When Mona Lisa smiled enigmatically from the cover of the Italian
magazine Epoca in 1957, she gazed out at more than three million
readers. As Emma Barron argues, her appearance on the cover is
emblematic of the distinctive ways that high culture was integrated into
Italy's mass culture boom in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when popular
appropriations of literature, fine art and music became a part of the
rapidly changing modern Italian identity. Popular magazines ran weekly
illustrated adaptations of literary classics. Television brought opera
from the opera house into the homes of millions. Readers wrote to
intellectuals and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Thomas Mann and
Salvatore Quasimodo by the thousands with questions about literature and
self-education. Drawing upon new archival material on the demographics
of television audiences and magazine readers, this book is an engaging
account of how the Italian people took possession of high culture and
transformed the modern Italian identity.