The American | Roma Termini — The Platform Where a Dead Man Becomes a Job

Jack comes into Rome the way anyone does: down a platform at Termini, into the roar under the great cantilevered canopy, out through a concourse where the boards clatter and nobody looks up. He meets his handler. He is told to go to a town called Castelvecchio and to make no friends. Almost everything that follows is him disobeying the second half of that instruction.

The station work was stolen rather than staged. The crew filmed in and around Termini and the streets off Piazza dei Cinquecento with small units and concealed setups, because nobody closes Italy's busiest railway station for a film. Something like half a million passengers move through here on an ordinary day. Clooney was in the middle of them, unnoticed, which is the joke the scene is built on.

You can stand in the exact geometry for nothing. The 1950 frontage with its wave-shaped roof — the *dinosauro*, Romans call it — still meets the older station behind, and the light still comes in low and grey across the taxi rank.

From here the film drives east. The A25 out of Rome climbs into the Apennines and vanishes into the San Domenico tunnel, some four and a half kilometres of sodium light under the mountains. No film ever found a cleaner border: Rome on one side, Abruzzo on the other, no way back through.

Photo: Kelly via Pexels (Pexels licence).