Abstract

In the last decade of the 19th century, international panoramas became widespread in major Italian cities: multi-place booths in which views could be admired in series. Although the phenomenon has been recognised by film historians, it has often been delimited in studies to the German case of the Kaiserpanorama or flattened to general considerations regarding the decline of the main 19th century optical devices in the face of the advent of cinematography. On the contrary, the albeit fragmentary sources of the time attest to a proliferation and specificity of international panoramas at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A proliferation that, in its relative brevity (about a decade), is nonetheless symptomatic of the profound visual and media changes taking place. The essay intends firstly to provide a historical framework of a phenomenon still largely under-studied, and then to reflect on the significance of the International Panorama in the complex multimedia offerings of the time. In particular, in its relationship with the cinema it is possible to identify a significant osmosis that, rather than going in the direction of competitiveness, seems to have been at least initially an effective partnership.