Cinema

Main article: Cinema of Italy

A Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival, the oldest film festival in the world and one of the "Big Three" alongside the Cannes Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival^[255][256]

The history of Italian cinema began a few months after the Lumière brothers began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian film was a few seconds, showing Pope Leo XIII giving a blessing to the camera. The Italian film industry was born between 1903 and 1908 with three companies: the Società Italiana Cines, the Ambrosio Film and the Itala Film. Other companies soon followed in Milan and in Naples. In a short time these first companies reached a fair producing quality, and films were soon sold outside Italy. Cinema was later used by Benito Mussolini, who founded Rome's renowned Cinecittà studio for the production of Fascist propaganda until World War II.^[257]
After the war, Italian film was widely recognised and exported until an artistic decline around the 1980s. Notable Italian film directors from this period include Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini. Movies include world cinema treasures such as Bicycle Thieves, La dolce vita, 8½, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. The mid-1940s to the early 1950s was the heyday of neorealist films, reflecting the poor condition of post-war Italy.^[258][259]

Entrance to the Cinecittà studios in Rome, whose together with Hollywood is the most recognizable film industry in the world

As the country grew wealthier in the 1950s, a form of neorealism known as pink neorealism succeeded, and other film genres, such as sword-and-sandal followed as spaghetti westerns, were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Actresses such as Sophia Loren, Giulietta Masina and Gina Lollobrigida achieved international stardom during this period. Erotic Italian thrillers, or giallos, produced by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1970s, also influenced the horror genre worldwide. In recent years, the Italian scene has received only occasional international attention, with movies like Life Is Beautiful directed by Roberto Benigni, Il Postino: The Postman with Massimo Troisi and The Great Beauty directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
The aforementioned Cinecittà studio is today the largest film and television production facility in continental Europe and the centre of the Italian cinema, where a large number of biggest box office hits are filmed, and one of the biggest production communities in the world, second only to Hollywood. More than 3,000 productions have been made on its lot (of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it), from such cinema classics as Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and the films of Federico Fellini (one of the most influential filmmakers of all time)^[260][261] to recent rewarded features like The English Patient, Gladiator, The Passion of the Christ, Gangs of New York, and Spectre.^[262]
As of 2016, Italian films have won 14 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film (the most of any country), 12 Palmes d'Or (the second-most of any country), 11 Golden Lions and 7 Golden Bears.