Quiz assurdo tra cultura generale e giochi di parole

What does “rotocalco” mean in Italian?

A rotocalco is a glossy illustrated weekly, the kind stuffed with celebrity photographs. The word is machinery: it’s short for rotocalcografia, rotogravure, a printing process that uses engraved rotating copper cylinders. The press gave its name to the paper it produced, then to the whole genre — and eventually to television, where a rotocalco televisivo is a magazine-format news show.

Roto- is the rotating cylinder and calcografia the engraving on copper (Greek khalkós, “copper”). Italian keeps a whole press-room vocabulary alive: la carta stampata, il quotidiano (daily), il settimanale (weekly), il periodico. In this quiz sketch the clue is just “rivista, periodico”, and the contestant, groping for the answer, produces rotogatto, rotocallo, rotocalzo, rotocalio — every near-miss except the word itself.