The Rise of Biography in Italian TV Drama

3 (2017), 1

Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen Jg. 3 (2017). Heft 1 und Fragen der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissen- PIEL piel schaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu verbessern. s SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of topics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches to the discipline. s Geschichte als TV-Serie II /

Milly Buonanno: Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama. History as TV-series II Lothar Mikos: (Die) Borgia(s) – Geschichte als Ressource für transkulturelle Fernsehserien. Kate Warner: History, Memory and Television Crime Drama. Sara Casoli: The Framework Herausgegeben von / edited by Character. When History Acquires Agency in a TV Series Narration. Thomas Wilke: Dimensionen von Identität, Anerkennung und Gewalt in der Fernsehserie Spartacus. Tanja Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff Weber: Il futuro non è ancora scritto – die Geschichtsdarstellung in der Serie 1992. Ava Laure Parsemain: Teaching history through entertainment: the pedagogy of Who Do You Think You Are? Evelyn Viehoff-Kamper / Reinhold Viehoff: Sketch History als Meta-(Media)- History. Scherz, Satire, Ironie – und tiefere Bedeutung? Lisabeth Bylina: Looking Back and Laughing: History and Humour in Another Period. Edgar Lersch / Reinhold Viehoff: Vom Vorwort zum Nachwort – Geschichte als TV-Serie / History as TV-series. Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Journal of Media Culture

Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff und Thomas Wilke Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff (Hrsg/eds.): Geschichte als TV-Serie II / History as TV-series II II / History as TV-series (Hrsg/eds.): Geschichte als TV-Serie Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff

PL 3 (2017), 1 3 (2017), 1

Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen ThemenJg. 3 (2017). Heft 1 Jg. 3 (2017). Heft 1 und Fragen der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere und Fragen der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissen- PIEL theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischenp Perspektiveni der medienkulturwissene- lPIEL piel schaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu verbessern. schaftlichen Forschungs zu erweitern und zu verbessern. s SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of to- SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of topics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, pics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches to the discipline. sto the discipline. s Geschichte als TV-Serie II / Geschichte als TV-Serie II /

Milly Buonanno: Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama. Milly Buonanno: Public history asHistory a hall of fame: the rise as of biography TV-series in Italian TV drama. II History as TV-series II Lothar Mikos: (Die) Borgia(s) – Geschichte als Ressource für transkulturelle Fernsehserien. Lothar Mikos: (Die) Borgia(s) – Geschichte als Ressource für transkulturelle Fernsehserien. Kate Warner: History, Memory and Television Crime Drama. Sara Casoli: The Framework Kate Warner: History, Memory andHerausgegeben Television Crime Drama. von Sara / edited Casoli: Theby Framework Herausgegeben von / edited by Character. When History Acquires Agency in a TV Series Narration. Thomas Wilke: Character. When History Acquires Agency in a TV Series Narration. Thomas Wilke: Dimensionen von Identität, Anerkennung und Gewalt in der Fernsehserie Spartacus. Tanja Dimensionen von Identität, AnerkennungEdgar und Lersch Gewalt &in derReinhold Fernsehserie Viehoff Spartacus. Tanja Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff Weber: Il futuro non è ancora scritto – die Geschichtsdarstellung in der Serie 1992. Ava Weber: Il futuro non è ancora scritto – die Geschichtsdarstellung in der Serie 1992. Ava Laure Parsemain: Teaching history through entertainment: the pedagogy of Who Do You Laure Parsemain: Teaching history through entertainment: the pedagogy of Who Do You Think You Are? Evelyn Viehoff-Kamper / Reinhold Viehoff: Sketch History als Meta-(Media)- Think You Are? Evelyn Viehoff-Kamper / Reinhold Viehoff: Sketch History als Meta-(Media)- History. Scherz, Satire, Ironie – und tiefere Bedeutung? Lisabeth Bylina: Looking Back and History. Scherz, Satire, Ironie – und tiefere Bedeutung? Lisabeth Bylina: Looking Back and Laughing: History and Humour in Another Period. Edgar Lersch / Reinhold Viehoff: Vom Laughing: History and Humour in Another Period. Edgar Lersch / Reinhold Viehoff: Vom Vorwort zum Nachwort – Geschichte als TV-Serie / History as TV-series. Vorwort zum Nachwort – GeschichteNeue als TV-Serie Folge. / History as TV-series. Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Journal of Media Culture Journal of Media Culture

Herausgegeben von Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff und Thomas Wilke Reinhold Viehoff und Thomas Wilke Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff (Hrsg/eds.): Geschichte als TV-Serie II / History as TV-series II II / History as TV-series (Hrsg/eds.): Geschichte als TV-Serie Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff II II / History as TV-series (Hrsg/eds.): Geschichte als TV-Serie Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff

PL PL spiel Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur/ Journal of Media Culture herausgegeben von/ edited by REINHOLD VIEHOFF und THOMAS WILKE

Hinweise/Notes Beirat/ Anne Bartsch (München); Uwe Breitenborn (Magdeburg); Katrin Fahlen- Advisory Board brach (Hamburg); Golo Föllmer (Halle); Anja Hartung (Ludwigsburg); Mar- Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen cus S. Kleiner (Berlin); Julia Nitz (Halle); Bernhard Pörksen (Tübingen); und Fragen der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Tanja Thomas (Tübingen); Sascha Trültzsch-Wijnen (Salzburg) Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die Redaktion/Editors R. Viehoff, Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Martin Luther theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissen- Address: Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Mansfelder Str. 56 06108 Halle/Saale [email protected] schaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu verbessern. Th. Wilke, Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg, 71634 Ludwigsburg Spiel. Neue Folge publiziert nur Originalbeiträge in englischer oder deutscher Sprache. [email protected] Vor jeder Publikation werden die eingeworbenen oder unverlangt eingesandten Beiträge Endredaktion/Final Karin Matt, Inst. für Kunst, Musik, Sport, Abt. Kultur- und Medienbildung, Reu- Layout: teallee 46, 71634 Ludwigsburg zu SPIEL. Neue Folge anonym in einem Reviewverfahren begutachtet. Bei unverlangt eingesandten Beiträgen besteht kein Anspruch auf ein Review. Die Herausgeber können die Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen und Fragen Gutachten ganz oder in Auszügen den Autorinnen und Autoren bekannt machen, um ihre der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. jeweiligen Entscheidungen zu begründen. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler können sich bei den Herausgebern mit Themen- verbessern. vorschlägen und Konzeptpapieren als Gastherausgeber bewerben. Gemeinsam mit dem Mit der Annahme des Manuskriptes erwirbt der Verlag für die Dauer der gesetzlichen Schutzfrist Beirat entscheiden die Herausgeber über entsprechende Zusagen. die ausschließliche Befugnis zur Wahrnehmung aller Verwertungsrechte im Sinne der §§ 15 ff. des Urheberrechtsgesetzes. Übersetzung, Nachdruck - auch von Abbildungen -, Vervielfältigungen auf SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of top- photomechanischem oder ähnlichem Wege oder im Magnettonverfahren, Vortrag, Rundfunk- oder ics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, Fernsehsen dung sowie Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen - auch auszugsweise - sind nur SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological mit schriftlicher Genehmigung des Verlages gestattet. questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches Die Zeitschrift SPIEL erscheint jeweils im April und Oktober eines Jahrgangs und ist direkt beim Verlag to the discipline. (Peter Lang, Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern Switzerland) entweder im Jahresabonnement (2 Hefte EUR 49,95) oder als Einzelheft zum Preise von EUR 37,95 zu beziehen. SPIEL. Neue Folge only publishes original manuscripts in English or German. SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of topics and re- All submissions to the journal, whether invited or unsolicited, are assessed via blind peer search questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, SPIEL. Neue Folge aims review. Unsolicited manuscripts are subject to a desk assessment by the editors who decide to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological questions and that helps to broaden, whether to subject the manuscript to external reviewing. Editors will choose whether to advance and improve existing research approaches to the discipline. make available, in part or as a whole, referee comments to the author(s) as part of their By accepting the manuscript for publication, the publisher acquires all rights in and to the work for final decision on any manuscript. the duration of German Copyright law (§§ 15 ff.). No part of the publication may be translated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopy, recording, lectures, radio or Researchers can apply to the editors with proposals for special issues of the journal. Editors television transmission, or any other information storage and retrieval System without permission in will then, in consultation with the editorial board, assess these proposals on their merit and writing from the publisher. communicate with the would-be guest editors. SPIEL is published in April and October of each year and may be purchased either by subscription (2 issues EUR 49,95) or individually for EUR 37,95 per volume directly from the publisher (Peter Lang AG, Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern Switzerland). Spiel spiel Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Neue Folge. Journal of Media Culture Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur/ Journal of Media Culture herausgegeben von/ edited by REINHOLD VIEHOFF und THOMAS WILKE

Hinweise/Notes Beirat/ Anne Bartsch (München); Uwe Breitenborn (Magdeburg); Katrin Fahlen- Advisory Board brach (Hamburg); Golo Föllmer (Halle); Anja Hartung (Ludwigsburg); Mar- Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen cus S. Kleiner (Berlin); Julia Nitz (Halle); Bernhard Pörksen (Tübingen); und Fragen der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Tanja Thomas (Tübingen); Sascha Trültzsch-Wijnen (Salzburg) Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die Redaktion/Editors R. Viehoff, Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Martin Luther theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissen- Address: Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Mansfelder Str. 56 06108 Halle/Saale [email protected] schaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu verbessern. Th. Wilke, Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg, 71634 Ludwigsburg Spiel. Neue Folge publiziert nur Originalbeiträge in englischer oder deutscher Sprache. [email protected] Vor jeder Publikation werden die eingeworbenen oder unverlangt eingesandten Beiträge Endredaktion/Final Karin Matt, Inst. für Kunst, Musik, Sport, Abt. Kultur- und Medienbildung, Reu- Layout: teallee 46, 71634 Ludwigsburg zu SPIEL. Neue Folge anonym in einem Reviewverfahren begutachtet. Bei unverlangt eingesandten Beiträgen besteht kein Anspruch auf ein Review. Die Herausgeber können die Die Zeitschrift SPIEL. Neue Folge ist eine internationale Zeitschrift, die sich allen Themen und Fragen Gutachten ganz oder in Auszügen den Autorinnen und Autoren bekannt machen, um ihre der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften widmet. Dabei spielt eine besondere Rolle, dass die in SPIEL. jeweiligen Entscheidungen zu begründen. Neue Folge behandelten Fragen und Antworten dazu beitragen, die theoretischen, methodischen und methodologischen Perspektiven der medienkulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung zu erweitern und zu Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler können sich bei den Herausgebern mit Themen- verbessern. vorschlägen und Konzeptpapieren als Gastherausgeber bewerben. Gemeinsam mit dem Mit der Annahme des Manuskriptes erwirbt der Verlag für die Dauer der gesetzlichen Schutzfrist Beirat entscheiden die Herausgeber über entsprechende Zusagen. die ausschließliche Befugnis zur Wahrnehmung aller Verwertungsrechte im Sinne der §§ 15 ff. des Urheberrechtsgesetzes. Übersetzung, Nachdruck - auch von Abbildungen -, Vervielfältigungen auf SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of top- photomechanischem oder ähnlichem Wege oder im Magnettonverfahren, Vortrag, Rundfunk- oder ics and research questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, Fernsehsen dung sowie Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen - auch auszugsweise - sind nur SPIEL. Neue Folge aims to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological mit schriftlicher Genehmigung des Verlages gestattet. questions and that helps to broaden, advance and improve existing research approaches Die Zeitschrift SPIEL erscheint jeweils im April und Oktober eines Jahrgangs und ist direkt beim Verlag to the discipline. (Peter Lang, Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern Switzerland) entweder im Jahresabonnement (2 Hefte EUR 49,95) oder als Einzelheft zum Preise von EUR 37,95 zu beziehen. SPIEL. Neue Folge only publishes original manuscripts in English or German. SPIEL. Neue Folge is an international academic journal dedicated to a wide range of topics and re- All submissions to the journal, whether invited or unsolicited, are assessed via blind peer search questions in the discipline of Culture and Media Studies. In particular, SPIEL. Neue Folge aims review. Unsolicited manuscripts are subject to a desk assessment by the editors who decide to publish research that addresses theoretical and methodological questions and that helps to broaden, whether to subject the manuscript to external reviewing. Editors will choose whether to advance and improve existing research approaches to the discipline. make available, in part or as a whole, referee comments to the author(s) as part of their By accepting the manuscript for publication, the publisher acquires all rights in and to the work for final decision on any manuscript. the duration of German Copyright law (§§ 15 ff.). No part of the publication may be translated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopy, recording, lectures, radio or Researchers can apply to the editors with proposals for special issues of the journal. Editors television transmission, or any other information storage and retrieval System without permission in will then, in consultation with the editorial board, assess these proposals on their merit and writing from the publisher. communicate with the would-be guest editors. SPIEL is published in April and October of each year and may be purchased either by subscription (2 issues EUR 49,95) or individually for EUR 37,95 per volume directly from the publisher (Peter Lang AG, Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern Switzerland). Spiel Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Journal of Media Culture s p i e l Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Journal of Media Culture

Jg. 3 (2017), Heft 1 s p i e l Neue Folge. Eine Zeitschrift zur Medienkultur Journal of Media Culture Geschichte als TV-Serie II / History as TV-series II

Jg. 3 (2017), Heft 1 Herausgegeben von / edited by Edgar Lersch & Reinhold Viehoff Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

ISSN 0722-7833 Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Schlüterstraße 42, 10707 Berlin http://www.peterlang.com

This is an open access publication. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Inhaltsverzeichnis Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Milly Buonanno Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama ...... 7

Lothar Mikos (Die) Borgia(s) – Geschichte als Ressource für transkulturelle Fernsehserien ...... 25

Kate Warner History, Memory and Television Crime Drama ...... 39

Sara Casoli The Framework Character. When History Acquires Agency in a TV Series Narration ...... 55

Thomas Wilke Dimensionen von Identität, Anerkennung und Gewalt in der Fernsehserie Spartacus ...... 71

Tanja Weber Il futuro non è ancora scritto – die Geschichtsdarstellung in der Serie 1992 ...... 89

Ava Laure Parsemain ISSN 0722-7833 Teaching history through entertainment: Peter Lang GmbH the pedagogy of Who Do You Think You Are? ...... 109 Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Evelyn Viehoff-Kamper / Reinhold Viehoff Schlüterstraße 42, 10707 Berlin Sketch History als Meta-(Media)-History. Scherz, Satire, Ironie – http://www.peterlang.com und tiefere Bedeutung? ...... 125

Lisabeth Bylina Looking Back and Laughing: History and Humour in Another Period .... 149 This is an open access publication. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under Edgar Lersch / Reinhold Viehoff the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 Vom Vorwort zum Nachwort – Geschichte als TV-Serie / International License (CC BY 4.0). History as TV-series ...... 163 For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Autorinnenliste / List of authors ...... 173

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Milly Buonanno Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama

Abstract: From the inception of Italian public television in the mid-1950s engagement with history has been a distinctive feature of domestic drama production. Past Milly Buonanno events, war events, the lives of noteworthy individuals, have in the years represented Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography a suitable source of inspiration and provided wealthy of subject matter for countless in Italian TV drama historical TV dramas. Biographies, however, have gained prominence and come to constitute the primary means through which public history is created and circulated 01 as a ‘hall of fame’ and arena for performance of righteous Italianness. The hugely successful biopic Perlasca. An Italian hero (2002) provides the appropriate case study to illustrate this typically Italian feature and to account for the entanglement of past history and present politics of memorialization.

Re-thinking television through history The widespread blossoming of history programming both factual and fictional has emerged as a prominent feature of 21st century television, following in the wake of the trend to ‘return to the past’ (Buonanno 2012, 199) that began to surface throughout the 1990s. Perhaps more importantly, alongside this “history boom” (Gray & Bell 2013, 1) we have witnessed the shaping and development in relatively short time of an area of scholarship “in its own right” (Landsberg 2015, 62) focused on ‘history and television’. Erin Bell, who conducted with Ann Gray a pioneering research study on factual history on British television (2013), while introducing in 2007 a special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies pointed out that “an international and interdisciplinary field of study into history on television” (Gray 2007, 6) was taking ground in 2000s. Ten years later, it is all too apparent that scholarly interest and engagement in issues relating to the use of history and the screening of the past in television, and how this affects historical knowledge, collective memory and identity, has perdured throughout almost two decades. The evidence is offered by the availability of a now conspicuous body of literature (Edgerton & Rollis 2001; Roberts & Taylor, 2001; Cannadine 2004; Landsberg 2004; Wheatley 2007; de Groot 2009; Bell & Gray 2010; Garde-Hansen 2011; Neiger, Meyers & Zandberg 2011; Oldsworth 2011; Mee & Walker 2014; Landsberg 2015; Treacey 2016: to name just a few key works), further amplified by an impressive wealth of journal articles and special issues, and chapters in edited collections.

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It may be worth reminding that this unprecedented flurry of scholarly attention and awareness about television “as historian” (Edgerton 2001), “technology of memory” (Landsberg 2004; Sturken 2008), “technology of history” (Anderson 2011), has eventually broken with the neglect of a still recent past, when the multifaced relationship of television to history was hardly acknowledged within academia, or regarded as a mésalliance of sorts. This is certainly not to forget that since the 1970s Horace Newcomb, a founding father of television studies, had indicated “the importance of history” (Newcomb 1974, 256) to television as popular art, or to ignore that television readiness to history has transpired, to a lesser or greater extent, through the not so scant scholarship that over the years has explored docu- mentaries, classic serials, biopics, and other kind of programming engaged with the past (also well before the history boom). Nor this is to overlook the noteworthy and influential contribution made by Dayan and Katz’stheory of media events (1992) to understanding the entanglement of live broadcasting and history. It is rather to remark that the chances for dispersed interests to coalesce into a field of study have long been minimized by received ways of conceiv- ing of television as contributing to the erasure rather than the shaping of the historical consciousness and the sense of the past in contemporary life (White & Schwock 1997; Huyssen 2003). Things have turned out differently for a more culturally legitimate medium as cinema, thus allowing the early formation and development of an area of scholarship devoted to the historical film. Interestingly enough, it is film studies scholarship that provided the discoursive context in which “the intervention of television in history” (Sobchack 1996, 12) and the major role of the medium “as purveyor of historical narratives” (Landy 2000, 21) were acknowledged, and the groundbreaking concept of “television as historian” (Edgerton 2001) was first asserted. Especially among the historians and film history scholars who contributed to Sobchack’s and Landy’s edited collections, it remained a contentious issue and raised concerns whether television could be trusted for making ‘proper’ history; and there was evidence in those works that a bias towards television’s ontology of liveness prevailed (White 2004), which resulted in prioritizing imminency and actuality of ‘history in the making’, while over- shadowing larger potentialities for popular historiography displayed, among others, in a range of fictional programming. Acknowledgment of the historical role of television did not come without reserve and criticism from film studies scholarship, but nonetheless it helped the inception of the field of television and history, still in the embryonic stage at the turn of the century. Based on this cursory reconstruction, I make the claim that the vibrant scholarship flourished over the last two decades has been higly beneficial to television studies. Not so much or not only for broadening research horizons

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama 9 and fostering new thinking and production of knowledge on the vast under- explored landscape of history and past onscreen. But rather, and perhaps more crucially, because this move has entailed re-thinking television itself, by challenging and undermining long-held essentialist and reductive conceptions of the medium which I have hinted at above: namely, the insistent present-ness of its temporal regime, the privileging of ‘live’ connection to reality and history as it happens, the proclivity for ephemerality and loss of memory. In early 21st century, many years after the anticipatory essay by Jane Feuer (1983), se- rious criticism was articulated within media scholarship (Ellis 2000; Bourdon 2000; Couldry 2004; White 2004) toward liveness and the hegemony of the present as quintessential hallmarks of television. The emerging area of studies aimed at grasping and exploring the relationship between television and history, and the role of the medium in the formation of popular memories, has in turn endeavored and largely achieved to reassess established theoretical assumptions. Specifically, approaching TV through the lens of history has significantly helped to foreground the awareness that television features and navigates multiple temporalities, all of which are crucial to the understanding of the medium. As an example, the intense engagement with the past that has been brougth into focus by the referred scholarship has expanded the recognition of television as technology of ‘symbolic mobility’. This latter concept was widely discussed in the literature, as I argued in previous work (Buonanno 2008), though it remained framed into privileged discourses of space and place: id est, discourses that elaborate on the power of television to connect and simbolically transpose us to another place, to a spatial elsewhere (Scannell 1996; Marriott 2007). It is another time, it is a temporal elsewhere (in mutual implication with space dispacement) that television enables us to experience and simbolically inhabit, anytime history and past are performed and represented onscreen. As Alison Landsberg contends apropos of cinema, the capacity “to carry viewers […] to alternative temporalities ” (Landsberg 2004, 12) is central to television; the current fascination with the past and the related field of study are a compelling reminder of this. Finally, television and history scholarship should be recognized the in- valuable merit of bringing and drawing attention to a cogent instance of the persistence of television, in the same years in which the end of TV turned into a key issue within media studies.

Public history by way of biographies From the inception of Italian public television in the mid-1950s engagement with history has been a distinctive feature of domestic drama production. Past events, war events, the lives of noteworthy individuals, have in the years represented an important source of inspiration and have provided wealthy of

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 10 Milly Buonanno subject matter for countless historical TV dramas. Furthermore, fact-based dramatizations have been supplemented by a number of period dramas of the kind Alison Landsberg has dubbed “historically conscious dramas”, because they do no re-create history but “reconstruct the lived contours of a particular historical moment” (Landsberg 2015, 62). These were for instance the literary adaptations (in Italy sceneggiati) of a vast body of 19th century novels that achieved unsurpassed popularity over almost two decades from the inception of national television. Biographies, however, have gained prominence over other fictional re- enactments of history for the increasing availability on prime-time offer, potential for generating events, capacity to gather large audiences, thus becoming a major genre on the Italian television scene. The historical biopic has actually turned into the primary embodiment and vehicle of the politics of memory and identity foregrounded by public television, and has established an elective affinity with the two-parts miniseries, long considered as the most culturally legitimate form of television drama production in Italy. Still today the power of television drama to shape public memory rests without doubt upon the re-creation of the lives of outstanding personalities: be they religious and political leaders, war or crime-fighter heroes, creative artists. As contended by George Custen with reference to Hollywood film, we can affirm that biographies are the ways through which Italian TV drama “created and still creates public history” (Custen 1992, 12). The temporal shift that, at the threshold of the third millennium, has fostered a widespread trend of ‘return to the past’ in televisual storytelling across Europe, has further boosted the Italian propensity for historical drama. The whole of biographies, historical events reconstructions, period dramas that were screened over the first decade of 2000s – mostly on the public, a minority on the commercial channels – reached to a hundred and fifteen titles; over fifty have been added in subsequent years until today. -Bi ographies account for the overwhelming majority of such impressive array of historical TV dramas. The prevailing biographical approach to history brings with it a specific representation of history itself, which is offered and experienced in the guise of a ‘gallery of portraits’, or rather ‘a hall of fame’, if Custen was right to state that “publicly defining fame” is the cultural role of the biography (Custen 1992, 215). In keeping with the shifting definition of fame and, more crucially, with the changing agenda of public memorialization, the gallery of historical portraits depicted in Italian TV dramas has been reconfigured from time to time. In the first decade of the 2000s, for instance, the central- ity assumed by the Holocaust within the public memory of War World II has either made forgotten saviors of Jews and opponents to Nazi-Fascism worthy of biographical treatment, or established the norm of emphasizing the salvific

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama11 role played by other biographies (popes, politicians, sport champions) who had witnessed those dreadful events. Whatever the time frame, or the historical events at stake, and the individual worthiness as a biographical requisite, translating national history via personal life stories has a further implication that, although it is not inherent in the biographical approach per se, clearly traspires through the way this approach comes to be inflected in Italian TV drama. The cogent nexus between historical memory and collective identity, in fact, works to substantiate and reinforce a paramount image of righteous Italianness, to the extent that the noteworthy lives to be remembered are tipically selected and narratively recreated to sit on the right side of history, or anyway to do the right thing when the need arises. History is so turned into a catalogue of real-life exemples of heroic deeds, civic behaviour, concern for the common good. Consistently with the picture sketched above, in the second half of the article I will focus on the case study of the biopic Perlasca. Un eroe italian/ Perlasca. An Italian Hero, (Raiuno 2002), to be considered the epitome of the biographical approach to history in Italian Tv drama – and also the master- piece of the genre. Issues of choice (whose lives should be told?), time (when they should be told?), politics (how re-creations of lives are shaped by specific politics of memory and identity?) that are central to the historical biography will be addressed in relation to Perlasca. In conclusion I will recall the theory of media events to account for the eventfulness of the biopic. In order not to conflate the notions of television event and eventization of television, in the following section I will use the latter as a lens to look at the recent evolution of historical TV drama in Italy.

From eventization to routinization The rise to relevance and popularity of historical TV drama, either in the hybrid form of the docudrama (Paget & Ebbrecht 2016) or in the guise of fic- tionalized period drama, has been accompanied nationally and internationally by a shift to eventization (Ebbrecht 2007; Cooke 2013), in which an increasingly pervasive trend of contemporary popular culture can be acknowledged. Speaking of Germany, Tobias Ebbrecht has affirmed: “Screening history on television entails turning history into media event” (Ebbrecht 2007, 223), to be watched by millions and largely debated. This is not completely new, of course. Speaking of the United States, John T. Caldwell argued in mid-1990s that television had always exploited history as a major source for “what has come to be known as event-status programming” (Caldwell 1995, 160): mostly big-budget epic miniseries, the viable embodiment of eventful TV. The same was true for Italy as well, as suggested incidentally by the images from Jesus of Nazareth and Marco Polo (Caldwell 1995, 161) – both of them

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 12 Milly Buonanno historical event-miniseries co-produced by Italy and the US in late seventies and early eighties – that were singled out by Caldwell, among others, to illustrate his discourse. “The competitive drive to create events” (Hesmondhalgh 2012, 393), to be observed in today’s television, has motivated recent scholarship to pay novel attention to phenomena of constructedness of media events. In this connection, especially scholars engaged with the ongoing critical re-thinking of Dayan and Katz theory (1992), have made the compelling point that forms of ‘eventization’ related to popular television genres should be integrated into a more flexible concept and a more expanded typology of media events (Couldry, Hepp & Krotz 2010). Italian television culture and industry has certainly not remained untouched by the widespread trend towards constructing, staging and marketing a range of TV programming as ‘events’. However further specifications are opportune to grasp the peculiarity of the logic of eventization of history in Italy. Perlasca, on which I will focus soon, belongs to and epitomizes the phase when eventization of historical TV drama was at its height. The beginning of this phase can be traced back to the early 1990s and coincided with the inception of the ‘Bible project’. Boasted as the greatest international co-production ever, the Bible project was a lavish miniseries collection made up of twelve epic biopics of figures from the Old and the New Testament. It aired over a decade (1993–2003) – each piece being turned into a must-see by intensive promotional campaigns – and achieved huge national popularity and wide international circulation (Buonanno 2012). Thus the biblical period drama established itself as event-status programming and fostered a broader, long- lasting historical-religious trend, based on the lives of saints of all time and 20th century popes. The entry into the third millennium witnessed, in the frame of a rapid expansion in number of historical dramas, a rather unusual turn of interest in the 20th century history and, namely, in recalling and remembering events and people related to World War II and its aftermath. Over the first decade of the the 2000s years an excess of twenty miniseries, half of them biopics, which re-enacted real-life episodes and figures or put fictional characters and plots against the background of that particular historical period, were screened on prime-time television. Although a minority resulted in disappointment due to lukewarm reception, a good majority of those historical dramas proved quite to be higly successful, indicating the thirst of the Italian public for knowledge and remembrance of the troubled history of Italy during the early 1940s. Not without raising criticism, television responded to the public’s readiness for history with a host of narratives that made civil resistance a priority subject matter and, accordingly, privileged the reenactment of stories related to the unarmed struggle for liberty and the partecipation of Italians in the rescue of persecuted Jewish. The criticism

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama13 towards the selectivity of such historical representation and the admittedly celebratory stance that transpired through prevailing narratives of resistance, courage and sacrifice of Italians, did not prevent that line-up of programming from appealing to a large national audience. Nonetheless only just a few historical dramas in that line-up can be said to have achieved expected or unexpected event-status; in actual fact, hardly ever such status was attained by any historical fiction throughout the last decade, if we want to look beyond the self-congratulatory rethorics in which broadcasters’ declarations indulge. Meanwhile the traumatic events of 1940s have lost momentum, and historical drama has gradually witnessed both a temporal shift towards more proximate periods – the second half of the 20th century, the early 2000s – and a turn to news media as suitable sources for biographies – to the extent that the gallery of portraits increasingly makes room to people whose noteworthy and exemplary behaviours have ‘made headlines’. This kind of popular historiography that doesn’t engage with the great history, and is committed to consign to public memorialization the lives of ordinary people turned extraordinary, operates on safe grounds of loyal appreciation by Italian viewers but it seldom matches an event. It may happen that the drive to put in place eventization strategies finds itself diminished, to a greater or lesser extent, in case of TV dramas that are not meant to address international audiences, nor they benefit from the big budgets of the international co-productions. Marketing as usual is deemed enough in similar cases, especially in the barely competitive Italian context wherein public television drama enjoys unchallenged prominence. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the vanished or lessened suitability of historical drama for being turned into an event is a consequence of the very history boom, or rather of the peculiar and perhaps unique impact the phenomenon has made on the Italian dramascape. As I already mentioned, the historical trend that emerged internationally on the threshold of the 21st century took Italian TV drama by storm, opening the gates to an overflow of programming set in the past. While it would be an exaggeration to conclude that historical drama has now become an inflated genre, due to the overabundance of supply, it is true that the dramatization of history, the re-enactment of the past, has turned on Italian television into something of a routine form of storytelling; and it is produced, screened and consumed as such, despite the equally routinized advertising practice to attach almost to everything the empty label of fiction- event, and despite the (now rare) occurrence of great successes achieved by stories set in the past, mostly biopics. This doesn’t imply that eventization of history has been altogether dis- carded, as demonstrated by the very recent case of Medici: Masters of Florence (2016), a drama series about the powerful Florentine dynasty of Renaissance

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Italy. An Italian-British sumptuous coproduction (at a total cost of 25 millions Euros) that boasted an international cast, including the world-famous actor Dustin Hoffman and the star ofThe Games of Throne Richard Madden, the historical series was in many ways constructed and marketed as a great television event, although the reception may not have fully met the expectations. Thus the case offers telling evidence that the eventization of history on Italian television is fundamentally driven by international ambitions.

Perlasca and the memory of the Shoah The two-part miniseries Perlasca. Un eroe italiano/Perlasca. An Italia Hero (RAI 1, 2002) premiered on the flagship public channel in January 2002; it attracted over 12 million viewers and still holds the fourth position (following three religious biopics) among the ten most watched TV dramas of 21st century. I have chosen Perlasca as a case study not just for the huge popularity it achieved, but rather because it provides the most telling evidence of how pro- cesses of selection and construction in historical TV drama may be inflected by and resonate with shifting politics of public memory in society at large. For decades hardly anyone in Italy had heard of Giorgio Perlasca and his efforts to rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews from extermination by the Nazis; but when his biopic was broadcast in the early 2000s, his story had already entered the public sphere thanks to a popular current affairs pro- gramme (Mixer, RAI 2 1990) and a biographical book La banalità del bene/ The Banality of Goodness (Deaglio 1991). These had discovered and unveiled the story of the man who, in the wake of the huge resonance of Spielberg’s filmSchindler’s List (1993), would soon to be dubbed ‘the Italian Schindler’. However the story of Perlasca first stepped into the public consciousness not so much as a glorious page of heroism, but rather as the ‘incredible’ case of an unsung hero whose noble deeds had remained buried in oblivion for nearly half a century. Wanting to do justice to a previously unsung hero would perhaps not have been a sufficient reason on its own; indeed a more compelling reason why the life of Perlasca ultimately ‘should be told’ (Lipkin 2002, 1) must be identified in the “process of major change in the co-ordinates of public memory” (Focardi 2012, 242) that Italy witnessed at the end of the 20th century. This change involved, among other things, criticism of and dissociation from the anti-Fascist paradigm that prevailed in post-war Italy. Giorgio Perlasca’s story (a former fascist who posing as the Spanish consul to Budapest in the winter 1944 rescued thousands of Jews from deportation to Nazi extermination camps) is today sufficiently well known internationally, so I can avoid retelling it. At his return to Italy in 1945, Perlasca’s attempts to obtain recognition of his deeds repeatedly came to nothing. It was not

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama15 until the late 1980s that his ‘heroic imposture’ was revealed by Hungarian survivors. In 1988 Perlasca was recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, as one of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’. His ‘reputational trajectory’ (Jansen 2007) in Italy began in the 1990s and reached its height in 2002, thanks to the eponymous fiction. Perlasca was an unconventional heroic figure, an ‘unsuitable’ individual who did not to fit in well with the heroic panoply of the post-Fascist Italy that emerged from World War II. A former Fascist who became a saviour of Jews: Perlasca, as a living oxymoron, was to prove a particularly inappropriate figure in the political climate of post-war Italy, in which polarized political positions and opinions prevailed (the right or wrong side of the war, winners versus losers, Fascists against anti-Fascists). In this climate anyone who, like Perlasca, could not easily be identified with any of the opposed polarities was to be disregarded. In actual fact, as long as the anti-Fascist Resistance remained the dominant narrative of memorialization, public acknowledgement and commemoration of heroic endeavors were mainly accorded to armed Resistance fighters. As Perlasca’s story ‘didn’t fit’ (Foot 2009), it was ignored. Furthermore, for some time after the war the Shoah was hardly a prominent issue of public debate. Perhaps also because they risked opening up embarrassing revelations about Italy’s responsibility for the persecution of the Jews, stories circulating at the time about deportations and death camps were primarily about political deportees (Perra 2010; Gordon 2012). The extermination of Jews did not rank high among the things that ‘should be’ remembered (in Italy, for instance, the broadcast of the US miniserie Holo- caust in 1979 resulted in a non-event: cf. Perra 2010). It is therefore not surprising that the end of the damnatio memoriae that had silenced Perlasca’s story should have coincided with the rise to prominence in the Italian public sphere of the commemoration of the Shoah. The promotion of the memory of the Shoah, acknowledged in 2000 by a law instituting the solemn occasion of a national Day of Memory, had taken shape in the 1990s during the dramatic political transition to the so-called Second Republic, following the Tangentopoli/Bribesville corruption scandal. Owing to a range of both national and international factors – including the reinterpretation of Fascism advanced by an influential school of historiography (De Felice 1977); the new course taken by the main leftist political party after the fall of the Berlin wall; the shape of a new identity endeavored by the formerly Fascist-inspired right-wing party – the will to “promote a new public memory that was disengaged from the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism” made strides into the 1990s political scene (Focardi 2012, 246). The endeavor to create a ‘shared memory’ found in the Shoah a special area of consensus, since anti-semitism by then was being explicitly condemned

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 16 Milly Buonanno by all political parties. The law that instituted the Day of Memory, to be celebrated on 27 January (the date when the gates of Auschwitz were broken down) was unanimously approved by the Italian Parliament; the wording of the law included among the people who should be remembered “those who even in camps and various groupings and at risk of their own lives saved other lives and protected the persecuted” (Art. 1, Law 211, 2000). The valorization of the memory of the Shoah that gained ground in the new political and cultural scenario was an influential factor in making Perlasca’s story ‘fit in’. Thus at the beginning of the 21st century (and only then) the conditions emerged that allowed for the story to be unearthed and told, and also indicated the way it should be told.

The construction of ‘an Italian hero’ Perlasca’s biography, a two-part miniseries as is tradition in Italy, was made in 2001 by Italian public television (RAI) in partnership with Hungary, Swit- zerland and France; its production cost was 12 million Euros, a very high figure for Italy at that time. A renowned director (Alberto Negrin), a successful producer (Palomar), a pair of very well-known cinema scriptwriters (Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia), an Oscar-winning musician (Ennio Mor- ricone) and the most popular actor of Italian TV drama (Luca Zingaretti) were mobilized in the production (entirely on location) of what an impressive advertising campaign announced as an event-miniseries. Public television’s efforts in the production and advertising of Perlasca were almost without precedent, in keeping with the ambitious aims and the expectations placed on a story that was loaded with deep symbolic meanings and undeniable political implications. Not by chance, and replicating a ritual put in place for religious biographies (which are often screened in preview to an audience of eminent Vatican figures), Perlasca was pre-screened in Parliament – in an emotional atmosphere, as reported by newspapers. The miniseries was premiered on the first public channel on 28 and 29 Jan- uary 2002. It was the first and the most successful among the several dramas in commemoration of the Shoah that RAI was to produce and broadcast on each anniversary in subsequent years. The introduction of the Day of Memory provided an institutional legitimization to this practice, and fostered the development of a specific strand of works about the Shoah within the wide range of historical and biographical fictions produced in the wake of the ‘turn to the past’. In this connection, it might be appropriate to borrow from the analytical tools of the memory studies the comprehensive notion of ‘commemorative genres’ (Tota 2001), which applies to the cultural arti- facts – be they a monument, a diary, a museum, a novel, a poem, a plaque and more besides – in which remembrance of people and events is embodied

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama17 and expressed in a concrete form. The notion might also prove suitable for biographical and historical TV dramas, as narrative forms of embodiment and institutionalization of collective memories as well as channels of historical consciousness and imagination. As already indicated, Perlasca proved a huge success and generated an impressive surge of journalistic coverage that was almost unprecedented, especially considering the unusually unanimous consent by critics and other commentators (intellectuals, opinion leaders, columnists). There were grada- tions of approval, but even the few moderate objections were expressed in the framework of a largely positive appraisal for remembering an outstanding story of heroism. Many praised RAI for having revived the lost mission of public service broadcasting, and Italian viewers for having displayed the capacity to discern and appreciate a piece of quality television; thus a story about rescue helped to rescue, if only for a short time, the scant reputation of public television and mass audience alike. Perlasca. An Italian Hero. The subtitle was key, in order not only to attract those viewers who were still unaware about Perlasca, but first and foremost to emphasize that the primary purpose of the work was to tell the story of an Italian hero – the emphasis clearly should be placed on the ‘Italianness’ of the protagonist. Therefore the narrative engaged in the re-enactment of the heroic deeds of a noteworthy man in whom viewers would recognize (and recognize themselves in) the unequivocal features of a common identity and national sense of belonging. To this end it was above all imperative to remove the figure of Perlasca from the politico-ideological interpretation that had helped to keep him for decades under the blanket of a forgetful silence. The reasons for his actions were to be traced back to the sphere of universalistic humanitarian ethics, while demonstrating at the same time that such an ethical stance ‘fit in’ with the national character of Italians. It must be said that the ethical na- ture of Perlasca’s heroism emerged from his memoirs, the written biography and numerous testimonies; thus the drama’s claim to truthfulness was not unfounded. But it is also true that this ethical approach was instrumental to the purpose of constructing an heroic figure in whom most viewers could see themselves mirrored beyond political divides, in accordance with the concilia- tory spirit of a shared memory. The script placed explicit verbal (as well as factual) emphasis on the words of the protagonist himself, or his interlocutors, that indicated Perlasca’s hu- manitarianism and his way of thinking and acting as a moral individual: for example, in his recollection of a boyhood dream of helping to “make the world more humane”; or in his affirmation “I thought it was a just war”, to explain his participation as a volunteer in the Spanish civil war. And again “you think rightly, act rightly”, said by one of his collaborators after a spir-

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 18 Milly Buonanno ited exchange that reproduced almost word by word a dialogue from Dea- glio’s book: “Why do you do all that?” “What would you do in my place?” The dramatization often recreated the conditions of a direct confronta- tion between Perlasca’s sense of humanity and the evil brutality of Nazism, whether by making the protagonist the painful witness of atrocities against the Jews or through the construction of an antagonist in the ominous persona of an SS official. Admittedly the figure of the ‘evil Nazi’ is an almost universal cliché in films and television programmes about the Shoah. But we have to recognize the reasons for this melodramatic mode of story-telling – and Per- lasca was informed by melodramatic imagination and aesthetics, like most Italian television drama – which presupposes a dichotomous moral universe where the personalized forces of good and evil clash, in order to magnify the emotional intensity of the ethical conflict (Brooks 1976). “To an extent, every famous figure […] is filtered through the persona of the star image” (Custen 1992, 45). In fact the figure of Perlasca furthermore enjoyed the reflected light from the halo surrounding the actor Luca Zinga- retti, universally identified in Italy with the virtuous, upright and independent- minded Commissario Montalbano, protagonist of the most acclaimed and widely exporter Italian police series. Although Zingaretti (short, sturdy and bald) was the physical opposite of Giorgio Perlasca (tall, thin and blond), he provided a compelling demonstration that ‘acting does have meanings and produces effects’ (Skirrow 1987, 165: quoted in Nelson 2000, 69); his outstanding performance proved instrumental in confirming the ‘Italianness’ of the rescue hero. To achieve this aim, Perlasca’s fictional persona presented mannerisms, style features and emotions that are generally associated with the Italian national character: a certain elegance in his dress, gallantry towards women – whether countesses or waitresses – a taste for ironic quips and the quality of cleverness “on which Italians place high value” (Gannon 1994, 57). And he was a sensitive and caring man, but at the same time fearless and dar- ing. Perlasca appeared in numerous scenes with his face streaked with tears, the emotional response of a compassionate person faced with man’s merciless cruelty to man. This happened in particular when the victims were children. The insistence on portraying violence inflicted on children, an incarnation of innocence and vulnerability, clearly served to intensify the moral horror of the evil Nazi machine; but it also allowed the protagonist to display the special concerns and caring attitudes towards children of a father figure who was the expression of Italy’s child-orientated culture. In his ground-breaking work on metaphors as a tool to understand cultures, Martin Gannon singles out the opera as a suitable metaphor for Italy. He identifies some distinctive operatic characteristics that cast light on Italian life: namely spectacle, exteriority and the relationship between the soloist and the chorus. I have already referred earlier to ‘exteriority’, to be understood as

Die Online-Ausgabe dieser Publikation ist Open Access verfügbar und im Rahmen der Creative CommonsLizenz CC-BY wiederverwendbar. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Public history as a hall of fame: the rise of biography in Italian TV drama19 the uncontained expression of feelings and emotions; and I will confine myself to pointing out that the dramatization provided a fine rendering of Perlasca’s responsible individualism. Although relying on information and opinions of a few counsellors and collaborators (the chorus) he was in the end the only one (the soloist) who “decides how to handle the peril” (Gannon 1994, 61). But what probably best identifies the connection between Perlasca and Ital- ian culture is the concept of the spectacle. Far from denoting a superficial and even fatuous and ostentatious attitude, the spectacle in its deepest meaning captures the importance in Italian culture of the art of appearing, of performing a façade role on the scene of life: not to the primary aim of deceiving but more often in order to resolve problems, to seek to thwart fate and “to face life’s injustices with one of the few weapons available to a brave people: their imagination” (Gannon 1994, 44). That is exactly what Giorgio Perlasca did in reality, inventing and convincingly performing the role of a Spanish diplomat; the biopic plausibly rendered “the marvellous imposture” (Deaglio 1991) of an individual, on his own and powerless, who when challenged to “fight the devil with bare hands” had recourse to the weapons of his imagination – in the colloquial style of the script: “I talked a load of rubbish and as far as I can judge I did it well” – and to the art of appearing in which Italians are reputed to be unsurpassed. In its engaging endeavour to create a shared memory by re-enacting the Perlasca case as an extraordinary exemplar, a paradigm indeed of the Italian way to heroism, Perlasca. An Italian Hero turned into a text of memory and identity, to be regarded as a major landmark in the long tradition of Italian historical drama.

Perlasca as Media Event Over the whole history of Italian Tv drama no other fiction has aroused as much scholarly interest, being time and again widely discussed in the literature on the public memory of the Holocaust, as Perlasca (see Bechel- loni 2003; Jansen 2007, 2008; Marcus 2007; Perra 2010; Gordon 2012; Clifford 2013; Jansen & Urban 2016). Contrary to the chorus of approval that resounded in the press after the miniseries premiered, reservations and criticism were expressed in a number of these successive works, especially towards the perceived alignment of the narrative to a revisionist take on fascism. Exploring the scholarly reception of the miniseries is beyond the scope of this article; it is rather the exceptional fact per se of becoming a lasting object of academic study that is worth indicating as a feature (among others) of the extra-ordinary, eventful character of Perlasca. This is further testified by the long afterlife of the miniseries in the itinerant process of circulating nationally and internationally the memory of the Italian Schindler. In this last section I will concisely discuss Perlasca within the media events framework.

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In so doing, I will not be engaging with matters of constructedness, although without any doubt Perlasca was constructed to be an exceptional piece of television, in keeping with a twice exceptional story – for its heroic magnitude, and for suffering such a long oblivion. I’m rather interested to explore and indicate a set of features that might allow us to ascribe Perlasca to the phenomenology of media events, as conceptualized by Dayan and Katz (1992). The theory contemplates a range of attributes and conditions that help define television events; it is not necessary to recall them all, because some have already been mentioned or alluded to, like for instance the an- nouncements and advertisements much in advance (“events are pre-planned”, Katz & Dayan 1992, 7), the not routine character of the broadcast and the viewing experience (“festive viewing”, 1992, 1), the capacity to “electrify very large audiences” (1992, 8), the suspension of criticism in journalistic coverage (“reverential attitude”, 1992, 7), the commemorative function of reminding us “what deserves to be remembered” (1992, 20), the ceremonial value – it was, namely, a reparation ceremony – that also fiction texts can assume, as acknowledged by Dayan and Katz themselves (1992, 118). As for the missing condition of the liveness, so central to the original formulation of the theory, suffice it to say that the suitability of non live television for inclu- sion in a more extended typology of media events has been argued in recent scholarship (Buonanno 2008; Hepp & Krotz 2008; Couldry, Hepp & Krotz 2010). However, it would not be implausible to hypothesize that the screening of Perlasca was a fact of historic significance in its own term, not because it re-created past history but because it was the first piece of popular history to embody and compellingly communicate to the nation the radical change in the actual politics of public memorialization (see Rymsza-Pawlowska 2004, for a similar hypothesis as regards Roots). If so, the millions of Italians who watched the miniseries premiere might be said to have witnessed history as it happened, and experienced an equivalent of the live broadcasting of history. In any case the miniseries marked a turning-point, a feature that pertains to what Dayan and Katz refer to as the “semantic dimension”, the meaning of the event. (1992, 12). Here is where Perlasca displayed a key-feature (although controversial in literature) of media events, namely the celebration of reconcilement. Media events “call for a cessation of hostilities” (1992, 8), their message “is one of reconciliation, in which partecipants and audience are invited to unite in the overcoming of conflict”(1992, 12). This was exactly the message conveyed by Perlasca that endeavored to harmonize Italy’s divided memories by foregrounding the consensual value of the humanitarian ethics and making it a hallmark of Italian identity. Finally the story told in the miniseries fit it well into one of the three basic scripts – contest, conquest, coronation – which, according to the authors, “constitute the main narrative possibilities within the genre” (1992, 25).

Actually, Perlasca staged the ‘coronation’ of a long forgotten hero and cast him in the mythical role of David against Goliath, in heroic fulfillment of the yearning for restoration of historical trauma and conflicts of memory that permeated the narrative, and likely helped turn Perlasca into a media event as originally conceptualized – by the time those kind of television events were losing “a large part of their enchantement” (Dayan 2010, 28) in Italy and elsewhere.

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Prof. Dr. Milly Buonanno Sapienzia University of Rome Department of Communication and Social Research, Via Salaria 113 00199 Roma, Italy

E-Mail: [email protected]

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