Venice might not seem the most original location for George Clooney’s marriage to Amal Alamuddin. You might even argue it was clichéd – thousands of non-Italian couples marry there every year, posing cheesily for wedding photos in St Mark’s Square with tourists swarming around them. But for Hollywood’s most bankable actor and his drop-dead beautiful bride, this fantastical city built on water could not have been more appropriate.
Venice enjoys a long and intimate relationship with the film industry: it is where the world’s first film festival was held in 1932, a prestigious event that continues to this day; it has been home to many actors and celebrities – from Audrey Hepburn to Woody Allen; and it is a favourite among directors as a film location – it has featured in around 1,300 movies. Venice, you might say, is the ultimate film set.
You can take a tour of the city’s film locations – a fascinating alternative to regular sightseeing – courtesy of the hotel that has the movie business in its DNA, having hosted more stars over the years than any other: the Hotel Cipriani, on Giudecca island. Clooney is a fan of this Italian grande dame – he booked the hotel in its entirety for his A-list Hollywood guests over the wedding weekend last month.
The Cipriani’s film tour, led by a Venetian photographer and journalist, Manuel Vecchina, begins, Clooney style, by boarding the hotel’s gleaming private launch in bright sunshine to tour the Giudecca and Grand Canals, just as the happy couple did in order to show off their wedding rings to an armada of paparazzi. And sitting in the back of this beautiful, leather-seated boat, with a capped and uniformed seaman at the wheel, does feel rather Hollywood, even without the paparazzi.
Hollywood so loves Venice, Vecchina explains early on our tour, that it is, in his view, responsible for the staggering levels of tourism the city enjoys (or suffers) today. Last year, 30 million people descended on this cluster of tiny islands with a resident population of just 57,000.
“The main business of Venice is not tourism, but the image of Venice,” says Vecchina, as we approach its legendary skyline. The city, he says, emphatically, is “not real anymore”.
I ask him to explain. “Hollywood films began, in the 1940s and 1950s, to shoot here, and they produced the idea of the ‘postcard Venice’, which is a just tiny area of the city between St Mark’s Square and Rialto,” Vecchina tells me. “But these images have become so iconic that tourists come simply to reproduce them for themselves. They don’t understand where they are, they just want to photograph it, and to say, ‘I’ve been here’. Venice has become a fake place.”
Vecchina is a genuinely thought-provoking guide, and chugging down the Grand Canal on a gloriously sunny day as he chatters away with passion and pride has to be one of life’s great travel experiences. Venice is at its most spectacular when seen from the water in a private boat, and the palazzi lining the Grand Canal – Vecchina knows the dates, architects and history of every one – are the architectural equivalent of a parade of catwalk models wearing haute couture gowns, each one more beautiful and elegant than the last.
As we progress, Vecchina talks us through film locations and sequences: the scenes in The Tourist where Johnny Depp leaps from the top of the fish market in Rialto; the powerboats that nearly collide in a fork in the canals in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job. The ending of Casino Royale, where a building falls down with Eva Green inside (the location is Campiello Remer – the collapsed building was created by CGI); a peek, through the palaces on our right, at the rooftop of La Fenice, the opera house, and the setting for scenes in Luchino Visconti's sensual melodrama Senso, made in 1954. We also admire Palazzo Barbero, which featured in Werner Herzog's Dracula film, Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring a very creepy Klaus Kinski, and in the 1997 adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Linus Roache.
We learn plenty of incidental detail, too. Palazzo Ca’ Dario, Vecchina informs us, which Woody Allen once tried to buy, is known for its curse – “la casa che uccide” (“the house that kills”) – because successive owners throughout the centuries have come to an unpleasant end through accident, suicide or murder. Vecchina also points out palazzi that have been temporary homes to film stars, including Henry Fonda (Palazzo Franchetti), Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (Palazzo Mocenigo) and Audrey Hepburn (San Gregorio Abbey).
We stop and linger, too, outside Palazzo Papadopoli, which is on lease to the Aman hotel, where Clooney and Alamuddin married and spent their wedding night. The super-discreet hotel is Italy’s only seven-star property, and has just 28 rooms.
There is one film that interests me in particular, and so, on my request, Vecchina asks the boatman to travel along Giudecca canal to Dorsoduro, in the south-west of the city. Here we find San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, a church dating from the 12th century that featured in, arguably, the greatest film ever set in Venice – Don't Look Now, made by the British director Nicolas Roeg in 1973.
This is one of the few movies that makes Vecchina’s prized, but sadly rather short, list of films that have bothered to look beyond the cliché of St Mark’s Square and Rialto. Roeg steered well away from romantic Gothic arches and crooning gondoliers to explore a haunted, menacing city in a dank, grey, foggy winter, where a serial killer is loose and bodies are being dredged up from the canals. Roeg’s Venice is infused with death and melancholy, mirroring the grief felt by a couple, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, who have recently lost their young daughter in an accident (by drowning, appropriately).
San Nicolò dei Mendicoli is empty on our visit, and boasts a beautiful gilded interior and fine oil paintings; outside, two Italian housewives gossip. Their chatter, and the water gently lapping the canalside, are the only sounds in this quiet, still quarter of the city, with no tourists. One can understand why Roeg chose it as a key location for his meditation on love, grief and fear.
Later that day, my partner and I pay a visit to the Hotel Bauer in San Marco, which Roeg used as the location for the moving love scene in Don't Look Now, set in the Royal Suite, which is covered in exquisite 18th-century decorative stucco. The bathroom, clad in red and white marble, is unchanged since the film was made. "We don't let this suite too often," Pietro Rusconi, the resident manager, explains, "it is so precious. We charge €13,000 [Dh59,750] a night, and we never discount it."
If you can’t stretch to renting the Royal Suite, you can content yourself with a link to Italy’s greatest cinema legend by sitting on a tiny stone perch built into the wall of the Bauer’s outside bar, overlooking the Grand Canal. This was one of Anna Magnani’s favourite spots to sip a drink – the hotel has a picture of her there.
The last part of Vecchina's tour is on foot, and takes us to the areas around Campiello dei Miracoli and the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo. These featured in another film that Manuel recommends for its honest look at Venetian life – an Italian romantic comedy called Pane e Tulipani (Bread and Tulips). "It shows you the normal life of the city, with bakeries and schools, and people going to work," he says. "And I love the fact that, during a scene in Piazza San Marco, you see the square as a reflection in someone's sunglasses, as they take a picture. The director is playing with this idea of the fake Venice, the touristic image, rather than a real place."
Real and unreal; genuine and fake; fantasy and fact. Venice, a city that seems to float miraculously on water, and whose ethereal beauty is made in part of mere reflections, has always existed somewhere between the two. It is no wonder that filmmakers, those ultimate purveyors of fantasy, love it so much, and why a film tour is such a good way to understand its contradictions. Venice can be hard to love sometimes, when its graceful skyline is hidden by monstrous cruise ships, and the bubble-gum chewers descend on it in their millions. But despite all that, the magic is still there. Just ask the Clooneys.
Venice on film
Senso (1954)
Luchino Visconti’s master-piece about a destructive love affair stars Alida Valli and Farley Granger, who meet in La Fenice.
Summertime (1955)
One of the films that cemented the notion of Venice as the city of romance. Lonely Katharine Hepburn meets the Italian heart-throb Rossano Brazzi in St Mark’s Square.
Death in Venice (1971)
Visconti returned to Venice in this film starring Dirk Bogarde, to examine the themes of art, death and regret.
Don't Look Now (1973)
Nicolas Roeg’s intelligent horror explores a haunted, melancholy side of the city.
The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
Matt Damon plays a suave, well-connected psychopath, whose game is very nearly rumbled in Venice by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Pane e Tulipane (2000)
An Italian housewife, played by Licia Maglietta, decides to start a new life in Venice. The film also stars the long-time Venice resident Bruno Ganz.
The Italian Job (2003)
The remake, starring Mark Wahlberg, opted for boat chases over car chases.
Casino Royale (2006)
Daniel Craig as James Bond hands in his resignation to M with Santa Maria della Salute in the background. Who can blame him?
The Tourist (2010)
Romcom in which Johnny Depp falls in love with Angelina Jolie in Venice.
