Contemporary French cinema returns to Italy and will be featured in Rome at the Nuovo Sacher Cinema and at the Institut français Centre Saint-Louis from April 7 to 11. This link between the diverse cinematic cultures of the two European countries will allow French-speaking enthusiasts to take advantage of an opportunity to expand their cultural horizons. All information on the event in Italy is available at https://www.institutfrancais.it/#/ . In Rome, as previously reported, the locations for this event are listed at this link https://www.institutfrancais.it/roma/rendez-vous-festival-del-nuovo-cinema-francese-roma-2 . There are several public transport options to get to the cinema https://www.sacherfilm.eu/ and the https://www.ifcsl.com/centre-saint-louis/rendez-vous-xvi-edizione#/ from my B&B, and both take about 40 minutes.

In Turin, in 1848, Giovanni Botero and Felice Govean founded the “Gazzetta del Popolo” (People’s Gazette), a newspaper that represented a novelty in the publishing panorama of the peninsula. It was a daily newspaper, with the main morning news, designed to attract a popular readership, low-priced and in a small format, with lots of news and simple, clear language, even in the comments. It was in line with the political current of the time: advanced, anti-clerical liberalism. In Milan, the “Corriere della Sera” dominated the scene with a new publisher who did not originate from the business world of publishing: Benigni Crespi. With him, so-called “impure” entrepreneurs entered this sector, that is, those coming from other sectors of the economy and who were not interested in making profits from newspaper sales, but above all in exercising economic and political influence on the country’s ruling class; in fact, Crespi was an entrepreneur in the textile sector. At the beginning of the 1900s, the political struggle developed along two currents and was also supported by newspapers: the right, later defined as historical, and the left. In this context, a new factor emerged: the government’s attempt to influence publishing, with legal and extralegal interventions, in order to seek consensus among public opinion in favor of the activities carried out by the executive. The attempt by the Prime Minister, General Luigi Pelloux, to muzzle publishing with a specific decree failed on April 5, 1900, due to the lack of support from many constitutional liberals such as Zanardelli and Giolitti. The political climate changed, and liberal-leaning newspapers emerged with a strengthened prestige. Now, even in Italy, the press was seen as the fourth estate, even if the exercise of freedom of the press and the independence of newspapers still faced many constraints; and it is precisely the “Corriere della Sera” that gives this indication with the arrival in June 1900 of the new director Luigi Albertini, who in contrast with the director Oliva publishes an article contrary to the government policy of the time. His intuition proves him right, as the political events that will follow will confirm his intuitions allowing him to direct the reins of the newspaper. Maurizio.