Lights, Camera, Travel: Famous Italian Film Locations

From Rome to Venice and Naples to Turin, even Sicily to Abruzzo and everything in between... international cinema has always loved the Italian peninsula and over the years has made it a great open-air film set. The results are wonderful, the locations are breathtaking. Let’s visit some epic Italian settings in all their unique, unforgettable, and emotion-evoking beauty.

In the 1960s, the city of Rome was Hollywood on the Tiber. It housed and continues to be home to Cinecittà Studios - the undisputed star of the celluloid world. It was the golden age of Hollywood with movies like Quo Vadis and Cleopatra, both shot in Cinecittà Studios and inspired by ancient Rome. For the blockbuster Ben Hur starring Charlton Heston and directed by William Wyler, the Circus Maximus, where the amazing chariot race was filmed, was reconstructed based on the real site located between the Palatine and Aventine hills.

Roman Holiday, the comedy directed by William Wyler in 1953, shows us a shining and enchanting early 1950s Rome through whose streets the young Princess Anne (Audrey Hepburn) in disguise rides on the back of a Vespa driven by a charming reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). The scene in which the princess places her hand in the Mouth of Truth—the mouth in the face of a sculpted marble disc that was once part of a fountain and is now affixed to the wall of a medieval church—has made the site one of the most famous attractions in Rome. Legend has it that if someone puts their hand in the mouth and tells a lie, the mouth will bite off their hand.

Ridley Scott’s film The Gladiator made the Roman Colosseum known to all the inhabitants of the Earth, as if that publicity was needed. The scene of the protagonist’s dream of returning home from the war is shot in the prodigious countryside of the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany. In 2009, Ron Howard chose Rome for filming Angels and Demons, based on the book by Dan Brown and starring Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor. For Inferno, filming began in April 2015 in Venice and continued in Florence the same year. Woody Allen dedicated a message of love to the eternal city with To Rome with Love in 2012.

The recent Mission Impossible 7, filmed at the end of the first lockdown of 2020 with Tom Cruise launched on a FIAT 500, winds between Rome’s central Piazza Venezia and the Jewish Ghetto. The production announced that as many as 18 of the 35 million dollars of the film’s budget were spent in the city.

Agent 007 moved to Rome in 2015’s Spectre. After escaping from the Spectre’s meeting at the Palazzo Cadenza, Bond drives off in his prototype Aston Martin DB10 through the streets of Rome.  James is pursued by Hinx in his monstrous Jaguar, and the car chase was filmed in several different parts of Rome. One of the more notable locations is undoubtedly St. Peter’s Cathedral, which makes up the heart of the Vatican City. Vin Diesel filmed much of Fast and Furious X on the streets of the capital as well.

Venice is the perfect stage for The Tourist, which stars Angelina Jolie as an Interpol agent and Johnny Depp as an American visitor. Tuscany’s Val d’ Orcia and Pienza, near Siena, are the sites chosen by Anthony Minghella to film the nine-Academy-Award-winning The English Patient starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristine Scott Thomas, and Juliette Binoche. Cortona shines in the 2003 romantic comedy with Diane Lane, Under the Tuscan Sun. To escape her sorrow, a recently divorced writer buys a villa in this small town near Arezzo. After a quick flirt with Italian local Marcello, she ends up meeting an American writer on vacation.

The island of Ischia welcomed the cast of The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matt Damon. Next stop for the all-Italy locations in the film: Venice. Mel Gibson set his The Passion of the Christ in Matera, which with its millenary stones has enchanted visitors and artists from all over the world.

The elegant halls of the Reggia of Caserta, near Salerno, hosted among the marble columns, immense staircases, and magnificent frescoes Queen Padme Amidala—played by Natalie Portman—in 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The Leopard, a 1962 masterpiece by Luchino Visconti with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale has as its main sets the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia on the Roman Hills and the Palazzo Valguarnera Gangi in Palermo, Sicily.

The island location where Francis Ford Coppola filmed part of The Godfather series was also Sicily at the castle called Castello degli Schiavi near Catania, while part of The Postman with Massimo Troisi was shot on Salina Island, one of the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily.

Guess where you can find the most iconic location from Ocean’s 12?  Villa Erba, in Cernobbio, on the banks of Como Lake, just a few miles away from Clooney’s enchanting villa of Laglio!