Hollywood on the Tiber

Hollywood on the Tiber is a phrase used to describe the period in the 1950s and 1960s when the Italian capital of Rome emerged as a major location for international filmmaking attracting many foreign productions to the Cinecittà studios.

The commercial success of Quo Vadis (1951) led to a stream of blockbusters produced in Italy by Hollywood studios, which reached its height with 20th Century Fox's Cleopatra in 1963.

[3] Following World War II, Hollywood studios increasingly shifted production abroad both to take advantage of lower costs and to use frozen funds (profits from American films which foreign governments barred from export).

[6] The companies hired actors from Britain and the United States, and elsewhere, who appeared alongside Italians who generally played smaller, supporting roles or extras.

[10] As the 1960s drew on, the fashion for classical epics began to decline following the commercial failure of The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), although films in other genres such as David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965) continued to be profitable.