Cinecittà Blockbusters in New York

From December 6 to 21, for the celebration of Cinecittà’s 80th anniversary, the Film Forum Theatre in New York will host the “Roman Hollywood”, a series of 34 screenings of films ranging from Rossellini to Scorsese, with the aim of focusing on the big American productions shot in Italy.

The event is organized by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, who states: “The so-called Hollywood on the Tiber became an unlikely cultural and cinematic crossroad, where the epics of Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, and Cleopatra co-existed side by side with the Neorealism. Italy was leaving the Fascist era to enter that of the economic boom. A new film industry was born, one able to deal with big stars-and-stripes productions.”

The festival opens on December 6 with Melville Shavelson’s It Started in Naples starring Clark Gable and Vittorio De Sica. Other titles include Billy Wilder’s Avanti! starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, the Godfather trilogy by Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Holidays by William Wyler, Stromboli by Roberto Rossellini, Volcano by William Dieterle, Quo Vadis by Mervin LeRoy, Ben Hur by William Wyler, War and Peace by King Vidor, One Upon a Time in America by Sergio Leone.