TRAVELOGUE

The first picture show

The Agostini family started showing movies
in Pisa in 1899. The show is still going on.

By Bennett Voyles

Like Pisa’s famous tower, the Cinema Lumière has defied the odds over the years. But despite wars, a depression and two decades of fascism, what may be the world’s oldest movie theater is still going strong in the Italian city after more than a century, under the watchful eye of the family who founded it.

The Agostini family’s interest in the movies began in the 1890s, when Alessandro Agostini, scion of a prominent Pisa family, began hearing about an interesting invention—the cinematograph—from scientists at the nearby university.

In 1899, the 15-year-old Ago-stini got hold of a projector and began showing films in a café his family owned on the ground floor of the Palazzo Agostini, the family’s 500-year-old red brick palace.

The Café dell’Userro had been in operation since Mozart was on the pop charts, but it wasn’t stuffy. The Userro had always tended to attract a forward-looking crowd— artists, writers and scientists met there to gossip and debate politics and new ideas. The novelty proved popular with patrons.

Encouraged by the reception, the young film buff had another novel idea: convert the café’s billiard room into a real movie theater. He named it Cinema Lumière in honor of the brothers Lumière, the French film inventors. The first show was G. Méliès’ Impossible Journey (1904), an early sci-fi flick. Some Lumière projectionists reportedly made their own films, mostly of local scenes.

The Lumière seems to have been more of a hobby for the family than a business concern. Yet Agostini kept experimenting with the new medium. In 1906, for instance, at 22, he founded a company to produce synchronized sound films, using a method pioneered by local inventor Pietro Pierini. In October of that year, his cinema demonstrated the new sound-synchronization system.

By 1914, demand for movies had grown enough that Agostini hired an established Tuscan architect to remodel some former church buildings in the back of the palace, and convert them into a larger art nouveau movie house that replaced the Lumière, the Cinema Splendor.

Italy’s stormy politics during the theater’s first 30 years affected the business only twice. Dictator Benito Mussolini ordered that businesses could not have foreign names—so in 1939, the Agostinis said good-bye Splendor, buongiorno Cinema Splendore. It was shut in 1943 and ’44; the palazzo is located on the Arno, on the German frontline.

After Alessandro died in 1958, his son Cossimo, now 89, began watching over the theater.

Cossimo’s son, Agostino Agostini, 51, says the family never had a direct role in the theater’s operations. The family always believed that for artistic reasons it was important for the managers to choose the programs. However, they did keep an eye on the business—sometimes literally. Agostino remembers looking through a special window from the family’s upstairs apartment as a boy. “I look inside the cinema and see the films like a private cinema,” he recalls.

The window is gone, a casualty of the modern fire code, but the Lumière today burns more brightly than ever. Modern electronics were installed in the late 1990s. After closing it down in 2001, the family restored the theater in 2004 with the help of grants from the European Union and the Italian government—and brought back its original name.

Since 2005, the theater has been put to a use Alessandro Agostini would have appreciated: a 200-seat art house cinema with state-of-the-art sound and projection system. What’s more, it’s still profitable—always a nice quality in a hobby.

Bennett Voyles is a freelance writer based in Paris, France.