No vacation this summer? Let the movies take you someplace new.
Have you been to Basilicata? It’s the hot new place to vacation, with spectacular mountain ranges, dark forested valleys and ancient villages carved into rock faces . It’s isolated, and in the past not heavily visited, but filmmakers are finding it a wonderful place to make movies.
Basilicata Coast To Coast follows four guys who play in a band together decide to go on foot to a music festival, crossing Basilicata from one coast to another with only a wagon and horse to carry their equipment.
Watch for film called Montedoro at film festivals; it filmed in Craco, an ancient town that was evacuated in 1963 due to multiple landslides and was first named “Montedoro” by the Greeks that inhabited it in the first century. The story is based on the protagonist’s (Pia Marie Mann) true story of the search for her birth mother, and her roots, as she tries to connect with a long forgotten past aided by some of the “ghost” town’s mysterious holdouts. Pia’s main co-star is Basilicata, far from the more well-known tourist areas in Italy but stunningly beautiful and begging for exploration.
Want to go to Rome? You can watch any number of American films to see the happy, vacationy Rome, but Paolo Sorrentino’s look at its seedier side in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) is lots of fun.
Every time I’m about to leave for Venice I re-watch Pane e Tulipani, Bread and Tulips, and imagine myself scooting around the ancient streets, ducking around corners with Rosalba, trying to lose the private detective that is trying to make us go home.
Want to see Calabria? Le Quattro Volte will show you the sweeter, pastoral side,
and Francesco Munzi will take you to the part that you probably shouldn’t go to in real-life without local escorts! (Watch out for the ‘Ndrangheta!’) Anime Nere (Black Souls) is a must see one way or another.
Baarìa provides us with a time machine as well as a travelogue, traveling back to the old days in Sicily, precisely director Giuseppe Tornatore’s home town in a very sweet, sentimental film that will make you book a ticket to Sicily.
Heading north for a minute, Carlo Mazzacurati’s last film, La Sedia Della Felicità is a funny, playful romp through the Veneto region; come along as Valerio Mastandrea, Isabella Ragonese and Giuseppe Battiston go on a treasure hunt.
Nothing playful or happy about Cristina Comencini’s ‘Quando La Notte’ (When the Night), but the scenery is spectacular, set in the mountains, at Macugnaga, in Piemonte, at the foot of Monte Rosa.
Once visiting Siena, we were talking to a young woman who worked at our hotel and she was lamenting that nobody ever visited her hometown, Certaldo Alto, the birthplace of Boccaccio, so we went there. What a happy, lucky surprise! We felt as if we were on a movie set in this lovely, quiet, historic town. You can see it in the Taviani brothers’ recent film, Maraviglioso Boccaccio!
And don’t miss Naples! Matteo Garrone’s ‘Reality’ makes you feel as if you were really there!
I Love Italian Everything 