Flirtations with Italian cinema history

As we've made our first real exploration of Italy -- I'd been here in 1994, but only in the far north to go skiing, and this is my wife's first time setting foot in the country -- we've expected to become reacquainted with our impression of Italy from the movies. 

In Venice, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was invoked multiple times. As I'm writing this, we have not yet been to Rome, but we're already talking about a visit to the Trevi Fountain, because that's where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita. (I had been saying it was Brigitte Bardot. Oops.) Perhaps more relevant to me personally, I will be on the lookout for scenes from Roman Holiday.  

What we were not expecting was what we found in the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, where we spent Tuesday night, chosen only for its relative equidistance between Venice and Rome. 

The town has the old buildings and piazzas to make it sort of the platonic ideal of a "small" Italian town. Small by the standards of Venice and Rome, anyway.

That must have been just what the producers of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful thought, which is why they chose to shoot the opening section of the film here.

Throughout the town you see little plaques like the one I've included above. I should say, we saw three of them. I assume there are only as many plaques as there are Arezzo locations that are recognizeable from the film. I recognized these specific locations only in the vaguest sense, having rewatched the movie as recently as five years ago, but still not having the familiarity necessary for full recall. 

However, the idea of the Italian piazza -- in movies ranging from Suspiria to Cinema Paradiso to the aforementioned films of Federico Fellini -- has been fully established for us, meaning the familiarity feels strong.

And then we discovered the view. 

We ascended to what we thought was Arezzo's highest point to look at a medieval cathedral, and then noticed the park beyond that. Which -- very casually, it seem to us -- had this view:

I know this doesn't even really convey it, but it's the best I've got without including members of my family.

So at this point I inevitably thought of a different sort of film set in Italy, the sun-drenched romantic films such as Under the Tuscan Sun, if you want a movie I haven't actually seen, or La Dolce Villa, not to be confused with La Dolce Vita, which I saw earlier this year, if you want films I have seen. And though I can't name them at the moment, I've seen a lot of films like this, travelogues with a lot of food porn at their center. 

So I guess I am reaching the following not very interesting point: I've seen a lot of depictions of Italy on film, and being in Italy proves that these films were actually shot on location?

Two other quick general thoughts about Italy in terms of its role in film:

1) When we were making our way through the rabbit warren of Venetian streets, I found myself wondering where they showed the films in the Venice Film Festival. There was not a single place I saw that I recognized as a likely, or even potential, screening area.

2) In Arezzo I ended up wearing my "The Good, The Bad and The Wookie (sic)" shirt, which you can see below, which I thought was appropriate as it invokes spaghetti western master and revered Italian director Sergio Leone.

Oh and here's another panorama image of Arezzo, just because: