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Rome's legendary Cinecitta Studios eye new golden age
Once the stomping ground of Italy's greatest directors and actors, Rome's renowned Cinecitta film studios are planning a much-needed makeover for a new era.
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A view shows the main entrance of the Cinecitta cinema studios on November 17, 2021 in Rome. (AFP/Laurent Emmanuel)
O
nce the stomping ground of Italy's greatest directors and actors, from Federico Fellini to Sophia Loren, Rome's renowned Cinecitta film studios are planning a much-needed makeover for a new era.
Dubbed the "Hollywood on the Tiber", Cinecitta was at the heart of the golden age of Italian cinema and now hopes to regain some of its former lustre thanks to European Union post-pandemic funding.
Italy is the main beneficiary of the bloc's recovery fund and the ageing studios are in line for a 260-million-euro ($292-million) windfall to expand and modernise to capitalise on the different ways of now watching film and TV.
"We can give back to this place the light that has always characterised it, and that it deserves," Cinecitta CEO Nicola Maccanico told AFP, hopefully.
Cinecitta -- which means "the city of cinema" in Italian -- has been the backdrop of more than 3,000 films, including 51 Oscar winners.
In recent decades, although critically acclaimed films such as Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 The Last Emperor and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient in 1996 were shot at Cinecitta, major productions have become more scarce.
The studios were inaugurated on the southern outskirts of the Italian capital in 1937 to churn out propaganda for the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini.
