Netflix’s latest destination romance “La Dolce Villa” largely takes place in a beautiful old Italian town called Montezara, and it really is beautiful. Unfortunately, it’s also not actually a real place. So, where did this film actually shoot?
Now streaming on Netflix, the movie centers on Eric Field (Scott Foley), a dad who rushes to Italy after his daughter Olivia (Maia Reficco) informs him that she’ll be purchasing a home for one euro and moving there, as part of an effort to bring in new residents.
While there, he not only gets closer to his daughter, but also finds love, as well as his old passion for cooking. Because that’s just what Italy does to people.
And for the record, yes, “La Dolce Villa” was actually filmed in Italy. Montezara is just a fake town (though it is the name of a real winery, spelled as Monte Zara). According to directo Mark Waters, the town they primarily shot in was San Quirico D’orcia.
Meanwhile, according to Netflix, the interiors of the villa were built at Cinecittá Studios in Rome, while the exteriors were shot in eastern Lazio, at a place called Torrino del Gelsi.
For Waters, it was important to get the beauty of Italy, without making it a movie that just hit every city it could.
“There was a story thing that put a lid on getting too ridiculous, as far as just making it a scenic travel log, in the sense that it’s supposed to be a really small town that’s not doing great financially,” he explained to TheWrap. “And so, when you’re going around Italy and you’re looking at these amazing places, you’re in Montepulciano, you’re in Orvieto, you’re like, ‘These places are incredible, but they’re all a little bit too grand, you know?”
The director added that the note he often gave his location scout was that the cities they pitched were “too nice.”
“There’s even a thing too, where I felt like some of the towns already have been kind of like art decorated, let’s put it,” he recalled. “Almost by Disney, to make it look like, ‘Yes, is the perfect little Italian town.’ Yet it felt curated to look like that. And so there’s something about the places that we did find that I liked. They seemed a little ramshackle.”
Waters conceded that he and his team did use their own movie magic to spruce up certain elements of San Quirico D’orcia though.
“It was kind of like, ‘Yeah, it’s not glamorous, but it looked perfect,’ you know? We made it look a little nicer, we kind of changed some storefronts, and we added some awnings, and put a fountain in the main square,” he admitted. “But, we still wanted to kind of be scaled that nice way, where it felt like it’s a little Italian commune.”
“La Dolce Villa” is now streaming on Netflix.