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?

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