The 40 Best Films Set in Italy

Italy is the quintessential cinematic setting. A set capable of evoking history, beauty, and drama. Of course, there is the iconic image, the “dolce vita” postcard that the world loves—and you will find the masterpieces that built that myth here. But this guide is also a counter-mapping. A journey into a different, complex, and often contradictory Italy.

True Italian cinema, the kind that defined the very concept of “art cinema” and influenced generations of filmmakers, was born in the streets. The founding act of modern auteur cinema, Neorealism, was not an aesthetic, but a productive necessity. Facing destroyed studios, directors were forced to point their cameras at reality.

This is not a simple list, but an alternative geography of the country. It is a path that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most courageous independent productions. A territory made of livid Roman slums, alienating industrial landscapes, and magical countryside. It is a “beautiful and lost” Italy, captured only by the stubborn vision of these authors.

Foundations. Neorealism as an Act of Environmental Resistance

Neorealism is not “independent” in the modern sense of the term, but it is in its foundational spirit. It was a total break from the dominance of producers and the polished aesthetics of regime-era cinema. It was a cinema born “from the street,” where the location was not a choice, but the only possible truth. As critic André Bazin observed, it was a cinema with “no more sets,” and in this absence of artifice, reality itself became pure cinema. The revolutionary choice to shoot in real locations, often devastated by the war, using non-professional actors, created an indissoluble bond between Italian arthouse cinema and its setting. Post-war Italy is the film.

Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945)

During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, a Resistance engineer tries to escape the Gestapo. He is aided by a Catholic priest, Don Pietro, and the courageous Pina, who is engaged to another partisan. Their struggle becomes woven into the fabric of a city under siege.

In this seminal masterpiece, Roberto Rossellini doesn’t use Rome as a backdrop: he transforms it into the main character. Filmed among the still-warm rubble of 1945, the film turns the devastated streets and bombed-out buildings into a theater of agony and hope. The urban setting is a moral labyrinth where resistance and betrayal play out. Rossellini rejects the monumental image of the Eternal City to film its popular, wounded soul, transforming real locations into an ethical stage.

Paisà (Paisan) (1946)

Structured in six independent episodes, the film follows the advance of Allied troops in Italy, from Sicily to the Po Delta. Each episode depicts the often tragic or impossible encounter between Italian culture and the American soldiers, showing the liberation of the country.

Paisà is a literal mapping of History. Rossellini takes his neorealist aesthetic outside the capital and applies it to the entire boot. From the ruins of Sicily to the landing in Naples, from the fighting in an Apennine monastery to the marshes of the Po, the setting is the true protagonist. The film is a historical road movie that documents not only the liberation but the culture-clash between two worlds, using the Italian landscape as a mute witness to tragedy and human complexity.

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948)

In post-war Rome, Antonio Ricci finally finds a job as a bill-poster, but he needs a bicycle to do it. When it is stolen, he begins a desperate search across the city with his son Bruno, descending into an odyssey of humiliation and poverty.

Vittorio De Sica uses the Roman setting not for its monuments, but for its geography of desperation. The film is an existential pursuit that takes us from the Porta Portese market, where stolen bicycles are dismantled, to the anonymous apartment blocks of the periphery. The vastness of the city, filmed with a documentary yet lyrical gaze, only amplifies the protagonist’s loneliness and powerlessness. Rome is an indifferent adversary, a labyrinth that swallows the poor.

Umberto D. (1952)

Umberto Domenico Ferrari is an elderly pensioner who can no longer afford to pay the rent for his room in Rome. With only his small dog Flike for company, he desperately tries to find money and dignity, clashing with the total indifference of the new bourgeois society.

Considered by many to be the final chapter of classic Neorealism, De Sica’s film paints a picture of “modern senile loneliness.” The setting is a Rome already racing toward the economic boom, an indifferent city that no longer has room for poverty or old age. The analysis of space is ruthless: from the dilapidated interiors of the boarding house, where the landlady rents rooms by the hour, to the empty avenues Umberto walks in search of charity. It is the portrait of a man who becomes invisible in his own urban landscape.

The Province and the Soul. The Post-War Masters

Once the immediate urgency of the rubble had passed, the great masters of 1950s Italian cinema began to use setting to explore the psyche. Italy was no longer just a wounded body showing its scars; it became a state of the soul. The focus shifted from collective survival to the individual’s moral paralysis. The setting becomes the objective correlative of aimlessness (Fellini’s province), spiritual searching (the roads of La Strada), or marital crisis (Rossellini’s ancient landscape).

I Vitelloni (1953)

Five young men in a small provincial town on the Adriatic coast drift through their lives between cafés, billiards, and vain dreams of escape. Fausto, the leader, is a seducer forced into a shotgun wedding. Moraldo, the youngest, is the only one who observes and meditates on escape.

Fellini defines the archetype of the Italian “province” here. The setting, an unnamed Rimini, is an existential limbo. The characters, as the narrator says, “never cross the borders” of their town. The analysis of the landscape is crucial: the winter beach, deserted and windswept, the empty cafés, and the nocturnal pier become the perfect metaphor for their moral paralysis, their youth wasted in an eternal present with no future.

La Strada (1954)

The young and naive Gelsomina is sold by her mother to Zampanò, a brutish street performer who breaks chains with his chest. The two travel on a rickety three-wheeler across rural Italy, encountering another artist, a tightrope walker called “il Matto” (the Fool).

Fellini leaves the province to film an itinerant Italy. The setting is not a city, but the road itself. It is an archaic, poor, rural, almost pre-industrial Italy that seems to exist outside of time. In this sparse and almost mythical landscape, Fellini stages a spiritual drama, a parable about loneliness, grace, and cruelty. The Italian landscape, made of empty squares, convents, and desolate countryside, becomes the stage for a neorealist fable.

Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy) (1954)

Katherine and Alex Joyce, a cultured and wealthy English couple, arrive in Naples to sell an inherited villa. The trip exposes the aridity of their marriage. Separated and bored, they explore the surroundings: Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri, clashing with a radically different culture.

A fundamental film that anticipated and influenced the French New Wave. Rossellini uses the Campanian landscape as an emotional catalyst. Italy, with its deafening mix of life (the chaotic crowds of Naples) and death (the ruins of Pompeii, the petrified bodies of lovers), forces the Nordic couple to confront their own emotional emptiness. The setting is not a backdrop, but a spiritual mirror that reflects their crisis and, perhaps, offers a chance for redemption.

Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) (1957)

Cabiria is a naive and dreamy Roman prostitute, constantly betrayed and robbed, yet unable to lose her faith in love. She lives in a shack on the outskirts and wanders Rome in search of a miracle or a man to save her.

Fellini returns to Rome, but carefully avoids the center and the postcard image. Cabiria’s setting is that of the desolate peripheries, the “archaeological walks,” and the barren fields. It is a marginal landscape, suspended between the ancient (the ruins) and the degraded modern (the shacks). This stark scenery, which Cabiria crosses with her indestructible innocence, becomes a metaphysical place, a stage suspended between the sacred (the pilgrimage to the Divino Amore) and the profane (the street).

Geographies of Alienation. The Modernist Landscape

With the tumultuous arrival of the economic boom in the 1960s, the Italian setting in arthouse cinema undergoes a radical transformation. The urgency of reconstruction gives way to the analysis of incommunicability amid opulence. Michelangelo Antonioni, in particular, becomes the seismograph of this mutation. He uses the new modern architecture, industrial landscapes, and arid islands not to reflect an emotion, but to film the absence of it. For Antonioni, the setting is the emotional void made visible: the Italy of the “miracle” is a desert.

L’Avventura (1960)

During a yacht trip to the Aeolian Islands, a group of wealthy bourgeois disembarks on a deserted island. Anna, one of the women, mysteriously disappears. Her lover, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, begin to search for her, but soon forget Anna and start a relationship.

The setting is the true engine of the film. The arid, primordial island of Lisca Bianca literally “swallows” the character of Anna. Her disappearance is not a mystery to be solved, but an existential fact. The Sicilian landscape, empty, sun-drenched, and petrified, perfectly reflects the emotional aridity of the characters, their inability to feel genuine emotions. The “adventure” of the title is not the search, but the void that takes its place.

L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962)

Vittoria, a young translator, breaks off a suffocating relationship. She begins to frequent the Rome Stock Exchange for her mother and there meets Piero, a young, cynical stockbroker. The two begin a hesitant relationship, destined to fail.

Here Antonioni chooses a Rome that is unrecognizable: the EUR district. The metaphysical, cold, and monumental architecture (designed during the fascist era) becomes the symbol of the new Italy of finance and alienation. The film contrasts the dehumanizing chaos of the Stock Exchange (a temple of materialism) with the geometric silences of EUR. The famous ending, a seven-minute sequence in which the protagonists fail to show up for their meeting and the camera films only empty objects and spaces, marks the victory of the setting over humanity.

Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) (1964)

Giuliana, the neurotic wife of an industrial manager, lives in the desolate industrial landscape of Ravenna. Suffering from psychological trauma, she wanders among the factories, chemical fumes, and toxic fogs, searching for an emotional connection she finds neither in her husband nor her lover.

Antonioni’s first color film is a masterpiece of the psychological use of setting. The director manipulates the colors of the landscape: he paints the grass, colors the smoke, accentuates the grays. The industrial pollution of Ravenna is not just a social critique; it is the psychological landscape of Giuliana’s neurosis. The Italy of the economic boom is shown as a toxic environment, both physically and mentally, a “red desert” of alienation and anguish.

Pasolini. The Sacred Topography of the Borgate and the Souths of the World

Pier Paolo Pasolini offers a vision of Italy that is radically opposed to Antonioni’s. If Antonioni films the void of bourgeois modernity, Pasolini rejects that modernity outright. He seeks an archaic, pre-industrial, and “sacred” authenticity in the most rejected and forgotten areas of the nation: the sub-proletarian borgate of Rome and the peasant South, seen as a relic of a pre-consumerist world. His settings are “a force from the Past.” Pasolini creates a unique visual short-circuit, using sacred music over images of decay, elevating the sub-proletariat to a mythical and tragic subject.

Accattone (1961)

Vittorio, known as “Accattone,” is a pimp who lives by his wits in the degradation of the Roman borgata. When his prostitute ends up in prison, he finds himself penniless. He tries to change his life for the love of an innocent girl, Stella, but his destiny is sealed.

Pasolini’s debut is a visual slap in the face. The setting is the Pigneto borgata in Rome. Pasolini films this “no man’s land”—a landscape suspended between the ancient ruins of the aqueduct and the new anonymous high-rises—like a Dantesque inferno. By using Bach’s music over images of misery and brutality, Pasolini sanctifies the landscape of decay and transforms his characters into Christ-like figures in reverse.

Mamma Roma (1962)

Mamma Roma is a former prostitute who tries to build a new life and achieve petty-bourgeois status for the sake of her teenage son, Ettore. She moves from the shantytowns to an apartment in a new working-class neighborhood, dreaming of a better future for him.

The film maps the failed migration from the sub-proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie. The setting is crucial: the film moves from the shacks to the new INA-Casa housing projects, a symbol of the dreamed-of modernity. But the architecture of these new buildings proves to be just as alienating. Pasolini uses the urban landscape tragically: Mamma Roma’s dream of redemption shatters against the anonymity of the apartment blocks, and the ending, with Ettore “crucified” on a restraint bed, is a powerful indictment of the new Italy.

Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) (1964)

The film is a faithful and austere transposition of the Gospel of Matthew, from the birth of Jesus to his crucifixion and resurrection. Pasolini uses non-professional actors, often local peasants, to play the roles of Christ and the apostles.

This is a stroke of geographic genius. For his Palestine, Pasolini rejects Rome and chooses Southern Italy, specifically Matera. At the time, the Sassi di Matera were considered the “shame of Italy,” a place of extreme poverty. Pasolini saw in that biblical, archaic, and untouched landscape, and in the sun-weathered faces of the Lucanian peasants, the authenticity he was looking for. The setting of Matera gives the film a sacred, documentary realism, transforming a place of misery into a universal set.

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) (1975)

During the final days of the Republic of Salò, four fascist libertines kidnap a group of young boys and girls. They lock them in an isolated villa on Lake Garda and subject them to a set of rules involving psychological, sexual, and physical torture.

Pasolini’s final, testamentary, and most extreme film. The setting is the Republic of Salò, but it is a closed, claustrophobic setting. The isolated villa becomes a chilling allegory for Power. For Pasolini, historical fascism is just a metaphor for the new power, that of consumerism, which transforms bodies into objects and sex into a commodity. The external Italy no longer exists; all that remains is this orderly inferno, a theater where violence is the norm and architecture becomes an accomplice to sadism.

Underground Italy. Politics, Genre, and the Avant-Garde (1960-1980)

Beyond the great and recognized masters, the 1960s and 1970s saw the flourishing of an independent, political, and “wild” Italian cinema. It was a period of extreme politicization and formal experimentation. The monolithic Italy of Neorealism no longer existed. Multiple “underground” Italys existed: the paranoid and grotesque Italy of power (Petri), the psychological and formal one (Bertolucci), and the totally deconstructed one of the pure avant-Garde, which used Italy as an archive of images to be dismantled.

Il Conformista (The Conformist) (1970)

Marcello Clerici is a man obsessed with the desire to conform, to be “normal,” to erase a childhood trauma. During the Fascist regime, he marries a mediocre woman and accepts an assignment from the secret police: to go to Paris and assassinate his former anti-fascist professor.

Bernardo Bertolucci uses the settings of Rome and Paris in an expressionistic way. The fascist architecture of Rome, particularly the EUR, is not filmed with Antonioni’s alienated gaze, but as a metaphysical nightmare. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography sculpts the spaces, both the bourgeois interiors and the monumental exteriors, as a psychological prison. The setting is not real; it is the protagonist’s twisted mental state, a labyrinth of shadows and light that visualizes his desire for conformity.

Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) (1970)

On the day of his promotion to head of the political division, a police commissioner (known as “il Dottore”) murders his mistress. Convinced of his own impunity, he deliberately plants clues at the crime scene to test how far the power he embodies will protect him.

Elio Petri’s masterpiece is a “tragic farce” about impunity. The Roman setting is fundamental. Petri uses spaces grotesquely: Rome is not the city of history, but a labyrinth of suffocating police offices, labyrinthine interrogation rooms, and kitsch apartments. The architecture of power (the police headquarters, the Ministry) is shown as a self-referential and paranoid machine that protects itself. The city is the theater of the Kafaesque absurd.

La verifica incerta (The Uncertain Verification) (1965)

This experimental film is a masterpiece of found footage. Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi bought a large quantity of “peplum” (sword-and-sandal) film scraps by weight from a dubbing company, mostly American films shot at Cinecittà in the ’50s and ’60s.

The setting of this film is not a physical place, but the cinematic archive. Grifi and Baruchello use the mainstream image of Italy (that of “Hollywood on the Tiber”) to deconstruct, re-edit, and destroy it. It is an act of artistic sabotage that dismantles the American narrative about Italy, revealing the cinema’s unconscious. It is one of the most important underground films ever produced in the country.

Il mostro verde (The Green Monster) (1967)

An experimental short film, emblematic of the Italian underground and avant-garde cinema of that period, particularly from the Turin scene. The film by Tonino De Bernardi and Paolo Menzio is a non-narrative work, a flow of abstract and psychedelic images.

This film represents the extreme opposite of the use of setting. Here, the Italian landscape (if recognizable) is completely transfigured, reduced to pure form, color, and painterly material. It is an example of how independent Italian cinema explored not only social reality but also the very limits of cinematic language, using the territory as an abstract canvas.

Foreign Gazes. Italy Dreamed and Deconstructed by Global Arthouse

Italy has always been a magnet for foreign independent directors. But unlike the major studios seeking the easy postcard, the great authors of global arthouse don’t come to Italy to film its beauty, but to use it. They come to dialogue with the weight of history, art, and architecture. For these directors, Italy is an ancient text on which to write a new, modern story: a text about obsession (Greenaway), the deconstruction of stereotypes (Jarmusch), or the concept of art itself (Kiarostami).

Il ventre dell’architetto (The Belly of an Architect) (1987)

American architect Stourley Kracklite arrives in Rome with his young wife to set up an exhibition on the visionary French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. As his private and professional life falls apart, Kracklite develops an obsession with his own sick stomach, which he compares to those of Roman statues.

Peter Greenaway uses Rome’s architecture obsessively and literally. The Pantheon, the Vittoriano, Piazza Navona, and the countless statues are not a backdrop, but the real protagonists that crush the architect physically and mentally. Rome is a body of stone, an ancient organism that digests and destroys modern man. The film is a visual treatise on the relationship between the human body (mortal) and the body of architecture (eternal).

Night on Earth (Roma) (1991)

An anthology film by Jim Jarmusch telling five simultaneous stories in five taxis in five different cities. In the Rome episode, a chaotic and logorrheic taxi driver (Roberto Benigni) picks up a priest. During the ride, he begins to confess his sexual sins with such fervor that he gives the priest a heart attack.

This is a radical move. Jarmusch, the king of American independent cinema, completely ignores classical and monumental Italy. Instead, he chooses to film a hyperbolic cultural cliché: the Roman “caciara” (chaos). The setting is a nocturnal, working-class, almost surreal Rome, populated by prostitutes and driven by an over-the-top character. It is a conscious rejection of museum-piece Italy, a “frontier” dive into its most grotesque stereotype.

Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) (2010)

An English writer, James Miller, is in a small Tuscan village to present his book on the validity of copies in art. He meets “Elle,” a French antique dealer. The two spend an afternoon together, and their relationship begins to ambiguously transform into that of a couple married for years.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Italian masterpiece is a stroke of genius. The Iranian director sets a philosophical film about the nature of the original and the copy right in Tuscany, the heart of the Renaissance, the land of masters and copyists. The Tuscan landscape, with its cypress trees that look “individual” but are endlessly reproduced, becomes a philosophical labyrinth. Italy is the perfect place to question authenticity, both in art and in human relationships.

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

In the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy, seventeen-year-old Elio spends the holidays at his family’s villa. The arrival of Oliver, a charming American graduate student assisting Elio’s professor father, disrupts his life, triggering an unforgettable summer of first love.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and produced by international independent companies, the film redefines the Italian idyll. The setting (Crema and the Lombard countryside) looks like a postcard dream, but Guadagnino uses it in a tactile, sensory way. It is a cultured, Hellenistic Italy (the Greek statues fished from the lake), lazy and sun-drenched. The setting is a summer Eden that provides the perfect backdrop for homoerotic awakening, deconstructing the “macho” Italian cliché and replacing it with a cultured, vulnerable sensuality.

The Sicilian Grotesque. The Apocalypse of Ciprì and Maresco

If you are looking for the most extreme, independent, and underground Italian cinema, you must go to Sicily. Far from the cinematic power centers of Rome and Milan, Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco created a unique and inimitable universe. Their Sicily is not Tornatore’s; it is an apocalyptic, grotesque, and post-human landscape, filmed in a livid black and white. It is the zero point of the Italian setting, its definitive anti-postcard. If Pasolini saw sacredness in decay, Ciprì and Maresco see only the grotesque, the corporeal, and the blasphemous. Their Palermo is another dimension.

Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn) (1995)

In an apocalyptic and unrecognizable Palermo, a dysfunctional and semi-literate family is forced by a local mafia boss to host a mysterious, decrepit old man, “the uncle from Brooklyn,” in their home. His presence upsets the already precarious balance of the family and the neighborhood.

Ciprì and Maresco’s black-and-white aesthetic transforms the Palermitan periphery into a lunar landscape, a landfill populated by “freaks” and deformed mafiosi. It is the end of humanism. The setting is not just degraded; it is irredeemable. It is a post-atomic Italy of the soul, where the only law is that of hunger and abuse, all filtered through a surreal and pitch-black humor.

Totò che visse due volte (Totò Who Lived Twice) (1998)

An anthology film in three episodes set in an infernal Sicily. The stories, including that of a beastly man named Paletta and a “Totò” who believes he is the reincarnation of the Messiah, are a blasphemous and grotesque parody of the Passion of Christ.

This film was censored and blocked before its release for “vilification of religion.” The Sicilian setting, once again a transfigured Palermitan periphery, becomes a stage for the “end of history.” It is a grotesque Gospel where Pasolinian sacredness has been completely replaced by primordial instincts, hunger, sex, and blasphemy. It is the most extreme and independent vision that Italian cinema has ever produced of its own territory.

The New Magic Realism. The Rebirth of Arthouse Cinema (1990-Present)

Contemporary independent Italian cinema has found a new, powerful voice. Directors like Matteo Garrone, Alice Rohrwacher, and Pietro Marcello have absorbed the fundamental lesson of Neorealism (the focus on the margins, the use of the real landscape) but have fused it with genre (noir, crime) and a unique “magic realism.” These authors have returned to mapping the Italy outside the tourist centers, exploring the Camorra’s system in Scampia, the illegal construction of Villaggio Coppola, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the peasant resistance in Umbria. For them, the setting is not just a place, but a social, economic, and criminal system.

Naples and Campania. Noir and History

L’amore molesto (Nasty Love) (1995)

Delia, an illustrator living in Bologna, returns to her hometown of Naples after the mysterious drowning of her mother, Amalia. Trying to understand what happened, Delia is forced to dig into her past and a maternal relationship built on repressed memories and hidden violence.

Based on the debut novel by Elena Ferrante, Mario Martone’s film uses Naples not as the sunny city of cliché, but as a dark and suffocating labyrinth. The urban setting is a psychological thriller. Delia moves through a city that is the map of her repressed memory. The alleys, the buildings, the subway become places of the unconscious, in a backward journey toward a hidden trauma.

L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer) (2002)

Peppino, a taxidermist with dwarfism involved in ambiguous dealings with the Camorra, hires Valerio, a tall and handsome young man, as his assistant. A morbid relationship develops between the two, which turns into a deadly love triangle when Valerio falls for Deborah.

The setting is the key to this grotesque noir. Matteo Garrone chooses Villaggio Coppola, an abusive “eco-monster” on the Domitian coast, near Castel Volturno. This spectral “non-place,” a planned tourist complex that was never finished and now lies in ruins, becomes a perfect set. The degraded and surreal architecture is the soul-landscape of the characters, a place of death and desire that reflects the sinister nature of the story.

Gomorra (Gomorrah) (2008)

Five stories of life intertwine in the territory dominated by the Camorra, between Scampia and Casal di Principe. A boy who does the shopping, two young criminals high on Scarface, a high-fashion tailor, a toxic waste broker, and a “paymaster” who pays the families of prisoners.

Matteo Garrone’s film is a watershed that redefined Italian cinema. The setting is Scampia. With an almost documentary style, Garrone immerses us in this territory. The brutalist architecture of the “Vele” (The Sails) is not just a backdrop: it is the very structure of the Camorra’s power, a concrete fortress, an open-air prison that conditions the life, death, and morality of its inhabitants.

Bella e perduta (Lost and Beautiful) (2015)

Tommaso, a shepherd who voluntarily cares for the Palace of Carditello, a Bourbon jewel abandoned in Campania, dies. From Vesuvius emerges Pulcinella (Punch), sent to fulfill his last wish: to save a young buffalo, Sarchiapone. A picaresque journey begins through a “lost and beautiful” Italy.

Pietro Marcello masterfully blends documentary, fable, and myth. The setting is the Palace of Carditello, a real place, a symbol of Italian beauty abandoned to plunder and decay (it is located in the “Land of Fires”). The use of Pulcinella, a mask from Neapolitan tradition, and a talking buffalo transfigures the setting. Italy is not just a place, but a lament, a beauty that asks to be saved.

Martin Eden (2019)

Martin Eden is a young proletarian sailor in Naples. After saving a scion of the upper bourgeoisie, he is introduced to their world and falls in love with the sister, Elena. He decides to elevate himself socially and culturally by becoming a writer, but his ambition will lead to self-destruction.

Pietro Marcello’s choice of setting is brilliant. By transposing Jack London’s novel (set in Oakland) to a twentieth-century, but ahistorical, Naples, the director makes the story universal. Italy (Naples) becomes a historical “everywhere,” a stage where the drama of class struggle, individualism, and political failure plays out. The use of archival footage fused with fiction creates a setting that is both real and dreamed.

Nostalgia (2022)

After forty years living between Egypt and Lebanon, Felice Lasco returns to his native Naples to care for his ailing mother. He settles in the Rione Sanità, the neighborhood where he grew up, but his return forces him to reckon with a criminal past and a betrayed friendship with a local boss.

Mario Martone returns to Naples and immerses himself in the Rione Sanità. The setting is the beating heart of the film. The neighborhood is a labyrinth of alleys, decaying noble palaces, churches, and catacombs. For Felice, this urban landscape is the map of his past, a place that welcomes him back and, at the same time, imprisons him. The setting is destiny: a past from which it is impossible to escape.

Calabria and the Rural South. The Real and the Invisible

Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (2010)

In an isolated village in the mountains of Calabria, an elderly shepherd herds his goats. The film observes the cycle of life and the transmigration of the soul: from the shepherd to a newborn goat, from the goat to a fir tree cut down for a village festival, and finally to the charcoal produced from the wood.

Michelangelo Frammartino’s film is an almost mystical work, bordering on documentary and fiction. The setting is a remote Italy, a pre-verbal place where human life is just one part of a larger cosmic cycle. Frammartino films the Calabrian landscape with a rigor and patience that transform everyday peasant life into a philosophical ritual about reincarnation and the connection between all living things.

Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body) (2011)

Marta, a thirteen-year-old girl, returns to live in Reggio Calabria after spending her childhood in Switzerland. She prepares to receive her confirmation, but she clashes with an environment she no longer recognizes: a catechism devoid of meaning, urban decay, and a spirituality reduced to superstition.

In Alice Rohrwacher’s debut, the Calabrian setting is the place of spiritual bewilderment. Reggio Calabria is shown in its stark contrast between a still-powerful nature (the sea, the fiumara) and urban and religious decay. Marta’s search for an authentic sense of the sacred clashes with an Italy that seems to have forgotten it, symbolized by the priest more interested in politics than in souls.

A Chiara (2021)

Chiara is fifteen and lives in Gioia Tauro, Calabria, surrounded by her loving family. On the day of her older sister’s 18th birthday, her father suddenly disappears. Chiara begins to investigate and discovers that the man she loves is a fugitive linked to the ‘Ndrangheta.

Jonas Carpignano, an Italian by adoption, closes his trilogy set in Gioia Tauro. His immersive style takes us inside the social and economic reality of a territory controlled by organized crime. The setting is not just a backdrop for a crime story; it is the system itself. Gioia Tauro, with its port and its inextricable family ties, is Italy seen as a power system where the line between family love and mafia complicity is tragically blurred.

Central/Northern Italy. The Magic Resistance

Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (2014)

Gelsomina lives with her family on a dilapidated farm in the Umbrian countryside. Her father, a gruff and idealistic German beekeeper, tries to protect the family from the modern world. The balance is broken when a television crew arrives in the area for a game show called “The Land of Wonders.”

Alice Rohrwacher films the rural setting (between Umbria and Lazio) as a “kingdom in ruins.” It is a peasant Italy that desperately tries to resist the homogenization of modernity, symbolized by the television kitsch of the hostess (Monica Bellucci). The setting is the site of cultural resistance, a magical and fragile world (beekeeping, the relationship with nature) destined to be corrupted from the outside.

Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro) (2018)

Lazzaro is a young peasant of a goodness so pure it seems like naivety. He lives on an isolated estate, L’Inviolata, where a marchioness exploits the peasants in a sharecropping system they believe still exists. When Lazzaro, following an accident, travels through time, he finds himself catapulted into the modern urban periphery.

This is Alice Rohrwacher’s magic-realist masterpiece. The setting is divided in two: L’Inviolata, a feudal Italy, outside of time, and the urban periphery, the post-industrial and cynical Italy. Lazzaro’s journey is an allegory for the loss of Italy’s innocence. The film uses the setting to show how Lazzaro’s pure “goodness,” a product of an archaic world, no longer has a place in contemporary society.

La Chimera (2023)

Arthur, a heartbroken English archaeologist, returns to a small town in Tuscia in the 1980s. He joins a motley crew of “tombaroli,” grave robbers of Etruscan tombs, using his dowsing gift to find buried artifacts and search for a passage to the afterlife.

Once again, Alice Rohrwacher explores central Italy. The setting of Tuscia is a place where the (degraded and picaresque) present literally lives on top of a sacred and rich underground world (the Etruscans). The film explores the relationship between the sacred and the profane: Italy is an open-air cemetery that its contemporary inhabitants plunder to survive. The setting is a palimpsest of desecrated history.

Documenting the Hidden. The Real Beyond Fiction

Finally, the Italian setting in independent cinema finds its purest expression in the arthouse documentary. These films return to the original mission of Neorealism—to observe the real—but they do so by seeking hidden, secret, personal, or forgotten worlds. From the “shouted” real of the rubble in Rome, Open City, we arrive at the “whispered” real of the Piedmontese woods or the Calabrian caves. Independent cinema continues to map the Italy that mainstream fiction ignores, bringing the circle to a close.

The Truffle Hunters (2020)

An American independent documentary that follows a group of elderly men, in their seventies and eighties, and their faithful dogs, on the hunt for the rare and valuable white Alba truffle in the forests of Langhe, Piedmont.

Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw portray a secret and archaic world. The setting is not just the Piedmontese forest, filmed as a magical, fairytale place, but an entire system of traditions, secrets, and rituals that is disappearing. The film uses the Italian setting to tell a story of passion, old age, and the conflict between ancient knowledge and the demands of a rapacious global market.

Marx Can Wait (2021)

The master Marco Bellocchio directs a deeply personal documentary. Reuniting his siblings and family, he investigates a repressed trauma: the suicide of his twin brother, Camillo, in 1968, at the height of the political protests.

The setting here is the Italy of memory. Bellocchio returns to the places of his childhood in Piacenza and reflects on his career in Rome. The film is a painful investigation that intertwines the History of Italy (the political ferment of ’68, which for the director and his friends was more important than anything) and private tragedy. The Italian setting becomes the theater for a family and historical self-analysis.

Il Buco (The Hole) (2021)

In 1961, as Northern Italy builds the Pirelli skyscraper and celebrates the economic boom, a group of young speleologists from Piedmont descends into the depths of the Pollino massif in Calabria. They discover the Bifurto Abyss, one of the deepest caves in the world.

Michelangelo Frammartino’s film is a work of pure observation. It sharply contrasts two Italys: the one above, modern and projected toward the future (the industrial North), and the one below, an underground, dark, and unexplored world (the rural South). The geographical exploration becomes a powerful philosophical metaphor. It is a film about the unknown, about the act of looking where no one has ever looked, which is the very essence of independent cinema.