Experiencing the last days of Pompeii through silent cinema

• Date and time: Saturday 9 May 2026, 18:00 to 20:30
• Venue: Bloomsbury Theatre,15 Gordon St, London WC1H 0AH
• Tickets: £12, £10 concessions
• Book your ticket from the Bloomsbury Theatre ticket office

Enjoy an early evening screening of a rarely seen yet extraordinary Italian epic from 1913, about romance and menace during the last days of Pompeii, ending with the terror of its citizens as the volcano Vesuvius erupts and destroys their city in spectacular fashion - Jone or The Last Days of Pompeii. 

A beautifully tinted digital print has been leased especially from the Museum of Cinema in Turin and will be accompanied on piano and percussion by two internationally acclaimed professional musicians.

The Italian feature film Jone o Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei displays the monumental aesthetics, beautifully rich material detail and the exciting drama that was created in the silent era of cinema to imagine the last days and the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii. 

Epic films from the silent era made the distant past come alive through their attractive use of gesture and facial expression, exotic sets and extravagant costumes, colour, movement and emotive live music. They also made the claim for cinema that it could offer an experience of the classical past of as much value as a tourist trip to heritage sites in Greece or Italy, a visit to a museum or an art gallery, or an education in Classics – and, perhaps, one more affordable and far livelier.

As a performance, this event replicates the scale of exhibition frequent in the silent era (epic films were often first shown in opera houses) and the means by which live music once engaged audiences emotionally with cinema’s classical worlds. On piano, John Sweeney. On percussion, Jeffrey Davenport.

Film synopsis

• Jone, or The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), directed by Giovanni Enrico Vidali
• Pasquali studio
• Runtime: approximately 100 minutes with English subtitles

This film is an elaborate adaptation to screen of the popular novel by the British aristocrat Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Another adaptation was released in the same year by the Italian film company Ambrosio.

A young Greek, Glaucus, falls in love with the beautiful aristocrat Ione who, together with her brother, is under the guardianship of Arbaces, the villainous Egyptian High Priest of Isis. When Glaucus sees the local innkeeper beating a blind slave-girl, he offers to buy her, an act of kindness that causes the girl Nydia to fall in love with him. The Egyptian priest attempts to seduce Ione but Glaucus arrives with Nydia in time to save her. 

The priest provides Nydia with a potion causing insanity, which she gives to Glaucus believing that it will stir love for her in him. The priest murders Ione’s brother, who has converted to Christianity and threatened to reveal the fraudulent nature of the Egyptian religion. He then frames Glaucus for the murder. Glaucus is thrown to the lions but, before they can attack him, Vesuvius erupts. During the panic, the Egyptian priest is killed, while the blind Nydia leads Glaucus and Ione to safety. Unable to live without Glaucus, she drowns herself allowing them to live happily together thereafter. 

This screening will be introduced by the four members of the Museum of Dreamworlds research project: Maria Wyke (UCL), Aylin Atacan (UCL) Ivo Blom (Vrijie University, Amsterdam) and Bryony Dixon (Curator of Silent Films at the BFI National Archive). There will be an interval and a short time allocated at the end for Q&A. 

The screening is one of the project’s many activities planned for 2026 and is also part of the UCL200 programme to celebrate UCL’s bicentenary.