Where it was filmed 'The Spider's Stratagem'

Tara, the imaginary village where Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) goes to find out the truth about his father’s death, is actually Sabbioneta (MN). The otherworldly station where he arrives and later leaves from is in nearby Brescello (RE). He enters the village which appears to be very close to the station by porta Vittoria.

We immediately find out about his heroic father, after whom a street – actually via Teatro Olimpico – is named. An anachronistic bust in piazza San Rocco is another reminder of his father. Behind it is the Church of San Rocco. The adjacent piazza Ducale, glimpsed at the start and in various scenes, is the square with the theatre (actually Palazzo Ducale), which was the setting for his father’s horrendous murder. The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption stands on the same square. The symbolic version of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the end of the film was filmed in the Teatro Magnani in Fidenza (PR). During Magnani’s travels from the station to the theatre, old men listen to Rigoletto on the loudspeakers in via dell’Accademia. The man walks along via dei Serviti to the theatre: in the background is a glimpse of the Church of the Incoronata.

The hotel’s long avenue, where several scenes later Athos strolls with Draifa, his father’s lover, is piazza 23 Aprile in Pomponesco (MN), blocked at the end by an embankment which Draifa reaches from a staircase. The woman lives in Villa Longari Ponzone in Rivarolo del Re (CR). When, during one of the many flashbacks in the film, she looks out of the window, curious about the noise caused by a lion escaped from the circus, her view outside is that of Galleria degli Antichi, once again in Sabbioneta.