Where it was filmed 'The Great War'

La Grande Guerra (The Great War) tells how men from every part of Italy lived a shared life in the trenches, one of mud, long marches through the cattle trails and cruel battles which many did not survive. The film is set in Friuli, a theatre of that war, where trenches were dug and the background areas rebuilt. The main location used for the film was Venzone (UD), a medieval town whose visible damage from WWII gives extra authenticity to the story. We see the walls of via Santa Caterina, where the new recruits walk into the town before being transferred to the front; piazza Municipio where the exhausted soldiers on leave are welcomed by the celebrating population; and Palazzo Orgnani Martina, where the prostitute Costantina lives, which was badly damaged by bombing in 1944, decimated by an earthquake in 1976 and later rebuilt. While on the march to the front, the soldiers stop in Gemona del Friuli (UD) in the valley of Sella Sant’Agnese where an Austrian is shot by the walls of the Church of Sant’Agnese. In that same area near Udine, Nespoledo, a hamlet in the municipality of Lestizza, serves as Ponte San Fedele, the village where the troops drag the boats that will be needed on the River Piave and where Giovanni sees Costantina again.

While film is set entirely in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, this did not prevent scenes from being shot in Rome: the Military Hospital on the Celio hill serves as the barracks where the conscripts’ medical examinations take place and where Oreste (Alberto Sordi) and Giovanni (Vittorio Gassman) meet for the first time; and the train station of Roma San Pietro is where the new recruits leave for the front, also serving as the station of Civitella where Oreste and Giovanni decide to give money to the wife of a fellow soldier who is unaware that her husband is dead. Meanwhile, the so-called Castellaccio dei Monteroni in Ladispoli (RM) provides the backdrop for the dramatic final sequence and the preceding comic scene where the two main characters, who have come to deliver a message, are stopped by a guard who first yells “Stop There” and then shoots without awaiting an answer. The battlefield where the 7^th Regiment manages to destroy a bridge is Galantina, hamlet of Forano (RI) while Oreste and Giovanni are stationed on guard near the Church of San Michele in San Pietro Infine (CE), where they lack the courage to shoot an Austrian solder.