The island of Stromboli has been hosting the Cinema Museum since 2009, which was initially created only as a virtual place.
The idea behind it is to collect and enhance the published and unpublished audiovisual heritage of Stromboli and the Aeolian Islands more generally. This happens in the belief that "the cinematic history of the places contains not only the memory of the community, but reveals the profound identity of a territory” (“Un Museo del Cinema per Stromboli", in Kalós, Arte in Sicilia, 06/2009).
Over the years, extensive research has been carried out through the Stromboli Cinema Museum to trace the different audiovisual forms that have made Stromboli an icon of the Mediterranean imaginary: from great films to lesser-known documentaries, up to amateur films in super8, which often hide the most lively, involuntary and direct evidence of the tumultuous transformation of the Mediterranean islands during the twentieth century.
In 2013, the organization behind the Cinema Museum set up a three-year exhibition in Strombolis School, bringing together, for the first time, all the repertoires of the RAI Teche on the Aeolian Islands created between the early 1950s and the end of the 80s.
It is thanks to the agreement with RAI that the films from the Teche today constitute the main corpus of the Cinema Museum of Stromboli, largely accessible to the public through the website www.museodistromboli.it.
Since 2016, the Museum has been housed in the "Aimée Carmoz" Library in Stromboli, with which the organization of the Museum collaborates regularly and where a permanent consultation point for the audiovisual archives that preserve the memory of the island is set up.
Over the years, the Stromboli Cinema Museum has promoted various cultural initiatives for the communities of Stromboli and the Aeolian Islands, including the restoration of films of immigrants in Australia, summer screenings, the creation of original productions, and audiovisual workshops for the schools.
In 2018, the Museum was listed among the projects of the European Year of Cultural Heritage.
In 2020, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the film “Stromboli, Land of God” and in collaboration with the MUFOCO - Museum of Contemporary Photography in Milan, the Museum of Cinema in Stromboli edited the publication of the photographic volume “Federico Patellani. Stromboli, 1949 ". A book which traces the adventure of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli through the shots, many of which have never been published before, of the most famous Italian reporter of the time (Humboldt Books).
In the spirit of the "museo diffuso" (The "widespread museum"), the Cinema Museum is now collaborating with a network of local entities and associations to make the audiovisual memory of Stromboli accessible to different audiences and in different places on the island.