I recently finished watching the TV series "Mussolini: Son of the Century."
I don’t speak Italian, so I’m curious to know if all the dialogue was in standard Italian. Or did some characters speak the country's regional languages/dialects? Given the historical setting, I was wondering if they incorporated different linguistic variations to reflect the time period more accurately.
by aszymier
5 comments
As far as I remember, only Mussolini and Rachele speaks some phrases in their regional dialect when they are alone, especially during the scenes where they are arguing. Other characters speaks in Italian but with their local accent
The accents of the main characters are correct.
Cesare Rossi is Tuscan, Mussolini is Romagnol, and Matteotti should be Venetian, but honestly, he doesn’t sound quite accurate.
In this [clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONZUoPVp6h4) , you can hear Mussolini and Rachele say several sentences in [romagnolo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romagnol), the regional language of the region where they were born. It is heavily mixed with sentences in Italian, though.
Several characters speak with a heavy regional accent, but ss far as I remember only Rachele and Mussolini speak their regional language.
It’s a lovely patchwork of Italian dialects!
I found it refreshing because after fascism TV and radio opted to speak standard Italian since they had an educational role in uniting a nation very different under a language point of view: so many people were illiterate and had no other way to learn the proper language. So today we’re not that used to hearing different regional accents on TV (except for Roman, Neapoletan and Sicilian). I’m more used to hearing different accents of English than my own language!
So Mussolini and Rachele speak Romagnolo, a dialect from Emilia Romagna (I am from Rome and I had a hard time at first, thank God for subtitles ahah), Margherita had an annoying (for me) posh Venetian accent and Cesarino a funny Tuscan accent. I found him very convincing and at the same time weird, because his actor played a Neapoletan character in My Brilliant Friend and I was used to see him as Bruno Soccavo rather than Cesare Rossi.
The other characters too play according to their region and social status – another thing I’m more used to with English rather than Italian, but they paid a lot of attention to it.
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