The present edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato includes at least two great films – to be shown on the first and last evenings of the festival – featuring the image of a panicked artist before a public turned monster: Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped and Charles Chaplin’s Limelight. Clearly, our affectionate audience is quite different. As I have repeatedly stated, in my humble opinion, our creative and passionate audience is – yes – the best public in the world. It’s all about individual knowledge, emotions and intuition – which is perhaps the definition of «cinephilia», based on a lifelong love affair with film. The elements connecting life and film merge to a rare degree, seldom felt more strongly than while watching masterpieces such as the aforementioned. Pure pleasure accompanies the pure joy of knowing more: about the films, the history which somehow shines through the texture of the films, reception history as well as proper history.