Fifty years ago, Scola's masterpiece 'We All Loved Each Other So Much' was released

Ettore Scola's masterpiece, We All Loved Each Other So Much, was released in Italian theatres on December 21, 1974; the film tells the story of the friendship of three former partisans – Antonio, Gianni and Nicola – which is put to the test by daily life and by a woman, Luciana.

The cast includes Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Stefano Satta Flores and Stefania Sandrelli, flanked by a group of equally memorable actors such as Aldo Fabrizi, Giovanna Ralli, Elena Fabrizi, Isa Barzizza, with cameos from Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, Mike Bongiorno and Vittorio De Sica.

The film received numerous awards, including Nastro d'argento for Best Supporting Actor (Aldo Fabrizi), Best Supporting Actress (Giovanna Ralli), and Best Screenplay written by Age & Scarpelli and Ettore Scola himself. International awards include a César (1977) for Best Foreign Film.

‘We All Loved Each Other So Much’ in Rome. Plot and location

We All Loved Each Other So Much covers a thirty-year period, from the 1940s, when the three friends are partisans together during the war, to the 1970s.

The film opens at the end of the story, on a panoramic view of a luxurious villa with a stone facade, in the residential neighbourhood of Olgiata, north of Rome: this is the home of Gianni (Vittorio Gassman), a former socialist, who has renounced his ideals in exchange for life as a wealthy bourgeois. A long flashback takes the protagonists back to the past. A key location in the story, a thread that continues throughout the film, is a trattoria – “Il Re della mezza porzione” – where the protagonists meet, clash, fall in love and betray each other: the trattoria, which really existed in 1974, was actually located in piazza della Consolazione.

Antonio (Nino Manfredi), a good-natured hospital porter with ideas too radical to make a career, works at Hospital San Camillo (actually the San Michele Institute in piazzale Tosti). Here he meets Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli) and, to get a date with her, agrees to accompany her to a play: the exterior of the theatre is galleria Sciarra, a covered pedestrian walkway in the central Trevi neighbourhood. Their relationship works until Gianni arrives and steals Luciana from his friend: at the start of their love affair, the pair look happy as they ride their bikes through the Aventino district and plan a future together.

Meanwhile, having lost his job as a teacher, Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores) moves to Rome, leaving his wife and son in Nocera Inferiore. He meets up with his friend Antonio: they converse about the future along the Tiber river near the Monumental Complex of San Michele a Ripa Grande at the port of Ripa Grande.

On the Spanish steps, in piazza di Spagna, Nicola and Luciana meet, both clearly tipsy. Luciana hasn't forgotten Gianni, who finds out about her extreme act when he goes to collect mail from her old house near piazza Caprera, in the Trieste neighbourhood; which is also the Friuli guesthouse where Luciana stays. Antonio meets Luciana later when, aspiring to be an actress, she is talking to Marcello Mastroianni: while Federico Fellini films one of the most famous scenes of his Dolce Vita, Anita Ekberg's dip in the Trevi fountain.

Years pass and the pair meet again for a final clarification in piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, on a bench at the foot of the statue of San Francesco. Years after their fight over Luciana, Antonio meets Gianni in piazza del Popolo: the former becomes convinced that his friend is a parking attendant.

The epilogue takes place outside an elementary school in piazza Sauli, in Garbatella: the four meet up and find out whose dreams came true.

• All the locations in We All Loved Each Other So Much.

The debt to Neorealism and tributes to Fellini and De Sica

We All Loved Each Other So Much was originally going to be the story of a teacher bewitched by Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), a visceral love clearly acknowledged in the film, which, however, ended up following a different path, commenting on three key decades for Italy and the Italians, with a dose of irony and a hint of melancholy.

Using the narrative of a friendship forged in the Resistance, We All Loved Each Other So Much describes the Italians of today and their contradictions, ironically and honestly, through observation of post-war society, the economic boom and the dawn of the crisis of the early Seventies, going beyond temporal limits to prove that, 50 years after its release, it is still very relevant.

The film is dedicated to De Sica who died during the making of the film. The director, and his masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, is evoked several times in the story through Nicola's obsession with Neorealism (his specialist subject when he participates in the TV quiz show "Lascia o raddoppia" with Mike Bongiorno), a ploy that allows Scola to pay homage to the seventh art and the genre that made Italian cinema internationally famous.

A scene with Fellini and Mastroianni, who play themselves in ironic cameos, evokes the memorable Trevi fountain from Dolce Vita: Fellini is mistaken for Rossellini (another recurring theme), while Mastroianni wears dark glasses to hide the signs of age and maintain the aura of a Sixties playboy paparazzo.

Other cinema references in the story include those to Michelangelo Antonioni and Antonio Pietrangeli. The former is evoked by the theme of the lack of communication between Gianni and his unhappy wife Elide (Giovanna Ralli), the daughter of a property developer (Aldo Fabrizi) he married for convenience. At one point, the aspiring actress Luciana works as a cinema usher, a reference to the character that Stefania Sandrelli played in I Knew Her Well (1965) by Antonio Pietrangeli, written by Scola.