GOOD CATHOLICS, GOOD ITALIANS: RELIGION AND RESCUE IN RECENT ITALIAN HOLOCAUST DRAMAS

Abstract

The Holocaust features prominently in a number of recent Italian television productions, many of which have focused on members of the Catholic clergy and on secular but pious historical figures. This article argues that such cultural products partake of a broader process of constructing a normative, ‘consensual’, and inherently conservative notion of Italian national identity for the twenty-first century. The article will combine two lines of enquiry. Firstly, it will situate these television products in the long-term history of conflicting and often mutually exclusive memory cultures in Italy, each vying for recognition in the public arena throughout the twentieth century. These fractured memory cultures find a common ground in the oft-mentioned myth of the ‘good Italian’. In the context of this long history, the article will then explore the challenge to fixed notions of Italian identity represented by the recent wave of immigration to the country, and television’s insufficient engagement with these developments. In exploring the place of Holocaust narratives in contemporary Italian television, this article examines the medium’s role as public historian and purveyor of far-from-neutral cultural values in a specific moment of the country’s history.