Where was Juliet of the Spirits filmed?
Fellini's first feature in colour looks entirely fabricated, and a great deal of it genuinely was. Here's what went up at Cinecittà, which beach and which spa casino are real, and the house the whole film is modelled on.
Almost every frame of Fellini's first colour feature looks like something built to order on a soundstage. A surprising number of the oddest ones were found rather than made.
Giulietta degli spiriti was shot in and around Rome in 1965, splitting its time between two studios — Safa-Palatino and Cinecittà — and a handful of real locations on the coast and, in one case, three hundred miles north in Lombardy. Gianni di Venanzo shot it in Technicolor, Piero Gherardi designed both sets and costumes, Nino Rota wrote the score, and Ruggero Mastroianni cut it. It ran 145 minutes and opened in France on 22 October 1965 and in Italy the following day.
The house is a copy of Fellini's own
Giulietta's pine-shaded villa, where most of the film's domestic misery takes place, is modelled directly on the house Fellini shared with Giulietta Masina at Fregene, on Via Volosca. He did not shoot there. The entire property was reconstructed at Cinecittà so that he could control the light, the colour and the walls, which is why the interiors behave less like a home than like a set of moods with furniture in them.
The locations that are real
Italian location researchers have verified five:
- Focene beach, Fiumicino (Via Niccolò Paganini) — the stretch where Giulietta talks with her doctor and watches Suzy arrive with her entourage, identifiable by the sandbar between the drainage channel and the sea.
- The Guardia di Finanza school, Ostia (Via delle Fiamme Gialle 16) — Suzy's villa. It reads on screen as pure Gherardi invention; it is an institutional building with its own fountain.
- The Casino at San Pellegrino Terme, Bergamo (Viale della Vittoria 51) — the hotel where Giulietta and Valentina consult the medium. Details from its stained glass were copied for the studio recreations.
- A bar on Viale America, Rome — where Giorgio makes the telephone call to his mistress, seen in the detective agency's surveillance footage.
- Bar dei Congressi, Viale della Civiltà del Lavoro, Rome — where Giorgio meets her.
Both bars are in EUR, Mussolini's unfinished exhibition quarter, which supplies the film's modern, hard-edged Rome without a single establishing shot explaining itself.
Two notes from the set
Valeska Gert plays Bhishma, the medium, and is dubbed throughout by Alighiero Noschese — a television impressionist, cast for a voice rather than a face.
Mario Carotenuto was first choice for the private investigator. Fellini replaced him with a lesser-known actor and, since the whole performance was going to be dubbed anyway, instructed him to say nothing on set but numbers.
The detective-agency subplot reportedly came from Masina, who had done something similar herself.
Afterwards
The film took the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and brought Gherardi Academy Award nominations for art direction and costume design. It holds 79% on Rotten Tomatoes and 83 on Metacritic, and Roger Ebert gave it four stars and added it to his Great Movies list in 2001.
For the record: Fellini had already worked in colour on his segment of Boccaccio '70 in 1962. Giulietta degli spiriti was the first time he was given a whole film to do it with, and Gianni di Venanzo, who shot it, died the following year at 45.