Licensing Policy and the Urban-Rural Distribution of Movie Theatres in Italy: The Case of Brescia

The proposal focuses on the movie theatre licensing policy enacted by the Italian national government. The license was established in 1936 – cumulating to the existing police authorization – and was in effect until 1998 (when it started applying only to venues bigger than 1300 seats and definitively ceased in 2005 due to a court ruling). By analysing parliamentary debates, draft legislation, newspapers, and trade magazines, I will focus on the motivations and issues that triggered the decision, along with its subsequent modifications. Like in 1956, when the licensing threshold switched from a seats/residents ratio to being based on attendance growth, or the new criteria changes in the Nineties that allowed the establishment of multiplexes. The primary motivation was the limitation to the geographic concentration that could affect cinemas’ competitiveness, along with concerns regarding the technical quality of the venue and the separation from itinerant and stage shows. This policy will be tested against the distribution of cinemas in the province of Brescia, resulting from a survey conducted on archives, newspapers, and yearbooks. This data (being collected as a part of a PhD research) allows going besides the quantitative data collected by SIAE on a provincial basis. With this data, we know the number of municipalities that had a cinema. Furthermore, we acknowledge the type of cinema (either industrial or not-for-profit), its run, its owner, and some technical specificity. That gives us the possibility to historically visualize when the significant changes in the geographic distribution of the venues occurred and how they were connected to the national licensing policy.