Emily Was Here

She came, she saw, she stayed.

For those fretting about the effects of the upcoming Jubilee year on an already overcrowded Rome, I have bad news: the damage may have already been done. Some girl named Emily breezed into town last month, and I suspect rooms at the Hotel Eden and Vespa rentals will be hard to come by for the foreseeable future.

Being one of the few people on earth not watching Netflix’s “Emily in Paris”, it took me a minute to understand why every time someone mentions Rome these days, they immediately reference a show quite specifically set in Paris. Is this another case of the American population’s declining knowledge of geography? Are the residents of one European capital now considered to be more or less the same as another (they sit at cafe tables; they smoke; they fall in love). Finally, someone pointed out to me that the intrepid American Emily is in Rome this season.

So if anyone in the world didn’t know about the Trevi Fountain or the Colosseum, now they know.

Emily in Paris, Season Four Credit: Netflix

When it comes to the influence of television, movies, literature and art on our perception of a place, none of us are untouched. While I’m not actively following the travels and travails of Emily, I did get hooked over the summer on Netflix’s “Ripley”, which, like the Patricia Highsmith novel, takes place largely on the Amalfi Coast and in Rome. Now when I find myself in a church staring at a Caravaggio, or climbing an echoey, dimly lit stairwell in a Rome apartment building, I start to wonder if I’m turning into history’s most creepy Italophile, Tom.  Stories will do that to you.

In the long hall of mirrors that runs between life and art, it’s never easy to tell who’s reflecting who. When Emily throws coins in the Trevi Fountain, she’s enacting a tradition that dates back to ancient Rome, in which an offering is made to the water gods (perhaps the last time a Roman ever threw a coin away on anything).  But most visitors to Salvi’s Baroque masterpiece  aren’t thinking much further back than movies like “La Dolce Vita” and  “Three Coins in the Fountain”. Likewise, when Emily and Marcello are on the Spanish Steps, it’s a not very subtle throwback to Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in “Roman Holiday”.

Art imitating other art imitating life. It can lead to unrealistic expectations.  How many 18th century travelers went to Venice based on a scene they saw painted by Canaletto, or a bad copy of one? When we bought our falling-down farmhouse in Le Marche, everyone said “Oh, just like “Under The Tuscan Sun”.  I would try to explain that the reality was much harsher than that. Yea, sure.

So when I saw some media commentators complaining  that the graffiti-washed, tourist-free Rome portrayed in “Emily in Paris” no longer exists, I had to wonder: did it ever? Maybe only on a soundstage somewhere.

When it comes to Italian image-making, no one has ever done it better than Cinecittà, the legendary film studio that has been home to multiple generations of Italian film talent, from Fellini to Sergio Leone to Roberto Benigni. As much as any single institution, Cinecittà has defined Italy to the world, which is exactly why it was created.

Declaring that “cinema is the most powerful weapon”, Mussolini inaugurated Cinecittà in 1937, intending it to be a propaganda machine that would promote the glories of Italian culture. In fact, it did just that, though not in the way that was intended.

In its early years, the studio churned out a good number of epic films about ancient Roman heroes, but it wasn’t long before it was almost completely ruined by World War II.  It only fought its way back in the late Forties through the success of movies like “Rome, Open City” and “The Bicycle Thieves” . These were hard-edged, Neo-realist films that depicted the crushing poverty and morally ambiguous world of post-war Italy. Not exactly what Mussolini had in mind.

Yet those movies opened the door to a generation of Italian icons like Sophia Loren, visionary directors such as Federico Fellini, and eventually led to Rome’s status as “Hollywood on the Tiber”. By the early-Sixties, America’s biggest stars, from Elizabeth Taylor to Ava Gardner, were fixtures at Cinecittà during the day and at the clubs and bars along the Via Veneto at night.

Soon Italy was not only inventing its own identity, but re-inventing an American one as well. Roman director Sergio Leone created the “spaghetti Western”, an Italian reinterpretation of the classic American genre, with movies like “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” that starred a young Clint Eastwood. Shot mostly on sets at Cinecittà or in Southern Italy and Spain, these films were beloved by many of the same American men who forty years earlier fought in those countries against the Axis powers.  Now the Italians were repackaging American history and selling it back to the Americans as their own.

Like film companies everywhere, Cinecittà runs on a boom or bust cycle.  At the moment, with Netflix cutting back its production schedule and Italy’s right-wing government ousting its respected CEO, the studio seems to be on a downward curve.  Still, it remains a destination for producers seeking out its renowned crew of artisans, who are masters at creating elaborate, historically accurate sets.

While not involved with “Emily in Paris”, most of which was shot on-site in Rome, Cinecittà was part of Netflix’s recent retelling of Boccaccio’s “The Decameron”, where the glorious Tuscan villa that anchors the story was constructed on some of its legendary soundstages. I got drawn into “The Decameron” and the place looked real enough to me. If it hadn’t been for the characters inside and the inconvenient presence of the bubonic plague outside its walls, I would have happily moved right in.

The Decameron Credit: Netflix

It’s easy to be cynical about the superficial picture of Italy depicted in shows like “Emily in Paris”, which rarely ventures far beyond a luxury travel magazine photo spread.  No train strikes? No pint-sized public trash bins overflowing with gelato cups? Can that be an authentic depiction of Rome?

And yet the glammed up Rome of “Emily in Paris” really does exist— it’s there everyday. If you spend a few hours in Rome and don’t have at least one heart-stopping moment in which you suspect you’ve wandered into the most beautiful movie ever made, you either went to the wrong places or are a little too jaded for your own good.

The dark side of Ripley’s Rome is there too, along with the Felliniesque strangeness, the Gladiator grandeur and gore, and the decadent nostalgia of “La Grande Bellezza”. That crumbling farmhouse in the Italian countryside, when the walls are shored up and the hills are green and the olives are ready to be picked, isn’t so far off a Frances Mayes book after all.

Whether it’s Hollywood or Cinecittà, the dream factories will always be accused of selling a “too good to be true”, airbrushed vision of the world.  But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Perhaps in a world too rich, too full of wonder for us to comprehend the whole of it, their depictions of a place let us picture it one small slice at a time. They’re how we learn to see. Bit by bit. Frame by frame.

I had hoped that Emily might soon head off to someplace that could actually benefit from her drive-by. Instead, it now appears that like many stranieri who spend time in the Eternal City, she’s decided to stay awhile—at least for part of season five. But if her Roman holiday awakens the imagination of a viewer who has yet to discover this remarkable country, or reminds another of their own life-changing experience here, then it’s worth having to push through a few more people for a  panino or a view from Janiculum Hill.

I just pray Taylor Swift doesn’t show up next.