“June 8, 1941: Conceived the Museum”: with this brief entry in a tiny diary, the history of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin begins. The author was its founder and director, Maria Adriana Prolo, a film historian and visionary collector.

Today, the Museum preserves a massive heritage of rare and precious materials, totaling nearly 3,260,000 works, including films, archival documents, photographs, equipment, art objects, posters, film memorabilia, volumes, and sound recordings. The three primary thematic pillars documented are the archaeology of cinema, photography, and film history.

The Museum’s Film Archive (Cineteca), specifically, began to take shape in 1942 when Maria Adriana Prolo purchased the first reel of film for 30 lire. The film archive currently holds over 33,000 titles on celluloid, representing a diverse range of eras and filmographies. This collection continues to grow through acquisitions, donations, and deposits, as well as an extensive restoration program launched in the 1990s, often in collaboration with other Italian and international film archives.

Of immense historical value is the core collection of early nitrate prints and the silent film collection, which stands as a testament to Turin’s cinema at the turn of the 20th century, when the city was one of the primary production hubs of Italian cinematography. Also noteworthy are over nine thousand film presentations, a collection of 16mm experimental cinema, and a section dedicated to small-gauge film (9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm, and Super8) focused on amateur and home movies. Finally, since 1953, the Museum has been an active member of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives).

The film collection of the Fondo Bogino (Bogino Fund) illustrates the perspective of a Piedmontese amateur filmmaker through home movies and private footage spanning three decades, from 1928 to 1958.

The primary subject of his filming is the city of Turin, to which the author pays a genuine tribute in his documentary Profili di Torino (Profiles of Turin, 1950s). In this work, the city is portrayed through its most famous and representative landmarks, monuments, and urban parks, all described and emphasized with great technical skill through the expert use of panoramic and aerial shots.

The same mastery of cinematic technique emerges in the footage of the city captured through a familiar and private lens. Here, the narrative of the Piedmontese capital becomes a collection of images capable of restoring everyday time and space, conveyed through the couple’s routines—often featuring Bogino’s wife on camera—and through the recording of major public events involving Turin, particularly in the 1920s, making the presence of history visible within the 16mm frames.

While the images testify to moments of leisure, they also consist of many defining elements that capture society in both its tradition and its transformation. Examples include the footage shot with a Cine-Kodak camera dedicated to the 1928 World’s Fair—a moment suspended between the two wars with strong political significance—or the fashion shows of the 1937 Autarchic Fashion Exhibition, captured in the saturated colors of Kodachrome film.