“Dante’s Inferno, with its fantastic images, stands (…) totally apart from the style of European films of the period. Its plastic beauty, deriving from a sophisticated visual culture, already proclaims the fantasy of the great Swedish and German masterpieces, thus showing the role played, in the 1910s, by the Italian cinema on the schools of the Countries of central Europe”.

Henri Langlois, Cinquante ans de cinéma italien (extract), Paris, Cinémathèque frangaise, February-March-April 1954

“For several months already, certain far-sighted producers had turned into the avenue of longer films, embarking on particularly demanding and costly projects, which looked directly forward to the goal of 1,000 metres. The first to arrive was Milano Films, which had inherited from its predecessors, the Saffi-Comerio company, the project and a group of sequences from the Infer­no: a reduction for the cinema of the first canto of Dante’s poem, directed by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan with the collaboration of Giuseppe De Liguoro. Perhaps encouraged by the great success enjoyed by these first episodes, presented and awarded prizes at the Concorso di Milano in September 1909, the directors of the Milanese firm proceeded with the laborious project, finally arriving at a long film of 1,300 metres (which it is said cost more than 100,000 Lire). Apparently there was no hesitation: the film had to be projected complete, as a single spectacle. The management of the publicity for the launch and of the world rights were entrusted to the ambitious, enterprising Neapolitan Gustavo Lombardo (…). At the last moment all this costly publicity effort risked being nullified by a stunt by a rival firm, Helios of Velletri, which in three months and for the modest cost of 8,000 Lire succeeded in producing a rival Infer­no, 400 metres in length, which was released in January 1911 – even materially making advantageous use of all the publicity work by Lombardo. (…) The ruse did not, however, succeed in eclipsing the success of Milano Films and Lombardo, who for their Inferno organized previews for invited audiences, first at the Mercadante Royal Theatre in Naples (2 March) and then at the Milan Filodrammatici (22 March) and at the restored Moderno di Alberini in Rome (7 April). Presented under the auspices of the Società nazionale Dante Alighieri, these projections attracted an exceptional public: for the first time a film filled the newspapers with news items, reviews, and interviews, almost all full of praise. (…) The success of Inferno was of international proportions, and quite lasting: it was repeated in France, the USA, and Great Britain (…)”.

Aldo Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano. Arte, divismo e mercato (1910-1914), Laterza, Bari, 1981, pp. 87-89