Abstract
In early twentieth-century Italy, cinema had already gained a place as a mass phenomenon. Around 1905 a capillary proliferation of movie theatres (Bernardini, 1981: 15–36) began remodelling the urban landscape, transforming the spaces of social life and redefining urban culture. In 1906 the magazine L’Albo d’oro noted that in Rome, after the opening of the Cinema Moderno, ‘movie theatres started springing up like mushrooms, so now […] one can find a movie theatre on every corner’ (‘I cinematografi’, 1906: 36), whilst in Naples novelist Matilde Serao denounced cinema as a new kind of ‘virus’ having a profound impact on contemporary society:
Today cinema is the ultimate expression of Neapolitan epidemics and manias, the dernier cri of success. […] Cinema reigns supreme, ruling and dominating and bossing around and invading everything, society life, charity, the arts, the theatre!
(Gibus [Serao], 1906)2
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Lottini, I. (2013). ‘Il delirio del lungo metraggio’: Cinema as Mass Phenomenon in Early Twentieth-Century Italian Culture. In: Bayman, L., Rigoletto, S. (eds) Popular Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305657_9
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