THE 'SAILOR' AND THE 'PEASANT': THE ITALIAN POLICE SERIES BETWEEN FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.

Applying the categorisation made by Walter Benjamin as regards popular storytelling - stories told by sailors, and stories told by peasants, the former being internationally oriented and the latter locally based - this paper reconsiders the history of Italian police drama as in transition from foreign' or international to `domestic' or national/local storytelling. This transition follows three phases: the adaptation of foreign classics in the first two decades of the Italian television; the emergence of the domestic voice in the 1970s and 1980s, when locally based police series were produced, although in the context of a television supply widely internationalised by massive slates of foreign imports; and the establishment and popularity of the now hegemonic formula, all'otaliana, from the 1990s onwards. The contemporary police drama is now a fully localised genre, yet this doesn't disguise the footprints of a trans-nationalisation which is still underway, whereby the sailor's and the peasant's voices converge and merge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]