World Film Locations: Rome

by Gabriel Solomons (Editor)

Overview

This volume of the World Film Locations series explores the city of Rome, 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 worldwide 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-six key films set in Rome, including The Belly of an Architect, The Facts of Murder, The Bicycle Thief, Roman Holiday, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, is complemented by essays that further examine the relationship between the city and cinema to provide an engaging, colorful, and insightful page-turning journey for both travelers and film buffs alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783202003
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	05/15/2014
Series:	World Film Locations
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Gabriel Solomons is a senior lecturer at the Bristol School of Creative Arts. He is series editor of World Film Locations and editor of World Film Locations: Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

World Film Locations Rome

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By Gabriel Solomons

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-298-0

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CHAPTER 1

ROME

City of the Imagination

Text by PASOUALE IANNONE

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 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 bettezza/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 high-profile 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 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 to celebrate twenty years of Fascist rule in 1942. It remained unfinished until the post-war period when modern structures were built to stand alongside those from the Fascist era. Michelangelo Antonioni, never one to choose locations merely as backdrop to the action, filmed one of the most 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?

CHAPTER 2

SPOTLIGHT

NEO-REALIST ROME

The Gritty Side of the Eternal City

Text by HELIO SAN MIGUEL

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-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 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 dissonant, and also serves as a poignant reminder that a storied past does not guarantee a bright future. In Sciuscià/Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) the Palace of Justice is the place where the 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.

THE WHITE SQUADRON/LO SQUADRONE BIANCO (1936)

LOCATION

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. [right arrow] Simone Brioni

ROME, OPEN CITY/ ROMA,CITTÀ APERTA (1945)

LOCATION

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 fiance (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 working-class neighbourhood which took an active part in the anti-Fascist movement. [right arrow] Eleanor Andrews

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Rome: City of the Imagination
Pasquale Iannone

 

Neo-realist Rome: The Gritty Side of the Eternal City

Helio San Miguel

 

Scenes 1-8

1936-1953

Fellini’s Rome

Louis Bayman

Scenes 9-16

1954-1960

Roman Holidays: Rome as an International Destination On-screen

Alberto Zambenedetti

Scenes 17-24

1960-1963

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

Nicholas Page

Scenes 25-31

1963-1980

Memory Man: Nanni Moretti’s Rome in Cairo Diario/Dear Diary (1993)

Eleanor Andrews

Scenes 32-38

1983-1999

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

Carla Mereu

Scenes 39-45

2001-2013

Screening Ancient Rome

Alberto Zambenedetti

Backpages

Resources

Contributor Bios

Filmography