Italy on Screen - One Hundred Years of Digital Memory: 1860s - 1960s
Cristina Della Coletta, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
2000 TTI Fellow
Email: cd4y@Virginia.EDU
Project website: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~cd4y/
Italy on Screen - One Hundred Years of Digital Memory: 1860s - 1960s is designed to enhance Cristina Della Coletta's ITTR 263, an undergraduate course that examines how several classic Italian films have presented and interpreted some of the most significant moments in modern Italian history and culture. By providing a unique way of viewing short clips from a wide range of films, Italy on Screen will allow students to compare the varied ways in which a country's past can be recounted through visual narratives. While facilitating access to rare films, this website will also gather supporting materials from other media, such as paintings, photographs, historical and fictional texts, interviews, and newspaper articles. An electronic archive storing materials dealing with a large segment of Italy's collective memory, Italy on Screen will be, first and foremost, an analytical tool, fostering its viewers' awareness that even a country's most crucial moments are never fully reflected in a single and univocal narrative, but are accessible through significantly differing reconfigurations. Engaging students in an interactive dialogue with these multiple sources in ways that would be otherwise cumbersome or impossible, Italy on Screen will, ultimately, encourage students to use computer technology to become personally involved in constructing, interpreting, and evaluating a new and multifaceted form of socio-historical representation and analysis.