Around The World in 80 Years

"Around The World in 80 Years" ("Il giro del mondo in 80 anni" in Italian) is a film written and directed by Alessandro Bettero: a travelogue that covers eight decades of history of the 20th century, narrated from the original point of view of the italian travel agent Adelmo Salvadori. In years in which a cine camera was only for the very few, Adelmo Salvadori travelled all over the world and filmed away with his cine camera. He mounted the reels in great secret, and then hid them away until one day by chance his daughter Gabriella, owner of one of the oldest Travel Agency of the World, discovered them in Bologna.
What was behind this frenetic activity? Why did Adelmo put his life at risk in order to shoot hours and hours of film? Part of those images have been put together for the contemporary viewer for the first time – with neither restoration nor any other manumission – and read against the vivid memories of middle-aged world travellers in the same decades.
So history and memory, personal and collective, interweave in this fascinating reconstruction in which we rediscover a world that no longer exists, even if we have always lived in it.