Telling the story does not change what happened, but it can alter what is to come. That’s the power of the narrative: when a story is heard, it becomes part of those who feel it’s their own and then act on what hasn’t yet happened. Every story has this margin of uncertainty, which resides in the perception of the listener. Hearing a story and feeling that it relates to you is like acquiring a formula to fix the world. I often think of a story the way a virologist does a virus, because a story can also become a contagious form which, by transforming people, transforms the world itself.

The Italy that listened to those monologues moved me. Each day I received thousands of letters and messages from people attesting to their receptiveness, their solidarity. Men and women who wanted to share their approval, as if a fresh breeze had begun to blow. What suffused every part of me during that time was actually the feeling that through that medium, television, which often seems useless, a device for obscuring people’s minds, a desire was building up: a longing to transform, to change, to speak out politically, to show that the country is different from the way it is portrayed, different from its political class, different from the crisis that it is going through.

The initial challenge was to portray this different Italy through ‘lists’ that would be the programme’s framework and grammar. A simple idea, because lists are containers for everything, every experience, every story. Here, too, audience participation was at a high: everyone thought of his or her own list, and during the broadcast, via Facebook and the website, thousands of them came in. Beautiful, funny, dramatic. I was reminded of the scene in the film Manhattan, when Woody Allen, lying on the couch, reflects on ‘An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves ’cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about … the universe.’ As an antidote, Allen thinks of something optimistic: a list of things that make life worthwhile. Of course it’s an expedient, the chronically ill person is him, and the optimistic list is useful to him and him alone, to free him from the pointless, neurotic issues which hold him captive. Woody Allen lists Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Swedish films, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, those incredible apples and pears painted by Cézanne, the crabs at Sam Wo’s and Tracy’s face. A light-hearted list that is worth more than a moral compass for those at a loss.