The 40-something man sitting in front of me on the train must have a pretty apprehensive mother, and I’m afraid the series of tunnels we’ve just entered won’t ease her anxiety. 

As the conversation livens, I’m reluctantly dragged in: if the train isn’t late, my fellow traveler will get off at Milano Centrale at 7:15 PM, take a taxi, and join mamma around 7:30 PM… mmm… no, at a quarter to eight more likely. I like this guy’s precision.  

We’ve finally got to the point of the call–what to make for dinner?–when I notice that at least three other passengers in our carriage are busy talking over their mobiles. Not bad for a seat in the train’s “silent area”. 

You see, it’s actually my fault. I made a fatal mistake. I forgot one of the most important unwritten rules in Italy: 

Thou shalt talk loudly over the phone, or thou shalt not talk at all. 

This volume is probably to compensate for the fact that hand gestures can’t be seen by our phone interlocutors, so we unconsciously raise our voices, involving everyone nearby in our dinner plans. And an aging population, mostly composed of squads of concerned mothers, makes phone calls way easier than texting. 

It’s no surprise that it was an Italian who invented the phone… because it was an Italian who invented the phone, in spite of what they’ve probably taught you in school. The paternity of the invention has long been debated, and it’s well-documented by an array of lawsuits mainly involving Florentine emigrant Antonio Meucci and his nemesis Alexander Graham Bell.

Besides being Giuseppe Garibaldi’s best pal, Meucci, who had set up home in Long Island, submitted a caveat for his “Sound Telegraph” in 1871. When the caveat expired and Meucci wasn’t able to renew it due to hardship, Bell went ahead, secured his own patent, and founded a company that made him as rich as Croesus.

Even recently, the pressing matter has required some serious governmental diplomacy. In 2002, a resolution from the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged Meucci’s work in the invention of the telephone. That was enough for Italian newspapers to state that the American Congress had declared Meucci the sole inventor of the telephone. Not that we needed it. We already knew it. In fact, in Italy we had known it since the very beginning. 

After its invention, the telephone quickly became a status-symbol. 

In the autarchic 1930s and 1940s, Italian cinematography developed its own reply to Hollywood. Strongly supported by the Fascist regime, Cinema dei Telefoni Bianchi (White Phones’ Cinema) featured upper-class characters dealing with the most effective theme in narration since Homer: adultery. 

In a country that prosecuted extra-conjugal relationships as a crime against morality, these films were often set somewhere else, preferably in Eastern Europe, in wealthy interiors typified by monumental staircases, refined Art-Deco furniture, and white telephones. As opposed to the black bakelite phones, which were relatively accessible, white ones were quite expensive and came to signify affluence and economic progress–the symbol of a world hardly accessible to the majority of cinema-goers.  

After the war, telephony had a phase of expansion. Manual switchboards multiplied all over Italy and the number of telephonists, who had to connect callers by inserting plugs into jacks all day long, grew with them. It was a highly gendered job: most telephonists were young, unmarried women.

Back then, making a call must have had a strong human feeling as telephonists were assigned to a set number of telephone subscribers. Regular callers would have been able to recognize the voice of their telephonist. 

In a light tone, Gianni Franciolini’s 1955 film Le signorine dello 04 (The ladies of the 04) plays with these dynamics, looking into the lives of five employees in a Roman telephone exchange. With elegance and razor-sharp wit, star actress Franca Valeri mocks Italian society of the economic boom by impersonating a middle-class housewife: distracted beyond help, long-winded, gossipy, and unable to cut the umbilical cord. 

Meanwhile, in 1966, Mina released the song “Se Telefonando” (“If Over the Phone”), which told the story of an intense and sudden passion with a quick death: “If by calling you / I could say goodbye for good / I would call you.” 

Another song over the phone, “Buonasera Dottore” (“Good evening, Doctor”, 1975), performed by Claudia Mori and Alberto Lupo, is an amusing and somewhat naughty song between two lovers. A man, in the company of his wife, receives a call from his mistress and pretends to be talking with his doctor.

Television, which turned both songs into hits, quickly grasped the symbolic power of connecting people telephonically. In the 1980s, the TV show Pronto, Raffaella?, starring the immortal Raffaella Carrà, revolved around interaction with live audiences through various telephone games. Competitors from home answered simple questions to win considerable sums, and Carrà kept a telephone receiver against her ear the whole time. From her striking outfits (shoulder-pads for days) to the tacky scenography, the show was perfect in every aspect. Moreover, Pronto, Raffaella? hosted remarkable guests–to name just two, Jorge Luis Borges and Mother Teresa (the show was the only television programme to ever interview her). But the power of the telephone was never so apparent as when a woman, who had phoned in to participate in the game, revealed that her daughter with serious speech impediment miraculously managed to pronounce the phrase “Raffaella, I love you.”

Fast forward some 40 years, and Italians’ love for the phone (and for Raffaella) hasn’t changed one bit.