From a semiotic perspective on the study of cultural memory, this article deals theoretically and methodologically with the category of event, with a case study on the so-called “strage di Ustica (Ustica massacre, a plane crash that happened in Italy in June 27, 1980). In the first part of the article, I will describe how interpretative and generative semiotics dealt with the notion of “event”. In particular, I will look at how in the 1960s and 1970s Eco and Greimas tackled the topic in their writings but without elaborating it further. Hence, I will elaborate a hypothesis on how to think events semiotically and how to analyze them, as historical, public or media events. In the second part, the article will develop a semiotic analysis of the Ustica event, looking at how it was narrated in the news (in particular on newspapers) during the 1980s, based on a corpus of 766 articles from La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.

The polarization masculine/feminine which, in the 1980s, shaped the representation of sexuality and the body in the discourse of fashion – both in the delimitation of market segments (“Pour homme”/ “Pour femme”) and in the semantic positioning of the terms of the category of sexuality – dropped in the 1990s, under the impulse of new proposals that appealed to a new conceptualization of a more inclusive sexuality (in line with the newborn Queer Theory). The advertising campaign for the fragrance Calvin Klein One exemplifies this process; it is hereby analyzed with the aim to provide a paradigmatic example of such a shift in perspective, concerning the themes of sexuality and body representation. The analysis considers several aspects of the campaign and makes a diachronic comparison with other previous advertising campaigns from the same fashion house; thus, the innovation and shift from a separatist and stereotyping paradigm to a more inclusive and neutralizing one are even more highlighted.

The new protagonists of TV series, in recent years productions, are not any more “heroes without blemish and without fear”, but “complex” antiheroes. They are characters more and more realistic. This effect is obtained through the fictional representation of their particularly cruel and immoral behaviors. But which kind of narrative devices allows the viewer to stand and accept the wrong behaviors of these rough characters? This essay will start from Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s (2013) thesis, trying to show how the dialectics between realistic narrative content and a fictional (melodramatic) way of representation could be the key concept to understand the viewer’s engagement. That is, the principal aim of the essay is to outline how viewers engage with the protagonists of strongly realistic, uncanny and disturbing TV series. The Italian TV series "Gomorra" will be taken into account as a specific case-study. As a matter of fact, this TV series has been widely criticized specifically for its strong and almost disturbing realism.

The essay aims at relating the outcomes of a multidisciplinary research project focused on the relationship between a specific kind of social discourse, such as advertising, and the concept of “media memory”. Through the analysis of concrete examples of commercials, we have tried to outline a composite field of studies ranging from semiotic studies on individual and cultural memory, to the role mass media play in defining a collective memory, up to the processes of interpretation that the reader/user activates to understand texts which create a network of references to our past.

L’articolo propone un’analisi semiotica dello spot della campagna ministeriale #ioleggoetu, operando un confronto tra i valori messi in scena nella narrazione audiovisiva con quelli proclamati dalla comunicazione a stampa. L’analisi delle strutture semionarrative del messaggio pubblicitario, assieme a cenni di marketing esperienziale e al commento di alcuni dati significativi estratti dal rapporto AIE 2016 sulla lettura, ci consentirà di verificare l’efficacia e la coerenza valoriale della campagna promossa dal MiBACT.

Idioms represent a very interesting knotty subject – in the light of the cognitive linguistic perspective – because their meaning is not compositional. Idioms in texts and contexts, their function and the role that they assume in specific situations represent a partially still unexplored research field. The present work, in particular, analyses twenty-one different idioms used in fifteen Italian TV advertisements that have recently been broadcast, from 1997 to 2014, The article is divided into two parts. In the first one there is the description of a complex analysis model that examines the idiomatic form taking into consideration some textual and semiotic parameters. In the second one it becomes evident how TV advertisements represent a specific form of a narrative structure that uses idioms to develop a semantically and pragmatically complex discursive strategy and to reconfigure a conceptual representation of products, which Turner and Fauconnier (2001) call “blends”. Here, the analytic model intends to point out the correlation between the position and typology of idiomatic expressions in the examined TV advertisements and verify the relation between words and imagines, as well as the interface which the link between the used idioms and some others that have been created in TV ads comes from. The last objective is to identify the necessary competencies in order to understand idiomatic constructions in view of the cognitive linguistic model.