'Three Bowls' and Trastevere

ART AND LOCATIONS: CINEMA IN DETAIL

“Three Bowls” by Catalan director Isabel Coixet, based on the book by Michela Murgia (2023), offers a perfect opportunity to revisit the places in Rome where the protagonists stroll, meet, or simply remember. Everything refers to the city in Three Bowls: obviously the main story which mostly takes place in Trastevere, but also what happens outside the story, in an evocative visual flashback that provides a perfect source of inspiration for this column.

We begin a imagined stroll on Viale Trastevere where Marta (Alba Rohrwacher) has her apartment. In the early sequences, Antonio (Elio Germano) is still living there and moves away later.  The building faces Piazza Mastai, the large 19th-century square named after Pope Pius IX who commissioned the enormous Palazzo della Manifattura Pontificia dei Tabacchi (Pontifical Tobacco Factory) (1860-1863) which provides a backdrop on the opposite side of Viale Trastevere. The classical building, complete with tympanum and columns leaning against the façade—which bear the coats of arms of Pius IX, the Apostolic Chamber, and the then Minister of Finance of the Papal States, the Dominican friar Giuseppe Ferrari—was designed by architect Antonio Sarti (1797-1880) from Emilia Romagna.

The film shows us this side of the neighbourhood briefly and only from the apartment's balcony, while we see the other side of the street several times. There, in addition to Marta’s front door, we see her on a bicycle, pedalling along the nearby Via di San Gallicano, past the San Gallicano hospital, commissioned by Pope Benedict XIII Orsini (1724-1730) for the 1725 Jubilee and completed the following year. With no offence to Sarti, the more famous Filippo Raguzzini (1690-1771), a Neapolitan who became the greatest exponent of Rococo in Rome, designed this building. He was also responsible for scenic Piazza di Sant'Ignazio with its five small buildings facing the church arranged like a theatrical backdrop. The buildings were originally intended to be offices for the Napoleonic administration, bureaux, which lead to the place becoming known in Roman dialect as Burrò or Burò: today it is the headquarters of the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.  The San Gallicano hospital complex was designed in a more traditional manner, with two large longitudinal wards, 9m in height, and an adjoining church in the shape of a Greek cross. Raguzzini, however, unleashed his style on the latter's decidedly late-Baroque concave-convex façade (Borromini's undeniable influence) and the exterior decorative motifs, which we also glimpse in Three Bowls.

Also in the area, Marta meets Silvia (Galatea Bellugi), Antonio's colleague and friend, at the intersection of Via Cardinale Merry del Val and Via di San Francesco a Ripa, and stops to chat in a nearby café. This street was once home to the Alcazar Cinema, one of the many theatres in Rome that closed its doors in January 2016.  On the subject of cinephilia and movie theatres, Marta cycles along the Porto di Ripa Grande past the Complex of San Michele, where Totò and Anna Magnani strolled at the end of the beautiful The Passionate Thief / Risate di gioia (Monicelli, 1960). This is just a stone's throw from Via di Porta Portese and Largo Ascianghi, home to Moretti's Nuovo Sacher Cinema. Facing this is the former Casa della Gioventù Italiana del Littorio in Trastevere, designed by Luigi Moretti, which also provided a location: here Marta and Elisa discuss relationships and betrayal at the inauguration of a contemporary art exhibition.

Also in Trastevere is the place where Marta and Antonio first meet - "L'antico supplì" (imaginary but very close to a real place on Via di San Francesco a Ripa) - and where Marta rediscovers the joy of small things by eating an ice cream sitting to look at the medieval porch of the church that gives its name to Piazza San Cosimato. Behind her, forming the backdrop to the scene, is the Fountain of the Diver with a mosaic by Silvia Codignola (2006), which references the famous fresco in Paestum and, with that, the Roman baths that once stood just here.