At the very start of the sixties, Roberto Rossellini, the most celebrated of Italian film directors (Open City; Germany, Year Zero; Stromboli) decided to turn away from the conventional film industry to devote himself to a vast project: a series of historical programmes retracing the adventure of mankind from the time of the cave-dwellers up to the conquest of outer space. This monumental project (over 60 hours were planned, half of which were made between 1963 and 1974) is explicitly linked to the ambitions of the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment period.