Once, when we watched the movie Cinema Paradiso together, I began to understand why this Italian classic was one of my uncle's favorite films – perhaps he had even named his cinema after it, even though it wasn't a French film with an impressionist soul. "Not bad for an Italian movie, is it? Pas mal, hein?" he growled in his grumpy patriotic manner, even though he could hardly hide the fact that he was moved. "Yes, you have to admit that even the Italians are quite capable."
I nodded, though I was still completely shattered by the tragic fate of the old projectionist who is blinded by a fire in his cinema. Of course, I saw myself in young Toto, even if my mother never hit me because I'd spent my money on going to the movies. And I didn't have to, either, because I was able to watch the greatest films for nothing, even those that were not quite suitable for an eleven-year-old boy.

Cinema also has one incontrovertible advantage compared with the theater; nowhere on any stage in the world is the illusion more perfect, identification closer, and reality more strongly suspended than in a dark cinema looking at a sereen. In the theater, people laugh; less frequently, they cry. But the cinema, with its films, is the place where really great emotions are evoked, the place where everything that goes on beyond the dark velvet curtains has, for a while, no meaning at all. It's the place where dreams become reality.