PhillyDeals: Italy's RAI network aims at U.S. market

With its slow economy and aging population, Italy seeks strength from abroad from the nation's ambitious expatriates, successful descendants of long-ago immigrants, and fans of Italian art, food, technology and investments.

And calcio (soccer): Juventus, AC Milan, Roma, and other top clubs are the top draw among the three channels that Italy's state-owned RAI World media network beams abroad to Comcast, Verizon and DirecTV customers and other networks outside Italy, says Piero A. Corsini, RAI's chief executive.

Corsini, who is based in Rome, was fueling up for a whirlwind tour of Italian America at La Colombe coffee shop, opposite City Hall. Praising the shop's bold espresso, passing on its piled pastries, Corsini was guided by Italy's energetic consul in Philadelphia, Andrea Canepari.

Canepari was sent back here (he has a degree from Penn) last year by his government, which had considered closing the city's last full-service European consulate. Canepari was told to organize gli amici d'Italia, and win new friends, across the Mid-Atlantic states, for the mutual benefit of la patria and Italian-interest communities here.

Like its predecessors, the year-old government of youthful Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has "invested a great deal of money," Corsini says, in the news and feature programming it beams abroad, some of which is visible even to non-subscribers at www.RAItalia.it.

RAI World has scored lately, Corsini says, with coverage of popular, tolerant Pope Francis. (Corsini, personally, expects that Francis' strict predecessor, Benedict XVI, will be "very well-respected by history" as a clear-thinking intellectual.)

RAI affiliates will be here in force to cover the visit of Pope Francis to World Family Day in Philadelphia next September. Canepari shepherded Corsini and his lieutenant, Giovanni Celsi, to meet with ParenteBeard L.L.C. chief Robert J. Ciaruffoli, the Italian American National Foundation, and other prominenti who will be part of that program and are shaking national networks to raise millions to defray the cost.

Searching for new audiences, Corsini and Celsi recently returned from Boston, where they found an Italian community bifurcated between aging immigrants and youthful students, professors and doctors.

It's more complicated, Canepari says, in his consular district, which stretches from South Jersey to North Carolina. He tells Corsini there are layers of Italians here who may have little contact with one another: young people in the food business, students and professionals, aging immigrants of the post-World War II generation (who keep alive old Italian Catholic churches and high-school language classes and Columbus Day parades), business leaders whose Italian forebears came here generations ago, and whom Canepari hopes to alert to investments back home.

"Italy has more trade with my district than with all of India," Canepari said, raising Corsini's eyebrows.

RAI World has its work cut out for it. The network is still debating basic questions, such as whether to lead with subtitles in Italian - or in the New World diaspora tongues of English, Spanish and Portuguese.

There are arguments both ways, says Corsini: "The Romans said it: 'Where you have two Romans, you have three opinions.' "