Numbers and names. One hundred years since the first telephone directory

The forerunner of search engines, an indispensable aid to novelists, an icon of progress, a household item, but also a tool of dictatorship and even torture! The telephone directory has represented so many things that not even all of them are featured in the exhibition now organised by Società Idroelettrica Piemontese in Turin, at the historic Italiaonline headquarters at 22 Corso Mortara. “Cento anni di connessione” is the name of the event, which runs from 2 October to 23 December. On 1 June 1926, the first official volume compiling telephone numbers in Italy was published by Stipel, which had begun operating the previous year in the historic Palazzo dei Telefoni: the monumental building at 10 Via Confienza, which has housed the company’s management and central offices since 1925. In an era of increasingly widespread internet access via third-generation mobile phones, the exhibition aims to highlight how that simple act of locating a physical address and telephone number by scanning an alphabetical list was a forerunner of the search activity via Google – or similar platforms – which has now become almost compulsive.

However, in Italian homes the telephone directory became increasingly widespread as the economic boom progressed. Historically divided into the White Pages for private individuals in alphabetical order, and from 1965 also the Yellow Pages for businesses, it was not merely a useful tool, but a veritable anthropological map of the territory. Flipping through its pages allowed readers to grasp the distribution of surnames, the emergence of new professions, and the urban expansion of towns and cities. In Italian homes, the directory occupied a specific "realm": usually on a small table in the hall, strictly positioned beneath the landline telephone, often a rotary-dial model. It was a well-worn object: its covers were scribbled on with impromptu notes, the most important numbers were circled in pen, and the margins were used as emergency notepads.

To illustrate how the Elenco has kept pace with changes in Italian society – evolving from a simple print directory to a tool for businesses and finally into a digital ecosystem – the exhibition uses documents, artefacts, images and personal accounts. There are original directories from the Italiaonline archives, some dating back to the 1920s. There are vintage switchboards and telephones, some of which were produced in collaboration with the TIM Historical Archive. There are six chronological sections, accompanied by audio guides, which recount the cultural and social evolution of the directory. An entire section is dedicated to advertising, which over the years has transformed the directories into a mirror of Italian social customs, through multimedia stations where visitors can relive advertising campaigns and celebrity endorsements that have become part of the collective imagination. For example, there is the 1988 advert in which a child cheers on his father, who is winning a running race on TV, only to see him finish second: he is disappointed, but then looks in the Yellow Pages and finds the perfect gift to console him. “Get listed in the Yellow Pages and you too will win over the general public,” advised Pippo Baudo in 1985.

Back in the days of the very first mobile phones, there was Alberto Castagna, who in 1995 rang Giorgia from a fishing boat to tell her that, whilst looking in the Yellow Pages for someone who makes fishing tackle, he’d found a supplier of bespoke fishing lines – and had one made ‘to ward off bad luck’ (even though he ended up catching very little). There is also the hugely famous catchphrase about the bandit who takes a hostage and, besieged by the police, makes the most improbable demands, while a policeman starts searching online. “What on earth are you doing?” asks the inspector. “I’m on the Internet. With the online Yellow Pages, I can find anything. I’ve got the whole of Italy at my fingertips.” A landmark turning point, the 1990s were also the years when, in Italy’s era of privatisation, the publication of telephone directories – initially published exclusively by Seat – was liberalised. Even before that, however, the annual delivery—an iconic event—was not the responsibility of the state but was entrusted to private companies that subcontracted the work to local youngsters, university students seeking to earn a few lire, and seasonal workers. They would often ride around on bicycles laden with bundles of directories, a style that today might recall Glovo.

“In the Yellow Pages, words become reality” was the slogan from the earlier Carosello era. But the Carosello jingle returned in the 1990s, notably in a slightly horror-themed advert in which Piero Chiambretti casts Barbara Bush, Stephen King, Luciano Pavarotti, Rin Tin Tin, Dracula and even Saddam Hussein as ambassadors for the Yellow Pages: “You might be wondering: where did I find my super-cannon? Simple – in the Yellow Pages, under ‘hardware’!” In another transitional phase, the taxi driver Walter – played by Claudio Bisio – calls 89.24.24 on his mobile to ask for a restaurant, and the operator shows him the image. The number 89.24.24 was also renowned for its catchy jingle, much like the one for 12.40: “12.40 / ring, whistle and sing / if you’re looking for a number / we’ll find it for you straight away / 12.40”. In 1995, the telephone directory began to be available online as well.

The exhibition also explores the relationship between directories and art, featuring designer covers ranging from the 2005 photography competition to images from the ‘Passione Italia’ project – created to mark the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy – right through to the ‘50 Covers for 50 Years’ series and the illustrations by Luciano Cinà, known by his stage name Luccico. The directory even reached the Sanremo Music Festival in 1979 with “Autunno, cadono le pagine gialle” by Marinella, a singer from Bologna who went on to pursue a career in zany songs, culminating in 1981 with the catchphrase “Ma lascia stare, ma chi te lo fa fare”. A delirious outburst from a SIP office worker alienated by telephone numbers, it didn’t even make it to the final, but it took the airwaves by storm. “I’m absolutely convinced / I’m just sexy enough / I’ve got the voice to sing / I’m already fed up with staying here at SIP / I’m a complete waste here / I’m a failed artist / At first they flattered me / Saying I’d make it big in pop / I’d love to sing the telephone directory / I’d love to sing through a megaphone / Accompanied by a saxophone, too / To serenade someone through the intercom / Hello, miss, I’d like to speak to 113 / The subscriber has changed their number / The state has ruined me / Through a combination of circumstances / That day at the supermarket / When the Sip manager fell in love with me / I was crowned Miss Interurban / Sip cover girl for the subscriber directory / Queen of the street directory / But I’ve even developed a tic over all these area codes.”

Before the list of subscribers drove the protagonist of a song mad, it had, unwittingly, become a symbol of the dictatorship when Benito Mussolini proclaimed his slogan ‘Book and musket’ whilst leaning out from the fateful balcony of Palazzo Venezia, holding a Carcano Model 91 in one hand and a volume in the other—said to have been a telephone directory. It was the first book he’d had to hand when the Duce asked for one. It then returned to the limelight in December 1941 when, shortly before declaring war on Washington, Mussolini once again sought Giovanni Ansaldo’s opinion. ‘Duce, have you ever seen the New York telephone directory?’ was the question that came in reply. Whilst the Rome telephone directory at the time still consisted of very few pages, the New York one, in fact, comprised several massive volumes. Ansaldo intended to make the dictator understand the immense demographic, industrial and economic potential of the United States, to highlight the folly of going to war against such a superpower. But the Duce merely shrugged his shoulders. Moreover, it was in the United States that the world’s first telephone directory had been published. On 21 February 1878, a full 46 years before Italy’s, in New Haven, Connecticut: a sheet measuring 14 by 21 centimetres listing the names of 50 people. Not yet in alphabetical order: that change came the following year. Two years later, the first European telephone directory would appear in Zurich, listing just 98 names.

When the list becomes extensive, in fact, it not only provides a symbolic indication of a country’s potential, but can also be used for more physical and mundane tasks. Some are endearing, such as placing it under a seated child to raise them to the same height as the adults at the table. But some are also sinister, such as the frequently reported practice of using it as a blunt instrument against prisoners, so as to inflict pain without leaving any marks. It is an old Latin American anecdote, from a region with brutal police forces, about a policeman interrogating a rather brazen criminal. At one point, the criminal suddenly headbutts a mirror to injure himself and threatens to report the policeman for abuse. At that point, a superior officer enters, sees the prisoner’s bloodied face, and blurts out in horror: “No! You don’t do that!” “But…” the policeman tries to protest, to explain that it wasn’t him, but the superior cuts him off. “No! I don’t want to hear any of it! You don’t do that! We’ll be in trouble with that bloodied face!” “But…”. “No, I don’t want to know anything! You’ve got to learn! You don’t beat a prisoner like that. Instead…”. At that point, he grabs a telephone directory, goes over to the prisoner, and starts hitting him hard on the head with it. The prisoner screams in pain, and the superior explains: “See?! That way you hurt him badly, but there’s no blood or other marks left.”

Also from Latin America comes “L’Eternauta”: a Netflix series that transposes the story of the terrible alien invasion of Buenos Aires – originally set in 1957–59 in the comic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López – to the year 2025. While it has been met with mixed reactions from fans of the original story, the attempt to adapt a tale set in an analogue world to the digital age—with the internet and mobile phones—is nonetheless intriguing: all things that the invading aliens, in fact, immediately destroy. In the fourth episode, the problem is finding a daughter who is staying with a friend whose contact details can no longer be found on a mobile phone. A frantic search is then carried out through the rubbish bins for an old telephone directory that had just been thrown away, as it was taking up space and was useless. Finding it finally makes it possible to locate the address – although actually getting there in person will prove to be a far more challenging undertaking.

A plot which, whilst emphasising that it is a thing of the past, nevertheless brings back into the spotlight an object that used to appear more frequently in old films. As recently as 1979, in the film The Jerk, Navin R. Johnson—a character played by Steve Martin—celebrated the appearance of his name in the new telephone directory in a memorable way, shouting: “The new directory’s here! The new directory’s here!”, as proof of the success and identity he had finally achieved. In 1984’s The Terminator, the cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger uses the directory to systematically track down and kill every woman named “Sarah Connor” living in Los Angeles: perhaps the most famous example of that pre-Internet film noir or thriller cliché where a page is torn from the telephone directory in a public telephone box to find the address of a mysterious character. There is also the display of strength: in cartoons, comics or street performances, the stereotype of the strongman or superhero is often cemented by the act of tearing a telephone directory in half with bare hands, making use of the book’s formidable thickness. Or that of skill: an actor so talented that he can move an audience even by simply reading from the telephone directory.

Comedians and radio shows have since built entire gags around leafing through the directory in search of funny, bizarre or double-entendre surnames to tease people with late at night. Distinguished writers such as Georges Simenon regularly used telephone directories and the Yellow Pages to track down and select the most suitable and realistic names for their characters. Other authors have celebrated it as the apotheosis of literature that transcends the ‘dictatorship of the plot’, bringing together millions of different destinies and lives in a single volume. More recently, the title was revisited in an ironic-existential vein by Zerocalcare in the famous collection from his blog, ‘L’elenco telefonico degli accolli’. In 2003, Tullio Avoledo made his debut as a writer with L’elenco telefonico di Atlantide, which went on to become a minor classic of Italian science fiction.

In 2010, New York became the first city to stop printing residential telephone directories, marking the start of a trend towards the increasing disappearance of physical media: this was also driven by pressure from environmentalists, who claimed that, in 2010 alone, the production and distribution of telephone directories would have generated 1,400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, resulting in the consumption of over 600,000 tonnes of paper. Yet the Turin exhibition’s journey still extends to the present and beyond, with a section dedicated to the future and artificial intelligence, demonstrating how new technologies are changing the way we search for information and forge connections between people, businesses and services. The history of the directory continues online through PagineGialle, PagineBianche, TuttoCittà and PagineGialle Casa, which together reach over 11 million active users per month. PagineGialle.it alone records 5.4 million searches per month and provides visibility to around 2.2 million national and local businesses. However, 2.7 million Italian households still request to receive the telephone directory at home.