The Many Meanings of Mina: Popular Music Stardom in Post-war Italy

By Rachel Haworth

Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini, born Lombardy, 1940) is an Italian popular music icon who throughout her sixty-year-long career has come to represent a range of diverse meanings. She is one of the best-loved popular music stars in Italy and abroad, with a large fan base across Europe, Asia, and South America. Her career began in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s.

Despite having retired from public appearances at the end of the 1970s, Mina remains popular and successful today, and continues to release new albums that consistently debut in the number one spot of the Italian charts. As an Italian popular music star, she is exemplary of the way in which stardom is constructed by different media and has come to represent different local and global identities, values, ideologies, and ways of behaving. This is because whilst Mina is first and foremost a popular music star, she has also been a film star and a television personality during different phases of her career. She has advertised successful Italian brands on television, and she has been a magazine writer and agony aunt. Her star persona is the product of her work in many different areas, as well as of the promotional materials and commentaries that are produced in response to her work.

This book explores these different ‘mediums’ that Mina has been involved in and which have shaped her career and significance. It traces the process by which she has come to embody a diverse range of meanings that reveal something of the values and ideals at work within contemporary Italian society.

Rachel Haworth is a researcher of Italian popular music and culture of the twentieth century, and Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull, UK.

The primary market for this book is students and academics in the following subject areas: Italian Studies; Popular Music Studies; Stardom and Celebrity Studies; Media Studies; Cultural History. Also scholars and researchers working on music divas.

The book is suitable for use on courses and modules at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, which deal with Italian cultural studies, Italy’s post-war history, and the role of women in Italy, as well as the wider study of popular music and the construction of stardom and celebrity.

The secondary audience for this book will be fans of Mina around the world, accessibly written, this will appeal to fans in Italy who are able to read in English.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Sep 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789385625

Rachel Haworth

Rachel Haworth is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull, UK. Her research interests lie within the broad areas of French and Italian popular music. She has published on French popular music in 1968, media representa-tions of Brassens, Brel and Ferré and the place of performance in the chanson française. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds and this research is due to be published by Ashgate with the title ‘From the chanson française to the canzone d’autore in the 1960s and 70s: Authenticity, authority, influence’. 

Book preview

1

Signore, Signori, Mina!: Mina as Popstar in Post-War Italy

The popularity of Mina in post-war Italy is undeniable.¹ Since the start of her career in 1958, Mina has sold more than 150 million records in Italy (Castaldo 2010: n.pag.), making her the most successful female Italian artist. Every album that she has released has charted in the top 100 best-selling albums of that year. And she continues to appeal to audiences, who buy her records, watch television programmes celebrating her career, and respond enthusiastically to the moments when she lends her voice to different television advertising campaigns. Such is the case of the TIM advertisements that aired during the 2018 iteration of the ever-popular Sanremo Festival, as part of the telecommunications company's sponsorship of the event. In this series of adverts, Mina in alien form visited planet Earth and performed on the Sanremo stage as a hologram. According to Rolling Stone, ‘Mina won at the Sanremo Festival’ that year (Rolling Stone 2018: n.pag.). In light of the response on Twitter to the holographic performance, which saw large numbers of users wanting to know from the Festival organizers how they could vote for Mina as winner, we can agree with the article's assessment. The significance of this moment is explained in the article thus: ‘Mina returned to Sanremo after 57 years and she did it in pure Mina-style, simply just singing. The icon of Italian music appeared at the last night of the Festival as a 3D hologram’ (Rolling Stone 2018: n.pag.). The importance of Mina's talent as a singer is clear here, but the reference to Mina's history at the Sanremo Festival is also telling. After her performances there in 1960 and 1961, where she appeared as the favourite but lost, Mina vowed to never again appear at the Festival (as we shall see in Chapter 2). The holographic return of the star is therefore an important moment, going someway to giving fans what they still very much hope to see: Mina's return to public performance. After summing up the content of the adverts, the article concludes that ‘Mina has always been on another planet’ (Rolling Stone 2018: n.pag.), thus reaffirming the iconic status and out-of-this-world talent that she is said to embody. Despite not appearing at Sanremo for 57 years, and in public for 41 years, Italian society is still interested in Mina and still desires her (be that her music, her voice, or her bodily presence). TIM's decision to use Mina indicates how relevant the star remains in contemporary Italy.

If we are to understand not only the reasons for this popularity but also the significance of Mina's status as Italy's most popular female popstar, there are two fundamental contexts against which we must analyse her: the analytical and cultural contexts of pop music stardom, and the historical and social context of post-war Italy. These aspects together constitute the focus of this chapter. To be able to contextualize Mina's popularity, the chapter starts with a brief introduction to Mina and the key moments of her career, before presenting the cultural backdrop of post-war Italian society against which her career developed. The chapter then focuses on the idea of Mina as a popstar and outlines ways of reading pop music that are important for understanding how significant Mina is and why her status as popstar matters. Finally, the chapter outlines the mediums which constitute my focus in this book, and how these fit into the chronology of Mina's career and shape her status as an intermedial star.

Mina Mazzini

My aim here is to provide an overview of key moments in Mina's career, rather than an in-depth biography. As I have explained, the aim of this book is not to provide a history of Mina's professional and private life, but to explore how Mina's status as star came into being, and what it has come to mean in contemporary Italy. However, I also do not wish to write a biography because such books already exist: Unicamente Mina (1983) by Paolo Belluso and Flavio Merkel, Dora Giannetti's Divina Mina (1998), Fernando Fratarcangeli's Parole ... parole ... parole ... (2008), and Mina: mito e mistero (2015) by Roberta Maresci are good examples, providing a detailed history that charts Mina's life and career. But these biographies also illustrate another reason why my aim here is not simply to write the story of Mina's life; these books, and others like them, have tended to serve two purposes: in addition to providing details of Mina's public and private life from 1940 onwards, they also fuel the star status that Mina has acquired in Italian society. The anecdotes and information given have tended to celebrate Mina's talent, status, and contribution, and the publications therefore functioned to cement her star status. For example, Fratarcangeli highlights Mina's iconic and legendary status when he introduces his volume thus:

It is pointless looking for grand, revolutionary or forward-thinking ideas: it is the public who decides how successful an artist will be and the public – young and old, male and female – for over fifty years have always been with Mina. This book draws inspiration from the best texts published about our pop music and celebrates the greatest voice that Italian pop has ever had: an icon who knew how to perform dreams, styles, and fashions in a way that has turned her into a legend.

(Fratarcangeli 2009: inside cover)

As my aim here is to understand how Mina has attained star (or iconic or legendary) status and what this status means, I do not want to reproduce the celebratory tone that biographies have tended to adopt. Nevertheless, in order to understand the process by which Mina's star status was produced, it is necessary to know something of her career trajectory and private life because, as we will see, it is precisely at the high and low points of Mina's career that her star status is being produced, as a result of the mediums with which she is interacting.

Anna Maria Mazzini known as Mina was born on 25 March 1940 in Busto Arsizio (Varese, Lombardy) to Giacomo (Mino) Mazzini and Regina (Gina) Zoni. In 1943, the family moved back to Cremona where, in the same year, Mina's brother, Alfredo, was born. Mina completed her secondary school education at the Collegio Beata Vergina in Cremona and then enrolled at the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale Beltrami, following her father's desire to see her become an accountant. As a result of establishing her singing career at the end of the 1950s, she would not complete the course.

1958 saw Mina's stage debut at the Bussola nightclub in Marina di Pietrasanta, where she appeared only semi-officially, as the result of a bet, performing the song ‘Un'anima pura’ (Belluso and Merkel 1983: 11). Her official debut came in September 1958, where Mina performed for the first time (under the stage name Mina Georgi) with the Happy Boys, having joined the band the month before. The performance included covers of popular American numbers such as ‘You Are My Destiny’ and ‘Be Bop a Lula’ and was well received:

the newspaper accounts report that the success of 14 September 1958 was such that the famous Achille Togliani, the following evening, was unable to warm the hearts of the public present, […] outclassed as he was by a little girl with short hair, frenetic rhythms and a superb voice: Mina Georgi.

(Crotti and Bassi 2007: 51)

A series of equally successful concerts followed, with Mina being described by the local press as ‘a real, true revelation, intelligent, modern, so young; she creates overwhelming enthusiasm’ (Crotti and Bassi 2007: 57). At the performance of 4 October 1958, Mina and the Happy Boys came to the attention of talent scout David Matalon, who worked for the label Italdisc. Mina was invited to record four songs for them, two in English (‘Be Bop a Lula’ and ‘When’) and two in Italian (‘Non partir’ and ‘Malatia’). Yet it was not clear under what name to release the records and thus launch Mina's career: her Italian name was not seen to be appropriate for the foreign market. Thus Italdisc released the two Italian songs as a ‘45 under the stage name Mina, whilst Matalon's label Broadway International, which specialized in Italian covers of international hits, released the English songs as a single under the stage name Baby Gate. Both did extremely well, each selling more than 100,000 copies (in an era where sales of 70,000 copies were considered exceptional) (Giannetti 1998: 14). From this moment, Mina's popularity began to spread across Italy, thanks in particular to her appearances on Italian television. Following the release of the first singles in December 1958, she appeared in the televised finale of Sei giorni della canzone (‘Six Days of Song’),² competing against other contemporary singers with her version of the song ‘Proteggimi’. She won second place, and a Corriere Lombardo journalist reviewing the show commented: ‘I must admit that this mop-top Mina, however inexperienced she is, knows how to sell her song, supported by a pained face and undulating body that are very fashionable nowadays’ (Casàlb 1958: n.pag.). And although the departure of the Happy Boys on tour resulted in her creating her own band, I Solitari, it was Mina the solo artist who quickly became famous. This fame, however, was arguably also a consequence of beginning to work with Elio Gigante, the renowned impresario who also managed Totò and Anna Magnani.³

Central to Mina's fame was her ‘modern’ style of performance, which would be fundamental for her success with ‘Nessuno’. Her version of the Wilma De Angelis’ Sanremo Festival song from 1959 was well-received at the Festival Rock in Milan in 1959. Indeed, ‘her punctuated and anglicized version […] would get her noticed by an audience from across the country, especially by young people who immediately proclaimed her to be the Queen of the Screamers’ (Belluso and Merkel 1983: 13–14).⁴ National recognition also came thanks to appearances on RAI's Lascia o raddoppia? (‘Leave it or Double it?’) (1955–59) and Il Musichiere (‘The Songwriter’) (1957–60) in March and April the same year. 1959 also brought other recognition of Mina's success: she achieved her first number one in the singles chart in Italy for ‘Tintarella di luna’; she received the JukeBox d'Oro (Golden JukeBox) and Microfono d'Oro (Golden Microphone) awards; she appeared on the popular television show Canzonissima performing ‘Nessuno’; and she starred in her first musicarello movie, Juke box, urli d'amore (‘Jukebox, Shouts of Love’) (Morassi 1959).

The year 1960 marked another important moment in Mina's rise to fame, with the invitation to appear at the ever-popular Sanremo Festival. She finished in eighth place with the song ‘È vero’, with ‘Non sei felice’ placed outside the top ten. More television appearances followed, along with an important number one spot in the singles chart for ‘Il cielo in una stanza’, which was also the best-selling single of the year. She appeared in five more musicarelli films: Appuntamento a Ischia (‘Appointment on Ischia’) (Mattoli 1960); Sanremo, la grande sfida (San Remo: The Big Challenge) (Vivarelli 1960); Urlatori alla sbarra (Howlers of the dock) (Fulci 1960); Madri pericolose (‘Dangerous Mothers’) (Paolella 1960); and I teddy boys della canzone (‘The Teddy Boys of Pop’) (Paolella 1960). Belluso and Merkel point out that, at this point, ‘Mina's popularity is now enormous: she is the most photographed singer of the year, with magazines dedicating covers to her. Her rapid and overwhelming success had affected everyone’ (Belluso and Merkel 1983: 14). The year 1961 would see Mina's return to Sanremo as the favourite, with apparently universal appeal according to the media coverage of the Festival that year. It was therefore something of a shock when Mina placed fourth with ‘Io amo tu ami’ and fifth with ‘Le mille bolle blu’. As a result, ‘Mina declared her intention to never again perform at the Festival, and withdrew somewhat from Italian popular music circles, heading to Japan and Venezuela on tour’ (Haworth 2015a: 29).

She would return to Italian television screens in October 1961 as the host of RAI's Saturday night variety show, Studio Uno. The creation of director Antonello Falqui, ‘Studio Uno is finally the prestigious show that the RAI directors had wanted to produce for some time: the first great variety show of international inspiration that inaugurated the golden age of song on Italian television’ (Monteleone 2005: 347). Mina acted as the host of the first series, which aired between 21 October 1961 and 13 January 1962 and attracted audiences of 16 million. According to Belluso and Merkel, in the context of the series, ‘her performances of classics of Neapolitan and American song […] definitively distanced her from the label of rock ‘n’ roller and lifted her to the level of the great international singers’ (Belluso and Merkel 1983: 17). In addition to television appearances, Mina starred in two more films, Io bacio … tu baci (‘I Kiss … You Kiss’) (Vivarelli 1961) and Mina … fuori la guardia (‘Mina … Beyond the Guard’) (Tamburella 1961). She also became the face of the caroselli advertisements for Industria Italiana beer, as well as continuing to release singles and albums.

This momentum would continue throughout 1962, with more television appearances, successful single and album releases, and another musicarello appearance in the film Appuntamento in riviera (‘Appointment at the Coast’) (Mattoli 1962). As the writer and journalist Daniele Ionio Prevignano explained that year,

From the stormy world of urlo, one voice has clearly emerged: that of Mina. Mina Mazzini is in turn becoming a celebrity, a myth: her audience ranges from 2-year-olds to 70-year-olds. She had copied the somewhat deep, secretly sensual voice of Nilla Pizzi, which had been idealized by enthusiastic listeners across provincial Italy. Yet Mina's own voice, silvery, boisterous, childish but controlled, draws attention to the secret immaturity of the spectating Italy. In some ways, it is participating in its own ‘economic miracle’, with the flavour of the calming harmony of spacious design and pastel colours that you find nowadays in homes and cars and of an ideal lifestyle, regulated by serene television programmes.

(Ionio Prevignano and Rapetti 1962: 36)

Mina had become a symbol of a modern, and modernized, Italy, in contrast to the traditional and provincial sounds of the 1950s, epitomized by the popular singer, Nilla Pizzi. Mina's fandom also spanned the generations in Italy, all of whom had been able to access the star through the medium of television. Yet 1963 would constitute a moment of personal scandal for Mina, and a potential turning point in her career.

In January 1963, Mina announced she was expecting a baby with the married actor Corrado Pani. The two had met in September 1961 and a relationship had soon developed. The news made the front pages of Italian newspapers and illustrated new magazines, given the socially transgressive nature of the pregnancy. As I have explained elsewhere,

it is important to place this announcement within the context of 1960s’ Italy, where divorce and abortion had not yet been legalized, and the influence of the Church and the Christian Democrat government resulted in the promotion of traditional domestic roles for Italian women.

(Haworth 2017: 248)

Mina's statement to the press made clear her intention to challenge societal conventions by creating a new family, with Pani and the baby:

I hope that people who know what love is, and especially women who are in love, will understand me. I have tried to be sincere and loyal to the core, like I have always been up until today, even if at times it can be difficult and risky to be faithful to the rules of the heart, over those of man. It would have been so easy to give up on this child. But I want this baby because it represents the most important raison d’être of my life. Because it is the child of the man I love and whom I could never give up.

(Libonati 1963: 24)

As a result of the pregnancy, RAI banned Mina from appearing for them; there was no place for the singer on shows that were shaped by the broadcaster's antiscandal sentiment and driving the ideal of ‘protecting common decency’ (Romano 1986: 54). Yet public support for Mina remained, as evidenced by the fact that the singles ‘È l'uomo per me’ and ‘Un anno d'amore’ both reached the number one spot in the charts, with the latter selling more than one million copies and thus achieving Gold Disc status. As a result, the ban was rescinded by RAI in 1964. Mina made a return to television screens, appearing in shows such as La Fiera dei sogni (‘Festival of Dreams’) (1964), hosted by popular presenter Mike Bongiorno, and Alla ribalta: Speciale per Mina (‘In the Limelight: Special for Mina’) (1964), an entire special programme dedicated to Mina.

This return to television screens was consolidated in 1965 with Mina going back to host that year's series of Studio Uno. Guest appearances in other popular series followed, together with the release of the album Studio Uno (1965), which became the best-selling album of the year. She also won the Domenica d'Oro, a popularity contest organized by the weekly magazine La Domenica del Corriere and adjudicated via a reader referendum. And Mina also became the face of the pasta company, Barilla, starring in a range of caroselli that were broadcast throughout the year. However, the year 1965 was also marked by personal tragedy for the star: her brother, Alfredo ‘Geronimo’ Mazzini, was killed in a car accident in May.

Yet Mina's career would continue to flourish. Belluno and Merkel point out that ‘1966 saw her once again triumphant on TV: Italian viewers now had a fixed appointment with her, to which was also added a radio appointment with the programme Gran varietà (Great Variety)’ (Belluno and Merkel 1983: 18). Television appearances included the final series of Studio Uno, and a second series of Barilla caroselli. 1967 saw Mina host RAI's new Saturday night variety show, Sabato Sera (‘Saturday Evening’) (1967). This was also the year in which Mina left her recording label RiFi and, together with her father, launched her personal recording label, PDU. In 1968, Mina celebrated ten years in the music industry with a live concert at the Bussola, and the release of a live album recorded during the performance. She also co-hosted that year's series of Canzonissima, with Walter Chiari and Paolo Panelli.

Into the 1970s, television appearances, single and album releases, and appearances in caroselli advertisements, this time for the drinks company Tassoni, were all part of Mina's activities. For example, Mina co-hosted the television series Teatro 10 in 1972, with Alberto Lupo, and Milleluci in 1974, with Raffella Carrà. The decade also brought important musical collaborations with Lucio Battisti and Mogol, and Giorgio Gaber. And 1970 was also a significant year for Mina's personal life: she met and married the journalist Virgilio Crocco. Mina and Crocco's daughter, Benedetta, was born on 11 November 1971, but Mina and her husband would separate during 1972. Tragedy struck in 1973, with Crocco's death in a car accident.

The hard work and superstardom were also beginning to take their toll. As early as 1972, rumours circulated regarding Mina's possible retirement from performing. In an article in Epoca, the journalist Torelli explained that ‘if she had accepted the invitations from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to do four months of shows in Las Vegas and then a series of television performances, she could have earned a billion in three years. Instead, in September, she is swearing that she will stop, that that's enough, that it's just sad and sickening’ (Torelli 1972: n.pag.). Mina is then quoted as responding thus: ‘I'm just a provincial girl. […] Give me back a banal life. Can I give up mine? Can I just take Massimiliano to school, prepare Benedetta's bottle, and mend my relationship with that journalist from Rome who, so very long ago, made my heart leap by asking me to marry him?’ (in Torelli 1972: n.pag.). By 1978, it became clear that the rumours were true: Mina would give one final live performance, once again at the Bussola, celebrating twenty years in the music industry. In recounting the concert, Romano quotes Sergio Bernardini, the manager of the nightclub at that time, giving his interpretation of Mina's decision to retire:

It was an unforgettable evening, Mina's last. Why did she quit? She would often speak about withdrawing and then she did it. […] Obviously something happened to convince her to make this decision. […] You need to know her well, like I do, to know that she prefers to stay at home with her children and her man rather than getting on a plane to jet off who knows where.

(Romano 1986: 133)

Perhaps, Romano argues, this is the reason behind Mina's decision ‘to give up on concerts and television studios and to limit herself to recording songs, shut up in her studio: she really wants a new life, a different life’ (Romano 1986: 133). As Mina did not explain her decision, her actual reason for retiring is unknown. Yet this desire to spend time with her family has become part of the official story that is told about the star.

Since 1978, Mina has not appeared in public or on television. She has continued to release new albums, averaging just over one per year. According to Mario De Luigi, writing in 1998, ‘over the past 40 years, Mina is the artist who has scored the most number of albums in the Top Ten of the charts […] for both singles and albums’ (De Luigi 1998: 166). In the last 20 years, this popularity has showed no signs of waning: indeed, Mina's most recent album, the double release Orione Italian Songbook and Cassiopea Italian Songbook (2020), entered the charts in December 2020 in the number two and number six spots respectively, demonstrating the star's ongoing appeal to Italian audiences. This appeal is underscored by the multiple ways in which fans continue to have access to Mina: she has been a columnist for Vanity Fair, La Stampa, and Liberal; she provided the voiceover for television adverts for Barilla (2009) and TIM (2017 onwards); in 2001, behind-the-scenes footage of Mina in the recording studio was streamed online to millions of viewers; her YouTube channel, Mina Mazzini Official, shares old and new performances and music videos, and has approximately 80,000 subscribers with the most popular videos receiving millions of views;⁵ and there is also the Mina Fan Club, established in Parma in 1980 with members from around the world. And as we have seen, since 2017 Mina has ‘appeared’ during the Sanremo Festival, providing the soundtrack for the sponsor's (TIM) advertisements that premier each night of the Festivals. Whilst the 2017, 2019, and 2020 advertisements featured Mina's voice alongside the German YouTuber and dance sensation, JustSomeMotion (JSM, otherwise known as Sven Otten), the 2018 series saw Mina ‘appear’ on the Sanremo stage in digital form, singing ‘Another Day of Sun’.

Such is the fame, popularity, and status of Mina in contemporary Italy that Roberto Favaro is able to claim that ‘Mina was and is, also in the common use of the term, a myth’ (Favaro 1998: 72). Her status as established star and popular myth means she has the same significance as many of Italy's film stars who, Stephen Gundle argues, offer ‘a significant way of reading Italian society and culture’ (Gundle 2008: 262). In this context, Italy's stars transcend their origins and come to reveal something about Italy. Whilst they of course also demonstrate something of the global phenomenon of the process of fabricating stars and have similarities to their European and even American counterparts, Gundle explains that

what is especially interesting for Italian studies is not so much the box office role of the star (in economic terms, stars serve mainly to attract the attention of the potential audience and ensure a film has good distribution and a strong opening) but his or her function as a cultural symbol and conduit for ideas about gender, values and national identity.

(Gundle 2008: 263)

As a result of the fabrication process to which they are subjected, Italian stars are seen to embody a specific set of meanings and connotations which reveal something about the systems of cultural value and the wider established ideologies and ways of behaving at work in Italian society. Moreover, there is a particular attraction for national stars specifically, as Catherine O'Rawe identifies in her volume on Italian male film stars: for national audiences, these national stars offer recognizability and familiarity, and feed into established perceptions and ideologies as regards societal norms and expectations at work in Italy (O'Rawe 2014: 13).

This is the function and potential that Mina embodies: as a national star, she has the ability to shed light on the society and culture of Italy, as well as functioning as a vehicle to be shaped by and promote the country's dominant norms and values. In order to fully understand the various significances of Mina, we therefore need to place her in the context of post-war Italy, and in the light of the cultural, social, and political changes that marked the country during Mina's career from 1958 to the present.

Cultural and social change in Italy from 1958

The second half of the twentieth century has seen the transformation of Italy from a predominantly agricultural country, in ruins at the end of the Second World War, to the eighth largest economy in terms of nominal GDP in 2018. The economic, social, cultural, political, and demographic changes of this period have resulted in an Italy that, as Paul Ginsborg explains, ‘has undergone an extraordinary process of enrichment, urbanization, and secularization’ (Ginsborg 1990: 1). This transformative process has seen the large-scale replacement of local peasant cultures with a national urban culture, and waves of internal and external migration and immigration, which has had a profound impact on the country's demographic profile. But as John Foot has pointed out, the history of Italy sheds light on the idea of ‘a divided country, fractured over its past and its present (as well as over a vision of its future’ (Foot 2018: xii, original emphasis). These divisions must be acknowledged: David Forgacs explains that ‘by taking the nation as a single space, [data can] smooth away the dualisms within it: not just the North-South gap but also the dualisms between capitalist and peasant agriculture and between modern and traditional industry in the North itself’ (Forgacs 1990: 17). Yet certain overarching recurrent themes and binaries nevertheless emerge when we consider Italy's history in this period: these include, for example, tradition vs. modernity; rural vs. urban; North vs. South; local vs. national. It is these binaries on which I focus here, tracing the key transformations and developments that demonstrate the tensions present within post-war Italian society. Indeed, this period can be characterized largely as one of crisis, with the transformations of culture, society, politics, leisure, gender roles, and family dynamics resulting in alleged moments of anxiety for the nation and producing a series of state-led or -inspired initiatives to resolve these crises. In the context of Mina, these tensions, anxieties, crises, and transformations constitute the cultural and social conditions that inform and shape the significance of her star image in this period.

When exploring Italy's social and cultural development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to Mina, our starting point must be 1958, a significant year not only because it witnessed the start of Mina's performance career but also because it has been identified by historians as marking the onset of the economic miracle in Italy, and initiating an important period of change. These years of economic expansion, from 1958 to 1963, made visible the effects of Italy's industrial growth during the 1950s, which was the result of the lack of destruction of industrial plants during the war, the availability of aid from the United States of America in terms of raw materials, loans, and capital, and the low cost of labour. These were indeed the years of growth and apparent prosperity for the nation and following the founding of the Common Market, between 1958 and 1963, there was in Italy ‘an annual growth rate of 6.4 per cent in income, 7.4 per cent in family consumption, 15 per cent in plant investment and 14.2 per cent in exports’ (Dunnage 2002: 149).

The impact this growth had on production and exports demonstrates the changes which were taking place in Italy at this time:

textiles and food products gave way to those consumer goods which were much in demand in the advanced industrial countries, and which reflected per capita incomes far higher than Italy's own: Italian fridges, washing-machines, televisions, cars, precision tools, typewriters and plastic goods were all marketed in extraordinary numbers.

(Ginsborg 1990: 214–15)

Yet there were tensions and contrasts across the country in terms of the experience of the boom: due to the localized nature of industry in this period in Italy, the miracle highlighted the North–South duality of the country by remaining a predominantly northern phenomenon, characterized also by high levels of internal migration from the predominantly agricultural South to the more industrialized, ‘promised land’ of the North with its prosperity and standard of living to which many aspired. Furthermore, Paul Ginsborg points out the distortion of consumption patterns that came about as a result of the miracle, with emphasis placed on private consumer goods without an accompanying development of public consumption, through investment in schools, hospitals, public transport, and low-cost housing. The result: ‘the economic miracle served once again to emphasize the importance of the individual family unit within Italian civil society’ (Ginsborg 1990: 216).

The importance of the family remained at the heart of political, social, and cultural life in this period. The Christian Democrats (DC) had been in power in Italy, either with an outright majority or in a coalition, since the elections of 1948, having consistently defeated the increasingly popular and powerful Italian Communist Party. As a political ally of the Church, the DC ‘continued to see women essentially as wives and mothers’ (Willson 2010: 131) and promoted the importance of the family unit, which ‘had to be defended itself against the Communist menace and the threats of modern society’ (Ginsborg 1990: 175). But there was again a tension around this view of the family:

on the one hand there was the tendency to stress the family's internal value, its primacy over society, the need to protect it from a hostile world. […] On the other hand, there was the desire to overcome the family's isolation, both with relation to the church and to society.

(Ginsborg 1990: 175)

Yet the modernization of Italian society in this period is evident in the changing attitudes towards women: Perry Willson explains that whilst the DC saw women first and foremost as belonging in the home, ‘it was more open to change. It embraced American culture more freely and encouraged escapist entertainment, even beauty contests. Hollywood films were preferred to the social realities of neo-realism’ (Willson 2010: 131).

Indeed, whilst the DC may well have appeared to be acting to safeguard Catholic values in a changing society, in fact,

the majority of the party fully espoused the cause of ‘modernization’. Here the key themes, strongly shaped by American influences, were the liberty of the individual and of the firm, the unfettered development of technology and consumer capitalism, the free play of market forces.

(Ginsborg 1990: 154)

But it was not just the political sphere that was influenced by American ideals and ideologies: the transformation of consumption patterns, and aspirations regarding standards of living, was also influenced by the United States of America. Stephen Gundle explains that

for the entire period of Italy's rapid transition from a traditional to a modern society in the 1950s, the USA was a beacon on the horizon, a model to emulate and assimilate, and to aspire to. When economic development shattered the existing demographic and cultural structures, American culture and society provided an example against which Italian television, consumer habits, values, and lifestyles apparently had to measure themselves.

(Gundle 1986: 563)

This influence would also generate further moments of anxiety and even crisis within Italian society. As Jonathan Dunnage explains,

the arrival of modern forms of cultural consumption also brought into evidence serious tensions within Italian society between tradition and innovation, revealing a ruling class and ecclesiastical hierarchy that, while supportive of economic progress, was fearful of the emancipating effects of social and cultural transformation accompanying the boom.

(Dunnage 2002: 166)

The arrival of television in Italy in 1954 is a case in point. The state-run broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (Italian Radio and Television, or RAI) ‘quickly won a reputation for authority and familiarity on a par with the BBC's Auntie image (Mamma RAI)’ (Gundle 2000: 77). Despite the fact that different