«Ferrania», a magazine published from 1947 to 1967 by the homonymous industry – the most important in Italy – manufacturing photographic and motion picture material, presents several articles devoted to the socalled ‘amateur’ cinema, characterized by the use of films downsized to 8 and 16mm. Among the different contributions, those of Guido Bezzola, Leonardo Autera, Enzo Monachesi and Alfredo Ornano do stand out as they share a few dominant themes ranging from the need to supply technical information in order that the professional quality of film strips may be improved, to critical observation on the ability of certain amateur film-makers to create innovative products from the artistic and the cultural viewpoint. Asystematic analysis of this magazine shows that both the Fifties and the Sixties were a season marked by a large spread of the amateur cinema to different ‘genre’ levels: domestic (o home), experimental, narrative and documentary. Particularly in the Sixties, everybody look up to French (Nouvelle Vague) and American (New American Cinema) experiences as possible models to take for low-cost professional productions. In the total heterogeneity of the products envisaged by definitions such as ‘amateur cinema’and ‘downsized’, «Ferrania»’s constant care consists in the fact of eliciting, somehow, an improvement of the amateur film-maker’s technical abilities, who must aim at reaching the utmost professionalism even though he is supposed to make a film strip on his son’s christening.