Features the history of Italian cinema from 1989 onwards. This title includes the Italian horror-film genre, Roberto Benigni ("Life Is Beautiful"), Bernardo Bertolucci ("Stealing Beauty"), Franco Zeffirelli ("Tea with Mussolini"), Michael Radford ("The Postman" ["Il postino"]), and Gabriele Salvatores ("Mediterraneo").

Preface; 1. The Silent Era; 2. The Coming of Sound and the Fascist Era; 3. The Neorealist Era: Masters of Neorealism - Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti; 4. The Neorealist Era: Exploring the Boundaries of Neorealism; 5. The Neorealist Era: The Break With Neorealism, the Cinema of the Reconstruction in Rossellini and Antonioni, Fellini's Trilogy of Character and Grace; and the Return of Melodrama with Visconti and De Sica; 6. The Italian "Peplum": The Sword and Sandal Epic; 7. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Commedia all'italiana - Comedy and Social Criticism; 8. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Neorealism's Legacy to a New Generation and the Political Film; 9. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: The Mateur Auteurs - New Dimensions of Film Narrative in Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica, and Fellini; 10. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: The Spaghetti Nightmare - the Italian Horror Film from the 1950s to the Present; 11. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: A Fistful of Pasta - Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western; 12. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Mystery, Gore, and Mayhem-- the Italian Giallo XIII. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Myth, Marx, and Freud in Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci; 13.. The Poliziesco: Italian Crime Films from the 1970s to the Present; 14.. The Old Guard Never Surrenders: Italy's Prewar Auteurs in the 1980s and 1990s; 15.. The Third Wave: A New Generation of Auteurs with Moretti, Nichetti, Trosi, Salvatores, Benigni, Tornatore, Giordana, Amelio, and Ozpetek; 16. Italian Cinema Enters the Third Millennium; Endnotes; Bibliography; List of photo credits; Index.