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Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg appear in the Italian film La dolce vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini. For this scene, Romeâs Trevi Fountain was reconstructed at CinecittĂ Studios, outside the capital.
CinecittĂ , largest motion-picture studio in Italy. It is located outside Rome.
CinecittĂ was constructed in 1936â37 on the site of Cines, an important early studio that had burned down, and it was an important part of the Fascist governmentâs attempt to develop a domestic film industry equal to that of Hollywood. CinecittĂ was the focus of the Italian movie industry during World War II, when bombings almost completely destroyed its facilities. After the war the Allies used CinecittĂ as a prisoner-of-war camp and then as a displaced-person camp. That CinecittĂ was closed after the war was a factor in the emergence of Italian Neorealism, which favoured films shot on location.
The studios were eventually rebuilt, and by 1950 CinecittĂ was once again in full production. For the next 20 years CinecittĂ set cinema trends through the work of such leading directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and particularly Federico Fellini, who shot most of his films there. Attracted by production subsidies and low labour costs, American studios shot such films like Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Cleopatra (1963) there, earning CinecittĂ the nickname of âHollywood on the Tiber.â The growth of television and the decline in the quality of CinecittĂ âs films diminished its prestige, however, starting in the 1970s.
The studio was privatized in 1997 and expanded to control two other studios in Italy, Dino Studios near Rome and Umbria Studios near Terni, and to have partial control of CLA Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco. Although in the early 21st century the number of projects of production was only one-third of that in CinecittĂ âs 1960s heyday, the studio still played a major role in Italyâs film industry and continued to attract foreign productions.
