Alberini & Santoni set up a studio from the outset, while Ambrosio, founded by a Turin optician, initially concentrated on filming current events before building a studio in 1913. Comerio and Luggo also built studios, respectively in Milan in 1913 (Milano film) and Naples in 1914 (Napoli film). 1913 witnessed the construction on Rome’s Caelian Hill of a glass-walled studio (all early studios were glass-panelled), whose metal structure is still extant, although encased in the walls of a television production centre.
While the Movie Palaces were being built in America, richly ornate and gaudy temples of kitsch, the opposite process was taking place in Italy: the great aristocratic palaces with their fabulous historic architecture first gave over rooms to family theatres and then, with the advent of film, to cinemas. In Piazza Capranica in Rome, a number of the rooms of Cardinal Capranica’s apartments, which amongst other things had been a theatre since the fifteenth century, were finally turned into a cinema in 1922 by architect Carlo Wadis. Much rebuilt in the meantime, the Cinema Capranica continues as a city-centre cinema to this day.