All the Money in the World|Villa Adriana, Tivoli — An Emperor's Water Garden

Twenty-eight kilometres east of Rome, the production filmed at Hadrian's Villa and used its most photographed corner: the Canopus, a long rectangular basin lined with caryatids and Egyptian gods, closing at the south end in the half-dome of the Serapeum. Hadrian built it after AD 118 as a memory of a canal town in the Nile delta. It is a rich man's souvenir of somewhere he had been, rendered in marble at enormous scale.

Which makes it an unnervingly apt place to shoot a film about J. Paul Getty. The whole villa — 120 hectares, libraries, three sets of baths, a private island retreat encircled by water — is one man converting a fortune into permanence. Hadrian at least had the empire's tax base behind him. Getty had oil and a refusal to pay two million dollars for a boy's life.

Very little is roped off. You walk the gravel between the Pecile's surviving wall and the pool, past the Maritime Theatre, and almost nothing tells you where to look. The site was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 and still feels under-visited compared with the Villa d'Este in the town above.

Bring water and something for your feet. It takes three hours to see properly, there is no shade on the Canopus, and the caryatids are copies — the originals are in the site museum, a hundred metres away.