Il Tubolario

Italy 1980, brand Sebino, material cardboard, cm Ø 4 height 20

At the end of the 1970, more precisely with Law 833 of 1978, the Italian National Public Health Service was established.
Following what is remembered as the true and major Italian healthcare reform, a flood of regional and local health plans began to circulate, crammed with repetitive, bombastic phrases and, as often happens, largely incomprehensible to most people.
Two professors with a sharp sense of irony came up with the GAPS (an acronym for Automatic Generator of Health Plans).
Professor Marco Marchi of the Institute of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pisa and Professor Piero Morosini, laboratory director at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, earned the front page of Corriere della Sera thanks to news of their “invention.”
In the early 1980s, Tecnogiocattoli Sebino, a company from Brescia best known for producing the famous Cicciobello doll, contacted them to develop the idea further and bring the Tubolario to life.
The GAPS phrases were adapted by replacing strictly healthcare-related terms and references, with the aim of presenting them in a more varied language.
The product sold in stores came in a box containing three tubes, each dedicated to a different theme: political and trade-union language, love phrases, and sports jargon (mainly related to the world of football).
The ironic and irreverent story of the Tubolario did not last long.
It was a clever game that poked fun at the widespread habit of expressing oneself through clichés, stock phrases, and other standardized forms of speec, traits that still characterize the specialized language of politicians, journalists, and other public figures who often play with words to communicate without actually saying anything that might compromise them.
The phrases, arranged to resemble a logically structured speech, in fact conveyed absolutely nothing, while giving the strong impression that they did.
The Tubolario was made up of around seventy short statements printed on seven rotating cylinders, allowing anyone who used it to improvise an endless number of striking phrases, without ever saying anything concrete.
Although it has now become something of a cult object and is quite hard to find, listening to some television talk show regulars (a term which, to be precise, means a “conversation show” or “talk-based program”), one might think it hasn’t been relegated to the attic of memories, but is still being used today with remarkable ease.

BO-02-0091 - available