Best film locations in Rome, Italy: How to tour a city made for cinema

The iconic Trevi Fountain features in such movies as Angels and Demons (2009) and Eat Pray Love (2010) .

"Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world."

Or so said Italy's best-known film director, Federico Fellini. And he is one of the stars of a three-hour walking tour which has a distinctly cinematic focus.

I meet my guide, history buff and movie-lover Ruggero, in Piazza del Popolo, the People's Square. Foreigners entered the Eternal City here during the Roman Empire, when one of the biggest movies of all time was set, he tells me – though Ben-Hur (1959) was actually filmed in Cinecitta, aka "Hollywood on the Tiber", a massive studio on the edge of Rome.

The tour takes you past a house where Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn hid from the paparazzi in Roman Holiday (1953).Credit: Archive Photos

Just off the piazza we duck down a cobbled lane, Via Margutta, which is surprisingly cool and quiet on this steamy afternoon. "When you want to escape the crowds, come to Via Margutta," says Ruggero.

We wander past the high gates of a house where Gregory Peck and a runaway princess played by Audrey Hepburn hid from the paparazzi in Roman Holiday (1953). The word "paparazzi" comes from another iconic film of that era, Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), in which a photographer called Paparazzo pursues the movie's two stars, Swedish beauty Anita Ekberg and Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni.

Fellini also lived in Via Margutta, with artist neighbours such as Picasso and Reubens. And while Roman Holiday inadvertently promoted the idea of holidaying in Italy to a new generation of Americans, his film popularised the notion of "the sweet life".

"La dolce vita is synonymous with Italy now," says Ruggero, "but it only became a thing post-war when America's Marshall Plan helped Italy's economy recover, businesses started thriving and people could suddenly afford to enjoy life in a way that hadn't been possible before."

Emerging from Fellini's street, we turn right and right again and pop into Caffe Canova, a restaurant that looks like a film set, or a museum. While Ruggero orders me a crema di caffe – a Roman iced coffee made with espresso, cream and ice – I take in the marble statues crowded into this former studio of 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova. There are headless torsos, heroes in loincloths, nearly nude deities, all dwarfing the tables of diners sitting beneath them.

At the base of the Spanish Steps, where Matt Damon meets Cate Blanchett under false pretences in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), we chat about the months-long Grand Tour pilgrimages to Italy once taken by well-heeled young Brits. Then we pass Babington's Tea Rooms, on one side of the famous steps, which has been serving tea, scones and finger sandwiches to tour-ists since 1893; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton also used to rendezvous there while filming Cleopatra (1963).

Movies such as Angels and Demons (2009) and Eat Pray Love (2010) should probably take some credit for the constant crowds at our next stop, the Trevi Fountain, but it is irresistible. After renovations in 2015 it's as gorgeous as a resort swimming pool, the water so clear and sparkling it makes you want to frolic like Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (though, sadly, that's been strictly forbidden since new tourist laws were introduced in 2019).

Our last stop is the Pantheon, a former Roman temple built in 118 AD that later became a basilica and featured in Peter Greenaway's 1987 cult classic The Belly of an Architect. It's busy too, but the crowd inside is subdued by the magnificence of its 43-metre-high dome, the largest in the Western world. As we pass tombs of long-gone kings, Ruggero points out the resting place of King Umberto I's wife, Margherita, for whom Italy's simple tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza was created in 1889. Pizza, movies – what's not to love about a tour that's a walking highlights reel of Rome?

THE DETAILS

TOUR

Urban Adventures' three-hour Rome Highlights walking tour costs $100 a person; you must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to take part. See www.urbanadventures.com

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Louise Southerden travelled as a guest of Urban Adventures.