L'occhio che palpita: Monica Vitti e gli scritti sull'arte

This article analyzes Monica Vitti’s writing production related to art. By drawing from different sources from the mid-1990s – an art column held on the magazine «Cahiers d’Art» (L’occhio innocente [The innocent eye] and her autobiographical texts (Il letto è una rosa [The bed is a rose] and Sette Sottane [Seven skirts]) – and intertwining them with archival documents and texts from Art History and Film Studies, this investigation aims at demonstrating how the artistic dimension is rooted for Vitti in the entanglement between vision, emotions and the forms of thought. The actress explores in her writing the possibilities of a haptic gaze able to activate a metamorphosis of reality. Her words open a dialogue with the cinematograhic medium and par- ticularly with the experience shared with Michelangelo Antonioni, but they also resonate with a genealogy of women’s writings focused on sensory phenomenology as a manifestation of an emotional intelligence.