The beginnings of a history of Italian cinema
As early as 1896, the Lumière operators travelled to the large cities of northern Italy, where the diffusion of the first films was exponential. It was in Turin that the very first screening in the history of the country was organized.
Italian cinema quickly became one of the most prolific in Europe, if not the world. It was in Italy that the first historical films in costume were made, soon followed by the peplums. Quo Vadis (1913) and Cabiria (1914) are the two most important films of this period. In addition to being among the first feature films in history, the ambition and means used to make these films are beyond comprehension, and will inspire dozens of filmmakers such as David W. Griffith, who will soon shoot masterpieces such as Intolerance (1916) in the United States. Little by little, and with the rise of Mussolini's fascism, cinema will move closer to Rome. After the war, film production was concentrated around Cinecittà.
Cinecittà, apotheosis of Italian cinema
Created to breathe new energy into the national industry, but also to fight against the omnipresence of American films and to develop the production of Mussolini's propaganda films, Cinecittà had twenty-one film sets when it was founded in 1937, as well as infrastructures to accommodate the hundreds of technicians, stars, and workers who would soon make this cinematographic anthill swarm. After the war, American directors themselves invited themselves to Cinecittà to shoot the great peplums of the 1950s, such as Quo Vadis (1951), Ben Hur with Charlton Heston (1959) and Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor (1962). At the same time, the studios also hosted Fernandel's comedies, then the first westerns of Sergio Leone who shot For a Fistful of Dollars More in 1964, before continuing his long career between Hollywood and Italy. In the 1970s, television gradually took precedence over filming, but one director remained faithful to Cinecittà, and not the least, Federico Fellini. Nevertheless, the decline continues, and even if the 2000s see some prestigious shootings like Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) or the last season of the series Kaamelott (2009), the renowned productions are becoming rarer. In 2007, a gigantic fire destroyed a large part of the studios. Fortunately, the great sets like those of Ben Hur have been preserved until today. Not all of them are open to the public, but several exhibitions will also welcome you at the Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema, adjacent to the studios.
De Sica, Fellini, Rossellini, Visconti and others
There is no lack of books on the masters of Italian cinema. Here is a small panorama of the great names from the 1950s to today, through their films.
Vittorio De Sica. Born at the beginning of the century, Vittorio De Sica shot his first feature film Children are watching us in the seaside resort of Alassio, between 1943 and 1944. A human drama, the film already heralded the neorealist vein of the filmmaker behind The Bicycle Thief (1948), but also Miracle in Milan (1951), Umberto D (1952) and many others. His fables oppose poverty and wealth, and tell the story of the little people with all the poetry that makes the strength of the artist. The final scene of Miracle in Milan, shot on January 5, 1951 in Piazza Duomo with hundreds of actors and amateur extras, is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in Italian cinema. A film that will earn De Sica the Palme d'Or.
Roberto Rossellini. Like De Sica, his films focus on the human. Rome Open City (1945), Païsa (1946), Germany Year Zero (1948) are great examples, in addition to being poignant works. Rossellini is also responsible for Journey to Italy (1954), one of Ingrid Bergman's great films. If you had to see only one, why not discover Stromboli (1950), combining this vision with a trip to the island? You will be able to see, always with Ingrid Bergman, the streets of the villages, as well as a traditional fishing scene. A real dive into history.
Luchino Visconti. Visconti was also one of the co-founders of neo-realism, a genre he explored in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), with Alain Delon, Annie Girardot and Claudia Cardinale. Later, the filmmaker will depart from this trend to focus on the throes of the bourgeoisie and its decadence. Adapting literary works or theater, we owe him the famous Death in Venice (1971). Le Guépard (1963) and L'Étranger (1967) are also among the great literary adaptations of his career, always with grandiose casts.
Federico Fellini. Who doesn't know that name? And that very recognizable face, associated with the great names like Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, and many others? This master of Italian cinema has been the inspiration for several generations of filmmakers, himself active for nearly forty years. From White Cheick (1952) to La Voce della luna (1990), the treasures of his filmography are called La Dolce vita (1960), Eight and a half (1963), Amarcord (1973), or Casanova (1976). A great lover of Cinecittà, he shot most of his works there. The film Intervista (1987) is an unconcealed tribute to this mythical place. Fellini, a character larger than the screen, is also the subject of many documentaries and fictions, such as the musical Nine (2009).
Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is difficult to talk about Italian cinema without mentioning its most iconoclastic and controversial director, Pasolini. Born in 1922 and murdered in 1975, the filmmaker left behind a complex and diverse body of work. Oedipus King (1967), Theorem (1968), Salò or the 120 days of Sodom (1975), so many films with drawers where the past, the present and the future are intertwined to lead to difficult existential reflections, sometimes at the limits of madness. These are extremely interesting films for those who have the courage to dive into them. And surely one of the most analyzed filmmakers, so you'll have no trouble finding more advanced works on the subject.
We could spend an entire guidebook telling you about Sergio Leone, Roberto Benigni, Matteo Garrone, Nanni Moretti, or recent directors who redefine the standards of Italian cinema such as Alice Rohrwacher, Asia Argento, not to mention great actresses such as Monica Bellucci, Claudia Cardinale, who have made Italian cinema what it is today. But let's focus now on the mythical filming locations in Italy, in order to better prepare your stay.
What has become of Italian cinema today?
We could spend an entire guidebook telling you about Sergio Leone, Roberto Benigni, Dario Argento and the other great names of twentieth-century Italian cinema . But since this period of splendor, and even if we can consider that contemporary Italian cinema is no longer as renowned as the one that preceded it, there are many talented artists who continue to make it known internationally.
Nanni Moretti. The doyen of this new generation is undoubtedly Nanni Moretti. Born in Brunico, in the north of Italy, the filmmaker distinguished himself from the beginning by an autobiographical cinema between fiction and reality, anchored in the places where he grew up and where he often played the main roles. From the 1980s onwards, he accumulated successes with his feature films such as Sogni d'oro, which won the Grand Prix in Venice, La Messe est finie, which won the Silver Bear in Berlin, and Diary, which won the prize for direction at Cannes in 1994. In 2001, he won the Palme d'Or for The Son's Room, shot between Ancona, Menton and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. We can recognize in the film the restaurant Cocody Sun, still in operation today. Since the early 2000s, Nanni Moretti continues his career in a more punctual way but always with great success. His Habemus Papam caused a sensation in 2011, and his latest work, Towards a Bright Future, the ninth film of the director to be discovered on the Croisette, is in official selection at the Cannes 2023 festival.
Matteo Garrone. In a very different vein from Moretti, Matteo Garrone revealed himself to the press and the international community with Gomorra in 2008, Grand Prix du jury at Cannes. Adapted from Roberto Saviano's bestseller that denounced the exactions of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, the film is a violent testimony of the spiral that can lead the lives of various characters to organized crime. After this breakthrough, the director confirmed with Reality in 2012, a dive into the harsh world of reality TV, which also won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Most recently, Matteo Garrone directed a realistic and touching adaptation of Pinocchio, in which Roberto Benigni (who had been the unlucky interpreter of a much maligned Pinocchio in the 2000s) plays a touching Geppetto.
Alice Rohrwacher. It is clear that Italian women filmmakers are quite rare, compared to the large number of actresses who have managed to cross borders such as Claudia Cardinale, Monica Bellucci and many others. With the change of century, a new paradigm is perhaps taking place. Alice Rohrwacher, trained in Turin, has succeeded since 2011 and her Corpo Celeste in imposing Italian cinema to women on the Croisette. In art house cinemas around the world, people have thus jostled to discover Happy as Lazzaro, screenplay award at Cannes 2018. Oscillating between short and feature films, Alice Rohrwacher embodies the revival of an Italian cinema that is both aware of its neorealist past but also oriented towards the marvelous and the future.
Asia Argento. Writer, producer, actress, director and even DJ, Asia Argento is a jack-of-all-trades in contemporary Italian cinema. In front of the camera, she has worked with Olivier Assayas, Sofia Coppola, Abel Ferrara and Bertrand Bonnello. Behind the camera, she filmed Indochine or Marylin Manson's video clips, before shooting short and feature films. Among these, we invite you to discover Scarlet Diva (2000), a touching and autobiographical work about the difficult youth of this filmmaker. More recently, she was selected at the Cannes Film Festival in the category Un certain regard with L'Incomprise, released in 2014.
On the side of the series
The rise of television has not only allowed the advent of Mussolini, fortunately. Through this new medium, Italian cinema has also been able to find a new youth and expand its horizons by revisiting its own myths as with The Medici, Masters of Florence (2016-2019) or Leonardo (2021), or by declining on the small screen internationally the successes of the big, with Gomorra (2014-2021) on Netflix. Thriller and corruption are also on the menu of the series Suburra (2017-2020), adapted from the eponymous film released two years earlier. Finally, we recommend you to discover the Italian co-production of HBO, The Prodigious Friend, which will make you discover Italy of the 1950s through a complex plot as the channel producer of Game of Thrones or The Last of Us knows so well how to stage them.
But now let's take a look at the mythical filming locations in Italy, in order to better prepare your stay.
Movie sets at every corner
In Venice, you will not know where to turn your head, as each building will remind you of the great scenes of the many international films that have been made in the lakeside city. In fact, not one, but two James Bond movies were filmed in Venice, Moonraker in 1979 and Casino Royale in 2006, while Tom Hanks walked through St. Mark's Square several times in Inferno (2016), adapted from the book of the same name by Dan Brown. Rome is equally present on screen, with the grandiose party sequences in La Grande Bellezza (2013). The Trevi Fountain is one of those recurring settings, where couples regularly have to be pulled out of the water to re-enact Fellini's cult scene in La Dolce vita. And of course, the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica have been used many times in movies, like in Angels and Demons, also with Tom Hanks. In Sicily, it is the imprint of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather that is most present. Following in the footsteps of Michael Corleone, you will walk through the streets of Savoca, where some of the cult scenes of this classic were filmed. Would you rather continue your journey in the footsteps of Agent 007? Go to the north, on the shores of Lake Como, where many productions have also brought their crews. For example, the Villa del Balbianello was one of the key settings for Attack of the Clones (2002), thesecond episode of the Star Wars saga. Four years later, it was Daniel Craig and Eva Green's turn to relax there in Casino Royale, again. Proof if any were needed that this villa - accessible to the public - is a true haven of peace. A few kilometers away, the Balbiano villa hosted the filming of House of Gucci (2021) by Ridley Scott, where Lady Gaga stars with Al Pacino and Jared Leto.
Discover and experience cinema in Italy
Inaugurated in 1953, Turin's National Cinema Museum, housed in the Mole Antonelliana, is the largest institution of its kind in Europe. With collections exceeding 1,800,000 admissions, the museum is full of nuggets for film buffs, including the original idol used in Cabiria. Its panoramic elevator is simply spectacular.
But the country's most prestigious event is undoubtedly the Venice Film Festival, held every year on the Lido in late summer. The oldest festival in the world, the Mostra was founded in 1932 and celebrated its ninetieth anniversary in September 2022. It is one of the most critically acclaimed festivals, on par with Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Sundance. And its highest award, the Golden Lion, is one of the most coveted by filmmakers around the world. However, you will have to be patient if you want to walk the red carpet, because the seats are expensive for these previews. This does not prevent you from meeting the great names of the seventh art on a terrace or on the vaporetto that links the city to the Lido. A unique cinema experience, for a country that is just as unique.
