The cultural interface. Cinema and the media in Italy

For Italian cinema, the 20th-century was a glittering constellation of honours, with the art form scaling great heights in terms of popularity and aesthetic quality, the extent of which we may, so far, have failed to acknowledge in full. We could say it led a wonderful life, living well beyond its means. “But what was its secret?” we might ask ourselves, indulging in a little rhetoric. Or course, the answers can only be multiple and contradictory, but one aspect of 20th-century Italian cinema deserves particular attention: its inherently “intermedial” nature. This contribution proposes an historical overview in order to reconstruct, tentatively, in three main steps, the impact of Italian cinema on the mediatization of its audience: in other words, the driving force provided by Italian cinema behind the process of change in terms of the media forms experienced by the Italian people.