ARCHIVIO DELL’IMMAGINE DI CESENA

The Great Italian Cinema, from Neorealism to Fellini

What remains when the film ends?

For TIFF 2026, Tirana’s Pedestrian Area in front of Cinema Millennium becomes an open-air cinematic journey through the history of Italian cinema, with The Italy We Dreamed Of, a special photographic exhibition organised in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Tirana, curated by Elton Koritari, and installation by EJAlbum.

Through archival photographs, the exhibition traces around six decades of Italian cinema  from the raw reality of neorealism and the work of De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti, to the dream, myth and imagination of Fellini, while also revealing the people and moments behind the films. The exhibition unfolds through five sections: The Dream Factory, The Real, The Masters, The Dream and the Myth, and The Gaze.

Its presence in Tirana carries a particular meaning. For generations of Albanians, Italian cinema was more than entertainment. It was a distant window onto another world, an image of a country that was watched, desired and dreamed of across the Adriatic.

The exhibition becomes part of the city itself: an open-air archive where every photograph is another frame, every step another cut, and the viewer becomes part of the story.