Italian cinema triumphed globally in the 1960, but by the end of the 1980s the Italian film industry was all but dead. This book traces the rise of the industry from its origins in the 19th century to its worldwide success in the 1960s, and its rapid decline in the subsequent decades. It does so by looking at cinema as an institution - subject to the interplay between the spheres of art, business, and politics at the national and international...