![‘History, Italian Style’ Trailer: Film At Lincoln Center & Cinecittà Trace Modern Italy Through 29 Films [Exclusive]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/01123718/%E2%80%98History-Italian-Style-Trailer-Film-At-Lincoln-Center-Cinecitta-Trace-Modern-Italy-Through-29-Films-Exclusive.jpg "‘History, Italian Style’ Trailer: Film At Lincoln Center & Cinecittà Trace Modern Italy Through 29 Films [Exclusive]")
Italy became a modern nation long before cinema arrived, but few national cinemas have returned to their own political ghosts with as much force, beauty, and self-scrutiny. That history is at the center of “History, Italian Style,” a new Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà series running from June 4 through June 25 at the Walter Reade Theater.
The Playlist is exclusively premiering the trailer for the 29-film retrospective, which traces the creation of modern Italy from the Risorgimento through the rise of Mussolini and World War II. The series opens with Bernardo Bertolucci’s 316-minute epic “1900,” presented in a 4K restoration, and continues with landmark works by Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Marco Bellocchio, Alice Rohrwacher, and Pietro Marcello.
Developed with curator, film scholar, and professor Emiliano Morreale, and with Marcello serving as program advisor, “History, Italian Style” focuses on how Italian filmmakers have wrestled with national identity, political failure, fascism, class conflict, war, and the lingering question of what Italy is and what it has become.
The lineup includes “The Leopard,” Visconti’s Palme d’Or-winning Risorgimento epic; “Senso,” his operatic bridge between neorealism and grand historical melodrama; Rossellini’s neorealist watershed “Rome Open City”; Fellini’s “Amarcord”; Bertolucci’s “The Conformist”; De Sica’s “Two Women” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”; Lina Wertmüller’s “Love and Anarchy”; Bellocchio’s “Vincere”; Marcello’s “Martin Eden”; Rohrwacher’s “Happy as Lazzaro”; and Maura Delpero’s recent “Vermiglio.”
“We are thrilled to be presenting ‘History, Italian Style,’ our latest collaboration with longtime partner Cinecittà,” Florence Almozini, Film at Lincoln Center’s Vice President of Programming, said in a statement. She described the program as “a deep and fascinating showcase” of Italy’s cinematic history, presented through 4K restorations and imported prints.
Morreale framed the series around a cinema that has often looked backward in order to diagnose the present. “Since the postwar period, reflecting on this essentially recent past has also meant grasping the roots of the present or creating a metaphor for it,” he said. In his view, the program is less about conventional historical films than “films about the meaning of history.”
That distinction gives the series its shape. “History, Italian Style” is not simply a greatest-hits program, though it includes some of the most canonical works in Italian cinema. It is also a political map: failed revolutions, abandoned peasants, fascist psychology, aristocratic decline, war trauma, and postwar memory, all filtered through filmmakers who repeatedly returned to the nation’s past to understand its contradictions.
Tickets are on sale now. “History, Italian Style” runs June 4 through June 25 at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Watch the exclusive trailer below.
- Rodrigo Perez
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