My research at the BSR investigated the role of celebrities and the media in communicating ideas about social change in Italy's 1968, with a focus on the Venice Biennale. Why go to Rome to study protests in Venice? The student protests in Rome and the Battle of Valle Giulia on 1 March 1968 became a symbol of the national protests. And, as I learned when I started my residency, the ‘battle’ occurred next door at Rome Sapienza's Department of Architecture and spilled over to the front steps of the BSR. The BSR's archive collection holds photographs of this day, captured by residents on the roof of the building, which provide important documentation of student, police and media activity.

Then as now, Venice and its festivals attracted media from around the world, with syndicated news services ready to distribute images of celebrities posing in the photogenic city, or transmit the columns written by journalists assessing the art, film and gossip. In 1968, these were replaced by images and stories of bloodied protesters, charging police with batons, and festival boycotts or sit-ins by the artists and film-makers that the Biennale sought to celebrate. The media created and distributed powerful images and words about the Venice sessantotto to national and international audiences. Images of Giuseppe Ungaretti greeting student protesters in Piazza San Marco, famous artists covering their work in the Italian pavilion or Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo marching with raised fists outside the Lido's cinema reveal a different kind of 1968 protest to those occurring in Rome, Turin and Milan. My archival work investigated the role of celebrities in magazine and newspaper coverage of the 1968 protests at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma and television coverage at the RAI's Biblioteca centrale Paolo Giuntella and the Teulada Studio Biblioteca di Comunicazioni di massa.

The Rome-based national film-maker association (Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici — ANAC) led the demonstrations at the Venice Film Festival. ANAC had supported other protests earlier in the year, issuing press releases against the violence towards students in Rome, and applauding the film-maker protests in Cannes and Pesaro. The ANAC archives show that the group planned their Venice film festival protest months in advance, and strategically used the media as part of their protest. Unlike many student-led or spontaneous protests, the ANAC film-makers were lobbying the Christian Democrat Party, the Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party for legislative changes to the selection and judging procedures of the Venice Film Festival. Access to the ANAC archive during the COVID-19 Omicron wave of early 2022 was very limited, so I returned in July to continue my work on this important collection. After two years away from Italy, it was an extraordinary three months.