Italian Biographies
The biographical genre, also known as the biopic, along with the Mafia story and the historical drama has been the cornerstones of Italian television fiction, a fundamental component in its most recent phase of development. The subjects of the many biographies realized by Italian television, though belonging to different “heroic types”, share an identical characteristic, which is that they are all from times gone by. Perhaps they lived thousands of years ago like Christ or during the 20th century like Pablo Pio, but they still all belong to the past. Some of the subjects were participants in, or witnesses to crucial moments and events in the history of the 20th century, such as Fascism, Nazism, and World War II. There has been a temporal turn at the beginning of the 21st century that has fostered in televisual storytelling, a widespread and prolonged trend of a “return to the past”, contradicting the Calendrarial passage suffused with the mythical aura of the advent new era, the dawn of a future world. The return to the past may assume more elusive, albeit not irrelevant forms. In this connection it is worth pointing out the emergence, in the current dramatic landscape, of a form of visibility of the past unrelated to the temporal dimension of the story – it can actually accompany the period drama as well as drama set in the present – whose peculiarity resides in a lived and, as it were, embodied modality. It is manifested in the physical shape, marked by the unmistakable traces of the passage of time, of elderly actors and characters. People advanced in age, usually in supporting roles but sometimes as main characters, appear in quite a few recent fictions; and elderly people, the grandparental figures who are the incarnation of the past and its roots, have become the pillars of the family in Italian TV drama. Un medico in famiglia / A Doctor in the Family (Rajuno, 1998–) , the most popular and long lived of the contemporary family series has pioneered this trend, rendering the elderly character “granddad Libero” – the only stable moral and educational anchorage or point of reference in a multi-generational household that is constantly undergoing change – an acknowledged and loved national icon.