If you’re in love with Rome or have a passion for Italian culture in general, you can’t miss some or all of these movies set in Rome. It will also be a way to inspire you to plan your next trip to Italy or a stopgap if you long to visit Rome right now but can’t.
If you are studying the Italian language, I recommend even more watching these films set in Rome to practice listening to typical Roman speech. If you are just starting out, watch the movies in the original language with English subtitles. In case you are advanced in the study of the language, use the Italian subtitles.
Among these films, there are also many foreign ones. I have chosen recent films as well as classics, in color and black and white.
Those who have already visited Rome will be able to recognize some of the monuments in the historic center and also some of the city’s neighborhoods.
For an in-depth look at Italian culture, read also:
30+ Surprising Quotes about the Italians
15 MOVIES SET IN ROME, ITALY
Here is my selection of the best films set in Rome.
1 THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT
A dramatic film by English director Peter Greenway, it tells the story of architect Stourley Kracklit, who arrives in Rome with his wife to set up an exhibition inside the Altar of the Fatherland. The real protagonist of the movie is Rome and its architecture fascinates Kracklit enormously. During his trip, the architect learns that he is suffering from an incurable disease and at the same time that his wife is pregnant. From then on, the film is a continuous cross-reference between life and death, between light and darkness, culminating in the tragic finale.
2 I SOLITI IGNOTI – BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET
One of the masterpieces of Italian cinema is the work of Italian director Mario Monicelli, released in theaters in 1958. This movie, all set in Rome, is considered the precursor of the “Italian Comedy”. It tells the story of a group of petty thieves, careless even in carrying out their misdeeds, who decide to get together to accomplish the heist of the century, a bank robbery.
The film is amusing while drawing a cross-section of precariousness and social marginality. This is what the Italian comedy is all about, a mixture of irresistible jokes and neorealist reflections.
The protagonists are some of the best Italian actors of all time: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Vittorio Gassman, Totò.
Many areas of the city are featured in the film: the Janiculum, Monte Testaccio, Foro Italico, Porta Portese.
3 TITUS
Anglo-American film of 1999 and directed by Julie Taymor, narrates the fall of a Roman general. It stars leading actors such as Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. The film is based on William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which is transposed by mixing contemporaneity and antiquity.
Of Rome, which serves as the backdrop to the story, the settings are contrasting: from the Roman ruins such as those on the Ancient Appian Way and the Park of the Aqueducts to those that depict the twentieth-century architecture of the Eur district, such as the Square Coliseum.
4 LO CHIAMAVANO JEEG ROBOT – THEY CALL ME JEEG
It is the young, Roman Gabriele Mainetti who directed in 2015 one of the best Italian films of the 21st century, unanimously acclaimed by critics and audiences. The superhero protagonist, the antagonist and the beauty have grown up and live in the suburban and infamous neighborhood of Tor Bella Monaca in Rome. As the plot thickens the scene shifts to the historic center, on the Lungotevere, at Porta San Paolo, at the Olympic Stadium at the Roma-Lazio derby, and atop the Colosseum.
The action movie will keep you in suspense until the end with duels and scenes that seem taken from a comic book. The main actors are Claudio Santamaria, Ilaria Pastorelli, and Luca Marinelli.
5 EAT PRAY LOVE
The 2010 film is based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel of the same name, which has inspired women around the world to take a sabbatical and travel alone. Liz lives in New York with her husband and has seemingly everything but happiness. She is dissatisfied. She discovers a memory box where she had collected magazine clippings about places she would like to travel to. That’s how she decides to revolutionize her life and loses all her savings in a disastrous divorce but manages to go on a 12-month trip.
Italy, and specifically Rome, is the first stop on the journey that will also take her to Naples, India and Bali. In Rome, Liz rents an ancient and decrepit apartment in Via della Scrofa, a stone’s throw from Piazza Navona. The scene also shows us the Spanish Steps, Villa Borghese, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Monkey Palace and Largo del Pallaro. The protagonists of the film are played by Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem.
6 INFERNO
Horror master Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) is not to be confused with Ron Howard’s 2016 film of the same name and set in Florence.
The Italian Inferno closes a trilogy that began with Suspiria and The Third Mother and is almost entirely set in Rome (even the scenes depicting New York are reconstructed in Rome and in the Roman film studios of Cinecittà).
The story begins with the discovery of the book “The Third Mother”, the work of an architect and alchemist.
The film is full of spirits and mysterious presences and is shot in the equally fairytale-like Coppedé District in Rome. Some scenes are also shot in the Angelica Library. The main actors are all Italian.
7 TO ROME WITH LOVE
American director Woody Allen comes to Rome to shoot one of his romantic comedies the year after he shot one in Paris. The plot intertwines four different stories: that of an American student who is in love with his girlfriend’s friend; that of an ordinary man who suddenly becomes a media star; that of a retired record producer and that of a man who has to pass off a prostitute as his wife.
The film does not manage to match the poetic, comic and surreal effectiveness of Midnight in Paris, but it does show a Rome in splendid form in all the glory of its postcard-perfect historic center, as an American tourist would like to see it.
Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck on Vespa in Roman Holiday trailer | Movies set in Rome
8 ROMAN HOLIDAY
The image of lead actors Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn happily frolicking through the streets of the historic center in 1953 has gone around the world and is as famous as the postcard monuments. The film is completely shot in Rome, between the streets of the center and the Cinecittà studios.
The romantic and light comedy, in addition to making you fall in love with Rome, tells the story of Princess Anne. The princess, on an official visit to Rome, decides to get rid of boredom and see the city through the eyes of an ordinary traveler, escaping from her escort and entourage. That’s how she meets the American journalist Joe Bradley with whom she continues to discover the city and have fun as an ordinary young woman, although he soon discovers her true identity. The two go on a real tour of the Eternal City, showing the viewer: Piazza Bocca della Verità, Castel Sant’Angelo, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Venezia, Piazza di Spagna, the Colosseum, Via Margutta, the Imperial Forums, Palazzo Brancaccio, and the Galleria Colonna.
9 DEAR DIARY
The film is directed and starred by the great Italian director Nanni Moretti in 1993. The protagonist, in the first of the three episodes of the film entitled “In Vespa”, finds himself wandering through a deserted summer Rome just like Gregory Peck, but without company and making urbanistic and sociological reflections on what he sees. Moretti goes on to explore the south-eastern part of Rome, the Garbatella district, the suburbs of Casal Palocco and Spinaceto until he reaches the Ostia seaplane port, where he stops near the monument dedicated to the Italian director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. The second episode of the film is shot in Lipari while the third narrates the protagonist’s delicate relationship with medicine.
10 MAMMA ROMA
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s second film is presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and stars Oscar-winning actress Anna Magnani. This story is a portrait of the Roman suburbs and the underclass that lives there, with no hope of rising to a happier social condition. Roma Garofolo is an ex-prostitute and mother of Ettore, who is unaware of his mother’s past. Ettore grew up in Guidonia, but his mother decides to try the big city route, in order to give her son a better future, so the two of them move to Rome in the district (then suburban) of Quadraro.
As soon as they arrive, Ettore makes friends with a group of petty thieves in the area and falls in love with Bruna, a girl older than him. His mother does everything she can to keep him off the streets, but in this film by Pasolini, as in the previous one, fate seems already written. And at the end, the old protector of Roma Garofolo makes his comeback.
Most of the film is shot in the Quadraro district, on the southeastern outskirts of Rome, some scenes are filmed in the Parco degli Acquedotti, and the final scenes in the Tor Marancia district, famous today for its street-art.
11 SPECTRE
In the 24th episode of the 007 saga (2015), the role of James Bond is played by Daniel Craig. The film is shot in Rome, where the protagonist goes to attend the funeral of a criminal boss whom he had tried to capture. The widow of the boss is none other than Monica Bellucci, with whom Bond will have a flirtation.
To make the movie, several areas of Rome were blocked to traffic for weeks.
Among the places in Rome that appear in the film are: the Museum of Roman Civilization in the Eur district, the Villa di Fiorano on the Via Appia Antica, Trastevere, the Janiculum, Ponte Milvio, Piazza Navona, all of them the scene of frantic chases on board Aston Martin.
12 THE GREAT BEAUTY
The film by director Paolo Sorrentino won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The plot echoes Fellini’s Dolce Vita: the protagonist, Jep, is a journalist and theatre critic who lives the Roman nights in the wealthy center of Rome. He takes part in parties and has plenty of time to illuminate the “dark side” of the characters he meets: lots of money but also loneliness, frustration, dissatisfaction… Roman society is as brilliant as it is empty, lacking substance and projects, it repeats itself in an endless present without a future.
The city of Rome is the other protagonist of the film, in all its beauty, with places known and less known: Villa Spada, Santa Sabina on the Aventine, the Tower of the Militia, Villa Giulia, the Baths of Caracalla.
13 LA DOLCE VITA – A MOVIE SET IN ROME THAT INFLUENCED A GENERATION
The masterpiece of Italian director Federico Fellini, in addition to having brought the wonderful monuments of the historic center of Rome around the world, has portrayed a lifestyle and influenced a generation. The 1960s were the years of the first economic boom in Italy and Fellini would inspire its inhabitants and travelers to enjoy life and enjoy Rome in a certain way. The expression “la dolce vita” became a proverbial saying. Even the term “paparazzo” comes from the film, it was in fact the name of a photographer featured in the story.
The protagonist is Marcello Rubini, played by the famous Mastroianni, a journalist who spends his nights between parties and social gatherings in Via Veneto. The scene with Anita Ekberg bathing in the Trevi Fountain made the fountain one of the most visited monuments in the world.
The other places in Rome portrayed are St. Peter’s and its Dome, the Church of Don Bosco, the Centocelle neighborhood, and Fregene Beach.
Many of the settings have been reconstructed in the Cinecittà studios.
14 BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI – DOWN AND DIRTY
Directed by Ettore Scola in 1976, this film takes up the themes of the urban underclass that were explored by director Pasolini in the 1960s. On the outskirts of Rome, in a shantytown on Monte Ciocci, between the Valle Aurelia and Boccea neighborhoods, dozens of families live on the margins of society, or rather, survive. The protagonist is the extended family whose founder is Giacinto Mazzatella, played by the great Italian actor Nino Manfredi. Giacinto is obsessed with the money he received as compensation after an accident at work that left him blind in one eye. And all his family members are obsessed with stealing it from him. All the characters are grotesque and lead miserable lives from a material and moral point of view.
One of Giacinto’s sons is forced to disguise himself as a woman and work at night, even though he is heterosexual. The wife of another of the protagonist’s sons has sexual intercourse with one of her husband’s brothers. Giacinto discovers what has happened and forces her to have sex with him, threatening her otherwise to reveal her secret to her husband.
Gradually the director makes small portraits of the many characters and no one is saved.
In this film, the underclass is grotesque, inhuman and violent.
15 ANGELS AND DEMONS
In 2009, director Ron Howard made the second film based on a novel by Dan Brown. This time Professor Robert Langdom, who was also the protagonist of the bestseller “Da Vinci Code”, has to deal with the Illuminati sect, who spread terror in the eternal city during the conclave. The professor finds himself on a haunting tour of the city, following clues scattered in the proximity of monuments, to unravel a skein of conspiracies: we see Piazza Navona, St. Peter’s, the Tiber River, and Castel Sant’Angelo.
Due to the subject matter, which put the Vatican in a bad light, the crew was denied the opportunity to shoot in St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican Library, and the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Piazza del Popolo.
There are dozens more of great movies set in Rome, this was just a taste, don’t forget to share what is your favorite film set in Rome in the comments!
16 Totò Truffa 62
This black-and-white film is a classic of Italian cinema. It is not well known abroad. However, I recommend you see it, even with subtitles, because it reflects upon some stereotypes of American culture in Italy and also of Italian culture in general.
The main characters are two penniless friends who are former cabaret actors who live by the day by conning their fellow man.
Famous is the scene in which Totò sells the Trevi Fountain to an American tourist.
After all, he is driven by good intentions. He is in fact very poor but determined to keep his daughter’s studies at a prestigious school to give her a better future.
