Italy in the movies: Piazza Vittoria and "Rosso Mille Miglia"

Film set "Rosso Mille Miglia" by C. Uberti, via XXIV maggio overlooking Piazza Vittoria, Brescia

Story.

"Rosso Mille M iglia," in its yellow-tinged comedy cut, tells of a journalist, played by Martina Stella, who wants to chronicle the famous race, and a vintage car mechanic who has the face of Fabio Troiano. Between love skirmishes and classic cars, the two will also have to solve an old and mysterious story related to an OM 665 S "Superba."

The Mille Miglia

The story takes the viewer to discover the "most beautiful race in the world," as Enzo Ferrari called it, and the sentiment that animates it. Between 1927 and 1957, the Mille Miglia was a granfondo road car race, an inline race with start and finish in Brescia, after reaching Rome and going up Italy for about 1600 km, precisely the approximately "imperial thousand miles." Suppressed in 1957 due to a fatal accident, the race did not return until 1977 as a regularity race for vintage cars produced no later than '57 that had participated or been entered in the original race. The Brescia-Rome a/r route has remained quite similar to the original, with the punching as always in Piazza Vittoria, and the start and finish on Viale Venezia at the height of the Rebuffone gardens, as chronicles and the "Rosso Mille Miglia" itself say.

The vintage cars ready for filming

The production

The film was born from the passion for the "Mille Miglia" of Claudio Uberti, a director and screenwriter from Brescia who produced it with Lucere Film srl, involving Automobile Club of Brescia and 1000 Miglia Srl as partners. Executive production was handled by CSC Production and made in collaboration with Russian production company Zori Film.

For the real-life filming of the race, the director and producer shot with a reduced crew in May 2014, following the cars from Piazza Vittoria. The fiction part, on the other hand, was shot between August and September 2014, starring Martina Stella and Fabio Troiano, the stage car Mercedes Ali di gabbiano, and, among others, Remo Girone and Francesca Rettondini.

The scenes at Piazza Vittoria

Thescenes of the punching, after a careful study of the documentary "footage" of Piazza Vittoria, were set in Via XXIV Maggio, which leads into the square: thanks to this choice and the availability of enthusiasts with classic cars, the disproportionate use of extras that the square would have required was avoided, resulting in a believable and well-blended mix between the real-life images of the punching and the fiction. The same was true for the scenes of the start and finish of the race on Venezia Avenue.

In Piazza Vittoria, from the side behind the hotel of the same name, in the underpass from the square to Via delle X Giornate, one of the final scenes of the film was shot with Russian actress Lyudmila Bikmullina, symbolically dressed in red, and with Fabio Troiano. And also under the portico behind the hotel the director chose to shoot the final scene with actors Remo Girone and Martina Stella. Finally, numerous rooms of theHotel Vittoria, which housed the actors and part of the crew, were the set of scenes with Martina Stella, Fabio Troiano, Remo Girone and Francesca Rettondini: the cafeteria bar, the restaurant hall, some rooms and the main hall, in which the "gala evening" was filmed with a single sequence shot.