An event is called an exceptional situation that does not occur frequently and which, for these reasons, remains imprinted in the collective memory. And for over twenty years the victories on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” have been so great that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and even less.

Precisely four, with the first, which took place on 18 March 2001, which still included the prize money in lire. The one who collected the billion was Francesca Cinelli from Pistoia, who read the fifteenth question, giving the correct answer.

It took four years to get an encore. In October 2004 it was Davide Pavesi from Cerro al Lambro who won, this time inaugurating the one million euro win, to which Michela De Paoli joined on 27 January 2011 and Enrico Remigio on 29 January 2020.

Characters whose faces, expressions, reasoning and sometimes even the questions asked by Gerry Scotti we remember, precisely because our mind catalogs certain situations in folders to keep. And those decisive seconds, if seen again, promptly ensure shivers and goosebumps.

Four triumphs in as many decades, we were saying. A trend that clashes with the exploit that took place last Sunday, in the second episode, with another competitor arriving the same evening to read the final question. This time not the fifteenth, but the tenth, because we are talking about a different “Millionaire”, transformed into a tournament.

We must start from an assumption: the metamorphosis adopted by Canale 5 appears more appropriate than ever. The qualifying phase and the three parallel heats gave liveliness and dynamism to a game that was otherwise too slow for this era. In 2025, with Italians living with a smartphone in their hands, it is in fact unthinkable to wait even five or ten minutes for an answer that they have already researched and viewed at home.

In this the “Millionaire” knows how to be a perfect witness of the times. If in the early 2000s everything was focused on exhausting waiting to create pathos, after a quarter of a century the watchword is ‘speed’, due to an attention span that has collapsed dramatically. A certain frenzy is therefore welcome, perfectly immortalized by the ‘switch’, an aid that allows, in case of difficulty, to change the question and not think about it too much.

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Woe betide you if you compare Vittoria Licari to the old winners

But beware of comparing this solution to the real “Millionaire”. Just as it would be necessary to avoid the comparison between those four winners and Vittoria Licari, who on December 14th put the most coveted check in her pocket.

“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, although anachronistic, was always conceived as a game of solitude, of silences, of eternal reflections and reasoning lasting even fifty minutes, as happened in 2020, when Remigio took all the time necessary to understand what Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to set foot on the lunar soil, had left written on the lunar soil.

Not today. Fifty minutes of waiting would cause spectators to flee. On the other hand, it is precisely that tension that is missing, mixed with the will to dare, to move forward, to challenge fate, with the risk of losing everything or almost everything.

Despite the degree of difficulty of the last rock, Vittoria Licari’s run-up never gave the public the perception of the mountain to be climbed. And, above all, her claim was crippled by a regulation that required her to wait for the outcome of her rival’s race. This is why his coronation did not restore emotions, nor did it define the meaning of the undertaking.

Yes, Vittoria won the million at “Millionaire”. But this is not that “Millionaire”.