Film Director, Screenwriter, Author and Poet. Considered the greatest dialect playwright of the Sicilian school. Born in Belpasso in the province of Catania, he soon abandoned his ambitions to become a sea captain, founding in 1889 at just nineteen a satirical weekly " Il d'Artagnan" written in Italian and Sicilian, where he published all his first poems, collected later in the collection "Centona", which were appreciated by Giosuè Carducci especially for the descriptive realism of the beauties of the characteristic landscape of the Sicilian island. In later years he devoted himself with greater attention to the theater and in 1901 created the Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana, which included actors such as Giovanni Grasso, Virginia Balistrieri, Jacinta Pezzana and Totò Majorana, with the intention to make famous the Sicilian dialect theater. In 1903 his theater company made ​​its debut in Milan proving a tremendous success. From 1907 until 1908, Martoglio was director of the Angelo Musco theater company, with whom he established a fruitful artistic collaboration, writing several successful plays including notably "San Giovanni decollato" (1908) and "L'aria del continente" (1910). In 1910, he worked at the Teatro Metastasio near Rome, directing several one-act plays of the Italian and foreign repertory, and especially encouraging and bringing on the stage the first plays of Luigi Pirandello, "Lumie di Sicilia" and "La morsa", both of 1913. Together with Luigi Pirandello, he wrote notably "A Vilanza" and "Cappidazzu paga tuttu". Martoglio directed numerous theatrical stagings and in December 1918, he founded his own theater company "Compagnia del Teatro Mediterraneo", active until 1920. From 1913, he devoted himself to the cinema, producing and directing for his own production company, four films now lost, "Il Romanzo" starring Carmine Gallone and Soava Gallone, "Capitan Blanco" taken from his drama "Il Palio" whose exterior were shot largely in Libya and "Teresa Raquin" from the homonymous drama by Emile Zola, but especially the film to which was linked his fame, the famous "Sperduti nel buio", from a play by Roberto Bracco, considered by many as the first film of Italian neorealist cinema, which had a sound remake in 1947, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque, starring Vittorio De Sica. All his work is characterized not only by the realism and beauty of the landscapes, even by a strong contrast between wealth and poverty. He was storyteller of the luxurious aristocratic palaces as well as of the hovels, of luxury cafés of late nineteenth century as well as of the crowded streets of the time. His fame remained intact until the end of the thirties, with many of his plays played on the big screen. He tragically died falling down an elevator shaft of the Vittorio Emanuele Hospital of Catania, where he went to visit the sick child.