Why Hollywood is obsessed with Italy

Rome, Venice, Capri — the list of locations for the new Netflix series, Ripley, reads like the recipe for a bucket-list trip through the best of Italy. Patricia Highsmith was inspired to write The Talented Mr Ripley, the book on which the series is based, during a holiday on the Amalfi Coast — and the new series looks set to inspire countless replica trips throughout Italy.

Of course, Italy has long been a star of the screen. Its ravishing landscapes, trapped-in-time cities and rich traditions make it a perfect fit for anything from Hollywood blockbusters to food documentaries.

“Italian landscapes have always been a unique attraction for international filmmakers,” says film historian Nicola Bassano. “Some of these locations have entered the imagination of millions of viewers around the world.”

The thing about Italy’s most beautiful bits, however, is that they tend to be full of other people who’ve been drawn to follow in the steps of the White Lotus cast, Sophia Loren or Tom Ripley himself.

What’s more, as Bassano notes, most foreign films about Italy “represent our country in a distorted way — something between the comic and the grotesque”. He puts it down to the influence of Federico Fellini’s Rome classic, La Dolce Vita, which gave viewers — who didn’t always realise it was a satire — an exaggerated view of the country.

Here’s how to see the most famous bits without becoming mere extras in the crowd — and how to glean authenticity in even the most overtouristed locations.

Rome 

From Roman Holiday to La Grande Bellezza, the Italian capital has long been a hit on the silver screen. “It has always been a symbol of beauty, mystery and Italian-style dolce vita,” says Bassano.

In Gladiator it was the all-powerful centre of an empire. In Bicycle Thieves and other Neorealist films, it was an impoverished, postwar shell of a city. Roman Holiday centred it as a tourist destination, and La Dolce Vita cemented it in all our heads as the sensual capital where anything goes.

Following in Hollywood’s footsteps can take you back in time. In Gladiator, the Colosseum took centre stage as Maximus Decimus Meridius, played by Russell Crowe, took his final revenge in a bloody battle.

Gladiatorial combat may not have been a thing since 404 CE, when it was abolished across the Roman Empire, but even 1,600 years on you can still get an idea of what went on with an underground tour of the Colosseum, running since 2021. While most of the tourists stay upstairs, you’ll plunge into the bowels of the building, through passageways where gladiators walked, past niches where wild animals were held and lift shafts through which they were catapulted up into the arena to fight to the death in front of up to 70,000 spectators. Nearly 2,000 years since the Colosseum was at its peak, it’s still an astonishingly visceral experience.

The Spanish Steps not only featured in a pivotal scene of Roman Holiday, in which Audrey Hepburn enjoyed a gelato with Gregory Peck, but also in The Talented Mr Ripley — the 1999 Hollywood adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, which starred Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Today, they’re always packed with tourists, and eating — yes, even a gelato — is strictly banned. Instead, sink into that vintage mood with a seat next door at Babington’s Tea Rooms, which has been serving tea and cakes since 1893. Or get a prime view of the steps from the Keats-Shelley House, a bijou museum dedicated to Italy’s influence on the Romantic poets.

Venice

Forget its reputation as the city of love; from Andrew Scott gliding down the Grand Canal on a vaporetto (water bus) in Ripley to Donald Sutherland’s fight to the death in Don’t Look Now, Venice has always been a top spot for thrillers. Although it’s one of the best-known cityscapes on the planet, La Serenissima [the most serene, a traditional nickname for Venice] has always kept its air of mystery, its canals shifting with every change of the light, and buildings disappearing as fog rolls in.

Start at Palazzo Grimani, where the denouement of Don’t Look Now was shot. Back then, in 1973, it was an abandoned mansion; today a museum, it’s as eerie as ever, with flaking 500-year-old frescoes in barely furnished rooms, and unframed paintings by grand masters perched on easels as if they’ve just been completed.

The Scuola Grande della Misericordia, which took centre stage in the Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp thriller The Tourist, isn’t usually open to visitors. Instead, head to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, decorated from floor to ceiling by artist Tintoretto and known as Venice’s Sistine Chapel. For extra movie points, make for the Lido — the city’s long sandbar island with sugar-soft beaches. Dirk Bogarde breathed his last here in Death in Venice; today, the Venice Film Festival revolves around the swanky Excelsior hotel, where you can grab a movie-themed drink overlooking the Adriatic.

Cinque Terre

For Bassano, there’s just one problem with seeing Italy on film: foreign directors tend to view it through a saccharine-slicked lens. “Continual references to food, noisy neighbourhood markets full of people gesticulating — the American vision of Italy is far from reality,” he says. “We get imprisoned in the same old stereotypes of the Bel Paese (beautiful country, a nickname used by Dante in the Divine Comedy) as a place to ‘eat, pray and love’.”

For a more authentic experience, he advises, head to Cinque Terre — the five famous cliff-wedged fishing villages surrounded by a national park in Liguria. Leonardo di Caprio floated around this coastline in Wolf of Wall Street, but for Bassano, the film that best typifies the area is Disney Pixar’s 2021 movie, Luca. Director Enrico Casarosa is Ligurian and spent childhood summers here.

2024 sees the reopening of the Via dell’Amore, the most famous of Cinque Terre’s many footpaths. Closed since a landslide in 2012, it winds around the cliff, connecting picture-perfect villages Riomaggiore and Manarola. Access — planned from July — will be by guided tour only, giving visitors background on Cinque Terre’s history and still tight-knit communities. And while most visitors crowd out the villages, head into the hills and you’ll find around 75 miles of panoramic footpaths crisscrossing the cliffsides.

You’ll also want to swap the cliche spritz for a glass of local wine. The villagers have spent the past 1,000 years terracing and taming the sheer cliffs to produce mineral, saline whites that bring Cinque Terre’s vertiginous landscapes to life with every sip. Try them on the clifftop at Riomaggiore’s A Pié de Ma, or with a slice of focaccia under fairy light-lit lemon trees at romantic A Piè de Campu.