Finally Dawn’s film-within-a-film, with Lily James (Josephine) in the centre
YOU MAY NOT have heard of Cinecittà Studios, but chances are you will have seen it on screen. The legendary studio lot, just outside Rome, has played host to over 3,000 films, and in the ’50s it was the film industry’s favourite playpen, earning the nickname ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’. “Cinecittà at that time was becoming enormous,” explains Italian director Saverio Costanzo — whose new film, Finally Dawn, is set there, over the course of one eventful 1957 day and night. “Big productions like Cleopatra and Ben-Hur were shot there. So Rome was a kind of Babylon at that time. It was the centre of the world.”