Ludovico Maria Chierici approached cinema in the 1920s by purchasing a Pathé Baby camera. The father of the family passed on his passion to his sons, who became passionate about the medium and produced an astonishing number of films. The starting point is the family. The Chierici brothers' stories revolve around this: stories, events, meetings, outings and trips, documented very often with an amateur camera.

Massimo Bacigalupo, filmmaker, essayist, translator and literary critic, started filming as a child. In his family, since the 1930s, his father had been shooting in Pathé Baby. At the age of fifteen, he made his debut at film competitions with some amateur documentaries made with his 8mm camera. The overwhelming force of the Underground and New American Cinema will be the references that will inspire his artistic evolution.

Luca Ferro has been reflecting on the family film since the 1970s, realising its cultural importance (and thus the need to safeguard it) and emphasising not only its subjective nature but also its 'unconscious documentary design'.

Andrea Granchi is an artist, filmmaker, curator and lecturer. Acknowledged as one of the protagonists of Italian 'Cinema d'artista', between the 1960s and 1980s he shot his films using small gauge format cameras, Granchi has also been a tireless promoter of numerous cultural initiatives, festivals and exhibitions on artists' cinema both in Italy and abroad.

The small gauge film format entered schools towards the end of the 1960s on the initiative of enlightened teachers who realised its importance as a didactic tool and, above all, capable of stimulating the creativity of children and young people. These were the first pioneering attempts, astonishing in their results. That of cinema at school is a little-known story but one in which Italy was in the vanguard, thanks also to the experience of teachers such as Emilio Sidoti.

Francesco Rinaldi bought his camera, a Silma 800 Macro in Super8, in the late 1970s, with the stated intent of building moving memories of his family, especially his parents and young daughter Anna Lisa. A self-taught enthusiast, he enjoyed exploring and showing everyday family life and the cycles of nature through films infused with handcrafted and creative solutions.

One speaks of a family film when thinking of a film dedicated to the representation of events, stories, places and figures belonging to a specific private household. The concept of the home movie, in fact, refers to a rather defined spatial perimeter, which is that of the home. Alice Cati introduces the concept of the family film by examining its historical and social aspects and emphasising the revolutionary power of the reduced format which, born in the 1920s, allowed everyone to represent themselves.

The history of small gauge cinema is first and foremost a history of the technology and innovations that made it possible to obtain film formats and technical equipment that were light, manageable, economical and safe, i.e. non-flammable. Mirco Santi traces the history of film formats, focusing on the most important junctures in the evolution of the technical characteristics and practices of small gauge cinema, from chromatism to sound, to projection methods.

The so-called 'experimental cinema' is a small-format film practice that emerges in Italy during Fascism and defines itself in the course of little more than a decade. It takes shape and is articulated within the structures of the Fascist University Groups, giving rise to one of the most original associationist formulas in the history of Italian cinema: the Cineguf. Andrea Mariani tells this story, focusing on the main junctures from which emerges the importance of an inescapable production, as well as a crucial and complex passage for understanding the evolution of cinema in reduced format.

In post-war Italy, amateur filmmaking practices spread at various levels, mainly in 8mm and 16mm. Cinematographers' circles were born, which on the one hand promoted film culture and on the other gave amateurs the chance to try their hand by providing exhibition materials, cameras, film, space and funding to make short films. Paolo Villa introduces us to one of the most flourishing periods of amateur filmmaking, a world in which interest in small-format practice exploded and flourished especially during the 1950s and 1960s.

Director, actor, screenwriter, critic and scholar, Adriano Aprà was born in Rome in 1940. His activity within the film context represents a point of reference for the discovery of new authors and new trends in contemporary cinema. A protagonist of the wave of Italian experimental cinema in the 1970s, Aprà became part of the direction of Filmstudio 70: a centre for research and cultural elaboration where he experimented with new artistic and critical proposals and deepened the relations of cinema with other arts and media.

Shortly after the mid-1960s the "arcadia" of amateur filmmakers was disrupted by the arrival of underground cinema, which burst onto the festival distribution circuits, producing a generational break that redefined the figure of the amateur filmmaker and the new practices of the small gauge film formats. The crucial moment to take stock of amateur productions is around the mid-1970s, with Dimensione Super8, an important review that will produce a complete mapping of Italian production, also indicating possible future developments in the production and enjoyment of reduced format films.

With the advent of Super8 and other small gauge film formats, opportunities for production, dissemination and distribution multiplied. Italian artists were faced with the possibility of being able to make films at home and it was the desire to reproduce, easily develop the film and generate copies for distribution that allowed exchanges, especially international ones. Film is much easier to circulate than an artistic artefact: a complete novelty and a game-changer for the time.

Desire, body and freedom are themes that are particularly intertwined with women's artistic production in the 1970s, especially since, in industrial cinema, women's bodies were hyper present as objects of male desire. Giulia Simi introduces us to the context of female and feminist cinema of the time through various examples of production and by looking at two fundamental and exemplary figures in their differences: Marinella Pirelli and Patrizia Vicinelli.

As early as the beginning of the 1970s, Italy witnessed the emergence of video, which differed from film in three main characteristics: the length of recording time, the asynchronous taking of audio and the reusability of magnetic tapes. Diego Cavallotti recounts a horizon of practices dealing with the electronic image and involving new and different skills. Narrating the era of the transition from film to video and pointing out the differences in technology and language, Cavallotti also dwells on the practical outcomes and social and cultural legacies.