Island of San Servolo, Room 9A, every Monday, 8:05 p.m.

Films by a selection of the most outstanding Italian directors portraying Italian History and Society. Original Language, English subtitles.

February 21st Allonsanfan by Paolo and Emilio Taviani, 1974, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Laura Betti, 115 mins , Italian with English subtitles, color. In the midst of the general disillusionment with Revolutionary ideals which followed the defeat of Napoleon, a Jacobin aristocrat attempts to betray his former comrades (set in 1816)

February 28th Senso by Luchino Visconti, 1954, starring Alida Valli and Farley Granger, 117 mins, color. A noble-woman who sympathises with the Risorgimento falls in love with an Austrian officer (partly set in Venice, 1866, based on a novel by Camillo Boito)

March 7th Pinocchio by Roberto Benigni, 2003 , starring Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi, 100 mins, color Ever-curious wooden puppet puts himself in to troubles. Successful adaptation of Carlo Collodi's classic moral fable, published in late XIXth Century Italy. Set in Tuscany.

March 14th L'albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) by Ermanno Olmi,1978, starring Luigi Ornaghi e Omar Brignoli, 185 mins, color. A peasant risks punishment after cutting down one of the landlord's trees to make a new pair of clogs for his son (set in the countryside near Bergamo, Lombardy, in 1897-98, the movie is a sympathetic account of Northern Italian peasant morality). Grand Prize winner at Cannes 1978.

March 21st Strategia del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem) by B. Bertolucci, 1970 , starring Giulio Brogi and Alida Valli, 97 mins., color. A young man of the 1970's tries to discover how and why his antifascist father died like a hero thirty years earlier (set in the XVth Century village of Sabionetta, near Manutua, based on a novel by Jorge Luis Borges).

March 28th Roma città aperta (Rome Open City) by Roberto Rossellini, 1945, starring Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, 93 mins, black and white. A woman, a man and a priest involved in the Resistance against Nazi German occupation of Rome in 1944.

April 4th Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) by Giuseppe De Santis, 1948 , starring Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman, 108 mins, Italian with English Subtitles, black and white. Seductive “mondina” (woman rice worker) involved in a robbery with her new lover (set in the Po Valley, immediately after Second World War)

April 11th Travolti da un'insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away by an unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), by Lina Wertmueller, 1974, starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, 116 mins, color. A rich capitalist milanese woman and a communist sicilian deckhand, stranded on a desert island.

April 18th Lamerica by Gianni Amelio, starring Enrico Lo Verso and Michele Placido, 1994, 116 mins, Italian with English subtitles, color. A Southern Italian, working for an enterpreneur who sets up a fake business to get State subsidies, discovers Albania and its ties with Italy (Fascism and Emigration).

April 27th (Wednesday) My Voyage to Italy 1 by Martin Scorsese, starring various actors, 1999, about 120 mins, Italian with English subtitles, color and Black and White Survey of Italian cinema from World War II through the early '60s by the Italian-American who directed “Taxi Driver” and “Gangs of New York” and watched these films before starting his career.

May 2nd My Voyage to Italy 2 by Martin Scorsese (continuation)

May 9th La Famiglia (The Family ) by Ettore Scola, 1987, starring Vittorio Gassman and Stefania Sandrelli, 128 mins, color. Three generations of a roman middle-class family seen through the transformation of their private lives (1906-1987).

May 16th Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) by Luchino Visconti, 1971, starring Dirk Bogarde and Silvana Mangano, 131 mins, color. An elderly German composer falls in platonic love with a Polish boy in the Hotel Des Bains at the Lido of Venice (set in 1911, based on novel by Thomas Mann). Special prize at Cannes (1971). ù