Over Sixty Years Alongside Italy's Cinemas

For over sixty years, S.A.C. (Servizi Ausiliari Cinema), the Momigliano family company, accompanied every film that reached Italian cinemas. Film prints, trailers, posters, locandine (the small Italian format) and fotobuste (the Italian photo lobby format): everything a cinema needed to open its doors and turn on the lights. A capillary operation, the connecting link between the distributors and every cinema in Italy, which came to an end in January 2020.

But something else happened over those decades. Handling those painted sheets day after day, the family fell in love with them: from the early 1970s onward, every poster, every locandina, every fotobusta that passed through our warehouses was kept and set aside, without yet knowing why. Out of that daily closeness grew direct acquaintance and friendship with the painters themselves, and from it came the acquisition of the rights to the works of most of the Maestri Pittori Cartellonisti Italiani, the great Italian masters of the painted movie poster: managing those rights alone was impractical for the individual Authors, and the agreement benefited them above all. In 2003 came Webphoto, the portal reserved for publishers, which today holds over 1,500,000 cinema and television images; in 2024 the two merged into SacWebphoto S.r.l., the single company that also runs Movie.it, the project born in 2019 to recover and celebrate the painted works of twentieth-century cinema.

When Every Film Was a Painting

There was a time when every film released in Italy brought a work of art with it. Not a reproduction, not a retouched photograph: a painting. Between the 1910s and the early 1990s, Italian movie posters were universally recognized as the most beautiful and refined in the world, the work of painters named Ballester, Martinati, Ciriello, Cesselon, Capitani, Brini, Symeoni, Sciotti, the Nistri brothers, Casaro and many others: a unique school born of the encounter between cinema and painting, today partly forgotten, hidden away in archives, partly lost.

We have devoted a full essay to this extraordinary story, the history of the Italian movie poster, which tells it decade by decade, from its nineteenth-century origins to the twilight of paint on paper.

The Mission: Recover, Preserve, Give Back

The mission of Movie.it is to recover, restore and make visible again as many of these masterpieces as possible. No longer displayed for a few days on city walls, as they were when the films came out, but permanently: in the homes, public spaces and studios of those who choose them.

The work, which we have called Il Manifesto Ritrovato, the Rediscovered Poster, took years on two fronts: professionally photographing the entire S.A.C. archive, with multiple shots per subject, and tracking down Italy's leading private collectors to recover what was missing, above all the works of the decades before the 1970s. A labour of research, travel, relationships and passion, whose result is the most complete vintage digital collection of movie posters, locandine and fotobuste ever assembled: over 18,000 films in the archive, over 40,000 works.

From Paper to Light: How We Work

An archive of this scale is not simply digitized: it is rediscovered, one sheet at a time, with the same patience with which these masterpieces were once painted.

Everything begins with cataloguing, a philological task: for each work, the format, the title, the year and, wherever possible, the attribution, tracing signatures and telling styles apart. Then comes archival photography in high resolution, with lighting calibrated to render the original colours, the grain of the paper, even the brushstroke beneath the surface; many pieces, marked by decades of folds and tears, first require careful, delicate preparation.

Digital restoration happens in two stages. After photography, each work receives a base restoration that removes the most evident marks of time, and is published on the portal, open to everyone. When a work is ordered, the definitive restoration begins: many hours of work on every imperfection, colours returning to their original intensity, details resurfacing. The fine art print, on premium paper or artist's canvas in the chosen format, is produced only for the person who ordered it: not a print run, not a stock product, but a work printed for one person alone, with a sharpness and vibrancy that surpass the typographic printing of the period.

An Open Archive

Museums and cultural venues find here the material for themed exhibitions. Festivals and film archives enrich their retrospectives with the posters of the period. Individuals and companies choose the work and the format they prefer. And every work purchased brings back to life the talent of the artist who created it: this is how each print supports the recovery of the next, one masterpiece at a time.

Cinema, in Italy, was painted extraordinarily well. It is time the world could see it again.