My dissertation, “La Voce della Radio,” examines opera programming for the radio in Italy between 1931 and 1961. Drawing on archival recordings of opera broadcasts and the various texts that circulated around those transmissions, I situate radio opera in relation to other forms of national programming. My investigation of promotional materials and documents of reception is complemented by an examination of the ways that evolving broadcast technologies shaped aesthetic expectations and the discourse surrounding new operas for the radio by Futurist artists and broadcasts of canonical operas by Verdi, Puccini, and others. In its early years radio was an important medium for uniting listeners around common opinions and shared aesthetic experiences; the power of radio for the fascist state lay partly in that unifying function. The dissertation grounds claims about the nationalist and propagandistic facets of radio in specific cases, while also considering radio transmission in Italy as an international phenomenon.