Ursus as a Serial Figure

This article examines the transtextual legacy of Ursus in Italian cinema from the silent period to the popular ‘sword-and-sandal’ genre of the 1950s and 1960s. We discuss Ursus as a blueprint for Maciste, the iconic strongman created by Gabriele D’Annunzio for one of the biggest international hits of early Italian epic cinema, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). We then discuss the persistence of the strongman icon in the following years, in relation to such topics as the emergence of physical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century, and the escalation of fascist culture and politics in the 1920s. The reappearance of Ursus in the late 1950s, in the second wave of the strongman genre, offers the opportunity to further discuss this figure in terms of both transnational reception and gender representation, exploring the multiple paths of its cultural circulation and appropriation.