Scholars have long recognized the crucial role that phonographs, fairground organs and other mechanical instruments played in the unsettled soundscape of early cinema. My talk asks what happens if we take one of these devices, the fairground organ, and trace within it a media-archaeological layer of cinematic prehistory. Commonly said to have been invented in the 1840s by an Italian, Ludovico Gavioli, elaborate fairground organs are a strikingly audio-visual phenomenon; and from the first such instruments underpinned a widespread form of itinerant spectacle whose commercial exploitation rhymes, at the least, with the industry that subsequently developed around moving picture technologies at the turn of the century. In uncovering the proto-cinematic affinities of Gavioli’s specific device what also emerges is the critical importance of Italy in contemporary accounts (factual or otherwise) of the mechanical organ writ large, which therefore offers new perspectives on Italian popular musical culture of the 1800s.