“Life is beautiful” (La vita è bella) won the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1999; thanks to it, the Tuscan actor and film director Roberto Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and became famous worldwide.

The film is set in the 1930s and 1940s and tells the story of Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni himself), his wife Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) and their child Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini).

The first part of the film was shot in Arezzo, where Guido works as a waiter at the Grand Hotel, and in its province (especially in Montevarchi and Castiglion Fiorentino, Benigni`s home town).

It is not a surprise, then, if as you stroll among the palaces and apartments, the shops and the villas in Arezzo historic centre you come across eight information panels reproducing some frames of the film with a description of the scenes that were shot in Arezzo

You could also rent the DVD of "Life is Beautiful" some days before your holidays in Arezzo and then look for the different places where the scenes were shot as soon as you arrive in town.

Apart from Benigni, the relationship between Arezzo and cinema is strong: among the films set in the province of Arezzo are "Under the Tuscan Sun", from the homonymous best seller by Frances Mayes; "The English Patient", directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Willem Defoe; and "Il ciclone", directed by Leonardo Pieraccioni and starring Pieraccioni himself and the two beautiful actresses Lorena Forteza and Natalia Estrada.