Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia

Listen for a moment. Traffic hums along Via Tuscolana, the long road that runs southeast out of Rome toward the Alban Hills. Buses sigh at their stops. Pine trees throw thin shade across the pavement. Behind the gates in front of you sits a calm, orderly campus of pale buildings and clean lines. It does not look like a place of drama. But for generations, young Italians have walked through these gates hoping to learn how to make the whole world cry, laugh, and hold its breath in the dark.

This is the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, often shortened to the CSC. In English, the name means the Experimental Centre of Cinematography. It was founded in 1935, which makes it one of the oldest film schools in the world still working today. Think about that date for a second. Sound in cinema was still new. Colour film was rare. And here, Italy decided that filmmaking was serious enough to be taught like architecture or medicine — with teachers, exams, and a national school.

That decision came from a complicated moment. In the 1930s, Italy was ruled by Mussolini's Fascist government, and the regime understood the power of moving pictures. Cinema could shape how people saw their country and themselves. So the state invested heavily in film. This school was one part of that plan. The other part rose just down this same road a couple of years later — the great studio complex of Cinecittà, whose name simply means Cinema City.

Here is the first surprise. A school created under a dictatorship helped to train many of the people who would later turn Italian cinema toward honesty and the street. After the Second World War, a movement called Neorealism changed film history. Neorealism means films shot on real locations, often with non-professional actors, about ordinary people surviving hard times. Several of the young people who learned their craft in these classrooms became part of that movement, or grew up inside its influence.

Among the students who passed through here was Michelangelo Antonioni, who later made slow, mysterious films about modern loneliness. Giuseppe De Santis and Pietro Germi also studied here, and both became important directors of postwar Italian cinema. Later generations brought names like Marco Bellocchio, whose debut film in the 1960s shocked Italian audiences. The list of alumni is long, and it includes not only directors but also cinematographers, editors, set designers, costume makers, and sound engineers.

Now the second surprise, and it is one most visitors never hear. In the mid-1950s, a young Colombian journalist came to Rome and enrolled here for a short time to study film. His name was Gabriel García Márquez. He would later become one of the most famous novelists of the twentieth century, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Film never became his main path, but he kept a lifelong love of cinema. Part of that story begins behind these walls.

The school also reached far beyond Italy in other ways. The Spanish cinematographer Néstor Almendros studied here before building an international career behind the camera. Students have come from across Europe, Latin America, and beyond. For many of them, Rome was not only a city of ruins and churches. It was the place where they first held a professional camera, cut their first reel of film, and argued late into the night about what a single shot should mean.

Look at the architecture in front of you. The campus belongs to the style often called Rationalism — an Italian form of modernism from the 1930s. Rationalism means simple geometry, flat surfaces, long horizontal lines, and very little decoration. It was meant to look efficient and forward-looking. Compare it with the domes and baroque facades of central Rome. Here there are no saints on the rooftops, no gilded angels. The buildings are designed like tools — calm, practical spaces for focused work.

Inside, the CSC does more than teach. It also looks after the Cineteca Nazionale, Italy's national film archive. An archive like this collects, protects, and restores films, from early silent reels to modern productions. Old film stock is fragile. It can fade, shrink, or even decay. Restoration teams work to save these images so that future audiences can still see them. In a quiet way, this building is a library of Italian memory, stored in cans and on digital drives instead of on shelves.

The school has also published a film journal called Bianco e Nero since the late 1930s. The title means Black and White. For decades, its pages carried criticism, theory, and research about cinema. It is a reminder that this place has always treated film as something to think about, not only something to make. Directors and critics in Italy often moved between both worlds, shooting films by day and writing passionate arguments about them by night.

A practical note. This is a working school and archive, not a museum. Most days, the campus is not open for casual walk-in visits. Students are in lessons, shooting exercises, or editing projects. So treat this as a place to observe from outside, with respect. Sometimes the school holds public screenings, presentations, or special events. If you want to go inside, check the official channels before your visit and see whether anything open to the public is planned.

You are also standing in a corner of Rome that many travellers skip. This southeastern district grew rapidly during the twentieth century, with apartment blocks, local markets, and neighbourhood cafés. It feels less like a postcard and more like everyday Roman life. With Cinecittà nearby, the whole area has a long connection to the film industry. For decades, actors, extras, carpenters, and technicians lived, ate, and commuted along these streets on their way to work in the studios.

Take one more look at the gates before you go. Somewhere behind those windows, a student may be framing a shot right now, or watching the same scene for the twentieth time to find the perfect cut. The history of this place is not finished. It is still being written, frame by frame. As you walk back toward the Metro or the bus stop, notice the light on the pale walls, the sound of the road, the faces passing by... any one of them could be a scene.