“Black and white screen and the city: Contessa di Parma becomes smart"

This paper aims to analyze some elements of medial development due to the digital convergence and to the influence of visual communication in the urban space like “city of screens” and “screen city”, according to the relocation of the cinema phenomenon. The image of the screen has became a symbol of our contemporary, it appears at the same time as a results of many computational processes and as a mirror, or a window, or a threshold of access to the real world. Alessandro Blasetti, one of the greater Italian filmmakers, in 1937 shot in Torino Contessa di Parma in which the screen can be read as a diaphragm of the narration and as symbolic object. Contessa, in fact, has been immediately considered a movie of the modernity and it shows us screens used as showcases, entrance doors of the place in which the plots develops but, overall, separation in character’s gaze because inside of the hotel they always watch through mirrors or glasses, symbols of their world full of lies and deceptions