1 Chasing the Audience

Can we talk about convergence culture before the invention of the World Wide Web? And how does participation function in the pre-Internet era? The photoromance is, at the same time, “un film stampato” (a printed film), a “complete illustrated soap opera,” a fan magazine, and a tabloid.1 But how much was the audience involved in its making? While the presumption of a passive audience made leftist critics doubtful with regard to the political effects of these magazines, in the age of the massive industrialization of culture, some claimed to engage with their readership as educators, thus believing to be able to mold readers’ behaviors via their magazines. The heteronormative discourse of the photoromance as low culture for women articulated the common sense of leftist intellectuals and Catholic politicians alike, demeaning female readers by considering them passive receptacles of corruptive ideas. In response to this discourse, and in the attempt to reconstruct the history of the Italian photoromance as a participant in the media system and as a product of the cultural industries, in this chapter I examine the role readers played in the making of the magazines accused of indoctrinating them.

In particular, I focus on the case of Bolero Film (BF) to demonstrate the prominent place that readership had, in the midst of corporate demands and social changes, in the development of its content (photoromances, columns, advertisements). In comparison to other magazines, such as Sogno and Grand Hotel, BF most interestingly shows the contradictions that derive from a publishing politics that both exploits and privileges readers/consumers. The degree to which readership actually mattered (and thus to which we can talk about participatory culture) depended on the power struggle between publisher Arnoldo Mondadori and editor Luciano Pedrocchi. In a way, the publisher acted as a Hollywood major producer would: to maximize profit, he added quality to entertainment by hiring the most respected professionals, by using the latest technologies in printing, and by investing in innovative marketing strategies (BF for example sponsored the music contest “New Voices” of Castrocaro Terme, a sort of Italian precursor to American Idol).2 Ultimately, though, Arnoldo Mondadori’s approach to publishing made customer satisfaction relevant exclusively in order to please advertisers. Instead, Pedrocchi’s private correspondence and editorializing show an explicit recognition of the active role played by consumers, who could not be manipulated or fooled. As I explain in this chapter, this approach is reflected in the magazine’s columns and in photoromances that represent BF fans (passionately engaged with celebrities and stories) and that foster the BF fandom, that is, that prompt readers to recognize themselves as part of a BF community.

These representations did not necessarily correspond to the historical reality of readers who were nomadic, according to data, since they usually bought other photoromances (but rarely read any other form of literature), went to the movies, watched television, and listened to the radio.3 In this respect, BF is more specifically an insightful case for a study of the photoromance in the context of media convergence. By comparison to the French Nous Deux, for example, BF is inscribed not only within a system of social relationships but also within a network of cultural industries. Agreeing with Giet, I claim that by sharing copies of different magazines, and discussing them, readers could establish links among family members and neighbors, and particularly, between generations of women.4 In addition, other media platforms exploited by BF under Pedrocchi’s direction were linked to build consumer loyalty, in other words, to ensure that readers found in the magazine a place to satisfy their multiple demands and a community with which to share their interests. While published letters and representations of fans as characters in photoromances created models of identification, cross-media strategies maximized the magazine’s potential to attract and maintain its clientele (who were also moviegoers, TV viewers, and music listeners).

The dispersed practices of cultural consumption across media favored advertisers who were, according to Fausto Colombo, “the receiver with whom [the publisher] really communicated.”5 However, I disagree with Colombo that the advertisers were the exclusive point of reference vis-à-vis production and show in this chapter how BF was informed by the association of convergence to consumer culture in its address to the readers. As Matthew Freeman describes in reference to early twentieth-century American culture, “the practice of guiding a fictional character across multiple cultural forms had become both a means and a source of branding consumerism to mass audience.”6 In the case of postwar Italy and its cultural industries, performers such as Mike Bongiorno (photoromance actor in BF, TV celebrity, and the face of various commercial products) mobilized Italian audiences as both media users and consumers. In this sense, BF becomes fertile ground for the study of the complex dynamics of “cross-media strategies as a historical industrial practice.”7

This is not to say that ultimately, readers were just coopted by BF to buy products that they did not need. On the contrary, considering the magazine’s trajectory from its birth in 1947 to its closure in 1984, which corresponded to the period of rapid growth in the Italian economy (approximately from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s), the magazine’s narratives and columns (together with advertisements) interpret the gradual changes happening in Italian society, especially with regard to gender roles, in the private and public spheres. Perhaps more savvy than erudite, more liberated than emancipated (challenging patriarchy in sexual conduct but continuing to fulfill their role as daughters, spouses, and mothers), the Italian women who made up more than 90 percent of BF readership could learn by means of BF how to take advantage of their increasing economic power to gain a new kind of perception of themselves and of their femininity. These new feminine fans, projected in the magazine’s pages, studied in surveys, and discussed in production materials and correspondence, simultaneously challenged the patriarchal status quo while actively embracing the culture of consumerism, giving way to ambiguities never completely solved in the dynamics that tied them to the publisher, the editor, and the advertisers.

Bridging Media

A modern style of entrepreneurship and mass production had characterized Mondadori since its inception in 1907.8 Similar to other Italian publishers, the company identified with its president and founder Arnoldo Mondadori (1889–1971). Differently than its earlier competitors, Treves and Sonzogno, Mondadori had applied the American model of industrial organization since the early 1920s. In 1927, the headquarters of Mondadori moved from the province of Mantova (Ostiglia) to the metropolitan center of Milan. A network of agencies opened throughout the peninsula, while books and magazines were distributed abroad with the help of local agents. From the 1930s onward, Mondadori strategically diversified to create a large, “integrated” firm.9 The company invested in illustrated magazines and cheap classics series, in addition to more expensive book editions, as well as in paper production.

Arnoldo Mondadori’s ascent from printer to publisher fueled a legend: that of a self-made man whose ties with industrialists and whose clever managerial choices (above all, the deal with Walt Disney in 1935 to become the only official franchise of the American comic strips in Italy) allowed him to build a commercial empire that not only continued to function under the Fascist regime, but also was able to immediately recover after War World II, thanks to U.S. financial support. Key to Mondadori’s editorial strategies within the framework of media convergence were its international distribution system, targeting of specialized audiences (children and women, in particular), and standardization of production. Also, Mondadori diversified its products by investing in periodicals, in addition to acquiring bestselling authors (from another publishing house, Sonzogno), signing Gabriele d’Annunzio at the height of his success in 1926, exploiting pulp fiction and comics, and publishing numerous translations (particularly in the 1930s). In direct competition with Rizzoli, Mondadori found its place in the tabloid industry by issuing the first women’s magazine Grazia in 1938, which targeted middle-class female readers with a cheerful imperative of optimism. That same year, the Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop) banned all foreign strips with the exception of Topolino (Mickey Mouse), which continued to be published until 1943, when the factory was occupied by Nazis and Fascists, under a different name (Tuffolino) but maintaining the same graphic in the title page and the original title (Topolino) for the magazine. This incident, among others, reveals the degree of freedom that Arnoldo Mondadori enjoyed, an ambiguous sign of both his independence and his entrenchment with the Fascist regime.10 Such an ambiguous position and new political alliances allowed the publisher and his family to come back from their exile in Switzerland (where they escaped in 1943) and to retake control of the factory almost immediately, to rebuild the plant with the help of the European Recovery Program, and to import advanced machineries from the United States (such as color printer Cottrel), which especially strengthened output. In 1947, BF’s first number was issued at the same time as a new women’s magazine (Confidenze) and the Italian version of the pro-American, conservative, and anti-Communist magazine Reader’s Digest (titled Selezione dal Reader’s Digest).

BF was not born a women’s magazine but rather became one, in the course of its history and in the process of maximizing sales. Both children and women were not “culturally at the margins” as Angelo Ventrone argues with regard to the target audience of Edizioni Universo’s Grand Hotel, but in fact, were highly profitable markets.11 Mondadori’s strategies also focused on selling BF (like other periodicals) on a global scale. In South America, franchises and affiliated publishers have been buying BF photoromances since the early 1950s; in North America, the magazine was distributed through subscriptions starting from 1949, reaching the Italian-speaking communities in the United States and Canada. In addition, Grand Hotel had already established a format in the 1950s that remain more or less the same thereafter.12 Instead, BF continuously changed through the decades, in multiple ways: in the composition of front and back covers, including the title, which in 1966 becomes Bolero Film Teletutto and then, in 1967, Bolero Teletutto; in the number of pages and therefore, of columns and photoromances; in the kinds of stories and of settings of photoromances; in the products and services advertised.13 Here, I claim that the magazine transformed in response to mutations in the social and cultural habits of readers and to their preferences with regard to entertainment and narratives, as well as on the basis of modifications and developments in the media system.

Structural configuration in the industry runs parallel to aesthetic hybridization and intertextuality. BF “poaches” (in Jenkins’s terms) from literature, cinema, theatre, and television with the same irreverence attributed to its fans.14 The magazine turns literary classics (Italian and foreign) into popular culture, casting respected actors in the main roles, and advertising the issues via newsreels in the movie theatres (as well as on the pages of its own magazines). In addition, BF extends consumption and bridges content across different media, within the photoromance medium and throughout the issue, in the relationship between columns and the photo-textual narratives. For example, the photoromance “Sconosciuto amore” (Unknown Love, 1949)—the first “romantic and musical story”—integrates music into the narrative world of the photoromance, to inaugurate a genre that would continue successfully in the 1960s by capitalizing on the popularity of singers on television and at the music festival of Sanremo.15 The lyrics of the song “Unknown Love” (by G. C. Testoni) were published in the same issue of the first episode, captioned by the announcement that the “beguine” song could be heard for the first time on the radio stations Rete Rossa (Red Network) and Rete Azzurra (Blue Network) the following Sunday.16 Radio, music, and the photoromance thus work in a coordinated effort to attract both consumers’ time and attention, over the narratives and beyond the magazine. In this respect, BF is peculiar by comparison with the other two main competitors in the photoromance market, Grand Hotel and Sogno, in the way that Mondadori fully exploited cross-media strategies beyond the branches of its business, in anticipation of current structures in media conglomerates.

To explain how celebrities in photoromances serve the purpose of branding consumerism, while also embodying and promoting social types, the example of the American-born TV personality Mike Bongiorno is useful.17 “National Mike,” also known as “the King of Quiz,” was the host of successful TV programs such as Lascia o raddoppia? (Leave It or Double It?, 1955–1959, considered the Italian version of The $64,000 Question) or La fiera dei sogni (Dream Fair, 1963–1966) as well as of many editions of the “Festival della Canzone italiana” (Italian Song Festival) in Sanremo (a national beloved music competition). In addition, Bongiorno starred in BF photoromances and advertised the detergent Dash and L’Oreal hair products in the televised commercials called caroselli. In many stories as in the commercials, Mike (as he is familiarly called in the magazine) plays himself, and fans recognize him;18 even when he interprets a fictional character, he acts always the same type: courteous, kind, and selflessly acting for the well-being of others, particularly women.19 Indeed, his character and demeanor correspond to that of the “everyday man” described in Umberto Eco’s famous 1961 essay titled “Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno.”20 Eco claims that in his average look and conformist behavior, Mike-the-character (“un personaggio,” in his words) is not a “superman” who appeals to the consumer because he offers an impossible model to attain. Italian audiences like Mike because he is “a living and triumphant example of mediocrity.”21 To Italian women, Mike represents “an ideal lover, subdued and fragile, sweet and kind.”22

I would extend Eco’s semiotic framework to consider Mike not just as a character but as a migrating character, across media platforms (publishing, television). In this perspective, I think there is something to add to his interpretation. In his migration, Mike maintains the same constitutive features of wholesome celebrity for the family (both children and adults); his fame does not keep him from acting properly and being relatable. In BF photoromances, his kindness and disinterested eagerness to help women stand in opposition to the behavior of the Italian male characters, the latter perhaps more virile but also ruthless and violent. Carried over in the TV commercials, Mike’s gendered identity promotes consumerism: the product he advertises is being offered (with courtesy) as a gift to the feminine consumer. Whether driving women in expensive vehicles to provide them with emotional support in a moment of need in the photoromances or landing in a helicopter to bring a new detergent to other women, also in need, in the commercials, Mike plays the accessible object of female desire that is associated with modern lifestyle and technology, in both situations. As an American man in the context of the heteronormative society of 1950s–1960s Italy, to which the readers of BF, primarily women, belonged, Mike is the masculine champion of modernity, representing the appeal of Americanism to a feminine audience.

Furthermore, the social type Mike embodies is a foil to the one of Italian masculinity in crisis, typical in Italian films of the period, especially comedies. In this context, Mike-the-character provides to both masculine and feminine fans an alternative model of both political redemption and social integration. For example, in the photoromance “Una strana storia” (A Strange Story, 1965), Mike reevokes an episode of his life during War World II. According to an ad published in Bolero Film, “when he [Mike] was hunted by the German police, he found refuge in an abandoned house where a woman lived and thus he could save his own life.”23 A very similar episode takes place in the film comedy Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), directed by Dino Risi, in which the main protagonist Silvio (played by Alberto Sordi) is saved from the Nazis and hosted by Elena (interpreted by Lea Massari) in an empty barn. Likely, the same story resonated with many Italian male readers and viewers who lived through the war. Mike was a soldier, but he was no hero. Like Silvio, he was saved by a woman, an event that could be interpreted ambiguously as both emasculating and serendipitous. But while the situation that Alberto Sordi and Mike Bongiorno live through is similar and relatable, their characters are very different, particularly in the social and gender models that they respectively embody. Like the typical protagonist of a “commedia all’italiana” (Italian-style comedy), Silvio is a pathetic, self-centered, and cynical man—an outcast in a modernized Italian society. Mike, on the other hand, is a man who has suffered and whose story may help readers to make peace with themselves and, moreover, to move forward. In the case of Silvio, desertion is a means to satirize the masculine hero; in the case of Mike, it is the guilt that needs to be forgiven. As the advertisement explains, the photoromance narrative aims “to forget the past and give hope for the future.”24 Italy’s transition to a consumerist society, which Silvio openly rejects in A Difficult Life, is “the future” that Mike embraces as one of its branding characters.

Transmedialization

From the point of view of photoromance production, BF’s approach to both cinema and comics signals a process of transmedialization rather than adaptation of the old medium into the new medium. As Jan Baetens explains, transmedialization is “less an event than a process” and “is less concerned with the shift from one medium to another . . . than the result of a wide and variegated range of relationships within a much larger network of related media, which all play a role in the process of transmedialization.”25 Pulp fiction, cinema, and comics all converge in the first issue of BF (published in 1947), which on the cover featured the photograph of an upper-middle-class couple, protagonists of the photoromance “Catene” (Chains). These characters (like those of pulp romances) inhabited the exotic (and geographically foreign) narrative world that was out of reach of the working-class readership, feeding the fantasy of social mobility through marriage that was forcefully under attack by many. While “Chains” may appear as an adaptation of a novel by feuilleton author Carolina Invernizio or by romance writer Liala, the second photoromance included in the issue resembles (in setting, plot, and character) Raffaello Matarazzo’s movie of the same title, Chains (1949), a story of motherly love and couple betrayal in a working-class family of a provincial town in Italy.26 Consistently, one of the two photoromances published in each issue of BF from the late 1940s to the early 1950s was set in Italy, in a low-income urban or rural environment, frequently in Southern Italy, and told stories of personal and social injustice, of forced emigration, of unwanted pregnancies, and of banditismo, featuring at least one scene of brutal violence, often a murder.27 The realist rather than escapist narratives of these BF photoromances recalled those of films such as Il lupo della Sila (Lure of the Sila, dir. Duilio Coletti, 1949), Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, dir. Pietro Germi, 1952), Tormento (Torment, dir. Raffaello Matarazzo, 1950), and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, dir. Giuseppe De Santis, 1950), featuring characters such as mothers, briganti (bandits), abandoned children, and unjustly accused wives. To bind them, the same “melodramatic imagination”—to use Peter Brooks’s definition, which brings to the surface the “moral occult” (the ethical dilemma)—expressed innocence, guilt, and repentance through the language of violence.28

BF’s convergence with cinema also had to do with production techniques, which set the magazine apart from other photoromances. In his analysis of the case of Grand Hotel, Ventrone argues that the photographer and the director were secondary to the writer, since shooting took place only after each episode was already completed in a storyboard. Based on the testimony of Director Matteo Macciò, Ventrone’s account contends that both the photographer and the director were not creatively intervening on the written text, but only dealt with practical aspects concerning the actors, lights, and so on. On the contrary, according to writer and director for BF Dante Guardamagna, production of a photoromance had much in common with that of a film, with the only difference being that characters did not move or speak.29 Scripts were structured according to scenes and characters; they included indications for direction (such as close-ups, long shots), mise-en-scène (interior/exterior), and photography (daylight/night time). However, the script was only the starting point for a visual text that was realized on the set and completed in the editing room. The director was in charge of composing the frame, giving indications to actors on how to express their lines, and even acting out the line for them. According to Guardamagna, “the idea was that readers received a printed film from us.”30

In fact, the photoromance is not a photographic rendition of a comic book, but it is also something other than a printed version of a film. As Guardamagna also indirectly confirmed in the interview, the ultimate product combined practices from multiple media (film, photography, comics): a set with rented furniture, both professional and nonprofessional actors, and the clapperboard; a day of work that produced between fifty and ninety shots; graphic designers in charge of writing dialogues over photographs (initially by hand) using a transparent sheet of paper over the grid, but also of retouching single images and creating photomontages. For each photo to be used, photographers could take up to twelve shots, which means a total of 150 to 800 photos per day (good, useful, needed) and shooting could last up to ten or twelve days. Approximately six hundred photos were selected for each script to be published over about six months.31 At the Mondadori Archives, the large number of negatives collected for each photoromance are grouped in packages of fifty photos, up to 800 for each photoromance. These also include several takes of the same shot, just slightly different in posture or composition and so-called negativi di riserva (extra negatives) or diversi (different) ones, some of which reveal crew members working with lights or other objects. One of the packages of negatives that I examined (for the photoromance “Donne tra le sbarre” [Women behind bars], published in 1959) presented some examples of photomontage, in which a cut image from one shot is superimposed on another. Possibly, this technique worked as a substitute for zooming in printing or, to put it another way, to create close-ups in post-production. In addition, looking at the original shots back to back with the printed version, it is possible to see how moving scenes that were difficult to render in still photographs could be recreated at the editing stage. For example, a car accident is reconstructed by editing long and medium shots taken at different times: first an image of people riding in a car, then a very long shot of the same car upside down in the street. Close-ups are then used to visualize the final scene from different point of views to instill some dynamism into the static shot. The performative aspect of photoromances is also evident in the script, and changes in graphic design functioned as a means to make them less wordy. While photoromances in the beginning included extensive captions and very little dialogue, the proportion progressively reversed during the 1950s (figure 1.1). Later on, makers of photoromance kept captions to a minimum, limiting verbal communication to dialogues (figure 1.2).

Stylistic choices speak of technological innovations. In 1949, Arnoldo and Giorgio Mondadori traveled to the United States looking for loans and tools. They came back to Italy with both, including a new Cottrel five-color offset printing press and a Champlain rotogravure press, which allowed better image quality.32 Within a few years, BF had moved from Novara to Verona, where the new Mondadori plant increased quality and output. From around the mid-1950s to 1966 (when the magazine transitioned from BF to BF Teletutto) transmedialization extended to the relatively new medium of television, in addition to radio and cinema. Because of its serial form, the photoromance was directly connected to the so-called sceneggiato (TV serial) since its inception in the mid-1950s, as well as the choice of literary classics to be used as narrative sources.33 In addition, photoromances based on original stories were shortened or prolonged according to ratings, similar to how ratings determine whether television series are renewed or ended. In the words of Guardamagna, “If readers did not like them [particular photoromances], they had to be cut, but if they did (and weekly sales established whether they were . . .), they should NEVER end. Or at least last longer.”34 For this purpose “we could extend an episode, with enlargements that took the typical page of six or eight photos to three and even going from episodes of four pages [tables] to three pages.”35 Given that Guardamagna’s testimony may or may not be reliable, generalization should not be based on it. However, in reading through several issues of BF, I noticed that some episodes are clearly “inflated”; the use of several close-ups can create an episode in which the plot does not really move forward but rather represents, for example, in one grid a single encounter between two people. More generally, Guardamagna introduces the question of whether or not the audience actively participated in the making of the magazine.

Knowing the Reader

So far, my reading has highlighted exclusively how cross-media strategies and business synergies functioned within the cultural system of representations and self-representations. I have discussed how BF converged literature, film, TV, and radio to make cultural products that engaged readers across multiple media channels with the goal of ensuring their loyalty. Readers were not only the target of these practices but also the subjects that fostered their development. In the early 1960s, in order to gather information on its readership, Mondadori Publishing commissioned the major statistical institute in Italy, Doxa, to complete a study on eight of its periodicals: BF, Epoca, Grazia, Arianna, Confidenze, Storia illustrata, il giallo Mondadori, and Topolino. Published in 1963, the study titled I lettori di otto periodici italiani showcases and analyzes data researchers collected by interviewing customers at newsstands (from April 22 to May 16, 1962) and subscribers (from June 10 to July 10, 1962). Here, I will only consider the data for BF readers (868 out of a cross-section of 6,349 respondents). This data includes information about readers’ purchasing power and ownership of durables such as cars and appliances, as well as about their reading practices and consumer behaviors (faithfulness, regularity, frequency, time for reading, keeping vs. borrowing/lending magazines, number of readers per copy, readings other than magazines, movie-going frequency, vacations). The results are framed in the study’s introduction by a statement regarding the “valore pubblicitario” (advertising value) of each magazine. According to this statement, the Doxa survey was conducted with the utmost scientific rigor to ensure precise, clear, and valuable information for advertisers seeking the best venues for their campaigns.36 For this reason, I argue that data included in the volume not only describes the readership but also sheds light on the publisher’s interests in its composition and expectations in order to foster business relations with advertisers and, at the same time, the magazine’s commercial success.

In 1962, BF’s buyers are almost exclusively women (92.6 percent).37 The image of the average female reader of BF that the survey established corresponds to the middle-class consumer who is the protagonist of the economic boom of the late 1950s to early 1960s. In fact, the same female middle-class consumer is also the main subject of the advertising campaigns published in BF. In conjunction with the increasing number of ads for beauty products and household items (as well as breast enlargement services, weight-loss programs, birth control methods, and more), the number of columns regarding fashion and household management increases in BF through the 1960s, thus feminizing the target reader according to traditional heteronormative models of gender. From the economic perspective, BF represents the average readership in the country with regard to durable goods, while readers of other magazines such as Grazia own durable goods in higher proportion with respect to the median Italian family. According to the survey results, almost half of the families purchasing BF have at least one person with an “occupazione fissa” (stable job), only a few of them have cars (15 percent) while most of them have a radio (74.3 percent), and about half own some appliances such as a refrigerator (42.2 percent) and a TV (38 percent). As stated in the volume: “[readers of BF] constitute a market that can absorb some or all appliances under consideration. Considering these percentages and at the same time the income bracket, it is possible to rationally plan campaigns to sell specific products, as a first or repeated purchase.”38 In fact, some data is collected to understand the projected condition of readers and their families, for example, asking whether there is an intention to buy furniture in the future or to make house renovations. Exactly 32 percent of BF readers say that they had such a plan and 32.5 percent of TV owners say that they had bought the appliance less than five years prior. The conclusion, according to Doxa, is that BF readers show signs of “the good path on which families are walking on their way to socio-economic elevation.”39

Documents collected in the Arnoldo Mondadori Archive at the Mondadori Foundation show the relevance of these results to the politics of BF. In 1964, Pedrocchi writes about BF readers in line with Doxa’s analysis with regard to Gigliola Cinquetti’s record that was released exclusively to BF readers by Mondadori’s own music label. According to Pedrocchi, sales were exceptional even though the record cost a “good 2000 lira”: “A rewarding experience since it demonstrates that among readers of the weekly magazine are those who have great purchase opportunities.”40 This letter is illuminating vis-à-vis the stereotypical image of BF readers that I discussed in the introduction: the so-called servette (little servants) who would be the target audience of the magazine were rather economically independent and ready to spend on entertainment. In fact, in the available correspondence, Pedrocchi comes across as mainly concerned with the fickleness of BF readers, not with their purchasing power.41 The Doxa survey also supported this position by showing that Italians were able to spend but were not exclusive in their choices. According to the data, 98.9 percent of BF readers are not subscribers but 86.1 percent read each issue faithfully (and more than two-thirds read each issue more than once), and while 81.2 percent did not read books, 50.1 percent read other photoromances. These nomadic readers fall into the category of consumers who may take their business elsewhere when dissatisfied with the product. Cinquetti’s record testifies to the effort to make readers feel privileged and thus valued customers by granting them access to exclusive products of Mondadori’s industries.

A sample of a survey distributed to BF readers by the publisher itself shows how important it was to monitor satisfaction and frustration among consumers.42 The survey included the following eleven questions:

1. Which photoromances do you like the most at the moment?

2. Do you like crime fiction and modern adventure photoromances?

3. Do you think that Bolero Film is better since the inclusion of a photoromance in color?

4. Would you like BF to publish a costume drama photoromance?

5. Among male characters that appear today, who do you like the most? And among the female ones?

6. Are you interested in song lyrics?

7. Are you interested in radio and tv listings?

8. Do you buy other magazines?

9. Do you work?

10. Are you a student?

11. Are you single?43

It is unfortunate that the Mondadori Foundation do not hold any copies of completed surveys or any collected data that could provide information on the results. The eleven questions themselves, however, are relevant to discuss editorial strategies. At first glance, the survey simply seems to assess readers’ preferences and demographics. A closer look reveals that questions clearly are intended to test two main strategies underway: developing cross-media content and experimenting with different genres. Questions 6 and 7 more specifically seek data on readers’ interests in media other than publishing, specifically, music, radio and television. To be noted song lyrics and radio and TV listings appeared in BF at the time of the survey; therefore, these questions can be interpreted as a way to probe customers’ satisfaction in these items. Furthermore, television (which in Italy consisted only of national public broadcasting, until the 1970s) had become increasingly important both as a form of entertainment in Italian society and as a subject of interest for BF to cover. In 1964, when the survey was distributed to readers, BF had recently expanded the number of pages dedicated to television and was casting TV celebrities in the photoromances, while proportionally reducing its coverage of cinema and film stars. Given that several TV shows were also music programs, and that singers appeared frequently on television and in TV advertisements, the survey’s attention to these media reflects certain changes in the magazine that needed to be tested. Questions 3 and 4 instead address innovations undertaken with regard to genres while shedding light on the implementation of practices that built on readers’ responses. In fact, a “action-photoromance” about a secret agent (Tom Dollar) featuring some pages in color had recently been introduced in the magazine; this venture may have been related to the success of the American James Bond movie saga (which began in 1962) or the national TV series The Adventures of Laura Storm (1965–1966), starring Lauretta Masiero as a journalist-detective and Oreste Lionello as her right-hand photographer.44 To be noticed, Tom Dollar would be later adapted for the big screen in a movie by the same title (Tom Dollar, 1967), a French-Italian joint production starring the same French actor (Maurice Poli) and directed by Frank Red (aka Marcello Ciorciolini).45

These questions are useful to understand how Pedrocchi perceived the magazine’s readership, whose level of sophistication was higher than in the average perception of BF consumers, derogatorily identified with the lower classes. In another letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, dated June 26, 1965, Pedrocchi expressed his concerns regarding customers’ frustrations due to the quality of paper, the number of photoromances published per issue, and the number of pages, with respect to the cost of one issue. In the conclusion, he shared his own frustration with Mondadori: “We cannot keep considering Italy a country in medieval conditions, with a small percentage of intellectuals and everyone else as savages. And Bolero proves that, since we lost readers after we promised (and did not maintain) great things when we hired the price from 70 to 72 lira (for 4 numbers), and Confidenze proves that because of the irresponsibility of its managers. Popular magazines are the most difficult to handle because they talk to an audience that remembers what was promised, who has demands, an audience that is by no means a creature of habit and, therefore, easier to abandon you.”46 A few weeks later, Pedrocchi sent another letter to Mondadori in which he complained about the latter and BF co-director Adolfo Senn neglecting readers’ expectations. In his words, “Luckily, I did not talk to my reader about the new paper, against your will and Dr. Senn’s. I sensed that, or better, my experience told me that, I would have lost my reputation. Today the publishing industry would have had a laugh about that.”47 Seemingly isolated in the company, which reflected the established notion of audiences’ passivity, Pedrocchi shared his frustrations on a few occasions with readers themselves in the pages of BF. For example, in a rebuttal to the accusation that BF was spreading propaganda in favor of voting “YES” at the referendum regarding the divorce law in 1974, he wrote: “Certain press believes that the Italian people consists of half-wit individuals, ready to change their political ideas even according to the wishes of a well-known Milanese actor. . . . Our friends and readers know that this is not true. I understand their outraged letters for the hideous slander and I understand also the harsh opinion on the credibility of certain press.”48

With these words, Pedrocchi expressed his editorial approach, which was to give complete support to readers’ opinions and recognition of their agency. Furthermore, Pedrocchi’s statement challenges the idea that photoromance fans lack rational skills and are blinded by their proximity to celebrities.

Interactivity, Participatory Culture, Consumerism

In this light, we can look at the different tactics by which Pedrocchi supported participatory culture to engage readers and sustain their loyalty. First of all, celebrification and celebrity culture were at the core of BF’s structure. TV personalities, singers, and film stars regularly appeared in columns about recent news, were featured in interviews, and even offered advice on every part of life, from housekeeping to love relationships. Frequently, the authors of the articles claimed that fans had commissioned the interview or asked for the advice, thus constructing the world of celebrities at the service of their fans. Moreover, consumers of BF were constantly offered the opportunity to become celebrities themselves: to audition for a part in a photoromance, to sign up for a music competition, or to send in their photos for consideration by a film producer. Eventually, however, BF defied the idea that the show business (and the film industry in particular) was the only or ultimate source of fame. Since the very first issue, the column “La posta di Ciak” (Ciak’s Mail) most clearly exemplified how BF was committed to helping fans get closer to their favorite celebrities, and even nurtured readers’ artistic aspirations, in some occasions, while also supporting the idea that the reward that came with consumer loyalty was much more valuable. Anonymous and knowledgeable, Ciak answers readers’ questions about film stars (including providing their mailing addresses), accepts requests for autographed pictures, and gives candid advice about readers’ own potential for stardom (as performers as well as writers). Upon request, Ciak (who identifies as a man) is willing to send manuscripts and photographs to Pedrocchi (or so he says); when he thinks that a reader does not have what it takes, he candidly rejects the request. When Ciak discourages readers’ aspirations, he does not do it because he does not trust their capabilities but because he does not seem to appreciate the glamour of the film industry very much. With the same skepticism of Luigi Malerba’s ironic portrayal of a female fan in Le lettere d’Ottavia (Ottavia’s Letters, 1956), Ciak’s bitter perspective paints the world of cinema as the place where young women are lured and betrayed.49 Unlike Malerba, however, Ciak does not satirize his female readers and their aspirations, but rather makes a point about the positive aspects of ordinary lives. In sum, in his view, readers have the potential to become stars but they are better off as fans. Above all, Ciak idolizes the BF community of readers, whom he calls propagandisti (promoters, literally “the propaganda-makers”). Issue after issue, he selects pictures that readers have mailed per his request: a group of male fans in Reggio; a young boy with his parents in Bari; a “beautiful propagandista” from Imperia; a group of “happy and enthusiast propagandisti of bolero film” from Milan; or from Sardinia, “five pretty and cheerful propagandiste di bolero.”50 In 1949, way before Andy Warhol’s oft-repeated quote “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (1968), Ciak already celebrated the notoriety that, in Graeme Turner’s words, “may or may not have arisen as a result of personal significant achievement.”51 From this perspective, Ciak’s campaign was forward-looking: the following year, the cover of the first issue of another Mondadori periodical, the tabloid Epoca (October 14, 1950) reinforced this point. Featuring a close-up of nineteen-year-old Liliana, a shop assistant in a Milanese ice-cream place, over the caption “Liliana, Italian girl,” the issue includes a photo-story that recounts her outing on Lake Como with her boyfriend. The text stated: “We choose Liliana and a Sunday afternoon on the lake because the ice-cream girl and her day off are part of daily life, and this is the magazine that tells your story, that comes looking for you in a crowd, picks out your face and brings it to the surface, in other words makes you a protagonist of the time.”52 What Epoca, “Ciak’s Mail,” and Neorealism shared, albeit the different settings, was the celebrification of ordinary life. In addition, “Ciak’s Mail” demonstrated that fandom was vital to turn the recognition of celebrity into a productive business. BF generated a community whose members could be proud rather than ashamed of liking photoromances, and thus more likely to transform from casual into loyal readers.

The case of the “Concorso Voci Nuove di Castrocaro Terme” (“New Voices Contest,” from now on, Castrocaro, created in 1957 and sponsored by BF since 1962) further supports the commitment to celebrifying readers, while revealing the link between this process and that of branding consumerism, at a different stage in the history of the magazine.53 Castrocaro was a contest for unknown singers with little or no experience, similar to contemporary reality shows such as American Idol.54 When BF became the official sponsor of the competition, the first to benefit were of course its loyal readers, who were invited to send their applications (in order to enter local auditions), but also to enter a contest with prizes such as a Lambretta motor scooter and a television.55 A few participants in this contest were selected and paired with a singer at Castrocaro and could hope to win their prize if the singer with whom they were matched won the competition. Again, BF was in charge of advertising not only Castrocaro but also the BF community and the privileges that came with its membership. In 1965, the Editorial Board published an article titled “Sei nostri lettori in gara a Sanremo” (Six of Our Readers Participate in Sanremo), claiming that six contestants in the national music festival that took place in Sanremo not only were previous participants of Castrocaro but also BF readers. “When these guys cut the application form out of BF [to participate to Castrocaro], they were totally unknown,” the article reads. “Today their names appear in the cast of the biggest song competition in the world.”56 Other media made evident that BF played an important role in turning ordinary boys and girls into celebrities, and that loyal readership was the means to success. In one episode of the newsreel series called Caleidoscopio Ciac, the commentator reveals the modest cultural, social, and economic background of Castrocaro’s contestants, who were also from different parts of Italy: Luciano Tomei from Naples, a student of music who reads philosophy; Anna Identici from Cremona, a clerk who likes to read poetry as much as comics; Anna Marchetti, a factory worker from Ferrara (same hometown as the famous singer Mina, the commentator points out); and the winner, Vittorio Inzaina, a bricklayer (according to the commentator) “whose life resembles a popular, tear-jerking novel.”57 At the end, the voice-over adds the stakes of the festival: “Thanks to Castrocaro and BF, the first moment of notoriety comes for one [the winner], which can turn into fame and, why not, into a full bank account.”58 The last point makes reference to the cash prize for singers, but also to those goods that readers could win if they entered the prize contest. In the sequence, a shot shows the list of names paired with the singers in the competition and the prize they could hope to win if their “idol” won.

Castrocaro winners, fans, and consumer culture are all thus connected in the process that brings fame to readers when they can sing but also, in any case, because they can buy. An interesting dramatization of this dynamic is in the photoromance “Caterina,” published in 1965, which also more specifically addresses the question of the celebrity status of the ordinary girl. The 1950 cover of Epoca featured an ordinary girl who was a shop-assistant but also a fiancée. Caterina works in a department store and is the only child of a single mother. In the narrative, her confrontation with a music celebrity (singer Bruno Filippini) questions the passivity of consumers, sketching a new model of femininity defined by her taste in popular culture and her freedom of choice in sentimental matters. This gender model and the character are perfectly inserted into a context of media convergence: Caterina listens to the same music as the youth starring in then-contemporary Italian movie musicals in which famous singers like Adriano Celentano and Mina often portrayed themselves (Caterina likes Celentano and rock and roll). Also called musicarelli, these romantic comedies starred singers who played their music in television advertisement and shows.59 Singers, products, and films appeared simultaneously in the pages of BF, which provided an entrance to a narrative world that extended across media platforms and was not necessarily accessed by fans in a strict chronological order. In fact, Caterina looks like Caterina Caselli, who participated in Castrocaro in 1963 (although eliminated) but was later discovered as a singer, in 1965 (when “Caterina” was published). In 1966, Caselli successfully performed at Sanremo the hit song “Nessuno mi può giudicare” (“Nobody Can Judge Me,” originally written for Celentano), also the title of a movie musical that came out the same year, in which she plays a shop assistant in a department store.60 The female protagonists in Nobody Can Judge Me and “Caterina” are close to each other insofar as they both embody a feminine type increasingly prominent in Italian society; not really an intertextual connection per se, as much as a symptom of a convergence culture in which successful narratives and fans’ demands contributed to transmedia storytelling and the migration of the same characters across platforms. The Caterina type falls in love but does not necessarily want to get married; she keeps her hair short but not her mouth shut, she flirts but is not a coquette, and she “does not want to be judged” (interestingly, the song was initially intended for a male singer, but was a success as soon as it was sung by a young woman). Caterina’s irreverence toward stereotypical models of femininity is shown in episode 19 when, while at work, she meets Filippini, who had won first place at Castrocaro in 1963 and participated for the second time in Sanremo just a few days before the episode was published. In fact, the cover of the same issue announces the publication of all the song lyrics from the competition, including Filippini’s melodic tune “L’amore ha i tuoi occhi” (Love Has Your Eyes). Extensive space is given to Castrocaro news, while an ad promotes the sale of records with all the Sanremo songs to be mailed directly to readers’ homes. The episode opens with an image of Filippini as he enters the department store where Caterina works and is welcomed by a crowd of tifosi (fans) wanting to buy his record and asking for his autograph. But while one of her colleagues, a blond girl named Susy who helps the singer get through the many requests, “is a masterpiece of initiative and vanity,” according to a caption, Caterina “keeps it to herself and ignores him.”61 Prompted by the singer, she admits that she does not like “little motifs, affected and bland,” but rather enjoys songs that are “truer,” with grit, and that can be more entertaining (such as those of Celentano) (figure 1.3).62 The scene provides readers with a model of femininity based on a woman who is confident in her social behavior and independent in her choices of consumption, but also proud of her condition as worker and not at all blinded by celebrity culture. In her conversation with Filippini, Caterina proudly states, “Work is work and must be taken seriously.” She adds, “I cannot stand them [singers] when they act like divas, when they think like they are God Almighty. There are many people more important than them!”63 Eventually, the episode concludes with a note on the impact that fans like Caterina can have on the industry. In fact, Filippini promises to write a new kind of song in the future, one that will be inspired by a girl like her.

Female Fans and the Powers That Be

The case of “Caterina” shows that media convergence (music + photoromance) refers to fans’ active participation as much as it does product promotion across media platforms (for example, Filippini’s record).64 Many other photoromances do the same by featuring singers as side characters in stories about aspiring female singers or female fans, similarly, as I mentioned, to the Italian-style musical, also functioning as both sources of entertainment and means to promote the artists. From a gendered perspective, it could be argued that the link between media convergence and consumerism can provide some agency, as portrayed also in “Caterina,” especially in a country like Italy where the government had a monopoly on television broadcasting and the Catholic Church exercised great control on the morality of both publishing and cinema. According to Sandra Falero, the idea of audience rights or “audience sovereignty,” which is usually referred to only in the context of contemporary digital participatory culture, could be traced back and connected “to larger political ideas about autonomy and power.”65 In other words, we can frame the previously mentioned strategies of engagement, promoted by the magazine, to the Italian context, in which political freedom and industrialization allowed working-class women to gain economic power, on the one hand, while continuities in social and gender dynamics limited their actual emancipation, on the other. Consider for example how, in the Doxa survey, more than 90 percent of buyers were women, while at the same time, more than 80 percent of respondents identified the man in the family as the head of the household. In face of these limitations, a sample reading of BF issues from the late fifties to the late sixties shows that BF defied traditional gender roles and sustained the modernization of social and sexual conduct.

According to Maurizio Cesari, photoromances followed the directives of the Christian Democratic government, whose information agency was in charge of controlling the press.66 In his view, the press was biased in defense of Catholic values and the politics of Christian Democracy, which especially addressed the new electorate of women: publishers sided with the government in repressing moral and social behaviors that could potentially destabilize its hegemony. Contrary to Cesari’s conclusions, my reading of BF suggests a different kind of alignment that favored the public over the national government. I am not claiming here that BF served the feminist cause of radical movements; however, if Cesari had actually browsed through its pages, he would have probably caught the nuances that are missing in his categorical judgment. In a way, given its history, Arnoldo Mondadori and his company continued to ambiguously thrive (as they did under Fascism) in line with the government and in favor of profit. From the unwed mothers of the late 1940s to the single working girl of the 1960s, women in photoromances do not conform to the Christian Democratic model of femininity, of motherhood and companionship, because of the ways in which they handle their sexual desires and behaviors. The so-called sexual revolution, in fact, as Dagmar Herzog demonstrates in his history of sexuality in Europe, was ambiguously fueled both by social movement activism and by consumerist culture and medical-technological inventions (i.e., commercial products), such as the birth control pill.67 In this sense, to highlight the magazine’s progressive attitude with regard to sexuality does not necessarily mean to claim its radical political position, but rather to understand its modernity. Through the decades, columns became increasingly open to discussing female sexuality and to promoting, rather than holding back, the tide of modernization. It is fair to say that the individuals in charge of these columns acted as experts and were generally conservative in their understanding of gender roles. Indeed, female characters in the photoromances as much as the authors of weekly columns supported aspirations for pure love to be crowned by marriage, which was still the ideal accomplishment for women. However, photoromances, columns, and advertisements also promoted a model of woman whose sexuality was not denied but rather embraced as empowering: efficient at home, this ideal woman of BF also achieved her professional goals; she was desired by men and used beauty to her advantage.

These seeming contradictions are rather characteristic of a gender discourse developed in Western European Democracies in conjunction with processes of socioeconomic modernization and with the development of the neoliberal discourse of self-improvement. According to Angela McRobbie, the “double entanglement” of this “postfeminist” discourse consists in “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life, with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations.”68 Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Italy’s transformation from a predominantly rural country into a modern industrial one was grounded in the reestablishment of traditional gender roles in the family, as part of a return-to-order process felt to be necessary to solve the economic and social crisis caused by World War II. At the same time, socioeconomic modernization meant increased liberties for women, both in terms of economic power and sexuality. Rather than unequivocally supporting the project of nation-building, BF gives increasing space throughout these decades to characters like Caterina, a single girl, and introduces new columns that engage in conversations with readers about their sexual conduct and love aspirations, in conjunction with advertisements that pitched the essential products for the modern woman such as the seductive shampoo, the efficient washing machine, and the powerful bra. In this respect, the case of BF fits within a feminine culture that Hilary Radner has defined by the tendency “to evoke choice and the development of individual agency as the defining tenets of feminine identity.”69 This culture, also called by Robert Goldman “commodity feminism” in reference to American advertising of the 1970s and 1980s, can then be understood as a “set of practices and discourses” focused on (1) reclaiming girlishness “as a new ideal promising continual change and self-improvement a sign of individual agency” and (2) rewriting sexual availability of women as a form of personal empowerment.70 While Radner argues that commodity feminism (which she calls “neo-feminism”) constitutes the main discourse articulated in the girly films (chick flicks) of the last twenty years, I claim that BF reproduced a similar paradigm in its targeting of female audiences, however, complicated by the contradicting discourses of gender and sexuality, as explained in McRobbie’s analysis, as well by the conflicting positions peculiar to Italian society, still fundamentally patriarchal despite the changes.

The magazine page is the space where such contradictions and conflicts are visualized in the relationship between texts and photos, as well as between different media sources. For example, in a page of a 1963 issue, a woman’s letter in the column “Chi sono?” (Who Am I?), a photograph inserted in the letter, and a large advertisement at the bottom of the page speak of sexual availability as a form of empowerment that could be both beneficial and damaging to a woman (figure 1.4). The column “Who Am I?” is in itself an interesting object of study. Agony aunts were a typical presence in women’s magazines where, as Milly Buonanno claims, “the commercial project and the educative project are admirably fused together.”71 In “Who Am I?,” counseling is offered by “a bit wiser and more expert friend” named Enrico, who is at the same time conservative and progressive.72 This coexistence of traditional gender norms and modern behaviors, which Buonanno does not consider, are in fact (as I previously explained) a defining feature of the pedagogical model offered in Bolero Film.73 Enrico’s answers vary from the appraisal of true love to statements of emancipation such as “your partner, not your boss” and, in response to a man’s letter, “a woman is a free subject and complex as you [man] are, not an object for your whims.”74

In the letter I consider, titled “Il solito onore” (The Usual Honor), a twenty-two-year-old Neapolitan woman writes that she is enraged with her boyfriend (who is twenty-three) because she is pregnant but he does not want to know anything about it.75 If he wants to leave her, she writes that she would be ready to kill him in order to defend her honor. The cultural, social, and legal issue hinted at in the letter is the so-called delitto d’onore (honor killing), protected under the Italian law, which gave only a light punishment to a man who killed his wife (daughter or sister) because he discovered her “illegittima relazione carnale” (illegitimate sexual relations).76 The delitto d’onore is also the center of the film comedy Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, dir. Pietro Germi, 1962) as a symptom of backwardness and the object of satire.77 In the film, the news about a woman who killed her husband because of his unfaithfulness inspires the protagonist to do the same with his wife; the bitter irony lies in the fact that the Italian law understood the murderer exclusively as masculine and did not provide for the case in which the killer was a woman. A few years after the previously mentioned letter was published in BF, another movie titled La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with the Pistol, dir. Mario Monicelli, 1968) would tell the same story of a woman wishing to kill the man who took her virginity. Also a comedy, The Girl with the Pistol interprets the social reality by showing the contrast between the anachronism of honor and the woman’s emancipated character.

Fictional representations in comedies, Italian style, are satirical expressions of Italian society that aim at critically unpacking its anachronisms. While characters in these films are verisimilar, in their comedic form their stories narrowly convey a masculine perspective on issues of female sexual conduct.78 Like Divorce Italian Style and The Girl with the Pistol, the letter in “The Usual Honor” engages with the same topic of honor in a serious tone, which is not only a matter of generic conventions. This is better explained by considering how the experience of the Neapolitan woman and reader of BF was not a unique case, not only privately but also in public debate. In 1959, Gabriella Parca, a writer for Sogno and Bolero Film who was also in charge of a letter column in other photoromance magazines, Luna Park (Carnival) and Polvere di stelle (Star Powder), edited a selection of women’s letters from a sample of eight thousand that she received throughout her career, publishing them in the volume Le italiane si confessano (Italian Women Confess, [1959] 1966). As testimony to the pervasive relevance of honor in the everyday lives of Italian women, a distinct section in this collection is dedicated to the “prova d’amore” (love proof), meaning, a man’s request to have premarital sex. In the letters, the man usually abandons the woman after she has agreed to his request and had sex with him, as in “The Usual Honor.” The typical double standard to which women were subjected (premarital relations as both a duty and a sin) makes the particular interpretation of this situation (i.e., the woman being the subject rather than the object of the honor killing) not a laughable cliché but a desperate gesture.

In his answer to the letter published in “Who Am I?,” Enrico begins regressively by blaming the woman for her carelessness; he argues that she should have thought about her honor earlier. Then, acting as the “wiser friend” Enrico addresses the question of revenge and argues that honor is a symptom of an old and anachronistic way of thinking, which damages the image of Southern Italy. His answer sides with the educational message at the core of Divorce Italian Style and of Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964), also directed by Germi and a sort of sequel to the first film, in its critique of Southern Italian culture and plot centering on a premarital relationship not honored by marriage. A still from Seduced and Abandoned is printed below Enrico’s answer in the magazine as an illustration, with a caption that states how the film was “ispirato all ‘onore,’ come inteso in Italia” (inspired by “honor,” as it is understood in Italy). Seduced and Abandoned had not been released yet when the letter was published by BF; thus, on the one hand, one may wonder whether the photo and perhaps even the letter are only a stunt to advertise the movie. On the other hand, these two texts together make visible the intertextual structure of the magazine’s page, completed by the advertisement printed at its bottom. In the ad, the young actress promoting a beauty product vaguely resembles Stefania Sandrelli, starring in both of Germi’s films. Shot as she leans against the bed with her shoulders uncovered, with the blurred image of a man (completely dressed in a suit) behind her, this photo lures readers with the glamour of the same behavior that “Who Am I?” scolds and Seduced and Abandoned turns into comedy. Seduction is visually expressed as well as linguistically conveyed in the slogan that says “in your hair, a call that says . . . love me [amami].79” “Amami,” the name of the shampoo promoted in the ad, is the desired tool of desire that will allow the woman to get the man she is supposed to reject, according to patriarchal rules, as in a famous scene in The Girl with the Pistol, when the female protagonist has finally convinced the man with whom she is temporarily sharing the apartment to make a move, only to violently reject him and say, in her defense: “a man must try, a woman must defend herself.”

By the late 1960s, right around the time when BF was renamed Bolero Teletutto, contradictions between the traditional ideal of honor and the modern imperative of choice are eventually smoothed to more openly support women’s sexual emancipation against legal and social backwardness.80 In the 1968 photoromance “Article 560 Concubinage,” for example, cohabitation is presented in a positive light, despite being forbidden by law, and having a premarital relationship is also portrayed as a fair option. In a dialogue between a female character who had sexual experiences before the marriage (with a man other than her husband) and her mother, the latter goes as far as to vindicate women’s rights to have pleasure and to attack men for their customary abuse of power. “Be sure that when he was in Germany he had his adventures,” the mother says to her (the man in question was an emigrant in Germany when the “illegitimate” sexual encounter happened). “And so? Men are allowed anything: they can do their business and poor women must stay subjugated to wait that they decide to do what’s right!”81 Most relevantly, the fictional representation of sexual emancipation finds resonance in readers’ experiences, for example, in the “true stories” told by Franca Antonini but “from the live voice of a reader” and published about two years earlier.82 In one of these stories, titled “Frigid by Mistake,” Antonini describes a woman who overcame her sexual problems by openly discussing them with her husband; while another, titled “The True Frigid,” debates the impact of past experiences, education, and repression of female sexuality. Antonini does not come across as feminist in her interpretations of readers’ stories, and her perspective on their experiences is quite conservative (she at some point sings the praises of virginity). At the same time, the column does acknowledge the rights of women to a satisfying sexual relationship (although still within marriage) and the uniqueness of female sexual desire at a time when frigidity was a common stigma. Recognizing this right, the “true stories” find correspondence in a product advertised on another page in the same issue: a contraceptive system, based on a natural method and approved by the Catholic Church, which will allow women to have children only when they want them, “to safeguard the happiness of your married life.”83 In sum, the various components of the magazine (photoromances, columns, and advertisements) converge to construct an ambivalent but consistent picture of Italian women.

In conclusion, while the actual degree of readers’ participation in the making of the magazine is hard to measure, my analysis shows that through links between texts within the issues and by means of connections across media platforms, BF casts their readers as subjects of representation as much as objects of study. Whether the true stories told in the series in fact really happened is not possible for us to say with certainty, the same way that readers’ letters could be (and probably were) edited before being published in “Who Am I?” What is more relevant here is that these columns make a point about the value of such contributions, about the fact that their choices and demands mattered (especially those of women). Further, these columns cannot be understood apart from the photoromances when drawing some conclusions with regard to the engagement of the latter with their audiences. To consider photoromances as tools of domination and indoctrination not only means to dismiss the evident involvement of readers as fans, but also to overlook the actual dynamic structure of the magazine, in which each tool of communication intertexts with the other. Ultimately, the success of BF was determined not only by how much readers liked the stories and the characters of photoromances, how photography could attract their attention, and how writing could capture their imagination. The appeal of photoromances also lay in their structure of media franchise, and as such they need to be studied in order to understand their cultural and social relevance.