Version made from a tinted and toned positive print with Italian intertitles, conserved by Remo Romeo’s Museo del Cinema di Siracusa, and from a tinted positive print with Dutch intertitles, conserved by the private collector Jan Zaalberg. Reconstructed by Riccardo Redi for the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema.
Film Artistica Gloria was the first cinematographic company to understand that for the cinema to support the war effort during the First World War it was not sufficient to resort, as most of the other production companies were doing, to the ridiculous rodomontades of a Maciste or a Cretinetti that, dressed up as a soldier, was able to put an entire regiment of krauts on their knees and thus win the war with their antics. They made a more refined choice by adapting stories from the book Cuore for the screen. Here young Lombard lookouts and heroic Sardignian drummerboys sacrificed themselves for their country, fighting the eternal enemies, even in far-off wars.
To play the parts of these intrepid youths two already experienced twelve year olds, Gigi Petrungaro and Ermanno Roveri, were called in. In fact Roveri is the heroe of Dagli Appennini alle Ande: the search for and final reuniting between mother and son after overcoming thousands of obstacles is one of the most moving stories written by Edmondo De Amicis and is the longest of his monthly series. The resulting film had a long play on the screen. Giuseppe Fabbri wrote a strange piece about the film in Il Maggese Cinematografico: “…There was a small celebration at the ‘Impresa Cinematografica Veneziana’ to inaugurate their new offices and there was a showing of one of the films to be released shortly, Dagli Appennini alle Ande. […] During the meticulously emphatic narration of the moving ordeals of the young heroe, a lady from Trieste who was part of the committee suddenly burst into tears and sobbed so strongly as to allarm the rest of the committee […]”.
(Vittorio Martinelli)