To Woody Allen’s Rome with Love: Four city profiles

Abstract

This article focuses on Woody Allen’s cinematic representation of Rome in To Rome with Love (2012). Rome is undoubtedly one of the most intertextually ‘contaminated’ cityscapes in the world, which means that there are so many pre-existing texts about it, such as paintings, novels, travel guides and films, that our minds are filled with predetermined notions of what the city is like. There are at least two well-established traditions of representing Rome that influence the way the city has been imagined. This article explores where Allen’s film stands within the tradition by focusing on four specific semantic profiles or scripts of the city overlooked by the film’s reviewers.