Le téléroman, ou la télévision italienne humaniste et pédagogique des origines

The teleromanzo is a cultural phenomenon characteristic of the first era of the history of Italian television. Also called “romanzo sceneggiato” and conceived as a narrative television work “a puntate” of literary origin, it soon became the very symbol of the cultural, humanist and educational project of the Rai monopoly, which is characterized, among other things, by a social conception of television as a means of cultural emancipation. Two are its distinctive features. Firstly, the literary origin of the works produced, presupposing an educational vocation which is a primordial component of the Rai of the monopoly: the teleromanzo must in fact both entertain and instruct. Secondly, the structure “a puntate”, which refers here not to a serial component, totally foreign to the teleromanzo, but rather to the need to create a television audience through the formula of the weekly meeting, and therefore to guarantee its continued interest, as well as its better assimilation of the values transmitted. The teleromanzo is therefore a primordial narrative genre of the monopoly's Rai production, which still has nothing to do with the rules of television seriality strictly speaking: these rules, at the time, in Italian television did not yet exist. More precisely, it belongs to an experimental phase of television narration located, during the 1960s, between the apogee of the teleromanzo and the massive advent of American television seriality, later favored by the new rules of the duopoly.