In God's good graces

It's a dark little world: the two faces of Emilia Romagna

So let’s go back to the bike ride above, which provides us with one way of seeing Brescello, the main location used to shoot the films about Don Camillo and Peppone. It’s a small town which has built itself a cinema-inspired identity around the legend of these two eternal bickerers (complete with its own museum), taking care to give visitors a taste of their good-natured and lively characters, with the help of the Sunday sun, a bell ringing out, and a bicycle, or rather two of them, zipping along.

But all of a sudden, clouds roll over and we hear a chorus of female voices that seem to emerge from the mist of centuries past, singing Nothing Else Matters by Metallica, a profound anthem that panders to the eternally young audacity of a director like Marco Bellocchio. We’re in Bobbio in the Trebbia Valley in the province of Piacenza, in the dark and gloomy 17th century, and the film is Blood of My Blood. Everything we see has a lot to do with a visit, that which the director makes to the old prisons built in the 19th century in the heart of his hometown, in the Abbey of San Colombano. It is in this very place that Sister Benedetta, like Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, is put on trial by the Inquisition for seducing and driving a priest to suicide in cahoots with a demon. The young woman ends up being walled up, night turns to day and, as time passes, a vampire takes up residence in the convent who walks the streets of modern-day Bobbio, where Bellocchio still teaches his highly popular film classes.

Umbria, an unresolved case

Let’s get back on our bikes now and touch base with Don Camillo, because the athletic and memorable Terence Hill played the role of Guareschi’s priest in the 1983 remake Don Camillo, which he also directed. It was a sign of things to come if you consider that in 2000, he took up a priest’s robes once more and practically didn’t take them off again for another 11 seasons of one memorable television series. We are of course talking about Don Matteo, a priest and detective who suggests solutions to the carabinieri in cases that disrupt the peace and quiet of sleepy little Umbrian villages, which go back to being so at the end of each episode. First there’s Gubbio, a stunning town in the grips of Franciscan spirituality: it was here, legend has it, that the Pauper of Assisi tamed the wolf, right here near the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, known as the Vittorina.

It is one of many Medieval stone structures, like the Church of San Marziale, which is put together with the Collegiate of San Giovanni Battista to form Don Matteo’s parish church, in a Gubbio that has showcased its treasures for eight seasons, with short (and highly recommended) trips, always hot on the trail of the priest, to Assisi, Perugia, Bevagna, Foligno, Narni, Orvieto, Umbertide, and Fossato di Vico.

From season nine onwards, the whole team moved to Spoleto, reconstructing places and points of reference in the main location of Piazza Duomo, with its 16th-century Palazzo Bufalini and Basilica Sant'Eufemia. The rest of the work is done by the bike rides in the historic centre and the countryside rolling by in the background.

Divine Marches

The tone is that of the opening theme, which livens up a frame filled with little monks like something out of a piece by Norberto: lots of Sister Angelas (played by Elena Sofia Ricci) prance about against the backdrop of a convent, leading us to the heart of the drama series Che dio ci aiuti, of which there are so far four seasons (with the fifth upcoming). From season two, the production moved from Modena and Emilia Romagnato the Marches. Looking at the ratings for the series, it’s safe to say that this move threw the spotlight onto Fabriano, the city of paper, heavily paid tribute to through its Museum of Paper and Watermarks, which is also used as a location.

Sister Angela, a nun with a stormy past is, with her lively fellow sisters, the life and soul of a boarding school, rebuilt with the help of the town’s Oratorio della Carità, and a bar, L’Angolo Divino, shot in Fabriano’s loggiato di San Francesco in Piazza del Comune. And it is from here that, with no lack of aerial shots and meticulous tracking shots, we explore piazzas, streets and gardens like those of Regina Margherita Park. That is of course without overlooking the nearby Recanati, the hometown of Giacomo Leopardi.

The end of faith: Rome and Ventotene

You could fill Rome with infinite troops of priests and Monsignors in black and red, nuns with wings blowing in the wind, born from the creations of Fellini and Sorrentino, ever-present iconography, in the street as in film.

But let’s focus on three priests who, in different ways and decades apart, struggle with their faith.In the middle (in the 1980s) is Nanni Moretti with his The Mass is Ended, which starts on Ventotene, an island in the Pontine archipelago used as a place of exile for Roman emperors and fascist party officials alike (it was here that the manifesto for a free and united Europe was drawn up). It is leaving this captivating rocky island, via the small Roman harbour, that Don Giulio (Moretti) returns home to find himself facing the end of a familiar, friendly and disarmed world that he can’t save. We pass through the districts of Coppedè, Prati, Prenestino-Labicano and Gianicolese, as per Moretti’s classic shooting style, which reaches its climax in Dear Diary. They are meanderings that are just as dear to Carlo Verdone, in the role of Father Carlo in Io, loro e Lara, starring a Laura Chiatti that the good-natured missionary spies on right up to the Colosseum, where she works as a tour guide. Last but not least, we have Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in the closing shots of 1970s film The Priest’s Wife, directed by Dino Risi with music by Armando Trovajoli. After drawn-out wanderings around the Veneto and, more specifically, Padua, the day of reckoning comes for the strange couple in Rome, which we enter in a yellow taxi as it cuts across St. Peter’s Square. The last shot is of the red faces of the grim cardinals: monsignor Mario Carlesi will never ask for dispensation, and will never marry the beautiful Valeria Billi.