The Photo Novels

In the beginning it was the feuilleton of nineteenth-century newspapers, a popular novel in installments, destined to increase newspaper sales. Then, in 1947, a certain Stefano Reda goes around the publishing houses proposing the crazy and innovative idea of ​​a comic that has photos instead of drawings. Only the small Novissima publishing house, affiliated with Rizzoli, accepts. Sogno, a sixteen-page newspaper, comes out. The subjects are by Reda and Luciana Peverelli, writer of romance novels. Shortly after, Arnoldo Mondadori also publishes a book of photo novels entitled Bolero (film). To these two must be added the previous Grand Hotel, whose novels, however, were only drawn.

We are in the post-war period, the stories are simple and sentimental, many girls dream and learn to read. The first narratives are sequences of famous films or adaptations of novels from “high” literature, such as Manzoni’s “I Promessi Sposi”,” I miserabili” by Victor Hugò, or even the Bible. Over time, the subjects multiply and, to interpret the photo novels, they call Raffaella Carrà, Giuliano Gemma, Sofia Loren.

But it will be the Lancio house, after having taken over Sogno, that will give the genre the greatest impetus. In the sixties the most important publications of this publisher were born, which became synonymous with photo novel: Letizia, Charme, Marina, Kolossal and many others were added to Sogno.

The decade of maximum splendor is that of the 70s. Five million photo novels are sold a month, fifteen million people read them at the hairdresser, in the waiting rooms of doctors, hoping for a new isuue or a loan from a friend.

Although transgenerational reading, the category that is most captured is that of thirteen year olds. Inexperienced in feelings and sex, we all had a slightly shrewd friend who passed us packs of used photo novels, with curled pages, with hearts drawn in pen on the photos of the most beautiful actors. We welcomed them with outstretched arms like a precious asset, we kept them hidden in our bedrooms, because mothers and grandmothers wrinkled their noses in front of those photos where an unmarried man and woman appeared in a bed, lying next to each other , with a sheet to cover them up to the throat. But the image hinted — and let you dream — more than many explicit and prolonged sex scenes in our fiction today, a natural evolution of the genre.

Expression of popular fiction, dream in the paper and photographic state, the photo novels had engaging plots, adventurous and full of easy feelings. The protagonists were beautiful, kind heroines, with whom ordinary girls could identify. Their happiness was undermined by evil rivals, with frowning elegance, always favored by intriguing future mothers-in-law. Everything was resolved, the happy ending was assured, the bad guys were punished, the lovers got married.

But, above all, the ones that drove us crazy were the male protagonists, actors whose posters we all hung on the wall. First of all he, the icon, the beautiful, the quintessence of virility: Franco Gasparri. Green eyes, black hair, powerful shoulders, the photo story of his life will be interrupted at the age of thirty-two, due to a fall from his motorcycle that will force him into a wheelchair until his death in 99.

The seventies, we said, marked the boom of the photo novel, creating myths adored by Italian teenagers: Katiuscia, Michela Roc, Franco Dani, Paola Pitti, the sisters Claudia and Francesca Rivelli (Ornella Muti).

From Italy, the photo novel genre spreads all over the world, up to Latin America and India.

But after the peak, the decline. The reading of photo novels waned in the second half of the eighties, supplanted by other forms of popular entertainment, from soap operas to fiction, and it is these new genres, from then on, that tell us what and how we should dream.