Focus Features

An old proverb says that “All roads lead to Rome,” and that’s certainly true for Jack, George Clooney’s hitman in The American, who flees to the Italian capital after his quiet existence in the Arctic north is abruptly and brutally disturbed. In Anton Corbijn’s movie, Jack doesn’t hang around in the Eternal City, but instead keeps on going into the heart of the Italian countryside in the hope of finding safety and seclusion. However, it’s fair to say that only people who are on the run and fearful of their lives would stop so briefly in Rome, a dazzling city rich in thousands of years of history and also a hub of international filmmaking.

With its piazzas and palazzos, the Colosseum and the Forum, Vatican City and the Pantheon, Rome is one of the most beautiful and visually striking cities in the world, and naturally a location that has incredible appeal for filmmakers. Over the years, it has been shown in the grip of war (Open City) and of poverty (The Bicycle Thief), has been framed as an exotic vacation city (Roman Holiday) and a place seen through the eyes of jaded locals (Dear Diary). In When in Rome: Movies from the Italian Capital, Nick Dawson examines how the way the Italian capital has been depicted on screen has shifted over the course of movie history.

No discussion of Rome and the movies is possible without dwelling at length on Cinecittà (literally “cinema city”), the mammoth movie studio located on the outskirts of the metropolis. Founded by Mussolini in the 1930s to help create fascist propaganda, Cinecittà evolved after the war into a place regularly utilized by Hollywood for such grand spectacles as Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur. More recently, Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson have both shot movies there recently, while the vast expanse of the Cinecittà backlot was also the subject of photographer Gregory Crewdson’s 2010 book Sanctuary. Peter Bowen casts an eye over the studio’s varied history in Rome's Cinema City: Cinecittà.

Rome, with buildings dating back over 2000 years to the heyday of the Roman Empire, is heaven for lovers of great architecture. But in addition to all the historical landmarks to be found around the city, there are also buildings which tell the history of filmgoing in Rome. In a place where architectural grandeur and scale are celebrated, movie palaces thrived, from the Cinema Nuovo Olimpia – where films were first screened in 1898 – onwards throughout the 20th Centiry. The slideshow Cinemas of Rome offers a pictorial tour which takes in some of the most striking movie theaters in the city.

In Italy, the great film festival city has always been Venice, which hosts one of the four major global film fests. However, the Italian capital added its own big-scale event (previously, it was only home to the sci-fi centric Fantafestival…) when the Rome International Film Festival was founded in 2006. Right from the start, the festival attracted big stars and blockbuster movies, with The Departed playing at the inaugural edition with director Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Vera Farmiga in attendance. The president of the jury for the 2010 edition will be Cinema Paradiso’s director Giuseppe Tornatore.