San Paolo (Giuseppe De Liguoro, Rodolfo Kanzler, Milano Film, 1910) narrates the highlights of the life of Saint Paul, a religious subject based on the Acts of the Apostles. In its settings it intersects with the representation of the classical world in the first century CE, tracing a geographical and historical arc from an imaginatively conceived Asia Minor (Tarsus) and Syria (Damascus) to Neronian Rome during the Great Fire of 64 CE. This analysis explores the various surviving versions of the film, as well as its notable use of on-location settings and colour as a means of reinforcing the authenticity of Paul’s presence in Rome and its religious resonance. The film is a pioneering work in which a hugely significant historical-religious narrative meets the merging grammar of silent cinema.

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.

This analysis treats three of the early films on martyrdom in Roman antiquity that survive in the BFI National Archive: La Fille du centurion (Radios, 1910), Dall’amore al martirio (Cines, 1910) and Santa Cecilia (Cines, 1911). All three are responsive – in different ways – to general conceptions of Christian martyrdom and their representation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Together they demonstrate that, while the practice of remembering martyrs continued to be a living feature of Christian worship in the early twentieth century, the representation of Christian martyrdom on screen could not resist the draw of its nineteenth-century fictionalisations – whether they were performed on the stage, narrated in a novel or magazine or depicted in paintings and on postcards. The three films are also differentiated from each other by the national cultures in which they were produced, the degree to which studios engaged with Catholic institutions, their relative proximity to the key sites of martyrdom around Rome, and their relationship to new cinematic technologies such as location shooting or the elaboration of an antiquarian eye for sets and props in which to place martyrs and their persecutors.