NOSTALGIE DI CASA Voci e corrispondenze nella rubrica televisiva «Saluti da casa» (1964-1968)

The essay starts from the analysis of the TV program Saluti da casa (Greetings from home), an event dedicated to the Italian immigrant workers in Switzerland, within the program Un’ora per voi (One hour for you), co-produced by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and the Italian Radio and Television since 1964. This audiovisual correspondence between distant relatives, though only from distant places, expresses some functions at the same time symbolic and social, absolved by television in those years: on the one hand, RAI’s pedagogical model at that moment experienced the challenging discrepancy between national languages and dialects; on the other, the media connection between families and emigrants aims at shifting the patterns of private communication to the public sphere. The processing of sound matter thus reflects the cultural register of the time tending, thanks to technological improvements, to a collection of vocal tracks in sync, and the building of an original audio-visual format, the ‘video postcard’. Finally, the rhetorical organization is the basis for pathetic-emotional messages, whose tone mainly turns on the nostalgic feeling.