My complete run of the first seven years of Ciak magazine, Italy’s premiere movie magazine, was scrapped while I was serving in the Air Farce – my mother decided all that useless paper was just a waste of space, and she threw it out. Granted, by that time I had stopped following the magazine, because I did not like the editorial approach anymore, but it was still a colossal loss for me: through that magazine I had started to look at the movies in a different way.

One of the reasons why Ciak was not cutting it anymore was, of course, that by the mid-90s I had started reading foreign movie magazines – Empire, Premiere, a few odd copies of Film Studies and Midnight Marquee, a couple of Fangoria, even a few issues of Cahiers du Cinema. Those were spared the Great Motherly Purge, because they were stacked in boxes and did not look like a bunch of magazines on a shelf.

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