People

Aldo Dalla Vecchia is back with a new book, this time dedicated to his greatest passion: television.
As we know, Italian television turns 70, and is still at the centre of our lives, indeed more and more, between linear and digital, generalist and platforms, free and on demand. L’occhio magico – Breve storia della television italiana (tr. The magic eye. A Brief History of Italian Television) is a tribute to the small screen written by a child of the Seventies, who grew up with TV and loved it to the point of choosing it as a job as an adult. Each of the eight chapters is dedicated to a decade, and it’s divided into two parts: the first is an overview of the television decade; the second, «The decade in a nutshell», is a calendar of important tele-events. The volume is completed by two appendices: «Television before its birth» and «Very brief history of television criticism in Italy».
The history of television is, in reality, made up of many stories. And trying to tell it involves taking on a point of view. On the eve of the celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the first regular Rai broadcasts (everyone remembers the capital date of 3 January 1954), this short volume - The Magic Eye signed by Aldo Dalla Vecchia - tries to carry out a decidedly in step with our contemporary sensibility. That is, to tell the essential part of these seventy years of history of what we once called "small screen" (even if today screens have often become gigantic home entertainment terminals). Even the selection of the "essential" obviously requires a point of view, or rather choices: the author makes the history of television - mainly - a history of programmes. Rightly resorting to the most usual and shared organizational principle when talking about content and television offerings: the container of genres. (an introduction by Massimo Scaglioni)