Professor Federica Capoferri Presents New Book on the Depiction of Rome in Film

Badlands. Il cinema dell’ultima Roma – book cover

On December 16, 2022, Professor Federica Capoferri presented her latest book Badlands. Il cinema dell’ultima Roma (Ledizioni, 2022), coauthored with Carolina Ciampaglia and Flaminio Di Biagi at the XIV International Film Festival Roma Film Corto.

The volume explores the depiction of Rome in film in recent years, reflecting on the role of the landscape and its cultural memories in forging contemporary cinematic images of the Eternal City. The authors use critical tools from other disciplines and artistic languages as well in order to analyze the material. Professor Capoferri contributed to the book with the introduction “Visioni dell’ultima Roma,” and two chapters. In “Usque ad sidera, usque ad inferos,” she explores the historical and theoretical relationships between Roman landscape and cinema. In “Cartografie del tragico,” she focuses on the emergence in several recent movies such as Non essere cattivo (“Don’t Be Bad,” 2015) and Dogman (2018) set in the outskirts of Rome, of archetypes derived from ancient Greek tragedy, and on how they support a commentary on the transformations of the city in the third millennium.

The Italian daily Corriere della Sera recently featured an article about the book entitled “Badlands, Roma (eterna) città del cinema.”

Born in Brescia, Italy, Federica Capoferri is Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature at JCU. After finishing her laurea degree at the University of Parma, she completed an M.A. in Italian at the University of Virginia and went on to earn an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in Italian at Columbia University. Her research interests include modern and postmodern Italian literature, critical and theoretical intersections between literature and cinema, and cinematic screenplays as a literary genre.

Read a review of Badlands.