This chapter aims to locate a sub-set of what has become known as the ‘giallo ’ filone within its historical contexts, and to ask what significance this relationship might hold for the broader study of Italy's cultural history. Such an under-taking immediately poses methodological questions: what are we looking for when we seek to identify ‘history’ in such popular cinema; by what models can we best pursue a ‘historical’ approach to an amorphous, frequently unruly cinematic format like the Italian filone? Certainly, such films can offer insights into how discourses about the past have been represented and consumed within particular registers of historical address. John Foot concludes his study of Italy's ‘divided memory’ by stating that, for the historian:

Foot's central thesis places the nation's history in an osmotic relationship with a contested ‘public memory’: a relationship that ensures that the past is continually constructed and narrated anew in the negotiated, organic shaping of the present. By thus repudiating perceived boundaries between notions of (empirical) ‘history’ and (subjective) ‘memory’, Foot seeks to examine heterogeneous ‘lived experiences’ of a people's relationship with their national past: analysing not mere ‘facts’, but the differing ways in which perceived facts have been understood and utilised (Foot, 2009: 5–6). In essence, this approach seeks to appraise ‘history’ on its audiences’ terms, to take account of the cultural options open to them for its interpretation and negotiation in a given moment.

Such an approach is brought into particular focus when we consider Italy's 1970s: a decade notable for schismatic preoccupations with the national past, which presents an array of cinematic registers through which such preoccupations were represented. Increasingly, scholarship in this area provides nuanced considerations of how popular formats engaged in historical discourse. Yet, where contextualisation within the specific political and historical conditions of 1970s Italy is concerned, gaps remain surrounding the diverse category of the giallo thriller.