Fregoli prestigiatore

Fregoli prestigiatore is a short Italian comedy from 1899 in which Leopoldo Fregoli appears as a magician. Running about a minute, the film centres on a stage illusionist and the trickery of his act, a simple comic premise built around performance rather than story.

Fregoli directed the film himself. It followed Pere cotte, released the previous year, and stands as the second of the two films he directed in chronological order. He also takes the leading role as the magician, so the same figure responsible for staging the act is the one performing it on screen.

The film was released in December 1899 and has drawn a small audience over time: on IMDb it holds a rating of 4.3 out of 10 based on 25 votes, a low score that rests on a very limited number of viewers. As a one-minute comedy from the earliest years of Italian cinema, it belongs to a period when films were brief attractions, and the modest response reflects that scale rather than the reputation of its maker.