Thinking Canzonissima again. Or: setbacks, distractions, and giving myself a good talking to

This might turn into a ramble so apologies and please bear with me. There is something exciting I want to share coming towards the end of the post so if you want to skip ahead, please do…

If you’ve decided to stay with me and get the exciting stuff the long way round, then here we go. And I’ll start with trying to explain where my head has been of late. Not an easy thing to do! But I’ve been struggling again lately. My tendency towards overthinking has been intensifying with age, and my brain has been in overdrive for the past few weeks now (I blame hormones, or lack thereof – sorry for too much information). Coupled with overthinking, there’s also been that little voice that constantly says ‘you’re not good enough’. I think wanting to have an academic career was perhaps one of the worst things for someone who immediately sees their own shortcomings and inadequacies as the reason for anything negative that happens, and can’t get past listing all the ways that they have failed. In academia, the peer review culture, the competitiveness, and the drive to constantly be better and innovative and outstanding far too easily create space for self-doubt, self-criticism, and feelings of inadequacy and failure – at least for me, anyway. And then there’s also my experience of (let’s call it what it is) losing my career through a department closure and (let me own it, even though it’s hard) my decision to take a voluntary (even if it didn’t feel very voluntary) leaving package, and not being able to find another academic job since August 2020. Yes, I know that there was a lot going on in the world in 2020, that universities have changed tremendously in the last 6 years, that it’s not me it’s the system… but that doesn’t stop my overthinking and my tendency to focus on what I could and should have done differently, how I should have somehow been better, and how ultimately it’s my fault that I haven’t been able to get another position as a lecturer because I just wasn’t good enough.

There have over the past few weeks also been instances where I have immediately compared myself to someone else and seen all the things that they are and I am not, and all the career opportunities that they have and I don’t. I don’t think what I experienced was jealousy (I mean, just to overthink that, perhaps there was some envy in the mix…): rather, I’m coming to identify these feelings as part of the grief I have about losing my professional identity. Grief that I still have and often feel very silly about (even though feelings are feelings and you’re entitled to feel them). For instance, I attended a wonderful inauguaral lecture of a colleague who has just achieved promotion to full professor. I was so happy for them and it was lovely to hear about all the truly exceptional things they have achieved. I then spent the journey home crying about how that was something I wanted to do some day myself and won’t have chance to. Another example: I saw another colleague had been invited to attend a summer school in Italy and teach postgraduate students on a topic of Italian media studies. I was happy for them and the recognition for their work. And upset that this was yet another thing that I would never get to experience myself (I started telling myself it was because the organiser doesn’t like me and doesn’t like my work… ah yes, hello overthinking my old friend). At the conference I attended at the start of May, I had a massive emotional wobble about not fitting in, about not working on something ‘worthy’ and ‘profound’. On not being intellectual enough… And then I got the (now customary) ‘thanks but no thanks’ email for a media and communications lectureship that I applied for, which colleagues (and Copilot!) thought was really strong. Another ‘not good enough’ sign in my head.

ENOUGH!

That’s the point I’ve finally got to. It’s happened this week whilst on holiday. I started the week with another wobble and lots of overthinking (which usually starts in the evening and gets worse at 4 in the morning) and my husband, very wisely, said: you’re going to have to accept that that is how you feel. And it’s ok to feel like that. Then you decide what you want to do once you’ve felt your feelings. So here I am, having felt my feelings, making a decision about what I want to do. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the decision revolves around Canzonissima, that wonderfully joyous Italian television programme to which I keep returning, which I spent time with in the TV archives in Rome in 2021 whilst at the BSR and which I decided then required a book to be written about it.

Well, it turns out, that book bas been written – and no, not by me. It’s just been published this year (end of March) and I found out about it whilst at a conference at the start of May. It’s called ‘Musica, milioni e follie: Canzonissima, lo show che incollava l’Italia’ and I got an electronic copy via Amazon (other stores are available!) – https://amzn.eu/d/07TO6Zw7. I started reading the book on the plane on the journey out for my holiday and finished it in two days! And I have mixed feelings. Initially, I really enjoyed all the Canzonissima trivia that the book recounts. I was finding out new things about the show and having affirmed my initial reactions and interpretations of the series. Then, I felt frustrated. This was the book I wanted to write. I had even planned the running order of the chapters whilst in Rome in 2024 and had ideas for a chapter on each iteration of the series across the almost 20 years it was on Italian television.

But here’s where sleepless nights full of overthinking can sometimes prove useful. I spent a rather productive hour between 3:45 and 4:45am the other morning channeling my overactive brain into thinking about the book I’d been reading and forcing myself to identify all the reactions I had had. And I finally articulated fully the sense of disappointment I had in the book, in that it left me wanting more. The information about the winning songs, the format of the voting, the choice of presenters, and the themes of the songs was all interesting but I had come away feeling like this was Canzonissima trivia. I wanted more. The historical context provided by the book was there but I wanted it directly linked to the presentation and analysis of the different series. I wanted to know why certain elements of the series were culturally, socially, and politically significant for Italy in that moment. I wanted the ‘so what?’ question answering in much more detail and depth. And that, my 4:15am brain said, is my opportunity!

So here’s the exciting part (in case you were scrolling down to find it!): here’s the plan for

Canzonissima. A Cultural History of Popular Music and Italian Television 1956-1974

Introduction	Because every book needs a good introduction
Chapter 1 – Canzonissima in overview	An overview of Canzonissima as a series and how it evolves from the 1950s through the 1960s to the 1970s and situate this overview against the socio-political-cultural landscapes of Italy, Italian television, and Italian popular music.
Chapter 2 – Canzonissima and the lottery	Explore Canzonissima’s link to lottery and how this reveals the close relationship between Italian television and the State, as well as the cultural changes taking place in Italy in the mid-1950s that a shift to consumerism and aspirations for wealth.
Chapter 3 – Canzonissima as varieta’	Analyse Canzonissima as a television format and how it aligns with the expectations of a variety series in Italy in the period (focusing on mise-en-scene, dancing, singing, comedy), then trace how the series develops and evolves between 1956 and 1974.
Chapter 4 – The labour of Canzonissima	(If this is even possible) analyse the unseen labour that went into creating and producing the series, focusing on budgets, rehearsal hours, sets, costumes, writers and directors to write a behind-the-scenes history of Canzonissima.
Chapter 5 – Role of the audience and presence of ordinary Italians on Canzonissima	Interrogate the role and presence of ordinary Italians on Canzonissima as audience, jury members, and lottery winners across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, situating this analysis against the broader trends in Italian television at the time.
Chapter 6 – The reception of Canzonissima	Analyse how Canzonissima is contemporaneously received in the press and by the general viewing public between 1956 and 1974, focusing also on the press coverage and how this builds the series’ popularity and on how the audience reception compares and contrasts to that of the critics.
Chapter 7 – Canzonissima and censorship	Explore the impact on Canzonissima of another trend of Italian television at the time: censorship and strict expectations about what can and cannot be shown on Italian television screens in this period, focusing in particular on 1959, 1962, 1970, and 1971.
Chapter 8 – Canzonissima as star vehicle	Analyse the impact of Canzonissima on the fabrication and dissemination of the female presenters’ star status, highlighting Delia Scala, Sandra Mondaini, Mina, the Kessler twins, and Raffaella Carra’ in particular and in contrast to their male counterparts on the show.
Chapter 9 – Canzonissima as popular music programming	Situate Canzonissima as part of the calendar of popular music television programmes in Italy in this period (highlighting the similarities and differences with the coverage of the Sanremo Festival and Disco d’estate), analysing the broader trends of how popular music was televised in Italy in this period.
Chapter 10 – Canzonissima as (pop)star maker	Focus on specific popstars and analyse how Canzonissima shaped their popularity and reception with Italian audiences (Nilla Pizzi, Claudio Villa, Gianni Morandi, Massimo Ranieri).
Conclusion	Because every good book needs a conclusion and this is where I get to really, explicitly explain the ‘so what’ of Canzonissima. I also get to acknowledge the afterlives of Canzonissima here, and talk a little about the 2026 iteration of the show and how that was received by contemporary audiences and critics – all of which I hope will show just how culturally significant Canzonissima was and is in Italy.

The holiday notebook that has now become my Canzonissima project notebook!

As is my want, I have questions about the structure of the book and the order of the chapters: is this the right order? Am I focusing on the right things? What have I missed? I also have questions about the time period but I think I want to start in 1956, to also take into consideration the precursors to Canzonissima that appeared in 1956 and 1957, before the first iteration of the show with the title Canzonissima in 1958. The periodisation could end in 1975, as it was in that January that the final episode of the ‘orignal’ run of Canzonissima aired. But I think I prefer to go with 1956-1974, as a reference to the years when each series started – plus, two even numbers just sounds better in my head!

So, as always, there are some practicalities that I need to think about: finding a publisher, writing a book proposal, doing the research into aspects I haven’t already worked on (behind the scenes, audience reception, history of the lottery in Italy!), writing the book… all the while finishing the book on Italian variety television stars, writing two other chapters I’ve promised to produce on Mina and Marcello Mastroianni, creating and producing series 2 of the ‘TV Italian Style’ podcast’ – and doing my job!

But here’s to forging ahead regardless!

 

Biblioteca di Studio Uno (1964) and the Unseen Labour of Bringing Literature and Music to the Italian Small Screen

This is an excerpt from the paper I represented at the University of Cambridge earlier this month, at the ‘Notes on Work. Music, Literature and Labour in Postwar Italy’ conference. The paper provided me with an opportunity to (finally) dive back into research after a long pause. 2025 and 2026 have been busy for me for work and life, and so my research activities have had to take a pause because there haven’t been enough hours in my weeks to do all the things I need and want to, of late. But revisiting Biblioteca di Studio Uno and the variety television for this conference has been something of a catalyst and I’m now planning ways to carve out time so as to have the opportunity for the joy that research gives me. Plus, there is the small matter of a book to write!

So here is some of what I talked about at Cambridge, to highlight the labour required to encode and decode literature and music for Italian television in the 1960s as revealed through the variety series, Biblioteca di Studio Uno.

At 9pm on Saturday 15 February 1964, approximately 13 million Italian television viewers tuned in to watch the first episode of the varietà Biblioteca di Studio Uno on RAI’s programma nazionale channel. This new variety show consisted of eight episodes of just over one hour that each week provided a musical parody of a different, well-known literary work: ‘Il Conte di Montecristo’ (15/2/64); ‘Il Fornaretto di Venezia’ (22/2/64); ‘I Tre Moschettieri’ (29/2/64); ‘Il Dottor Jekyll e Mister Hyde’ (7/3/64); ‘La Storia di Rossella O’Hara’ (14/3/64); ‘La Primula Rossa’ (4/4/64); ‘Al Grand Hotel’ (11/4/64); and ‘Odissea’ (18/4/64). The series was the product of a collaboration between director Antonello Falqui, producers and screenwriters Guido Sacerdote and Dino Verde, and popular music group Il Quartetto Cetra (Felice Chiusano, Giovanni “Tata” Giacobetti, Lucia Mannucci, and Virgilio Savona), and is described by television critic and historian Aldo Grasso as ‘il primo kolossal-varietà della televisione’ (2019: 269).

The television and radio listings magazine Radiocorriere gives a sense of the scale of the production behind the show in an article introducing the series: ‘Centosessanta attori e cantanti di tutti i calibri, più i balletti e millecinquecento comparse. Circa quattrocento motivi musicali, oltre a quelli originali, suddivisi con una media di quaranta-cinquanta per ogni sera. Centocinquanta ambientazioni scenografiche (compresa Venezia, con canali veri e gondole), tutte fabbricate nell’interno dell’ormai famoso Studio Uno, in via Teulada. Questa sommaria esposizione rappresenta a sufficienza quale è stato lo sforzo realizzativo per questo genere di spettacolo, che non è possibile ancora definire chiaramente’ (Barbicinti 1964: 10-11). Television historian and critic Aldo Grasso provides a possible definition for this kind of genre of variety show when he describes it as ‘il primo kolossal-varietà della televisione’ (2019:269). The kolossal, according to Grasso, is the ‘termine con cui si designano le pellicole cinematografiche e le produzioni televisive contraddistinte da un grande dispiego di risorse tecniche, scenografiche, umane oltre che finanziarie. […] Non si tratta di un vero e proprio genere, quanto di un tipo di produzione caratterizzato da precisi criteri di realizzazione: costruzioni scenografiche imponenti, impiego di grandi masse di comparse, messa in scena di storie epiche di grande presa emotiva e intensità drammatica’ (2008: 403).

My aim in this paper is to explore what the Radiocorriere journalist described as the sforzo realizzativo required to bring these musical-comedy adaptations of literary works to the small screen in Italy in 1964. To do this, I want to highlight the effort required to produce, disseminate, and interpret these television programmes, drawing on Stuart Hall’s model of encoding and decoding (1973). This model helps to explain how communication via the medium of television takes place. Hall characterises this type of communication as a process that is ‘produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution, consumption, reproduction’ (Hall 1973: 508). Each moment constitutes a type of discursive form that enables the construction, transmission, translation, and internalisation of the message that is being communicated, a message which relies on a process of encoding and decoding to ensure it can be communicated successfully. But as Hall points out, encoding and decoding are open to interpretation and distortions and misunderstandings can arise when there is a lack of equivalence or alignment between the encoder and the decoder, or, rather, when the audience (the decoder) is not operating within the same code as the broadcaster (the encoder).

Hall’s model sheds light on the process by which meaning is constructed, transmitted, and received in televisual communication, and it is clearly a process which requires much labour on the part of both the encoder and the decoder in order for the televisual message to be communicated successfully. In order to shed light on the labour involved in encoding literature, music, and humour for television viewers on the varietà, I’m going to examine the work involved in the writing and scripting of the programme, and in the production of the series. I will analyse the technical infrastructure, relations of production, and frameworks of knowledge (to use Hall’s terminology) which are at play in the encoding of the varietà as revealed by interviews with the show’s producers and writers and by its mise-en-scène, staging, and scoring.

So let’s begin by looking at the labour of encoding as revealed through the writing and scripting of the show. The opening and closing credits across the series reveal that Antonello Falqui, Guido Sacerdote, Dino Verde and the Quartetto Cetra collaborated to write the scripts of each episode as well as the lyrics for the songs that featured therein. In an interview, Falqui recounts how he had the idea for the series following the experience of working with the Quartetto Cetra for the 1962-63 series of the varietà Studio Uno, in which the group performed six-minute musical parodies of famous films. Falqui explains, ‘Queste parodie ebbero molto successo, e così mi venne in mente di fare i grandi romanzi, allo stesso modo. Per prima cosa, quindi, ho scelto i testi su cui fare le parodie. […] “Lo strano caso del dottor Jekyll e del signor Hyde” l’avevo letto e riletto avidamente, fin da ragazzo. Era tra i miei romanzi preferiti. Ed anche gli altri erano comunque tra le mie letture più care. Ma soprattutto quelli scelti avevano trame che potevano sostenere un racconto ritmato. Ed erano inoltre romanzi “popolari”, cioè noti più o meno a tutti. O almeno a tanti’.

He goes on: ‘Con la “Biblioteca di Studio Uno” mi sono davvero divertito tanto. Letteratura e musica leggera insieme. Grandi romanzi messi quasi in operetta, riscrivendo le canzoni di successo e salvandone solo i motivetti, popolari, che le sorreggevano. Anche lì ci mettevo 10 giorni per fare un episodio… […] È stato davvero un grande sforzo produttivo e realizzativo per la Rai. Vi erano in primis coinvolti tutti miei collaboratori rodati ed affezionati, e visto che ognuno di loro conosceva già il mio modo da stakanovista di lavorare, tutto è andato per il meglio. “La biblioteca”, è stata anche un’occasione per riunire, per così dire, gli “interessi familiari”, quelli di mio padre e quelli miei, ossia la letteratura ed il varietà. […] Il vero motore di tutto il racconto erano i “centoni”, ossia le famose canzoni celebri sceneggiate, parodiate, mantenendo però la stessa metrica degli originali; e ci scriveva Dino Verdo che era fenomenale! Uno spericolato trapezista delle parole. Del resto, Dino veniva da quella grande fucina d’umorismo che era stata il “Marc’Aurelio”. C’era anche Tata Giacobetti come autore, ma le canzoni “reinterpretate” le scriveva Dino Verde che in questo era davvero imbattibile […]. Ero, e come al solito, piuttosto burbero, schiavizzavo un po’ tutti, anche perché, assieme a Croce che era il direttore di studio, dovevamo tenere a bada tutti quei, tantissimi collaboratori e c’era solo il pugno di ferro per tentare di farlo. Ma, insomma, al di là del muso duro che dovevo mostrare, soprattutto mi divertivo un mondo, prima mentre giravamo, e poi quando mi rivedevo le puntate in televisione a casa’ (in Lavagnini 2022: 144-147).

There are two themes (or ‘relations of production’, to use Hall’s terminology) that speak to the work involved in the creation of Biblioteca di Studio Uno here. Firstly, it is clear that the labour required to write and script the series was substantial and involved not only investment in time and resources, but also in talent – as was only fitting for the adaptation of such great and substantial works of literature. Ten days per episode, a way of working that befitted a workaholic’s approach, a painstaking approach to writing and re-writing songs that would act as the central hook for the parody of each episode, and the necessity to control everything with an iron fist to ensure the work was completed on time. But this is also a labour of love: the stories chosen are dear to Falqui, the show enables him to explore elements of culture that are important to him and to his father, he is able to work with colleagues who he admires and respects. What is more, Falqui downplays the labour that was required by highlighting how well everyone worked together on the series and how much fun he had in the studio. This framing functions to both negate and simultaneously reinforce the hard work required to create the series and the number of people involved in the undertaking.

The three male members of Il Quartetto Cetra are interviewed in Radiocorriere in February 1964, in advance of the broadcast of the first episode of the series and all three shed light on the writing process: ‘“E così abbiamo cominciato – ci spiega Tata Giacobetti in un angolo dello Studio Uno – un lavoro duro, sei mesi di fatica. Oddio, non nego di essermi divertito perché creare un’opera musicale del genere incuriosisce, stimola e finisce con attrarre gli stessi autori. Scegliere, tra centinaia, migliaia di motivi musicali, dall’opera lirica al twist, dalle canzoni napoletane ai ritmi urlati, dall’operetta alle canzoni di trent’anni fa, e farli cantare ai personaggi di romanzi così celebri ci ha spesso costretti tutti a ridere…”.

“Non c’è dubbio – interviene Chiusano – che in fondo il segreto di questi romanzi, recitati al venti per cento e cantati all’ottanta, è proprio quello di trovare un giusto ritmo musicale. Se ciò è stato motivo di divertimento per noi, speriamo che lo sia anche per i telespettatori”.

Virgilio Savona, che ha impersonato Jekyll, sorride: “Adesso che non ho denti alla ‘vampira’ e non sono truccato da mostro, posso dirvi che i motivi scelti per il popolare personaggio di Stevenson mi hanno messo spesso in crisi: dovevo fare la faccia feroce e cantare, ad esempio, una frase cattiva sul ritmo della ‘Partita di pallone’. Ho dovuto veramente far violenza a me stesso per non sbottare mentre si girava. È facile dire che noi siamo abituati all’autocontrollo. Ma in certe occasioni le situazioni sono tali che è veramente difficile sostenerle. E sono d’accordo con i miei colleghi: la comicità di questi lavori è proprio legata ai ritmi che li sostengono” (in Barbicinti 1964: 11).

A similar framing emerges here to that offered by Falqui: the hard work involved (sei mesi di fatica) is juxtaposed with the fun of writing the parodies, the painstaking selection of songs (tra centinaia, migliaia di motivi musicali) is minimised, and perhaps even forgotten, when the result is laughter. And the effort and difficulty of containing and constraining oneself in order to craft a performance is worth it with the hope that viewers will laugh at the series as much as the writers did whilst making it.

To give you a sense of how much labour and effort is actually being downplayed by Falqui and the Quartetto Cetra here, I want to now spend a moment outlining the work that went into the mise-en-scène of Biblioteca di Studio Uno. The following table lists the different sets were constructed for each episode of the series:

Episode	Number of different sets
‘Il Conte di Montecristo’	18 (Marseille port, the Catalan quarter (street and inside the tavern, Villefort’s office (Capo Gabinetto della Suretée), Château d’If (exterior, prison cells, inside Abbé Faria’s cell), Church (interior for the wedding of Mercédès and Fernand), cave of treasure on Montecristo, inn in Marseille, Parisian ballroom, Danglers’s office, gambling salon, Albert’s office at newspaper, forest, Fernand’s office).
‘Il Fornaretto di Venezia’	12 (Venice (canal and at least three different street views, with Carnevale celebration), Barbo’s house (kitchen, Contessa’s bedroom), bakery (kitchen and street outside), La’ Zeno (courtyard), Tintoretto’s studio, Council chambers (court), torture chamber).
‘I Tre Moschettieri’	16 (D’Artagnan’s village, tavern, Musketeers’ barracks (training hall, courtyard), Richelieu’s castle (throne room), Paris (square and streets, two inns), palace (Queen’s chambers, two anti-chambers, ballroom), forest, port, Duke’s palace).
‘Il Dottor Jekyll e Mister Hyde’	18 (London (three different streets, cemetery), Jekyll’s house (dining room, sitting room, office, laboratory), laboratory table (oversized as backdrop for Fiorina and Sedlak’s performance), theatre box, pub, Osborne house (sitting room), circus, hall of mirrors, Scotland Yard (Inspector’s office), Club reading room, horse and carriage, Margie’s house).
‘La Storia di Rossella O’Hara’	19 (O’Hara house (garden, cotton plantation, Rossella’s bedroom, and garden, staircase, entrance hall, office, plantation, downstairs bedroom after the war), Wilkes farm (grounds, hallway, staircase, entrance hall, dining room, sitting room), dancehall, cabaret hall, street (with saloon and other buildings), grocery shop).
‘La Primula Rossa’	16 (Square with guillotine, Gendarmerie (courtyard), Robespierre’s office, Dover (inn, harbour), Versailles palace (throne room, anti-chamber), Blakeley house (garden and croquet lawn, ballroom, sitting room, library, bedroom), Bastille prison, Paris sewers and street (horse and cart), Calais tavern).
‘Al Grand Hotel’	14 (Hotel lobby and reception desk, switchboard, five guest bedrooms, hotel lift, corridor, dining room, exterior walls and balconies of hotel, ballroom (with dance floor and set up as cabaret).
‘Odissea’	12 (Greek camp outside Troy, Palace at Ithaca (atrium, Penelope’s weaving room), Mount Olympus, Ogygia, Odysseus’ ship, island of the Sirens, island of the Cyclops, island of Aeaea, Oceanus, island of Scheria (beach and Alcinous’s palace).

Each scene required specific props and costumes, for the large number of actors and extras involved in creating each story. The Radiocorriere article that I quoted above gives an indication of the total amount of labour required for the series’ mise-en-scène: 160 actors and singers were involved, alongside the professional dancers and 1,500 extras; and 150 different sets were created inside RAI’s Studio Uno in Rome. In his book about the television programmes that changed Italy, Walter Veltroni notes that ‘il programma di Falqui era, credo, un grande set, un immane sforzo della giovane macchina produttiva della Rai. In una sola puntata si potevano contare venti scene diverse, cinque o sei balletti, duelli, costumi d’epoca e parrucche. E poi tutto il lavoro di scrittura dei testi, la scelta delle musiche, la loro registrazione, la colonna sonora delle voci degli attori, il perfetto playback. Un gigantesco lavoro, per un varietà. E fu un grande successo’ (Veltroni 1992: 30). And in her book on Antonello Falqui, Ornella Magrini makes the point that ‘A differenza dello stile sobrio ed essenziale di Studio Uno, gli adattamenti di Biblioteca richiesero una molteplice gamma di costumi, ricche scenografie e una grande varietà di numeri coreografici. Fu necessario investire ingenti capitali, certo non molto superiori a quelli richiesti per alcune attuali produzioni che stentano però a raggiungere gli stessi risultati qualitativi’ (Magrini 2009: 66-67).

The result of this labour was to create credible adaptations of the eight different literary worlds for the television viewer, by offering realistic representations of the various locations. As far as televisual realism is concerned, John Fiske explains, television is ‘an essentially realistic medium because of its ability to carry a socially convincing sense of the real. Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed’ (Fiske 2010: 21). Viewers accept what they are watching is ‘realistic’ because it convincingly reproduces on screen conventions that are seen and enacted in the real world. This means that on-screen ‘realism does not just reproduce reality, it makes sense of it – the essence of realism is that it reproduces reality in such a form as to make it easily understandable’. (Fiske 2010: 24). The labour of RAI’s production and stage crew, and costuming and make-up departments offered a reproduction of literary reality that viewers could make sense of, drawing on the frameworks of knowledge they already possessed about television’s technical infrastructure (to use Hall’s terminology again), which they had derived from watching other televisual and cinematic adaptations of literary works.

There is much more that could be said about the labour of encoding: who was employed to create the sets, the work of the orchestra in scoring each episode, the terms under which these RAI employees worked on the series. And of course, there is also the labour of decoding the series, which fell to the television audience, who had to work hard to interpret the parodies and satire offered by each episode of Biblioteca di Studio Uno. But I’m still thinking about all of that for now, so will just share these initial ideas as I continue to develop my analysis. Thank you for reading.

 

Next steps, or: how to write the variety television book and not get distracted by other things…

I’m finding at the moment I’m very easily distracted. Granted, there is much going on in the world at the moment that is distracting (other adjectives would also be very appropriate here but I’m not going to let myself get distracted again!). But I’m finding myself in what for me is a recognisable phase of working on a project where there’s so much to do, so many possible things that might be done, and so many other competing tasks and deadlines that I’m feeling that project overwhelm that I realise now always happens to me. It happened on the PhD. It happened when writing the book on singer-songwriters. It happened whilst I was writing the Mina book (and then it happened in life, in a way that meant the Mina book was my refuge and the place where I could retain control and do what I wanted to do – very motivating in terms of getting on with writing, but not something I’d recommend as a way of working all the time!).

And so I find myself recognising that that overwhelm is happening again. This time with the variety television book. I completed the book proposal at the end of 2024, which coincided with the end of the British Academy Small Research Grant that I had to work on the project and which funded my research trips to Rome to collect archival data (aka watch television) and the TV Italian Style podcast. I had realised that I wasn’t done with variety television and that the podcast had only really scratched the surface of what there was to say. A book felt like a logical next step in terms of pulling everything together and doing some of that ‘deep thinking and analysis’ which brings me joy as a researcher. But since signing the book proposal, I’ve been finding myself getting distracted. And then panicking that I’m not focused and won’t be able to finish the book (even though I’m aiming for a publication date of 2029, to coincide with Italian television’s 75th anniversary). So I’m taking a moment to take stock. To breathe. To tell myself that actually, this isn’t distraction. Or overwhelm. Or panic. For no good reason. There is actually a reason. Life has been busy! My work as a development consultant at Leeds has been full-on since the start of 2025, and I haven’t had the space to think about anything much other than work. My evenings and weekends are usually my thinking and writing and research time. But it hasn’t been the case yet this year. So it’s only natural to feel some overwhelm and panic. Things look like they might be starting to settle, though, and I’ve spent the morning thinking about how to feel more prepared for writing and research and how to maintain my focus. Writing this blog post is one of the ways I identified I could do that. By sharing my plans with the world, I’m articulating ‘what next’ and working out what to focus on.

The ‘what next’ I came up with was sharing my plans for the variety television book and asking, does this sound ok? To help with context, here is how I described the book in the proposal:

Stasera in TV: Italian variety television and its stars 1954-1976

The real School of the Nation. A tool for modernisation. An embodiment of authority and familiarity. A platform for attractive new models of behaviour and opportunities for shared experience. This is the significance of Italian television during the medium’s so-called golden age of the period 1954 to 1976. These were the years in which RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, Italian Radio-television) held a broadcasting monopoly. Like other state broadcasters, its explicit mission was to entertain, inform, and educate. Underlying this was the promotion of government approved, Italian-specific models of behaviour, ideals, and values. This book undertakes a longitudinal analysis of the principal programming through which Italian values and ideals were transmitted during this golden age: variety television. These shows best encapsulate RAI’s threefold mission and functioned as great homogenizing agents of the viewing public, thanks in no small part to the stars who appeared on the progammes. These stars became the physical embodiments of and vehicles for the entertainment, informing, and education of the nation. Figures like Corrado, the Quartetto Cetra, Raimondo Vianello, Sandra Mondaini, Franca Valeri, Walter Chiari, Johnny Dorelli, the Kessler twins, Mina, and Raffaella Carrà became cultural symbols and conduits for ideas about gender, values and national identity during this golden age. And because they were stars, audiences sought to identify with them. By focusing on each star in turn, this book identifies the specific ideals and values they represented and tracks the evolution over the period of the state-approved vision of Italian national identity that television promoted. But what did audiences think of the shows they were watching? Did they identify with the stars they were seeing on screen and the values and ideals being promoted? To answer these questions, the book draws on interviews with television viewers from this golden age and reveals how audiences responded to what they were watching. These memories reveal the impact of Italian variety television and its stars and shed light on the complexities and debates around what it meant to be Italian in the post-war period.

Now granted, you can see in this description that I’m wanting to talk to viewers and see what they thought of the programmes and stars I’ll be writing about. Working out how to do that is on the to do list (and any advice on how to do audience research would be welcome!) but it’s not the main point on which I’d appreciate a sense check. I’d really appreciate feedback on the choices of stars I’ve gone with. I ended up cutting some out and I’m wondering if I was write to do so! Here’s my proposed running order of chapters, which is determined by the order in which the stars in question first appeared on Italian television screens. So the book will be chronologically structured, but the chapters won’t necessarily follow that chronology as they’ll focus on the careers and appearances of the stars, and what they signify for audiences.

Table of Contents	Proposed Title
Chapter 1	Signore, signori… Italian variety television and its stars
Chapter 2	The varietà televisivo: origins, influences, evolutions
Chapter 3	Varietà directors and the establishment of a televisual format
Chapter 4	Corrado (January 1954)
Chapter 5	Sandra Mondaini (May 1955)
Chapter 6	Quartetto Cetra (February 1954)
Chapter 7	Raffaele Pisu (January 1955)
Chapter 8	Raimondo Vianello (February 1955)
Chapter 9	Delia Scala (May 1956)
Chapter 10	Franca Valeri (October 1957)
Chapter 11	Johnny Dorelli (January 1958)
Chapter 12	Walter Chiari (January 1958)
Chapter 13	Mina (April 1959)
Chapter 14	Alice and Ellen Kessler (January 1961)
Chapter 15	Lelio Luttazzi (June 1962)
Chapter 16	Raffaella Carrà (October 1962)
Chapter 17	Conclusion

My question is: who have I missed from this period and from variety television who really ought to have a chapter? Who have I included that perhaps doesn’t need to be there? Should I include Paolo Panelli, Bice Valori, and Gino Bramieri – as I was originally planning to do? What do you think?!

 

Marcello Mastroianni on Studio Uno (1965)

This is an extract from the paper I presented at a conference in December, which marked the centenary of Marcello Mastroianni’s birth. I focused on Mastroianni’s appearances on Italian variety television between 1965 and 1968 and here’s what I said:

I think these three years are particularly interesting because it is in this period that Mastroianni makes the majority of his appearances on the small screen. But this is also an interesting period in terms of his star status and significance. By 1965, Marcello Mastroianni was a household name both in Italy and beyond, thanks to his performances in films like I soliti ignoti (1958), La dolce vita (1960), and Divorzio all’italiana (1961), for which he won a BAFTA and Golden Globe award in 1963. Mastroianni had started his film career in the 1940s, and appeared in a series of small roles and as an extra, before landing his breakout role in Luciano Emmer’s Domenica d’agosto in 1950. But it was the global success of Fellini’s La dolce vita that would mark a shift in Mastroianni’s star status and significance. Giulia Muggeo explains that this is the film that turns Mastroianni into an international celebrity, and that ‘da qui in avanti nascerà e si sedimenterà il tanto odiato epiteto del latin lover, un epiteto rifiutato e contestato fin da subito dallo stesso attore ma che, nonostante gli sforzi, non si separerà mai dalla sua persona’ (p. 19). Indeed, the Latin lover image was one that was ascribed to Mastroianni, largely thanks to La dolce vita which, as Jacqueline Reich explains, ‘was marketed to the international (particularly American) public who hungered for Italian commodities (fashion, design, travel), [which included] sexualised images of Italian masculinity’ (p. 47). Mastroianni appeared to fit the bill, as he explains: ‘I’m not sure what this idiotic term palmed off on me means. People have labelled me as such evidently because I wore a blue blazer in the film and moved in a circle with a lot of women’ (in Reich, p. 47).

By 1965, Mastroianni had appeared in films like Il bell’Antonio (1961), Divorizio all’italiana (1961), 8½ (1962), Ieri, oggi, domani (1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (1964). In these films, Mastroianni had played characters that ‘ridiculed national mythologies of virility and power’ (Brunetta in Reich, p. 22), and portrayed what Reich terms the inetto underneath the facades of the tropes of Italian masculinity of the bella figura, the Latin lover, and the Sicilian gallo. But it’s clear from his appearance on the Saturday night variety show Studio Uno in March 1965 that there was one particular, overriding significance of Mastroianni’s star persona – head over to YouTube to watch the clip!

In a segment entitled ‘He’s the man for me’, Mastroianni is perhaps an obvious choice for a guest star. His star status as Latin lover makes him the perfect possible partner for Mina, and it’s certainly this status that is on show in this clip. He appears dressed as Casanova, a reference not only to the film that would be released later that year in Italian cinemas but also to his star status as womaniser and Latin lover. His sex appeal is underlined by the fact that all he has to do is snap his fingers and women (here, the Kessler twins) find him irresistible. And it’s reaffirmed at the end of the dance routine, as we also see him chatting to both of the twins and telling them that he’ll see them tomorrow, before being called back to stage front by Mina to finish off his guest performance.

But there is also an indication here of the façade that is inherent to that Latin lover label. When Mina calls him Casanova, Mastroianni exclaims that whilst it started as a joke, ‘ora non vivo più. Veramente, devo sempre piacere. Guarda, in divisa devo sempre presentarmi. Devo essere romantico, bello, affascinante – non è possibile! E poi le donne mi tormentano’. The character of Casanova, or Latin lover, is just an act and one which Mastroianni finds worrisome and burdensome. But he nevertheless is happy to play up to that character and stereotype on Studio Uno, playing the role that viewers expected of him.

However, there are also indications in this performance of a different Marcello Mastroianni behind the Latin lover label. A Mastroianni who wants to show off his musical talents and sing, and who is prepared to dance with the Kessler twins, revealing also his talents as a showman and entertainer (much to the audience’s delight who applaud at regular intervals throughout the routine). When it comes to talking about his forthcoming film with Mina, Mastroianni changes the subject and wants to learn how to sound like Mina when she sings certain lines. He eschews his status of ‘film star’ and instead appears as a music fan, taking the opportunity to sing a duet with Mina. And at the end of the performance, Mastroianni introduces a member of his family who is also a Mina fan: Bobby, his dog, who does not want to miss out! I like the fact that Mastroianni is having fun here. This isn’t the Latin lover character that audiences were used to seeing. Rather, there’s a kind of ordinary, private, everyday intimacy here (seeing the relationship Mastroianni has with his pet) that is nevertheless a performance, but perhaps of another facet of Mastroianni’s star persona.

 

1000 downloads for the TV Italian Style podcast!

1000 podcast downloads congratulatory message from the podcast host platform

In just over 12 months, the TV Italian Style podcast has received over 1,000 downloads. The first episode went live on January 15th 2024, and yesterday, February 14th 2025, I received the notification that there had been 1,000 downloads across the 26-episode series. It’s been a fun learning experience for me writing and producing the episodes and I wanted to take a step back and reflect on the surprises and the learning of the past 12 months.

First, don’t underestimate the time it takes to research, prepare, write, record, and edit a podcast episode! I found I got quicker at the process as time went on but it still takes a good amount of time. Researching your subject matter is obviously a task where the time needed can vary, because it really depends how confident you feel about the subject you’re going to be talking about. For episodes where I had already done quite a bit of research and thinking (the episodes on Mina, Un, due, tre, and Studio Uno for example), I found I had a really good idea of how to structure the episode and what to focus on fairly quickly. For other episodes where I was almost starting from scratch, I did a fair amount of reading round, watching more TV programmes, and sifting newspaper and magazine articles to help out together the narrative of the episode. And there’s another piece of learning – for me, a successful podcast episode has a story. A narrative thread that provides a journey through the podcast on which (hopefully) the listeners’ enjoyment and (given I was aiming for an educational type of podcast) learning. It takes time and planning to craft that story.

To help the story come across, I found I had to write out everything I wanted to say. I produced a script that if necessary, I could read out. I often did read but hopefully in an engaging way, but I found that I needed help to stay on track in terms of the sorts of things I wanted to say and also how I wanted to say them. Ad-libbing isn’t one of my strong suits as it turns out! But writing a script takes time – possibly as much as 2 hours for a 30 minute episode.

I also learned several lessons around technology! I’ve used Buzzsprout as my platform to publish the podcast and I liked the fact that there is an AI tool that can help “smooth” the final version of your audio before it goes public. I was using Zoom to record my audio and Audacity to then edit, but I’m still not certain that I was using noise gates effectively! So I was grateful for the AI tool to help clean up the audio. Halfway through the year, Zoom provided an upgrade that meant audio was recorded in stereo which also improved overall quality. Audacity also released a series of upgrades and updates that brought in extra features that made editing quicker. But editing is still time-consuming, particularly when you fluff your lines and have to delete your (many!) mistakes. I would estimate that for 30 minute episode, it would take me about 45-60 minutes to record and then 3 hours to edit the audio – and insert the relevant clips that I wanted to include. I also found that recording in Zoom was ‘cleaner’ than recording in Audacity directly and I presume that’s something to do with the background noise suppression that Zoom offers.

One of the aspects of producing a podcast that I hadn’t thought about but really enjoyed in the end was choosing artwork and images to accompany each episode and the series. I ended up designing my own logo for the series using Canva and then used screenshots that I took myself for the different episodes.

I have been surprised to find out which episodes have proved most popular. When you come up with an idea of what might work as a podcast, you never really know if you’re going to find topics that resonate with listeners or if you’re going to end up speaking into a void. My top five episodes that have most resonated with people are currently:

5) Episode R – Race and Italian variety television. I was joined in that episode by Jessica L Harris and we discussed the inclusion and representation of black Afro-American stars on Italian television screens. It’s clearly a topic that is of interest but also one that is sometimes excluded from histories of Italian TV.

4) Episode I – Io, Agata e tu… Introducing Raffaella Carrà. For this episode, my co-host was Nicolò Salmaso who shared much of his research on Raffaella that he conducted for his PhD. Raffaella is clearly a much-loved star and this was one episode that attracted listeners from South America, not surprising given Raffaella’s popularity there.

3) Episode C – Canzonissima. I had another co-host for this episode, Giancarlo Lombardi. This was also the first fully bilingual episode of the series, but that doesn’t seem to have put anyone off from listening! This was such a fun episode to record but also one that makes me realise how much there is to say about the cultural significance on the song competition for Italy. There’s so much to say that I might just write a book about it…

2) Episode A – Allegria! Mike Bongiorno, Corrado, and Italian variety television. The episode that started it all off. Unsurprisingly, this proved a very popular episode as people clearly tried out episode one to see if they liked the sound of the podcast.

The thing that most surprises me about the podcast is which episode takes the number 1 spot. That’s Episode J – Johnny Dorelli – Love in Portofino and beyond. Since that episode was released in May 2024, it’s been listened to nearly every week and has a truly global audience. I think this speaks to how popular Johnny Dorelli remains with audiences and it surprises me that nothing has been written in an academic context about him and his significance in Italy. Another piece of writing to add to the ‘to do’ list.

But that’s not the only piece of writing on the list. Last year, I signed an advance contract with Lever Press to write the book Stasera in TV: Italian variety television and its stars 1954-76. The book will draw on the research I’ve been doing that has informed the podcast and will focus on many of the famous faces who inspired the different episodes. I’m right at the start of the writing process so it’s going to take some time to pull everything together but here’s to more thinking about Italian variety television for the foreseeable future!

If you haven’t yet listened to the TV Italian Style podcast, you can download all 26 episodes from https://tvitalianstyle.wordpress.com/

 

Stasera in TV: Italian variety television and its stars, 1954-1976 – the conclusion of a project

It’s a bittersweet moment today as I just finished editing and uploading the final episode of the ‘TV Italian Style’ podcast that has been the main output of my British Academy Small Research Grant and the associated project that’s been exploring Italian variety television and its stars between 1954 and 1976. If you haven’t already listened to the podcast, you can listen online at https://tvitalianstyle.buzzsprout.com to all (from tomorrow) 26 episodes of the series, which provides an A to Z guide through Italian variety television.

The final episode looks at variety show theme songs and all the guest co-hosts from the series came back to suggest one particular song to talk about – I’m really grateful to Cecilia, Jessica, Giancarlo, Matteo and Nicolò for their support and generosity in giving of their time to come and talk about Italian TV. I’m also very thankful for the support of the British Academy as without the funding they provided, I wouldn’t have been able to produce and share the podcast or conduct the research that has informed the contents. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed sharing my research in this way and feel rather proud of the fact that all 26 episodes of the podcast are now complete!

At the culmination of a project like this, I always find myself thinking ‘what next?’ – and that’s where some of the bittersweet feeling starts to come in. I had applied for a British Academy Mid Career Fellowship that would have enabled me to have time to write the Stasera in TV book, with chapters dedicated to the principle stars that I’ve been looking at this year, and to conduct some interviews with viewers from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to get their take on the shows and stars I’ve been watching. That audience reception work is something that I think is missing from work on Italian variety television in this period (Damiano Garofalo’s book is a great start to filling the gap but there’s more to do, I think) but unfortunately, it’s going to have to wait as my funding application wasn’t successful. I’d still like to write the Stasera in TV book of course (as well as the ‘Cultural History of Canzonissima‘ book that I planned out one morning in November whilst in the RAI library in Rome watching the 1969 series and thinking that someone ought to write a book about the show) so I think that writing might be what fills my 2025. I also have some articles to pull together on aspects of variety television that merit specific attention: in the pipeline are pieces on popular music on Italian television in the 1950s, Canzonissima as foundational for Raffaella Carrà’s star image, and Marcello Mastroianni as recurrent guest star on Italian variety television. Quite how I’m going to fit all this writing in around everything else I do in my day job is another matter… But I suppose this isn’t really the conclusion of the Stasera in TV project. Rather, it’s the conclusion of phase 2! Phase 1 started at the British School at Rome. Phase 2 has been funded by the British Academy Small Research Grant. Here’s to finding out what phase 3 brings! Happy New Year, everyone!

 

With 6 months left of the ‘Stasera in TV: Italian variety television and its stars, 1954-1976’ project, where have I got to?

I was lucky enough to secure a Small Research Grant from the British Academy back in March 2023, which has provided me with funding to continue with the ‘Stasera in TV’ project on Italian variety television and its stars during the first 22 years of television in Italy. I was and am very grateful to the British Academy as I had applied as an independent scholar and was fortunate enough to secure the funding that I had applied for.

Here’s what the project is all about:

Italian television of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s has been described as ‘the school of the nation’ . And this educative function of television was even embedded in the mission statement of the Italian state broadcaster, RAI, which was to entertain, inform, and educate the viewing public. Hidden within that mission was a wider aim of creating a unified, Italian viewing public so specific behaviours, ideals, and values could be transmitted that would promote a certain type of Italian identity. One tool RAI had at its disposal was the television stars and hosts who embodied these models and ideas. This project examines the most popular television stars of the period – those from variety shows – and explores how these figures came to represent ideals and ideas of Italian-ness in this period, and how their role as cultural symbols evolved between 1954 and 1976, under the state broadcaster’s watchful eye.

The project is a follow-on from my work at the British School at Rome but officially started 1 April 2023 (yes, I know what you’re thinking but I promise, not an April Fool). It’s due to conclude at the end of the year, so this feels like a good time to reflect on what I’ve managed to do and what’s left to complete.

The main outcome of the project has been and will be the creation of a podcast all about Italian variety television of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I’m almost halfway through the publication of that series and have been thoroughly enjoying myself exploring different series and stars and talking to different colleagues about some of the important shows from the period. The podcast series is called ‘TV Italian Style’ and I’m using it to create an A to Z of Italian variety television. Once a fortnight, I publish a new episode, which is named after the different letters in the alphabet. This week, I published episode L, ‘Lelio Luttazzi and Alberto Lupo at Teatro 10’. Previous episodes include: ‘A: Allegria! Mike Bongiorno, Corrado, and Italian variety television’, ‘C: Canzonissima’, ‘F: Franca Valeri – more than just La Signorina Snob’, I: Io, Agata e tu… Introducting Raffaella Carrà’, and ‘J: Johnny Dorelli – Love in Portofino and beyond’. And a shameless plud: if you’d like to listen to any of the episodes, here’s the link: https://tvitalianstyle.buzzsprout.com

I had hoped to have presented some of the project research at two conferences this summer, but life has got in the way and I had to cancel one of the conferences. I was able to present remotely at the other conference, though, and am very grateful to Dr Flavia Laviosa at the Italian Cinema and Media Conference in Rome for supporting me. I was able to share some thoughts on popular music on Italian television in the 1950s, and I’m hoping to be able to turn these initial ideas into a journal article on how popular music was presented and represented on Italian television in the first six years of national broadcasts. I have a couple more articles to try to write up, one on variety television in the 1950s where I’d like to think about some of the characteristics of the genre, and one on singer and star Raffaella Carrà and her early appearances on Canzonissima, which would establish her stardom and significance for Italian popular culture. I have got a few more months of funding left too, so am hoping to get back to Italy for one last data collection trip. Given the podcast is taking up my time at the moment, I’m not going to try to rush getting the journal articles ready. Rather, I want to try to enjoy my thinking and writing when I’ve got the time to do precisely that! But I do recognised that I am privileged to be able to think and write and publish, and am grateful to the British Academy for all their support.

 

Reflecting on the process of writing ‘The Many Meanings of Mina’ book

This is an excerpt from a presentation I gave at the University of Bath in April 2023. I now want to share it more widely:

Thank you to Enrico Cecconi for organising this event and to Royston Vince, who has inspired me to be more aware of what writing means for my identity and to embrace writing in Italian (I’ll talk more about that at the end of my presentation, if there’s time). This is a bit of a departure from the usual ways in which I tend to talk about Mina and my experience of writing about her (I don’t talk about me, I just talk about her because frankly she’s great!). So please excuse me if I’m a little nervous this evening!

Let me try to explain what I want to share with you. I’m going to reflect on this book, The Many Meanings of Mina, which was published in September, but which is actually the product of my 13-year journey of reading, researching, listening, watching, thinking, and writing about Mina. I want to share with you how I came to discover Mina and decide to write about her, and explain what kind of writing that initially looked like. And I want to reflect on how the process of writing presented me with certain challenges as a writer, and ultimately what the writing experience has revealed to me about the different personae that I adopt when it comes to Mina, and how some of those are helping me to try new things now in my writing.

So to begin, let me tell you the story of how I came to write a book about Mina. Now this is something of a departure from how I’ve often tended to start my talks about Mina when I’m presenting at a university in this kind of seminar context. but I think you need to understand where this journey began, so as to understand some of my feelings about it and my reflections on the process of writing the book and all that that experience meant and means to me.

Now I was going to claim that the journey into discovery of Mina began in 2011 but actually, I realised that that isn’t quite accurate. 2011 was the first year I presented a research paper on Mina, but the discovery had come earlier, probably around 2008 whilst I was doing my PhD. I was working on French and Italian singer-songwriters, which in the Italian case meant working on Fabrizio De André. Whilst researching about his career, I discovered that apparently, it was all thanks to one popular popstar who covered his songs on Italian television that De André’s career really took off. That popstar was Mina. She had in 1968 performed a cover of De André’s La canzone di Marinella on the popular variety show Canzonissima. That was the moment I first met Mina and was left wondering who she was and why it was that her cover could launch someone’s career. More work resulted in that first conference paper in 2011, and so a journey had begun. 

I think the decision to write a book started to coalesce in 2015, after I wrote a journal article about Mina and her appearances on Italian television in the 1960s. The journal was celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the RAI, and so something on Mina and TV was appropriate. In preparing that article, I entered the fantastic world of Italian variety television of the 1960s and 1970s. Mina was such an important and continual presence on the Italian small screen in these years and even the face of Saturday night variety TV in this period (so I ended up concluding in my article). I got to watch her in action through archived recordings of the programmes (most of these are still available on Raiplay) and wondered how it was that so little academic attention had been given to such an important figure. Now at this point, I was working as a lecturer in Italian in a university and so was writing academic publications like journal articles. And whilst I would set up a blog in 2016 to track my progress of working on Mina, that was still academic writing of sorts. Because I was writing as an academic, I was looking to situate my ideas in amongst other academic writing. And was struck by the dearth of academic material about Mina at that point. There was basically nothing in English. But there was also very little in Italian. Yet I had found something really fascinating in Mina as I watched her television performances: the way her style and look changed over the years reflected the social and cultural changes in Italian between 1961 and 1972 (the period I looked at for the article). She was the demure and respectable starlet in the appropriate knee length and high-necked dresses in 1961. By 1972, she was the diva of the moment with long blonde hair, heavy eye make-up, plunging necklines, and long flowing gowns who was at ease in front of the camera and the audience. Those changes told me something about the modernisation of Italian television of the period, which reflected the modernisation of Italian society more broadly and of the role of women within it. Mina was fascinating and surely there was more to her than just singing songs. So the writing of the book began. That book would become ‘the many meanings of Mina’.

[…]

So now comes the more challenging part of this talk for me: when preparing the description of what the seminar would focus on, I promised Royston and Enrico that I would reflect on the process of writing about Mina and on the journey of discovery that I have been on, which produced the academic insights that I shared in the book The Many Meanings of Mina as well as personal insights into my development as I have gone through this process. But I’ve been finding it difficult to know where to begin. Reflecting further, I think that difficulty stems from the fact that this type of talking about process and writing approach is not regularly part of academia. I was writing the book about Mina first and foremost as an academic. The aim was to create a book that would provide new scholarly insights into Mina and her significance in the context of Italian post-war culture and society (and beyond, if possible). But that book would speak to an academic community of readers. And so I wrote it from a position as a an academic writer. This meant minimising my own perspective and opinion, my own enjoyment of Mina and the joy of discovering new things about her.

Yet the joy grew as I worked through Mina’s career and those many mediums that shaped her significance. And whilst I might not have acknowledged it in the book, I am definitely a fan of Mina (even if I didn’t necessarily start out as one at the start of the process). I love her music. I enjoy watching her on television. I find it fascinating reading about her in the media. The fanfare that greets any new album release is contagious. 

I was joyful in the subject matter. But I also found joy in the process. I was writing the book at a very difficult point in my academic career. I think that that is perhaps another reason why it was a challenge knowing where to start when reflecting on the process of writing this book, as it is so intensely personal. I wrote the majority of the book after discovering that I was going to lose my job as an academic. So whilst I was writing as an academic, I was acutely aware that I might not be one for much longer. There was pain and uncertainty in the background of my writing. But the writing also became a place of solitude and peace. Mina became my refuge and writing about her allowed me to embrace the identity of academic and keep hold of that identity. In a similar way, this presentation is another way of keeping hold of that identity. But I acknowledge that academic is just one identity now, one persona.

The other persona is one of fan. Consumer of pop culture. Seeker of joy and enjoyment. And (hopefully) bringer and encourager of joy, in the sense that I hope by sharing my passion and enjoyment, others will find similar joy. And meeting and talking to Royston has motivated me to embrace that persona a little more, even if I’m a bit uncertain at the moment about how to fully embody that identity in my writing in particular. He kindly invited me to speak about the book on Mina with him for his BritItaliaLive YouTube channel. During that conversation, I was able to learn more about how he approaches his passion, and how he uses it in his writing, which was an inspiration to me. I would like to write more from this joyful position on the variety television programmes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s that I thoroughly enjoy watching and thinking about. I’d like to combine my academic and fan personae as I develop as a writer, and introduce writing in Italian too. And I hope to start with a book all about Milleluci – a variety series hosted by Mina alongside Raffaella Carrà, which in 2024 celebrates its 50th anniversary since it was first broadcast in 1974.

So watch this space!

 

Starting something new (aka where’s the time gone?)

It’s already May 2023 and I don’t know where the year is going! The last time I posted here was October 2022 and since then, I’ve been slowly working on a range of fun research things. It’s getting harder to balance work on Italian culture and media with my 9-5 job, but I’m making some progress – which I’m sharing here as a way to energise my research and encourage myself to get back into this kind of work.

So, what’s happened since October 2022? Well, I applied to the British Academy for funding to allow me to continue the ‘Stasera in TV: Italian Variety TV and Stars 1954-1976’ project that I started in Rome. The funding would enable me to return to Rome to complete the data collection that I started in Rome (i.e. I get to go back to the Discoteca di Stato and watch some more variety series!). But it would also support the creation of a podcast that celebrates all things Italian television and will be available to listen to during 2024, as a way of celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Italian TV. And I hope to organise a project conference or colloquium of some description to bring colleagues together (maybe in a hybrid way) to talk more about early Italian TV. I found out in March that the application was successful so from April 1st, ‘Stasera in TV’ is slowly moving forwards!

But I haven’t left Mina behind! She will obviously be part of the ‘Stasera in TV’ project but I’ve also been able to revisit ‘The Many Meanings of Mina’ book and share some of that work with different audiences. In October and November 2022, I produced a 5 episode mini series podcast on Mina (if you haven’t heard it, you can listen at https://themanymeaningsofmina.buzzsprout.com/). I was also invited to talk about Mina at the University of Bath in April 2023, but this time, I had a slightly different focus. My talk was entitled ‘Personae on the stage and on the page: Writing about the many meanings of Mina’ and I spoke not only about what I had found out about Mina but also about the writing process and how important it was for me. I was speaking alongside the author and musician Royston Vince, who is English but who writes and publishes in Italian. It was a great opportunity to reflect on the type of writer I would like to become, now I’m not working as an academic. The session gave me the encouragement to move into writing in Italian, which would be perfect for the book I really want to write on the 1974 variety series, Milleluci. Hosted by Mina and Raffaella Carra, the programme is a wonderful celebration of the history of light entertainment in Italy. And I’d like to write a ‘watch party’ book where I ‘notice what I’m noticing’ and reflect on what is going on on screen.

So for now, I’m thinking much more about variety television in Italy and the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (of course). I’m planning another book, written in Italian (if I don’t chicken out that is). And I’m preparing a whole host of interesting conversations on Italian TV for an A to Z of Italian variety television for the podcast. Plus I’ve got to get back to Rome to finish my re-watch and my collection of materials (gossip magazine articles in particular) from the library. I’ll be updating about the variety television finds as the ‘Stasera in TV’ project progresses.

 

Reflecting on 2022

I’ve been a bit quiet on here this year as I am still trying to find my feet and my identity as a ‘Post Career Researcher’! But I’ve been keeping busy in the background and am committed to carrying on my work on 20th century Italian pop music and culture. To that end, here’s an overview of what I’ve got up to so far in 2022.

The return to reality from the British School of Rome at the start of the year was a difficult one! Transitioning back to a 9-5 routine was a bit of a challenge and is still taking some getting used to, now that my social media memories of Rome are coming up again! But what being Rome did was remind me how much I love working on Italian popular culture and how much there is to explore. Watching variety television series from the 1950s left me with questions about the extent of the interconnectedness of media and cultural industries in this period, in Italy and beyond. Whilst I’m not sure what to call this phenomenon (media entanglements seems a good label, particularly given the research that’s going on precisely on entangled media histories at the University of Lund, but I’m also wondering about how useful the idea of intermediality might be in this context too), it’s clear that there’s something really interesting going on in terms of how media forms influence one another and how stars of specific media forms cross over into other areas with ease (another label may be ‘crossover’ – things to think about). To explore this, I’ve been doing some work on the presence of popular music on Italian television during the 1950s as a way of exploring just one specific entanglement. The Radiocorriere digital archive has been brilliant here: http://www.radiocorriere.teche.rai.it/ if you don’t know it.

The first half of the year also got taken up by final preparations for the publication of The Many Meanings of Mina: Popular Music Stardom in Post-war Italy. The book came out with Intellect in September and I’ve been working on a podcast to give readers a way into Mina. More information about the book is available at: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-many-meanings-of-mina And the podcast is available at: https://themanymeaningsofmina.buzzsprout.com/ Currently, I’ve only managed to publish episode 1 but episodes 2-5 are coming over the next few weeks. I’ve also delivered several talks on Mina (from Bristol to Bloomington, Indiana – the wonders of Zoom!) – and I’m definitely available for more Mina conversations, too (just saying!).

June saw a departure from Mina and a chance to think about Raffaella Carrà! I was invited to be part of a panel at the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies conference in Rome, which was focused on ‘Looking back, looking forward: the changing shape of Italian cinema and media studies’. The panel was organised by Nicolò and Lucia, two PhD students from Bloomington, whose research into Carrà is really exceptional. My presentation looked at Carrà and Canzonissima and at some point, I’m going to write it up into something a bit more coherent purely because of the joy of watching Carrà!

Summer also involved working on the ‘Watching the Transnational Detectives’ special issue of the Modern Languages Open journal. The issue was drawn from the Detectives conference that I organised with colleagues at Hull in 2018, and is the culmination of that project. It’s good to see it complete for all sorts of reasons, and it really is a fantastic collection of essays that look at the reception of international crime dramas in the Anglophone context. You can read the articles here: https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/collections/special/watching-the-transnational-detectives/ and the collection includes my introduction, my article on the UK reception of six case study series, and an interview that my colleague Helena and I did with Walter Presents. And you can also read my blogpost about the project and collection at: https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2022/09/21/introducing-watching-the-transnational-detectives-a-modern-languages-open-special-collection/

Over the summer, I completed the write-up of part of the research I was doing in Rome. So fingers crossed there’s an article on the way soon, all about Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello, and Un, due, tre, and how the stars and the show helped to establish Italian television audiences, genres, and expectations in the 1950s. It’s still in for peer review so I won’t say much more for now! But if you haven’t come across the show, it’s great:

I have more things in the pipeline but I’m also going to try to write up some of the things I’ve been thinking about this year into some more detailed blogposts, as a way of sharing some of the questions all about Italian television, music, and culture of the 50s, 60s and 70s that I’ve been thinking about. So, as usual, watch this space – but hopefully for not as long this time!