"Twenty-four thousand kisses" by Francesca Rolandi, a book about popular culture and the people who were lucky enough to live in this place in the 1950s and 1960s
If you are 50+ and someone asks you how you were able to know what was being worn, listened to and watched in the world when there was no Internet, you refer them to the book "Twenty-four thousand kisses" by Francesca Rolandi. "Geopoetica" published it last year, but it can be found in bookstores.
The book is a study on the influence of Italian popular culture in Yugoslavia during that good decade 1955-1965, it is written in a readable and interesting way, as if it were not a scientific reading but rather a documentary full of examples of people who were lucky enough to live in this place at that time.
A small note, if anyone does not know: the title of the book refers to the Italian song of the same name "24 mile baci" which was sung by Andriano Celentano in 1961 at the San Remo festival, which at that time was a concept above the concepts of musical pop culture. The song won second place, and is important in the history of the festival as the first rock and roll song in that competition.
Why Italian of all other popular cultures? Well, because after the Second World War, for a country of self-governing socialism like Yugoslavia, Italy was the immediate producer and exporter of Western popular culture and the consumer society model, the first West encountered by Yugoslavs in the 1950s and 1960s.
The first associations with that time are shopping, fashion, music, film. Shopping in Trieste was a confirmation in practice that Yugoslavia had opened the border to Italy, a symbol of bygone times and prosperity, in which Yugoslavs, from porters to doctors of science, could (!), run to Trieste and buy sneakers, jeans, shoes on Ponteros mandatory - everything they need and don't need, and that because of that, they justifiably feel happy and satisfied.
In this book, a real little movie is written about this, both for the curious and for those with enviable experience on this topic, full of information from life - I did not know that Beba Lončar went to Trieste to buy a dress for the premiere of the movie "Love and Fashion".
In the same way it was written about music, about San Remo, about film, television... The new information for me was that the first news from the Anglo-American music scene penetrated into Yugoslavia thanks to the sailors from the ports in Split and Rijeka, and that the first intermediaries were through which were penetrated by new sounds, were visiting Italian amusement parks. There is, for example, an account of this in the film "Do you remember Dolly Belle" by Emir Kusturica, and the testimony of Vladimir Janković Dzhet, which is quoted by the author of the book, is also interesting.
The author says that the penetration of Italian hits into the repertoires of Yugoslav artists was quick and unstoppable: in 1960, Đorđe Marjanović rearranged and performed in Serbo-Croatian three songs by Domenik Moduno, of which "Lazarella" is one of his most popular songs. That same year, Moduno performed in Yugoslavia, and he said for "Illustrated Politics" that he distributed 5000 photos at that time.
In the book, there is also the background of all this pleasure, about politics. For a long time, Italian culture was considered suspect because it was one of the tools of Italian fascism, but not Italian pop culture. Pop culture was something new, it had no connection with the past and was not burdened by the events of war and fascism, as was high culture. Pop culture has become the most important thing in the relations between the two countries.
Slovenian politician Edvard Kardelj, after Tito the most influential figure in socialist Yugoslavia, already in 1951 clearly recognized the need for entertaining musical genres. He formulated the essential idea of the Yugoslav cultural policy on music: it was necessary to create a kind of domestic entertainment music that would be the answer to the desire to escape from reality. Tito first objected, publicly criticized jazz, and then, six years after Kardel's idea, during the Youth Day celebration, he attended a pop music concert accompanied by a jazz orchestra and denied to a journalist that he did not like jazz.
Thus, in the middle of the fifties, state circles accepted jazz and fun music, and after that everything was fine despite the voices against it among the members of the Federal Ideological Commission. The fact that the government discussed music proves that it had a strategic position in the state.
The book "Twenty-four thousand kisses" is perceived as a postcard of a time, and as a beautiful postcard of a beautiful time, there is nostalgia in it, and it leads to the question of how everything was beautiful and easy to achieve in the past, but today it is not. And why not.
Or, how is it that at that time people, who had just come out of the war against fascism, which is a product of Western countries, aspired to that West and not to Russia, which helped them win. The book also mentions other issues stemming from current experience, and this exclusively speaks in its favor.
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