Romanesco in the post-war Italian cinema

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of romanesco, the urban dialectal variety of Rome, in post-war Italian cinema, considering the following three films: Roma città aperta (1945), by Roberto Rossellini; Il sorpasso (1962) by Dino Risi; and Viaggi di nozze, by Carlo Verdone (1995). The aims are: a) to observe the use of the romanesco in the films of the three historical periods, with the theoretical support of Sergio Raffaelli (1992), Eusebio Cicotti (2001) and Fabio Rossi (1999, 2006, 2007); b) to verify the degree of formality/informality of the filmic speeches, regarding the identification of the criterion for data collection and treatment. The selection criterion of the three films was the presence of phonetic phenomena, considered detectors of diaphasic variation. The frequency of such traits allowed to identify the level of formality/informality in the actors’ speeches of each film and to verify how the Roman linguistic continuum can be observed.