World Film Locations: Rome [1 ed.] 9781783202980, 9781783202003

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WORLD FILM LOCATIONS ROME Edited by Gabriel Solomons

WORLD FILM LOCATIONS rome Edited by Gabriel Solomons

First Published in the UK in 2014 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First Published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright ©2014 Intellect Ltd Cover photo: La Dolce Vita (1960) © Riama-Pathe / The Kobal Collection / Pierluigi Copy Editor: Emma Rhys

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written consent. A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library World Film Locations Series ISSN: 2045-9009 eISSN: 2045-9017 World Film Locations Rome ISBN: 978-1-78320-200-3 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-298-0 Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow

WORLD FILM LOCATIONS rome editor Gabriel Solomons series editor & de sign Gabriel Solomons contributors Eleanor Andrews Louis Bayman Cecilia Brioni Simone Brioni Dom Holdaway Pasquale Iannone Carla Mereu Keating Helio San Miguel Santiago Oyarzabal Nicholas Page Michael Pigott Alberto Zambenedetti location photography Gabriel Solomons (unless otherwise credited) location maps Greg Orrom Swan

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Bookends: Photo by Gabriel Solomons This page: The Great Beauty (Kobal) Overleaf: The Bicycle Thieves (Kobal)

CONTENTS Maps/Scenes

Essays

10 Scenes 1-8 1936 - 1953

6 Rome: City of the Imagination Pasquale Iannone

30 Scenes 9-16 1954 - 1960

8 Neo-realist Rome: The Gritty Side of the Eternal City Helio San Miguel

50 Scenes 17-24 1960 - 1963 70 Scenes 25-31 1963 - 1980 88 Scenes 32-38 1983 - 1999 106 Scenes 39-45 2001 - 2013

28 Fellini’s Rome Louis Bayman 48 Roman Holidays: Rome as an International Destination On-screen Alberto Zambenedetti 68 Strange Tides: The Tiber and Its Role in the History of ‘Cinema Romano’ Nicholas Page 86 Memory Man: Nanni Moretti’s Rome in Caro Diario/Dear Diary (1993) Eleanor Andrews 104 Cinecittà: The Highs and Lows of the ‘Roman Heart’ of Italian Cinema Carla Mereu 122 Screening Ancient Rome Alberto Zambenedetti Backpages 124 Resources 125 Contributor Bios 128 Filmography

World Film Locations | Rome

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acknowledgem ents

I am indebted to the hard work, diligence and expertise of each contributor to this very special volume in the World Film Locations series. Each of them have brought a highly individual and informed voice to this filmic journey through one of the most evocative cities on-screen. Thanks must also go to Scott Jordan Harris who spearheaded the research for this volume and set the course for much of the content. Finally I’d like to thank my wife and two children for their love, which more than being an energizing force, is an important ingredient when working on any book about 'The Eternal City'. gabriel solomons

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INTRODUCTION World Film Locations Rome

throughout the world film locations series we have attempted to engage a wider audience with the marvels of film location 'scouting' and the ways in which cinema can enrich our understanding of place. Whether as an elaborate backdrop to a directorial love letter or as time specific cultural setting, the city acts as a vital character in helping to tell a story. Paulo Sorrentino's recent Rome set The Great Beauty/La grande belleza is just one in a long line of films that show the symbiotic (and symbolic) link between the city and its inhabitants; revealing how place informs notions of ourselves and the shaping of our hopes, dreams and desires. Appropriately enough, the film starts with a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932) which relates as much to the experience of 'cine-tourism' as it does to the narrative journey of its main protagonist Gep Gambardella: “To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.” This 'travelling' – when seen in context of film making and film watching – is as much figurative as it is literal, so while we may not be able to undertake all of our desired location pilgrimages, we can still be swept away to all parts of the world through the magic of cinema. The city of Rome holds a special place in the hearts of many travellers, both figurative and literal, with a rich and varied history surpassing that of most other locations - if only for sheer scale and spectacle. Its representation onscreen is equally as varied, from the 'epics' that reinforce the city's empirical past to everyday life stories typified by Neo-realism of the post World War II era - rightly regarded as the 'golden age' of Italian Cinema; from the satire of manners seen in many Italian-style Comedies (Commedia all'italiana) of the 1950s and 1960s to the more accessible and familiar present day portrayals of the city as a place perfectly suited for coming-of-age, romance centred stories. As with other volumes in this series, we make no claim to be a completist's guide of film making in Rome or an exhaustive listing of filming locations in the city. Rather this collection is an editorially driven journey of discovery that urges readers to begin looking at the city in a new light and perhaps even galvanize a few adventurous souls to use it as a handy filmic travel guide the next time they embark on a trip to Rome. In this book you will find a selection of 45 scene reviews from a variety of films set in 'the Eternal City'. These short synopses, written by a team of discerning film buffs present individual snapshots in time that connect us in some way to the city and its representation onscreen. Familiar locations such as the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Del Popollo, The Pantheon and the Coliseum are looked at alongside less familiar spots that will help to broaden an appreciation of parts of the city equally suited to exploration. Alongside these scene reviews are seven 'spotlight' essays that take a closer look at themes, directors or significant movements that have helped to shape our sense of the city and offer ways of bridging the gap between the imagined Rome and the one very much rooted in reality. We hope you enjoy the journey. { Gabriel Solomons, Editor

World Film Locations | Rome

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ROME

City of the Imagination

Rome does not need to make culture. It is culture. Prehistoric, classical, Etruscan, Renaissance, Baroque, modern. Every corner of the city is a chapter in an imaginary universal history of culture. Culture in Rome is not an academic concept. It’s not even a museum culture, even though the city is one enormous museum. It is a human culture. – federico fellini, Conversations with Fellini

inside and outside its famous studios Cinecittà, Rome has always been a cinematic city. Generations of film-makers have been attracted not only by its ancient, decaying grandeur but also by its modern structures, its suburbs, its provinces. From the city’s historic centre to its more outlying areas, it would seem that no corner of Rome has escaped the glare of film cameras. The directors born and bred in Rome – the likes of Roberto Rossellini, Elio Petri, Carlo Lizzani, Sergio Leone and Dario Argento – return again and again to film in their hometown, all in very distinctive ways. Most famously perhaps, Roberto Rossellini made Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945) during the Nazi occupation, one of the darkest periods in its recent history. Rome has also spawned a long line of distinguished

6 World Film Locations | Rome

w Text by

Pasquale Iannone

performers who are forever identified with the city – from Anna Magnani and Alberto Sordi to Carlo Verdone and Margherita Buy. It’s interesting to note that some of the most famous Italian chroniclers of Rome have actually come from outside the city. Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini both arrived there from their hometowns in the north whilst one of the most striking recent cinematic visions of Rome – 2013’s La Grande bellezza/The Great Beauty – is the work of Neapolitan Paolo Sorrentino. In the preface to a photo diary of the film – La Grande bellezza: Diario del film (2013) – Sorrentino describes the city as ‘the greatest holiday resort in the world’ and says that, despite having made his home in the capital, he still doesn’t completely understand it: But I don’t really want to understand it. Like all the things we understand completely, the risk of disappointment is always round the corner […] I’m contented just to get a sense of it, to pass through it, like a tourist without a return ticket. When we think of Rome, what are the landmarks that spring to mind? The Coliseum of course, the Spanish Steps certainly, but few Roman landmarks have been seared into the filmgoer’s imagination with greater force than the Trevi Fountain. Before Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg took a dip in Fellini’s La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (Federico Fellini, 1960), the fountain had top billing in Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in A Fountain (1954), a glossy, picture-postcard romance from Twentieth Century Fox about three young American women looking for love in the Eternal City. The film was one of a string of highprofile Hollywood productions that set up camp at Cinecittà in the early 1950s; others included William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959) and Quo Vadis? (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951). The 1950s and 1960s were the golden years for the city’s film production and not just because

Opposite Three Coins in A Fountain (1954) / Below The Great Beauty (2013)

Above © 2013 Indigo Film/Medusa Film/Babe Film/Pathe Opposite © 1954 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

of the influx of Hollywood stars such as Charlton Heston and Elizabeth Taylor. One short Vespa ride and you were sure to bump into a film shoot of one description or another, even before you headed out on the Via Tuscolana to Cinecittà. Film-makers have always been attracted to Rome’s singular fusion of the sacred and the profane – you need only watch the first ten minutes or so of Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty to see this perfectly crystallized – but it was poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini who evoked this most powerfully in Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) and Hawks and Sparrows (1966), films which take the viewer to areas of Rome rarely explored by other directors, in particular the borgate or shanty towns; as far as it’s possible to get from the bustle and glamour of the city centre. Other areas that became popular with film-makers include the EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma), a district to the south of the city that was originally commissioned by Mussolini Film-makers to celebrate twenty years have always been of Fascist rule in 1942. attracted to Rome’s It remained unfinished singular fusion of until the post-war period the sacred and the when modern structures profane – you need were built to stand only watch the first alongside those from the Fascist era. Michelangelo ten minutes or so Antonioni, never one to of Sorrentino’s The choose locations merely Great Beauty to as backdrop to the action, see this perfectly filmed one of the most crystallized. striking, beguiling Roman

sequences of them all in the EUR – the finale of his 1962 film L’Eclisse/The Eclipse. Influenced strongly by Antonioni, Dario Argento infused the streets of his hometown with a similar sense of unease in his gialli, from 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to Tenebrae (1982) and beyond. Even though foreign film productions at Cinecittà and in Rome more generally are fewer now than in its heyday, there’s certainly no danger of the city losing its appeal. In the past decade, Rome has provided locations for globetrotting US blockbusters such as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve (2004), Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons (2009) and Ryan Murphy’s Eat, Pray, Love (2010), as well as similarly large-scale Bollywood productions. In Siddarth Annand’s 2008 romantic comedy Watch Out Girls, I’m Coming!, we see protagonist Raj Sharma (Ranbir Kapoor) strut his stuff in front of the Barcaccia Fountain just below the Spanish Steps. Arguably more imaginative in its sun-kissed, picture-postcard prettiness is Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love (2012), a series of four vignettes with memorable scenes shot in Piazza Venezia and the Baths of Caracalla. Of recent Italian films set in Rome, Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008) and Gianni E Le Donne/The Salt of Life (2011) are among the most charmingly unassuming. Eschewing the extremes of Roman life, Di Gregorio’s films unfold largely in and around his own neighbourhood of Trastevere with the director playing (a version of) himself. Loose, unhurried, very Roman; what if it was these films that give the viewer a more authentic sense of the true rhythm and pace of life in the Eternal City? { 7

Neo-realist Rome w Text by

Helio San Miguel

SPOTLI G HT

The Gritty Side of the Eternal City

rome, the eternal city, is a historical

and architectural palimpsest whose sheer monumentality and arresting beauty have seduced film-makers since the silent era. As cradle of the Roman Empire, centre of the Catholic Church and capital of modern Italy, it has been a witness to some of the most dramatic episodes of western history, many of which have found their due place on the silver screen. Neo-realism, the Italian film movement that emerged in the 1940s as a reaction to the dire economic, social and moral circumstances of the country during World War II and its aftermath, presented a different Rome; a Rome of anonymous workers who never visit the cafes in Via Veneto, who live in rundown neighbourhoods like Trastevere and Prenestino or in crowded and dilapidated housing projects in the outskirts, and whose lives are oftentimes mired in poverty and despair. Neo-realism lasted barely a decade, but its impact changed cinema forever and its echoes still reverberate today. Apart from mainstream Hollywood, no other film style has had such a profound, long-lasting and transformative influence. It showed film-

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8 World Film Locations | Rome

makers around the world – from Europe to the United States, and from India to Latin America – that another way to make politically-conscious and socially-meaningful movies was possible. It also launched the careers of some of the most celebrated Italian directors, who later found their own distinctive voices. Neo-realism started with a group of writers connected to the magazine Cinema –among them Michelangelo Antonioni, Giuseppe De Santis, Luchino Visconti and especially Cesare Zavattini, scriptwriter of some fundamental neo-realist masterpieces and the ideologist of the movement. They rejected Italian mainstream cinema epitomized by the conservative ‘telefono bianco’ comedies (white telephone, a status symbol in Italy at the time) made in the 1930s. Their motivation, according to Vittorio De Sica, was the need to tell the truth about the war and post-war period and to practice what Zavattini called ‘excavation of reality’. They searched for inspiration in literary traditions like Giovanni Verga’s Verismo and in the poetic realism represented by Jean Renoir, with whom Antonioni and Visconti had collaborated before. Precedents can also be found in some of Alessandro Blasetti’s films, in the realist touches of Mario Camerini’s comedies and in Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki-Bóbó (1942). As with German expressionism, another extremely influential film movement, some neo-realist features were a matter of necessity rather than aesthetic choice. Italy experienced a shortage of equipment and Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, built by Mussolini in 1937, had suffered serious damage during the war. Neo-realist films were shot without a solid industry, mostly on-location with natural light, and frequently featured kids and non-professional actors, although sometimes famous stars were also cast. Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943) is sometimes considered the first film of the movement, but neo-realism truly developed

Opposite Ossessione (1943) / Below Rome, Open City (1945)

Above © 1945 Excelsa Films Opposite © 1943 Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane (ICI)

after the fall of Mussolini in 1945. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945), made just months after the liberation, became the first important film of post-war Italy and the movement’s manifesto. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and gained international recognition. A string of highly acclaimed movies followed, directed mostly by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti and De Santis, and penned among others by Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini and Zavattini. These films were not shot only in Rome, but this city became its most important location. Neo-realist film-makers many times intentionally rejected the city’s monumental iconography and its most glamorous side. Rome became an abstract symbol of the harsh urban realities of post-war Italy. The daily and often tragic struggles of the underprivileged were not deemed uniquely Roman, and inhabitants of other cities could easily identify with them. But in Rome the camera can hardly avoid monumentality, so oftentimes neo-realist film-makers cleverly re-contextualized its emblematic significance. The contrast between the rich history represented by grand locations, and the grim present of the characters turns Neo-realist filmdissonant, and also makers many times serves as a poignant intentionally rejected reminder that a storied the city’s monumental past does not guarantee iconography and its a bright future. In most glamorous side. Sciuscià/Shoeshine Rome became an (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) abstract symbol of the the Palace of Justice harsh urban realities is the place where the of post-war Italy. tragic destiny of the kids

is sealed by unfair sentences. In Rome, Open City, when the kids return from witnessing the brutal execution of the priest, we see St Peter’s Dome in the background. In Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) the old protagonist feels humiliated begging for alms outside the Pantheon, where prominent Italians are buried. Regarding the architecture erected during the Fascist years, neo-realist filmmakers treated it, as Mark Shiel has perceptively pointed out (Cinematic Rome, p. 31), with distance and irony. The EUR’s (Esposizione Universale di Roma) Colosseo Quadrato that appears in the background in Rome, Open City, and Cinecittà in Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951) are examples of this. By the early 1950s, as the Italian ‘economic miracle’ was taking off and the first signs of recovery appeared, neo-realism started to fade. Living conditions were gradually improving, and optimism slowly substituted despair. Neo-realism’s bleak depictions were now regarded as disheartening in a country that was healing from recent and painful wounds. When Umberto D opened, Giulio Andreotti – a promising politician and future prime minister – accused De Sica in Libertà magazine, of doing a disservice to his country by tarnishing Italy’s image abroad. Umberto D’s box office flop encapsulated neo-realism’s plight. The movement that had revived Italian cinema had completed its cycle. Rome was getting ready to embrace fashion, sports cars and glamorous stars. Ready for Audrey Hepburn riding a Vespa all over the city, for a voluptuous Anita Ekberg stepping into the Fontana de Trevi, for other Fellinian fantasies, for the commedia all’italiana, and even for Antonioni’s angst-ridden characters. In short, personal inquiries displaced social explorations. These moments evoke some of the most unforgettable images of Rome, but so do Pina’s death at the hands of German soldiers, the desperate wanderings of Antonio searching for his bicycle under the tender eye of his son Bruno, and countless other scenes that neo-realism has given us. Neo-realism unveiled a more complex and cinematically richer Rome where a handful of brilliant film-makers in the 1940s and early 1950s proved that a different kind of cinema could and should be made. Since then their path has been followed by numerous directors from all around the world and this might well be the most everlasting and inspiring cinematic gift that the Eternal City has given us. { 9

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maps are only to be taken as approximates

Villa Borghese

4 Vatican City

Castel Sant' Angelo

6

Pantheon

Piazza Navona

Campo dè Fiori

7

1

Gianicolo

Fori & Colosseo

8 Trastevere

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10 World Film Locations | Rome

3 Palatini

Aventino

ROME LOCATIONS SCENES 1-8

1. the white squadron/ lo squadrone bianco (1936) Basilica Maxentius, Clivo di Felice Venere, 00186 page 12 2. rome, open city/ roma, città aperta (1945) Via Raimondo Montecuccoli, No. 17, 00176 page 14

Via Veneto

3. shoeshine/sciuscià (1946) Complesso Monumentale di San Michele in Ripa, 25 Via di San Michele, 00153 page 16 4. bicycle thieves/ ladri di biciclette (1948) Via Francesco Crispi and Traforo Umberto I (Tunnel Umberto I), 00187 page 18

Quirinale

2

5. bellissima (1951) Cinecittà Studios, Via Tuscolana, 1055, 00173 page 20 6. umberto d (1952) The Pantheon (exterior) and Piazza della Rotonda, 00186 page 22

San Giovanni in Laterano

7. the white sheik/ lo sceicco bianco (1952) Via XXIV Maggio, 00184 page 24

Caracalla

5

8. roman holiday (1953) Bocca della Verità, Via della Greca, 4, 00186 page 26

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The White Squadron/ Lo squadrone bianco LOCATI O N

(1936)

Basilica Maxentius, Clivo di Felice Venere, 00186

mario ludovici (Antonio Centa) goes to Libya as a cavalry lieutenant to forget his badly ended relationship with Cristiana (Fulvia Lanzi). In Africa, he becomes a ‘real man’ by fighting together with crusty Captain Santelia against Libyan rebels (or anticolonialist partisans, depending on the perspective). This scene shows Cristina at a concert in Basilica of Maxentius – a magnificent example of fourth-century Roman architecture –, where she suddenly realizes that she misses Mario and made a mistake in leaving him. When she goes to Libya in an attempt to reconnect, Mario rejects her: he wants to stay in Tripolitania and lead the Italian troops against the ‘enemy’ in place of Captain Santelia, who ‘gloriously’ died during a battle. This film is a reminder of a chapter in Italian history that the country has not yet come to terms with, as the glorification of colonial conquests in the names of many streets in Rome seem to testify. For example, the toponymy of the African quarter celebrates the colonial enterprise in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and the streets in Celio Hill are named after Italian explorers in Africa. More controversially, Largo Ashianghi takes its name from a lake that Italians poisoned, and Via dell’Amba Aradam is named after a battle in 1936 when more than 800 people were killed with mustard gas. Genina’s filmic reconstruction of history, awarded the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Film Festival, downplayed these facts, representing the Italian–Libyan war as a cavalry battle rather than a conflict in which gas and aircraft were massively employed. ✒Simone Brioni Photo © Alexander Z. (wikimedia commons)

12 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Augusto Genina Scene description: Cristiana longs for her man who is fighting in Libya Timecode for scene: 0:25:21 – 0:26:42

Images © 1936 Francesco Giunta

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Rome, Open City/ Roma, città aperta LOCATI O N

(1945)

Via Raimondo Montecuccoli, no. 17, 00176

rome, open city is generally considered to be the first Italian neo-realist film. Neo-realism, an umbrella term for a current in Italian cinema after World War II, provided a way of depicting and reviewing the terrible realities of war-torn Italy and the brave exploits of the Italian Resistance, frequently using location shooting and non-professional actors. Rome, Open City set out to evoke the events which had taken place in Rome in the first months of 1944 under Nazi occupation. The film was made at the end of the war, in a city still ravaged by the bombing. This scene takes place halfway through the film. After an explosion at a fuel depot, the Nazis search a tenement building in Via Montecuccoli for members of the Italian resistance. Pina (Anna Magnani) sees her fiancé (Francesco Grandjacquet) being taken away in a lorry. She is shot dead in the street by the Nazis as she runs after the vehicle. As she dies, she is held by the local parish priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) in a reversed pietà. Pina’s storyline was based on the account of the murder in 1944 of a 37-year-old pregnant woman, Teresa Gullace, mother of five children, whose husband had been taken by the Germans. In the film, Pina’s family lives at number 17, Via Montecuccoli, which is in the Pigneto area at the heart of Rome’s Prenestino District. During World War II, Pigneto was a workingclass neighbourhood which took an active part in the anti-Fascist movement. ✒Eleanor Andrews

Photo © Google street view

14 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Roberto Rossellini Scene description: The round-up of the Resistance men and the death of Pina in Via Montecuccoli Timecode for scene: 0:53:54 – 0:55:01

Images © 1945 Excelsa Film

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Sciuscià LOCATI O N

(1946)

Complesso Monumentale di San Michele in Ripa, 25 Via di San Michele, 00153

the 1946 film Shoeshine, directed by Vittorio De Sica, tells the tale of two poor shoeshine boys living and scrounging in the centre of Rome. Throughout the film, a conscious attempt is made by director De Sica to differentiate, visually, between the low and high moments of his two young protagonists. Most of their time is spent kneeling, looked down upon by big-booted foreign soldiers as they apply their trade; brief moments of hope and pride, on the other hand, can be seen when they ride their horse, in turn looking down on both colleagues and clients alike as they fly past. This concept of up and down, of large and small, is applied perhaps most strikingly during the scene in which Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) are taken to a reformatory after being accused of stealing money from a fortune teller. The scenes shot here (in a real-life juvenile detention centre, built in 1701 by Swiss architect Carlo Fontana after being commissioned by Pope Clement XI and still standing in the Trastevere area of Rome) are very Dickens-like, but the setting itself is unlike any prison ever committed to film; with its long shadows and hanging arches, it seems lifted directly from a De Chirico painting. Here, De Sica once again employs and further develops his deliberate visual design, initially dwarfing the boys as they walk into the room, with its high ceiling and tall windows; their movements and motions are those of two children overawed. Finally, De Sica has them physically wrenched from each other – hands torn apart via a Bressonian close-up – and bundled into two different cells; one upstairs and one downstairs. ✒Nicholas Page

16 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Vittorio De Sica Scene description: Giuseppe and Pasquale find themselves in a reformatory after being accused of stealing money Timecode for scene: 0:31:22 – 0:32:50

Images © 1946 Societa Cooperativa Alfa Cinematografica

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Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette LOCATI O N

(1948)

Via Francesco Crispi and Traforo Umberto I (Tunnel Umberto I), 00187

antonio’s (lamberto maggiorani) wife pawns her wedding linen to get a bicycle he needs for his new job. On his first day, while sticking posters on a wall, someone steals it. He runs after the thief and jumps onto a car to follow him into a tunnel. But he’s gone. Antonio’s life is wrecked. Ladri di biciclette – known in English as Bicycle Thieves and The Bicycle Thief­– conveys with this simple premise a realistic and humanistic depiction of post-war Rome. It earned De Sica his second Special Oscar – a forerunner of the foreign-language academy award created in 1956 –­­ and became one of the most influential films in history. The street where the bicycle is stolen is Via Francesco Crispi, named after a prime minister who had been an important figure of the nineteenth-century Italian reunification. The wall is still there today, next to the building whose neoclassical-style facade we see in the scene. This building, constructed in 1921, houses since 2007 the famous Gagosian Gallery, with its spectacular oval exhibition room. The tunnel is Traforo Umberto I, built in 1909 by architect Pio Piacentini, who also designed the Palazzo delle Esposizioni at the other end of the tunnel. It connects Via Tritone with Via Nazionale and passes under the hill of Quirinale, where the sixteenth-century palace previously occupied by popes and kings currently serves as the residence of the President of the Republic. De Sica’s choice of a busy street crossing and a tunnel for the futile chase serves as a metaphor for the aimless state of the country and a distant hope for the citizens Antonio embodies. ✒Helio San Miguel

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Directed by Vittorio De Sica Scene description: A thief steals Antonio Ricci’s bicycle Timecode for scene: 0:18:29 – 0:20:50

Images © 1948 Produzioni De Sica, SA

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Bellissima LOCATI O N

(1951)

Cinecittà studios, Via Tuscolana, 1055, 00173

while luchino visconti’s Bellissima very successfully alternates throughout between comedy and drama, the sequence wherein the protagonist Maddalena Cecconi (Anna Magnani) and her daughter Maria (Tina Apicella) walk out of Cinecittà for the last time works as both an homage to, and a cautioning reminder of, cinema’s immense influence on our thoughts, dreams and desires. Cinecittà is in many ways Rome’s equivalent to Hollywood: the dream-factory that entrances Maddalena. Funded by Mussolini in 1937, the studios were bombed during World War II, and were later used as a refugee camp. Since 1946 Cinecittà has hosted all kinds of productions (many by some of the greatest Italian and international directors). It has also been the battleground for several economic, political and labour struggles. In this final scene, working-class mother Maddalena (in an unforgettable performance by Magnani) comes to a realization about how far she has pushed her small daughter Maria to achieve the dream of getting into movies. Hidden in the projection room, she witnesses the studio managers burst into laughter at Maria’s pathetic performance in her filmed audition. In a scene shot, like most of the film, as a long-take with deep focus, allowing a theatrical staging, Maddalena stands up to them, demanding to know what was so funny, before leaving Cinecittà with Maria. Although she will be later offered a juicy film contract for Maria, Maddalena rejects it, choosing to educate her according to the values of a working-class Italian family. ✒Michael Pigott and Santiago Oyarzabal

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Directed by Luchino Visconti Scene description: Maddalena's disenchantment of the dream factory Timecode for scene: 1:32:05 – 1:38:52

Images © 1951 Film Bellissima

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Umberto D. LOCATI O N

(1952)

The Pantheon (exterior) and Piazza della Rotonda, 00186

a masterpiece of late neo-realism, Umberto D is one of the many great films resulting from the collaboration between director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. The titular character Umberto, played by linguistics professor Carlo Battisti, is a retired public servant who struggles to make ends meet in post-war Italy. Pushed to his wits’ end by his financial hardship and by society’s indifference, he contemplates begging for alms in front of one of Rome’s most iconic monuments, the Pantheon. This sequence, whose extraordinary narrative economy is comparable only to that of the classics of silent cinema, is the film’s emotional core and dramaturgical climax. After a friend ignores Umberto’s request for a loan, the elderly gentleman observes a beggar receiving money from a passer-by in Via dei Cestari. Inspired to do the same, he walks towards Piazza della Rotonda, the Pantheon’s iconic curved wall looming big on his left. Reaching the front of the Roman temple, he leans against the short brick wall that encompasses it, and hesitantly stretches out his hand, readying himself to receive charity. Just a moment before a man deposits some money in his palm, Umberto succumbs to his pride and flips his hand over, pretending to check for raindrops. Unable to endure the public humiliation, Umberto next coaches his faithful fourlegged companion Flaik to beg on his behalf, but when an acquaintance happens to walk by, Umberto jumps out to greet him and retrieves his hat from the dog’s mouth in shame. ✒Alberto Zambenedetti

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Directed by Vittorio De Sica Scene description: Umberto considers begging for money on the street Timecode for scene: 1:00:05 – 1:04:14

Images © 1952 Rizzoli/De Sica/Amato

23

The White Sheik LOCATI O N

(1952)

Via XXIV Maggio, 00184

federico fellini’s debut as a solo director is a satire of a provincial, petty bourgeois young couple honeymooning in the big city. The susceptible, gullible Wanda (Brunella Bovo) wanders off to a magazine publisher in search of her hero, the photo-romance star the White Sheik. Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste), full of hapless pomposity, undertakes a desperate search across the bewildering capital to find his straying wife in time to introduce her to the in-laws. Unbeknownst to each other, their paths cross in this scene of the film as a convoy of actors leads Wanda out of the city and to the coast for a photo shoot; Ivan doesn’t spot her, but instead reads her fan letter to the White Sheik and realizes she has, momentarily, left him. Via XXIV Maggio leads up to the capital’s Presidential Palace, and although this street scene is full of local life it already displays Fellini’s movement away from realism and towards representing a Rome of the character’s inner thought processes. The repeated heavy thud of a road-worker’s labour seems to indicate Ivan’s delirium as the camera closes in on his sweaty, panicked face. He is then swept up in a procession of bersaglieri (Marksmen), the first appearance of what was to become a Fellini trademark, the over-eager public crowd and the phantasmagoric spectacle of musical display that overwhelms the senses. Although the film was not a commercial success on its release, one can see even in this brief moment the convergence of deflated pretension, cinematic exuberance and imagination out of which all the rest of Fellini’s work was to flow. ✒Louis Bayman

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Directed by Federico Fellini Scene description: Ivan discovers his new wife Wanda has gone in search of the White Sheik Timecode for scene: 0:18:40 – 0:20:50

Images © 1952 OFI/P.D.C.

25

Roman Holiday LOCATI O N

(1953)

Bocca della Verità, Via della Greca, 4, 00186

in roman holiday, Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn), tired of the constraints of her official visit to Rome, escapes the confines of her Embassy to explore the city. She is discovered and befriended by journalist, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), who at first hopes to get a sensational news story about her. Later the two become romantically involved and he returns to her all the photos taken by his colleague Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert) on her day of freedom in the Eternal City. During their tour around Rome they visit the Bocca della Verità (Mouth of Truth), an ancient marble carving, in the shape of a man’s face, housed in the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin since the seventeenth century. This sculpture may be part of a first-century fountain, or perhaps a manhole cover, possibly representing the ancient god of the river Tiber. According to the legend, if you tell a lie when your hand is in the mouth, the god will bite it off. This scene is at a significant turning point in the narrative, as both Ann and Joe have lied extensively to each other about their identity and motives up to this moment. Hereafter, the truth of their situations is gradually revealed. Peck improvised the moment when he pretends that his hand has been severed in the mouth of the stone carving, so that Hepburn’s horror, surprise and scream at the apparent tragedy were genuine. The scene has been reproduced in several other liveaction and animated films. ✒Eleanor Andrews

26 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by William Wyler Scene description: Princess Ann and Joe Bradley visit the Bocca della Verità Timecode for scene: 1:15:39 – 1:16:31

Images © 1953 Paramount Pictures

27

Fellini’s Rome w Text by

SPOTLI G HT

Louis Bayman

a young woman stands at the banks

of the Tiber, in front of the medieval fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo and surrounded by ramshackle riverside homes. Her distraught gaze alternates from the river’s waters and upwards to Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpted angels. Streetlights cast a halo around them and Nino Rota’s soundtrack sounds a single bell. She gasps, genuflects, then jumps into the water, which, being only a foot deep, leads her to fall into the mud. ‘Ao!’ comes the heavily Roman-accented response from a half-dressed local, ‘Go on, scarper!’, and her moment of spiritual crisis is halted. This scene from Fellini’s debut as solo director, Lo Sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (1952), contains all the main elements that Rome was to play in his

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28 World Film Locations | Rome

film-making. There is the caricaturist’s eye for an unembellished, Romanaccio take on life. There is a satirical demystification of Catholic solemnity, and of Wanda’s own pretensions to romantic tragedy. And yet what stops Fellini from displaying a detached superiority is his faith in spectacle of even the most everyday kind. Wanda is a fool; but to her, the statues are messengers from heaven, an illusion the film comically encourages. Fellini is counted as the film-maker who captured Rome’s soul, and in his film-making it is a city of cinematic imagination rather than literal truth – a Rome of memory, fantasy and spirit, mostly recreated in the studio at Cinecittà. Fellini was an adopted son of Rome – his mother ran away from the capital to the Romagna to be with his father – moving there in 1939 from the seaside town of Rimini at 18 years old. Working on cartoons for the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio amidst the lively cultural scene of what was still the Fascist capital, one can imagine Fellini gleefully agreeing with Tacitus that ‘All things atrocious and shameless flock to Rome’. The journey from the provinces to the bustling noise of the capital is taken by many of his characters, whether Wanda on her honeymoon in The White Sheik, or in Fellini’s first big success I Vitelloni (1953), which ends as Moraldo boards a train away from the unnamed, dead-end town to which his layabout friends remain confined, or in the more directly self-referential later works Roma (1972) and Intervista (1987), in both of which the young Fellini arrives in silent awe at the grand metropolis. Fellini began his film-making career scriptwriting for a number of important neorealist films, including Rossellini’s wartime Resistance drama Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945). But as a director his sensibility quickly diverged from neo-realist political earnestness. His attention to the details of life revealed the often irrational or self-aggrandizing foibles of human behaviour, his interest lying instead in the allure of

Opposite Fellini and Claudia Cardinale on the set of 8 1/2 Below Fellini's Roma (1972)

Above © 1972 Ultra Film, Les Productions Artistes Associés Opposite © Cineriz / The Kobal Collection

popular entertainments and spectacle itself. In Le Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria (1957), Cabiria, the susceptible prostitute played by his wife and veteran of the Roman variety theatres, Giulietta Masina, wanders through Rome, but unlike her neo-realist forebears, her journey does not offer social analysis. She dances the mambo on the street then in a swanky nightclub after being picked up by a film star (Alberto Lazzari – played selfparodically by the romantic hero Amedeo Nazzari) on the plush Via Veneto, later fatefully going to see a stage magician. Fellini reveals showmanship in ways that render it simultaneously profane and magical, and no less so in relation to the Catholic Church, for which Rome is also the capital. Cabiria attends a religious process to the Virgin Mary where the lame are most emphatically not healed, but she is overwhelmed all the same. At the end of The White Sheik the errant Wanda is hurriedly reunited with her husband’s family outside St Peter’s Basilica where, remaining in her fantasy world to the end, she realizes that her rather silly husband is her true White Sheik. La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960) opens on a statue of Christ flying through the air hoisted Fellini is counted as to a helicopter, but all the the film-maker who more a public attraction. The ten-minute captured Rome’s Ecclesiastical Fashion soul, and in his Show in Roma is by film-making it is turns satirical, absurdist a city of cinematic and awe-inspiring. imagination rather For Fellini, ‘A created than literal truth. thing is never invented

and it is never true; it is always and ever itself.’ (I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon [2003]) As such, he succeeds in lightheartedly making a key point regarding post-war modernism, which is that however much the world on the cinema screen may recall reality, it is an artistic construction of illusions whose capacity is to make us laugh, to cry and to wonder. Culturally the Italian 1960s began with the scandalous success of La Dolce vita, a remarkably perceptive critique of a society of celebrity obsession, presenting a Rome which at the time only really existed in embryo but which the success of the film itself helped conjure into being. In the film’s most famous sequence, journalist Marcello joins the foreign blonde-bombshell actress Sylvia to splash in the Trevi Fountain, reaches to caress her and stops just before he touches her. In a world of instant gratification and gutter journalism, the sweetness of this life – as does the spirit of Fellini’s cinema – lies just out of grasp. There remains something ever elusive then in Fellini’s Rome. It has a timeless quality for sure, being a place of popular entertainments (where the audience members are often funnier than the performers onstage), of community, of chaos and of spirituality. Do the gluttonous protagonists of his adaptation of Petronius’s ancient text Satyricon (1969) differ in anything more than dress from the hippies who populate the Spanish Steps in Roma? Have the prostitutes who ply their trade in front of the crumbling Caracalla Baths moved at all in 2,500 years? In Roma, a film where the city itself is the main character, an archaeological expedition accompanies the dig for the modern urban metro and discovers a room of ancient murals which inexplicably resemble the contemporary protagonists. Exposure to the air causes these priceless artefacts to vanish away. The film ends on a long sequence during the ‘Festa di Noantri’, ‘Our holiday’. Musicians play and locals eat, sing, joke and shout, while celebrities join in the mix, each jostling for attention whilst the odd hippy falls under a policeman’s truncheon. The scene is overtaken by a procession of motorcycles which speed noisily past each of the city’s principal monuments in a breathtaking montage. But the wordless suggestion seems that – maybe – Rome, continuously inhabited for thousands of years, may just be about to be drowned out in inhuman noise, vanishing like the ancient murals. The screen fades to black on the eternal city. { 29

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maps are only to be taken as approximates

10

Vatican City

Villa Borghese

Castel Sant' Angelo

15 11

Piazza Navona

Pantheon

13 Campo dè Fiori

9

Gianicolo Fori & Colosseo

Trastevere

16

Palatini

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30 World Film Locations | Rome

Aventino

ROME LOCATIONS SCENES 9-16

9. an american in rome/ un americano a roma (1954) Via del Portico D’ottavia, 00186 page 32 10. il bidone (1955) Piazza del Popolo, 00187 page 34

Via Veneto

11. girl in a bikini/poveri ma belli (1957) Fontana del Nettuno, Piazza Navona (north side – next to Via Agonale), 00186 page 36 12. nights of cabiria/ le notti di cabiria (1957) The Passeggiata Archeologica, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 28, 00100 (next to the church of Santi Nereo) page 38

Quirinale

13. the facts of murder/ un maledetto imbroglio (1959) Building No. 44, Piazza Farnese, 00186 page 40

San Giovanni in Laterano

14

14 . big deal on madonna street aka persons unkown/soliti ignoti (1958) Piazza Armenia, 00183 page 42 15. the sweet life/la dolce vita (1960) Trevi Fountain, Piazza di Trevi, 00187 page 44

Caracalla 16. the passionate thief/ risate di gioia (1960) Porto di Ripa Grande, 00153 page 46

31

An American In Rome/ Un Americano A Roma LOCATI O N

(1954)

Via Del Portico D’ottavia, 00186

one of the most prolific directors of post-war Italian cinema, Steno (Stefano Vanzina) was famous above all for his comedies, in particular his collaboration with Neapolitan comic Totò. In 1953, he made A Day in Court, a film comprising a series of vignettes about various cases that come before the magistrate Del Russo (Peppino De Filippo). One of these cases involves Nando Mericoni (Alberto Sordi), a young man whose obsession with all things American has landed him in trouble with the law. Steno and his screenwriting team (which included future horror maestro Lucio Fulci) felt that there was more mileage in the character of Nando and the following year dedicated an entire film to the character, An American in Rome. Although he had already starred in Federico Fellini’s Lo Sceicco bianco/The White Sheikh (1952) and I Vitelloni (1953), it was to prove the breakthrough film for Sordi. The scene in which Nando returns from the cinema late one night and can’t resist a plate of his mother’s spaghetti has become an iconic image in Italian film history. Before arriving home, however, we see Nando – dressed in jeans, white T-shirt and baseball cap – leave a screening of a Hopalong Cassidy film. We follow him as he imitates Hopalong’s gestures and phrases before coming across a bemused policeman along the ancient ruins of Via del Portico d’Ottavia in an area that became the centre of Rome’s Jewish Ghetto in the middle of the sixteenth century (the Great Synagogue of Rome on the Lungotevere Dè Cenci is less than five minutes’ walk). ✒Pasquale Iannone

32 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Steno Scene description: Nando Mericoni heads home after a trip to the cinema Timecode for scene: 0:08:19 – 0:09:54

Images © 1954 Excelsa Film/Ponti De Laurentiis

33

Il Bidone LOCATI O N

(1955)

Piazza del Popolo, 00187

the spacious form of Piazza del Popolo has appeared on many an occasion throughout the history of Roman cinema, though rarely can it be seen to influence a single director’s work as it does that of Federico Fellini. Perhaps the most iconic of these appearances, as well as one of the more comprehensive, is the role it plays in Fellini’s La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960), when Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée’s characters take a ride through central Rome, stopping there briefly to discuss love, happiness and solitude. ‘Personally, I like Rome very much. It’s sort of a moderate, tranquil jungle where one can hide well,’ says Marcello’s character at one point, echoing Fellini’s own sentiments. More often than not, however, these appearances are more fleeting, as it is in the director’s earlier Il Bidone, which tracks the movements of an aging con man named Augusto (Broderick Crawford) who begins to reflect on a life swindling peasants after meeting his estranged daughter. In the scene, it is New Year’s Eve and Augusto can be seen trudging, alone and forlorn, overcoat turned up against the wind, across Piazza del Popolo and into the mouth of Via del Corso. He is also disgruntled, for he lashes out at scraps of rubbish in his path, and glares at two giggling prostitutes that call out to him. Once again, this is Fellini dealing with solitude; in this case, the solitude of advancing age for a character that has no family other than those he swindles alongside. This is, then, Fellini being ironic, since not only does this occur on a night of celebration but in a location that is associated with festivity. ✒Nicholas Page

34 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Federico Fellini Scene description: To the distant sound of New Year's fireworks, Augusto trudges alone and forlorn through Piazza del Popolo Timecode for scene: 0:58:57 – 0:59:45

Images © 1955 Titanus and Société Générale de Cinématographie (SGC)

35

Girl in a Bikini/Poveri Ma Belli LOCATI O N

(1957)

Fontana del Nettuno, Piazza Navona (north side – next to via Agonale), 00186

piazza navona is one of the most significant tourist attractions of the Città Eterna, with its magnificent palaces and the imposing Bernini Fountain. However, it used to be a working class area, and in place of the current stands of artists and caricaturists, the whole perimeter of this oval square was occupied by a corner market. Girl in a Bikini testifies to this period, and narrates the story of Romolo (Maurizio Arena) and Salvatore (Renato Salvatori), two close friends who live in the same building in the square. Romolo works in his uncle’s record shop, while Salvatore is a lifeguard at a beach resort by the Tiber River near Ponte Sant’Angelo. Still, they are not passionate about their jobs: their real interest lies in women, whom they frequently attempt to seduce. When they meet Giovanna (Marisa Allasio) – a Roman girl who just moved to the neighbourhood to work at her father’s tailor shop near Fontana del Nettuno – they both fall in love with her. This scene shows Romolo and Salvatore upon first meeting Giovanna. The two friends pretend to be interested in buying a suit to approach her, but Giovanna makes fun of them, asking to try it on in a room that is in fact a shop window by Piazza Navona. Romolo and Salvatore find themselves standing in their underwear in front of their friends and the whole square. Girl in a Bikini is also remembered for the sensual bikini worn by Marisa Allasio at Salvatore’s beach resort, which is evoked in the British title of the film. ✒Cecilia Brioni

36 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Dino Risi Scene description: Beautiful Giovanna makes a fool of Romolo and Salvatore by putting them on display – literally Timecode for scene: 0:07:00 – 0:10:46

Images © 1957 Silvio Clementelli/Titanus

37

Nights of Cabiria/ Le notti di Cabiria LOCATI O N

(1957)

The ‘passeggiata archeologica’, viale delle Terme di Caracalla 28, 00100 (next to the church of Santi Nereo)

‘è una che fa la vita’ says a streetwise young boy playing around the fast urbanizing outskirts of 1950s Rome. A group of kids has just saved Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) from drowning in a river, but she squirms and storms off unthankfully. And if one was yet to understand what kind of life Cabiria leads, certainly this scene, the first of three short episodes shot at night at the Passeggiata Archeologica against the backdrop of the grandiose ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, will clear all doubts. A dissolve introduces us to Cabiria’s profession and to her ‘work station’, populated by a colourful group of Roman prostitutes and their pimps: accompanied by the off-screen rambling speech of an ageing prostitute, the camera zooms-in on a pair of high heels of another prostitute walking the unpaved street up and down. As the ageing woman’s plump figure reflects a shadow over the arched niche, the contrast between the reality of her condition and her self-perception is exposed with both grotesque and comedic undertones. The dim-lit scenographic appeal of the external wall of the Roman archaeological complex is now revealed by Fellini’s camera, an evocative location which the director will use again – although placing the action inside the Baths – to shoot the more fashionable dance between Sylvia and Marcello in La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960). It was not the first or last time that prostitution was portrayed by an Italian film-maker (see for example Rossellini’s Paisà [1946] or Pasolini’s Mamma Roma [1962]) yet it was a topic that always risked running into state-run film censorship. Despite neither nudity nor any sexual acts appearing in Nights, the film (awarded Best Foreign Language Picture at the 30th Academy Awards in 1958) was in fact initially rejected by the Italian film commission and only finally authorized following a series of cuts directed to ‘lighten scenes of precise realism’. ✒Carla Mereu Keating

38 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Federico Fellini Scene description: Cabiria arrives at her ‘work station’ where she engages first in a mambo and then in a fight Timecode for scene: 0:13:54 – 0:18:32

Images © 1957 Dino De Laurentiis

39

The Facts of Murder/ Un maledetto Imbroglio LOCATI O N

(1959)

Building No. 44, Piazza Farnese, 00186

the credits open on a night-time view of a fountain (one of the baths of the ancient Terme di Caracalla Spa) in the Piazza Farnese in the city’s historic centre. The camera is turned away from the Piazza’s most famous building, the Renaissance Palazzo Farnese, home since 1936 to the French Embassy, and towards the apartment block. A shot rings out after a daylight petty theft. The thief escapes, a crowd quickly appears in the heavily-residential square, and the police arrive. This opening scene, full of dynamism, is an introduction not only to the film and the location but to the late period of Pietro Germi’s cinema. He both stars and directs in this bleakly cynical and perfectly stylized film that he was to follow with the black comedy Divorce, Italian Style (1961). The film adapts Carlo Emilio Gadda’s recently published anti-Fascist modernist novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana into a more dramatically conventional policier, but the eye for critical detail remains. The film presents a Rome where post-war liberation has freed the populace from a battle for political engagement but not the constraints of class nor hypocrisy and structural inequality. It also captures a capital on the cusp of the enormous and rapid changes of the economic miracle, showing that the communal life of an older Rome is being overtaken by the consumerist modernity besides which it sits in uncomfortable proximity. The film also gives an early starring role to the 20-year-old Tunisian actress Claudia Cardinale, and ranks as one of the great Italian detective films of the post-war era. ✒Louis Bayman

40 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Pietro Germi Scene description: A crowd forms and the police arrive after a thief escapes an apartment Timecode for scene: 0:01:45 – 0:03:50

Images © 1959 Riama Film

41

Big Deal On Madonna Street/ i Soliti Ignoti (1958)

LOCATI O N

Piazza Armenia, 00183

in an interview from 1978, Tuscan director Mario Monicelli revealed that the main influence on his cinema was not another film-maker, but novelist Charles Dickens. With his laying bare of social injustices but also in his humour and characterization, it’s easy to see how Dickens was very much the model for Monicelli’s often bitterly satirical work. In 1958, he made a film that for many critics and historians is the first example of the commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian style). A pastiche of crime thrillers such as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), Big Deal on Madonna Street brought together Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale and Totò in a bitter-sweet, typically Monicellian picture, a comic take on what Jean-Pierre Melville later referred to as ‘the uphill struggle to failure’. The film was written by Monicelli together with screenwriters Age, Scarpelli and Suso Cecchi D’Amico and shot by Gianni Di Venanzo, whose striking black-and-white photography anticipates his betterknown work on Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) and Fellini’s 8½ (1963). Monicelli’s film details the plight of a group of thieves and their doomed attempts to pull off the perfect robbery. After taking in locations across the city, the heist itself takes place in Via delle Tre Cannelle, tucked away between the familiar spots of Via Nazionale and Piazza Venezia. Towards the end of the film, with the heist not quite having gone to plan, we find the remaining members of the gang trudge along Piazza Armenia and into Via Britannia early the next morning, each going their separate ways. ✒Pasquale Iannone

42 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Mario Monicelli Scene description: Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) leaves the group and takes a bus Timecode for scene: 1:42:26 – 1:43:54

Images © 1958 Vides Cinematografica/Lux Film

43

The Sweet Life/La Dolce vita LOCATI O N

(1960)

Trevi Fountain, Piazza di Trevi, 00187

narrated in seven episodes, La Dolce vita follows the life of journalist, Marcello Rubino (Marcello Mastroianni), who writes scandalous news stories about Roman Society in the late 1950s, although he has ambitions to become a serious writer. Marcello is seduced by the frivolous pleasures of the ‘sweet life’ of Rome, which contrast vividly with the ups and downs of daily existence. The film has been likened by several film scholars, including Robert Richardson, to a Dantesque pilgrimage into the underworld, where Rome is depicted as a moral wasteland. This scene is part of the second episode when Marcello accompanies a beautiful Hollywood film star, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) on her visit to the capital. After an evening of dancing at the Baths of Caracalla, Sylvia and Marcello leave her group of friends and tour round the city. As they roam the streets, she sees the Trevi Fountain, the largest baroque fountain in Rome, and wades into its waters. A tradition holds that if visitors throw a coin into the fountain, they are ensured a return to Rome. Totally infatuated with Sylvia, Marcello follows her into the water. At the very moment that Sylvia playfully ‘baptises’ Marcello, the water in the fountain stops and the dawn comes up, breaking the magic spell of their adventure. The film has introduced two Italian expressions into the English language: the title itself, which is the name of countless shops and restaurants, as well as a perfume; and the word ‘paparazzi’ named after the scurrilous society photographer who sometimes works with Marcello. ✒Eleanor Andrews

44 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Federico Fellini Scene description: Sylvia and Marcello Rubini in the Trevi Fountain Timecode for scene: 0:48:15 – 0:50:15

Images © 1960 Riama Film/Gray-Film/Pathé Consortium Cinéma

45

The Passionate Thief/Risate Di Gioia LOCATI O N

(1960)

Porto Di Ripa Grande, 00153

in 1960, director mario monicelli was riding high on the unprecedented success of The Great War (1959), a World War I satire featuring Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi as two good-for-nothings catapulted into the horrors of war. He followed it up with a film which, while on a much smaller scale, was nonetheless infused with his characteristic love of life’s losers. When film extra Gioia (Anna Magnani), veteran actor Infortunio (Totò) and pickpocket Lello (Ben Gazzara) cross paths on New Year’s Eve, they decide to take full advantage of the city’s high spirits. Having previously worked together in the theatre, the film sees Italian cultural icons Totò and Magnani on-screen together for the first time. In the film’s famous finale, which takes place some eight months later in the height of summer, Infortunio meets Gioia as she is released from a prison on Porto di Ripa Grande. The busiest and most important port in Rome since the middle ages, Ripa Grande is situated between modern-day Ponte Sublicio and Ponte Palatino. Monicelli’s camera cranes down, follows a group of children running to a watermelon stand and cuts to Infortunio standing outside the prison gates. When Gioia emerges, she gives the hapless Infortunio short shrift (despite his gift of an umbrella) and makes her way along the banks of the Tiber. A holidaying English couple looks on in amusement. ‘Look at the funny way these Italians dress,’ says the wife. Infortunio and Gioia hail a taxi and Monicelli holds the shot as they start to drive away only for the taxi to come to an abrupt halt. It turns out Infortunio can’t afford the fare, having spent his last few lira on Gioia’s umbrella. ✒Pasquale Iannone

46 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Mario Monicelli Scene description: Gioia is released from prison and is met by Umberto Timecode for scene: 1:37:11 – 1:41:04

Images © 1960 Titanus

47

Roman Holidays w Text by

Alberto Zambenedetti

SPOTLI G HT

Rome as an International Destination On-screen

cinematic pilgrimages to the eternal city have taken many different forms, from literary adaptations to sword-and-sandal epics, from science fiction thrillers to pulpy crime stories. Nevertheless, the tourist film remains king of all genres for both its extraordinary resilience and its ability to adapt to geopolitical and socio-economical changes. Tourist films are so culturally pervasive that we can trace their origin back to the medium’s inception; in fact, one could make the case that the first examples date back to the travelling cinematographers who captured images of Rome for foreign consumption around the turn of the century. The premiere chronicle of transatlantic tourism is the 1912 short documentary American Tourists Abroad, while the first feature-length drama shot on-location is the unfortunately lost 1915 adaptation of Hall Caine’s novel The Eternal City directed by Hugh Ford and Edwin S. Porter. George Fitzmaurice was at the helm on another production of the same book starring Barbara La Marr and Lionel Barrymore in 1923. While it was not uncommon for foreign directors to shoot Italian films (Max Ophüls, Max Neufeld, Jean de Limur, Fyodor Otsep being the most notable ones) it is

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48 World Film Locations | Rome

almost impossible to find international titles made in Italy during the Fascist years. However, after World War II ended and the neo-realist films had shown the world the hardship of reconstruction, the gates were reopened to a slow but steady procession of productions from all over the world. First on the lot was William Dieterle’s 1950 September Affair, which resumed the long tradition of anglophone tourism in the sunny peninsula, followed in 1953 by Vittorio De Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife/Stazione Termini. Based on a short story by life-long collaborator Cesare Zavattini, this US-Italy co-production starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift in the role of the Italian beau is so embedded in its location that it was inscribed in the original title, ‘Stazione Termini’, before producer David O. Selznick’s shorter edit turned a fascinating, crepuscular film into a toothless melodrama. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the lighthearted Roman Holiday, also released in 1953 and directed by William Wyler. Possibly the most celebrated of all tourist pictures, it paired a ruggedly handsome Gregory Peck with an adorably wiry Audrey Hepburn, launching her into global stardom from the back of a Vespa. The iconic images of these Hollywood actors strolling around vibrant Roman streets or zipping by its historical sights on a Piaggio scooter generated a large number of copycats, such as Jean Negulesco’s 1954 Three Coins in the Fountain and Wolfgang Becker’s 1958 Voyage to Italy, Complete with Love. Delmer Daves’s Rome Adventure (1962) is so unabashedly indebted to Roman Holiday it has Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue ride a Vespa in front of the Coliseum on the film’s poster. Even archetypal Malibu surfer girl Gidget has a Roman adventure in Gidget Goes to Rome (Paul Wendkos, 1963). But not all the relationships born under the aegis of the she-wolf have happy endings, as testified by the much darker tones of René Clément’s 1960 Plein soleil/ Purple Noon (the first cinematic adaptation of the

Opposite Indiscretion of An American Wife (1953) / Below When in Rome (2010)

Above © 2010 Touchstone Pictures, Krasnoff Foster Productions Opposite © 1953 Columbia Pictures Corporation, Produzioni De Sica

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley) and by The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (an adaptation of Tennessee William’s novel, directed by José Quintero in 1961), which replaces romance with rather sordid sexual tourism. Federico Fellini commented on Rome’s new position in the imagination of moviegoers worldwide with his 1960 masterpiece La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960), which rivalled Roman Holiday in iconic-image-per-minute ratio. In fact, the famous scene of Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroinanni waist-deep in the water of the Trevi Fountain at dawn has been replicated countless times with various results; most recently, Kristen Bell took a drunken fountain bath in When in Rome (Mark Steven Johnson, 2010). In the second half of the 1960s the formula began to show signs of wear and tear, as Melvin Frank’s 1968 Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell demonstrates, and the number of tourist films decreased dramatically. In the 1970s Rome became the set for dark crime dramas that reflected the tense political atmosphere of a decade that was fraught with social unrest and Federico Fellini terrorism; hardly the commented on Rome’s new position stuff of Hollywood’s in the imagination of carefully calibrated moviegoers worldwide dream machines, these films did feature some with his 1960 American actors in masterpiece La Dolce the role of the tough vita/The Sweet Life cop or the ruthless (1960), which rivalled hit man. Foreign Roman Holiday in productions returned to shoot in Rome with iconic-image-persome confidence in the minute ratio.

mid-1980s, often transforming tourist films into comedies of intercultural miscommunication, such as in 1985’s European Vacation (Amy Heckerling), the continental installment in the popular National Lampoon’s franchise starring comedy giant Chevy Chase. Gradually, Rome’s monumental and artistic sights reclaimed their position as picturesque backgrounds to steamy romances (A Man in Love [Diane Kurys, 1987]), insufferable tongue-in-cheek crime comedies (Hudson Hawk [Michael Lehmann, 1991]; and Once Upon a Crime [Eugene Levy, 1992]), and prestige historical dramas (The Portrait of a Lady [Jane Campion, 1996]; and The English Patient [Anthony Minghella, 1996]). But the real throwback to the 1950s formula arrived on the eve of the new millennium: in 1999 Anthony Minghella remade The Talented Mr. Ripley with a cast of sexy up-and-coming young stars, and in 1998 Bernardo Bertolucci updated the Roman romance by scrambling tourism, xenophilia and political exile in the small but fascinating Besieged. The 2000s saw a resurgence of tourist films set in Italy, with Rome still being the privileged destination; a few remarkable (in any sense of the word) titles are When in Rome (Michael Swerdlick, 2002), featuring television stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the remake of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2003) starring Helen Mirren in the titular role; the Disney franchise The Lizzie McGuire Movie (Jim Fall, 2003); The Moon and the Stars (John Irving, 2007); The Eternal City (Jason Goodman and Arianna De Giorgi, 2008); the unconventional tale of lesbian lovers Room in Rome (Julio Medem, 2010); and Woody Allen’s latest comedy of upper-class Americans vacationing in Europe, To Rome With Love (2012). { 49

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23 50 World Film Locations | Rome

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17. purple noon/plein soleil (1960) Piazza del Popolo, 00187 page 52 18. accattone (1961) Ponte Sant'Angelo, 00186 page 54

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19. the eclipse/l’eclisse (1962) Intersection of Viale della Tecnica and Viale del Ciclismo, EUR page 56 20. mamma roma (1962) Frascati (located 20 kilometres south-east of the city), 00044 page 58

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Purple Noon/Plein soleil LOCATI O N

(1960)

Piazza del Popolo, 00187

purple noon is adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s classic crime novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). It tells the story of suave, agreeable and completely amoral Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), who is sent on a mission to Italy by a wealthy American to bring his irresponsible playboy son, Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), back home to the United States. In Purple Noon the dark and mysterious themes of envy, deceit and murder are juxtaposed with the glamorous and dazzling mise-en-scène under the Mediterranean sun. This scene takes place in the Piazza del Popolo which was designed in neoclassical style between 1811 and 1822 by the architect Giuseppe Valadier. The twin churches of Santa Maria di Montesanto (1679) and Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1681) define the junctions of three roads: the Via del Corso in the centre; the Via del Babuino to the left; and to the right the Via di Ripetta. On the steps of Santa Maria di Montesanto Philippe collides with a blind man. Tom persuades Philippe to buy the blind man’s white stick at a high price in compensation. With the stick in their possession, Tom and Philippe take turns to pretend to be blind, crossing the Via del Corso towards Santa Maria dei Miracoli, with the famous restaurant Dal Bolognese seen in the distance. The scene succinctly demonstrates much about the characters of Tom and Philippe and their relationship: their financial disparity, their impulsive and rash actions, and the sometimes cruel practical jokes which the two play on each other. ✒Eleanor Andrews

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Directed by René Clément Scene description: Tom and Philippe buy a blind man’s white stick Timecode for scene: 0:05:30 – 0:08:10

Images © 1960 Robert and Raymond Hakim/Paris Film/Paritalia and Titanus

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Accattone LOCATI O N

(1960)

Ponte Sant'Angelo, 00186

‘i want to die with all my gold on me, like the Pharaohs,’ yells Vittorio ‘Accattone’ Cataldi (Franco Citti), towards the beginning of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film of the same name, before plunging from the heights of the Ponte Sant’Angelo into the filthy, fetid waters of the Tiber River. The film details the wretched life of this common Roman street-bum and occasional pimp, with his dive from the bridge prefiguring an eventual and crushing fall from grace. The early Pharaoh line mentioned previously, coupled with Pasolini’s composition of the scene, is the director glorifying his protagonist; elevating him to a figure of grace perched high above the ‘masses’, as he refers to them; masses that eat, joke and generally clown around in the shadow of the bridge – or even, underneath the bridge, as though these characters represent the very underbelly of Roman society. It is also at this moment, with Accattone stripped and contemplating his situation from the bridge’s edge, that Pasolini juxtaposes him against one of sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s angels, which he can be seen standing next to before making his cruciform dive. Once again, this Christian iconography is offset by cultural references, such as the comparison between Accattone’s jump and that of Tosca in Giacomo Puccini’s play, who hurls herself to her untimely demise from the ramparts of the of the nearby Castel Sant’Angelo. This comparison is made later, when Accattone bets that he can make a similar jump, only this time with his clothes on. Unfortunately, on this occasion our hero cannot make the leap of faith; he is no graceful figure like Tosca, for whom death was a dignified end. ✒Nicholas Page

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Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini Scene description: With his cronies looking on, Vittorio ‘Accattone’ Cataldi dives from Ponte Sant'Angelo into the Tiber River Timecode for scene: 0:04:04 – 0:05:44

Images © 1961 Arco Film/Cino del Duca

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The Eclipse/L’Eclisse LOCATI O N

(1962)

Intersection of Viale della Tecnica and Viale del Ciclismo

the final scene of Antonioni’s The Eclipse is a long sequence of urban landscape and detail-shots that bear a striking absence – neither of the two lead characters are featured. What comes to the fore instead is a location that we are familiar with, the clean, new, modernist district of EUR in the south of the city. This is where Vittoria’s (Monica Vitti) apartment is, and where she is courted by Piero (Alain Delon), a fiery and precocious stockbroker more at home in the city’s stock market housed in the Borsa, an ancient Roman temple. Their meeting point is a zebra crossing in front of an empty hulk of a building, still under work and surrounded by a veil of scaffolding and raffia sheets, an ugly and idiosyncratic outcropping. With its construction debris and jauntily temporary wooden fence, it disturbs the clean lines, smooth surfaces and well-kept grassy expanses of the EUR, a district originally developed for the planned 1942 World’s Fair, and as a celebration of twenty years of Fascism in Italy. In this final sequence many shots repeat images that we have seen earlier at this location – a man in a horse trap passing by, a nurse with a pram, both apparently doing circuits, perhaps of the lake at the centre of the district – suggesting that this space is condemned to repetition, and precisely because of the main characters’ absence, we feel them locked into this inescapable cycle. ✒Michael Pigott and Santiago Oyarzabal

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Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni Scene description: Repetition in the EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) Timecode for scene: 1:58:14 – 2:05:50

Images © 1962 Cineriz/Interopa Film/Paris Film

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Mamma Roma LOCATI O N

(1962)

Frascati (located 20 kilometres south-east of Rome) 00044

shot in june of 1962 at an abandoned farm on the outskirts of Frascati, south-eastern Rome, the opening ‘Pranzo di Nozze’ sequence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma is important in that it immediately sets the overall tone of the film: that of religious imagery and the contrast between high art and the lower classes. This, we soon come to realize, is a celebratory dinner for the marriage of Mamma Roma’s old pimp, Carmine (played by Anna Magnani and Franco Citti respectively). The film will go on to tell the trials and tribulations of this neighbourhood prostitute, and those of her gangly, disenchanted and father-less young son. Pasolini opens the aforementioned scene, and indeed the film itself with the crude image of piglets dressed in hats and ribbons, before filling it with bawdy behaviour and vulgar language. As some have noted, this scene is also a celebration of the body: guests eat and drink to excess, stuffing the body with nourishment and then using it to express feelings of delight and dismay, though never politely. It is the indecency of such scenes that may have provoked displeasure among the Italian populous upon release, yet it is key in Pasolini’s grand vision, for it is used in stark contrast to elements of high culture so as to accentuate the nature of the lower classes. There is the Vivaldi concerto that precedes the scene, but more importantly there is the composition of the scene itself: shot to mimic Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (similar to a celebrated shot in Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, released a year earlier), it is the kind of Christian allegory that runs throughout the work of Pasolini. ✒Nicholas Page Photo © Renato Clementi (wikimedia commons) / Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati

58 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini Scene description: Mamma Roma's old pimp, Carmine, is getting married; family and friend gather in loud, vulgar celebration Timecode for scene: 0:02:35 – 0:08:32

Images © 1962 Arco Film

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Le mépris/Contempt LOCATI O N

(1963)

Cinecittà studios, Via Tuscolana 1055, 00173

contempt, based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Disprezzo (1954), chronicles the break-up of the marriage of Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), condensed by Godard from a few months into a few days. Paul is working on a rewrite of Homer’s Odyssey for a vulgar and mercenary American producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), while Fritz Lang, playing himself, is the reluctant director who wants to make an art film. This scene takes place early in the film and is set in the Cinecittà Studios, which were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini and where some of the most celebrated films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), were made. This key scene combines the themes of the failure of the marriage and the crisis in the contemporary film world. The future of European cinema is questioned by Godard, who uses the derelict setting, full of abandoned buildings and old, broken props, to represent the dream factory, where illusions were once made, but which is now a crumbling ruin. When Camille and Paul meet in Cinecittà, it is the last occasion when they show any genuine affection for each other. Prokosch’s red Alfa Romeo dramatically drives between them and as Camille is coerced by her husband to ride home with the producer, the marriage starts to disintegrate. The evocative colour of the car and the portent of the poster for Hatari!/Danger (Howard Hawks, 1962), which appears behind Camille, suggest a tragic conclusion to the film. ✒Eleanor Andrews

60 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard Scene description: The beginning of the end of Paul and Camille’s marriage at Cinecittà Timecode for scene: 0:20:35 – 0:24:15

Images © 1963 Les Films Concordia/Rome Paris Films/Compagnia Cinematografica Champion

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Il Boom LOCATI O N

(1963)

Viale Dell’oceano Atlantico 3, 00144

in 1963, roman comic actor Alberto Sordi joined forces with Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves [1948], Umberto D [1952]) to make one of the most scathing satires on the Italian economic miracle. Sordi plays Guido Alberti, a struggling building contractor living way beyond his means. As he sinks deeper into debt, he is made an unusual offer by Mrs Blausetti (Elena Nicolai), the wife of a wealthy industrialist, one which would put an end to his financial troubles. To Guido’s horror, the offer involves him donating one of his eyes to Mr Blausetti to replace the one he lost in an accident. De Sica’s film unfolds in a variety of well-known Rome locations – Villa Borghese, St Peter’s Square, St Sebastian’s Basilica – but ends memorably in a clinic in the EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) when Guido, about to undergo the operation, gets cold feet and escapes into the thronging traffic of Viale dell’Oceano Atlantico, at the intersection with Via Laurentina. The EUR is a district to the south of the city centre which was originally planned by Mussolini to celebrate twenty years of Fascist rule in 1942 but was only completed in the post-war period when new modern structures were built to stand alongside those from the Fascist era. When Mrs Blausetti catches up with Guido, she forces him to accept his fate. Flanked by men in white coats, he is led back to the clinic and De Sica ends the film with a wide shot from across the street, with the film’s main musical theme – the upbeat guitar twang of Billy Vaughan’s ‘Wheels’ – returning one final time as sharp counterpoint to the images. ✒Pasquale Iannone

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Directed by Vittorio De Sica Scene description: Giovanni escapes from a clinic and is chased by doctors Timecode of scene: 1:23:47 – 1:25:12

Images © 1963 Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica

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8 1/2 LOCATI O N

(1963)

Beach near Ostia (south-west of Rome)

the final scene of Fellini’s masterpiece takes place on a beach near Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, just outside of Rome. The beach is a favoured location throughout Fellini’s films, perhaps because of its potential as an empty expanse, a space to build upon, to construct the scaffolding of dreamlife, of philosophical enquiry, of resuscitated memory. Indeed the two most significant intrusions onto the flatness of the beach in this scene are the circus ring and the massive, ridiculous and expensive scaffolding of a rocket launchpad, built for Guido’s (Marcello Mastroianni) aborted film project. The beach serves as empty soundstage, devoid of features apart from sand and tufts of grass, a ready staging ground for an image of Guido’s mind, where the players that have populated the film’s merging of reality, memory and dream come out for one last turn around the circus ring of Guido’s fantasy. Guido directs the action, asking for the curtains to be pulled back, inviting the host of characters into the ring – it is a moment of profound acceptance of these relationships, and their irritating, stimulating, confusing, fascinating, depressing lives, a sort of euphoric wrap party for the filming of the film that is the film you’re watching. ✒Michael Pigott and Santiago Oyarzabal .

Photo © Cha già José (Flickr)

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Directed by Federico Fellini Scene description: Guido the ringmaster Timecode for scene: 2:05:00 – 2:10:27

Images © 1963 Cineriz/Francinex

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Gidget goes to Rome LOCATI O N

(1963)

Curia Iulia area and Forum of Caesar – Foro Romano/Fori Imperiali, Via della Salaria Vecchia

gidget (cindy carol) is a teenage American girl growing up on the surfing beaches of Malibu. In the third chapter of her adventures, she travels with a group of friends (including her boyfriend, Moondoggie played by James Darren) to Rome, for the very first trip without her parents. The group identifies Rome as the capital city of romance and love; however, the couple experience some troubles, since both Gidget and Moondoggie become infatuated with someone else. They eventually reunite at the end of the film, blaming ‘that old devil Italian moon’. While still very much in love, they have the chance to visit the most famous symbols of ancient Rome: the Coliseum and the Roman Forum. In this scene, as she walks across the Forum, Gidget lets her teenage mind wander, daydreaming about a fictional story: she imagines herself as Cleopatra arriving at the Senate, and when a slave (actually Moondoggie) helps her over a puddle, she gives him an old sandal (actually a tennis shoe) as a gift. The Fora area has preserved its magical atmosphere throughout millennia of negligence and injuries: in medieval times, it was employed as a meadow, and much of the stone was taken away to be reused as building material during the Renaissance. One of the most damaging actions, though, was the Fascist construction of Via dei Fori Imperiali, which cut the area in two in order to connect the Coliseum with the Vittoriano. This road has recently been pedestrianized (August 2013), and in future the Roman Forum and the Imperial Fora may be reunited to become one large archaeological park. ✒Cecilia Brioni

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Directed by Paul Wendkos Scene description: Gidget daydreams about ancient Rome while visiting the Roman Forum with her friends Timecode for scene: 0:30:30 – 0:32:55

Images © 1963 Jerry Bresler – Columbia Pictures

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PASSING TIDES w Text by

Nicholas Page

SPOTLI G HT

The Tiber and Its Role in the History of ‘Cinema Romano’

historically, towns are often

founded by places of interest where people would meet; crossroads, or next to rivers and seas. A river provides a vital supply of water to be used for drinking, washing, agriculture and waste disposal, not to mention convenient routes for trade and commerce. As such, many of today’s biggest European cities were built on the banks of a river. In the case of Rome, Italy, the river Tiber (or Tevere) not only provided a site for the city’s birthplace but also its name: from Rumon, or Rumen, which is what the river was known as archaically, and is rooted in the Latin verb Ruo, meaning to rush. According to Roman legend, the city of Rome was founded by twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who were abandoned on its waters before being rescued by a she-wolf. Just as the Tiber is a vital artery eternally flowing through the heart of Rome, so it is a vital artery that runs through the city’s cultural history; its art, literature, opera and cinema. In what is perhaps its most famous appearance on film, the Tiber provides the backdrop for a key scene in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), which tells the story of Princess Ann (Audrey

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68 World Film Locations | Rome

Hepburn) and her increasing alienation with royal life on a trip to Rome. In the shadow of the Castel Sant’Angelo, down on the waterfront, a small dance floor lit by strings of twinkling light bulbs has been erected, to which young couples and fluttering moths flock alike. After a brief dance scene that provides a neat contrast to an awkward earlier one, Ann is cornered by her pursuers. She then plunges into the Tiber before swimming downstream to evade capture, echoing the Roman legend of Cloelia who is said to have escaped a Clusian camp in the same manner. It is a sequence that exudes vivacity and adventure, and perhaps helped to coin the term ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, a phenomenon that would arrive some years later when American producers began taking advantage of Rome’s Mussolini-built Cinecittà Studios and the city’s cheap-labour potential.  In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone, released in 1961, a similar vivacity is shared in a similar position on the river by the film’s titular character, a two-bit pimp who is seen eating and fooling around with his friends under the very same Ponte Sant’Angelo. His eventual dive from the bridge into the river to settle a bet not only prefigures his later fall from grace but also allows for the allusion to the Tiber as a symbol of death: ‘I’ll end up like Tosca!,’ he shouts at one point, referring to the protagonist in Giacomo Puccini’s opera, who sacrificed herself to the raging waters by diving in from the castle’s ramparts. Pasolini later helped to conceive the premise for Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Commare secca/The Grim Reaper, which opens with the discovery of a prostitute’s body on the banks of the river. Pasolini would die a mere few hundred yards from the Tiber’s mouth, murdered on a beach at Ostia in November of 1975. Indeed, death is all but synonymous with the river Tiber. In ancient Rome, under Tiberius and beyond, the river was used to dispose of executed criminals. In 897, the body of Pope Formosus was mutilated and dumped in the river, later to be

Opposite Love in the City (1953) / Below Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Above © 1948 Produzioni De Sica, SA Opposite © 1953 Faro Film

retrieved by a monk. An early cinematic example of this association between the Tiber and Death can be seen in Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist classic Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), in which the protagonist Antonio searches in vain for his stolen bicycle along the city’s cobbled alleys and across its crowded market squares, forever shadowed by the small but stocky form of his young son, Bruno. After angrily scolding Bruno at one point, Antonio is struck by remorse when he sees people rushing under the Ponte Duca d’Aosta to save a drowning child. Remorse ultimately gives way to relief when he finds the boy standing sheepishly nearby, safe and well. The boy is framed ingeniously by De Sica, who dwarfs his small body against the bridge’s monumental architecture. There is a much closer parallel to the demise of Tosca in Federico Fellini’s Lo Sceicco bianco/ The White Sheik (1952), in which the character of Wanda has sullied her new husband’s name and so attempts to take her own life in penance. Music soars as she stumbles down to the riverbank before looking back up at Bernini’s angels; Ultimately, while the the very same angels river Tiber was the that Accattone was very placenta that depicted standing allowed for the birth between, as though at and subsequent growth one with, before his dive. of Rome, it can also Embarrassingly, upon be seen as a symbol of making her leap, Wanda death and decadence finds but a shallow that runs throughout puddle and succeeds only in dampening her the city’s history.

spirits further; as with Accattone, and unlike Tosca, she is denied a dignified end. One of the writers behind The White Sheik, Michelangelo Antonioni, would revisit the scene in a documentative manner a year later, in his segment for the episodic L’Amore in città/Love in the City, in which a prostitute recounts a similar attempted suicide. Fellini, on the other hand, would develop the idea in much more memorable fashion, building upon the character he had written for wife Giulietta Masina in The White Sheik, a chirpy prostitute named Cabiria. Le Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957) opens with a long shot of Cabiria frolicking over the dry grasses with her current boyfriend. They near the Tiber, she swinging her handbag playfully. Then they pause to admire the scenery, before he grabs her bag and shoves her in. It is a scene that Fellini says was inspired by a newspaper report of a real event, in which the prostitute was not saved, and one that recurs at the end of the film to create a bookend of sorts. Ultimately, while the river Tiber was the very placenta that allowed for the birth and subsequent growth of Rome, it can also be seen as a symbol of death and decadence that runs throughout the city’s history; as reflected in the art it has produced. The river has been depicted as a site of vivacity; of life, on many occasions in the history of ‘Cinema Romano’, though perhaps most memorably though the eyes of outsiders. More often, however, it has been used to symbolize death; its murky depths suggesting a dark history that writers and directors alike have been drawn to. Art imitates life, which in turn imitates art. { 69

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25. the girl who knew too much (1963) Piazza di Spagna, 00187 page 72

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26. the leopard (1963) Palazzo Chigi all'Ariccia, Lazio 00040 page 74

Via Veneto

27. i knew her well (1965) Via Nicolò Bettoni 158, 00153 page 76 28. the conformist/il conformist (1970) Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, 1 Piazza John Fitzgerald Kennedy, EUR page 78

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much LOCATI O N

(1963)

Piazza di Spagna, 00187

although the film’s title states its debt to Hitchcock (being a play on 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much), Bava’s film heralded a new genre, the giallo, or Italian horror film, many of whose principal traits are established in this scene alone. An American visitor (Letícia Román) rushes outside after her bedbound hostess dies. A man snatches her bag and she falls unconscious. On waking she witnesses a woman stabbed to death. The Spanish Steps, the widest staircase in Europe, provides the grand dramatic stage on which threat lies behind every corner, but the high-key lighting amidst the general darkness renders all indistinct. Its tourist protagonist signals not only the film’s ambitions for foreign distribution but gives us a disorientated heroine. We share her wavy and distorted view of the Trinità dei Monti, the large church at the top of the hill for which the Bourbon French built the Spanish Steps (linking the church to the Spanish embassy at the bottom of the steps), then see it reflected upside down in a puddle. She is compelled to look at the murder – just like the presumed audience of the giallo – while several shots indicate that she too is being watched. All traces of the murder disappear when she wakes up, hysterical, and her claims are dismissed, being instructed instead to stop reading gialli and diagnosed as deluded and alcoholic. Unafraid to draw attention to its fictional status, the giallo offers a stylized world made all the more unsettling for its disruption of the boundary between real and imaginary. ✒Louis Bayman

72 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Mario Bava Scene description: A barely-conscious tourist witnesses a murder Timecode for scene: 0:09:10 – 0:14:30

Images © 1963 Galatea Film

73

The Leopard LOCATI O N

(1963)

Palazzo Chigi all'Ariccia, Lazio 00040

ostensibly, the leopard, Visconti’s adaptation of the celebrated novel by Di Lampedusa, never leaves the island of Sicily. The film tells the tale of the corruption of Italy’s national revolution, the Risorgimento, through the slow decline of its central Sicilian aristocratic family and their accommodation with the ascendant forces of the northern Piedmontese monarchy and the rising bourgeoisie who led the formation of the united Liberal Italy. Some of the interiors however are filmed in the Palazzo Chigi all’Ariccia, located on one of the hilltop towns outside of Rome called the Castelli Romani. In this scene, Tancredi (Alain Delon), the thrusting war hero and nephew to the protagonist the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), chases his betrothed, Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the beautiful daughter of a newly wealthy ex-peasant. The scene does not push forward any aspect of the plot, but adds a sense of novelistic detail in which the film revels – Angelica represents a somewhat tantalizing presence, always in movement, leading the aristocratic Tancredi in continual chase. Later she accuses him of not really caring for her. The suggestion is not answered but adds to the rich portrait of historical relations, the pair embodying an alliance between the old nobility and emergent capitalism. Lit in the late afternoon sun, the deserted rooms of the mouse-infested palazzo are furnished in autumnal colours and cluttered with cobwebbed, dusty furniture and portraits, relics of a past glory which surrounds the characters but which has lost its claim to vitality. ✒Louis Bayman Photo © wikimedia commons

74 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Luchino Visconti Scene description: The fiancés Tancredi and Angelica frolic upstairs in the Palace Timecode for scene: 1:44:45 – 1:51:00

Images © 1963 Titanus/Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma/S.G.C.

75

I Knew Her Well/ Lo La Conoscevo Bene LOCATI O N

(1965)

Via Nicolò Bettoni 158, 00153

possibly the mid-1960s film par excellence, this New Wave comedy captures an Italy crammed with the ephemera of modern consumer culture and quick gratification. As an actress Stefania Sandrelli embodies the fashionable type of the era and is unrivalled in her ability to convey superficiality with sympathetic depth. She plays aspiring young film star Adriana amidst a liberation that has reached so far as to allow women leisure and lovers but not meaning or purpose in director Pietrangeli’s most accomplished study into the post-war Italian female psyche. The scene begins on some rubbish floating down the Tiber, the camera tilting to a panorama of the eternal city and drawing back to show the vast complex of newly built high-rises, from one of whose upper stories Adriana gazes out of the window. The three-minute sequence is made up of one single shot and forms a perfect expression of an afternoon spent at home contemplating … we never quite know what. Sergio Endrigo’s ‘Mani bucate’ (‘Empty-handed’) plays on the radio, singing, ‘there is no one to give you a flower, not even a hand to put in yours.’ Adriana turns to profile framed as if in a fashion shoot, changes rooms and turns again, while the camera, continually pulling towards and away from her, remains outside. The film avoids any simple denunciation of her unrealistic dreams by suggesting an inner life which is never directly articulated, and to which the lifestyle in which she partakes is inadequate; this scene a vague presentiment of her final devastating act. ✒Louis Bayman

76 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli Scene description: : Adriana looks over the city with the radio on, cleans her door handle and answers the telephone Timecode for scene: 0:25:53 – 0:28:47

Images © 1965 Les Films du Siècle/Roxy Film/Ultra Film

77

The Conformist/Il conformista LOCATI O N

(1970)

Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, 1 Piazza John Fitzgerald Kennedy, EUR

although it was not completed until 1954, Adalberto Libera’s Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi is the crown jewel of the EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) complex. Originally named E42, the neighbourhood was specifically designed to host the ill-fated 1942 World’s Fair whilst celebrating the accomplishments of the Fascist regime on its twentieth anniversary. In The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci uses the Rationalist masterpiece for two of the film’s key scenes: first, when Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignan) is assigned the mission of killing his former-Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in exile in Paris. Second, when the protagonist and his drug-addict mother (Milly) visit his deranged father and former blackshirt (Giuseppe Addobbati) in a mental institution, and display a morbid interest towards the man’s violent and possibly murderous past. In a brilliant rhetorical stroke that comments on the nature of totalitarian regimes, the director transforms the breezy open-air performance space on the rooftop of Libera’s building into an oppressive asylum, and capitalizes on the tectonics of Rationalist architecture to convey a sense of rigidity and oppression. Pacing through the white marble benches of the stunning Teatro all’Aperto, the distressed man in a black straightjacket mutters under his breath his newly found progressive ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state. At odds with Marcello’s views and with the country’s direction, the man has no other choice but to ask the orderly to be restrained and embrace his physical and ideological confinement. ✒Alberto Zambenedetti

78 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Scene description: Marcello Clerici and his mother visit his father in a mental institution Timecode for scene: 0:21:55 – 0:23:48

Images © 1970 Mars Film (Giovanni Bertolucci and Maurizio Lodi-Fè)

79

We All Loved Each Other So Much/ C’eravamo Tanto Amati (1974)

LOCATI O N

Piazza Del Popolo, 00187

one of the most important Italian films of the 1970s but (at the time of writing) still relatively underappreciated by English-language critics, Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other So Much ambitiously takes on 30 years of Italian history through the lives of three men and the woman who drifts in and out of their lives. Gianni (Vittorio Gassman), Antonio (Nino Manfredi) and Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores) become friends as resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of Italy only to lose track of one another after the liberation. Giovanni becomes a lawyer, Antonio a hospital orderly and Nicola a politically committed cinephile. Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli) is an aspiring actress and is courted by all three men at different points in the film. Like the best examples of the commedia all’italiana, We All Loved Each Other So Much mixes comedy with melancholy but Scola’s film is far more formally daring than most; switching from colour to black and white throughout and featuring an extraordinary use of the soliloquy technique made famous by Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude (1928). The film’s reflexivity is heightened by cameos from Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, playing themselves (when Luciana is cast as an extra in Fellini’s La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life [1960], Scola recreates that film’s famous Trevi Fountain scene). Another Roman landmark is featured when Giovanni and Antonio are reunited for the first time in more than two decades in Piazza del Popolo. The piazza itself was once the traveller’s first view of Rome and also the site of public executions up until the early nineteenth century. What is striking looking at the piazza at the time of We All Loved Each Other So Much and now is the absence of traffic. In 1974, cars were allowed to park but since 1984 it has been pedestrian-only. In Scola’s film, Antonio mistakes his old friend for a car park attendant. Ashamed to tell Antonio the truth – that he has compromised the principles of his youth – Giovanni does nothing to correct him. ✒Pasquale Iannone

80 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Ettore Scola Scene description: Old friends Antonio and Gianni are reunited after 25 years Timecode for scene: 1:34:15 – 1:39:21

Images © 1974 Le Deantir/Delta Film/Dean Film

81

A Special Day/ Una Giornata Particolare LOCATI O N

(1977)

Palazzo Federici, Viale XXI Aprile

in may 1938, Adolph Hitler went on a week-long official visit to Italy that culminated on the 6th with a parade across the streets of Rome. This event provides the background for Scola’s film: while the whole city is involved with the celebrations, housewife Antonietta (Sofia Loren) and homosexual man Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) go about their quiet lives in the massive apartment complex where they reside. The director celebrates the encounter of these two souls by allowing them to take over, if only for a day, the magnificent space of Palazzo Federici, a masterpiece of early Italian Rationalist architecture designed by Mario De Renzi in 1931. The 440 apartments are organized around two main courtyards and connected by glass-encased staircases, seemingly contradictory architectural features that, conversely, manage to reconcile the idea of community with that of Fascism’s modernity. Scola recalls that while working on the film’s screenplay he scouted locations with his set designer, architect Luciano Ricceri. Palazzo Federici provided them with almost all the features they were looking for, such as a big courtyard that would create the atmosphere of a small town, of people knowing – and possibly spying on – each other. The majority of the film was shot on-location at Palazzo Federici, whose small balconies and rooftop terraces, however, proved inadequate for the key scene in which Antonietta mistakes Gabriele’s kindness for flirting. For this intimate moment, the set was moved to the tiled rooftop of the Eastman Institute of Odontology in Viale Regina Margherita. ✒Alberto Zambenedetti

82 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Ettore Scola Scene description: The tenants of Palazzo Federici storm out of the building to see Hitler and Mussolini Timecode for scene: 0:08:59 – 0:21:23

Images © 1977 Carlo Ponti

83

Inferno LOCATI O N

(1980)

Mincio Square, 00198

the second in dario argento’s supernatural gothic-horror cycle following the delirious baroque of Suspiria (1977), Inferno is a further exploration by the Italian horror maestro of his imaginatively designed cinematic world of fright. This scene is part of the film’s central section set in Rome, with other scenes set in New York and Freiburg. As the soundtrack plays a frantic prog rock version of Verdi’s patriotic hymn ‘Va’ pensiero’, subverting its original heavenly associations, Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) opens a letter and asks her taxi driver to take her through the driving rain to a library at Via dei Bagni. The library and location are fictional, and the heightened, stylish artifice creates a dreamlike environment which is submerged (‘bagni’ means baths) in hellish terror. The lighting casts a sickly blue in the darkness while indiscriminate red lights flash occasionally from the street outside. She gets out of the car and cuts her finger before ascending the steps to the infernal red glow from the library. The setting is Piazza Mincio, built in the 1910s with the aim of recalling Imperial Roman design but also befitting the bizarre architecture of Argento’s gothic films. The 1914 historical epic Cabiria had a scene set there, as well as Argento’s debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). It is situated in the posh part of town, Parioli, and the Piazza is home to both the South African and Bolivian embassies, as befitting the jetsetting milieu that tends to populate the world of the Italian giallo, or horror movie. ✒Louis Bayman

Photo © Danilo Enrietti (Flickr)

84 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Dario Argento Scene description: Sara enters the library to discover the secret of the three mothers Timecode for scene: 0:23:50 – 0:25:05

Images © 1980 Produzioni Intersound

85

MEMORY MAN w Text by

Eleanor Andrews

SPOTLI G HT

Nanni Moretti’s Rome in Caro Diario/Dear Diary (1993)

at the end of the seventeenth century,

wealthy young men travelled around Europe on the Grand Tour visiting the major cities of Italy, including Rome. The nineteenth century saw further developments in tourism, so that the beauty of natural locations was appreciated in addition to monuments, museums and artefacts. Postcards circulated the images of celebrated locations and buildings, and guidebooks, such as the famous Baedekers, became indispensable to the traveller. Nowadays what the tourist contemplates can be captured in photographs, home movies and social media as well as in feature films, and the city of Rome is no exception to this. Rome can be seen in a series of beautiful, moving postcards in films such as Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1954), where a montage of the most famous sights becomes a distillation of a visit. In contrast, there is the ‘insiders’ view of Rome which, ignoring the famous monuments, delights in the individual neighbourhoods, with their unique characteristics. One such ‘insider’ is Nanni Moretti, whose film Dear Diary is a

published by Intellect The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK T: +44 (0) 117 9589910 F: +44 (0) 117 9589911 E: [email protected]

86 World Film Locations | Rome

cinematic essay on contemporary Italy, shot in a docudrama style. Rather than simply telling the spectator about aspects of present-day Italian society through dialogue or voice-over, Moretti’s principal aim in Dear Diary is to show the audience, through the filter of his own perspective, the places that he enjoys, which are for him the quintessence of the city. His preference is for less immediately recognizable locations, slightly eccentric constructions and a variety of facades of buildings which, he informs the audience, are ‘the things he likes best of all’. On a hot, sunny day in August, the time when the majority of Romans flood out from the capital and head for the coast, or go to visit family in Lazio or Umbria, Moretti journeys around Rome on an iconic Vespa. The usual chaotic city traffic is absent in this holiday period as the scooter meanders along narrow lanes and broad boulevards, from one part of Rome to another, across bridges and through communities, each one representing a different phase in the development of the city, and each being populated by a different kind of Italian. Nevertheless, although a large part of the Rome that Moretti presents to the spectator is attractive and photogenic, it is not the visitor’s Rome of the Trevi Fountain, the Forum, St Peter’s Basilica and the Coliseum. Moretti’s favourite area is La Garbatella, and the film-maker shows the audience shots of the penthouses that he and his wife, Silvia Nono, dream of possessing one day. Based on the idea of a garden city for working-class people, this carefully planned area was designed in a variety of architectural styles. The residents have traditionally held left-wing views. By choosing La Garbatella as his preferred area of Rome, Moretti associates himself not only with the richness of the architecture, but also with the politics of the ordinary workers who were its original inhabitants.

Above and Opposite © 1993 Sacher Film/Banfilm /La Sept Cinéma/Rai Uno Radiotelevisione/Canal+

Although images of the Catholic church are everywhere in this city, the atheist Moretti omits these in the view of Rome he considers his own. His itinerary through Rome takes him at least twice a day across the Ponte Flaminio, a bridge built across the Tiber in the 1930s to provide an impressive entrance for traffic coming into the city from the north. Its construction was halted during World War II and the bridge was finally completed in 1951. Moretti’s preference for this bridge, despite its original connections with the period of Mussolini’s rule, suggests his political link with the anti-Fascist post-war Republic and a cinematic connection with the neo-realist period of Italian cinema. His interest in building projects takes him next to Spinaceto, a comparatively recently-built suburb of southern Rome, which has already acquired a bad reputation. Moretti reflects that ‘Escape from Spinaceto’ might be a good title for a film, drawing on the dystopian connotations which link this title to Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981). In this area Moretti speaks with a young inhabitant of the housing estate who For Moretti, Rome is sitting on a graffitirepresents more covered concrete wall. than history, Behind this youth is a patch of waste ground monuments and covered in weeds and tourism; it is about the people who live debris, with menacing tower blocks rising there, the places up in the background. they inhabit and the Although Moretti feels ordinary, everyday no connection here, as things that they do. he did in La Garbatella,

he is not prepared to dismiss this working-class neighbourhood. On arriving in Spinaceto, Moretti declares that it is not so bad after all. However, some spectators may perceive his comment to be ironic, because this is clearly a somewhat neglected urban development which is both physically and spiritually outside the central area, cut off by the vast Roman ring road. His next destination is Casal Palocco, a residential district between Rome and the sea. Here, Moretti questions a casually dressed middleaged resident about why so many Romans left the capital in the 1960s, a period when the city was so attractive, to live in quiet yet anonymous districts in the suburbs. This man represents everything that Moretti despises: watching videos instead of going to the cinema; eating takeaway pizzas instead of going to a convivial restaurant; wearing tracksuits and slippers instead of dressing properly. The cosiness and smugness of this area frightens Moretti more than the debris and graffiti that he witnessed in Spinaceto. If Moretti does not condemn the residents of Spinaceto for their lifestyle, he does reproach those who live in the leafy, comfort of Casal Palocco, where even the air seems tainted by their lavish way of life. In Moretti’s view, they form part of the generation which has abandoned the youthful ideals of the 1968 political movements. For Moretti, Rome represents more than history, monuments and tourism; it is about the people who live there, the places they inhabit and the ordinary, everyday things that they do. {

87

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maps are only to be taken as approximates

35

Villa Borghese

Vatican City

Castel Sant' Angelo

Pantheon Piazza Navona

37 Campo dè Fiori

32

33

Gianicolo Fori & Colosseo

34 Trastevere

published by Intellect The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK T: +44 (0) 117 9589910 F: +44 (0) 117 9589911 E: [email protected]

88 World Film Locations | Rome

Palatini

Aventino

ROME LOCATIONS SCENES 32-38

32. nostalgia/nostalghia (1983) Piazza del Campidoglio, 00186 page 90 33. the belly of an architect (1987) Altare della Patria, Piazza Venezia, 00186 page 92

Via Veneto

34 . my own private idaho (1991) Via Celio Vibenna, facing the Coliseum, 00184 page 94 35. dear diary/caro diario (1993) Corso di Francia, 00191 page 96 36. besieged (1998) Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, 00185, Quartiere Esquilino page 98

Quirinale

36

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38

San Giovanni in Laterano

38. titus (1999) Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Quadrato della Concordia, EUR page 102

EU R

( So

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37. the talented mr. ripley (1999) Piazza Mattei, 00186 page 100

Caracalla

89

Nostalgia/Nostalghia LOCATI O N

(1983)

Piazza del Campidoglio, 00186

the close collaboration between the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and the Italian poet Tonino Guerra in the writing of Nostalgia could not but leave the most indelible mark in the dramatic stage of Piazza del Campidoglio, the square located between the two summits of the Capitoline Hill. Possibly the most renowned of Rome’s fabled seven hills, the Capitoline symbolized the epicentre of ancient Rome’s power and has since played a fundamental political role for the city. The freed madman Domenico (Erland Josephson) delivers an intense speech to denounce the decadence of all mankind and the need for society to be united again. His speech is preceded, interposed and then followed by the protagonist’s (the poet Andrei Gorchakov) decision to keep his promise to Domenico and postpone a longed-for return to his homeland Russia and stay in Bagno Vignoni, before dying in the emptied thermal pool. The enormous equestrian statue of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (a 1981 copy of the original) on which Domenico stands and tragically sets himself on fire provides a central focus to the trapezoidal shape of the square which was re-designed by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century. The statue faces west, towards St Peter’s dome – which is visible in very long distance when the camera frames Domenico between the two statues of the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux. The camera also reveals the two opposite sets of lateral stairs and the imposing central flight, the Cordonata, from where Eugenia the translator at last arrives. However, similarly to other significant moments in the film (e.g. the scene of the Madonna del Parto, see MacGillivray 2002), the architectural layout of the square is manipulated by the director’s use of the camera’s field of view. In this sequence, long shots followed by dynamic sound editing (e.g. the distorted start and the abrupt stop of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy) succeed in creating an alienating and challenging change of perspective. ✒Carla Mereu Keating

90 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky Scene description: Standing on top of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, Domenico delivers an intense speech before setting himself on fire Timecode for scene: 1:38:23 – 1:41:08 / 1:43:41 – 1:48:20

Images © 1983 Producer Francesco Casati, for Rete Due TV RAI, in collaboration with Sovin Film

91

The Belly of an Architect LOCATI O N

(1987)

Altare Della Patria, Piazza Venezia, 00186

in the belly of an architect, Peter Greenaway’s most traditionally narrative film, American architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) travels with his wife Louisa (Chloe Webb) to Rome. There he will curate an exhibition on the eighteenth-century French visionary architect ÉtienneLouis Boullée that will be on display at Il Vittoriano monument. Nicknamed the typewriter and the wedding cake, its outsized shape and visibility make it one of the most conspicuous and controversial buildings in Rome. It was designed in 1885 to honour Victor Emmanuel II, the new king of a reunified Italy. Erected in Piazza Venezia, next to the Forum and just around the corner from the Capitol, it was not finished until 1925. It currently houses the tomb to the Unknown Soldier and its official name is Altare della Patria (Altar of the Nation). In Greenaway’s elaborate and orchestrated tour of major Roman sites, it becomes the battlefield where Kracklite, increasingly obsessed with a tumour in his stomach, struggles to keep both his exhibition and his wife from a young handsome architect. Kracklite is finally removed from the organization and does not attend the opening ceremony where the climax scene takes place. However, he secretly enters the monument from the back and witnesses from above how his pregnant wife cuts the ribbon and inaugurates the exhibition. She suddenly goes into labour and as we hear a baby cry, Kracklite lets himself fall. He lands on top of a car and dies. We are left with the doubt of whether he committed suicide overwhelmed by the downward spiralling chain of events, or because he felt a certain sense of fulfilment. ✒Helio San Miguel

92 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Peter Greenaway Scene description: Opening of the Étienne-Louis Boullée exhibition. Timecode for scene: 1:46:06 – 1:54:53

Images © 1987 Tangram Film/Mondial/SACIS

93

My Own Private Idaho LOCATI O N

(1991)

Via Celio Vibenna, facing the Coliseum, 00184

when river phoenix’s character Mike first falls into a narcoleptic fit on a deserted road in Idaho at the beginning of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the film’s time and place blur and lose focus. The film follows Mike and his friend and fellow hustler Scott (Keanu Reeves), on an erratic and vague journey first to Washington, Oregon, then back to Idaho, searching for Mike’s mother at her ex-work place, who provide the most recent forwarding address. ‘Rome. Roma? Rome … She’s in Rome, Italy,’ Mike tells Scott, though his overemphasis on the city seems less disbelief that his mother might be there than bemusement at this inconsistent spatial geography. This search for his roots takes Mike first to Piazza del Popolo, where he awakens from another narcoleptic fit, then to his mother’s family village, Settevene, and finally back to Rome. Here we see the boys, among others, cruising for clients alongside Via Celio Vibenna, with the back of the Coliseum rising up behind: Van Sant thus captures a typical, Grand Tour trajectory across Rome, from north (Piazza del Popolo was the typical, adorned and baroque entry point) to south, and the Coliseum. But the entrances and exits are masked, and the locations are re-written. Here the infamous cruising ground outside the Coliseum rewrites the national monument from a queer perspective, in a fleeting temporality. Van Sant cuts very quickly to the hotel room of Mike’s client, where, again, his narcolepsy cuts short the experience and transitions us erratically back to the United States. ✒Dom Holdaway

94 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Gus Van Sant Scene description: Hustling at the Coliseum Timecode for scene: 1:19:02 – 1:20:19

Images © 1991 New Line Cinema

95

dear diary/Caro Diario LOCATI O N

(1993)

Corso Di Francia, 00191

in this very short scene from his semi-autobiographical film Dear Diary, Italian film-maker and actor, Nanni Moretti, rides his iconic Vespa over the Ponte Flaminio (Flaminian Bridge). This bridge was built across the Tiber in the 1930s, to provide an imposing transit point for traffic entering the capital from the north. Its construction was halted during World War II and the bridge was finally completed in 1951. Originally it was to be called Ponte XXVIII Ottobre (28th October Bridge) in memory of the Fascist March on Rome in 1922. After World War II, the bridge was to be renamed Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge), but nowadays it is called after the road which leads into it, the Corso di Francia. A bridge allows not merely connection between one space and another, but also emphasizes the separation between these two spaces. In his essay ‘Bridge and Door’, sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel suggests that bridges are the zenith in human constructive achievement ‘freezing movement into a solid structure that commences from it and in which it terminates’ (Simmel 1997: 66). This is Moretti’s favourite bridge in Rome, despite its original connections with the Fascist period. He says in voice-over that he crosses it twice a day and this accentuates the connections between the various parts of Rome that he visits and their different histories. The brevity of the scene is typical of Moretti’s paratactic narrative structure, where he loosely and simply pieces together images and sketches to form a whole. ✒Eleanor Andrews

96 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Nanni Moretti Scene description: Nanni Moretti riding his Vespa across the Ponte Flaminio Timecode for scene: 0:08:09 – 0:08:36

Images © 1993 Sacher Film/Banfilm/La Sept Cinéma/Rai Uno Radiotelevisione/Canal+

97

Besieged LOCATI O N

(1998)

Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, 00185, Quartiere Esquilino

besieged tells the story of a white English pianist, Jason Kinsky (David Thewlis), who attempts to seduce his housemaid Shandurai (Thandie Newton), an African political refugee and medical student in Rome. It is mostly set in Vicolo del Bottino 8, in the flat where the novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote his famous novel, The Child of Pleasure (1889). Kinsky’s decadent apartment faces one side of the glamorous Spanish Steps, a landmark for tourists who come to visit the house where the English poet John Keats died in 1821, and the baroque Barcaccia Fountain, which was carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his father Pietro. When Kinsky expresses his love for Shandurai, she angrily refuses him, and reveals that she is married. When he tells her that he would do anything to make her love him, she tells him what she wants most is to see her husband freed from jail. Confused and exhausted, Shandurai later reaches Rome’s, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, where we see her physical repulsion for her insistent suitor when she throws up while looking for another apartment. Piazza Vittorio is a key symbol of immigration to Rome, and a stark contrast to Piazza di Spagna. It hosts multi-ethnic shops and a big market. Significantly, this piazza is the setting of a crucial novel about immigration to Italy, Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006), and lends its name to the most famous multicultural orchestra in Italy, the Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio. ✒Simone Brioni

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Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Scene description: Shandurai attempts to escape from Kinski in Rome’s multicultural plaza Timecode for scene: 0:28:30 – 0:30:27

Images © 1998 Massimo Cortesi

99

The Talented Mr. Ripley LOCATI O N

(1999)

Piazza Mattei, 00186

perhaps it is testament to Ripley’s uncanny criminal capacities, but the chances of a temporary American resident successfully speeding through the labyrinth of cobbled streets that make up the ghetto in Rome’s historic centre are, any confused tourist will tell you, the stuff of Hollywood’s imagination. The setting however conveys a Rome of old-world European class as seen by the American elite. In Anthony Minghella’s Hitchcockian adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, Ripley (Matt Damon) takes Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) home on his scooter while trying to evade discovery of the growing trail of murders that began as he killed her boyfriend in a rowing boat off the coast of Naples. Speeding past his hotel situated at Piazza Mattei (although the interiors were shot in the St Regis Grand Hotel in a different part of town), he notices the police waiting for him. Piazza Mattei is a small square noteworthy for its beautiful centrepiece known as the ‘Turtle Fountain’, for the bronze turtles that adorn it. Legend has it that the dissolute Duke Mattei ordered the fountain to be built overnight to win the approval of a local maiden’s father, and its odd iconography has intrigued ever since. Unlike most of Rome’s historic fountains this one was not built for a Pope, and in 1555 its Catholic patron was given free passage in and out of the ghetto when Rome’s Jewish population were confined to the area, where they have maintained a continuous presence to this day, the square standing just by Rome’s large synagogue and Jewish museum. ✒Louis Bayman

100 World Film Locations | Rome

Directed by Anthony Minghella Scene description: Ripley drops Marge off on his scooter and notices the police outside his home Timecode for scene: 1:30:56 – 1:32:10

Images © 1999 Miramax International/Paramount Pictures/Mirage

101

Titus LOCATI O N

(1999)

Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Quadrato della Concordia, EUR

a visually extravagant adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Taymor’s film was shot almost entirely on-location in Rome. Capitalizing on Dante Ferretti’s lavish production design and Milena Canonero’s Oscar-nominated costumes, the director adapted the grisly play into an eye-popping spectacle of massive proportions. It is only fitting that she chose to set several of the film’s key scenes in front of the grandiose Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a masterpiece of the simplified neoclassicism that characterized the architecture of the Fascist period. Designed by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario Romano, the 1943 building is often referred to as Colosseo Quadrato (Square Coliseum) for its use of stacked exedras and arches, which recall the iconic Flavian amphitheatre. Adorned with billowing strips of ominous black cloth, the Palazzo’s facade and steps furnish in Titus the backdrop for the coronation of power-hungry Saturninus (Alan Cumming) as the new Roman Emperor, the event that sets the wheels of Shakespeare’s bloody revenge tragedy into motion. Later Saturninus will marry Tamora (Jessica Lange), Queen of the Goths, who is brought to Rome as a prisoner by the general Titus (Anthony Hopkins) after a victorious ten-year campaign against her people. With the help of Tamora’s secret lover Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix), this unholy alliance brings death and destruction upon Titus’s family and allies. For Aaron’s famous soliloquy (Act 2, Scene 1), Taymor offers her audience the rare privilege of taking a stroll under the building’s colonnade. ✒Alberto Zambenedetti

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Directed by Julie Taymor Scene description: Saturninus is crowned new emperor of Rome Timecode for scene: 0:15:34 – 0:24:11

Images © 1999 Fox Searchlight Pictures/Clear Blue Sky Productions

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Cinecittà

w Text by

Carla Mereu

The Highs and Lows of the ‘Roman Heart’ of Italian Cinema

during the summer of 2012 a large banner hung outside the main entrance of the legendary Roman film-making complex which read ‘Cinecittà Okkupata’. In its heyday, the main entrance on Via Tuscolana No. 1055 was used by popular film stars, by prominent personalities of the film industry and by politicians – the maestranze (film workers) would have to access the studios from the less celebrated side entrances of Via di Torre Spaccata. The strikers were protesting against the management’s plans of disposing of part of the outdoor section of one of Europe’s oldest and largest film studios to private property developers. At the centre of the dispute were concerns around speculation which would aim to turn this site of historical, artistic and cultural importance into a commercial venture which had little to do with incentivizing cinema production. Unfortunately, it is not the first time in the studios’ 75-year history that Cinecittà workers gathered to protest against the fear of job losses, in the safeguard of the internationally recognized

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104 World Film Locations | Rome

expertise of Italian film set and costume designers. Nor is it the first time that Cinecittà has been hit by financial crisis and (political) speculation. Indeed the origins of the ‘Roman heart’ of Italian cinema are themselves intertwined with the financial predicament that the Italian film industry established in the late 1920s, and the creation of the studios in the second half of the 1930s might well be considered as the epitome of the uneasy relationship between private (industrial and property) interests and the political involvement of the government in the Italian, Roman-centric film industry. The birth of Cinecittà had links to the studios of the film company Cines, based in Via Vejo, nearby Porta San Giovanni, which perished in a fire in September 1935. The creation of a new cinemacity, immediately after the disaster, was largely supported by Luigi Freddi, recently appointed General Director of the Cinematography at the Ministry of Press and Propaganda, who had visited the Hollywood film studios in California a few years earlier. Carlo Roncoroni, property developer as well as owner of the burned down Cines Studios, was the largest investor in the project. The Friulian architect Gino Peressuti was appointed by Roncoroni to design the studios. In November 1935, Peressuti was sent on a ‘Grand Tour’ of the main film studios in Europe: Berlin, Paris, Vienna and London. Only two months later, on 29 January 1936, construction began in the south-east quadrant of the city, in a rural area called Quadraro. The decision to build the studios in this area was in response to the government’s aims of concentrating the entire process of filmmaking in an easily reachable, yet not central, location. The Quadraro, 7 km from the city centre, stood at the margins of the Fascist government’s urban development scheme for the Capital and

Opposite Protests by workers in 2012 / Below The Cleoptara set

Above © http://www.cinecittastudios.it Opposite © http://www.bbc.co.uk

had been recently served by the expanded tramline of STFER (Società delle Tramvie e Ferrovie Elettriche di Roma) which departed from the Capital’s main station Stazione Termini. According to Peressuti’s original layout, the imposing complex stretched over an area of 600,000 square metres and consisted of six main groups of buildings that included nine film studios (covering a total of 16,500 square metres); pre- and post-production rooms, such as state-of-the-art laboratories for sound and music recording, film editing and developing; laboratories for makeup, set and costume design; actors’ changing rooms; buildings designed for general services which gravitated around the main entrance and the central square (e.g. the direction, production offices, press and publicity rooms) and along Via di Torre Spaccata, all supplied with electricity, Cinecittà rose water (thanks to a tank to international tower 32 metres high) fame during the and phone lines. Streets 1950s and Rome and pathways were lined gained the epithet with green areas which of ‘Hollywood on tempered the rationalist style of the buildings. the Tiber’ due to Overall, Peressuti’s the large presence design aimed to combine of Hollywood film an austere aesthetic companies and the appearance with a strong glamorous stars practical organization, working at the and thus to convey in Roman studios. the buildings’ simplified

lines a sense of severity and efficiency. By this logic, Cinecittà’s features were a typical example of the architectural work produced during the Ventennio which perhaps more than other later impressive edifices (such as the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana or the Palazzo dei Congressi in the EUR [Esposizione Universale di Roma] District) responded to the ideals of unity and collaboration propagandized during these years by the regime. The construction of the studios employed approximately 1,200 workers over a period of fifteen months. On 21 April 1937 (the date recalling manifestly the legendary founding of Rome by Romolus), Cinecittà was inaugurated by Mussolini, accompanied by leading industrials and Fascist hierarchies. With Roncoroni’s death one year after the opening, the government became the only proprietor of the studios and in 1940 Luigi Freddi assumed the role of general director. In the same year, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the national film school) was moved from its provisional location in Via Foligno to the new purposely-built site on the same Via Tuscolana, across the road from Cinecittà. By this date, Freddi’s target to ‘support, control and incite’ national film production could be considered achieved. Little there was to indicate that less than three years later the studios would be used to round up civilians, deprived of a large part of its equipment, damaged by air raids and then used to shelter war refugees. Cinecittà rose to international fame during the 1950s and Rome gained the epithet of ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ due to the large presence of Hollywood film companies and the glamorous stars working at the Roman studios. In the 1960s and 1970s, together with the important work of the director Federico Fellini, it hosted the production of genre films, such as the neo-mythological films, and international co-productions. On the other hand, less attention has been given to discuss the serious crisis that hit Cinecittà in the 1980s, which resulted in the privatization of the studios and its use for television production; or to the fact that in the last ten years, with the exception of some high-profile historical productions, the studios have mainly become the set of Italian television series and adverts. Today, the demand is for the management to invest in the re-launch of the studios’ cinema activities and for the site to be preserved as a distinctive landmark of twentiethcentury Rome. { 105

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maps are only to be taken as approximates

43

Villa Borghese

44 Vatican City

Castel Sant' Angelo

Pantheon Piazza Navona

42 Campo dè Fiori Gianicolo Fori & Colosseo

45 Trastevere

41

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106 World Film Locations | Rome

Palatini

Aventino

39

ROME LOCATIONS SCENES 39-45

39. his secret life aka the ignorant fairies (2001) Gazometro, Ostiense, 00154 page 108 40. the last kiss/l’ultimo bacio (2001) The Parco delle Cascate, EUR page 110

Via Veneto

4 1. ocean’s twelve (2004) The ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’ Aeroporto di Roma, Fiumicino page 112 4 2. mid-august lunch (2008) Lungotevere Farnesina, 00186 page 114

Quirinale

4 3. nine (2009) Piazza del Popolo, 00187 page 116 4 4. the salt of life/ gianni e le donne (2011) Ara Pacis Fountain, Lungotevere in Augusta, 00186 page 118

San Giovanni in Laterano

45. the great beauty/ la grande bellezza (2013) Dell'Acqua Paola Fountain, Via Garibaldi, Janiculum Hill page 120

Caracalla

107

His Secret Life AKA The Ignorant Fairies LOCATI O N

(2001)

Gazometro, Ostiense, 00154

a doctor, antonia (margherita buy), is grieving her husband’s death in a car accident. Searching through his things in their well-furnished and lonely home she finds a painting, given to her husband with a dedication from his ‘ignorant fairy’. She tracks down the address of the mysterious gift-giver and drives out of the city’s medieval boundary walls, past the Pyramid monument that marks the southern entrance to the historical Rome and into the working-class district of Ostiense. She is travelling away from the comforts of bourgeois domesticity, visibly disorientated, while on the soundtrack an oriental-influenced dance track plays over her introduction to a multicultural Rome. Ostiense is dominated by the large Gazometro, a latenineteenth century structure of industrial design, and the area has nowadays a bohemian left-field character as artists and bar-goers rub shoulders with the market traders and workers that give the area its vibrant diversity. This film was the unexpected breakout hit of film-maker Ferzan Özpetek, who lives and sets most of his films in Rome and who is unique in Italian cultural life as an openly gay Turkish film-maker. The comedy features footage from the 2000 Rome Gay Pride march and embeds the traditional Italian values of family and popular community within the LGBTQ of Rome. It may not be much more politically radical than an average episode of Will and Grace, but its success marked a true turning point in the representation of gay characters in Italian cinema. ✒Louis Bayman

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Directed by Ferzan Özpetek Scene description: Antonia goes to the address of her dead husband's mysterious 'ignorant fairy' Timecode for scene: 0:16:19 – 0:18:06

Images © 2001 R&C Produzioni/Les Films Balenciaga

109

The Last Kiss /L’ultimo bacio LOCATI O N

(2001)

The Parco delle Cascate, EUR

the rome that we see behind the narrative of The Last Kiss is distinctly peripheral, showing the streets, parks and apartment blocks of areas such as Testaccio (where Carlo [Stefano Accorsi] and Giulia [Giovanna Mezzogiorno] live), Olgiata (where Giulia’s parents live), or Parioli (where Francesca lives). These settings reflect the comfortable middle-class lives of the late-twenties, young professional protagonists, and offer an accessible backdrop to the melodramatic events of their deeply troubled relationships. A contrasting, recurrent location is the Parco delle Cascate in the EUR neighbourhood, which is first used at the film’s beginning, where we see Carlo, Adriano, Alberto, Paolo and Marco standing in front of a series of waterfalls, celebrating the latter’s marriage and maturity. In a later sequence, Adriano, Alberto and Paolo return and shout again, only this time to release their anger and frustrations with their oppressive work and relationships. In this sequence, the natural background (greenery and waterfalls) marks an escape from their daily lives, and provides the opportunity and impetus to escape, as they decide to depart on a world tour. The scene ends with a time-lapse, longshot of EUR’s city buildings in front of them, where dawn brings commuters and workers into the same rhythm that the men have chosen to flee. Yet by situating it in this very park – where the nature was fundamentally fabricated, within a part of the city constructed under Fascism to reflect the ‘new’ Roman empire – Muccino is perhaps hinting that the escape itself is just as much a false salvation. ✒Dom Holdaway Photo © Blackcat (wikimedia commons)

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Directed by Gabriele Muccino Scene description: Emotional release beside the Laghetto, EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) Timecode for scene: 0:34:53 – 0:36:20

Images © 2001 Fandango, Medusa Film

111

Ocean’s 12 LOCATI O N

(2004)

The ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’ Aeroporto di Roma, Fiumicino

in a train station in paris earlier on in Ocean’s Twelve, two of the members of Danny Ocean’s (George Clooney) crew of thieves are talking about his girlfriend Tess. Linus (Matt Damon) begins to ask Rusty (Brad Pitt), ‘did you ever notice that Tess looks like …’ but Rusty interrupts him sharply, and tells him, mysteriously, never to ask that question. This is the beginning of the film’s mischievous metacinematic trick with the audience, whereby Tess, we are told, is a perfect doppelgänger of Julia Roberts, who, of course, is the actor behind her character. This becomes central later, when the gang’s attempts to steal the Fabergé Imperial Coronation Egg from the fictional ‘Galleria d’arte di Roma’ (whose frontage is filmed at the British School at Rome) are failing miserably. ‘Julia’ is transported in to do a ‘lookie-loo’, in other words, a lookalike diversion while the thieves snatch the egg. Tess’s arrival in Rome is shot at Fiumicino Airport, near Ostia. Following a rotated pan tracking the plane landing, Tess/Julia emerges from Terminal 1 (called ‘A’ until 2009) onto Via Generale Felice Santini, and is guided into a beautiful red Daimler. In the car, Tess completes the look with ‘A-list’ clothes, sunglasses and a cushion under her dress (at the time Roberts was pregnant with twins), while the other terminals of Fiumicino pass by outside the car windows. Ironically, even then we do not fully grasp the trick: it is not until a surprised hotel receptionist first announces ‘Julia Roberts’ that the con reveals itself, and the film’s fiction is playfully pierced with the real. ✒Dom Holdaway

Photo © Bartolomeo Gorgoglione (Panoramio)

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Directed by Steven Soderbergh Scene description: The arrival of ‘Julia’ at Fiumicino Timecode for scene: 1:19:20 – 1:21:17

Images © 2002 Warner Bros./Village Roadshow Pictures/Jerry Weintraub Productions

113

Mid-August Lunch/ Pranzo di Ferragosto LOCATI O N

(2008)

Lungotevere Farnesina, 00186 (nb. actually down from the street, on the river)

unlike the industrious north, Rome is according to Italian stereotypes thought of as a good place to find ways of taking it easy. But during the humid heat of mid-August the city slows down to a different gear, the continual noise and bustle stops as the native Romans shut up shop and depart for the country (although ever fewer afford to in these days of economic crisis). This is the setting to Gianni di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch, the debut for the director and star of this gentle comedy set on Ferragosto, the bank holiday which marks the centre of the summertime exodus. A middle-aged man who spends his days at home looking after his aging (but formidable) mother, Gianni is offered the chance to make good on his overdue debts by taking in three other elderly women for the holiday including the mothers of his doctor and landlord. This scene represents a brief, late-afternoon escape from their eccentric and infantilizing entrapment of Gianni to his condo as he rides out for supplies and takes a glass of wine with some people fishing by the Tiber. Normally lined by bars and clubs that pop up in the summer, the banks are here home instead to those few remaining in the eerily empty metropolis, happy to share in the early evening sociability. This charming film presents a Rome not seen even by many Romans, and continues the trend in modern Italian comedy of exploring the changed, makeshift conditions of family and community that once so structured the city’s life. ✒Louis Bayman

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Directed by Gianni Di Gregorio Scene description: Gianni gets supplies for his guests, and enjoys a beer with the men fishing by the river Timecode for scene: 1:00:00 – 1:02:15

Images © 2008 Archimede MiBAC

115

Nine LOCATI O N

(2009)

Piazza del Popolo, 00187

rob marshall’s nine is a playful ode to Federico Fellini and his 8½ (1963), based on the 1982 musical by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston. As well as a stellar cast of muses to Daniel Day Lewis’s tormented director Guido Contini (played by Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench and Sofia Loren), and cameos from notable Italian stars and directors (Martina Stella, Ricky Tognazzi, Elio Germano, Valerio Mastandrea), the film is teeming with whimsical homages to Fellini and his films. We glimpse ‘remade’ film posters, from ‘Il Vicolo’ (‘The Alley’), playing on La Strada/The Road, Fellini’s 1954 Oscar winner, to ‘La Donna moderna’ (‘The Modern Woman’) spied in the opening scene at Cinecittà, which mimics that of La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960). Behind this sprawling image of Nicole Kidman (as Anita Ekberg), we also see Teatro 5, Fellini’s favoured film studio in Cinecittà, where he infamously fabricated Via Veneto for La Dolce vita. Later, once Contini has fled his producers and driven into central Rome, we are offered a further nod to the maestro as his car approaches Piazza del Popolo. The sequence shows a guilty, imagined conversation between the director and his dead mother, cut between (wing-)mirrored close-ups and deep space compositions, with a trendy 1960s cafe in the blurred foreground and the Piazza spreading into the background. This northern part of Rome’s city centre was Fellini’s home, and by no shade of coincidence the camera faces south-east, pointing towards Via Margutta, where Fellini and Giulietta Masina lived; and towards the side of the Piazza, where Fellini’s favoured Canova Café still sits today. ✒Dom Holdaway

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Directed by Rob Marshall Scene description: Guido’s Rome and Fellini’s Rome, Piazza del Popolo Timecode for scene: 0:08:53 – 0:10:06

Images © 2009 Relativity Media/Marc Platt Productions/Lucamar

117

The Salt Of Life/ Gianni E Le Donne LOCATI O N

(2011)

Ara Pacis Fountain, Lungotevere in Augusta, 00186

the salt of life – a follow-up to director and star Gianni De Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (see page 114) – focuses on Gianni’s anxieties about ageing and his relationships with a variety of women including his wife, his daughter, a party-girl neighbour, old flames, as well as his formidable mother who is frittering away his inheritance on champagne and poker tournaments while he struggles on a basic pension. Mid-August Lunch was set largely within the confines of a single Rome apartment but The Salt of Life allows him to venture out into the city, in particular his neighbourhood of Trastevere. Towards the end of the film, Gianni leaves a family dinner to fetch some cigarettes and drops by his twentysomething neighbour Aylin (Aylin Prandi) to take her dog for a walk. He finds her hosting a party and before he can leave, she has offered him a potent-looking cocktail. Walking the streets with Aylin’s dog, Gianni quickly starts to feel the effects of the alcohol and wanders around in a drunken stupor, arriving at one of Rome’s newest fountains, outside the Ara Pacis Museum. Opened in the spring of 2006 and designed by architect Richard Meier, the museum was built to house the 2000-year-old ‘Altar of Augustan Peace’. The new structure has since aroused considerable controversy with the Roman mayor Gianni Alemanno declaring it aesthetically incompatible with the baroque architecture that surrounds it. ✒Pasquale Iannone

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Directed by Gianni Di Gregorio Scene description: A drunk Gianni takes his neighbour’s dog for an evening walk Timecode for scene: 1:26:00 – 1:28:00

Images © 2010 BiBi Film/Isaria Productions/Rai Cinema

119

The Great Beauty/ La Grande Bellezza LOCATI O N

(2013)

Dell'Acqua Paola Fountain, Via Garibaldi, Janiculum Hill

neapolitan film-maker Paolo Sorrentino is among contemporary cinema’s most unabashed stylists. His authorial stamp is unmistakable: a prowling, restless camera; striking, precise widescreen compositions; and a bold use of extra-diegetic music. In terms of narrative too, the director returns to the same handful of themes: the use and abuse of power, ageing masculinities and tragicomic twists of fate. His sixth feature The Great Beauty – like Fellini’s La Dolce vita/The Sweet Life (1960) – is a fresco of Roman high society as seen through the eyes of a flâneur-journalist. Sorrentinofavourite Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old Naples-born writer who has spent almost four decades savouring the Roman sweet life. Jep knows anybody who’s anybody in the Eternal City and makes a good living interviewing various prominent figures but laments having frittered away time at parties instead of dedicating himself to writing serious fiction. Before we meet Jep in a raucous rooftop party overlooking the Coliseum, Sorrentino presents an extraordinary pre-credits sequence shot on a peaceful, sun-drenched Janiculum Hill. As the camera glides past a variety of figures, the sound of David Lang’s ‘I Lie’ sung by an all-female choir can be heard coming from the spectacular Fontana dell’Acqua Paola. One of the first major fountains on the left bank of the Tiber and also known as ‘Il Fontanone’ (‘The Big Fountain’), it was built in 1610–12 and took its name from Pope Paul V. Its design was to inspire that of the Trevi Fountain. ✒Pasquale Iannone

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Directed by Paolo Sorrentino Scene description: Japanese tourists walk around Janiculum Hill while a female choir perform from the chapel. A tourist collapses Timecode for scene: Pre-credits sequence

Images © 2013 Indigo Film/Medusa Film/Babe Film/Pathe

121

SCREENING w ANCIENT ROME Text by

Alberto Zambenedetti

SPOTLI G HT

in the middle of cinecittà, the massive Via Tuscolana film and (now) television studio complex that Benito Mussolini inaugurated in 1937, sits another, smaller Rome. Made out of wooden trellises and papier mâché, scaffolding pipes and ropes, painted plaster and fiberglass, this colourful ghost town is the abandoned set for the short-lived HBO series Rome (2005–07), created by Bruno Heller, John Milius and William J. MacDonald. Over the course of two seasons, Rome chronicles the lives of soldiers Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) and their brush with power during the last days of the Republic. Sheltered from visitors’ eyes for copyright reasons, the mise en abyme of Rome in a studio lot is Cinecittà’s best-kept secret. This city-within-the-city celebrates and eulogizes two distinct yet interlaced eras in Italy’s long history: Ancient Rome, for which cinema has an endless fascination, and modern Italy, once a premier destination for global film production thanks to its natural sceneries, impeccably equipped studios and inexpensive labor force. At

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122 World Film Locations | Rome

its heyday in the 1960s, the fortress-like Cinecittà was even nicknamed ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ for the large number of international productions and stars it attracted. Many classics were shot here, including the most famous incarnations of Quo Vadis? (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and BenHur (William Wyler, 1959), which revived the peplum genre, a long-standing tradition in Italian cinema. Between 1957 and 1965, the national film industry churned out scores of Sword-and-Sandal emulators of Greco, Roman and Biblical settings. Capitalizing on the success of the big-budget foreign productions, these inexpensive historical epics starred Anglo-American bodybuilders (or Italians who Anglicized their names) in the role of Maciste, Ursus, Hercules, Samson and Goliath. Often shedding their togas for more musclerevealing loincloths, the heroes of these popular films rescued equally succinctly dressed damsels in distress from a variety of stop-motion animated, monstrous creatures. While in the mid-1960s the peplum genre was superseded by spaghetti westerns, shows like Rome demonstrate that the audience’s appetite for Ancient Rome is reportedly cyclical. In fact, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (1896) was first adapted for the cinema as early as 1913 by Enrico Guazzoni (Quo Vadis?), and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) appeared as a short film in 1907 (directed by Harry T. Morey, Sidney Olcott and Frank Rose). Most recently, Ben-Hur became a TV miniseries in 2010 (with Joseph Morgan in the titular role) and Quo Vadis? received the same treatment in 1985 (featuring Klaus Maria Brandauer as Nero). The allure of movies set in Ancient Rome are as resilient as their brawny heroes: in the silent era (1914–27), Maciste had his own cycle of films that took him all over the world

Opposite The Rome set at Cinecittà / Below Ben Hur (1959)

Above © 1959 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Opposite © Alberto Zambenedetti

to dispense justice by the power of his fists. Today, it is the slave-turned-hero Spartacus that gets revived by the eponymous TV miniseries created by Steven S. De Knight that puts appropriately oiled, strapping young actors in the arena to engage in gruesomely violent, CGI-enhanced fights. However, Spartacus: War of the Damned (2010) and Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (2011) lack the restraint of their defunct predecessor Rome. These new shows fail to take Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 namesake masterpiece as their blueprint, turning instead to the ruthless violence depicted by Ridley Scott in his blood-soaked Gladiator (2000), and, even worse, to the mind-numbing use of slowmotion pioneered by Zack Snyder in his GrecoPersian green-screen extravaganza 300 (2006), a hyper-stylized adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book series on the battle of Thermopylae. The peplum demonstrates that the historical, cultural and geographic remoteness of Ancient Rome has invited film-makers to take all sorts of poetic licences and departures from historical record. Moreover, this remoteness has allowed for a greater tolerance for titillating male and female nudity and a certain degree of permissiveness in the depiction of sexual behaviours. But while the silent era and the 1950s heroes ultimately kept their loincloths on, Tinto Brass (and Bob Guccione) pushed boundaries with the notorious Caligula (1979), in which a roguish Malcolm McDowell as the titular character shares the screen with thespian royalties Helen Mirren,

As the hundreds of titles set in Ancient Rome demonstrate, this dislocated, deterritorialized, often CGI setting is here to stay.

Peter O’Toole and Sir John Gielgud. This divisive film, famously despised by the late Roger Ebert, is possibly the most popular of all the many biopics that fictionalize the lives of Roman emperors. Seemingly best embodied by mercurial British actors, Nero and Claudius sit at the top of the list of rulers that are hardly celebrated for their righteousness in many film and TV productions, which span from Luigi Maggi’s 1909 Nero. Or the Fall of Rome to I, Claudius, to the 1976 mini-series starring Derek Jacobi as Claudius and John Hurt as Caligula. As the hundreds of titles set in Ancient Rome demonstrate, this dislocated, deterritorialized, often CGI setting is here to stay. The lure of emperors and gladiators, of back-room intrigues and brutal assassinations, of sizzling intercultural romances (of which Joseph L. Mankievicz’s 1963 Cleopatra is the urtext) extends well beyond the confines of Cinecittà and its hidden treasures. Its dramatic history provides endless plot twists and character types, including high-stakes situations, life-and-death scenarios, power-wielding lunatics, brave heroes, promiscuous traitors, and much more. In essence, Ancient Rome is the stuff of great dramatic action, as William Shakespeare knew well. His Roman tragedies have found their way to the screen many times, most notably in Ralph Fiennes’s recent Coriolanus (2011), Charlton Heston’s Anthony and Cleopatra (1972) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999). And while many great actors and directors have taken on The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, only the Taviani Brothers have been able to capture its complexity in their masterful Caesar Must Die (2012), in which the inmates of Rebibbia prison (a non-place like the abandoned sets of Rome) rehearse and perform the play for their families and friends. { 123

GO FURTHER

Recommended reading, useful websites and film availability

books Conversations with Fellini edited by Costanzo Costantini (Harcourt & Brace, 1995) Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia edited by Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas (British Film Institute Publishing, 1997; pp. 84–99) Roma, città aperta/Rome Open City by David Forgacs (British Film Institute, 2000) Rome in Cinema between Reality and Fiction   edited by Elisabetta Bruscolini (Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, 2003) Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome   by John David Rhodes (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) Cinematic Rome edited by Richard Wigley (Troubador, 2008) The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World by Peter Bondanella (The University of North Carolina Press Enduring Editions, 2009) Il Cinema a Roma: Guida alla storia e ai luoghi del cinema nella capitale by Flaminio Di Biagi (Palombi Editore, 2010)

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Scrittori inconvenienti: Essays on and by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gianni Celati edited by Armando Maggi and Rebecca West (Longo Angelo, 2010; Ravenna, pp. 25–50) Directory of World Cinema: Italy edited by Louis Bayman (Intellect, 2011) World Film Locations: Venice edited by Michael Piggott (Intellect, 2013) La Grande bellezza: Diario del film by Paolo Sorrentino (Feltrinelli, 2013) articles ‘Suggestioni d’antico: Dalla Passeggiata Archeologica a Porta San Sebastiano’ edited by the Associazione Culturale Mirabilia Urbis Cosmofilm/Elio di Rosa In Itinerari romani 5 (Collana di informazioni del Comune di Roma [Ufficio Turismo], 2008) ‘Andrei Tarkovsky’s Madonna del Parto’ by James MacGillivray In Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 11. 2 (2002), pp. 82–100. Capital City: Rome, 1870–2010 edited by Cristina Mazzoni. In Annali d’Italianistica. 28 (2010). online Cinecittà Studios http://www.cinecittastudios.it/en Rome, The Great Movie Set http://www.initaly.com/regions/latium/ romemoviealb.htm

CONTRIBUTORS Editor and contributing writer biographies

editor Gabriel Solomons is both a practising graphic designer and senior lecturer at the Bristol School of Creative Arts. Alongside working with design clients, he has been responsible for developing a number of trade publications that cover areas of film, design, fandom and fashion – all of which aim to further our understanding of collaborative practice and explore the wider influence of creativity in society. Alongside lecturing, he is currently innovation manager and book series editor at Intellect, a UK-based publisher specializing in the fields of creative practice and popular culture. His current projects include both editing and art directing the World Film Locations book series and Fan Phenomena, a book series that decodes icons of popular culture. He is Editor-in-chief of the film magazine The Big Picture, editor of the book World Film Locations: Los Angeles (Intellect, 2011) and is currently working on a book about Havana Street Style.

contributors Eleanor Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Italian and Course Leader for Film Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK where she teaches European Cinema. Her interest in Italian Cinema includes neo-realism, the spaghetti western and the work of the director Nanni Moretti. She has published chapters on family life and authorship in Moretti’s films. She has also worked on the Holocaust in film, as well as film, myth and the fairy tale. Dr Louis Bayman is Early Career Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. He specializes in Italian cinema and popular cinema. He has published the monograph The Operatic and the Everyday in Italian Film Melodrama with Edinburgh University Press (2014). He has co-edited the World Film

Locations: Sao Paulo volume (Intellect), and the Brazil and Italy volumes of the Directory of World Cinema series, as well as the collection of scholarly essays Popular Italian Cinema, and has written essays on a range of topics regarding aesthetics and popular cinema.  Cecilia Brioni is a PhD candidate in Italian at the University of Hull. She graduated in contemporary Italian history at the University of Pisa, and her MA thesis focused on female beauty standards in Italy and France during the interwar period. Her current research focuses on the beauty standards of young Italians from the end of World War II to 1977. Simone Brioni is Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Language Research, University of London. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, where he was Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Using cultural studies, translation studies and postcolonial theory, his work analyses the literary and cinematographic representation of migration and Italian colonialism. He edited the volumes Somalitalia (2012) and Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! (2012), which respectively contain the documentaries Aulò: Roma postcoloniale and La quarta via: Mogadiscio Italia, for which he was co-director and co-author. Dom Holdaway is Research Fellow in the area of cultural policy at the University of Warwick. His main research interest is film, and he has published on political engagement, crisis and the representation of the mafia in Italian film. He has also worked on space and urban studies, with particular emphasis on Rome, and he has co-edited a volume on Rome’s postmodernity. Pasquale Iannone is a film lecturer, writer and broadcaster. He teaches at the University of ➜ 125

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor and contributing writer biographies (continued)

Edinburgh and contributes regularly to Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and BBC Radio. He is currently working on a book on Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres for BFI/Palgrave. Carla Mereu Keating completed her PhD at the University of Reading (UK) with a thesis discussing the interplay between practices of film censorship and film translation in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. She has taught academic courses on film and European studies and has contributed to various publications on film history, censorship, ethnicity, dubbing and subtitling. She is currently working as a translator and on a monograph on the Italian dubbing industry. Helio San Miguel holds a PhD in Philosophy and an MFA in Film and TV Direction and Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He teaches film at the New School in New York City, and has written and lectured extensively about cinema. His areas of research are film theory and aesthetics, and western, Indian and Latin American cinemas. He is the editor of World Film Locations: Mumbai (Intellect, 2012), and co-editor of World Film Locations: Barcelona (Intellect, 2013) and El Nuevo Bollywood (Secuencias, no. 36, 2013). He has contributed, among others, to New Trends in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Intellect, 2014), Ciudades de cine (Cátedra, 2014), World Film Locations: Madrid (Intellect, 2012), The Cinema of Latin America (Wallflower Press, 2002) and Tierra en Trance (Alianza Editorial, 1998). Helio is also the writer and director of Blindness (2007), a 32-minute fiction film selected in over thirty festivals, including New Filmmakers New York and the European Film Festival.

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Dr Santiago Oyarzabal is research fellow and teaching assistant of film and Latin American history at the University of Warwick. He specialises on Argentine and Latin American film and is currently working on a monograph based on his PhD. Nicholas Page is a self-confessed cinephile from the English midlands but currently based in Rome, Italy. He attained a degree in software development before deciding to pursue a career in graphic design abroad. His main passion, however, remains cinema, which he feeds daily with an unhealthy dose of European arthouse cinema. He has had pieces published in The Independent and is a regular contributor to The Big Picture magazine. Most of his spare time is spent running a small online film community named The Corrierino, or else translating English subtitles for Italian films from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Michael Pigott is Assistant Professor of Video Art and Digital Media at the University of Warwick. He has published work on world cinema and new media, and is the editor of World Film Locations: Venice (Intellect, 2013) and author of Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Alberto Zambenedetti earned his P.D at New York University in 2012, and he is now Assistant Professor of Italian Cinema in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. His film criticism appears regularly on Gli Spietati, Italy’s premier online film magazine (www.spietati.it), and he has written numerous articles and book chapters on the relationship between film, landscap, and human mobility.  

filmography All films mentioned or featured in this book

300 (2006) 123 8 1/2 (1963) 28, 42, 51, 64, 65, 116 Accattone (1961) 7, 51, 54, 55, 68 American Tourist Abroad (1912) 48 An American in Rome/ Un Americano a Roma (1954) 31, 32, 33 Angels and Demons (2009) 7 Aniki-Bòbò (1942) 8 Anthony and Cleopatra (1972) 123 Bellissima (1951) 9, 11, 20, 21 Belly of an Architect, The (1987) 89, 92, 93 Ben Hur (1959) 6, 60, 122, 123 Besieged (1998) 49, 89, 98, 99 Bicycle Thieves/ Ladri Di Biciclette (1948) 11, 18, 19, 62, 69 Big Deal on Madonna Street AKA Persons Unknown/ Soliti Ignoti (1958) 31, 42, 43 Bird with the Crystal Plumage (197) 7, 84 Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1969) 49 Cabiria (1914) 84 Caesar Must Die (2012) 123 Caligula (1979) 123 Clash of Civilization over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) 98

Cleopatra (1963) 123 Conformist, The/ Il Conformist (1970) 71, 78, 79 Contempt/ Le Mèpris (1963) 51, 60, 61 Coriolanus (2011) 123 Danger/ Hatari! (1962) 60 Day in Court, A (1953) 32 Dear Diary (1993) 86, 89, 96, 97 Eat, Pray, Love (2010) 7 Eclipse, The/ L'Eclisse (1962) 7, 51, 56, 57 English Patient, The (1996) 49 Escape From New York (1981) 87 Eternal City, The (1915) 48 Eternal City, The (2008) 49 European Vacation (1985) 49 Facts of Murder, The/ Un Maledotto Imbroglio (1959) 31, 40, 41 Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) 48, 51, 66, 67 Girl in a Bikini/ Poveri Ma Belli (1957) 31, 36, 37 Girl Who Knew Too Much, The (1963) 71, 72, 73 Gladiator (2000) 123 Great Beauty, The/ La Grande Bellezza (2013) 6, 7, 107, 110, 111 Hawks and Sparrows (1966) 7 His Secret Life AKA The Ignorant Faries (2001) 107, 108, 109 Hudson Hawk (1991) 49 I Knew Her Well (1965) 71, 76, 77 I Vitelloni (1972) 28, 29 Il Bidone (1955) 31, 35, 35 Il Boom (1963) 51, 62, 63 Indescretion of an American Wife/ Stazione Termins (1953) 48 Inferno (1986) 71, 84, 85 Intervista (1987) 28 La Notte (1961) 42 Last Kiss, The/ L'Ultimo Baccio (2001) 107, 110, 111 Leopard, The (1963) 71, 74, 75

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Lizzie McGuire Movie, The (2003) 49 Love in the Street (1953) 69 Mamma Roma (1962) 7, 38, 51, 58, 59 Man in Love, A (1987) 49 Mid-August Lunch (2008) 7, 107, 114, 115, 118 Moon and the Stars, The (2003) 49 My Private Idaho (1991) 89, 94, 95 Nights of Cabiria/ Le Notti di Carbiria (1957) 29, 31, 32, 33 Nine (2009) 107, 116, 117 Nostalgia/ Nostalghia (1983) 89, 90, 91 Ocean's Twelve (1982) 7, 107, 112, 113 Once Upon a Crime (1992) 49 Ossessione (1943) 8 Paisà (1946) 38 Passionate Thief, The/ Risate Di Gioia (1960) 31, 46, 47 Portrait of a Lady, The (1996) 49 Purple Noon/ Plein Soleil (1960) 48, 51, 52, 53 Quo Vadis (1951) 6, 122 Rififi (1950) 42 Road, The/ La Strada (1954) 116 Roma (1972) 28, 29 Roman Holiday (1953) 6, 11, 26, 27, 48, 49, 68, 86 Rome, Open City/ Roma, città aperta (1945) 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 28 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone The (1968) 49 Rome (2005-2007) 122 Rome Adventure (1962) 48 Room in Rome (2010) 49 Salt of Life, The/ Gianni E le Donne (2011) 7, 107, 118, 119 Satyricon (1969) 29 September Affair (1950) 48 Shoeshine/ Sciuoscia (1946) 9, 11, 16, 17 Spartacus: Gods of the Arean (2010) 123 Spartacus: War of the Damned (2010) 123 Special Day, A/ Una Giornata Particolare (1977) 71, 82, 83 Suspiria (1977) 84 Sweet Life, The/ La Dolce Vita (1960), 6,29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 44, 45, 49, 80, 116, 120 Talented Mr. Ripely, The (1999) 49, 52, 89, 100, 101 Tenebrae (1982) 7 The Asphlat Jungle (1950) 42 The Great War (1959) 46 Three Coins in a Fountain (1954) 6, 48, 86 Titus (1999) 89, 102, 103, 123 To Rome With Love (2012) 7, 49 Umberto D (1952) 9, 11, 22, 23, 62 Voyage to Italy, Complete with Love (1958) 48 Watch Out Girls, I'm Coming (2008) 7 We All Loved Each Other So Much/ C'eavmo Tanto Amati (1974) 71, 80, 81 When in Rome (2010) 49 White Shiek, The/ Lo Sceicco Bianco (1952) 11, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 69 White Squadron, The/ Lo Squadrone Bianco (1936) 11, 12, 13

WORLD FILM LOCATIONS rome Rome is a city rich in history and culture and imbued with a realism and romanticism that has captured the imaginations of filmmakers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With over two and a half thousand years of continuing history, Rome has served as the setting for countless memorable films, creating a backdrop that spans all genres and emotions. World Film Locations: Rome takes the reader on a cinematic journey through the city with stops at key locations that include the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Via Veneto, Piazza del Popolo, Sant’Angelo Bridge and, of course, the Trevi Fountain, made famous world- wide in its appearances in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in the Fountain. A carefully selected compilation of forty-five key films set in Rome, including The Belly of an Architect, The Facts of Murder, The Bicycle Thief, Roman Holiday, and The Great Beauty, is complemented by essays that further examine the relationship between the city and cinema to provide an engaging, colourful, and insightful page-turning journey for both travellers and film buffs alike.

Cover (La Dolce Vita) and back cover (Eat Pray Love) images: Kobal

part of the world film locations series

World Film Locations Rome ISBN: 978-1-78320-200-3 eISBN: 978-1-78320-298-0

www.intellectbooks.com