Actor Giulio Brogi talks about how his role in The Subversives mirrored his character at the time. The Taviani brothers describe how they found another actor in that film, young Lucio Dalla, the famous (and now deceased) singer-songwriter.

San Miniato is where the Taviani brothers were born, but it was also the birthplace of their careers in filmmaking. Their first was a documentary and right away they had some problems with censorship.

The Taviani brothers talk about how, as young movie lovers, they would grab their bikes and go to whatever movie theater in the area was showing their favorite films. Then they had to go to the big city, Rome, to pitch their first documentary. They learned a valuable lesson.

The Taviani brothers lived through the war, so they had a good feel for the terror people felt. But as kids they were also very much affected by the movies offered at the time.

This documentary is about 2 brothers — the Taviani brothers — who are famous for having made many award-winning Italian movies. The short clips from their films will surely entice us to see the complete movies in the original Italian. Perhaps the most famous one is La Notte di San Lorenzo from 1982, whose English language release had the title: The Night of the Shooting Stars.

The narrator goes over the vanishingly small number of expressions coined during Mussolini's time that are still in use today. The song that gives the series its name is provided in full.

After the war came TV. It changed everything, and provided a new way to unify the Italian language and teach people reading and writing.

The segment looks at the Royal Academy of Italy's dictionary of Italian, which was filled with quotes from Mussolini. By the end of World War II, the dictionary had gotten to the letter “C.”

Mussolini inveighs against the middle class, saying that it is the enemy of fascism. Much of the footage in this segment features EUR, the Rome district that was built in the 30s and 40s.

This segment opens with a sort of poem, demonstrating how kids growing up in fascist Italy were expected to behave. Minority groups had a pretty hard time, too.

Schools in fascist Italy banned the study of dialects and moved to using standardized textbooks. The fascist hymn “Viva Adua nostra” refers to a battle won by the Kingdom of Italy in 1896 near Adwa, Ethiopia.

Soon after the introduction of talkies, dubbing came about in the thirties. Dubbing was extremely popular in Italy and remains so today.

The nineteen twenties ushered in sound in cinema. Italy's L.U.C.E. [L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa or Educational Film Union] was founded in 1924 and generated the fascist regime's cinematic propaganda.

In World War I, Italians who up until then had spoken their regional dialects, found themselves fighting side by side against a common enemy. But Mussolini was interested in fighting the internal enemy.

The documentary comes to a close with an interview regarding a prison cell used during the Inquisition. The cell bears the graffiti of its inmates. Pitrè had laboriously uncovered the graffiti, but it was only rediscovered in the 1970s by the writer Leonardo Sciascia and the interviewee in this segment, Giuseppe Quatriglio, who used Pitrè's writing to find it.