Religion and history in Italian tv drama

Over the last decade (from late Nineties onwards) the television fiction has turned into the central story-telling system of Italian society. In a country where reading books and newspapers is a scarcely diffused habit, and where the national cinema ceased since the Seventies to be a medium of popular entertainment, television managed to play the role of contemporary ‘supernarrator’. The production of domestica drama, which in the Eighties and the early Nineties had dramatically decreased under the impact of foreign imports, has significantly increased in relatively short time; and a real explosion of huge successes has rewarded the intensive supply of homegrown fiction stories, firmly established in prime time of the main channels, where the American imports have to a lesser or greater extent been pushed to the edge. The chapter reconstructs the ‘success story’ of end-of-century Italian tv fction, within the context of cultural processes and other factors that have grounded and supported it. The elements that relate the television story-telling to the Italian identity are focused; with special reference to the powerful wave of stories which, at the millennium turn, have drawn inspiration and contents from the source of the catholic sentiment and the collective memory of Italian population. Particularly striking is the interest of the Italian audience in the life of popes and religious historical figures, which have been used as a basis for awakening and reinterpreting memories of the Italian past. For the author, it is exactly this kind of “appeal” to the components of national identity which was an indispensable condition for popularity, recognising the changes in collective identities over time.