20 Oct 2013 Hugh Grant, spy in Naples
The film by Guy Ritchie, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” was partly filmed in Italy, in the Gulfs of Naples and Pozzuoli. Tagged Warner Bros, and co-starring – among others – Hugh Grant and last Superman hero Henry Cavill, here a CIA agent fighting evil in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the film is a remake of an American cult TV series of the sixties.
It tells how, during the Cold War, two spies – one from the West and one from the East – decide to form a team to track down and destroy a German scientist, who’s trying to create a new atomic bomb from his refuge in the Aragonese Castle of Baia, the great fortress of Roman origins, rising on a rock spur dominating the sea of Pozzuoli, in the very place where, according to the main historical and literary sources, the villa of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar rose up.
In the film, the Aragonese Castle is also borrowing the features of Castel dell’Ovo, since Ritchie, when carrying his location hunting, chose this Castle to shoot some of the scenes such as that on its staircase. Castel dell’Ovo is the oldest castle in the city of Naples, standing out from the famous panorama of the Gulf.
Castel dell’Ovo will also serve as location for a diving scene, whilst nearby the Manor of Baia masonry walls will be built for filming an incursion by sea: the building area will fall down in a spectacular explosion with special effects.
The scenes shot in the splendid locations of the area are all spectacular and breathtaking action scenes: from Villa Ferretti to Bacoli where acrobats played SWAT units climbing on top of the outbuilding roofs, to Molo Caligoliano and Valjone, or in Pozzuoli, where five cranes have been used to light up from 7 am to 2 am the whole shooting area. An ostentatious stone staircase has been set up for performing a daring escape aboard the vintage polished-wood speedboat.
Shooting also took place in Borgo Marinari of Naples, the village located in the islet of Megaride, near Castel dell’Ovo; in the San Ferdinando neighbourhood, with its marina where many boats, yachts and sailboats are moored, ; and Marina di Corricella, the Seventeenth-Century charming Procida island marina, resembling a small nativity scene, where you can still see fishermen spinning their fighing nets.