Guglielmo Giannini e la via del giallo, dal teatro al cinema

This paper is based on the discovery of a large amount of archive materials belonging to the Italian playwright Guglielmo Giannini (1891-1960). The article brings attention to his versatile personality and clarifies the role played by him in Italian cinema in the early twentieth century. After a brief description and overview of the newly acquired archival resources (comprising drama scripts, film scripts, film subjects, drafts of novels, etc.), the essay focuses on the various roles played by Giannini in the Italian silent film industry. Giannini was a critic and a director of the ‘militant’ magazine “Kines” while he also translated the intertitles of American films for local audiences. These activities help us to capture Giannini’s position with respect to the relationship between Italian and American cinema and the genres they conveyed, with particular reference to the ‘giallo’.