CINEMATOGRAFEIDE!

Matilde Serao’s novels were adapted for film, which was the subject, among others, of her journalistic writings, such as her well-known reviews of films like Inferno, Quo vadis, and Cabiria. She also wrote original scenarios. As a regular collaborator of the film magazine L’arte muta edited by the Neapolitan distributor Gustavo Lombardo, she fervently promoted Neapolitan cinema, which was favoured by a cultural environment well oriented towards the Seventh Art.
Cinema was for Serao a popular art, able to reach a widespread and, at times, uneducated audience. In her 1906 article “Cinematografeide!,” the first article about film written by an intellectual in Italy, she caught the dawn of the Neapolitan enthusiasm for the cinématographe, suggesting, with the suffix of the neologism she coined, the emergence of cinema in Naples as an epidemic, a contagious disease.