Cinema of Naples

Over the decades, the Neapolitan capital has also been used as a film set for many works, over 600 according to the Internet Movie Database, the first of which would be Panorama of Naples Harbor from 1901.

In May 1898 the Paduan Mario Recanati, considered the first in Italy to distribute and trade films, opened the first cinema in Galleria Umberto I at number 90;[5] in that year, the new invention was also used for advertising purposes, achieving such success as to worry the Naples Police Headquarters.

[4] In the early years of the twentieth century, the first Italian film house, namely the Titanus (originally Monopolio Lombardo),[6] was built in the city, in the Vomero district.

[17] Gian Piero Brunetta defines it as an exception wherever «the economic history of Italian cinema lacks the origins of the figures of tycoons comparable to the Hollywood ones of Mayer, Fox, Goldwyn, or the Warner Brothers».

[18] Brunetta also defined his films «events inspired by successful songs, or taken from drama, stories of street urchins and "piccerille" (children) who get lost».

[22] In the 1930s, however, film production moved to Rome, according to Goffredo Lombardo because his father Gustavo wanted to «change the production system and the quality of films»;[9] however, according to the historian Daniela Manetti because a provision of the censorship office for cinema in 1928 already constituted «A very serious limitation to the Neapolitan genre that Lombardo has made appreciated even outside the regional borders and a serious mortgage for Naples as a city of cinema».

[36] Massimo Troisi, also a director whose film Il postino received two Oscar nominations, is defined by Treccani as an «Actor with engaging comedy based above all on virtuosic monologues».

[40] Naples has also been widely represented in national and international cinematography: great directors have followed one another over the years, starting with the Lumiere Brothers who in 1898 made some of their first shots on the Naples waterfront with their silent documentary short film Naples, passing through the sixties and seventies with the films of Mario Monicelli,[41] Roberto Rossellini with Paisà, Pier Paolo Pasolini,[42] Ettore Scola,[43] Nanni Loy,[24] Dino Risi with Operazione San Gennaro and many others, up to the present day with Giuseppe Tornatore,[44] Gabriele Salvatores,[45] Matteo Garrone,[46] John Turturro[47] and Ferzan Özpetek with Napoli velata.

[60] In the last ten years, thanks to the great work carried out by the Campania Region Film Commission, Naples has become one of the most loved sets in the world.