Cinecittà

Historic · Tuscolano (Via Tuscolana)Rome,Italy

A walled state film city built outside Rome in 1937, holding Europe's largest sound stage and, for six postwar years, a refugee camp.

Cinecittà opened in 1937 as a state-run film city, built in fifteen months on farmland outside Rome, and the motto over the gate said that cinema is the strongest weapon. It is a walled campus of low white buildings and sound stages. The largest of them is Teatro 5, nearly three thousand square metres under a fourteen-metre roof, with a tank of water sunk into the floor, and it is still the biggest sound stage in Europe. Fellini worked in it for thirty years, building the Rome of his films inside the studio rather than filming the real city outside. Between 1944 and 1950 no films were made here at all. The Allied authorities requisitioned the studios and turned them into a camp for people who had lost their homes. Italians bombed out of the cities, families of colonists returned from Libya, refugees from Trieste and Dalmatia, Jews coming back from the camps. They lived in the sound stages, divided from each other by pieces of film scenery. When the camp closed, American productions arrived to use the cheap crews and the big stages, and the studios spent a decade making Roman epics ten kilometres from Rome.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Ask what is open before you make the trip — the outdoor standing sets shut with no warning when a production needs them, and without them the visit is exhibitions only.
The entrance faces the metro station — the studios are a walled campus at the end of the line, and there is nothing else to see in the streets around them.
Take the guided route if one is running — the standing sets look like painted boards until somebody tells you which film each was built for and what was changed for the next one.

Things to do

1
Walk the ancient Rome street
The standing set of a Roman city runs for a couple of hundred metres, with temple fronts, shopfronts and an arch. Walk down the middle of it, then go to the end and look back. From the angle the camera uses the street looks like a real city, and from anywhere else you can see where each building front stops and the bare structure behind it begins.
2
Stand in the middle of Teatro 5
If the stage is open and nothing is built in it, go inside and stand in the middle. It is nearly three thousand square metres of empty floor under a fourteen-metre roof, with a water tank sunk into one part of it. Fellini refused to work anywhere else for three decades, and the size of this empty room is the reason.
3
Look at the costumes and the machines
The permanent exhibitions hold cameras, lights, drawings and racks of costumes made in the studio workshops. Look for the plaster and papier-maché props standing next to the metal ones: the studio's craft was knowing which cheap materials look like marble on film and which do not.