They may seem out of time, they may seem ancient, but perhaps we have never realized one thing: the role that photostories have played in the history of the country. We realized this by filming some of them that have remained in the basement, among dusty boxes, as a past removed. And indeed, that past they do represent.
Because especially we, Millennials and Generation Z, have not experienced that genre. We were born with dramas and TV series already in vogue, first with television and then with devices. But we were not familiar with what came before Netflix and Amazon Prime Video: magazines that sold millions of copies.
Still, there would be much to say about that phenomenon born in the immediate postwar period. Of its role in spreading reading, in a country that was still becoming familiar with books, but also of the dream that those love stories on paper managed to give. Dialogues that today, re-reading them, might seem “cringe-worthy,” but which were a mirror of the era.
There was seriality, there was fantasy, there was the intuition of an Italian: Stefano Reda. As Treccani recounts, he went around among publishing houses with a simple idea: take the comic strip and replace the drawings with photographs of real scenes. The one who believed in it was a Roman publishing house, Novissima, a subsidiary of Rizzoli, which founded Sogno magazine. It was March 8, 1947.
What seemed like a bizarre idea would accompany the imaginations of millions of male and female readers, who went to the newsstands each week to find out how their favorite stories were progressing. A form of seriality that anticipated, in some ways, the dramas and TV series of today.
Cinema, too, took advantage of the wave, thanks to the popularity of some of the faces launched there: from Sophia Loren, who in Sogno called herself Sofia Lazzaro, to Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio Gassman. And then names like Giorgio Albertazzi, Renzo Arbore, Claudia Cardinale, Raffaella CarrĂ , Giuliano Gemma and Sandra Milo.
Faces that made those magazines, initially considered too “popular,” a phenomenon. A part of history today almost forgotten, but one that each of our grandparents, at least once, had in their hands.
[📸 IPA]
