Unit 1: January 15th – 17th
Course preview and introduction to some key concepts: culture and popular culture; national vs transnational/transcultural products; media and behaviors; consumption and taste. Italian media and popular culture studies. Basic information about Italian history from Unification to date, to better understand the development of the entertainment industries and the way they have been assimilated.
Unit 2: January 22th – 24th
Digital Italy: features of the digital era and their impact on traditional media. The coming of new media and their penetration in Italy. Rewriting youth culture: social networks, video and computer games. Smartphones: redefining personal and collective identities. Italians and the use of new technologies.
Unit 3: January 29st – 31st
Music: The Sanremo song Festival and Italian identity. Who are the best-selling artists in Italy and who has made it abroad. Popular music: indigenous drives and foreign influences (rock, rap, canzone, hip hop, etc). The globalization of an Italian trademark: opera, bel canto, Neapolitan song.
Unit 4: February 6th – 7th
Television: local and global formats. History of Italian television. The Americanization of the Italian small screen. From paleo to neo-TV: the changing habits of family watching. The close relationship between TV and politics.
Unit 5: February 9th (Make-up day for Monday, April 1) – 12th
Cinema, gender and stardom: the industrialization of the imaginary and the rise of a society of the spectacle. Italians’ contribution to world cinema: from silent movies to Neo Realism. Hollywood’s impact and some Italian ways to tell domestic stories. The average Italian as portrayed by Totò, Alberto Sordi and Fantozzi. Stardom, beauty and trend setters, from Sofia Loren to Ennio Morricone.
Unit 6: February 14th – 19th
Radio and print: history of radio in Italy, from propaganda to mobile listening, from state monopoly to free radios. The press: journalism in Italy from its heydays to DYT information. The destiny of books and the mutations of publishing industry in a world market. Written and oral culture in the digital age, from blogs to web radios.
Unit 7: February 21nd – March 4th
Course review and mid-term exam
Unit 8: March 6th –11th
Revolt, countercultures and subcultures:
social movements and cultural resistance, from universities to factories, in the street and in theatres. Classic subcultures: mods, hippies and punk vs contemporary subcultures: hip hop, ravers, skaters. How did they take root in Italy and why some of them were ignored. Labelling the new generations.
Unit 9: March 13th - 18th
Food culture
Food and national identity: hunger and the myth of a rural country. The invention of regional cooking. Gender in the kitchen. Fast vs slow food: ways of approaching the table. Espresso and coffee culture. Food TV show and the rise of a cooking awareness: international and domestic formats.
Unit 10: March 20th – 25th
Holiday culture: travelling, trains, cars: mobility and modernity. Beach culture and its representation on big screen. Mythologies of Italy: from the Grand Tour to mass tourism. Autogrill, package tours, holiday villages and amusement parks: the rise of pseudo-places. A clash between tradition and modernity: Christmas in Italy.
Italian trademarks: fashion, design: Fashion and the easy life (Dolce vita) in the Sixties. Icons and brands: Armani, Ferrari, Vespa, Espresso, Martini.
Unit 11: March 27th - April 3rd
Church and the media – Religion and music Pope Francis, Twitter and CTV (Centro Televisivo Vaticano). Fatal attraction: John Paul II and the Papa boys. How the church has assimilated the media, from cinema to radio, from TV to social networks.
Unit 12: April 8th – 10th
Queer culture – Homosexuality in a backward Catholic country: early evidence of a homosexual issue. The rise of a gay movement in the Seventies: actions and representation on cinema, tv and music. The murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini: the first media event to focus on gay culture. The spread of LGBT culture.
Unit 13: April 15th - 17th
Consumption styles: shopping and advertising: from village and neighbourhood markets to round-the corner outlets, from supermarkets to shopping centers, the lure of things and the art of displaying them. Pseudo (non) places and new ways of wasting time. Objects as promoters of symbolic consumption. Carosello and the fictionalization of advertising. The myth of America in Italian TV commercials. The meaning of things: everyday object and consumption from the 1930s to date
Unit 14: April, 22nd – 24th
Divas: from cinema to television, from theatre to sport, the role and image of woman in contemporary Italy. Female subcultures and movements, from mondine (riceweeders) to feminism. Case studies: Mina, Raffaella Carrà.
Final course review
Readings will be assigned on a weekly base. What follows is a list of books that can be useful for the final paper and have been in part included in the schedule.
Reference list:
Allen, Beverly and Mary J. Russo. Revisioning Italy. National Identity and Global Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Burke, Frank (ed. by), A Companion to Italian Cinema, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017.
Eco, Umberto. Apocalypse Postponed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Dickie, John. Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and Their Food. London: Sceptre, 2007
Fabbri, Franco and Plastino, Goffredo (eds.). Made in Italy. Studies in Popular Music. London: Routledge, 2014.
Forgacs, D. and Gundle. S. Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008
Forgacs, D. and Lumley, R. Italian Cultural Studies. An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Hebdige Dick. Hiding in the Light: on Images and Things. London: Comedia, 1988.
Hibberd, Matthew. The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital. Open University Press, 2008
Lumley, Robert. States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. Verso, 1990.
Minardi, E. – Desogu, P. (ed. by). The Last Forty Years of Italian Popular Culture, Cambridge Un. Press, 2020.
Paulicelli, Eugenia. Italian Style. Film and Fashion from the Early Cinema to the Digital Age. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Sassoon, Donald. The Culture of the Europeans. From 1800 to the Present. London: Harper Collins, 2006.