Cinecittà

Where it sits. Cinecittà occupies a walled forty-hectare site on Via Tuscolana about nine kilometres southeast of the centre of Rome, in the Don Bosco district, with its own stop at the end of Metro Line A. From the street it reads as a low, austere complex of ochre buildings behind a long perimeter wall — deliberately plain, because the architecture was never the point. Behind it stand around twenty sound stages, a set-building workshop, costume and prop stores, and a backlot large enough to hold a permanent ancient Roman street, a Renaissance Florentine quarter and a reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem at the same time.

The story behind it. The studio was built after fire destroyed the Cines lot in 1935, and it opened on 28 April 1937 as a state project under Mussolini, whose slogan for it — cinema as the strongest weapon — was mounted at the entrance. Gino Peressutti designed the original plan on rationalist lines, with stages arranged along orthogonal avenues. The Fascist propaganda purpose lasted only a few years. The Germans stripped equipment during the war, and from 1944 into 1950 the lot served as a camp for several thousand displaced people. What rescued it was arithmetic: American studios had large sums of lira revenue frozen inside Italy, and shooting in Rome was the legal way to spend it. The result was the era the trade press called Hollywood on the Tiber.

On screen. The list of productions made here is the reason the place matters. Quo Vadis (1951) and Roman Holiday (1953) came first; Ben-Hur (1959) built its chariot circus on the backlot as one of the largest sets ever constructed; Cleopatra (1963) relocated from Pinewood to Rome and nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century-Fox. Federico Fellini then made the studio his permanent workshop, treating Teatro 5 almost as a private address for 8½ (1963), Fellini Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord (1973) and Casanova — famously refusing to shoot a real sea and building one out of black plastic sheeting instead. In the modern era Martin Scorsese built the Five Points of Manhattan on the backlot for Gangs of New York (2002), Mel Gibson worked here for The Passion of the Christ (2004), and the HBO and BBC series Rome raised a vast standing city, part of which burned in a backlot fire in August 2007. Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope and The New Pope used a full-scale reproduction of the Sistine Chapel, and House of Gucci (2021) shot interiors here.

What you actually see today. The public entrance is the Cinecittà si Mostra exhibition, open since 2011, which is a genuine studio tour rather than a theme park. A guided route crosses the working lot to three permanent outdoor sets — the ancient Rome street built for the Rome series, a fifteenth-century Florence, and the Temple of Jerusalem — and their condition is honest: painted plaster, exposed scaffolding at the back, doorways that lead nowhere. Indoor galleries cover the studio's history, the Fellini archive, set and costume design, and the mechanics of production, with original drawings, models and equipment. Because the lot is still in daily use, individual stages and sets close without notice when a production needs them, and the itinerary varies from week to week.

Practical detail. Cinecittà station on Metro Line A leaves visitors within a minute of the gate, which makes this one of the easiest outlying sights in Rome to reach. The exhibition typically opens from mid-morning to early evening and closes one or two days a week, and the outdoor sets are only accessible on a guided tour, which runs in English at fixed times — booking the language slot ahead is the difference between walking the backlot and only seeing the galleries. Allow two to three hours. The sets are unshaded and the Roman summer afternoon on them is punishing; morning tours in July and August are markedly more comfortable.

Why it still works. Cinecittà is not a museum of a dead industry. It remains state-owned through Istituto Luce Cinecittà, and a large public investment programme is currently adding stages and post-production capacity, aimed at international series work that would otherwise go to Budapest or Prague. That gives the visit an unusual double character: the tour crosses a functioning industrial site where trucks are being loaded and crews are breaking for lunch, and the standing sets are maintained because they are periodically needed again, not because they are exhibits. Anyone who has spent a day at the Colosseum will find the ancient Rome backlot instructive for the opposite reason — it shows how much of the Rome we recognise from screens was invented here, at a manageable scale, in painted timber and plaster.