Fancy a slice of Hollywood on the banks of Rome's Tiber

What could be more melancholic, extravagant, alienated, operatic and deeply strange than Italian film? Try turning Italian film into a theme park, writes Christine Smallwood.

If you had asked me before I visited Rome to free-associate off the phrase ‘Italian cinema’, I probably would have said something like, “Antonioni-Fellini-Bicycle Thief-little boys-poverty-whore-mother-sex-women’s mustaches-death.”

As the great-grand-daughter of Sicilians, jokes about women’s mustaches are something I really can’t get enough of. I might have further said, thinking of Fellini, that Italian cinema is a cinema of extravagance and fantasy.