Italian Sword and Sandal Films, 1908-1990

Produced in Italy from 1908 the sword and sandal (or peplum) films are one of the screen's most neglected and marginalized film genres. The sword and sandal films were present in Italian cinema from the silent era, but attained their greatest popularity in the 1960s when the release of Hercules (1959) provoked a global craze for these fantasy-adventures.