“Lucciola is a strange girl. She is a flower that has bloomed in the dirt, a girl who manages to thrive and remain fresh and pure in the squalor of all the social environments into which destiny and poverty force her”. This is how the blurb begins on the handout given to the audience of this film which became one of the biggest cinema successes of 1917. Fernanda Negri-Pouget had been cast as the heroine for Geninia’s previous movie, La signorina Ciclone but she could not accept the part as she was already starring in two other movies. So when she was offered the part of Lucciola she accepted happily, as she did when the same director offered her the leading role in his next film, Maschiaccio. Francesco Savio described Fernanda Negri-Pouget as a kind of Italian Mary Pick- ford without the sickly-sweet conventionalism of the “American fiancée”. She began working at Cines in 1907, and at the start of her cinema career she tended to play characters distinguished by their languid sentimentality but when she was later asked to play a series of wild adolescent roles in riotous comedies at the end of the decade she showed she was a lively actress with a clearly independent spirit.

Vittorio Martinelli