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This paper analyses one of the most successful historical shows broadcasted on the Italian networks, Passato e presente. The essay focuses on how this broadcast declines historical narration and how it constructs, through the language of television, its dimension as an enunciative vector. By outlining the characteristics of its mise-en-scene and narrative, the essay demonstrates the degree of sophistication and innovation of Passato e presente in the Italian panorama, but also the persisting limitations in understanding the specificities of the audiovisual medium for the dissemination of history.

The following article aims to analyze how the representation of gangster in Hollywood movies (1905-1939) has changed according to the transformations of the American society and the embedding of neo-populist mythology by the New Deal Administration: the gangster, before immigrant and “alien by nature”, from the Thirities on becomes the incarnation of unregulated capitalism. This paper would like to suggest a map of the relations between cinema and society and how one was influenced by the other (and vice versa) in order to show on the Big Screen the phenomenon of gangsterism, a theme deeply connected with American Society and the idea of “Americaness”.