ABSTRACT
In recent years scholars from different branches of human sciences have studied Olympic ceremonies as a modern intercultural and cross-cultural phenomenon. In our global village the efforts and results of the Olympic organization committees, along with all the publicity surrounding the games, are magnified by television — mass medium par excellence — by the Internet and by the new media as an innovative means of communication introduced during the Beijing Olympics. Focusing on the first symbolic event, the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony, which took place on 24 March at Olympia in Greece, an exploratory analysis will be presented on how the Italian and Swiss media reported and interpreted the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games by examining audiovisual material gathered from television, newspapers, the Internet and social networking websites. This study will focus on the event itself but other moments will be considered in light of their relevance for this analysis.
