Between socialism and capitalism: The Cold War geopolitics of Bob Dylan in Italian newspapers, 1965 –1969

This thesis offers a preliminary, transnational analysis of the reception of Bob Dylan in Italy during the second half of the 1960s, examining how his music, public persona, and political meaning were interpreted across competing ideological frameworks. The project was initially prompted by personal experience and by observing how divergent interpretations of Dylan within my own family raised a broader historical question: did Dylan function similarly within Italian society at large, as a figure through whom competing worldviews were negotiated? Drawing on Italian newspaper such as L’Unità, Avanti!, Vie Nuove, Corriere della Sera, and La Stampa, this study shows that Dylan was not passively received, but actively interpreted, contested, and re-signified. In the context of Cold War cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, this thesis asks whether Dylan drew Italians toward the American side or instead reinforced anti-American sentiment, and how Italians constructed different understandings of the United States and of Americanness through the meanings they attributed to him. When Italian newspapers wrote about Dylan, they were not simply reporting on a singer; they were engaging deeply political and moral questions: was America the land of freedom or of oppression? Was protest legitimate or threatening? Was American youth a force for peace or for self-destruction? Left-wing newspapers, including L’Unità, Avanti!, and Vie Nuove framed Dylan as the voice of an “other America,” one of dissent, civil rights, and opposition to war, whose critiques of racism and militarism were taken as evidence of democratic plurality within the United States. Conservative and bourgeois newspapers, like Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, by contrast, portrayed him as a destabilizing force associated with drug use, nihilism, and youth rebellion, while generally refraining from direct attacks on the United States itself and instead isolating what they perceived as its most troubling cultural expressions. In an industrializing Italy, such representations also reflected anxieties about discipline, labor, and the formation of a productive citizen. Yet across these divergent readings, Dylan’s America remained a central cultural reference point. I argue that Dylan mattered geopolitically not because he defended America, but because he made it difficult - if not impossible - for Italians to imagine freedom, peace, protest, social justice, modernity, and moral critique without America. Methodologically, this study combines archival materials and theoretical frameworks drawn from history, philosophy, cultural studies, and sociology. It should be read as an initial exploration and a foundation for a broader research project requiring more extensive literature review and archival research in both Italy and the United States.