The history of cinema still has mysterious continents. Among these, an Atlantis forgotten for too long: the Italian silent cinema. However, in the years following its invention, it enjoyed an international reputation, fascinating crowds, intellectuals and artists from all over Europe. These films, shot in Italy between 1896 and 1930, are now becoming accessible thanks to restoration, digitization and online campaigns that finally offer the possibility to take a new look at this cultural heritage. The book dives into the heart of the aesthetics of Italian silent cinema in its intrinsic relationship with the other arts. Dance, theater, opera, literature, figurative arts: cinema was invented from the great classical works as well as from the most fashionable ones circulating through the media that were then in full expansion. From the first documentary views, immortalizing Italian landscapes and monuments, to the monumental peplums, through the melodramas that revealed the first great female actresses, or the literary adaptations of the Film d’Arte Italiana, cinema was born with this unusual and marvelous ability to absorb, revisit and transform a multitude of artistic forms and disciplines. All the texts are crossed by a strong will to insist on the innovative reach of the seventh art in its capacity of re-use.