"Il mondo perduto" collects six documentaries that Vittorio De Seta shot in 1954 in Sicily and four other important short films that he directed between 1958 and 1959 in Sardinia and Calabria. De Seta always turns his eye to realities already then threatened by "development without progress", giving a precious testimony of rituals, customs and knowledge that have now disappeared. Thanks to the contribution of the Cineteca di Bologna and Martin Scorsese, who called De Seta "an anthropologist who expresses himself with the voice of a poet", all these works have been digitized.