Mamma per caso: Raffaella Carrà e la rappresentazione di una maternità alternativa sui media.

The image displayed in the church during the funeral of Raffaella Carrà - chosen by herself and then bounced across all media - was a photograph taken on the set of a television promo directed by photographer Oliviero Toscani to advertise the 2006 variety show Amore (Raiuno), which had the goal of promoting long-distance adoptions. The now famous photo portrayed Raffaella Carrà surrounded by infant children of different ethnic groups. Previously, in 1997 Raffaella Carrà returned to star in a TV mini-series for Rai - Mamma per caso (Sergio Martino, Raiuno) - after many years from her last involvement in an acting job. In it, she played a character that resembled her actual personality: a career-driven woman, the host of a popular and mainstream daytime television talk-show, who found herself having to look after the children of her sister (Carla Signoris) who suddenly left for Spain in an attempt to win back her cheating husband (Maurizio Crozza). These two television shows represent an example of how Raffaella Carrà's relationship with motherhood has developed in the media, both in television series and variety shows, and as a topic of interest for popular press and gossip that have explored her private life. Many interviews, along the course of her career and even in recent years, often return to the theme of missed motherhood, allowing the diva to advocate social causes such as adoptions by single parents. Carrà depicts herself as an atypical mother for the role she played in the lives of the daughters of her partners and of her nephews after the death of her brother Enzo. She thus appears to be a forerunner of a narrative of motherhood as a set of experiences and exploded meanings difficult to reassemble. Raffaella Carrà's public image passed from representing a sensual and revolutionary icon in the Seventies to a strong and independent woman in the Eighties, eventually becoming a cathodic priestess of family reunifications in the Nineties. Her familiar presence on the small screen mirrored the evolution of female representation in the Italian media landscape under the lens of an extended concept of family and motherhood. However, these topics are at the centre of an often-contradictory narrative, supported over the years both by the presenter's declarations of regret and by the awareness of being able to claim a maternal role instead, even outside the traditional context, thus offering her personal experience in support of progressive causes. The story of Raffaella Carrà as it unravels on and through the Italian media therefore becomes emblematic of the contradictory drives that intersect motherhood and its representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]