Gloria, produced by Istituto Nazionale Luce in 1934 and directed by Roberto Omegna, was assembled from archival footage from the Royal Italian Army and the Royal Italian Navy, with the exception of the sinking of the dreadnought Santo Stefano, filmed by the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Navy. The documentary drew both its source material and its narrative structure from Guerra nostra (1927), a montage film that had established a “canon of narrative themes and visual motifs” (Alessandro Faccioli) surrounding the conflict. Gloria adapted this repertoire to the shifting technological, discursive and political- cultural conditions of sound cinema and of the Fascist regime in the first half of the 1930s, eliminating the transition from the transfer of the Unknown Soldier’s coffin to the Blackshirts and Il Duce from its finale and presenting itself to audiences as the “official cinematic documentation of the epic war fought by Italy against the Central Empires, from 24 May 1915 to 4 November 1918” (Istituto Nazionale Luce, 1937). Today, Gloria appears as a strikingly modern cinematic project in its reuse of documentary images drawn from “reality”, and in these images’ manipulation as spectacle and the construction of an ideology. It is a monument in which the narrative of collective sacrifice, widespread heroism and the nation united in arms is articulated through a visually powerful and dynamic catalogue of images, supported by a music and commentary which is indebted to comparable experiments of the period and anticipating later practices in film sound design. The restoration of Gloria is part of the project Gloria e le grandi antologie cinematografiche italiane della Grande Guerra, funded by the Ministry of Culture and coordinated by Archivio Storico Luce – Cinecittà, in collaboration with the Università di Roma 2 Tor Vergata and the Università di Udine.