“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 amateur films and private footage spanning three decades, from 1928 to 1958.
The primary subject of his filming is the city of Turin which is portrayed 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 city becomes a collection of images capable of restoring everyday time and space and, through the recording of major public events, making the presence of history visible within the 16mm frames.

Stefania Carta

Stefania Carta is Curator of the Film Archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema – Torino (Italy). Since 2006, she has been dealing with cataloguing, supervision of the archiving material, analysis, film inspection and repair, valorization and distribution of the collections. She graduated in Modern Literature, specializing in film studies at the University of Torino, with a thesis about Italian film archives and film restoration. In 2010 she took part in an internship at the Cineco laboratory in Amsterdam coordinated by the Haghefilm Foundation.

Nadia Maltauro

Nadia Maltauro is a film archivist at the Film Archive of Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin (Italy). At La Camera Ottica, University of Udine, she participated in digital restoration projects for the Imperial War Museum and for the preservation and promotion of Italian audiovisual heritage (small-gauge formats and video). After graduating in Audiovisual Heritage, she worked at the Anim digital laboratory of Cinemateca Portuguesa. Since 2024 she started working for Museo del Cinema di Torino, where she specialises in archival work.