THE “SANREMO FESTIVAL” AS A TRANSGENERATIONAL MEDIATED RITUAL: BRIDGING POP CULTURE AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

The “Sanremo Music Festival”, a quintessential “mediated ritual”, disrupts routine media programming and daily life in Italy, serving as a cultural event that bridges entertainment and public values. In recent years, as a transmedial and transgenerational phenomenon, “Sanremo Festival” offers a unique stage for societal reflection, intertwining music with themes of civic and cultural relevance. Over its history, the festival has often addressed significant social and political issues through contest songs, and guest performances. The article briefly examines the 2024 and 2025 editions in which a new kind of initiative was introduced with the presence for the first time of an institutional European campaign. The contribution aims to analyse how this campaign is integrated into the transmedial event and whether the “Sanremo Festival” succeeds in transforming institutional civic messages into shared cultural narratives capable of stimulating engagement on social networks.