Cinecittà - the Legend

Cinecittà Studios has a long and distinguished history that includes more than 3,000 productions by filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Mel Gibson and Anthony Minghella, as well as many Italian directors like Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci, to name just a few.

An astonishing 48 of the films that have been made, in whole or in part, at Cinecittà have received Oscar Awards and 83 have received Oscar Nominations.

The current studio was designed by one of the great Italian architects of the time, Gino Peressutti, and is still one of the best examples of modernist architecture in Europe. 

Construction began on 26 January 1936 (on the site of an older studio destroyed by fire) and took 457 days to complete. Cinecittà was officially opened on April 28, 1937 by Benito Mussolini.

In its first few years the studio produced dozens of historical dramas and propaganda films. By 1943, just six years after it opened, nearly 300 productions had been made on the Cinecittà lot.

Many American filmmakers began arriving at Cinecittà in the early 1950s, drawn by the studio's reputation for creative talent and Italy's low production costs relative to the US.

Soon Cinecittà became known as "Hollywood on the Tiber" and many classic American feature films were made over the next 15 years, such as:

Quo vadis? (Mervyn Loy, 1951)
Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)
The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)
Helen of Troy (Robert Wise, 1956)
War and Peace (King Vidor, 1956)
The Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1958)
Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959)
The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959)
Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)
The Pink Panther (Bake Edwards, 1965)
The Agony and the Ecstasy (Carol Reed, 1965)

For Federico Fellini, Cinecittà was home for four decades of filmmaking. He made nearly all his productions on the lot, including La Dolce Vita, Satyricon, Roma The Clowns, City of Women and Amarcord.

In the 1960s  and 70s Cinecittà was the birthplace of fine Italian feature films by renowned directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Ettore Scola, Franco Zeffirelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Vittoria De Sica. Many of these films, including Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and Visconti's Death in Venice, won huge English-speaking audiences around the world.

Dozens of "spaghetti westerns", such as Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More and Once Upon a Time in the West, were made at the studio around the same time.

The 1980s saw a major upgrade of Cinecittà's facilities and equipment, including the building of Cinecittà Digital and the expanion of the studio's restoration capability.

In the mid 1990s Cinecittà Studios was transformed from a public institution into a private company. (See "Who We Are" for details about Cinecitta Studio's organizational structure.)

Cinecittà Studios entrance

   
Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)

War and Peace (King
Vidor, 1956)




Set for a "Spaghetti
Western" of the 1960s