Always focused on looking for new ones to watch films, TV series and cartoons, I had forgotten that on the internet you can also find more serious but equally interesting films and videos: documentaries. The documentaries can be streamed on the internet and therefore also downloaded from important Italian sites to enrich school research, to collect teaching materials or simply for the desire to know and culture.
These are often historical videos, excerpts from newscasts on important dates, chronicles of historical facts and commented, illustrated and, at times, interactive explanations of natural and scientific phenomena.
So let's see what are the best websites where to view documentaries online, clearly for free .
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1) The Italian site that surprised me the most and that must be awarded first place is Reteitalianaweb.it .
It is a web portal created completely in flash, therefore fully animated, even in the selection of videos.
When you enter the site, it almost seems to be in front of an interactive program similar to a media center.
From the home page you can see some proposed documentaries or you can go under and scroll with the mouse the categories of videos present, up to the online documentaries.
Among the videos in this section, there are some interactive ones, where not only can you watch the streaming video but you can also interact with an animation .
For example, they hit me:
- the videos on the solar system that can be chosen by clicking on the planets.
- those relating to ancient Rome with a 3D map on which to navigate and with videos that automatically start when you choose a historic building.
- the documentaries on dinosaurs, also interactive with many thematic videos.
Then there are documentaries on ancient Egypt also rebuilt virtually with interactive streaming videos, on crop circles, on Sumerians, on Classical Greece, on the Maya, on pregnancy, on insects and animals and much more.
If you can make a criticism of this really high quality site, it is that there has not been a division of documentaries by categories, so the videos are listed all together, both the historical ones, those on nature, the religious ones, the geography ones and so on.
Reteitalianaweb however remains a site to be placed as a favorite and to be kept as the heritage of our home web.
2) Going to see the most famous sites, you cannot miss the section La Storia Siamo Noi on the Rai.it site.
The site is not done well because the search for its archive is a bit inconvenient and the page is narrow.
The fact remains that from here it is possible to review the episodes broadcast on TV of La storia siamo noi with some really interesting and involving modern history documentaries that tell the political facts, wars, characters and events of the twentieth century.
On the portal you can see, in the right section, the streaming videos of the news broadcast on television, on this day.
So basically you can see what happened in the past, today (April 26) and every day the event to remember changes.
By clicking on the archive button at the top right, you can scroll through the various episodes, for which there is all the descriptive text of the historical event treated and some clips of documentary videos to be viewed directly online .
3) One cannot fail to name YouTube as a resource for finding documentaries of any kind.
The best Youtube channel for viewing historical videos is that of the Istituto Luce where more than 20, 000 original documentaries shot in the years from 1920 and 1960 are collected.
Below a video presentation
You can also search for the word "documentary" and then perhaps refine it by adding another term.
4) Google Cultural Institute is instead the historical archive of the 1900s with photos, videos and information regarding the main events of the last century.
At the top there is a timeline and you can scroll through the various documents by viewing them on a modern and high-quality site.
5) The Documentary.net site lets you watch many streaming documentaries for free .
The videos are in English but the site allows you to see the top 20 or browse the titles by categories, including scientific documentaries, technology, historical videos, animals, art, wars and more.
6) Science, nature and technology enthusiasts can find all the documentaries they want for free on the Italian National Geographic website .
The videos are listed with preview and cataloged according to the most clicked, the most viewed and, finally, by categories.
The topics of the videos available are: animals and nature, engineering, disasters, natural history, science, travel, history, society, environment and music.
Unfortunately, however, these are mainly video previews that are broadcast by the pay TV channel.
7) Critical Past is a site in English full of historical photos and videos and documentaries from 1890 to today (with insights especially for the years of the Second World War).
Really a huge archive full of resources, for any subject you want to deepen.
The videos can be viewed from the site but can only be downloaded by paying a subscription.
8) The site in English best supplied with free documentaries to be streamed is Documentary Heaven, a collection of videos from Discovery Channel, historical and modern documentaries, videos on nature and in-depth services.
Each documentary is presented with a preview and there are also the rankings of the most viewed and most popular.
9) Thought Maybe is a documentary site in English very rich in videos to watch for free streaming directly from the internet.
To search for interesting ones, you can use tags or categories or the search engine.
If you know of other streaming sites for documentaries, let them know.
