How many of your favorite films are actually literary adaptations? Literature and Film are two different worlds, with their own language and very specific features. These two worlds, though, often intertwine, and numerous films are inspired by literary works or popular narrative fiction – films that do not simply adapt the text to the visual medium, but give birth to a different work of art. What happens in this passage from the text to the screen? What gets lost, what is added, and how are things translated between two very different art forms? What are the theoretical implications of such a “translation”? The course will explore cinematic adaptations of famous literary works made by renowned Italian filmmakers. Case studies include, but are not limited to, Mann’s Death in Venice (Visconti 1971); Boccaccio’s Decameron (in both its cinematic adaptations, Pasolini 1971 and Taviani 2015); Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (Visconti 1963); Collodi’s Pinocchio (Benigni 2002); Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Taviani 2012). The course will provide students with the necessary critical tools to analyze both verbal and visual texts within the historical and cultural context of their production, as well as an overview of theoretical approaches in adaptation studies.