Bologna from Pasolini to Avati

“What does Bologna have that is so beautiful? The winter is sunny with snow, the sky barbarically blue against the terracotta. Bologna is the most beautiful city in Italy after Venice.” This is how one of the city’s most famous sons, Pier Paolo Pasolini, paid tribute to the city where he lived for 7 years only yet which he unhesitatingly defined as the best of his life. Here he thrilled in the cultural atmosphere and ferment that nurtured him to become one of the most visionary intellectuals Italy has ever had. However, it was another famous resident of the city, Pupi Avati and his intrinsically Bolognese work, who brought the city its true cinematic fortune. The Two Towers, the endless porticoes extending through the centre, the bicycles in constant movement: Bologna is a fascinating place, never melancholy it offers the visitor of today the chance of falling in love, just as it did to those in times gone by.

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In the footsteps of Pier Paolo Shooting at the foot of the Two Towers Roaming the hills around Bologna

Piazza Maggiore – Bologna

In the footsteps of Pier Paolo

Any tour of the centre of Bologna must start in Piazza Maggiore where Pasolini shot the last scenes of Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re), his personal adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy which was filmed mostly in Morocco. The piazza and portico of Chiesa dei Servi can be seen here. Several years earlier, some of the interviews in his docufilm Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), where he questioned residents about their habits and sexual taboos, took place outside the municipal stadium Renato Dall’Ara. Villa Aldini stands in Via dell’Osservanza on a hill overlooking the centre of Bologna, named for Antonio Aldini, a lawyer and minister under Napoleon. The stunning neoclassical building incorporates the ruins of the Romanesque Church of the Madonna del Monte, also known as La Rotonda, which was built in the 12th century. The circular building was used for institutional meetings or as a dining room. Pasolini used the main courtyard of the villa, the park and its facade for several scenes of his Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma).

Shooting at the foot of the Two Towers

Bologna and its surroundings, however, have never been as celebrated as they are in the work of Avati, as attested by the many city tours offering the common theme of the director’s love for his place of origin. Any walk through Bologna that traces Avati’s films must include Palazzo d'Accursio/Sala Farnese, setting for the prologue of The Mazurka (La Mazurka). The Basilica di San Petronio in Piazza Galvani evokes the scene when Diego Abatantuono goes to see Elisa Delai in Christmas Rematch (La rivincita di Natale). Two particularly picturesque settings in A School Outing (Una gita scolastica) deserve mention: piazza San Domenico, the meeting place for the departure, and Via Castiglione, setting for the school, Liceo Ginnasio Luigi Galvani. The city’s landmark towers – Garisenda and Asinelli – feature in The Friends at the Margherita Café (Gli amici del Bar Margherita), a place that becomes legendary to Taddei, the film’s main character, and is set in the real via Saragozza. They also appear in Incantato (Il cuore altrove) where one side of piazza Maggiore (with the Fountain of Neptune in the background) is the setting for the Corona d’oro restaurant, built for the shoot, where the main character Nello takes his beloved Angela to dinner, and the Musuem of Industrial Art in Palazzo Davia Bargellini was used as the location for the Hunt Club where Nello and Angela spend their first day together.

Roaming the hills around Bologna

Avati also immortalized a large swathe of the countryside surrounding the capital of the region of Emilia Romagna in his films. The monumental cemetery of the Certosa di Bologna, in the foothills of colle della Guardia, was used twice by the director who shot there both the revocation scene in Thomas and the Bewitched (Thomas e gli indemoniati) and Silvio Orlando’s melancholy stroll in Giovanna’s Father (Il papà di Giovanna). The Castello di Manservisi in Porretta Terme is where the students wash and spend the night in A School Outing (Una gita scolastica) while the hotel is actually the Stabilimento Termale Leone-Bovini, which today belongs to FAI - Fondo Ambiente Italiano. The director shot his debut Balsamus, l'uomo di Satana in Rocchetta Mattei, and used the same area several years later for All the Souls... Except the Dead (Tutti defunti...tranne i morti). Horror is a theme that also features in conjunction with the Etruscan necropolis of Marzabotto, used in Revenge of the Dead (Zeder), and the Chiesa di San Giovanni in Triario Minerbio, which appears as the church with the painting of St. Sebastian, and the Lido degli Scacchi in Comacchio which provides the main location for his cult film The House of the Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono). Forty years later, Avati returned to Comacchio for his recent Il Signor Diavolo, a horror film based on a story from the Fifties, which he filmed in the valleys of the area and several places in the centre including the Chiesa del Carmine.

Bologna from Pasolini to Avati

The locations

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Piazza Maggiore – Bologna

In the footsteps of Pier Paolo

The two towers – Bologna

Shooting at the foot of the Two Towers

Comacchio

Roaming the hills around Bologna