Film Commission Torino Piemonte

The troubled unification of Italy began in Turin, 150 years ago. Today, in the same city, a team of historians is preparing a major exhibition, entitled Making the Italians and set in an ex-industrial area. That area and the preparation of the exhibition are the symbolic location and action where our story begins and, on the opening day of the exhibition, ends. From the previous century and a half, the exhibition’s historians have selected events and characters based on their unifying or dividing features, for Italy and Italians. However, this leaves a long-standing paradox unsolved: given that Italy’s cultural identity is much older and stronger than its political one, what is the relationship between those two identities? The use of this historical criterion enables us to look for long-term tendencies and to recount the nuances of a complex country, where the lines between good and bad are not only often blurred, but invisible. The storyline adopted is chronological, marked by 4 great turning points. The first: 1861 with the sudden unification of Italy. The second: 1922 with the takeover by Mussolini. The third: 1946, when the people chose to abandon the monarchy that had collaborated with fascism and embrace the republic. The fourth: 1992 when the main political parties were swept away by judicial investigations which exposed corruption at all levels and paved the way for the so-called Second Republic.