Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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La presa di Roma and Il piccolo garibaldino: the

Risorgimento and national identity in early Italian
cinema

Giovanni Lasi

To cite this article: Giovanni Lasi (2013) La�presa�di�Roma and Il�piccolo�garibaldino: the
Risorgimento and national identity in early Italian cinema, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:2,
244-255, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2012.753006

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.753006

Published online: 07 Mar 2013.

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Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 2, 244–255, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.753006

La presa di Roma and Il piccolo garibaldino: the

Risorgimento and national identity in early Italian
cinema

Giovanni Lasi
University of Bologna

Abstract
The first film to be industrially produced in Italy, La presa di Roma (Alberini &
Santoni, 1905), marks the beginning of a relationship between Italian cinema and the
Risorgimento that will have an enduring and fruitful future. Between 1905 and 1927,
more than sixty films would be based on the Risorgimento, each one realized in its
own particular style and with its own historical interpretation. This diversity of
cinematic approaches to representing the Risorgimento was already visible in two
films made just four years apart; La presa di Roma (1905) and Il piccolo garibaldino (1909).
Through a reconstruction of the historical studies conducted during the restoration of
the two films, this essay analyzes and compares the essential characteristics of each
film, relating their choices of imagery and style to the historical and political context
in which they were made.
Keywords
La presa di Roma; Il piccolo garibaldino; premier of Italian cinema.

As film historian Michele Canosa (2006, 9) accurately notes, La presa di Roma –

20 settembre 1870 celebrates the birthday of Italy’s motion-picture industry and
its nationhood: ‘È un film genetliaco: attiene alla nascita di una cinematografia,
di una nazione.’1 It is both the cinematographic portrayal of a critical event of
the Italian Risorgimento and the first film of a ‘latecomer’ Italian film industry
(Brunetta 2006, 19).
Late in comparison with other countries like the United States, France and
England, whose first film studios were established between 1896 and 1897,
Italy’s first film production company, Alberini & Santoni, was established in
Rome in 1905, by Filoteo Alberini and Dante Santoni.
Alberini was one of the pioneers of Italian cinema. A professional
photographer and cartographer, he was immediately fascinated with cinema
after the Lumière brothers presented their cinématographe in Paris. Enthusiastic
about the new technology, Alberini would build his own cinematographic

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Early Italian cinema: Risorgimento and national identity

machine – similar to the one the Lumière brothers had patented just a few
months earlier – and would soon become one of the most renowned Italians in
the film industry, opening cinema halls in Florence and Rome.
In 1904, Alberini oversaw the creation of an industrial-scale film production
studio, and, together with the engineer Dante Santoni, owner of the property on
the outskirts of Rome on which the studio would be constructed, founded the
company Alberini & Santoni. The construction moved swiftly; begun in the
spring of 1905 the project was almost completed by the first months of the
summer. The result was a modern structure equipped with a large windowed
studio, as well as rooms for development, printing and coloring. The studio was
envisioned with the prospect of competing with the best foreign film studios, a
capability displayed with the release of La presa di Roma.
The film has many remarkable characteristics compared with many other
films from the period: Alberini shot both interior scenes, – artfully constructed
by the theater set designer Augusto Cicognani – , and exterior scenes, filmed at
the actual location of the events they portray; he used large crowds of extras for
the scene in which the Italian bersaglieri take Porta Pia; some of the frames of the
film were hand-colored; and two professional theater actors were cast in the
main roles – Ubaldo Maria del Colle, who would have a long career in cinema
as an actor and director, and Carlo Rosaspina, who was already one of the
leading actors in Eleonora Duse’s company. However, the film’s most striking
characteristic was its extraordinary length: 250 meters. Few production houses
could aspire to make a film of such dimensions in 1905.2

La presa di Roma
Notes on an atypical restoration
What remains of La presa di Roma today comes from a documentary (no. 4 of the
series Rivista Luce) made in 1935 and now conserved at the Cineteca Nazionale
in Rome. In the documentary, edited by Corrado D’Errico on the occasion the
fortieth anniversary of the birth of cinema, a few Lumière films are included
together with four scenes, which are unmistakably taken from La presa di Roma.
Subsequently these scenes were isolated and printed to become the positive
master print from which all other later copies of the film would be created.
In 2005, in occasion of the centenary of Alberini’s film, the Cineteca
Nazionale entrusted the task of restoring La presa di Roma to Mario Musumeci
and Irela Nuñez, the former in charge of matters of restoration and conservation
at the Cineteca, the latter of curation.
Since D’Errico’s recovery of the film had been completely forgotten over the
years, one of the first successes of the restoration team was their rediscovery of
his 1935 documentary. Although the film had a soundtrack, an analysis of the
35-mm negative duplicate revealed that some of the frames, though not taken

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Giovanni Lasi

directly from the original 1905 negative, had come from a copy from the period,
probably from the 1910s.
Following this initial discovery, the restorers looked for other copies with the
intention of later integrating all of the materials available. They were able to
identify four other copies of the film in various archives around the world: at the
Cineteca Italiana in Milan, in New York, at the British Film Museum in
London, and in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, all of these copies were found to
have been made after 1935 and to have been taken from the D’Errico
documentary conserved at the Cineteca Nazionale. As such, the documentary
would become the principal source for the restoration of the La presa di Roma.
The restorers began by attempting to determine what sections and how much
of the original 1905 film had gone missing. By consulting numerous sources
from the period, they were able to determine the correct order of the scenes and
establish that three scenes were missing from the original (3, 4 and 6). This work
was facilitated in large part by non-filmic sources from the period, and in
particular by an Alberini & Santoni advertising brochure from 1905 that lists and
describes each of the seven scenes.
By studying the advertising brochure, the restorers were able to recuperate
the text of the intertitles that accompanied each scene and which had been
practically ignored in D’Errico’s documentary. Another problem related to these
frames regarded the lettering: in the 1935 film the few intertitles that remained
had been written using an Art Nouveau style of lettering identical to that used
for the frames of the Lumière films in the D’Errico documentary, evidently an
effort by D’Errico to adopt a consistent style for all of the films included in his
documentary. Abandoning this approach, the restorers decided to adopt a style
of lettering more commonly used for the intertitles of films from the early
twentieth century.
The next problem the restorers faced was how to confront the lacunae left by
the missing scenes. To establish a coherent narrative connection between
the surviving and missing scenes and to avoid disruption to the viewing of the
film, the three missing scenes were substituted with title cards with descriptions
taken from the advertising brochure.3 In the fourth scene, which had shown the
Italian troops as they fired at the Aurelian Walls, the restorers inserted a
photograph that had been used as the cover image for the advertising brochure
and that had clearly been made on the set of the film. Once the editorial phase
had been completed, they began to work on the film itself, cleaning and reviving
the original coloring of the film. All of these details, which were discovered
through various sources from the period, had been absent in D’Errico’s
documentary.4

A current event
One current thesis defines Alberini’s film as the prototype for an entire genre of
Italian historical films: a series of films in vogue in the 1910s and 1920s which

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 Early Italian cinema: Risorgimento and national identity

mythologized historical events and which were largely responsible for making
Italian silent cinema popular. However, in light of recent research, it is more
appropriate to speak of La presa di Roma as a political film, and even a ‘militant’
film, than a historical film.
Many of the people present at the projections in 1905 would have
experienced the very events of 20 September 1870 in person. The entire
population would have considered the episode as something very actual, not yet
historical.
For a long time, the Risorgimento would remain the only aggregating
element on which post-unification Italy could form a national identity. And 20
September was its epilogue, the definitive moment of Italy’s birth as a new,
united, free and independent nation.
The last frame of La presa di Roma, scene 7, shows the fathers of the nation,
born of the Risorgimento, as they enter into the empyrean of immortality. In its
use of Christian imagery, the scene serves to represent the apotheosis of the
secular, post-unification state: in the tableaux vivant, Garibaldi, Mazzini,
Cavour and Vittorio Emanuele II are sanctified by the figure of Italy, shown here
as a female figure rising above them. In the background, one can see the
Campidoglio and the Quirinale, symbols of the state and civic power. Above
them shines a star, secular symbol of revolution. Compositionally, the scene
forms a pyramid – the symbol of the Italian state at the time – the base of which
would have been created by the passionate crowd below the screen.
Precisely for its close connection with the present, La presa di Roma is unique
compared with subsequent Italian cinematic historical reconstructions. Instead,
the film shares evident similarities to a genre popular at the beginning of the
1900s, ‘actuality film’, which reconstructed current and historical events using
actors and designed sets. In its framing of the image, its emphasis on the action and
its quick narrative rhythm, Alberini’s film is more reminiscent of the reportage of
illustrated periodicals from the period than the monumentality of the
mythologizing historical films that would be popular in the years that followed.
For example, in publicizing La presa di Roma, Alberini insists on the veracity
of the documents he has used to reconstruct the scenes: this obsessive reference
to the real sites and events seems to reconfirm the director’s intention of
chronicling the events rather than memorializing them. Alberini reproduces
what has come before so that it may persist in the present, projecting 20
September as a fundamental example of those values that must remain alive in
the collective memory of all Italians. Like the popular press, La presa di Roma
chose the Risorgimento as the subject to embody best the patriotic vision that
would serve to hold the new state together.
In post-unification Italy, a state in which cinema would come to serve an
important role, the new secular vision provided by films like La presa di Roma
was forced to contend with the well-established iconographic tradition of the
Catholic Church.

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A secular iconography
The battle of 20 September 1870 marked the end of the temporal power of the
popes, even though, in the years following, the Vatican would strenuously resist
the full laicization of the State. The Church, which had a rooted presence in the
territory and had firmly established and reinforced its iconography over the
years, continued to exert great influence over the Italian populations.
Proponents of Italian unification immediately recognized the need to
substitute the ideological and symbolic structure of the Church with their own
civil, secular liturgy. With this aim, the State encouraged and promoted an
analogous language to that of the Church: in place of santini (small holy pictures
reproduced on cards) they offer figurines celebrating the military corps; the
figure of the Patria was place alongside the supreme mother, the Virgin;
Christian divinities were replaced by secular ones; and the streets and the squares
were given the names of the nation’s fathers.
A formal and iconographic strategy was created as part of this the new secular
creed, often defined as the ‘religion of the nation’ and existent in Italy as a
concept since the beginning of the Risorgimento (see Baioni 1994). Within this
clash, which was also a battle of images, cinema was called to action from the
very start. La presa di Roma, immediately understood as a clear symbol in defense
of the secular State, was promoted by institutions and other influential sectors of
society. The film was born as a type of film-manifesto and consecrated at the
most symbolic time and place imaginable, on 20 September 1905 in Piazzale
Porta Pia.
Patriotic commemorations were used as moments of collective worship
meant to bolster the creation of the new secular liturgy. The anniversary of 20
September was certainly one of the most passionate of these commemorations.
The anniversary drew hundreds of thousands of Italians to Rome for several
days. They crowded the streets and the squares of the capital to celebrate the
secular festival.
In 1905, the Comitato per i Festeggiamenti del XXXV anniversario della
presa di Roma (celebrations committee for the 35th anniversary of the capture
of Rome) was created with the task of overseeing all of the activities planned in
occasion of the anniversary.
The celebrations committee planned for the film to be projected at the
climax of the celebrations, the night of the 20th, and was even able to arrange for
a large, white, cloth screen to be installed right in front of Porta Pia.
An article in the daily La Patria reported the presence of thousands of people
in the square when Alberini started the projection at ten o’clock in the evening
and noted that the film was projected multiple times following the passionate
requests of the crowd. The journalist added: ‘At a quarter past 11 the
magnificent and free representation was over and the enormous crowd that was
the audience, bigger than most shows will ever see, began to break up and
disperse’ (La Patria, September 21, 1905).

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 Early Italian cinema: Risorgimento and national identity

Italian cinema could not have hoped for a more impressive premier. It is
evident that the clamorous success of the projection of La presa di Roma was in
large part due to the organizational efforts, both promotional and logistical, of
the Celebrations Committee.

Freemasonry and pedagogy

The role that the Celebrations Committee had in assuring the success of the first
screening of La presa di Roma should not be underestimated. It was the
Celebrations Committee that exerted pressure on the mayor in order to obtain
permission to project the film directly in front of Porta Pia; the Committee was
also responsible for publicizing the film by affixing posters all over the city and
was successful in having the film advertised in the papers.
The Celebrations Committee was not merely an organizational entity. It was
a group with real power and influence. The committee’s directors included four
delegates from Rome. One of them, Guido Bacelli, was among the most
influential men in Italy at the time: he had been Minister of Education numerous
times and was part of the top ranks of the Italian Freemasonry. Another,
Raffaello Giovagnoli, was also a Freemason.
Beginning in 1870, the Freemasonry played a key role in Italian politics:
Agostino De Pretis, Francesco Crispi and Giuseppe Zandarelli and many other
influential politicians were part of the society. And in 1905 the situation was
nearly identical: Alessandro Fortis, Prime Minister at the time, was a member of
the Freemasonry, as were many other ministers from his cabinet. Alberini
himself was a third-degree Master Mason of the ‘La Concordia’ lodge in
Florence, one of the oldest and most influential in Italy.
The Freemasonry’s influence in society was most felt in the sphere of
education. Promoting a secular and ethical approach to education, the
Freemasons intended to break the monopoly over education exercised by the
Church and reinforce a sense of the State in the weakest and least educated levels
of society.
From its very beginnings, cinema was considered the popular entertainment
par excellence as it was patronized and enjoyed by the less wealthy, whose lack of
education made them more susceptible to religious proselytization. And it was
precisely among this social group that the Freemasons concentrated its efforts to
spread and instill a civil education and a sense of national belonging.
La presa di Roma would be the embodiment of a new secular pedagogy,
founded on the values of the Risorgimento and supported by the institutions of
the State and the Italian Freemasonry.
The State directly and explicitly contributed to the realization of Alberini’s
film: the advertising brochure for La presa di Roma publicly declared that the
Ministry of War had proudly supported the film: ‘the ministry of war has kindly
contributed, volunteering soldiers, light cavalrymen, artillery, uniforms and
arms’5 (Alberini & Santoni 1905, 2).

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The Minister of War in 1905, the year in which the film was produced,
was General Ettore Pedotti, who, just a year later, would confirm his interest
in an education based on Risorgimental values when he took the position
of President of the Società Nazionale per la Storia del Risorgimento
(National Society for Risorgimento History), an institution created for the
popularization of the Risorgimento.
Raffaello Giovagnoli was also on the board of directors of the historical-
pedagogical association. As mentioned before, Giovagnoli was part of the
Celebrations Committee, which so strongly supported the promotion of La
presa di Roma. His pedagogical vocation was indisputable: an ex-garibaldino and
later a deputy for many years, he was an eminent Risorgimento historian and
the author of a monumental work written for educating children about the
Risorgimento.

Il piccolo garibaldino
La patria and her children
In the years to come, following the example of Alberini’s film, Italian screens
would continue to celebrate the exploits of the heroes of the Risorgimento. The
first of these, Il piccolo garibaldino, produced by Cines in 1909, inaugurated a long
series of patriotic films based on the events of the Risorgimento, intended
explicitly for children.
These pedagogical films fit perfectly within the State’s attempt to impose a
secular education based on civic associations on Italian youth. In these years, the
number of researchers and educators, as well as places allocated for the
instructional and free-time activities of children and adolescents would multiply
as an alternative to the Catholic oratories. One quickly understands the potential
of the cinema in this scenario.
After 1905, the use of films as a didactic instrument became common practice.
A famous pedagogue and Freemason, Domenico Orano (1909, 56), wrote of the
pedagogical merits of the new technology: ‘the cinematograph comes to the aid
of us and our good intentions with an efficiency that we had never imagined’.
In 1908, just a year before the debut of Il piccolo garibaldino, in a report
regarding the state of education, addressed to Minister Rava, General Director
of Primary and Popular Education, Camillo Corradini wrote: ‘Supplemented
when possible with conferences and projections, books will become our surest
means of succeeding at our project of moral and intellectual enrichment,
something which school can only do in part.’
The cinematograph, then, was officially recognized as a useful instrument for
educating and morally elevating children, and films that spoke of the history of
the new nation were obviously preferred.

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In an article published in La cinematografia Italiana in January 1909, a professor

at the Scuola Normale in Florence argued for the use of films on the
Risorgimento:

Let us welcome films that can speak to our youth of the sublime battles
fought for our independence, and remind them of the heroic acts carried out
by both the young and old in our Patria’s most difficult moments. (Bossi
1909, 4)
Cinema joined other educational and propagandistic instruments directed
toward youth, such as anecdotal and edifying literature, or periodicals for
children like Il giornalino della domenica or Il corriere dei piccoli. De Amicis’ works,
for example, would almost all be adapted for the screen.
Among the Italian youth, the myth of Giuseppe Garibaldi was certainly one
of the most popular: there are thousands of booklets and small illustrated
volumes explicitly dedicated ‘to young readers’ which document the endeavors
of the hero in a romanticized fashion.
One such film, Il piccolo garibaldino (1909), tells the story of a young boy who
runs away from home to find his father, a volunteer in Garibaldi’s army. On the
battlefield, the boy is shot by enemy fire and dies in the arms of his father. The
small volume written by Capitan Masè (1910) and the film are not only identical
in their choice of important episodes to portray but are also both pedagogical in
nature: in both cases the volunteerism of the garibaldini, their abnegation in the
face of duty, their devotion to the Patria and the flag, and their heroism, which
inspires them to the point of self-sacrifice for the nation.
Also on a figurative level, there are many similarities between Masè’s book
and the film. Many films based on events from the Risorgimento from this
period drew inspiration from popular illustrated journals for children and for
adults, for which the Risorgimento was a common subject. In turn, this endless
iconographic patrimony had itself been inspired by and borrowed from the rich
tradition of Risorgimento paintings of the 1800s, a group of paintings against
which many popular painters of the early 1900s – Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe
Molteni, Gerolamo Induno, Eleuterio Pagliano, Federico Faruffini, Giovanni
Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Odoardo Borrani, Michele Cammarano, Giuseppe Sciuti
– would still be weighing themselves. In many films about the Risorgimento the
reference to these paintings is explicit and direct. Il piccolo garibaldino is a perfect
example. A scene representing the departure of the volunteers who are leaving
behind their fellow citizens to join the Mille expedition is, from a compositional,
formal and narrative point of view, quite clearly inspired by Girolamo Induno’s
(1878) painting La partenza dei coscritti nel 1866.

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Giovanni Lasi

Some notes on the restoration

In 2007, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi,
the directors of the Cineteca Nazionale di Roma decided to begin restoration
on Il piccolo garibaldino, entrusting the responsibility to the curator Irela Nuñez.
She had two copies of the film at her disposition: a colored nitrate positive of the
film, with German titles, conserved at the British Film Museum, and a black-
and-white duplicate of the same version, held in Rome in the archives of the
Cineteca Nazionale.
The first decision was to attempt a reconstruction from the Italian version of
the film by substituting the titles in German with titles in Italian: this operation
proved to be fairly straightforward thanks to the work of the cinema historian
Aldo Bernardini, who had already tracked down the original text in Italian.
Maintaining the template for the intertitles in the frames available, they
attempted to reconstruct the written text in a lettering typical of that used by
Cines in 1909.
After comparing and assessing the different copies, it was decided to base the
restoration on the copy with the best photographic quality, the one from the
British Film Museum.
After an initial digital reconstruction, the film was transferred onto 35-mm
negative film, from which the final positive print was obtained. On this first
positive copy, coloring was done to some of the frames, following the model of
the existing copies and information obtained from sources from the press
published at the time of the film’s debut.

Proof of another Risorgimento

In both La presa di Roma and Il piccolo garibaldino, the heroes and ideals of the
Risorgimento are exalted. The cinematography of the second film draws on the
myth of Garibaldi, which, as noted above, was one of the fundamental lenses
through which people imagined the Risorgimento. However, in Il piccolo
garibaldino, the myth of Garibaldi is stripped of its most extreme and
revolutionary characteristics, and the cult of Garibaldi is preserved only in the
film’s veneration of Garibaldi as the Hero of Two Worlds, an unconditional
devotion that reaches a level of idolatry capable of justifying his martyrdom.
The Christ-like image of the mother and son shown in a scene recalling the
Passion is indicative of this interpretation. Once again we see the messianic
language typical of the new ‘religion of the Patria’; only here, in 1909, it is not
proposed in opposition, but rather alongside the Catholic tradition.
In this sense, the different approaches to representing the Risorgimento in La
presa di Roma and Il piccolo garibaldino reveal a change in perspective. Though
only four years have passed, the conflict between the Church and State which
had been so bitter in 1905 had been now notably attenuated by numerous
antisocialist compromises between Giolitti’s government and the Vatican.

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 Early Italian cinema: Risorgimento and national identity

Although Alberini’s film was not completely anticlerical in nature, it

established a clear distinction between temporal and spiritual power.
By contrast, in Il piccolo garibaldino the symbols of Church and State appear
alongside each other with little discrimination: as the father is leaving for Sicily
to join the expedition of the Mille, there is a priest present who blesses the rifle
of the father and waves farewell to the maniple of redshirts; when the young boy
is preparing to run away, we can see a crucifix hanging above his mother’s bed; at
the end of the film a nun runs to try to help the piccolo garibaldino as he is dying on
the battlefield.
The distance between the two films is also clear in an analysis of their final
scenes, both of which portray a type of apotheosis. In La presa di Roma, the
Patria, shown in the guise of a female figure, blesses the fathers of the Nation,
who stand amongst the clouds with the symbols of national authority, the
Quirinale and the Campidoglio, behind them. Il piccolo garibaldino, on the other
hand, ends in the domestic space of the boy’s home, where ‘L’Italia’, also in the
form of a woman, appears to bestow glory on the young hero, a representative of
all Italian youth and the future of the nation.
La presa di Roma has a strong collective dimension, while Il piccolo garibaldino
takes place in the private sphere in order to represent the complete union of
nation, family and the individual: the film is addressed to the family – with the
mother who accepts the sacrifice of the son, fallen for his country – and all
young Italians ready to die for the greater good of the nation.

1910 – 1927: the Risorgimento and cinema

The slight ideological shift one notes in a comparison of La presa di Roma and Il
piccolo garibaldino was only the very beginning of a progressive revisionist
evolution in historical and political readings of the Risorgimento which would
ensue as the events of the Risorgimento came to be reinterpreted and
manipulated by the various governments in power.
Cinema adapted itself to numerous periods: during the Giolittian period,
films on the Risorgimento continued to celebrate the liberal state, but,
following the relaxed tension between the Church and the State, the secular
claims of its first period were tempered; one thinks of a film like I Mille
(Ambrosio, 1912), in which the Church is shown as having a positive role in the
Risorgimento. Or Nozze d’oro (Ambrosio, 1911), made on the occasion of the
celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the unification, in which the
relationship between the State and the citizen is compared to the unbreakable
bound of Christian marriage.
Similarly, during the First World War, films on the Risorgimento would
become increasingly anti-Austrian, in support of a pro-war propaganda that
attempted to legitimize the conflict by painting it as another war of independence;
films such as Brescia, leonessa d’Italia (Real Film, 1915), Ciceruacchio, martire del
piombo austriaco (Tiber, 1915), Il nemico (Etna Film, 1915), Altri tempi . . . altri eroi

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Giovanni Lasi

(Real Film, 1916) and Verso la gloria (Tespi Film, 1917) transformed the events of
the Risorgimento into invectives against the Austrian enemy.
Similarly, the Fascist regime would claim a historical and ideological continuity
between the feats of the Risorgimento and the new order of Fascism established
after the march on Rome, something that is evident in many of the films on the
Risorgimento made by the Istituto Fascista di Propaganda Nazionale (Fascist
Institute of National Propaganda). For example, Il grido dell’aquila (1923), directed
by Mario Volpe, shows an old garibaldino, who has fought in the Risorgimento
during the capture of Rome, joining the Fascist march on Rome in 1922.
Fascist cinema’s exploitation of the Risorgimento, however, would rely
heavily on the comparison between the figures of Garibaldi and Mussolini.
Carmine Gallone’s 1925 film La cavalcata ardente (S.A.I.C), in which Garibaldi is
associated with Mussolini as the undisputed new leader of the Italian population,
is a good example of this tendency.
Many Fascist films from this period attempt to make this unfortunate
comparison: Garibaldi e i suoi tempi (Superfilm, 1926) and Anita o il romanzo
d’amore dell’eroe dei due mondi (Sphinx, 1926), produced by a committee, the
Comitato d’onore, over which Mussolini himself presided.
The attempt to exploit the Risorgimento by associating it with
contemporary political situations would not subside with the advent of the
talkies. Inaugurated with the first film produced by the Italian cinema industry,
this practice would continue throughout the years. And still today, the
Risorgimento continues to remain susceptible to the needs of the period. As
Michele Canosa (2011, 11) rightly noted, ‘perhaps to speak of the Risorgimento
in relation to cinema means to speak of something else all together’.

Translated from the Italian by Stephen Marth

Notes
1 On La presa di Roma and the production activities of Alberini & Santoni, see Canosa
(2006), Bernardini (1983), Redi (2009, 10– 18) and Toffetti and Musumeci (2007).
2 The four scenes of the film that still exist today show: the arrival at Ponte Milvio of
the Italian army emissary who is entrusted with the commission of summoning the
surrender of the Papal troops (scene 1); the encounter between the emissary and
General Kanzler, commander of the Papal army (scene 2); the Italian bersaglieri taking
Porta Pia (scene 5); and the apotheosis of the fathers of the nation, blessed by the
female personification of Italy (scene 7).
3 From description of the film from the period, in particular from the advertising
brochure, it was possible to establish that scene 3 showed the bersagliere camp on the
outskirts of Rome, before the attack; scene 4 showed the shots of the Italian artillery
on the city walls; and scene 6 showed the white flag, symbol of the surrender of the
Papal army, being raised above St Peter’s.
4 Details about the coloration of the film were found in different periodicals from the
period and in Gualtiero Fabbri’s (1907) short story Al cinematografo, in which he
describes the projection of La presa di Roma.
5 Brochure advertising La presa di Roma, published in 1905 by Alberini & Santoni (p. 2).

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visibile: il cinema delle origini in Europa, edited by A. Costa, 117 – 125. Florence: Usher.
Bossi, A. 1909. “La cinematografia didattica.” La Cinematografia Italiana 2 (29– 30): 4.
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