Luigi Comencini is one of the pioneers of European film archiving. A passionate cinephile, in the late 1930s, together with Mario Ferrari (who died young in 1938) and the future director Alberto Lattuada, he started collecting films and exchanging them with French enthusiasts like Henri Langlois. This was the core for the future Cineteca Italiana of Milan. Once he became an established director, he made La valigia dei sogni in order to provide financial support to the Cineteca. Several scenes and part of its voice-over were borrowed from the documentary Il museo dei sogni, which he had made several years earlier. His aim was to use a fictional narrative to raise public awareness and interest in the heritage of Italian silent cinema, which was gradually disappearing. The story of the ageing actor Omeri, who rescues films from being destroyed and tries to bring them to the public’s attention, provides a pretext for an anthology of silent films, from the very first Italian film, La presa di Roma, to Antamoro’s Christus, Assunta Spina with Francesca Bertini and Cenere with Eleonora Duse, right up to Cabiria. The cinema of the past is crossed with neorealism, with the theme of actors taken from the streets and the use of film within film. Reality and fiction are mixed: the silent actress Helena Mankowska plays herself; the same is fundamentally true for Maria Pia Casilio, the supporting actress who played the role of the servant girl in De Sica’s Umberto D. and who here plays the protagonist’s assistant who is recruited into the world of cinema.