The National Cinema Museum’s archives is, thanks to the substantial nature of its contents, of incomparable range and offers the visitor the opportunity to experience unique and unedited documentation of the history of cinema. The archives keeps and conserves thousands of documents that bear witness to the lives and the work of the companies, directors, managers, scriptwriters, actors, cameramen and technicians who helped create Italian and foreign films, whether silent or with sound.
This collection comprises over one hundred funds and collections, with dossiers, documents and individual pages of greatly varying origin and nature. The entire 20th century is covered, as are the 18th and 19th centuries, albeit less fully. The documentation of these periods is mostly related to pre-cinema and photography.
The richness and value of the collection are primarily due to the determination with which Maria Adriana Prolo dedicated her time to the recovery and the conservation of any type of document that could shed light on the history of cinema. The founder of the Museum often met directly with the protagonists of Italian silent films and this helped form the archives’ core nucleus with an obvious and inevitable inclination toward the very beginnings of cinema. Year after year, the Museum has added to this solid base and has broadened its areas of interest to all periods of cinema and all types of materials linked to the creation of films.
Over time, the online archive will be augmented through revision and updating of the historical funds, campaigns to digitalize the most relevant documents and the publication of material as it is purchased and processed.



The Explore menu
To explore the archive, choose between “All funds” and “Only digitalized documents.” Select a fund from the drop-down menu and click “Select.” The option “All funds” will visualize the file of the fund’s creator and the complete structure of the fund. To navigate inside the fund, simply open and close (+ and –) the sectors of interest, until the descriptive files of the individual documents are attained. By selecting the title of each inventory level (series, sub-series, dossier), the relative archival file can be consulted.
By selecting one of the names inserted at the end of the descriptive file of the individual documents, the data and the history of the person or body selected can be visualized, as well as all the archival files associated with the name.
Digitalized documents that can be browsed online are labeled with the icon .
To consult only the digitalized documents of a fund, select “Only digitalized documents,” choose a fund from the drop-down menu and then click “Select” in order to access the fund, filtered on the basis of images that can be consulted online.

The Search menu
This menu has three functions, “Free search” by keyword, “Search by name” of people and bodies, and “Search by film.” The search takes into consideration all the funds and the results are filtered on the basis of the inserted criteria. To start the search, after having inserted or selected the data of interest, click “Start search.” To make a new search, the box must be cleared by selecting “New search.”