I watched a lot of adventure/fantasy/sf movies, when I was a kid, in the second half of the ’70s.
The two main venues, as far as I was concerned, were the church cinema, in the local parish, and the Cinema Colosseo (not bad as a name), two blocks away from my grandmother’s.

The parish cinema was a shoestring operation, put together by a young priest as a way to attract kids for the saturday evening service.
The deal was, you get the movie, then you go to mass.
Well, ok, it was a fair deal.
I used to skip church, but I did enjoy the movies: a weekly dose of Zorro, Tarzan, assorted Kaiju eiga, the occasional Sinbad adventure, quite a lot of dinosaurs.

Did I really see Matango, Attack of the Mushroom People in the hall behind the church?
And The Quatermass Xperiment?
Crazy.
I sometimes wonder where the heck did the guys in black get their films.
Because, to be fair, there was a lot of stuff, in those movies, that today could cause quite a lot of problems with parents, educators… the clergy, too!
But maybe we were simply less politically correct and more relaxed, at the time.
And yet… I paid with one hour in church the experience of seeing Godzilla stomping over Tokyo.
It does sound weird, eh?

And all those Folco Quilici natural sciences documentaries?
Natural sciences, anthropology, undersea adventures… and today they have problems when I lecture about evolution.
I must belatedly admit that I had very progressive priests  in my parish.

And my granny was very progressive – and crazy about movies – too!
Not only she gave me my first SF book as a gift for my tenth birthday, but she used to get me to the movies at least once a month, when I was visiting.

The Colosseo was a small cinema.
Among the movies I saw in the Colosseo are some of my all-time faves.
Swashbuckler, the pirate movie with Robert Shaw*.
The Man that Would be King, with Connery and Caine.
E rerun of 007 – From Russia with Love and a brand-new Live and Let Die.
The Island on Top of the World, the Disney steampunkoid feature withthe big red airship.
Paper Tiger, with David Niven and Toshiro Mifune.
And Doug McClure in The Land that Time Forgot and its sequel.

It was a good, consistent education.
At the time I was already convinced that the books were better, but all those movies, the action, the exotic locales, the monsters…

Later on, the Colosseo was turned into a theater and concert hall.
I went there to see Suzanne Vega live.
And the Penguin café Orchestra.
But that was much later.