Francesco Penco (Trieste, 10 April 1871 – Trieste, 29 December 1950) was a Triestine photographer and cinematographer, a key figure in the visual documentation of the city from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century.
He trained at the Manenizza family's photographic atelier at Piazza della Borsa 11, one of Trieste's most prestigious studios, founded by Spiridione Manenizza who had acquired the historic Atelier Rottmayer in 1881. In 1898, Penco undertook a brief journey to America, arriving at Ellis Island on 25 May 1898 aboard the German transatlantic liner Werra. Upon returning to Trieste, he began collaborating with Emilia Manenizza (1853–1905), a professional photographer and Spiridione's daughter, whom he married on 30 August 1904 at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
The year 1902 marked his turning point toward photojournalism. In February he documented the Austrian Lloyd stokers' strike, violently suppressed with thirteen workers and one student killed during the solidarity general strike. In July he rushed to Venice to photograph the ruins of the Campanile di San Marco, which collapsed on 14 July.
In September 1904 he inaugurated nighttime photography using electric light, an absolute novelty for Trieste. Penco designed and built the apparatus himself — two powerful reflectors of over 2,000 candlepower each, capable of producing up to 250 photographs per hour. The studio advertised itself as "the first photographic studio with electric light for artistic photography."
After Emilia's death in 1905, Penco continued the business as "F. Penco successor to E. Manenizza", relocating the studio to various addresses along the Corso. In 1906 he produced a major commissioned photographic reportage of the city of Fiume (Rijeka).
Penco's compositional modernity set him apart from posed-studio photographers: his shots captured the Trieste of Svevo, Saba, and Joyce — barefoot children and elegant ladies, shipowners and dockworkers, politicians and opera singers, newsboys and sports-paper readers.
In 1921, at fifty, he requested authorization from the Extraordinary Commissioner for Trieste to practice cinematography, proposing to introduce "cinematography into families" and to document Triestine life for audiences throughout the Kingdom. From that moment he adopted dual filming — photographic and cinematographic — a unique case in the Triestine panorama.
Penco's archive comprises approximately 80 original prints preserved in the Fototeca of Trieste's Civic Museums of History and Art, and about 10,000 metres of film, rediscovered by collector Claudio Erné in some 70 metal boxes abandoned in a cellar in the Ponziana district. These newsreels, shot between the 1920s and 1948, document Trieste, Muggia, the Karst, Fiume, Pola, and Istria — material unique compared to the Istituto Luce archives.