Grand Hotel and Italy's Post-War Cineromanzi Magazines

Don’t let the Elena Ferrante frenzy fool you: Italians are voracious image consumers. This isn’t a product of television or the Internet or of poor journalism. The Italian penchant for visual media has a long history with diverse products that demonstrate a unique interpretation of popular culture. My favorite product? The 1950s picture magazine.

During the years following World War II, Italians devoured magazines that adapted Hollywood films into serialized photo montages. The comic-style stories featured Italian actors chosen for their resemblance to American stars. People who couldn’t afford to see the latest release at the cinema, could buy the adaption instead and spend hours perusing the annotated screenshots and speech bubbles. Italian picture magazines weren’t a limited phenomenon of cheap entertainment, but a clever way for media to appropriate the symbolize of modern, American culture.

Grand Hotel was one of the most loved of these fotoromanzi, picture novels. Each week Italian women — and men, if we believe the letters that published in the front — indulged in a new chapter of a popular story. Similar to how television cut cinematic plots into pieces for private viewing, Grand Hotel extended a movie’s lifespan to several weeks and prized the role of personal fantasy. Rather than watching a screen with a group in a dark room, the fotoromanzo lets the reader meanders through the story at their own pace, focusing on the panels, styles, and quotes that stoke their imagination. The picture novel promises personal escape.

Grand Hotel continues to be published, but as a tabloid, having lost film adaptions in the 1970s and reduced picture-stories in the 1960s. While tabloids could be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the Hollywood-inspired cineromanzi — they both scrutinize celebrity — the original Grand Hotel presented fame as a story rather than as an aspiration. Tabloids display celebrities’ daily lives. Fotoromanzi presented celebrity in stories. If film stars once seemed as untouchable as actual stars, Western society’s increased wealth renders stardom’s cars, clothing, and cash more accessible. Today celebrities must be perfect people as well as perfect characters because they reflect contemporary goals. All Grand Hotel stars had to do was fuel fantasy.

The need for fantasy endures. And Italian readers — perhaps having been brought up in a culture where it’s not strange to see an adult reading a comic in public — seem to crave them more than most. Although photo-driven periodicals such as Life and Picture Post appeared in the US and UK during this era, the range of options and continued popularity of image-heavy publications in Italy remains unique. From Topolino (Mickey Mouse comics generated as a franchise within the country) to Diabolik (a detective comic for adults), illustrated magazines are sold at every edicola, or news kiosk. Italy’s post-war picture press speaks to a certain style of imagination that epitomized an epoch, but also extends throughout the country, demonstrating a desire to immerse oneself into a visual fantasy on a personal level. 

Soho Square and Lessons in Public-Private Urban Spaces

Soho Square is the untended child of London’s green spaces. It is not well-manicured like Russell Square, nor illustrious like Berkeley Square. When the Earl of Macclesfield built Soho Square in 1681, it was London’s first garden piazza. Today people come to sit and read and toast to Friday with cheap cava and challenge their coworkers to ping pong. They come to gasp at the drunks and druggies and dead-beats who mill about as if a homing device lures them to the epicenter of once-raucous London. Soho Square exhibits the memory of London pseudo-grittiness.

But the Square’s scruffy appearance juxtaposes the high-street stores, boutiques and restaurants that draw people to Soho. You could be on Corso Como in Milan or Mott Street in Nolita. Some people aren’t content. In 2014, Stephen Fry and Tim Arnold began a campaign called ‘Save Soho’ to defend the neighborhood’s art scene from being priced out by Identikit shops and cafes. According to them, Soho means independent expression, creativity, and interaction. These days, however, urban grit lives there only before the street washers arrive on Sunday morning.

Yet some character remains in Soho Square.  Sanitation officers might wash the dirt from the street, but they won’t take it off your pants after you lounge in the patchy grass. The token bum might be three feet away. Combined with the phone conversation in French on your left and the sprinklers beating the grass to the right, Soho Square personifies weird Soho.

This is public space. This is the public realm. This is what makes London vibrant.

I recently attended a talk at the New York Public Library presenting Alex Garvin’s book What Makes a Great City. His answer: Shared spaces that develop the relationship between citizens and their city. These spaces encompass everything. They are the sidewalks and the subway platforms and the parks and the streets. In London they are the squares.

These garden squares haven’t always been open-access and their liberalization highlights how smart urbanization rendered London a modern world city. In the seventeenth century, green areas became popular as the population grew and wealthy citizens craved an escape from the chaos. Developers built houses along fenced-off parks, which residents of the surrounding townhouses could access only with a key. This elite model persisted for several hundred years until politicians realized that a disempowered artistocracy meant regular citizens should also benefit from squares. So far roughly two hundred have been turned into public-private urban green spaces, but many private ones remain. Nevertheless, this re-imagination of city space demonstrates London’s commitment to creating shared zones where all social classes can interact.

Garvin knows that he’s not revolutionizing urbanism by suggesting that a vibrant public realm equals a vibrant city. What he does instead is argue that urbanists should develop a vital atmosphere through a combination of public and private funds. It’s a complex argument with implications too technical to approach in this blog-post. There are indications that this model works, just look at Brooklyn Bridge Park, London’s Santander (previously Barclay) bike sharing scheme or Atlanta’s BeltLine. But the encroachment of private money in the public realm also qualifies free-access. Although Bryant Park currently offers a calendar of free events, they could erect gates and charge admission if they wanted to control their audience and boost funding. Garvin wants his reader to understand that cities need help to attract to a dynamic population, but the relationship between money and civic life remains negotiable.

Soho Square encapsulates this paradox. It attracts wealth and poverty. It attracts business and leisure. It attracts relaxation and work. But this peaceful co-existence is precarious. Although the area provides a place for people to meet, stronger policing could threaten diversity. Out pricing the surrounding area could promote sanitization. Every visitor has an individual reason for mucking up their jeans in Soho’s patchy lawn. We need to linger and observe to understand how cities can enable citizens to indulge in their urban fantasies together.

The Weirdest 1980s Italian Food Advertisements You Need to Watch

Forget reminiscing about the Trix bunny and the Froot Loops toucan. I watch food adverts from 1980s Italy when I want an (un)healthy dose of industrial food nostalgia.  

Italian television in the 1980s presents a complex landscape. Until the late 1970s, state broadcaster RAI held a monopoly over the airwaves. But then national lawsuits determined RAI’s hegemony prevented free speech. Local channels flourished and soon after media magnate Silvio Berlusconi launched quasi-national Canale 5, which imported American soaps like Dallas and broke them up with ample commercial breaks.

Yet while today’s viewers might groan at the incessant pauses, in the 1980s these respites represented a step toward American-style broadcasting following the dissolution of the advertising format characteristic of RAI’s programming. As Italy developed a television model in the 1950s, both the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats were concerned that replicating an American model would also promote unwanted consumerism. RAI was decidedly partisan and consequently chose to segregate commercials into a half-hour show called Carosello, which aired before evening programming began. During this half-hour companies bought spots that ran up to 155 seconds, but could only name the product in the last 30 seconds. The majority of the commercial told a story about the attributes the advertisers wanted to highlight.

Although this model was obsolete by the 1980s, its impact remained. Advertisers continued to develop stories in multi-part commercials, but these stories highlighted emotions and morals rather than product description. In this sense Italian advertising in the 1980s represents a hybrid. Spots sell modern products like canola oil and ice cream novelties, but do so in a narrative style that .

Here’s a collection of my 7 favorite food commercials from the 1980s. Some are for products that are still around, others are for products that should have never been invented. But they are all hysterical and uniquely Italian.

1. Burghy was Italy's answer to McDonald's in the 1980s. Watch this commercial twice and you too will agree that 'più gusto di Burghy, nessun ti dà!' [No one will give you a more Burghy flavor!]

2. If cats and children and cuddles make you tear up, you'll find this Barilla tearjerker irresistible. Because a good plate of pasta turns all our eyes watery.

3. Does fruit juice make you want to choreograph a dance and dress up in neon? It did for Billy fruit juice in 1985.

4. Mulino Bianco commercials attempt to present a nostalgic yesteryear even today, but this 1986 advertisement for chocolate covered soldini cakes replicates the Carosello format to win over both parents and children.

5. Sofficini, essentially Italy's version of pizza pockets, try to win over kids with this modern version of Pinocchio, presenting two tokens of Italian history to suggest that the country can sell industrial food through their illustious traditional culture.

6. Olio friol was sold as a healthy oil for frying that allowed you to capture all the perfect crispiness of fast food without the unhealthiness. Presumably because the diners were too interested with each other to care about the food on their plates.

7. Fonzies are fun. Even I want to be an American teenager in the 1980s watching this advertisement. Though I can't imagine Italian teenagers made the Happy Days connection.

On reading, pleasure and selling entertainment

Summer means travel and this year I enjoyed four weeks of it. And four weeks on the road demands juicy reads. I soared through love triangles and depleted inheritances and dysfunctional families. But now I must atone for devouring novels so entertaining that a slower pace would misrepresent them. I read books irrespective of their cultural capital.

Reading this way should feel liberating. Yet society convinces us that a book’s value is proportional to the amount of effort it takes to finish. Better to push yourself through The Castle than to frolic with The Year of Living Danishly. We should laugh at this. It’s the reading process that’s important. Whereas cinema seduces you with perfectly-pressed pictures, books require you to assimilate another outlook that generates as a hybrid experience between book/reader and author/reader.

Just as some people prefer thrillers to comedies, everyone has a favorite narration-style. For me, The Castle was thought-provoking but not a page turner, while The Year of Living Danishly lured me out of museum galleries and into the toilet where I’d sneak-read a chapter when ohh-ing and ahh-ing at Picasso grew tiresome. Although name-dropping Kafka at a dinner party might exhibit my cultural capital (as could the Picassos I spurned), I’d sooner mention Jutland’s Lego-themed hotel, which I learned about in The Year of Living Danishly. The former seemed the intellectual equivalent of an undressed kale salad, while the latter was indulgent like a Saturday morning croissant. My preferred narrative style is casual, modern and anecdotal.

If I were to focus on just that genre, I’d still suffer from too-many books too-little time syndrome. Avid readers understand this affliction. You realize its severity when you return home from your favorite bookstore and struggle to balance a third layer of books on your deepest shelf. Digital society exacerbates this affliction. Now we can crowdsource recommendations from friends, get personalized selections from Good Reads and download them all with a single click on Amazon. Whereas money, space and time previously constrained the of books we encountered, the rise of e-readers and low-priced e-books renders the first two constraints irrelevant.

We need new parameters to decide what to read. Publishing might bring a book to stores, but it doesn’t keep the book in print. Time sets a story apart.

But time doesn’t signify longevity; it means any book that people have collectively decided to devote time to. Whether that means the weeks it takes to meander through The Goldfinch, the years Potter-heads devoted to waiting for J.K. Rowling’s next installment or the decades War and Peace has sat (unread) on your bookshelf, time determines social value in myriad ways. The greater a book’s power to mobilize communal time, the greater its cultural visibility. It means that the title be name-dropped and understood. Unfortunately, this turns books into weapons of self-presentation in the crusade of conspicuous consumption. We use the covers and quotes, the licensed products and spinoffs, to exhibit our understanding of the story’s social value. When space and money no longer restrict access to books, a story's ability to mobilize time in myriad ways that determines its cultural value.

Mass-commodification touches every book. Oprah includes a translation of Anna Karenina in her reading club. Dante’s Inferno has become a computer game. Baz Luhrman forced us to share an image of The Great Gatsby’s great green light. Although some might argue that classic literature offers an escape from the commercialization of reading, social trends reveal that a story rich in time is apt for commodification.

I’m at an impasse. During August I committed myself to reading only novels that bring me unwarranted pleasure. Will September’s fresh pencil smell encourage a return to Kafka, Calvino and Kant? To books that allow me to feign separation from the industrial publishing machine? Maybe. Or maybe I need a new balance. One that lets me read books that are engaging and light and thoughtful and consoling. Not every book communicates every emotion, but the best mix them into unexpected cocktails that change your perspective on what reading and feeling mean. The ones that have mobilized the most time and money are the ones to which we surrender shelf space. But just like some people prefer gin-based cocktails while others opt for bourbon, different readers seek different consolations and outlooks. These can vary within a reader’s life. Somedays you crave a challenge, other days you long for a chuckle. Library card in my hand, I can’t wait to see what I have time for next.