Silent films depicting antiquity utilized a range of representational strategies to vividly reconstruct Graeco-Roman architecture, thereby facilitating a temporal transport for audiences to the ancient past. One of the most prominent techniques was monumentality, which was used to create impressive sets and reflected advancements in film technology. This approach became a recurring feature in many films of the 1920s. The main set for the silent epic Quo Vadis (1924) set in the reign of the emperor Nero was the monumental palace created for the exhibition Mostra dell'Agricoltura, dell'Industria e delle Arti Applicate (Exhibition of Agriculture, Industry, and Applied Arts) held in 1923 at the Galoppatoio inside the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome. The architect Armando Brasini-renowned for his eclectic style rooted in Fascist architecture-designed the exhibition spaces. Brasini’s work drew inspiration from ancient Roman and Italian Baroque architecture, incorporating elements that evoked the poetic quality of ruins, a hallmark of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s visionary drawings. This article explores Brasini’s architectural contribution to the film, with a focus on the representation of Nero’s palace and examines his influence on the rise of a monumental aesthetic in silent films portraying antiquity.

Nero has occupied the cinema screen more than any other figure of Roman history, creating for spectators a multisensory experience of the emperor as image, movement and sound. The background of these Neros goes back to his wide circulation in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century, in restagings of operas and plays as well as the performance of new ones, in paintings and postcards, novels, circus shows and lantern slides. But, across the first decades of the twentieth-century, cinema shaped its own Neros better to suit the specificity and needs of the medium, its changing technologies and industrial practices, and the differing cultural contexts of his reproduction. This essay puts the four prints in the BFI archive that concern Nero - namely, Nero or the Burning of Rome (Nerone o L’incendio di Roma, 1909), Way of the Cross (1909), Quo vadis (1913) and Quo vadis (1924) - within the context of the eleven silent films about the Roman emperor that have survived from the early years of cinema. The essay reflects upon differences that emerge between these cinematic representations across time and nation and, in doing so, explores more broadly why silent cinema was so attracted to him.