Italian films in Belgium are cultural objects. Socially, they share the same symbolic life that perfumes, fashion, restaurants, TV programmes, etc. do. The people who decide to import, distribute and subtitle these films do so according to their professional experiences. But being professionals in the field of culture implicates the existence of an idea of culture. This paper will reconstruct this idea of culture depicting the itinerary that conducts a movie from Rome to Brussels. The data presented are the results of pilot-field research which is part of a larger, ongoing PhD research on multimodal texts.
Furthermore, the paper will define the motivations that emerged from the interviews with the above-mentioned professionals. Through the analysis of the interviews I will try to establish which ideas of cinema emerge and what the perception of Italian cinema is among the interviewees. Moreover, I will demonstrate the presence of Flemish taste as an important component of the decision-making process. The Flemish professionals who choose, buy and translate Italian movies do so according to a culturally determined taste.

Manuela CANIATO holds a scholarship for PhD research at the University of Ghent and University College Ghent. The topic of the PhD research is the subtitling of Italian films into Dutch (2000-2006). Her research presents a sociological, linguistic and media-analysis approach. Manuela Caniato also teaches Italian at the University College Ghent, Department of Translation Studies, Belgium (level BA1 and BA2). From 2004 to 2008 she taught Italian at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (level BA1 and BA2) and from 2000 to 2008 she taught Italian in evening courses for adults. Before that she used to live in Italy where, from 1995, she was a part-time assistant of Sociology of Communication at the Faculty of Sociology, Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth, Milan. Simultaneously, she taught at the Classical Lyceum “S. Raffaele” from 1993. At the beginning of her working life she was a copywriter in an advertising agency and a reader for different publishing houses.