Italian Cinema

The World's Oldest Film School

Italy did not invent cinema, but it invented what cinema could aspire to be. The peninsula's relationship with the moving image runs deeper than any national tradition outside Hollywood, and unlike Hollywood, it was never primarily industrial. From the start it was personal, regional, political, and obsessed with surfaces: the peeling plaster of a Roman tenement, the bleached white void of a Sicilian midday.

Geography matters here. The north-south divide that defines Italian politics and culture runs straight through the cinema. Neorealism was overwhelmingly a Roman and southern phenomenon, shot in the actual war-damaged streets of Rome, Naples, and Sicily because the studios at Cinecittà had been bombed or converted into refugee camps. The spaghetti western borrowed the arid Andalusian landscape of Almería, Spain, but its spiritual address was always the Italian south, the mezzogiorno, where law was fragile and honour was the only currency. Fellini came from Rimini on the Adriatic coast and never stopped making films about provincial life colliding with metropolitan fantasy. Antonioni was from Ferrara in the foggy Po Valley, and that northern landscape of industrial flatness and emotional coldness haunts everything he made.

The tradition divides, roughly, into five eras. First: the silent epics (Cabiria, 1914), which essentially invented the feature film and the travelling camera shot. Second: Neorealism (1945-1952), which rewrote the grammar of how cinema represents the poor. Third: the great auteur decade (1960-1970), when Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, and Pasolini simultaneously produced their masterworks and Italian cinema became the international benchmark for artistic ambition. Fourth: genre cinema (1965-1980), the spaghetti westerns, gialli, poliziotteschi, and horror films that were commercially despised and are now canonized. Fifth: the long modern period from Nanni Moretti's first films through the prestige television of the 2010s, where Italy quietly rebuilt an international voice it had briefly lost.

What links all five eras is an argument about beauty: what it costs, what it conceals, and whether it can be trusted.

The Ferrante Question

Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet is, by any measure, the most significant Italian literary event of the past thirty years. Four novels published between 2011 and 2014, set across sixty years of Naples from the 1950s to the 2000s, chronicling the friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from childhood through old age. The achievement is structural: Ferrante uses the friendship as a prism for class, gender, politics, and the specific violence of southern Italian life without ever letting the argument overwhelm the characters.

The HBO adaptation (2018-present) directed by Saverio Costanza is one of the rare cases where a television series genuinely deepens its source material rather than simplifying it. The decision to film entirely in Italian and to use actors from Naples rather than Rome was not just authenticity signalling. It means the class distinctions encoded in dialect remain legible, which is central to everything the books are doing.

Visconti and the Class Problem

Luchino Visconti is the most underappreciated figure in the auteur canon, possibly because his politics complicate easy categorization. He was a Marxist aristocrat from one of Milan's oldest families who made films about both the Sicilian peasantry (La Terra Trema) and the Risorgimento nobility (The Leopard), and he was equally at home in both worlds. The Leopard (1963), adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, is one of the most magnificent films ever made about political resignation: the Sicilian prince who understands that everything must change so that everything can stay the same. Burt Lancaster's performance, a Hollywood star dropped into an Italian aristocratic epic, somehow works, which is its own kind of miracle.

Games: A Note on the Italian Absence

Italy does not have a significant native video game industry. A few smaller studios exist, and some notable projects have emerged (Milestone for racing, some independent work), but nothing comparable to Japan, the US, or even France in terms of a recognized canon. What Italy does have is cultural saturation: Italian cinema, history, and architecture have generated dozens of game settings. Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood are set in Renaissance Florence, Venice, and Rome, and whatever one thinks of Ubisoft's historical liberties, those games are responsible for more people learning the names Botticelli, Leonardo, and Rodrigo Borgia than any history curriculum. Countless action titles use Italian aesthetics without Italian authorship. It is a meaningful asymmetry: Italy as subject for games is everywhere; Italy as producer is largely absent. That gap is itself a kind of cultural story.

Where to Start

If you have seen nothing: Bicycle Thieves, then La Dolce Vita, then The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Three films, three different Italys, three radically different relationships to beauty and despair. If you have covered the canon and want to go deeper: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) by Ermanno Olmi, a three-hour film about Lombard peasants at the turn of the twentieth century, shot with non-professional actors in the Po Valley, and one of the quietest and most devastating portraits of rural poverty in the medium. For television, start with My Brilliant Friend before Gomorrah: the friendship story gives you the Naples that the crime series takes for granted.

For the books: read Ferrante's quartet before the series if you can. Read Saviano's Gomorrah after the television series rather than before, because the book's first-person documentary mode becomes more interesting once you understand how radically the adaptation departed from it. Read Lampedusa's The Leopard alongside the Visconti film: the novel and the film are in genuine dialogue, neither reducible to the other.