Sunday 3 January 1954. The cameras are turned on and Rai begins to broadcast the first regular broadcasts of Italian television. Those first images, in black and white and very grainy by today's standards, are seen by very few people. A television set costs five times the monthly salary of a worker and there are only 24 thousand TV subscribers in the country.
Yet, that January 3, 1954 marks a historic date because within a few years television will revolutionize the customs and habits of Italians. To tell us what was in all respects a revolution is the agile little volume L'occhio massimo (Graphe.it, 2023, pp. 108), a brief history of Italian TV written by the television journalist Aldo Dalla Vecchia .
In Italy during the economic boom of the 1950s, television soon became a real status symbol , a bit like the latest model of smartphone or iPhone today. However, not everyone could afford a television set, so people gathered in the homes of those who owned them or went to watch the most successful programs in bars that had quickly equipped themselves with televisions so as not to lose customers. In a very short time , TV became the new domestic hearth around which Italian families gathered every evening . Despite the cost of the device and the TV subscription , already in 1958 there were one million televisions in circulation, destined to become five million in 1964 .
It was the era of the origins, TV of the first stars such as Mike Bongiorno, Enzo Tortora, Mario Riva and of programs capable of bringing Italy together such as the quiz "Leave or double?". It was a totally black and white television, controlled under a monopoly regime by the government and which had to in a certain sense educate Italians, not just entertain them . Above all, he must not distract them too much from their duties. Thus until the end of 1961 there was only one channel, which broadcast only for a few hours a day. Furthermore, one of the characteristics of this "first" Italian television was its pedagogical function: in a country where it was estimated that there were still 13% of illiterates, the television programs, even the prize quiz Leave or double? hosted by Mike Buongiorno (which reached audience peaks of over 20 million people), they had the task of teaching Italian and raising the level of general culture.
At the same time , TV became a mirror of the country, a sort of monitor in which to observe its changes . Politics, social and economic perspectives, judicial scandals and musical tastes passed through the small screen and were built together; in other words, the dreams (and nightmares) of Italians at the turn of the century.
The ability of the television medium to exercise a function of control and orientation of public opinion appeared so incisive that television was given the nickname "fifth power" : fifth compared to the three traditional powers of the State (legislative, executive and judicial). and fourth, the press.
Already in the 1979 essay Giovani, the psychiatrist and writer Vittorino Andreoli highlighted the great impact TV had on people thanks to the power of images . «The television is a cognitive earthquake: that is, it concerns learning processes, knowledge. I am convinced that it has decreed the end of rationality and logical-verbal thinking, even changing the use of spoken and written language: the end of words or their return to a pure sound, without meaning. The television has flooded everyone's mind with images. Compared to words, they have their own brain processing. [...] Images are dominating verbal activity which is losing meaning." Words that sound more than prophetic almost fifty years later.