In many ways, Italian women are like movie stars. They love big—big sunglasses, big hair, big jewels, big drama. They love flash—flashy men, flashy fabrics, flashy addresses, flashing cameras. Yet at the same time, they love sophistication, understatement and class. They are akin to what would emerge if you threw a high-class prostitute, a New York fashionista and a nun in a blender and pushed “whirl”. They love to attract, turn heads, make waves, stir up drama. But when it is all said and done, they want to be respected as women, as icons of beauty and style and, in a prudish way, as descendants of the Madonna.

All of this plays out on the runways that are the streets of Rome in style that is distinctly Italian, more specifically, distinctly Roman. It is not a rarity to see a Roman woman walking down the street wearing bumble bee sunglasses with a polka-dot scarf silk wrapped around her neck and a patent-leather clutch in her hand as if she’d stepped out of a film and on to via del fill-in-the-blank. Or to see a business woman standing nonchalantly on a corner wearing a skirt suit that fits so well as to be unmistakably bespoke and heels so high that they make your toes curl just looking at them. Or to see a senora, a woman in her 70s or 80s wearing a matching cashmere sweater set coordinated perfectly with her hat, bag and shoes on her way to Sunday mass. In Rome, the theatrics are endless and the cast includes anyone willing to play a part. Everyone over-dresses, overreacts, overstates, screaming and carrying on at the slightest inconvenience or at the slightest hint of pleasure. Oh mio Dio!—in the good and bad sense of the phrase-- is every Roman’s favorite expression.

But it’s Rome itself that incites its inhabitants to the cinematic. The city looms so large, so beautiful and romantic that everything becomes exaggerated—the colors, the smells, the people, life itself. It’s no wonder that it has been the “star” of so many classic films shot by Directors from Fellini and Pasolini to De Sica and Germi. Riccardo Pieroni, professor at the most important film school in Italy, the Istituto di Stato per la Cinematografia e la Televisione where this story was shot explains: “Rome is a preferred location for Directors because you find so many contexts, so many potential sets within one city. The history of Rome is so long that you can find everything from the modernity to antiquity within its limits.”

And he is right. Who could resist shooting along the narrow, winding streets, against the marble monuments, the buzzing piazzas, the shiny store fronts or the colorful buildings in the historic center? Looking for a cinematic backdrop? Just stop by the daily produce market in the cobble-stoned Campo dei Fiori and watch as the women-of-the houses emerge to shop for the day’s meals. Focus your lens on any one of them and one-two-three-- Action. She smiles flirtatiously at the vendor and raises her sunglasses as she slowly approaches the stand. She picks up a vegetable, turns it around in her perfectly manicured hands and asks what’s fresh that day. A swish of the skirt, pursing of lip-gloss tinted lips, a tilt of the coiffed head in contemplation and then in a flurry: give me a kilo of this, 500 grams of that, three of the best of these, a few bunches of that. She crosses her arms in satisfaction. Cut. Beautiful. It’s a wrap.