Subject
The excerpt shown is from “C’era una volta” (Once Upon a Time), the 1967 cinematic telling of a Neapolitan fairy tale, produced by Carlo Ponti and directed by Francesco Rosi. The story is inspired by some of the novellas composing “Il pentamerone”, or “Lo cunto de li cunte” (“The Tale of Tales”) by Giovan Battista Basile, cavalier and man of letters living in the latter decades of the 16th and early part of the 17th centuries. The work was published posthumously, in 1674, thanks to the efforts of the author’s sister, the famous singer Adriana Basile. In this scene we see a tournament of arms between Moorish and Christian princes within the original Circus Maxentius, clearly under restoration during filming.
Between the 2nd and 3rd mile of the Via Appia, Emperor Maxentius (306-312 AD) had built a grandiose residential complex consisting of a palace, circus and dynastic mausoleum, over the site of a villa once owned by Herod Atticus and Annia Regilla, in the 2nd century AD. In this scene, horses gallop alongside the spine running the down the middle of the circus, on which Maxentius had placed the Egyptian obelisk brought to Rome centuries earlier, by Domitian, for the Temple of Isis in Campus Martius. (In 1651 the obelisk was transferred again to the centre of Piazza Navona, becoming part of the Fountain of the Rivers by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.) Also visible in the scene are the remains of the masonry once supporting tiers of circus seats, and the large tribune for accommodation of the emperor himself. Near the end of the scene, as she scrambles through the walls (in “opus vitae”, i.e. alternating rows of tuff stone and bricks), we see the splendid Isabella Candeloro (Sophia Loren), a commoner of the Kingdom of Naples who lives by her wits, as best she can.
Director
Francesco Rosi
Year
1967
