Valley of crime: The Po Valley as the theatre for Italian television crime drama in the third millennium

Adopting the interdisciplinary approach of location studies, this article focuses on TV series set in the Po Valley, which in the past twenty years has become – both from the point of view of current events and from that of the related television fictional representations – a social and narrative theatre of murky mysteries and heinous crimes. In this TV series, the visual innovation of the ‘provincial’ Padanian context is further amplified by complex narratives, ambiguous anti-heroes and unconventional female characters, who renegotiate the rules of gender. Lending itself not only as a topical film-television location but also as an authentic ‘actor’ – around which the most hidden fears and the most brutal instincts of the Italian history of the third millennium are condensed – the peripheral Padanian geography lends itself to localize universal stories, thus reshaping the entire audience’s collective imagination regarding ‘Italianness’.