Dante's Inferno

Milano Films, 1911: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro stage Dante's descent with Virgil through the circles of Hell. Salvatore Papa as Dante, Arturo Pirovano as Virgil. About an hour, more than fifty tableaux, many copied from Gustave Doré's engravings: Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino, the frozen lake. Italy's first feature and, unlike the fragmentary Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the oldest feature that survives nearly complete. Shown in the United States with a lecturer. Smithsonian and others note the Doré debt and the claim of earliest intact feature-length print.