in its full brilliance, in which even idleness becomes pleasure. Its slow, harmonious, ecstatic pace bewitches us, but ends up making us no longer remember the taste of the sea. Summer has a special charm, a mix of contrasting sounds and emotions that can be difficult to describe. It is a season of light and warmth, but also of introspection and nostalgia.

In Italy, the arrival of the summer has always been synonymous with change and renewal, and especially in the early 1950s it became the perfect depiction of the country at the dawn of the economic miracle. The beaches were stormed by every type of social class, anticipating the beginning of a new, seemingly dreamy era. The growing optimism, derived from a condition of collective well-being, on the other hand hid the dross of a country still searching for its own identity. This became cardinal in the cinematographic social commentary of the era.

The archetypes of the Italian cinema of the time, which have forged such a strong collective iconography, couldn’t have existed without a generational narrative that still feeds the dreamlike spectrum of our summer landscape.

If the music industry gave birth to an etire genre by recounting the feelings and scents of the Italian summer in the form of 45rpm pop songs, cinema was able to go even further. It showed the essence and the continuous evolution of that time of the year in which everything seems to stop, and then start anew towards new shores, with light-heartedness and the hope for new beginnings. To do so, music became a cardinal narrative element.

Some of the classics of the genre such as La famiglia passaguai (Aldo Fabrizi, 1951), La spiaggia (Alberto Lattuada, 1954), or the more introspective Il sorpasso aka The Easy Life (Dino Risi, 1964) and the reportage La lunga strada di sabbia by Pier Paolo Pasolini and photographer Paolo di Paolo, oscillating between neo-realism and Italian-style comedy, showed a detailed and intimate snapshot of a nation that had just begun to undergo its process of transformation. Music – whether diegetic or not, composed or sourced – traced the contrasting sides of a society that was finally recovering from the misery and devastation of wartime. It accurately counterpointed the feelings that the dreamy summer season could evoke in each protagonist, highlighting their burning desire for carefreeness.

The profound social differences that these films displayed, also analysing the human process with respect to a new collective condition, made every popular element become the glue that only music, inherent in its context, could effectively narrate.

Summer for many composers such as Riz Ortolani, Piero Piccioni, Piero Umiliani, Armando Trovajoli and Ennio Morricone was the way to give shape to an unprecedented soundscape. 

Although each coastline had its own specific characteristics, these maestros focused on recreating musically both the concealed carefreeness of a topical time of the year and its constant inconsistencies. The exotic and tropical syncopated rhythms, the jazz that provided the soundtrack to the Dolce Vita, showed a young Italy where there seemed to be room indeed for everyone. But the music also set in motion a sentimental process that only the memory of a bygone summer could create; that endless sense of melancholy for something now past that is difficult to grasp and capture again. 

If in Amarcord (1974) Nino Rota had given a glimpse of how a summer memory, with the balls at the Rimini Grand Hotel and the arrival of the transatlantic liner Rex, could become the slideshow between the end of adolescence and the indelible memory of it, more than ten years earlier it was these composers who outlined a style that would never fade. 

Through the idyll of the voyage, an all-Italian take on the road movie archetype, as a metaphor for the change that drove many Italians to leave the idleness and heat of the big cities and head for a summer of great hopes, they were able to perfectly transport the spectator to a suspended time called summer.

Tropicale is the collection exploring the summer sound of Italian cinema in the years of La Dolce Vita

From Ennio Morricone’s rhythmic pattern in I malamondo that seems to mimic the chaos of a provincial bar, the stage of a new generation of damned teens, to Riz Ortolani’s jazzy trumpeting matching Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassmann)’s sinuous driving of his Lancia Aurelia B24 in Il sorpasso: the audeince discovered the sound spectre of a new Italy running unaware of danger. It was with Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (1962), first, and above all Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away (1974), then, that films set in the Italian summer the manifesto of a more profound social crisis that the economic miracle had triggered. 

Emphasising it all is the music. The perennial dualism between the exuberant Bruno and the introspective young Roberto (Jean-Louis Trintignant) represents the style and attitude to life of two different souls of Italy. Similarly, the excitement of rock ‘n roll and twist, which were making their way through the jukeboxes of the beaches, bars and taverns, collide with the compositions of Ortolani, which emphasise the psychological scenery and the perennial wondering, in the summertime idleness, of what the future holds.

And the same takes place in Swept Away. The social and cultural clash between the sailor Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini) and the bored bourgeois Raffaella Pavone Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato), which turns into an intense but ephemeral summertime, is soundtracked by the music of Piero Piccioni – at times languid, at others alienating – deliberately underlining the whole scenario.

The Italian summer cinema archetype which took shape in the 1950s, hence determined the reiteration of the genre over the following decades, always with great degrees of commercial success. Even today, young filmmakers like Filippo Barbagallo seem keen to demonstrate so, as done with his debut Troppo Azzurro. 

From 1980s classics such as Carlo Vanzina’s Sapore di mare (1983) and Carlo Verdone’s Un sacco bello (1980) as well as the successive Caro Diario (1993) by Nanni Moretti’s later Caro Diario (1993) and Luca Guadagnino’s international hit Call me by your name (2017), summer remains one of the most popular themes in Italian cinema, tracing its sociological evolution, which without its music would not have achieved the same result. Summer is remembrance, feeling and emotion, in continuous suspended space.

Opening image: Sapore di Mare, Enrico Vanzina, 1980, frame from the film.