The promotion of the Serbian edition of the book ’24,000 Kisses – The Influence of Italian Mass Culture in Yugoslavia (1955-1965)’, written by Francesca Rolandi, and published by Geopoetika will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade, on Tuesday, 11th October, at 6 p.m.
The book is translated by Ivana Simić Ćorluka and Marija Ćojbašić. The book’s author, Francesca Rolandi, as well as Professor Snežana Milinkovic of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, Professor Radina Vučetić and Professor Milan Ristović of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Roberto Cincotta, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, and Jasna Novakov Sibinović, director of Geopoetika, will take part in the promotion.
The provisional settlement of the border issue, which took place under the auspices of the London Memorandum of 1954, was the premise for a blossoming of cultural relations between Italy and Yugoslavia, two countries with different political systems and until 1954, divided by a bitter territorial clash. In particular, the influence of Italian mass culture in Croatia was a filter that allowed the transfer of Western cultural phenomena, making them less controversial and more acceptable in the eyes of the Yugoslav authorities.
Stronger contacts, made possible by the opening of what had been one of the contentious post-war borders, contributed decisively to the formation of Yugoslav mass culture, especially in the decade between 1955 and 1965, and great openness for socialist Yugoslavia.
It was that the Sanremo Festival, the songs of Adriano Celentano and Rita Pavone, film co-productions, RAI programmes filmed by the nascent local television, as well as the popular practice of shopping in Trieste, allowed the people in Yugoslavia to become familiar with Italy, to the point of building a sense of cultural closeness, albeit not without its problems. This was rather an imagined Italy that had little to do with reality but reflected the expectations the Yugoslavs had for their own future which they envisaged as the same across the border.
About the author
Francesca Rolandi received a PhD in Slavistics from the University of Turin in 2012 with a thesis that was later published under the title ‘24,000 Kisses – The Influence of Italian Mass Culture in Yugoslavia (1955-1965)’ by Bononia University Press in 2015. During her post-doctoral studies, she carried out research at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies in Naples, the Centre for Southeast European Studies in Rijeka, the University of Ljubljana and at the University of British Columbia. Her main research interests range from the cultural and social history of the Upper Adriatic and the post-Yugoslav space to the history of migration and refugees and Europe in the 20th century.
Ms Rolandi is currently involved in research activities under the auspices of the project “Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century”, implemented by the European Research Council at the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.