The Ladies’ paradisea very successful Rai Uno soap opera, set in Milan in a department store that recalls the beginnings of the famous Rinascente, between amorous intrigues, sentimental jealousies and professional envies, betrayals, solidarity and low blows as in any self-respecting soap, reached its tenth year last December and shows no sign of slowing down, on the contrary. Rai has just announced that this year, unlike previous seasons, it will continue until the third week of May, rather than interrupting at the beginning. Then it will stop to resume in the autumn.
One title, two formats, from series to soap
Started on 8 December 2015, for two seasons as a TV series, and then veered more decisively towards a soap opera with daily episodes in the afternoon slot from Monday to Friday, it continues for over 1,340 episodes, telling the events that revolve around a women’s clothing department store, between the fifties and sixties, when ready-to-wear in the cities at least began to replace tailoring and marketing began to appear as evidenced by the slogan “The beauty of accessible to all” symbol of the television department store, a crossroads of female figures.
A little history
Packages of 160 episodes and more each, at least since 2018 when the format changed, reflecting everyday life and seasonality of the outside world, to the point that Al Paradiso hosts Christmas showcases when this also happens in the real world or awaits the premiere at La Scala on 7 December. But ten years is longer than any actor can guarantee, and in fact of the protagonists who are part of it today only Filippo Scaraffia alias Roberto Landi resists from the very first hour, when in 2015 Giusy Buscemi, then protagonist of the first two seasons, in the role of Teresa who arrived in Milan from Sicily with a cardboard suitcase in 1956 to look for work in Milan thus escaping an unwanted marriage proposal, told Rosanna Biffi on Famiglia Cristiana about her debut and the spirit of the beginning, with a limited prime time format: «At the beginning for Teresa beauty is a business card only up to a certain point: she is dressed so badly that it doesn’t matter if he has a nice little face, because elegance was something completely different.”
Among others, Alessandro Tersigni played the role of Vittorio Conti for over 800 episodes from 2015 to 2024, while Roberto Farnesi (Umberto Guarnieri) and Vanessa Gravina, (Adelaide di Sant’Erasmo) have been protagonists since the turning point of 2018. Others, however, participated for more limited periods.
An unsuspected historical resemblance
To facilitate actor turnover the soap opera format that few know has a very curious resemblance in its structure to an ancient literary precedent, certainly unconscious but highly suggestive, in popular and consumer baroque novels which, although not gone down in history for their literary value, in the seventeenth century experienced in Italy a fluvial production for the time, and which in their structure closely resemble that of soap operas.
A scheme that explains well both the mechanism of the appearance and disappearance of the numerous characters, as well as a seriality that can be interrupted and resumed at any moment at the cost of leaving many threads unfinished and with them the readers of the time and the viewers of (it is no mystery that Paradise and soaps in general have a very large predominantly female target), but also free hands for the authors of the time and the productions of today to take and drop according to the whims of the market or the audience.
«Once their role is exhausted», the characters (of which, as in soap operas, there were dozens and dozens), «disappear more or less completely to make way for others, who will subsequently follow the same fate. The type of construction by parallel lines is thus preserved indefinitely and on the other hand the “open” character of the narrative structure is also preserved; if it is indeed true that from a logical point of view each episode seems destined to end at the moment of its grafting onto the main trunk (…) the ease with which new protagonists can be introduced at any time in any place leaves the authors of the time free”, who certainly did not have to be asked “to stoke fires, however ephemeral, almost everywhere”. And who took precautions by leaving the door open at the end of the novels by announcing new episodes, which may or may not come. Thus the critic Marco Fantuzzi spoke of Girolamo Brusoni, a bizarre novelist of the Baroque era who no anthology remembers, describing the narrative mechanisms in the baroque novel (Antenore, 1975).
How it will end
Having forgotten Brusoni, just apply the description to the characters and the plot of the ladies’ paradise and to the soap opera genre, to see the mechanism replicate itself almost intact, also explaining well why the story on the one hand never seems to end and on the other the reason for so many threads cut in the trunk. It is not difficult to imagine that one day when the audience runs out, even Paradise will stop without us knowing exactly how it will end simply because the soap, like baroque novels, is not programmed for a pre-written epilogue, it simply interrupts itself, finding an end in the running of the main story and leaving the other threads suspended.
The source of inspiration in Émile Zola’s novel
The Ladies’ paradise television, however, also has a true, certified literary precedent, declared right from the title inspired by a novel by Émile Zola, exponent of French naturalism and author of Germinal and of Nanabut also of a novel published in 1883 for the Rougon-Macquart cycle and entitled To the Ladies’ Paradise, whose story revolves around the unscrupulous and glittering rise of the first Parisian department store Le Bon Marché, with the bold entrepreneur Octave and the shop assistant Denise from the province as its protagonists.
Does Rinascente have anything to do with it?
It is inevitable in the transposition from Paris to Milan and from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century that the historical reference of the screenwriters of Ladies’ Paradise are also the real Milanese department stores and that the viewer’s imagination immediately runs to Rinascente, the most central and famous, without however ever having been an explicit reference. Rinascente also actually gave inspiration to a historical, but very recent novel: A million stairs. The girls of Rinascentereleased in 2025 by Giacinta Cavagna di Gualdana for Neri Pozza, but that’s another story.
