Filoteo Alberini (14 March 1867 – 12 April 1937) was an Italian inventor, movie director, and one of the earliest pioneers of cinema.

[1] In 1894, inspired by Thomas Edison's kinetoscope (a "peepshow" machine which allowed to see moving frames through a lens), he patented his "kinetograph", a shooting and projecting device which could show moving images to multiple people simultaneously not unlike that of the Lumière brothers.

[2][3] Alberini built the kinetograph one year before the cinématograph invented by the Lumière brothers who, in turn, borrowed and expanded the idea for such a device from Léon Bouly.

[8] The film was divided into seven scenes, each representing some of the episodes of the capture of Rome, occurred on 20 September 1870, which was the final event of the long process of Italian unification.

[9] The seven scenes are:[10] Among Alberini's other inventions there were the 'cinepanoramic' (a revolving lens system that expands the image on the screen, an ancestor of today's Vistavision), the 'cineclock' (a round film disk with many frames that could be viewed with a luminaire manual), and a device to be applied to cameras, a forerunner of sequential shooting.