All the Money in the World|Piazza di Porta Maggiore — Where the Van Pulls Up

The abduction is staged at the ugliest, most magnificent junction in Rome. A white Fiat van, a bundled boy, and behind it the travertine hulk of Porta Maggiore — two arches Claudius built in AD 52 to carry the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus over the roads to Praeneste and Labicum, later swallowed whole into the Aurelian Walls. Scott shoots the snatch fast and from a distance, so the monument does the work: a machine for moving water, indifferent to what happens under it.

The film relocates the crime here from Piazza Farnese, where the real Paul Getty III was taken in July 1973. The trade is honest. Porta Maggiore gives you rusticated stone left deliberately unfinished, tram lines cutting across the cobbles, and the strange freestanding Tomb of the Baker Eurysaces beside it, its façade carved with the round openings of a bread oven and a frieze of dough being kneaded.

It is a working intersection, not a ruin behind rope. Trams 5, 14 and 19 grind past every few minutes; commuters cross without looking up. That is exactly why it reads on film as a place where something could happen and nobody would notice.

Stand on the traffic island between the arches at dusk. The aqueduct channels are still visible in the attic above your head, and the noise of the number 14 will be the loudest thing you hear.