The plain that doesn’t exist

In the film The Last One for the Road (Le città di pianura in Italian), there is a place nobody can visit.  Two men cross the Venetian plain at night, in search of one last drink, redemption, a religious drinking ritual, and dragging a student along with them on a journey through deserted roads and small-town bars. The synopsis of Francesco Sossai’s film describes it, with pinpoint accuracy, as an “inner geography”.

The Venetian region we see on screen is not a place: it is a time of night, a place-time that does not exist. Or rather, it exists only in the shots and in the way that Paolo Cottignola’s editing (which won a David di Donatello Award in 2026, one of the eight the film received) allows a conversation to fade out on its own before cutting away. Take away that sense of duration, and all that’s left is a warehouse, a roundabout, and a closed bar. Cinema has never simply captured places. Cinema invents places. Without resorting to lofty references to the cinema of the past, the sets are often located in different regions, in different houses, and in different spaces that, thanks to editing, become a single, unified setting: the setting of the story.

And yet, after the film’s release on October 2nd 2025 and more than forty weeks in theatres, thousands of viewers downloaded the map of the route taken during filming and went to see those places with their own eyes.  San Vito, a hamlet of Altivole - a town that no one would normally have any reason to pass through - has become a destination. The viewers expect to visit a place that was created in the editing room and, obviously, don’t find it there: they find the reference, but not the image.

San Vito is not an anomaly; it is simply the most recent and the most glaring example.  The Matera where Imma Tataranni: Deputy Prosecutor conducts her investigations, the Mediterranean-style Bari of Lolita Lobosco, and the vintage Torino of The Law according to Lidia Poët are some examples. People now cross these places having already seen them on screen, and the regions recognise the same places as part of their own narrative heritage.

This phenomenon is, in fact, quantifiable: according to a survey conducted by Experia Group, more than two-thirds of travellers say that movies and TV series influence their choice of destination; this percentage exceeds 80% among Millennials and Gen Z. Italian film tourism is worth nearly 600 million euros a year, according to research conducted by JFC Tourism & Management. In addition, ENIT (the Italian Government Tourism Board) has estimated that 5.5 million visitors come for reasons related to film and television, with over 19 film commissions currently active throughout the country.  These figures are cited everywhere as proof of virtue. What is hardly ever mentioned is the other side of the coin: not what cinema does for these regions, but what these regions ask for in return from the film industry.

That’s because the regions stopped waiting for a positive image a long time ago and started buying it.  Nevertheless, the money they use to do this, for the most part, is not funding for culture. The film The Last One for the Road, for example, received large sums from the 2023 call for bids of the Veneto ERDF Regional Program 2021-2027 cohesion funds earmarked for business competitiveness.  The Veneto Film Commission itself states this quite openly: the goal is to strengthen the competitiveness of Veneto-based companies working in the sector and to promote awareness of the region’s cultural and landscape heritage. Under this model, a film becomes both the product and the marketing campaign for the place where it was produced.  It’s no surprise that the results are reported accordingly: in Veneto alone, between 2020 and 2024, there were 106 productions, with an estimated economic impact of around 118 million euros.

From now on, the issue is no longer economic but procedural, because the conditions for accessing that money are written, public, and surprisingly precise. The 2026 Emilia-Romagna call for bids requires at least six days of filming within the region and, in addition, no less than 30% of the total filming days or 30% of production costs to be spent in the region; this percentage drops to 20% if the creator is a resident, and projects with more than eighteen days of on-location filming are exempt from the other criteria. The section dedicated to larger-scale projects requires, as an eligibility criterion, a historical or geograèhical setting with narrative or biographical references to Emilia-Romagna.

Setting. This is a term from the vocabulary of film directing, not from that of financial reporting; finding it among the eligibility requirements of a call for bids should raise a red flag. This means that the place has an obligation to achieve a specific result: it must be declared, reported, and recognised. A landscape that remains anonymous is, technically speaking, a landscape that cannot be accounted for. And this constraint comes into play long before filming begins: the script is written with the knowledge of how many shooting days must fall within a given administrative boundary, shaping the structure of a story just as much as stylistic choices do.

Geography is no longer the result of a single glance. It is a starting point.

The medium that shows this trend better is the TV series, which, not surprisingly, has become the true driving force behind the phenomenon   A TV series needs a stable, consistent and instantly recognisable setting, season after season: this is precisely the kind of format that funding calls reward and that the tourism industry knows how to capitalise on. The commissioner must have his own city, that one city and no other.  What gets lost along the way is that composite setting - the montage that brings together three regions into a single imaginary country, the nameless province which Italian cinema has portrayed for decades.  Not because anyone has banned it, but because it costs more and doesn’t bring benefits.

The paradox is that the most award-winning film of the season is the one that undermines that very mechanism from the inside: a low-budget production, shot in a place beyond the reach of the tourist imagination - not the cities of art, not the Dolomites, but the plain between Treviso and Belluno. The region funded its own portrait at a loss; the portrait won eight David di Donatello Awards, and this victory became the basis for refinancing the region: at Palazzo Balbi, Sossai received the full support from the film commission that had been announced on that very occasion.  There’s nothing scandalous about it; in fact, that’s exactly why films like this are still being made. But cultural journalism that merely counts overnight stays is only looking at half the picture.

That time of the night remains. Anyone arriving in San Vito with a map downloaded onto their phone is looking for a view captured at the right distance, for the right length of time and in the right light, but finds a country road in the middle of July.

It is not the tourist’s fault: it is the most concrete proof that the film’s setting never coincides with the actual location. The plain from Sossai’s film is not a place to be visited. All you can do is watch it again - which is, after all, the only form of travel that cinema has ever offered.

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The Last One for the Road directed by Francesco Sossai – © Festival de Cannes