Where it was filmed 'Torture Me But Kill Me with Kisses'

Marino and Marisa meet at an annual gathering of Italian folklore groups which, as the narrator explains in the opening title sequence, takes place at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. It is love at first sight, and soon afterwards Marino takes a job as a barber in her village, the fictional Sacrofante Marche. The location was actually Pescocostanzo (AQ), although the piazza del Comune in Ronciglione (VT) is used in the first part of the film as the entrance to the barber shop and Guidonia Montecelio (RM) as the area where Marisa’s marble sculptor father works and Marisa lives. After an hour’s trudge through the snow, Marino finds his beloved as she walks to work with a group of women (Rivisondoli – AQ in the background). Their engagement lasts for months and, on the death of her father, the only obstacle to their love, eventually consolidates into a date for their wedding until a fatal doubt worms into Marino’s brain. The barber’s delayed regret ends up with him rushing to the train station, passing the staircase of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Colle in Pescocostanzo.

The rest of the film is set in Rome. Marino’s long search begins in the city’s employment agencies, one of which has a window overlooking piazza Venezia. He also attempts to find her with a classified announcement in the daily newspaper Il Messaggero (whose offices are in piazza del Tritone) suggesting an appointment at the Axum Obelisk which stood in piazza di Porta Capena, facing Circus Maximus, from 1937 until its restitution to Ethiopia in 2005. With only a few coins left, Marino calls home to ask if there is news of Marisa from a telephone box in piazza Marconi in the EUR neighbourhood. He walks through piazza Addis Abeba alone on New Year’s Eve and the next day he makes a clumsy attempt at suicide, throwing himself into the Tiber River from the Cavour Bridge. He meets up with Marisa in hospital, but she has married Umberto, a friendly deaf and dumb man who orders his coffee by whistling and has an uncle who is a Capuchin monk (in one scene they walk together to a bar in Campo de’ Fiori). Resigned, Marino decides to return to his village but he is joined by Marisa at the bus stop in piazza San Giovanni Bosco (Tuscolano neighbourhood). The two race hurriedly through the traffic of Rome in a taxi to piazza Farnese where the exterior of Umberto’s house is above the Church of St. Brigida. The wedding at the end takes place in the Church of Santa Maria in Celsano in Santa Maria di Galeria, in the countryside north of Rome.