Progetto Visconti

In the early nineties, the Cineteca Nazionale (National Film Archive) - a Sector of the Foundation Scuola Nazionale di Cinema - has started to work on the 'Visconti Project' in order to preserve and restore the Director's complete work.

Over a ten-year period all of Visconti's films have been restored, thanks to the support and collaboration of all those who had an in-depth knowledge of Visconti's cinema, first and foremost Giuseppe Rotunno, the coordinator of most of the preservation projects. The preservation was done by working on the negative (from the original materials or, whenever this wasn't feasible, from the best copies available) in order to give to the films the original glamour. Moreover, in many cases in which cuts or changes had been made, the original version as intended by the Director was recovered.

This ambitious endeavour - launched with the first official screening, in September 1991, of Il Gattopardo at the XLVIII Venice International Film Festival - was completed in May 2000 when all of Visconti's films were screened during a Retrospective organized at the BNL Hall in Rome.

Since then, the Retrospective has circulated in the most prestigious centres both in Italy and Europe, from the Cinémathèque in Paris to the International Salonika Festival in Athens, from Portugal, during 'Porto 2001, European Capital of Culture' to 'Schermi d'amore' in Verona, from the Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid, to Helsinki, in collaboration with the Finnish Film Archive.