Where it was filmed 'Exterior Night'

With Esterno Notte Marco Bellocchio returns to the 55-day imprisonment of the kidnapped Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro after his Buongiorno, Notte. The tv series, which retraces the slaughter of via Fani and the kidnap and murder of the politician in 1978, was shot mostly in the places where these events, which have affected Italy’s history so profoundly, actually happened. Reproduction of the kidnap sequence of 16 March 1978 where Moro’s bodyguards lost their lives paid attention to the smallest details: Moro’s departure from home in the blue Fiat 130 towncar; arrival at the corner of via Stresa where the flower seller’s van was unusually absent (the terrorists punctured the tyres to stop him occupying his usual spot); the gunshots that felled the bodyguards; and the seizing of Moro, his glasses and the newspaper he was reading only moments below left on the back seat of the car.

While his 2003 film imagined what happened during Moro’s imprisonment and the perspective of the terrorists, here Bellocchio’s intent is to reconstruct the events that took place outside that hideout, in the key places of the negotiation: the Quirinale, Ministry of the Interior, Vatican (Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia was used for the interiors of the Palazzo Apostolico). In large-scale works, a vast range of interiors were recreated at Cinecittà Studios and the streets and squares of Rome’s historical centre were taken back to 1978. A bar was redressed in piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere and an ice cream parlour installed, along with a yellow telephone cabin typical of the early 1980s, a taxi rank (the square was accessible to cars at the time), and campaign posters for the Communist Party and Lotta Continua: here the terrorists try to mingle with the crowds as they discuss Moro’s fate.

Other areas of Rome were also used to reconstruct these events. Including the road that links the Balduina-Monte Mario neighbourhood to piazzale Clodio, where graffiti, referring to the working-class struggle that was a key issue in the 1970s, was scrawled on the walls to create a more realistic context. The monument to Giuseppe Mazzini, in Circus Maximus, is a silent witness to a nocturnal negotiation between Moro and Enrico Berlinguer, Communist Party leader: the two politicians are seated in a car while their respective bodyguards discuss football. The area of the Colosseum and the Fori are used for demonstrations against terrorism. The terrorist Adriana Faranda (Daniela Marra) abandons her daughter outside a school in piazza Damiano Sauli, in the Garbatella neighbourhood, to dedicate herself entirely to the armed struggle. The shoreline of Ostia is the setting for a scene where the terrorists shoot at the sea as if reenergizing themselves before kidnapping Moro. A Red Brigade communique is left in an orange envelope in the porta Pia underpass. On an inner side area in Termini station is the cabin where one of the terrorists makes a last call to Eleonora Moro.

The famous epilogue takes place in via Caetani, only dozens of metres from the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party in via delle Botteghe Oscure and the Christian Democrats in piazza del Gesù. Here, on 9 May 1978, Moro’s body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4; vintage police cars and ambulance were used to recreate the tragic scene. Significantly, Moro’s last journey flanks the most important monuments of the city: the “Square Colosseum”, Cestia Pyramid, the Vittoriano.