Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science


 3104/15 | Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science

1 Paola Valentini 
paola.valentini@unifi.it

1 AGAS Department of History, 
Archaeology, Geography, Art and 
Performance Arts, 
University of Florence, Italy

Society in colour: 
Italian television and 
the switch to colour 

While Italy was proudly celebrating the advent of 
its own television system on 3 January 1954 and 
the first official broadcasts were starting to go 
out, at around the same time, the United States 
saw the arrival of colour television. Indeed, in 
December 1953, the Federal Communications 
Commission (FCC) approved the standard 
for colour television set out by the National 
Television System Committee (the same one 
that established the 525 line standard in 1941). 
The NTSC colour television standard was chosen 
for its versatility over other similar experiments, 
including its CBS rival, since its broadcasts were 
perfectly compatible with the black-and-white 
receivers which were widespread at the time. 
While Italy stood out for black and white, in mid-
January 1954, colour television was authorised 
to operate commercially in the United States, and 
the analogue colour standard made its entrance 
on screen. It was then quick to be adopted in 
Canada, South Korea, Japan and many other 
countries, and would remain in place up until 
the arrival of the ATSC Digital system in 2009. 
Italy, however, officially seemed to have to wait 
until 1977.

1. POLITICS AND 
    THE COLOUR EXPERIENCE ITALY

In 1965, a RAI studio in Rome was set up with 
three Colour Television RCA TK40 cameras 
and a colour TK40 telecine [1-2]. This was the 
start of the first “technical broadcasting tests”, 
while elsewhere in Europe, Britain, France 
and Germany – albeit with an eight-year delay 
compared to the United States – introduced 
colour television broadcasting in 1967. In Italy, 
however, the process came to an abrupt halt, 
and only seemed to fully open up again on 1 
February 1977 with the official launch of colour 
broadcasting. The study of colour television, 
which is entirely overlooked in Italy, is often 
merely limited to accounts of the (political) 
causes of this delay, which fail to deal with its 
full complexity. In Italy, this 

“continuous succession and interweaving of 
speeding up and slowing down, of cutting-
edge experiments and prolonged periods 
stagnation”

is not uncommon and, according to Peppino 
Ortoleva, appears somewhat to be a peculiarity 
of Italian history of telecommunications. Indeed, 

at the very time when television may have 
seemed to be behind, in 1970, Italy held the 
record – together with Germany – for the first 
direct distance dialing [3]. The switch to colour 
television in Italy conceals something more 
complex, which cannot be put down merely 
to technological developments. It is a complex 
story which is very much still to be written, the 
main aspects of which will be outlined below.
Often the delay in Italy is associated with the 
battle over the standards running through the 
world history of colour. It began in the United 
States, where the choice of system, despite 
becoming the matrix for its successors, was by 
no means a painless process. Yet, the contest 
was especially fierce in Europe, where there 
was clash between two systems, PAL (Phase 
Alternation Line) and SECAM (Séquentiel 
Couleur à Mémoire), between two powers 
(Germany and France), between two political 
and expansionist concepts, and indeed between 
two opposing worldviews [4]. Nonetheless, the 
impression in Italy was that the late arrival of 
colour was only the result of uncertainty over the 
standard. Accordingly, the final move to opt for 
PAL, approved by the Ministry on 5 April 1975, 
did not create any particular controversy or 
backlash in newspapers, where the news was 
reported in a cut and dry way. This is despite the 
fact – which has never been properly brought 
to light – that this decision not only threw out 
the French standard, but the entire Italian ISA 
system (Suppression Alternation Identification) 
patented in 1972 by the Turin-based company 
Indesit.
Indeed, what had been occurring in Italy took the 
form of a confusing but lively political debate, 
more than an economic-industrial matter. Any 
attempt to untangle it is extremely difficult, as it 
often used as an opportunity to renew (and decide 
how to renew) the expiring television monopoly, 
a battle more of principle than substance, more 
of ideals than politics or economics. The picture 
is as hazy as the approach and stance adopted 
by the television phenomenon itself, between 
“empty and inane anti-capitalist leftism” and “over-
indulgence in crass consumerism”, as stated in 1977 
by Ugo La Malfa, one the fiercest opponents of 
colour [5]. What is remarkable when reviewing 
the newspapers’ coverage of colour is the 
disconnect between the theoretical discussion 
on television and the path it has taken. In 1972, 
in the wake of the widespread Eurovision colour 
broadcasts on other foreign channels, RAI 
decided, on an experimental basis, to broadcast 
the Munich Olympics in colour, alternating – 
somewhat paradoxically – the SECAM and 



32 Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science | 04/15  

PAL standards. As soon as news was given 
of this initiative by the Italian Government in 
early August, all newspapers – including those 
which were left-wing and traditionally almost 
indifferent to what they considered to be a mere 
and useless appliance – devoted a great deal 
of space to the story and to the debate around 
colour television. The minute-by-minute report 
of the ups and downs in the political reception 
of this decision by the Ministry of Posts and 
Telecommunications follows a script that would 
be repeated for five years. “Waste”, “unnecessary 
expense” and “distortion” in the face of Italy’s crisis 
and real needs, were the most frequently used 
arguments, together with – something that was 
perhaps the most accurate premonition given 
what would take place at the end of the decade – 
an attempt to make people fear colour television 
as a “dangerous tonic”, a glare and mirage of an 
economic miracle that was now impossible [6]. 
More than the boycott of vehicle manufacturers, 
or than the Italian Communist Party’s invectives 
against the persistent misinformation of 
television now in colour, what emerges from the 
news reports of the time is the depiction of an 
Italian society where colour was already a reality 
for much of the country: 

“consumers in the north [...] already have 
colour TV sets: those in the Lombardy 
and Piedmont area are served by Swiss 
TV from Lugano, those around Liguria and 
Tuscany receive French TV programmes 
[Telemontecarlo], and those in Adriatic areas 
capture Yugoslav broadcasts [Tele Koper]” 
[7]. 

Within a year, the actual framework becomes 
clearer: the extraordinary measures put in place 
on 22 November 1973 to address the oil crisis 
directly associated television with the politics of 
austerity, and the “dangerous tonic” was defeated, 
putting an end to Italy’s experiments in colour. 
Policy imposed black and white (as well as a 
compulsory silence as the small screen was 
required to be turned off early); darkness fell 
upon Italian cities, where shop windows and 
signs were turned off and public lighting was 
halved.
There was already, however, a growing 
relationship between colour and the viewer. 
Indeed, whether directly or indirectly, colour 
made a significant contribution to stabilising 
the television picture in Italy. How the television 
picture was experienced by viewers in its first 
twenty years is extremely interesting. At least 
in Italy, the economic expenditure of mobile 
external units set up for live broadcasting and 
the poor performance of radio links used to 
transmit the signal to the production centre, 
meant that, from the outset, television filming 
was carried out with film stock and Arriflex 
cameras, which were much more manageable 
than the bulky “backpacks” for the magnetic 
recorder of portable cameras, and were often 
preferred by operators with a background in 

film. Therefore, the base photographic image, 
albeit converted electronically, remained for a 
long time – at least until the mass spread of 
U-Matic technology introduced by Sony in 1971 
but becoming massively widespread in RAI in 
the second half of the 1970s. This technology 
became the workhorse of the first private 
networks – the standard for filming not only 
documentaries and news reports, but services 
including the much-loved sports coverage, 
starting, for example, with the football match 
summary. Moreover, when TV serials opened up 
to the outdoors (being initially made entirely live 
in the studio using small models and effects), 
they opted for the more flexible film cameras, 
mixing cinema film and other entirely electronic 
footage with telecine. It is not easy to establish, 
in this era of craftsmanship, whether what 
was in play was a consolidated practice or a 
particular aesthetic choice of the producers 
and directors. For instance, already in L’isola 
del tesoro (1959), Anton Giulio Majano uses film 
to show, in just a few minutes, a pirate falling 
from a brig (entirely rebuilt in studio) in the real 
waters of Lake Fogliano. Conversely, in Il mulino 
del Po (1963), Sandro Bolchi shoots in film the 
famous film credits superimposed over the 
flowing river, while to achieve the famous flood, 
she chooses to flood studio 3 in Milan. What is 
certain, however, is that the eye of the viewer 
perceives, with some degree of clarity, the 
difference in texture between the two images, 
which opposes the above-mentioned scenes, 
as well as the medium close-ups of newscasts 
with recorded services and an entirely different 
lighting distance [8].
Colour increases this ontological genetic 
instability of the television picture, which the 
general “overflow”, so to speak, is not fully able to 
conceal; in actual fact, it is fuelled by the external 
environment. First, the viewer’s experience starts 
to bring about an interaction between the black-
and-white television pictures and their colour 
print counterparts. The advent of television 
runs parallel to the revival of the rotogravure, 
characterised by photojournalism and colour 
pages, such as in Epoca; in magazines with a 
greater focus on the television world, colour 
still seemed to interact directly, supplementing 
or perhaps attempting to overtake the small 
screen. For instance, in 1962, “Bolero Film” 
accompanies a service on Canzonissima with 
an array of colour shots, half a page large, on 
the ballet and costumes worn by Mina in the 
episode aired that week [9]; at the same time, 
the weekly publication Successo, presented an 
unusual interview between the famous singer 
and Luchino Visconti, accompanying the text 
not only with black-and-white feature of the 
restaurant encounter between the two, but also 
with several shots of Mina on the set, as Lina 
Cavalieri, during the making of a Carosello for 
Industria Italiana della Birra (figures 1-2) [10]. 
The relationship between the text in black and 
white and the paratext in colour also relates to 
cinema, where it was not uncommon for black-



 3304/15 | Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science

and-white film to clash with the colour of flyers 
or posters (such as L’avventura, Michelangelo 
Antonioni, 1960, or Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Luchino 
Visconti, 1960). Nevertheless, film paratexts 
now have a narrative or symbolic relationship 
with the film subject, representing a form of 
novelisation. For this very reason, the preferred 
choice was for illustration, such as in the famous 
posters of Carlo Campeggi or Angelo Cesselon, 
and where the film frame is used, the image 
opts for pseudo-toning change or strong colour 
backgrounds charged with symbolism. Whereas, 
in the case of colour television paratexts, the 
relationship seems to be of a calligraphic 
and didactic nature with both a “faithful” use 
of colour and, at the same time, the powerful 
performance of four-colour coated paper, which 
becomes an emblem of the post-war “universe of 
coloured objects” [11]. As such, the colour image 
seems to be a complementary experience to 
black-and-white television. The above example 
of Mina is not accidental: the significance of 
clothing and fashion, make-up and disguise is 
an essential part of constructing this character, 
and the periodical’s images not only make the 
viewer dream of lavish dressing tables, but help 
to complete the feel of the scene.
Nonetheless, through its relationship with 
paratexts, colour also shows a television picture 
which is far removed from that commonly-
projected window on the world: a manufactured 
and unstable image, which at the time in 
Italy, was incomplete and, therefore, awaiting 
integration

2. COLOURING REALITY: 
    SPORT AND GAMES SHOWS

In 1978, on the pages of Corriere della sera, 
Luca Goldoni remarked: 

“Today, Italy’s television unity is a past 
memory, we have now returned to the 
Municipalities and Signorias. Every district 
has its own private antenna; people no 
longer converse on the train, but rather just 
brag about who gets the most channels. If 
two travellers realise that they have both 
seen the same programme the night before, 
they embrace one another” [12].

The commercial sale of colour TV sets led to 
the spread of the remote control, which came 
included with all of them, and the transition to 
colour coincided with the widest proliferation 
of private and commercial broadcasters and 
with the practice of “zapping” [13]. However, as 
mentioned above, for some time, viewers did not 
all have the same perception of the television 
picture, so much so that, in Italy, it somewhat 
questioned – or made into a reconstruction – 
that sense of immediacy and of living nature 
that would would immediately characterise it. 
The perspective on colour shows a complex 
and protean television picture, which was far 
from that mere framework or window onto the 

world, that would only be fuelled by the meaning 
constructed by the live coverage from the late 
1970s.
The relationship and interference between 
the television picture in black and white and 
paratexts in colour soon came together with an 
audiovisual text identity, where the colour system 
varied according to its communication channel. 
The crisis and need to renew RAI’s production, 
leading to a close dialogue with cinema [14], 
which once again would be over-simplistic to 
dismiss as a generic “transition to film”. In actual 
fact, it was a very complex situation both in its 
causes and its consequences: from the inability 
to dub with magnetic tape, thereby excluding 
this option for large international co-productions 
(L’Odissea, Franco Rossi, 1968), through to the 
choice between 35 mm (La strategia del ragno, 
Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970 or I clowns, Federico 
Fellini, 1970) or “inflated” 16 mm (L’Orlando 
furioso, Luca Ronconi, 1975).  The question of 
colour – whose mere adoption was the result 
of various and complex causes – has also been 
addressed with an equally simplistic approach 
and cannot be reduced to how close the writer 
was to the world of television. Whilst the choice 
of black and white in Francesco d’Assisi (1967) 
by Liliana Cavani may be traced back to her 
previous television reports, this is not the case 
of Leandro Castellani who, despite also being 
an exponent of television reporting, is motivated 
– as he himself acknowledged – by the latest 
developments of the American Cinéma vérité 
and its different use of black and white for 
his Le cinque giornate di Milano (1971). At this 
stage, colour had a fundamental importance 
which one must begin to reconsider. Firstly, the 
television picture continued to find its colour 
elsewhere. Often our memory fails us and we 
tend to forget that the greatest successes, such 
as Le avventure di Pinocchio by Luigi Comencini 
(1972), and the most daring experiments, like 
the aforementioned Furioso by Ronconi, were 
seen at the time in black and white. Yet, we also 
tend to forget that our colour perception of these 
works is not so much due to the fact that they 

Figure 1 (left) – Photograph of the set 
of Carosello by Industria Italiana della 
Birra (in Successo, March 1962, p. 
63).

Figure 2 (right) – Part of the television 
frame of Carosello by Industria Italiana 
della Birra



34 Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science | 04/15  

were aried in colour in following decade, but 
because of the concurrent availability of colour 
in cinema theatres: La strategia del ragno was 
aired on Sunday 25 October 1970 but gained 
its censorship certificate on 6 October the 
following year, embarking on an autonomous life 
of film; at a shorter distance apart, Comencini’s 
Pinocchio, aired in April 1972, hit the screens of 
major cities in August. In this period of revival 
of television narratives, things become more 
complicated when widening our scope to the 
above-mentioned foreign broadcasters in the 
Italian language. We might narrow it down to 
one case in point: from the 3 October 1971, the 
RAI viewer was able to see UFO in black and 
white, a great international success from the 
British channel ITV, whose episodes were aired 
in colour in Italian-speaking Switzerland the year 
before under the title Minaccia dello spazio, which 
could be received in a large part of Italy. That’s 
not all: given its success, the producer of the 
the television series, Kent, made feature films 
by assembling scenes from “Swiss” TV series 
in colour, making it finally possible to show 
everyone in colour the Fuchsia-haired female 
protagonists or the futuristic base of the SHADO. 
It was not by chance that the first of these films, 
Allarme rosso… attacco alla Terra! (1973), was 
touted as “a great colour film that you’ll never see 
on TV”.
Last but not least, one can see how colour 
became a central element through a correct 
and thorough understanding of these particular 
hybrids, these products of “cinema-television” 
where the co-occurrence of film and television 
material – seen in early TV soaps – becomes 
an integral part of the text and subject matter 
and, once again, survives the apparent 
homogenisation caused by telecine. Indeed, the 
factors at play are not only the clash between 
cinema and television with different areas of 
competence in terms of viewing, or the role of 
the frame and its relationship between the big 
and small screen, but also the duality of light 
and colour between cinema and television. The 
latter is the result of the particular interplay in 
television between chrominance and luminance 
signals (used for the brightness of the image 
which is, in fact, the black-and-white signal) 
[15]. This aspect is well-known to the great 
cinematographers, who often work on these 
productions, such as Vittorio Storaro, pushing the 
boundaries of film photography or breaking that 
of television, devoid of strong tonal contrasts.
Colour television was yet to triumph in the wake 
of audiovisual narratives and RAI’s increasingly 
sought-after twinning with cinema, which 
– as caustically observed in 1977 by Lietta 
Tornabuoni – was turning RAI into “an institute 
of historical and nostalgic studies”, but saw victory 
with a completely unexpected area of the state 
monopoly: sports. The regular broadcasts of the 
Yugoslav network Tele Capodistria in full colour 
(since 6 May 1971) not only attracted viewers 
with cartoons or TV series, but also through the 
European coverage of major sports events. The 
viewer alternated and soon migrated to watch 

the winter Olympic Games in Sapporo (1972) 
on the Istrian channel, being able to see Gustav 
Thöni win gold in the giant slalom with his yellow 
skis as the Italian flag was raised triumphantly 
for the awards ceremony. The experience would 
be repeated more often, with the Olympics in 
Munich, the FIFA World Cup in West Germany 
(1974), the European Football Championship 
(1976) and the Olympics in Montreal (1976). 
Likewise, private broadcasting began in colour 
(reflected in the broadcaster GBR’s yellow, blue 
and red initials). The Rome-based broadcaster 
later gained international renown for its 
footage during the kidnapping of Moro, gaining 
authorisation to enter stadiums and provide live 
coverage in colour of those games where state 
television would only be able to maintain some 
degree of appeal thanks to the replays with Carlo 
Sassi in Domenica sportiva. Through sport, colour 
provided “real” coverage, with the emblematic 
example of the Sanremo festival: in 1973, the 
final would be televised by Eurovision in colour 
but could only be captured on foreign television 
and not by RAI repeaters; the following year a 
fierce TeleNapoli would offer all three events in 
colour.
Soon after the entry into force of the official 
state colour television, the dichotomy of a 
picture whose artifice became exposed by 
colour was finally over, and the colour television 
was proven to be a key element for the success 
of the television picture as a “window onto the 
world”. Colour became the central feature when 
constructing the television picture, which finally 
displays that supposed transparency which will 
becomes one of its key elements.
Following the dissatisfaction of its audience 
(although one might take the foreign example 
where the second international French Channel 
ORTF chose the opening of the Winter Olympics 
from Grenoble on 1 October 1967 to inaugurate 
their own colour broadcasting), RAI releases 
the colour broadcasting of the infamous 1972 
Summer Olympics in Munich, where the red 
shirts of the Soviet basketball team overpowering 
the white jerseys of the US team in the last three 
seconds of the hotly contested final was even 
able to stir up excitement among Italian viewers. 
Yet, television failed on the real “show”, as the 
Fedayeen’s attack on the Israeli athletes would 
be covered minute by minute by radio reporters 
directly linked from within the Olympic village. 
Conversely, private televisions now commanded 
the film phenomenon both through companies 
set up specifically to distribute films to television 
(such as the Rusconi Audiovisual system) and 
through direct agreements with major production 
houses (as in 1979, Berlusconi with Fide and 
Titanus). Indeed, RAI was not only battling over 
film content, but over being able to offer a real 
and credible vision of reality: in 1977, the Giro 
d’Italia bicycle race was still broadcast in black 
and white, owing – they say – to the high costs 
involved in covering such a large event.
RAI would later be able to address its problems 
and the crisis of its system, but thanks to colour, 
the television picture – and with it the same 



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media identity – would stabilise in a mix of 
both highly spectacular and everyday events, 
as a dirty mirror as it was called, which could 
now fully deploy its effects. The game show 
is the most mature and conscious platform 
where, once again, colour plays a central role. 
The move from Tele Milano to Canale 5, from a 
small local cable service to the core of the future 
Berlusconi - owned network was announced 
in December 1979 on a game show, I sogni nel 
cassetto, which only apparently copied RAI’s 
format – with Mike Bongiorno supported by 
his most loyal collaborators, such as the notary 
Ludovico Peregrini or Director Lino Procacci – 
and a traditional game mechanism focusing 
on general knowledge questions. However, as 
commented by Orietta Berti in her theme song 
I sogni son desideri, the prize is making a dream 
come true (albeit within the “limit” of 20 million 
lire). No one remembers what the dreams of 
competitors were, yet there is a clear colour and 
spatial translation created by the aspirational 
scenario where nothing is impossible: the TV 
set builds the communication situation with 
lights and colours, with a predominance of 
strong primary colours, and set designs with 
warm tones as opposed to the icy blue and 
grey colours of state television in Rischiatutto. 
The set created by Graziella Evangelista – the 
unparalleled set designer who would make an 
unforgettable mark on commercial television, 
from Ok, il prezzo è giusto! to Il gioco dei nove 
and Drive in – contained coloured flowers and 
rainbows, superimposed elements and dazzling 
psychedelic optical effects. Everything came 
together to make the game show space closer 
to the fantastic world of the Wizard of Oz, where 
reality and dreams, window onto the world and 
entertainment coexisted – a far cry from RAI’s 
inefficient, sterile, dull, grey cabins and theatre 
boxes [16].
The new decade began for Italian society where 
this quality of colour television had now become 
a well-established reality. The first images of the 
Bologna station bombing were shown by private 
networks in colour, as were the desperate live 
images from Vermicino awaiting an impossible 
happy ending, the equally innovative coverage 
of Enrico Berlinguer’s funeral, the euphoric 
images of the fall of the Berlin wall, the student 
who was able to stop the tanks in Tiananmen, 
and the chilling scenes that crushed teleological 
ambitions of the Shuttle exploding into a 
thousand pieces during the festivities in Cape 
Canaveral. Similarly, in 1980 a television show 
opens on the glitzy, psychedelic TV set of Tele 
Milano 58, shining with thousands of colours, 
where Mike Bongiorno cheerfully strides on 
stage with his programme Allegria! 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1]RAI Radio Televisione Italiana, Annuario 1965, Edizione 
Radio Italiana, Torino 1965.

[2] A. Lari, Sistemi di ripresa e registrazione in RAI dal 
1950 ad oggi, Sandit, Albino (BG) 2012.
[3] P. Ortoleva, Telecomunicazioni: un modello italiano?, 
«Memoria e ricerca», n. 5, gennaio-giugno 2000, p. 112.

[4]F. Andreas, “Politique de la grandeur” versus “Made 
in Germany”: politische Kulturgeschichte der Technik 
am Beispiel der PAL-SECAM Kontroverse, R. Oldenbourg, 
München 2007.

[5] A. Ronchey, Intervista sul non governo. Ugo La Malfa, 
Laterza, Roma-Bari 1977.

[6] G. Crapis, Il frigorifero del cervello: il Pci e la televisione 
da ‘Lascia o raddoppia?’ alla battaglia contro gli spot, 
Editori Riuniti, Roma 2002.

[7] R.R., Tv a colori per le Olimpiadi, «Corriere della sera», 
2 agosto 1972, p. 7.

[8] M. Mazzanti, L’illuminazione in televisione: manuale 
per la progettazione e l’uso tecnico/creativo delle luci 
nello studio TV, Quartz color Ianiro publishing division, 
Roma 1979.

[9] Anon., Mina. 5 dive in una sola, «Bolero Film», 777, 25 
marzo 1962, pp. 30-32.

[10] S. Benelli (a cura di), Luchino Visconti. Mina. La donna, 
e altre cose ancora, «Successo», marzo 1962, pp. 60-65.

[11] F. Pierotti, La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura 
del colore nel cinema, Le Mani, Genova 2012, p. 219.

[12] L. Goldoni, Il “pirolino” che fa scoprire le mille tv 
private, «Corriere della sera», 3 febbraio 1978, p. 14.

[13] P. Ortoleva, Un ventennio a colori. Televisione privata 
e società, Giunti, Firenze 1995.

[14]F. Pinto, G. Barlozzetti, C. Salizzato (a cura di), La 
televisione presenta… La produzione cinematografica 
della Rai 1965-1975, Marsilio, Venezia 1988.

[15] A. Banfi, Corso integrale di televisione a colori, con 
la collaborazione di A. Nicolich, N. Stucchi, H. Salan, D.S. 
Fleming, 8 voll., Il rostro, Milano 1966.

[16] P. Valentini, Televisione e gioco. Quiz e società italiana, 
Archetipo/Clueb, Bologna 2013