Italy to screen Una Poltrona per Due on Christmas Eve for the 22nd time.
Italy is home to some of the world’s oldest and most spectacular Christmas traditions that have illuminated and enriched the Italian festive season for centuries.
The country also has some more unexpected modern-day traditions and few are more intriguing than the annual screening of Trading Places on Italian television at Christmas.
Year after year, millions of people in Italy sit down to watch the dubbed version of the 1983 movie whose title in Italian is Una Poltrona per Due.
Last year a restored 4K version of the film returned to the big screen in Italy four decades after its release in Italian cinemas.
The classic American comedy, a 20th-century take on the tale of the rich man (Dan Aykroyd) and the poor man (Eddie Murphy), has become a fixture in Italy every Christmas.
Trading Places is a festive favourite in Italy.
Directed by John Landis, the movie was released in US cinemas on 8 June 1983, and in Italian cinemas on 19 January 1984.
Although the film was an instant success in the US box office, in Italy it came only 13th in the ranking of most viewed films that year.
The movie tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker (Akroyd) and a poor street hustler (Murphy) whose lives cross when they are unwittingly made the subject of an elaborate bet to test how each man would perform when their life circumstances are swapped.
First aired by Italia 1 on Christmas Day in 1989, the movie has been screened in Italy at Christmas time practically every year since 1997.
The tradition has been broken only six times: in 2001 (when the film was screened on Christmas Day), in 2002 (31 October), in 2003 (21 December), in 2007 (25 November), in 2011 (23 December) and in 2005 (when it was not screeed at all).
Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy in Una Poltrona per Due.
There is also a significant economic factor for re-screening the same movie each year: it costs far less to broadcast a cult classic compared to purchasing the rights to a new title.
Whatever the reasons, public approval has remained consistently high down through the decades, and has even started to grow in recent years.
In 2022 more than 1.9 million viewers in Italy tuned in, the year after that the number climbed to 2 million while last year it rose to 2.4 million.
There is even a Facebook fan page dedicated exclusively to the annual screening, with around 10,000 followers.
The good news for Trading Places fans in Italy is that the much-loved film will retain its prime time spot on Christmas Eve 2025 on Italia 1.
The film can also be streamed on Mediaset Infinity as well as on Prime Video, where it is available in its original language version with Italian subtitles.
