The story of Adriano Olivetti and his development of the family business, which expanded from typewriters to computers. This first segment shows CIA officers who consider Olivetti's electronic brain a great threat to American business. The segment also features a flashback to Adriano's childhood in Ivrea, when he was not too eager to learn the ropes.

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.

Vittorio Umiltà Anzen was a lawyer who passed away in 2012. He loved Palermo and was proud of his house, which he shows us complete with private chapel and rooftop garden.

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.

A visit to a sumptuous palace in Palermo which incorporates a variety of styles, from the Gothic to the Baroque.

We can see that the battle against using "Lei," the common, formal, second-person form of address, was taken very seriously by the fascists. In fact they went too far when it came to a popular women's magazine called "Lei" (she, her).

Mussolini continues to get rid of any traces of foreign words, and even mounts an exhibit against the use of the common formal second person singular address "Lei" (you) in favor of "Voi." See this lesson about "Voi" to get some background.

A great deal of effort went into purging foreign words from the Italian language under the fascist regime. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers were at the forefront of the effort and were tasked with finding Italian replacements for foreign words and expressions. Many fascist-era terms have fallen by the wayside, but some succeeded and are still in use today. As an example, the word manifesto [poster] was successfully introduced to replace the French term affiche.

The segment looks at how Mussolini patterned his fiercely nationalist rhetoric after poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, while harkening back to the glory of Imperial Rome. The song in the segment refers to Balilla, an 18th century Genoese boy. In 1746, Balilla threw a stone at an Austrian official of the occupying Hapsburg Empire, which led to the War of the Austrian Succession.