The film:

With the advent of cinema, and travel films in particular, the world suddenly seemed to shrink at dizzying speed. Mario Piacenza (1884-1957), a textile manufacturer from Biella, in Piedmont, with a passion for mountaineering, travel, and photography, was an exemplar of this ruling class, firmly rooted in its own region and at the same time involved in a dynamic and romantic expansion into the outside.

In 1910, when he filmed the scenes of Viaggio in Caucaso e Persia, Mario Piacenza was 26, and shared with his brother Guido (1881-1939), himself a famous balloonist, the management of their thriving family wool business as well as a love of mountain climbing. Although the Matterhorn would always remain Mario’s favourite mountain, that summer he planned an expedition to a more exotic destination: the Caucasus Mountains, most of whose peaks were still unexplored.

The film restoration:

The reconstruction was based on positive and negative nitrate fragments, unedited and without intertitles, conserved at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin. The main sources used to establish the editing order of the shots and to prepare the texts of the intertitles were the letters written by Mario Piacenza on his travels, now held by the Fondazione Piacenza in Pollone. We wish to acknowledge the valuable contributions to the research behind this presentation by Gosfilmfond in Moscow and Simone Cristoforetti.

The work was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory of Bologna in 2017.

Link Vimeo Cineteca MNC: 

https://vimeo.com/760967357

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