Please go straight to The Luminaries Magazine to read this handcrafted, slow journalism film review of the best films to transport you to Italy. The newsletter is here just to let you know that this exciting new film feature is published in The Luminaries Magazine.
Italy, dear reader, is my favourite country on earth. Life is always sweeter from the vantage point of a cafe to observe the world go by a hop and a skip from the Spanish Steps in Rome or turning a street corner in Florence and admiring another Roman god and the gleaming dome of the Duomo. I've had such fun watching some of the greatest films ever made, which celebrate the beating heart of Italy and its ancient cities, teeming with people, art, culture, palazzos, glorious slow food and of course the restless, eternal spirit of La Dolce Vita.
I've been captivated by Katharine Hepburn allowing herself to be vulnerable and to live life fully in sensual, intoxicating, majestic Venice as she falls for the spirit of the city and for Rossano Brazzi's intense merchant of Venice. Summertime is Sex and the City, fifty years before Carrie Bradshaw, as Katherine Hepburn acknowledges her desires and needs and goes out to get them in a sublime little black dress, red scarf and scarlet Venetian shoes, in the ultimate holiday romance. Summertime is directed by the celebrated film auteur Sir David Lean. Lean would go on to direct Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago, and yet it was Summertime that was his favourite film work of art.
Summertime is like a painting we get to inhabit, straight into the beating pulse of St Mark's Square. See Venice in technicolour and swoon at the spectacle, the stately ocean liners, the concerts at night and a rainbow of colours in every vista where Venice does resemble a grand master painting and Katharine Hepburn is every woman who has dared to go on holiday alone, dressed to be admired, to be kissed and to kick off those red shoes...
I've revisited Roman Holiday, where the press and royalty collide as Audrey Hepburn's unhappy princess goes marvellously awol, while La Dolce Vita is probably one of the best windows onto the unholy alliance between the press, the paparazzi, Hollywood and the idle rich.
I enjoyed the affecting story of Ida, a rather beautiful woman played by the talented and charismatic. Danish actress Trine Dyrholm. Ida returns home after finishing her cancer treatment to find her terrible husband poised to have sex on the living room sofa with a brash younger colleague from the office. Love is all You Need is a Danish, English film which is funny, tragic, awkward and yet ultimately hopeful, after the messy bits. Ida's life is transformed when she goes to Italy for the marriage of her daughter and falls in love with Philip, Pierce Brosnan's angry widower, who comes alive with the possibility of a new love, second chances and the joy of a slow life under an Italian sun. Philip owns a villa with an idyllic lemon grove near Naples. It turns out that Ida and Philip can't live without lemons or each other.
You won't want to miss Enchanted April, a beautiful film about female friendship, sorting out errant husbands and the splendours of a month in an Italian castle surrounded by opulent blooms, the sea and each other.
It's remarkable what sun, going slow and the Mediterranean lifestyle and a sense of gentle companionship and fun can do for love.
I hope you love my selection of the greatest films set in Italy, happy slow summer. Alison Jane, Editor, The Luminaries Magazine.
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita, directed by Visconti is one of the most accurate, ravishing to look at and intoxicating films about the unholy relationship between the press and the icons and celebrities that we write about as journalists. The film is set in Rome, just like Roman Holiday, but this film is a much darker, sensual, cynical and world weary glimpse into the itinerant, superficially alluring, glittery world of film stars and the wealthy, their excesses and the casualties that ensue in the white hot mirage of fame. We get to be the voyeurs as tabloid journalists and the paparazzi buzz around their quarry, chasing stories and invading people's lives in pursuit of that next picture or front page story. No matter the mayhem or harm that ensues.
Buy the DVD of La Dolce Vita at World of Books or there are you can find the Criterion Blu-ray from HMV on Ebay. There are also a few good versions of the film on Youtube which you can watch free of charge.
Buy the DVD of La Dolce Vita at World of Books, or there you can find the Criterion Blu-ray from HMV on Ebay. There are also a few good versions of the film on YouTube, which you can watch free of charge.
Who could forget the scenes where Anita Ekberg frolics in the Trevi Fountain in a couture gown with a white kitten, acting the part of a movie star goddess with joie de vivre or the scene in the church where she leaves the paparazzi exhausted as she soars into the gods, an unstoppable force of nature who is more than a match for the tabloid press.
Visconti captures the allure and the mania and the restless energy of the fourth estate, where no story is too high or too low to cover.
The film is shot through with melancholy as Marcello Mastroianni searches for meaning in his life and yearns to be taken seriously as a writer. Will he break away or be eaten alive by the business of fame and end up manufacturing stories for the celebrities he once pursued?
Buy the DVD of La Dolce Vita at World of Books, or there you can find the Criterion Blu-ray from HMV on Ebay. There are also a few good versions of the film on YouTube, which you can watch free of charge.
Visconti captures the allure and the mania and the restless energy of the fourth estate, where no story is too high or too low to cover.
The film is shot through with melancholy as Marcello Mastroianni searches for meaning in his life and yearns to be taken seriously as a writer. Will he break away or be eaten alive by the business of fame and end up manufacturing stories for the celebrities he once pursued?
Buy the DVD of La Dolce Vita at World of Books, or there you can find the Criterion Blu-ray from HMV on Ebay. There are also a few good versions of the film on YouTube, which you can watch free of charge.
Letters to Juliet
Letters to Juliet - Letters to Juliet is the slow film to watch when you need to transport yourself to the Veneto countryside or an ancient cobbled street in Verona, radiant with history, beauty, gelato and the indelible setting for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
This achingly picturesque, evocative film, soaked in love and cooking, is perfect for hopeless romantics and foodies, too. It stars Amanda Siegfried, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, Christopher Egan and Gael Garcia Bernal, the latter is a very good chef who has no room in his life for anything except cooking. Siegfried is believable as an aspiring journalist looking for the elusive story that will catapult her from fact checker at The New Yorker to a bylined writer.
Redgrave steals the film as incandescent, fearless Claire, together with the city of Verona and the Italian countryside. The film is based on Lise Eve Friedman and Ceil Jann Friedman's 2010 book about the Secretaries to Juliet, ladies who answer love letters from women across the world who write to Shakespeare's heroine asking for guidance as star-crossed lovers.
After lots of play-fighting from between Sophie and Charlie and a will they or won't love match, Redgrave finds her man riding towards her on majestic stallion. Hell it's only been fifty years. Redgrave gets to marry her real-life husband Franco Nero all over again, on-screen, in an Italian country wedding five decades after she ran away for a different life back in England and Sophie gets her first scoop in the New Yorker and Charlie too!
What's not to love?
Buy Letters to Juliet DVD from HMV or Stream on
Summertime
Forget The Holiday, the bee all an end of all of the single girl and the holiday romance is Katherine Hepburn goes to Venice in Summertime, Sir David Lean's 1955 picture postcard masterpiece film about love and the single girl on holiday, shot entirely on location in Venice. Summertime looks like a beautiful postcard, with all the colour, hustle and bustle, authenticity and majesty of La Serenissima, which is more than a match for Hepburn's wide-eyed tourist who falls hard for Rossano Brassi, who turns out to be married, but not seriously.
I am not going to call Hepburn a middle-aged spinster! Do we talk about single men in the same way?! She is a woman, with enough pluck and determination to save up for a marvellous holiday far from home. She has an adventure and it changes her and gives her a new joie de vivre.
Summertime was David Lean's favourite film. It's not hard to see why. The film has the exuberance, wit and sparkle and laid-back charm of being on vacation, with a script by Lean and the novelist HE Bates. Watch it, immerse yourself in everything Hepburn experiences in Venice and plan your getaway to Italy and Venice and remember anything can happen.
Buy the DVD of Summertime from World of Books to Treasure
Journey to Italy
Journey to Italy is Roberto Rossellini's neorealism masterpiece starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a husband and wife at war on a fabulously slow and alluring road trip from England to Naples in a Bentley to view and sell an exquisite villa they have inherited from a beloved uncle who has recently died.
The film is an intimate, fly-on-the-wall portrait of a marriage in trouble. Bergman's couture wardrobe is sublime, and the film offers a mesmerising and important historical, documentary style view of fifties Naples, Pompeii and Capri and the English and Italian upper classes at play.
The scenes where Bergman enjoys a private tour of Pompeii and the sulphur springs with her Box Brownie are fun and shot through with waspy comedy, longing, satire and panache.
Buy Journey to Italy on DVD from HMV in this newly restored restoration print of the film in conjunction with the BFI.
Love is All You Need
Take me to a lemon grove in Italy! Love is All You Need starring Trine Dyrholm - a Danish actress with a luminous, charismatic screen presence and Pierce Brosnan at his most natural in director Susan Bier's beguiling, sour-sweet rom-com about a Danish hairdresser who discovers her feckless husband is cheating on her with a brash younger woman, while she has been in hospital having cancer treatment.
Fortunately, an invitation to her daughter's wedding in Italy changes everything for Ida, who has been having an awful time with a husband who deserts her after months of gruelling cancer treatment.
At her lowest ebb, Ida meets widower Philip (Pierce Brosnan) after she reverses into his car in an airport car park. In a delicious twist of fate, it turns out that Ida's daughter is about to marry Philip's son at his villa and lemon grove outside Naples.
After a disastrous start, relations begin to thaw as Philip comes alive around Ida as she tests him and shows him the beauty of life and the Italian home he abandoned after the death of his wife in a car crash.
While the wedding doesn't happen, Ida and Philip experience a courtship and transformation from their respective tragedies, aided and abetted by an authentic, beautiful, slower way of life under the Italian sun. Philip also gently supports Ida as she emerges from the trauma of cancer treatment. The film is deftly intertwined with the stories of the fellow wedding guests, with their secrets, desires, longings, family dynamics and faux pas and the sister-in-law from hell played with vicious, grasping aplomb by Paprika Steen as Benedicke.
Buy the DVD of All You Need is Love on Amazon.
Marriage Italian Style
Marriage Italian Style - Sophia Loren towers over this stoic portrait of a woman born into poverty and insecurity, who becomes the long-suffering mistress of Marcello Mastroianni's thoroughly spoilt, rich and heartless businessman and playboy. Mastroianni exploits her youth and beauty and picks her up and discards her at will whenever he pleases. He is a man driven by his appetites.
She Loves Him!
The torment for Filumena is that she loves him.
The film is a fascinating meditation on love, keeping up appearances and Italian bourgeois life, and Loren is magnificent as the former prostitute who becomes the chatelaine of a grand house in town, but she has no security or public recognition as Domenico's wife, and he treats her with casual cruelty and disdain.
Ah, but there has to be a way for the downtrodden woman to get the upper hand with such a bastard? When Domenico plans to marry a younger woman who works in his shop, Loren plays her hand. She has quietly and nobly raised three beautiful sons and educated them with his money.
It is only in this moment that the spoiled rat realises what love and self-sacrifice is, and he marries Filumena, finally understanding what love is.
Buy Marriage Italian Style from HMV. You can also find second-hand copies
Buy Marriage Italian Style from HMV. You can also find second hand copies
Roman Holiday
Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, remains one of the greatest films about love, self-sacrifice and news-paperland (my world) as Hepburn's unhappy princess and Peck's cynical newspaperman collide by the Coliseum in Rome and have a holiday romance that still echoes through the years while our man in Rome (Peck) tries to pull off the scoop of the decade, aided and abetted by Eddie Albert as press photographer Irving. Note from the editor. I worked with quite a few Irvings at the beginning of my career!
Princess Anne goes rogue and enjoys a glorious, unfettered, chaste romance, Italian style, along with the freedom to just be an ordinary woman. Along the way, she creates a fashion sensation for circle skirts, white blouses and jaunty neckties. Hepburn exudes a rare radiance on screen that no actress has ever matched. For twenty-four riotous hours, Princess Anne goes AWOL, cuts off her hair, eats gelato on the Spanish Steps, sleeps in Peck's bed (not with him), falls madly in love and gets involved in a fight which is all about her and dashes around the eternal city on a moped, feeling alive and young.
Gregory Peck is more than a match for Hepburn, as the worldly newspaperman who falls in love whilst going after the dynamite scoop of his newspaper career.
The scene where Peck walks out of the palace after the press conference at the end is forever etched in my conscience as a rare act of nobility. It could only happen in the movies.
Buy the DVD of Roman Holiday from HMV
Buy the DVD of Roman Holiday from HMV
Tea With Mussolini
Tea with Mussolini is a dazzling film to watch on a Sunday afternoon. Based on Franco Zeffirelli's memories of his childhood, it features a spectacular ensemble cast with Cher, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Lily Tomlin and Judy Dench and, as expat ladies who live a delightful existence in Florence until the shadow of fascism and the rise of Mussolini obliterates their genteel way of life and the ladies are forced to confront the fact that El Duche is no gentlemen and WW2 is hurtling towards them and nothing will ever be the same.
The film is a story of tragedy, heroism, ingenuity and bravery amid war. It is also a story about war, friendship, beauty and art as the ladies seek to protect and preserve the culture of the country they have grown to love.
Buy Tea with Mussolini from HMV. Second hand copies are availabl from World of Books
Enchanted April
Enchanted April has always been a great favourite film of mine as a journalist who who loves Italy, flowers, castles and stories about women helping women. The film is about transformation. Based on the 1922 novel by Elisabeth Von Arnim, Lottie, a downtrodden middle class woman with an overbearing and mean husband, sees an ad in the Telegraph to rent a castle with the captivating headline - Wisteria and Sunshine. The idea captivates her. She must have the holiday at the castle and take a break from her bullying husband. She persuades Rose, an equally unhappy woman with a husband who writes racy novels, who neglects her, to join her in renting the castle for a month and take a break from their miserable lives. Note how it never stops raining in London!
As the two women can't afford the rent on their own, they advertise for two more ladies to join them and split the expenses. Rose and Lottie are joined by glamorous socialite who wants to escape predatory men back in London and Joan Plowright, as a widow, who thinks she is too old to enjoy life. Each woman comes alive in the company of each other and the beauty and peace of the villa .
Let loose and free in the sun, Lottie and Rose's confidence grows, and they decide to invite their husbands to join them. While I remain unconvinced that such husbands could be transformed by the slow life in Italy, and suddenly become devoted to their wives, the film itself is full of enchantment and celebrates friendship, solidarity, flowers and the slow life in my favourite country on earth, Italy. The truth is, I wanted Rose to run off with Michael Kitchen's eccentric, charming owner of the castle. Alas, Miss Socialite snaps him up as a fantastic man who doesn't have a clue what or who she is and she is delighted.
Buy the DVD of Enchanted April at HMV. Second hand copies are available on WOB and Ebay or look out for it in you local charity shops.
Cinema Paradiso
Cinema Paradiso, considered one of the greatest films of all time, is the story of the friendship between Salvatore, a cheeky, intelligent boy growing up in Sicily without a father and Alfredo, the projectionist at the town cinema - Cinema Paradiso.
The film, which garnered the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, is an unforgettable ode to the magic of film, friendship, the effect of cinema on the local community and the art of movie making.
Years later, Salvatore, has followed his passion for film and he is a celebrated director, living in Rome. He is very fulfilled professionally, but he remains emotionally detached in his personal relationships after the heartbreak of first love. When his mother phones him to tell him Alfredo has died, the director returns to his village for Alfredo's funeral.
Alfredo has left his friend a souvenir from their days at the Cinema Paradiso. He has spliced together all the kisses and love scenes censored by the local priest! When Salvatore watches the reel back in Rome, it unleashes years of repressed feelings and nostalgia and he cries.
Buy Cinema Paradiso at HMV. Oxfam online also has a single, precious director's cut DVD at the moment and you can find good second hand copies from charity shops, eBay and WOB.
Copyright Alison Jane Reid/ The Luminaries Magazine August 2025. All Rights Reserved. No copying in any format including Ai.
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