Italian Institutional communication in pandemic period: a chronological analysis of Prime Minister speeches

Since the beginning of 2020, the whole world has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Italy, the first infections occurred in February 2020, immediately after the spread of the epidemic in China. In this frame, communication, especially that provided by official channels, has played a crucial role. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the YouTube Presidency of the Council of Ministers channel has been widely used in Italy. The paper aims is to study the mood of the speeches and compare it with the pandemic curve, in addition, the topics covered in the speeches are detected and observed according to the chronology. We analyzed 133 speeches of the Italian Prime Minister from February 2020 (the beginning of the spread of the virus in Italy) to September 2020 and to study how pandemic events influenced the language used in institutional discourse. In the time series of the contagion curve, we have identified three points of variation associated with four time periods. These periods are used to analyze grouped speeches using both an unsupervised approach based on cluster analysis and probabilistic topic analysis.