This is a travelogue of Italy read as a movie.
This is the second volume, following the previous volume.
The theme of Volume 1 is the known city, and the theme of Volume 2 is the hidden city.


For example, Volume 1 selects films set in world-famous cities like Rome, Florence, and Venice, conveying a humanistic understanding of Italy and the appeal of the films themselves.
In this second volume, we visit lesser-known cities such as Bologna, Vicenza, and Volterra.
The method is the same as Volume 1.
Travel through Italy through films shot in that region.

As the world becomes more and more alike, Italy is the country that has managed to maintain its relatively unique character in the West.
This can be seen in the fact that opera, which is considered the 'art of a class society,' is still loved, and that masterpieces created by hand by artisans are more highly valued.
Even in cutting-edge products like Ferrari and Lamborghini, the realm of handcrafting still remains.
So to speak, Italy is a country where individuality is relatively stronger than popularity.
In the hidden small towns, such Italian culture is even more evident.
This book is a travelogue that seeks out that unique Italian character.

It is surprising that such a 'slow' country is included in the Group of Seven (G7) of Western countries, and perhaps that is Italy's charm.
‘Slowness’ is like a ‘pleasant indifference’ that is not harsh and does not strangle people.
The seven Western countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan.
These are usually countries with developed industries, fierce competition, and well-adapted to the capitalist order.
The G7 is, roughly speaking, a gathering of advanced countries led by the United States.
But the country that shows the most unfamiliar attitude here is Italy.
Italy is an outsider or a maverick in the G7.
It often shows moves that deviate from the US-led order.
In Italy, the Italian Communist Party was the second largest party until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Italy is one of the leading countries in the market economy, but this means that there are quite a few groups with opposing views.

---From the "Preface"

Andrea Palladio, a master of the Renaissance, was able to display his architectural skills to such an extent because he had the support of the discerning citizens of Vicenza and the practical support of local nobles who allowed him to realize his imagination.
According to Palladio's records, the most common thing these nobles said when commissioning buildings was, "I have a responsibility to make my hometown beautiful."
‘Responsibility for beauty’, this would be the Italian ‘noblesse oblige’.
---From "Chapter 1, Vicenza"

Personally, I owe my discovery of the city of Ferrara entirely to Michelangelo Antonioni.
His hometown is Ferrara.
The foggy landscapes characteristic of Antonioni's films originated right here in Ferrara.
Antonioni grew up in the fog of Ferrara from an early age.
From the fluffy fog that envelops your entire body to the cold winter fog that stings your lungs, Ferrara, the representative city of the Po River basin, is always remembered with fog.
Greek director Theo Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Fog (1988) also owes a great deal to Antonioni.
For me, it was Antonioni's films and the scenery of Ferrara that drew me in with the charm of the fog.
After arriving in Rome, Italy, the first city I visited was Ferrara.
It was purely out of personal affection for Antonioni.
---From "Chapter 3, Ferrara"

Joyce finally began to become known as a writer after living in voluntary exile in Trieste, Italy.
There Joyce wrote Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
After the outbreak of World War I, Joyce temporarily fled to Zurich, Switzerland to escape the war.
Joyce then reached his peak in Paris, a city as important to him literary as Trieste.
During his 20-year stay in Paris, Joyce completed his masterpiece, Ulysses, which he had conceived in Trieste, and followed it with Finnegans Wake.
The life of James Joyce, a master of modern literature, is completed through ten years in exile in Trieste and twenty years in Paris.
All that glorious history would not have existed if Joyce, then 22, had not gone to Trieste, a place so far from Ireland, in the northeastern tip of Italy.
Trieste will forever remain as 'Young Joyce's Challenge'.

---From "Chapter 4, Trieste"

Bologna is the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy.
Together with the three central regions of Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche, it is called Italy's "red region."
It has always been in a progressive position, and since the establishment of the Italian Republic after World War II, the left has almost always been in power in the regional governments here.
At the center of it all is Bologna.
Bologna is strongly linked to progressive parties.
In the past, it was a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party.
Like the progressive parties in Western Europe, their goal was to take power through elections.
The stronghold of the Italian Communist Party was Bologna.
For political reasons, Bologna is called 'La rossa' (The Red), meaning 'the red city'.
---From "Chapter 15, Bologna"

Among the Sicilian directors, the most popular one is probably Giuseppe Tornatore.
This is the decisive reason why Cinema Paradiso (1988) was loved worldwide.
Thanks to his second feature film, Cinema Paradiso, the then 32-year-old Sicilian youth suddenly emerged as a rising star in the world of cinema.
This largely autobiographical film, which follows the story of Toto, a boy from the Sicilian countryside, who becomes a famous director, marked the beginning of Tornatore's subsequent consistent theme of 'father-son love'.
The (pseudo)father-son relationship between the boy Toto and the projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret) is an ideal father-son relationship that Tornatore repeatedly portrays.
This is also a unique Sicilian tradition about 'family', a story of parents making sacrifices and children being grateful for those sacrifices, which is natural, but can be seen as a 'myth'.
The space where this ideal relationship unfolds is Bagheria.
It is located about 20km to the right of Palermo, the capital of Sicily.
Bagheria is the hometown of Tornatore.

---From "Chapter 28, Bagheria"

British writer D.
H. Lawrence was relentlessly pursued by the British military during World War I on suspicion of being a German spy.
A major source of suspicion was that Lawrence's wife, Frieda Wickl, was German.
Frida was six years older and, unlike Lawrence, who was a "miner's son," was of noble birth.
The love that transcended the class gap between an upper-class woman and a hunting man depicted in Lawrence's seminal work, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was not much different from the author's own experience.
As they were not an ordinary couple, they were often the object of envy from those around them.
The Lawrences eventually go into voluntary exile, unable to withstand the military's investigative pressure.
They left England in 1919 and lived a wandering life until they settled in the United States in 1922.
The first place the Lawrences arrived after leaving England was Italy.
After traveling through central Italy, Capri, and Sicily, the final destination was Sardinia, an island in the western Mediterranean.
Here Lawrence began to realize that he was destined not for a 'journey' but for 'exile'.
Sardinia, in Lawrence's eyes, was 'a place lost between Europe and Africa, a wasteland that belonged nowhere.'

---From "Chapter 30, Sardinia"