Beyond ‘Destination Italy’: Revitalising Italian Television’s Spatial Capital

This chapter discusses the representation of the Italian territory through the concept of ‘Destination Italy’ (Hom 2015), which refers to a ‘powerful imaginary born of mass tourism’, kept cohesive by ‘stereotypes that situate Italy within a romanticised past’ and ‘ideas of tradition and authenticity’. This imaginary, rooted in the visual culture established during the eighteenth century Grand Tour, has been nurtured and consolidated by Italian television dramas over the years. In this respect, the chapter analyses innovative forms of placemaking in recent Italian TV series that aim to revitalize the spatial connotations attached to Destination Italy, ‘rebranding’ the nation and emphasising new translocal senses of place. Adopting a textual and production perspective, the chapter focuses on the ‘spatial capital’ (McNutt 2022) of serial dramas like Thou Shalt Not Kill, La porta rossa, Anna and Prisma, which challenge traditional stereotypes and explore diverse, ‘peripheral’ (Hansen and Re 2024) representations of Italy. The chapter suggests that this shift in Italian television series can offer new translocal aesthetics that can engage both domestic and international audiences, with series like Anna and Prisma using unconventional settings and visual styles to create a new geography of screened Italy.