Caro Diario Sparknotes

The 1993 film, Caro Diario (Dear Diary), can be seen as a critique of modern Italian culture and its ills, in contrast to a more idyllic past, if perhaps as seen only in the mind of the film’s director, Nanni Moretti (who also plays the main character, Moretti himself). The film takes us on a journey through Italy in three chapters, each with its own focus on Italian culture. Though each vignette differs from the other, they all reveal Moretti’s deep love for Italy and its cinema as forces that shaped his life. The irony on the film’s surface belies a deeper call underneath: a prophet’s urging for Italy to return to its roots while it still can. As Peter Bondanella states, “Moretti’s films constitute a coherent body of work that treats a number of recurrent themes: metacinematic considerations of the state of cinema, particularly in Italy; a focus upon Moretti’s own personal problems and intellectual or artistic concerns…; a critique of useless rhetoric and political jargon…; and political concerns…” (Bondanella 520) In Caro Diario, these fascinations are laid bare. “Chapter One: On My Vespa” has us follow the director on a scooter through Rome as he meditates on the city and cinema today; each seems to fall short of the ones he recalls knowing and
We see the love Moretti has for what (we imagine) must be another formative film from his boyhood as he dances along with the singer on screen. He sets off with his friend in search of a place to concentrate and write, only to see his friend flee in search of television and modern conveniences. The film explores this tension between the pull of high culture and low, but Moretti seems at home in both. We suspect that Moretti, as a filmmaker, shares his friend’s affinity for daydreaming, moronic though it may seem to some intellectuals, for instance, film