Memory Redux: The foibe on Italian Television

This article argues that the overwhelming success of the television drama Il cuore nel pozzo (Alberto Negrin, 2005) signals a shift in the conception of national history and identity in the Italian popular imagination. In conjunction with Negrin’s earlier film Perlasca: un eroe italiano (2002), the film can be read as a calculated and politically motivated attempt to re-code the memory of the Second World War as one of heroism and shared victimhood. Ultimately, Il cuore nel pozzo forms part of the broader movement to establish the foibe as the ‘Italian Holocaust’, deflecting attention away from the crimes of Fascism. The crucial difference between the two films is that Perlasca is based on the real historical person of Giorgio Perlasca, whereas the characters in Il cuore nel pozzo are purely fictional and their story is merely set against a specific historical backdrop. The film nevertheless makes various explicit and implicit claims to historical veracity, for example the interpolation of ostensibly documentary footage, which, however, turns out to be a fabrication. The intrusion of this documentary idiom into this fictional representation in fact mirrors the ongoing campaign to superimpose a fictional narrative on the historical record more generally in contemporary Italy.