Il 1866 sulla pagina e sullo schermo: Senso tra Boito e Visconti

The article compares the film by Visconti, Senso, and the short story with the same title by Boito from which the film is taken. Taking advantage of the different screenplays published, we aimed at highlighting some aspects not yet investigated by critics regarding characters, places, symbolic devices, and above all the conception of the Story of the writer and the director. An important example is the male protagonist's change of name: the Tyrolean lieutenant Remigio Ruiz becomes the Austrian Franz Mahler. Thus the vital ambiguity - Austrian and Italian at the same time - that characterized the literary character is lost. The elimination by Visconti of the issue of the 'austriacanti' seems to be dictated by the desire to focus more on the psychological aspect of the character rather than on the political one. In both historical representations appear however some anachronisms that we consider as distinctive choices of a poetics. Rather than rewriting in a literary or cinematic way the historical experience of 1866, Boito and Visconti intend to offer a symbolic representation of it.