Cinecitta - Italian motion picture studios

The roller-coaster history of the legendary Italian studios

During the night of 26 September 1935, a terrible fire destroyed the Rome studios of Cines, then Italy's biggest film company. It was immediately decided to build a new "cinema city" called Cinecitta.

The creation of Cinecitta was part of a wide-ranging plan to promote the Italian cinema implemented by the Fascist regime from the beginning of the 1930s onwards. To encourage production, it was decided in 1931 to institute a state subsidy system whereby all Italian films would receive a 10 per cent bonus on their takings. In 1932 the Venice International Film Festival was established; it remains one of the most important such events in the world. In 1935 the film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, went into operation. The cinema was intended to promote the image of the regime both at home and abroad. Mussolini proclaimed the cinema to be "the strongest weapon".

After building work lasting a mere 475 days on a site near Rome, Cinecitta was inaugurated by Il Duce on 28 April 1937. Italy's replica of Hollywood was intended to mark the beginning of a new era in the Italian cinema. Between 1937 and 1939, some sixty films were made at the studios by some of Italy's finest directors and actors, from Alessandro Blasetti and Roberto Rossellini to Alida Valli and Vittorio DeSica. At the beginning of the 1940s, over 100 films a year were being made in Italy.

With the fall of Fascism in 1943, film production came to a halt. German troops smashed and looted the studios, which were bombed by the Allies the following year. At the end of the war, the only place where films could be shot was in the streets: this marked the beginning of the unique period of neorealism.

Hollywood-on-Tiber

But Cinecitta rose from the ashes and became a veritable legend, which from 1951 on spread from Italy throughout the world. With the help of a favourable exchange rate and cheap, high-quality labour, the Americans took over Cinecitta. The studios became an ideal place to shoot the superproductions with which Hollywood was trying to answer the challenge of television. The first director to come to Cinecitta from the United States was Henry King, who shot Prince of Foxes there with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles. Two years later Mervyn LeRoy made Quo Vadis? with Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr.

By the mid-1950s Cinecitta swarmed with big international stars like Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn and Jennifer Jones. Their high jinks, brawls and love affairs were the talk of the town. But American film-makers also gave Cinecitta a strong sense of professionalism and organization. It took Joseph L. Mankiewicz two weeks to shoot the triumph scene in Cleopatra. The chariot race in William Wyler's Ben Hur required three months' work. The Egyptian port of Alexandria was entirely reconstructed in Torre Astura, a few kilometres from Rome.

In all, Hollywood companies produced twenty-seven films at Cinecitta between 1950 and 1965, including such spectacular and unforgettable movies as Charles Vidor's A Farewell to Arms, William Wyler's Roman Holiday, Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire and King Vidor's War and Peace. It was the years of dolce vita enjoyed by top people in Hollywood on the Tiber that Federico Fellini immortalized in his 1960 film of the same name - a partly critical, partly affectionate portrait of a fleeting period of wild living.

The television era

In the mid-1960s, Cinecitta suddenly woke up to the fact that it was in the middle of a crisis. The Americans had pulled out, and the reign of the superproduction was over. Ever-mounting competition from television cut directors' ambitions down to size - labour costs were by then the same as in Hollywood. An epoch was drawing to a close: sets were dismantled, and dummy forums and temples carted away. As Cinecitta's debts spiralled out of control, making renovation impossible, it entered a dark period of its history, even though a number of prestigious films were still made there, including Fellini's Satyricon (1969) and City of Women (1980), and Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Ludwig (1972). These difficult years for Cinecitta partly coincided with a world crisis in the film industry.

An upturn came at the beginning of the 1980s following the sale of a huge piece of land owned by Cinecitta. In 1983 Sergio Leone shot Once upon a Time in America, and in 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci recreated the Beijing of the interwar years for The Last Emperor (which won nine Academy Awards). Non-Italian film-makers started coming back to Cinecitta. Johannes Schaaf's Momo was made there, as was Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose. Fellini, who had always felt at home in Cinecitta, paid a movingly melancholy tribute to the studios with his 1987 film, Intervista.

Down the years Cinecitta has changed considerably. Television companies now occupy its biggest stages, from which live shows and quiz games are beamed to millions of households. And teenagers, whose knowledge of the cinema derives mainly from their video recorders, queue up at its gates in the hope of making a career in television.

Francesco Bono, an Italian film critic, is a specialist in the cinema of northern and central Europe. Among his published works are Dansk Film (1993, "Danish Film") and (as co-editor) Nordic Television - History, Politics and Aesthetics (1994).

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