With Bernardo Bertolucci on the set of Novecento, in the Lombardy lowlands and Verdi’s homeland

Mantua is the nearest city, and a reference point that was geographically close but culturally distant for the rural population in the early 20th century, who lived in farmhouses and fields shrouded in the fog of the plains. In Novecento, Bernardo Bertolucci does not dwell on the artistic beauty of the Ducal Palace and Palazzo Te, nor on the other monuments that contributed to Mantua being designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

When the two protagonists of the film, Alfredo and Olmo, arrive in the city centre during one of their escapades, they instead head to the more intimate Piazza Canossa. Here the two characters are shown only from behind as they pass an Art Nouveau-style newsstand near Palazzo Canossa; in the opposite direction, an elegant carriage drawn by a pair of white horses goes past. Apparently, the scene was not actually performed by Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, but by two stunt doubles. 

A few kilometres west of Mantua, in the hamlet of Grazie, within the municipality of Curtatone, another filming location for Novecento can be found. It is the sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which has attracted countless worshippers since the early 15th century, not only from the city but also from the surrounding countryside. In November 1974, Bernardo Bertolucci filmed one of the final sequences of Act I of Novecento, a key moment in the film’s plot.

A meeting, chaired by Giovanni Berlinghieri (Romolo Valli), is held in the Gothic-style nave of the sanctuary, where the landowners of the lower Po Valley decide to ally themselves with the fascists to suppress the strikes organised by the peasants and dairy workers. It is also the moment when Alfredo realises he feels increasingly distant from the ideas of the ruling class to which he belongs and closer to the life of his uncle Ottavio.

The choice of the landowners, which is destined to have bloody consequences, comes across as almost blasphemous in the film. Indeed, the church in which the scene was shot is a place of deep devotion for the local community, cherished by generations of farmers who have confided their worries to the Virgin Mary, entrusted her with their hopes, and thanked her for the blessings they have received. This is evidenced by the numerous votive offerings and life-size devotional statues that line the sides of the nave, made from humble materials and depicting highly expressive subjects: anatomical elements, dramatic episodes, even a series of prisoners condemned to death who were miraculously spared from execution. Many of these also appear in the film. The statues almost take on the role of extras and heighten the pathos of the sombre scene, emphasised by stark cinematography and powerful chiaroscuro contrasts.  

The Corte delle Piacentine is the focal point of Novecento – the starting point for everything and the place to which everyone inevitably returns. The film’s protagonists, Alfredo Berlinghieri and Olmo Dalcò, are both born here on the same day, and both their families live here: the former are landowners, the latter poor farmers.

The Corte is one of the largest and most monumental structures overlooking the countryside known as Verdi’s homeland. It is located in the municipality of Busseto  in the hamlet of Roncole Verdi, not far from the birthplace of Giuseppe Verdi.

For Bertolucci, the Corte delle Piacentine was the perfect location, not only because of the visual impact of its architecture, beautifully set in the agricultural landscape, but also because of the harmonious vision behind its construction: the courtyard houses both the manor house and the farm labourers’ cottages, as well as stables, sheds and storehouses. This meant that lords and peasants lived cheek by jowl despite belonging to different classes, just as in the film. In various scenes in Novecento, you can spot the cheesemaker’s building where Olmo is born, the attics used for breeding silkworms where the young protagonists fight, the dining hall where the peasants gather for meals around the long table, and the flight of steps up which (on screen as in reality) the peasants carried heavy sacks of wheat. The hook from which Alfredo Berlinghieri senior (Burt Lancaster) hangs himself can still be seen in the stable today.

For about 15 months between 1974 and 1975, the Corte delle Piacentine was both the crew’s “base camp” and the main set for filming. In both cases, the help of the many families who lived there was crucial: they offered assistance with production and, in some cases, ended up joining the cast as extras, alongside the Hollywood stars. Depardieu is rumoured to have fallen madly in love with Emilian cuisine after spending time with local farmers and their wives. Bertolucci only moved the crew when absolutely necessary, and never travelled very far. Other countryside locations for filming were located within a radius of 35 km from Busseto, around Casalmaggiore and San Giovanni in Croce.

The old town of Guastalla, in the province of Reggio Emilia, is a little Renaissance gem. It was a favourite spot of Bernardo Bertolucci, who grew up in the Reggio lowlands and chose to shoot several scenes of Novecento here. The presence of the film crew and such an illustrious cast disrupted the quiet life of the town for a week that would remain etched in the memories of its inhabitants, many of whom were recruited as extras.

In Guastalla, the director sets the scene for the funeral of the four farmers who died in the fire started by the fascists at the Casa del Popolo. The cart carrying the charred bodies of the victims, a macabre sight, passes through the town along Via Garibaldi, met with indifference by the inhabitants. Everyone remains shut inside their homes, while Olmo (Depardieu) and Anita (Stefania Sandrelli) cry out in despair in the streets, urging people to wake up. They then arrive in the arcades of Piazza Mazzini, the old Piazza Maggiore, overlooked by the Cathedral and the Ducal and Municipal palaces. At the time, the buildings, which had not yet been restored, showed signs of weathering and damp. The funeral procession takes place in the square, in an atmosphere made solemn by red flags and the sound of the Internationale, with the mourning peasants finally joined by the town’s residents. The crowd is played by the residents of Guastalla, who were given traditional tabarro cloaks and cappellaccio hats to wear by the production team.

The camera then moves behind the door of the Ducal Palace of Guastalla. This is where Bertolucci sets the scene in the tailor’s shop in which Donald Sutherland, who plays farmer Attila Melanchini, has a black shirt made; there is also a notoriously brutal scene, in which he kills a black and white kitten to demonstrate his total rejection of the values of tenderness and pity, inciting the fascists to leave the building and take possession of the square.

Another location in Guastalla that features in Novecento is the railway station, where the steam train sets off to take the farmers’ children to summer camp in Liguria. On the same railway line, the young Olmo and Alfredo decide to prove their courage by lying down on the tracks as the train passes.

Over the course of Novecento’s five-hour-plus runtime, Bertolucci sprinkles in the occasional moment of escape from the reality of the Po Valley countryside. One of them, in the first part of Act II, is shot in Salsomaggiore Terme. This historic holiday resort, with its elite hotels and stately homes in eclectic styles, was an ideal location for filming scenes with a completely different atmosphere to those of the Corte delle Piacentine without needing to relocate the film crew, as it is little more than 20 km from Busseto.

Here in Salsomaggiore, in the luxurious Terme Berzieri spa, built in the early 1900s to harness the therapeutic properties of the thermal waters, Ottavio Berlinghieri (Werner Bruhns) is joined on holiday by his nephew Alfredo, who is travelling with his future wife Ada (Dominique Sanda). However, neither Salsomaggiore nor the Terme Berzieri are ever actually mentioned in Novecento; in the film, they stay at the Grand Hotel in Capri. The Art Nouveau and Art Deco elegance of the Salsomaggiore thermal baths is every bit as impressive as the most luxurious hotels on the Campanian island. Ottavio, an aesthete and art collector who is considered the black sheep of the Berlinghieri family, has decided to leave his homeland and distance himself from his family, who have marginalised him, so that he can finally live his life freely as a gay man.