The film “Cabiria” premiered on April 18, 1914, at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Turin, simultaneously with the Teatro Lirico in Milan. The film was a great critical and commercial success, both in Italy and abroad: it ran for six months in Paris and for almost a year in New York. The film was a sort of celebration of Roman culture, shortly after the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. Cabiria, subtitled “Historical Vision of the Third Century BC,” is a 1914 silent film directed by Giovanni Pastrone. It is considered the first true blockbuster and the most famous Italian silent film. It was also the first film to be screened at the White House. Filmed in Turin at the Dora Riparia River studios, it was the longest Italian film of its time (approximately 3,364 meters long, with a running time of three hours and ten minutes) and also, by far, the most expensive: one million gold lire, compared to the average film financing of the time of fifty thousand lire. Some scenes were also shot in Tunisia, Sicily, the Alps (in the Lanzo Valleys, where Hannibal was said to have passed), and at the lakes of Avigliana. The original version was color-toned in twelve different shades, some previously unseen. Pastrone had the foresight, due to the film’s commercial success, to create a product that combined the demands of popular entertainment with those of bourgeois culture.
