We start discovering what kind of person Adriano Olivetti is.

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 second part of Via dell’inferno (Hell Road/Road to Hell) where songwriter Davide Ravera creates an atmosphere of cold winter, tears, music, freedom, longing for home, and beginning again.

Pupazzo is the word for "doll," but Federica has transformed it (as she likes to do with words) into pupezza because pezzo means "piece," and as you will see, she uses pieces or scraps to make these dolls. Federica uses these rag/paper dolls as a means for looking deeper inside herself, at the dark as well as the light parts. It is part of a kind of therapy she uses to help others discover hidden areas inside themselves, by means of creative imagination.

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.

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).

Season's greetings from Yabla Italian. A personal message from the faces and voices you know so well.

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.