Representations of childhood and adolescence have played a major role in Italian cinema. Figures of childhood, tied to representations of the family, serve as a window to another, less familiar, way of exploring and viewing the social landscape. Evolving since the cinema's beginnings, the cinematic child and adolescent have functioned variously as signifiers of innocence in a corrupt world, melodramatic images of martyrdom tied to the disintegration or regeneration of society, figures of nostalgia for a lost past, signs of generational warfare in society, and as means of providing a different and distanced perspective on familiar social situations. This chapter explores the role cinema has played in disseminating and interrogating images of the young.

Sometimes the young person is the unknown, a tabula rasa to be written on by social forces, a medium for cultural common sense. At other times, he or she is the locus of knowledge, offering a perspective that challenges the common sense of the adult world. In some instances, especially in films of the interwar era, the child, more often than the adolescent, is an unknowing victim, whereas in neorealism, he or she is a knowing victim. In the former narrative, the child is viewed through the lens of the adult world; in the later, the child as knowing victim governs the perspective. In all instances, the child is an index to cultural knowledge – who has it and how it is shared with the audience.