In 1926, architecture students from the University of Liverpool travelled to Rome and documented their journey in the amateur film Road to Rome. On the surface, the film is a playful documentary and travelogue, blending campus humour, and visits to ancient monuments. Yet it also reflects deeper concerns within British architectural education during the interwar period, when classical training and modernist critiques were in tension. Rome, long established as the pinnacle of architectural study through the BSR Rome awards, functioned as both a symbolic and pedagogical destination, where students engaged in rigorous observation, measured drawing, and restoration of classical monuments. By situating Road to Rome alongside archival material from the British School at Rome (reports, correspondence, and scholar assessments), this essay discusses how students like George Albert Butling and Charles Anthony Minoprio navigated these expectations, and examines how notions of success, tradition, and innovation were defined within architectural education. Ultimately, Road to Rome provides both a visual record and an interpretive entry point for understanding interwar architectural training and the lived experience of students negotiating classical ideals in a changing educational landscape.

This article explores Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (1926) as the culmination of silent-era cinematic representations of Pompeii, arguing that the film transforms cinematic fiction into a valuable source for understanding ancient architecture and urban life. By the 1920s, these layers converged in large-scale historical epics, enabling cinema to function as a medium of virtual time travel in which the spectator assumes the role of a beholder-traveller. Through close analysis of scenography, the article examines the reconstruction of streets, the Forum, public buildings, domestic interiors, baths, and the amphitheatre. It demonstrates how spatial organisation, architectural accuracy, decorative detail, and crowd scenes created immersive environments that animated Pompeii as a lived city rather than a static ruin. While acknowledging moments where fictional composition departs from archaeological precision, the article emphasises the film’s exceptional attention to material culture and its partial use of real locations. Ultimately, the study contends that Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (1926) represents both the apex and the conclusion of silent Pompeii cinema, where spectacle, architecture, and narrative converge to produce a cinematic document of enduring archaeological and cultural significance.