ROME - Cinecitta, the fabled film studio where the Italian version of “Big Brother” is now taped, has become a symbol of Italy’s current turmoil.
Lately this country has become its own reality show, as Italians often lament. Nobody even seems to find it especially odd that the prime minister, poised to go on trial for paying an underage girl for sex, regularly phones television chat shows to rant or complain. (One host recently refused to take his call.)
The administration of Silvio Berlusconi, having endlessly chipped away at the national arts budget, pays scant attention to culture . The second anniversary of the earthquake that devastated L’Aquila came and went this month, and, shamefully, the historic center of that city still remains nearly empty. A concert hall designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect, has been delayed repeatedly by the usual money and organizational afflictions.
The conductor Riccardo Muti last month led an audience in a spontaneous encore of “Va, Pensiero” (“O, my homeland, so beautiful and lost” goes one of the relevant lyrics), a protest against arts cuts and the country’s general state of upheaval, Mr. Muti explained. He compared the event to “something out of the Visconti film ‘Senso,’ ” confirming that for Italians life has come to imitate fiction.
Luchino Visconti , Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, William Wyler, Martin Scorsese - the list goes on - have made Cinecitta the most storied film production center in Europe, but until a couple of weeks ago it too was an Italian landmark in crisis . Without a program of the kind that facilities abroad have to entice international filmmakers, the studio was even talking about selling some of Fellini’s priceless props to raise cash.
The government recently promised a three-year reprieve, with tax breaks on 25 percent of the money that international producers spend on production here. This brings the studio more in line with those in Berlin, Prague, Budapest and London.
Still, Italy today seems unable to plan well into the future, whether securing for posterity its famous filmmaking center or preserving its crumbling architectural and archaeological heritage.
But Maurizio Sperandini, deputy general manager of Cinecitta, said he and his bosses were satisfied with the deal. A 22-year veteran of the complex, he boasted of having doubled annual income to $57 million since the studio went private in the mid-1990s, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Founded by Mussolini to make Fascist propaganda films, Cinecitta depends on public tax breaks, but it is a private, for-profit enterprise . Its investors are now contemplating a $115 million expansion .
Meanwhile, the 1930s campus by Gino Peressutti, a significant work of Italian Modernist design, gracefully declines in a landscape of cypresses, palms and fiberglass trailers.
On the set of a 14th-century Florentine palazzo, the submarine from “U-571,” the 2000 movie about a German U-boat, slumbered on a weedy lot . “We sell a mix of past and future,” is how Mr. Sperandini summed up this place, where the glamour and surrealism of Fellini have not yet evaporated, and the general state of craziness - a charmed, worn and fairly somnolent variety of it - seems a microcosm of Italy and a metaphor for how, despite themselves, Italians thrive anyway.
The story of Italy is one of improbable fortitude and resourcefulness. Time and again the country survives its self-inflicted calamities. It’s part of its endearing, incomparable beauty and appeal.
On a recent day, hundreds of protesters mocked Mr. Berlusconi for his relationship with Karima el- Mahroug, the underage girl . They mixed with perplexed Japanese and Chinese tourists in front of the Pantheon.
It was the usual scene of chaos, merriment and complaining. A band struck up near the fountain. The sun sank, casting shadows across the square.
This was Rome. And everybody looked very happy.
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ESSAY
