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Trevi Fountain
Rome is one of the most filmed cities on earth—and its signature set location is
Trevi Fountain, a romantic, 85-foot-high baroque masterpiece depicting the god of
the sea, Neptune, and his Tritons.
In the Hollywood classic Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), three American women
toss coins into its picturesque waters and make wishes for love. Soon afterward,
all three become involved in passionate romances, to the Oscar-winning title song
immortalized by Frank Sinatra. In the equally iconic Roman Holiday (1953), a princess
traveling incognito (Audrey Hepburn), slips into a hairdresser in front of Trevi
Fountain to get a more fashionable, short haircut, tailed by her freewheeling guide-for-the-day,
Gregory Peck. Hepburn must return to her official life as a princess in the final
scene, which is shot near the fountain in the Palazzo Colonnaa. But perhaps the
most brilliant use of Trevi Fountain comes in Federico Fellini's classic, La Dolce
Vita (1960), as Anita Ekburg frolics in its pool after dark, watched agog by Marcello
Mastroianni. The couple then slips from the fountain to the smoky clubs of Via Veneto
in scenes that would define Italian glamour to the outside world.
Most of the interiors were actually sets created in the famous Roman film studio,
Cinecittà. This vast "cinema city" on the outskirts of Rome was also where most
of the "sword-and-sandal" classics set in ancient Rome were shot in the 1950s and
1960s, including Ben Hur (1959), Quo Vadis? (1951), and the Elizabeth Taylor version
of Cleopatra (1963). In recent years, the studio has been revived for films as diverse
as Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) and the HBO series Rome (2005).
For Romans themselves, perhaps the most beloved cinematic portrayal of their city
takes place at the end of another Fellini movie, Roma (1972), when the characters
hop on Vespa motorcycles and drive in a deafening pack through the city at night.
The floodlit monuments of Rome flash past, not as tourist sites but as the essential
fabric of Rome, bringing its majestic history effortlessly to the present.
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