"A Bridge Over the Atlantic"

In 1958, the newly elected Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani published an important article, titled “A Bridge over the Atlantic,” in a special issue of the American magazine Atlantic Monthly. The article was dedicated to Italy and presented the country as an ideal cultural mediator between the Old World and the New World.

According to Fanfani, the difficult period of Italy's reconstruction was over and a new era of stability and wealth was about to come, such as to build an invisible bridge across the Atlantic linking the peninsula and the United States.
He thus commented:

"The millions of tourists, including Americans, who now visit us every year realize that we have come a long way. We intend to go on, even hurriedly, in order to put ourselves among the most advanced nations as quickly as possible. … [Now,] one can hardly speak of the Old and New Worlds; the terms, in fact, are seldom used now, at least in Italy - we speak instead of the western world and the free world, and we mean the same thing by both. … Thus an opposition which considers Italy from one standpoint and America from another is inconceivable today."

The goal of the article was to show how Italy had become focused on the present as much as was the United States. The Italians had defined a new national identity, effectively conjugating their past, heritage and tradition with new and innovative paradigm of modernity, posing the foundation for a “new Italy." This represenation was meant to foster a more positive US attitute toward Italian society, counterbalancing and disproving stereotypes on Italian backwardness.