From Raccontami to I Medici, From Karol to Luisa Spagnoli: Narrative Formats and Collective Memory in Italian Fiction

This paper rethinks critically the Italian serial production of fiction, in recent years, placing it in relation to the dynamics of collective memory. The analysis starts from two Italian fiction: Raccontami, the history of a family returns the great changes of the 60s’; I Medici dedicated to the biography of the great Florentine Renaissance banker family, exemplified by similar international productions (including the Borgia) and subject to strong promotion by Rai 1. Around these two lines of address is also the analysis of some miniseries among these biopics dedicated to figures of the national imagination such as pontiffs, doctors, partisans, entrepreneurs. If the twentieth century was defined as the “century of testimony” this is also due to the massive and pervasive presence of media that are often at the center of the processes of transformation and transition of the public and cultural life of societies. Television, in particular, confirms itself as the real, symbolic and rhetorical place in which historical events unfold, to be, on some occasions, a substitute simulacrum. Fiction, as a form of popular narrative and reworking, is an intermediary and central element in the processes of building the social imagery and collective memory, responding to the need for a typical tale of every society.