On March 1, 1911, the first public screening of Inferno was held at the Mercadante Theater in Naples. The production of the film took almost two years and the cost rose to an unprecedented amount of money: at the time there was talk of the astronomical sum of one million lire. The enthusiasm for the film adaptation of the first Cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy was unanimous and shared by the distinguished writers and intellectuals present at the Neapolitan screening, including Benedetto Croce and Matilde Serao who compared the film to the work of the most celebrated illustrator of Dante, Gustave Doré, an iconographic point of reference for the filmmakers.
