The American | Castel del Monte — The Village at the End of the Road

Pavel told him to go to Castelvecchio. Jack drives past it, keeps climbing, and stops instead at a village stacked up a hillside like something poured and left to set: arches over the lanes, stairs cut between the houses, doorways too small for the men who will eventually come through them. That village is Castel del Monte, province of L'Aquila, above 1,300 metres on the southern flank of the Gran Sasso.

Corbijn chose it for its geometry. The place is a knot of covered passages and cobbled flights, which is why the scooter chase works at all — Clooney can drop out of a pursuing car's sightline in fifteen metres. It also chose him. The April 2009 earthquake made L'Aquila impossible to shoot in; the crew never set foot there. Castel del Monte, forty-odd kilometres away and largely intact, took the production instead, filming in autumn after the tourists had gone, in a village where, as the director put it, most of the houses stand empty for most of the year.

The procession near the end — hooded figures winding through the lanes by candlelight — used villagers as extras. They were not imported. This is a shepherds' town that has kept its rites.

Walk in through the gate and take any staircase that looks like it leads nowhere. Within two minutes you lose the sightline back to the road. That is exactly what Jack was buying.

Photo: Regina Tommasi via Pexels (Pexels licence).