Seventy years of ‘Roman Holidays’, the film that created the idyllic image of a city of ‘vespas’ and ice creams

It is a fable and as such it happened a long time ago in a place far away. At least by Hollywood standards. Holidays in Rome it was one of the first major American productions to be shot outside of the mecca of cinema. It happened in the Italian capital 70 years ago now. the film of William Wyler launched to stardom Audrey Hepburn, who won the Oscar for his first role. She consecrated to Gregory Peck, his counterpart, as a comedy actor. But it is the Italian capital that is the real star of the film. Rome was a bright and vibrant city emerging from fascism and the destruction of World War II. Its streets teemed with scooters, their cafes were bursting with stars. The negroni ran, life was sweet and cinema, neorealist of course, was everywhere. “In Rome today everyone seems to be talking about movies, making them or helping in the process,” said an article in the New York Times from 1952. Holidays in Rome, which premiered in 1953 but was shot a year earlier, perfectly reflected that city, which today only exists in the imagination. And in the movies.

“It is a very important film for Rome. And to understand its importance we have to situate ourselves”, explains Gian Lucca Farinelli, president of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma and director of the Cineteca di Bologna, by telephone. “We are in 1952, the war has been over for seven years, Italy is making itself known to the world through cinema. Neorealism, the films of Rosellini or De Sica represent the arrival of Italy to modernity. All this gives a dignity to the country, which comes out of fascism, and allows it to be seen in a new way”.

At the same time, thousands of miles away, Hollywood is becoming an international industry. In the 1950s, half of his film revenues were generated outside the US, especially in Europe. The cinema begins to expand under the watchful eye of Washington, which uses the most commercial films as a propaganda tool. In this context, shooting in Italy is a master move: it is a way of satisfying new markets, reducing costs and offering, at the same time, an exotic stamp to the American market. Furthermore, under the image of gentle comedy, a propaganda tool is hidden in the Cold War scenario. With the story of the princess freed from her obligations, Hollywood wanted to build a story of consumerism and freedom, to sell the image that there was a fun, modern and free Europe, a Europe that was reinventing itself thanks to the money from the Marshall Plan.

This was not the only geopolitical event that conditioned the film. In a first version, the mafia kidnapped the princess, but pressure from Italy caused this idea to be scrapped. She also put a spoon in England, which saw in the film’s plot an obvious parallel with a scandal that affected her royal family. Princess Margaret, sister of the current Queen Elizabeth II, had jumped to the covers of society magazines for a forbidden love and a getaway to Italy. Wyler read with relish the articles of the time to understand what obstacles a young European princess faced. The English censors, for their part, pushed for the film to expressly state that Anna was the princess of a small European country.

Holidays in Rome It was the American dream of a communist, because the one who signed the entire script was Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, accused of belonging to the Communist Party and imprisoned for the McCarthyism witch hunt. Trumbo made his friend Ian McLellan Hunter appear in the credits and his name was not integrated until the film was restored in 2002. And his honorability. But Holidays in Rome It was not an American and exotic look at a foreign country, the libretto was adapted to the Roman reality by two local writers, Ennio Flaiano and Suso Cecchi D’Amico, who later wrote for Fellini, Visconti, Monicelli… “They wrote most of the works of art of the golden age of Italian cinema,” says Farinelli. It is they who give a (neo)realistic patina to Wyler’s Roman postcard.

Holidays in Rome it was shot between June and October 1952, in a particularly hot summer. Hepburn appears in the film wearing only one dress on her walk around town, but production had multiple models of that same outfit ready so she could change into it as soon as she broke a sweat. The shooting environment was relaxed. Even with several breaks such as Ferragosto, an Italian holiday on August 15, when the director stopped filming to organize a beach weekend in the nearby town of Fregene. All these anecdotes are recounted by Caroline Young in her delicious book Roman Holiday: The Secret of Hollywood in Rome.

“That wonderful Roman summer was probably the happiest set experience of my life,” Gregory Peck went on to say. It’s easy to guess why. The actor stayed in a villa on the outskirts of Rome, surrounded by vineyards, along with his wife and his children. Hepburn, then an unknown actress, stayed at a more modest hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps. The chemistry between the two was instantaneous and evident, so much so that many speculated on a romance that never really got beyond fiction. It is mythical and well known that the sequence of the Bocca della Veritá, in which Peck pretends to have lost his hand, was improvised, and Hepburn’s frightened reaction, real. Today, millions of tourists imitate her in that same place.

Everyone fell in love with Rome, but the one who did it most clearly was Hepburn, who moved to the Italian capital, where he lived for 20 years. There she could be seen having a drink on Via Veneto, sheathed in her Givenchy (“Her suits are the only ones in which I am myself”, she said) greeting the paparazzi. His son Luca Dotti tells in the book audrey in rome that the actress had a cordial relationship with the city’s photographers, who took her beautiful and elegant in photos that today would be classified as “posed-robbed”. “Her friendship with Pierluigi Praturlon, perhaps the paparazzi emblematic of the Rome of the fifties, guaranteed an almost reverential respect from the press”.

It was precisely in Via Veneto where last July a copy of Holidays in Rome in the open air, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its filming. “It is true that this street does not appear in the film,” admits Farinelli, who as president of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma was in charge of organizing the event. “But he does in a very related movie. I think that the sweet life would not have existed without Holidays in Rome”, reflects Farinelli. “It is, in a way, a kind of remakeWell, it tells the same story. He talks about a journalist who is chasing a scoop, about a princess, who here is Anitona [sobrenombre con el que el director Federico Fellini se refería a la actriz Anita Ekberg], the Hollywood diva who lands in the city. And together they discover the places, the magic of Rome”. There are other points in common, characters like the paparazzia term that was coined in Fellini’s film, but of which the one from Wyler already spoke. Scenarios are also repeated, such as the Trevi Fountain, which in both cases ends up serving as an improvised swimming pool, in one case for a group of children, in another for a fascinating and alcoholic diva.

It is not the only film that is related to this classic. At the time many saw Holidays in Rome as a rereading of Cinderella with a reverse ending, the commoner will become a princess when the charm ends. “Wyler manages to insert elements of this ancient fable in a city like Rome, where the scenery is perfect.” The steps of Plaza de España act as the stairs where Cinderella loses a shoe. The dance is not in the palace, but on the banks of the Tiber. “Some enclaves of the city thus become magical places, Rome becomes a fabled city,” he says. From the present it is easy to relate it to another Disney classic: Aladdin tells the story of a princess fed up with life in the palace who falls in love with a commoner together with whom she discovers the city. This inspiration is naturally cannibalized, since Holidays in Rome, Deep down, it’s a classic tale that fits perfectly into the universe of Disney princesses.

Wyler’s film may have taken into account the local reality, although it is still an American production that idealizes a foreign city. It offers a sweetened, monumental vision of a Rome where hairdressers overlook the Trevi Fountain, parties are held outside Castel Sant’Angelo, and a humble journalist who can’t afford his rent lives in a gorgeous apartment. with terrace in the center. In this sense, Holidays in Rome it was also a pioneer, establishing a way of selling cities abroad as a succession of moving postcards, where the plastic beauty of the settings prevails over the logic of the plot. A model that has been standardized (and profitable) in productions of all kinds, from Emily in Paris even Woody Allen movies.

Many do, but few reach the mastery of the original, because Holidays in Rome supposes the sublimation of the city in the eyes of the tourist, the enjoyment of the spectator who discovers the capital from the hand of its protagonist: by giving the play she becomes Audrey Hepburn touring the anonymous streets of central Rome on the back of a Vespa, she wants an ice cream in the Spanish Steps, a glass of champagne in front of the Pantheon. The spectator becomes a tourist and is surprised, like her, by the unfolding of the charms of a magical city. Perhaps because there was no money involved, because Wyler’s love for Rome was genuine. Or because she is portraying a city in a state of grace. “Each city, in its genre, is unforgettable,” explained Princess Anna in the final scene of the film. “However, if you ask me which one is my favourite, I’ll tell you it’s Rome.” Audrey Hepburn repeated the phrase, word for word, in the promotion of the film. She thus created a game of mirrors between reality and fiction whose reflection continues to this day, 70 years later.