With its Romantic waterfront and the typical historic town’s streets, it’s not hard to imagine the reason why Cefalù has been chosen by Italian and foreign directors as a big open-air film set in many occasions.
Every year, the beauty of the small norman-arab city attracts thousands of curious tourists from all over the world and more. Many are the stories that have found their set within the streets and the squares of Cefalù, and many of them already in the early days of the great italian cinema. The first film dates back to 1921, that is “The cross of Grottamarina“, made by Totò Lo Bue, and it goes on with big works as “Magic village” (1955), with Lucia Bosè, Walter Chiari e Domenico Modugno, and “We Still Kill The Old Way” (1967), based on Leonardo Sciascia’s Novel with Gian Maria Volontè and Irene Papas. But it was “Cinema Paradiso” (1990) to finally present Cefalù to the entire world, a film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, which won that year the award for the best foreign film. Among other titles, we also recall “Love Meetings” (1965) by Pier Paolo Pasolini and “The Wedding Director” (2006) by Marco Bellocchio.
The production continues still nowadays: recently the fifth part of the famous saga of Indiana Jones has been realeased, which was shoot right in the historic centre of the city. Also last year, Cefalù has hosted the shooting of The White Lotus season 2, a TV series made by Sky Italia that has been a huge success. In other words, even as the years go by, it’s clear that Cefalù has never lost it’s charisma.
