Al di qua della nazione e al di là della patria

Universal Expositions, Futurism, Television. In analyzing some crucial moments in Italian history, this essay returns the image of communicative practices suspended between the ancient and the modern, between innovation and the persistence of stale, entrenched traditions. The particularity of Italian communicative regimes - the spurts as well as the sudden regressions that distinguish different media practices - can be traced to the absence of a modern metropolis in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a metropolis that serves as the origin and vector of media history.