Showing posts with label Commedia all'Italiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commedia all'Italiana. Show all posts

30 June 2023

Mario Carotenuto - actor

Roman from theatrical family made more than 100 films

Mario Carotenuto forged a career as a character actor in comedies
Mario Carotenuto forged a career
as a character actor in comedies
The actor Mario Carotenuto, who became one of the most familiar faces in the commedia all’italiana genre of Italian film, was born on this day in 1916 in Rome.

Carotenuto, who was active in the movie industry for more than 30 years having started in the theatre and on radio, acted alongside some of the greats of Italian cinema, including Totò, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti.

More often than not, he was cast in supporting roles rather than as the star, yet became respected as one of Italy’s finest character actors in comedy, winning a Nastro d'argento award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of The Professor in Luigi Comencini’s 1973 comedy-drama Lo scopone scientifico - The Scientific Card Player - which starred Sordi, Silvana Mangano and the American Bette Davis.

Carotenuto was born into an acting family. His father, Nello, made a living in Italian silent movies, while his older brother, Memmo, also had a long career in films. His nephew, Bruno, and his niece, Nennella, also entered the acting profession.

He made his stage debut at the age of eight but is said to have had a rebellious nature as a child and his involvement in petty crime and antisocial behaviour saw him receive part of his education in a reform school.

As he matured, he became fascinated with theatre and acting and alongside various jobs he took in order to earn money he was always on the lookout for opportunities to act, one of which came with a radio station in Florence, where he was given parts in radio drama productions.

Carotenuto's acting style was perfect for the  highly popular commedia all'italiana genre
Carotenuto's acting style was perfect for the 
highly popular commedia all'italiana genre
After the end of the Second World War, in which he claimed he joined the Italian Waffen SS in order to avoid being imprisoned by the Germans, he set up his own small theatre company in Milan before being discovered in 1956 by the director Giorgio Strehler, who wanted to entrust him with the part of Peachum, the king of beggars, in Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. 

Carotenuto’s interpretation of the role gained the approval of Brecht himself and won him the San Ginesio Prize, awarded by a Milan-based magazine. He went on to have roles in plays by Shakespeare, Pirandello, Molière, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.

After making his film debut in 1950, his ability to portray a broad range of characters soon saw him an actor much in demand, particularly in the comedy genre, working for famous directors such as Alberto Latuarda, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Luigi Zampa and Ugo Tognazzi. 

Ultimately, his most popular roles were those in which his character was one with which many Italians could identify in the years after the war, a character looking to make his way in a changing society in which generally people looked forward with optimism.

Carotenuto's simple memorial at  the cemetery of Grottammare
Carotenuto's simple memorial at 
the cemetery of Grottammare 
Federico Fellini used him as the voice of the actor Mario Cannochia in Otto e mezzo (8 ½).

Carotenuto had many television credits as well as his long list of movie roles but ceased to be active in either medium in the early 1980s, dividing his time between Rome and the seaside town of Grottammare in Marche, the home of his second wife, theatre actress Gabriella Cottignoli.

He had been married previously to Luisa Poselli, an actress, singer and dancer, with whom he had a daughter, Claretta, who went on to become an actress and director.

He died in Rome in the Aurelia Hospital in April 1995 at the age of 79, having for many years been ill with lung cancer.  His funeral took place in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo - the 'church of the artists' - and was attended by many personalities of cinema and entertainment. His body was then taken to be buried in the municipal cemetery at Grottammare.

Rome's principal opera house, the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, was originally the Teatro Costanzi
Rome's principal opera house, the Teatro dell'Opera
di Roma, was originally the Teatro Costanzi
Travel tip:

Carotenuto made his stage debut at the Teatro Costanzi in Via del Viminale, a short distance from Piazza della Repubblica. Today the theatre has a different identity as the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma - Rome’s main opera house. Built in 1879-80, it takes its name from Domenico Costanzi, a contractor, who financed the project. It was designed by the Milanese architect Achille Sfondrini, a specialist in the building and renovation of theatres. Built on the site of the house of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, the theatre was inaugurated in November 1880 with a performance of Semiramide by Gioachino Rossini.  Sfondrini paid particular attention to the acoustics of the theatre, the dome of which was adorned with frescoes by Annibale Brugnoli. As well as the world premiere of Pietro Mascangi's Cavalleria rusticana, the theatre staged the first production of Tosca by Giacomo Puccini in January 1900 and introduced Roman audiences to Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, Turandot and Il trittico as well as Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

Piazza Peretti is the central square of the older part of Grottammare, which sits above the resort
Piazza Peretti is the central square of the older part
of Grottammare, which sits above the resort
Travel tip:

Grottammare, where Carotenuto is buried, is one of the beach resorts that make up the Marche region’s Riviera delle Palme, a stretch of coastline around the larger town of San Benedetto del Tronto. It is notable for a fine, sandy beach but also for the well preserved remains of a fortress overlooking the town that was built following the sacking of Grottammare by the Montenegrin Princes of Dulcigno in 1525.  The centre of the older part of the town is Piazza Peretti, a square enclosed by the Church of San Giovanni Battista, the Town Hall, Municipal Tower and Teatro dell'Arancio.  A peculiarity of which the administration of Grottammare takes pride is that it sits on the 43º parallel, the line of latitude that also passes through the cities of Assisi (Italy), Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Lourdes (France), Medjugorje (Bosnia), Vladivostok (Russia), Sapporo (Japan), Buffalo and Milwaukee (United States).

Also on this day:

1961: The birth of novelist Gianrico Carafiglio

1986: The birth of heiress Allegra Versace

First Martyrs Day


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10 May 2022

Ettore Scola - screenwriter and film director

Master of dark comedy and social drama

Ettore Scola is seen by some as the last of the great postwar Italian directors
Ettore Scola is seen by some as the last
of the great postwar Italian directors
The screenwriter and director Ettore Scola, whose films encompassed elements of commedia all’italiana and neorealism, was born on this day in 1931 in Trevico, a mountainous village in Campania.

Scola, regarded by some as the last in the line of brilliant postwar Italian filmmakers, is best remembered for his 1977 drama Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, which won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1978.

A Special Day was also nominated for an Academy Award as were three other films that Scola directed or co-directed during a career that spanned more than 60 years.

Scola made his first movie as a director in 1964 with the comedy Se permettete parliamo di donne - Let’s Talk About Women - which starred Vittorio Gassman. He was only 33 but was already a widely respected scriptwriter, which had been his profession since the age of 21.

He had regularly sent suggestions for gags and sketches to the Italian comic actor Totò and others when he was a 15-year-old at high school.

Scola was born to parents who were themselves both actors.  His home village, high up in the Campanian Apennines more than 60km (37 miles) from the city of Avellino, had no cinema, but films were occasionally shown on a screen erected in the main square and Scola says he has memories of watching Laurel and Hardy shorts as a small boy.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day, regarded as Scola's finest work
Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A
Special Day,
regarded as Scola's finest work
In the late 1940s, he left the village to attend university in Rome, first to study medicine and then law but dropped out without graduating.  He found work on a satirical magazine called Marc’ Aurelio, where the director Federico Fellini was a member of the editorial board. The magazine had helped launch Fellini’s career and Scola found it opened doors for him, too.

Scola collaborated with directors such as Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, and Antonio Pietrangeli, three giants of the commedia all’italiana genre. Often working in tandem with fellow writer Ruggero Maccari, he was part of Pietrangeli’s team for dramas including Adua and Her Friends (1960) and I Knew Her Well (1965). The two worked for Risi on comedies such as Il Sorpasso (1962) and I Mostri (1963).

Commedia all’italiana, which Scola once described as a natural off-shoot of gritty neorealism, was a genre that emerged in the late 1950s. The films had the traditional elements of bawdy comedy and farce but were at the same time a vehicle for examining the political and social issues of postwar Italy. “Serious” subjects such as marriage, religion, contraception and divorce were often looked at through the prism of satire and farce, sometimes causing deep offence to the Catholic Church.

Monica Vitti with Mastroianni (left) and Giancarlo Giannini in Scola's Dramma della gelosia
Monica Vitti with Mastroianni (left) and Giancarlo
Giannini in Scola's Dramma della gelosia
Let’s Talk About Women and other early films by Scola brought some success at the box office while attracting no great critical acclaim, but that began to change in the ‘70s, which began with Dramma della gelosia (anglicised as The Pizza Triangle), which featured Monica Vitti as a florist in Rome torn between a middle-aged bricklayer (Marcello Mastroianni) and a young pizza chef (Giancarlo Giannini).

Between 1974 and 1977, Scola made three of his most important works: C'eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much) in 1974, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Down and Dirty) in 1976 and Una giornata particolare (A Special Day) in 1977.

The first, a comedy starring Nino Manfredi, Satefania Sandrelli and Vittorio Gassman, followed three former partisan fighters as they returned to very different civilian lives in Rome. Consisting of interlinked stories, including one sequence in which Scola recreated the Trevi Fountain scene from Fellini's La dolce vita, it was described by one critic as “a loving homage to Fellini, De Sica and post-war Italian cinema”.

Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, again starring Manfredi, was particularly Felliniesque, a comedy of the grotesque featuring a large, impoverished Apulian family living on the wrong side of the law in Rome, headed by an irascible patriarch who wins a huge insurance payout for losing an eye but hides it from his family.

Four of Scola's movies were nominated for Oscars
Four of Scola's movies were
nominated for Oscars
A Special Day was arguably Scola’s greatest triumph, a sensitive story of of two lonely residents of a seedy apartment building who are drawn together on the day in 1938 when the populace in the streets is cheering Hitler’s visit to Mussolini in Rome. He cast Sophia Loren as the repressed wife of a fervent Fascist, and Marcello Mastroianni as a gay man, an anti-fascist, who is waiting to be deported to Sardinia. The two become unexpectedly close.

After further Oscar nominations for I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, also titled Viva Italia for English-speaking audiences) in 1978, Le Bal in 1983 and The Family in 1987, Scola made 10 more films before announcing his retirement in 2003, emerging again in 2013, when he directed Che strano chiamarsi Federico (How Strange to be Named Federico), an affectionate semi-documentary on his friend, Fellini.

Away from his film-making, Scola was often politically active. A member of the Italian Communist Party, in the late 1980s he was shadow culture minister. At around the time of his retirement, he was an outspoken critic of the right-wing populist, Silvio Berlusconi.

Upon Scola’s death in 2016 of pneumonia following heart problems at the age of 84, the then Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said his passing “leaves a huge void in Italian culture”.

Steep streets are characteristic of the village of Trevico, high in the Campania Apennines
Steep streets are characteristic of the village
of Trevico, high in the Campania Apennines
Travel tip:

Trevico, Scola’s home village, has the distinction of being the highest inhabited place in Campania, situated at the top of a steep hill in the Apennines with an altitude of 3,576 feet (1,090m). The house where Scola was born and spent his early childhood is located among the alleys of the historic centre in a panoramic position and retains many of its original features. Now known as the Palazzo Scola and renovated after the damage suffered following the 1980 earthquake, in 2003 it was donated by the Scola family to the municipality of Trevico. 

The facade of Roma Ostiense railway station was built entirely in Tavertine marble
The facade of Roma Ostiense railway station
was built entirely in Tavertine marble
Travel tip:

The suburban railway station of Roma Ostiense, the third largest in Rome after Termini and Tiburtina, owes its striking appearance to the visit to Rome by the German leader Adolf Hitler in 1938, which featured in Ettore Scola’s Golden Globe winner A Special Day. The existing rural station at Ostiense, about 5km (3 miles) south of the city centre close to the fashionable former working class neighbourhood of Testaccio, was demolished with the aim of creating a monumental station to receive the German dictator, although it was not actually finished until 1940. Architect Roberto Narducci designed the station, of which the entire facade is made of Travertine marble and the entrance is marked by a columned portico, in the architectural style favoured by Hitler.  A road built to connect the station with Porta San Paolo was initially named Via Adolf Hitler but was changed after the Second World War to Viale delle Cave Ardeatine, as a way of commemorating the victims of a mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners in Rome by the Nazi troops in 1944.

Also on this day:

1548: The birth of Antonio Priuli, Doge of Venice

1784: The birth of military general Carlo Filangieri

1922: The birth of journalist Antonio Ghirelli

1949: The birth of fashion designer Miuccia Prada


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16 May 2018

Mario Monicelli - film director

Life’s work put him among greats of commedia all’italiana


Mario Monicelli directed his first film in 1949, which also  marked the start of his successful relationship with Totò
Mario Monicelli directed his first film in 1949, which also
marked the start of his successful relationship with Totò
Mario Monicelli, the director who became known as ‘the father of commedia all’italiana’ and was nominated for an Oscar six times, was born on this day in 1915 in Viareggio.

He made more than 70 films, working into his 90s.  He helped advance the careers of actors such as Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, and forged successful associations with the great comic actors Totò and Alberto Sordi.

Commedia all’italiana was notable for combining the traditional elements of comedy with social commentary, often addressing some of the most controversial issues of the times and making fun of any organisation, the Catholic Church in particular, perceived to have an earnest sense of self-importance.

The genre’s stories were often heavily laced with sadness and Monicelli’s work won praise for his particular sensitivity to the miseries and joys of Italian life and the foibles of ordinary Italians. He claimed the lack of a happy ending actually defined Italian humour and that themes drawn from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death were the ones that most appealed to the Italian love of tragi-comedy.

Monicelli continued to direct films into his 90s
Monicelli continued to direct films
into his 90s
He was part of a golden generation of Italian directors including Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dino Risi and Luigi Comencini, and many of his films were hailed as masterpieces, including the caper comedy I soliti ignoti (1958), which was packaged for American audiences as Big Deal on Madonna Street, the satire La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), which won him Venice's Golden Lion award, and the bitter-sweet drama I compagni (The Comrades, 1963), also known as The Organizer.

Monicelli was the son of a noted journalist, Tommaso Monicelli, and had two older brothers, one a writer and translator, the other a journalist. He attended the universities of Pisa and Milan, where he studied literature and philosophy, and after graduation became became a film critic and amateur film-maker. At the age of just 20 he made a feature-length film, I ragazzi della via Paal, which won an amateur prize at the Venice Film Festival  in 1935.

He spent 12 years as scriptwriter and assistant director, collaborating on some of the most celebrated Italian films of the 1940s, including Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949).

Monicelli’s debut as a director came in a collaboration with Steno (real name Stefanio Vanzina) on Totò cerca casa (Totò looks for a house, 1949), the first of several popular films the pair made starring Totò over the next four years, including Guardie e Ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951) and Totò e i Re di Roma (1952). 

Totò cerca casa was typical of the genre, a farce set against the background of Italy’s desperate housing shortage. Guardie e Ladri caused controversy because it was about the friendship between a thief and a policeman, two men from similar backgrounds sharing similar problems, a concept considered so revolutionary that Monicelli had to appear personally before the sensors before it could be released.

Alberto Sordi (left) and Vittorio Gassman in a scene
from the tragic Italian movie La grande guerra
Totò e Carolina (1955), which depicted a young suicidal girl being helped by Communists, was actually banned for a year and a half, and was ultimately granted a certificate only after Monicelli had made 34 cuts.

I soliti ignoti, sometimes called Italian cinema's first true Commedia all'Italiana film, was his first hit. Starring Totò, it gave early comedy roles to Mastroianni, Gassman and Cardinale. Despite the lack of a happy ending, it was a success both in the United Kingdom, where it was titled Persons Unknown, and in the US, where it was also turned into a Broadway musical.

Next came Monicelli’s bravest and possibly most controversial film, the funny but poignant La grande guerra, a scathing satire of the First World War with Sordi and Gassman as peasants thrust into the bewildering world of battle, which opponents claimed would defile the memory of the 600,000 Italians who died in the conflict but once released was seen as a triumph, a film that at last dared to say that so many men, poor men who were badly dressed, badly fed, ignorant and illiterate, had gone to fight a war that had little to do with them and was ultimately pointless.  The film won the Golden Lion award at Venice, and, like I soliti ignoti, was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film.

Totò (left) and Aldo Fabrizi in a scene from Guardie
e Ladri.
They worked together in numerous films. 
I Compagni brought his second Oscar nomination and in 1968 came a third, for La Ragazza con la pistola (Girl with the Gun), which starred Monica Vitti as a girl who travels from Sicily to London intending to murder her unfaithful lover.

Amici miei (My Dear Friends, 1975), a tale of ageing friends who play jokes on one another to camouflage the realities of disillusionment, loneliness and failure, proved one of his greatest hits, breaking records in Italy and France. The following year he won his final Oscar nomination, for another Mastroianni hit, Casanova '70. 

His last feature film was Le rose del deserto (Rose of the Desert, 2006), the story of a group of soldiers in Libya during the Second World War, which he directed at the age of 91. Yet he had still not finished working, in 2008 directing a documentary entitled Monti, about his adopted neighbourhood in Rome.

A lifetime supporter of left-wing parties, he remained politically active until late in life, in 2009 calling on students to protest against the government's proposals to cut the culture budget. He described Italy's then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi as “a philistine” and "a modern tyrant".

Monicelli’s father, Tommaso, had committed suicide and when he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2010, he decided he would end his life the same way, dramatically jumping from a window on the fifth floor of the San Giovanni Addolorata Hospital in Rome.

Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano said Monicelli would be "remembered by millions of Italians for the way he moved them, for how he made them laugh, and reflect."

Viareggio's Grand Hotel is a throwback to its heydey
Viareggio's Grand Hotel is a throwback to its heydey
Travel tip:

Viareggio, the seaside resort in Tuscany in which Monicelli was born, has an air of faded grandeur, its seafront notable for the Art Nouveau architecture that reminds visitors of the town's heyday in the 1920s and '30s. Thanks to its wide, sandy beaches, however, the resort remains hugely popular, especially with Italians. In addition, it boasts a colourful Carnevale, featuring a wonderful parade of elaborate and often outrageous floats, that is second only to the Venice carnival among Italy’s Mardi Gras celebrations.

Via dei Serpenti, looking towards the Colosseum
Via dei Serpenti, looking towards the Colosseum
Travel tip:

One of Rome's oldest and most charming residential neighbourhoods, Monti retains a bohemian flavour with chic cafes and street food and alternative fashion shops. Occupying the area between the Quirinal Hill and the Colosseum, in Roman times the area was home to craftsmen but also to prostitutes and good-for-nothings and was hidden from the more refined areas of the city by a large wall. Nowadays, it is popular with architects, screenwriters and other creative types as one of Rome’s most fashionable central areas.  Monicelli’s former home in Via dei Serpenti is marked with a plaque.

Also on this day:

1945: The birth of business tycoon and former Inter chairman Massimo Moratti

1974: The birth of top-selling singer-songwriter Laura Pausini


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22 March 2018

Nino Manfredi - actor and director

Totò fan became maestro of commedia all’italiana


Nino Manfredi made more than 100 films in the course of his career
Nino Manfredi made more than 100 films
in the course of his career
The actor and director Saturnino ‘Nino’ Manfredi, who would become known as the last great actor of the commedia all’italiana genre, was born on this day in 1921 in Castro dei Volsci, near Frosinone in Lazio.

Manfredi made more than 100 movies, often playing marginalised working-class figures in the bittersweet comedies that characterised the genre, which frequently tackled important social issues and poked irreverent fun at some of the more absurd aspects of Italian life, in particular the suffocating influence of the church.

He was a favourite of directors such as Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, Ettore Scola and Franco Brusati, who directed him in the award-winning Pane and cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), which evoked the tragicomic existence of immigrant workers and was considered one of his finest performances.

It helped him fulfil his dream of following in the footsteps of his boyhood idol Totò, the Neapolitan comic actor whose eccentric characters took enormous liberties in mocking Italian institutions, and to be spoken off in the company of Ugo Tognazzi, Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi as a true maestro of commedia all’italiana.

Manfredi had a tough time in his childhood. Born into a farming family in the Ciociaria region south of Rome, he was uprooted to live in the capital at a young age after his father, a public safety officer, won a promotion.

Manfredi in a comedy called, in English, Fiasco in Milan,  which also starred Vittorio Gassman and Claudia Cardinale
Manfredi in a comedy called, in English, Fiasco in Milan,
 which also starred Vittorio Gassman and Claudia Cardinale
Brought up in the San Giovanni neighbourhood south of the Colosseum, he had a happy time with his brother, Dante, until he developed a strain of pleurisy in 1937 that was so serious he was admitted to hospital and given only a few weeks to live.  He survived but spent several years in the care of a sanatorium and would suffer health problems throughout his life.

It was while in the sanatorium that he began performing with a musical group and set his heart on a career on the stage, much to the dismay of his father, who wanted him to be a lawyer.  He became fascinated with the cinema and when he left hospital he enrolled himself at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome, although he acceded to his father’s wishes and studied law at the same time.

In the event, he passed his exams in both, despite the difficulties imposed by Italy being at war. In fact, he and Dante spent many months hiding in the mountains in Ciociaria to avoid conscription.

Making his way in theatre, Manfredi appeared in serious dramas and musicals, including a spell in a company in Milan in which he appeared in plays by Pirandello, Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare until he tired of the lack of laughter, bursting as he was to perform comedy.

Manfredi played the puppet-maker Geppetto in Luigi Comencini's acclaimed TV version of Pinocchio
Manfredi played the puppet-maker Geppetto in Luigi
Comencini's acclaimed TV version of Pinocchio
He made his screen debut in 1949 and landed his first major part in 1955, starring with Alberto Sordi in Lo scapolo (The Batchelor), directed by Antonio Pietrangeli.  His big break came after a revue company he formed were invited to host a RAI television show, Canzonissima.

The exposure this brought accelerated his movie career and from the second half of the 1960s he became an established star of commedia all’italiana. He directed for the first time in 1971 with the acclaimed Between Miracles (Per grazia ricevuta in Italian) which controversially explored a young man’s torment when sexual desires and the sacrifices of faith collide.

Manfredi continued to make films even after a minor stroke in 1993 left him with cognitive difficulties, his last role coming in 2002 in La luz prodigiosa, also known as The End of a Mystery, a film set in Spain that imagined that Federico Lorca, a poet murdered by Franco’s thugs, had survived.

The following year, Manfredi suffered two major strokes and died in 2004, aged 83.  Married in 1955 to Erminia Ferrari, a model, he left a son, Luca and two daughters, Roberta and Giovanna, two of whom followed him into the entertainment business.

Castro dei Volsci sits on a hillside in Ciociaria
Castro dei Volsci sits on a hillside in Ciociaria
Travel tip:

Castro dei Volsci, which is situated some 25km (16 miles) southeast of Frosinone and about 105km (65 miles) from Rome, is a small town of less than 5,000 inhabitants that has been described as capturing the charm of Ciociaria. It has a hillside setting, with a network of steep, cobbled medieval streets and breathtaking views over the surrounding countryside of rolling hills and richly verdant valleys.




The San Giovanni neighbourhood is the area around Porta San Giovanni, south of the centre of Rome
The San Giovanni neighbourhood is the area around
Porta San Giovanni, south of the centre of Rome
Travel tip:

San Giovanni is a neighbourhood of Rome southeast of the city centre, straddling the Via Appia Nuova, en route to the town of Frascati and the Castelli Romani. A combination of modern thoroughfares and the architectural features of the Renaissance, it is considered an authentically Roman neighbourhood and one that is becoming popular with visitors looking for an affordable part if the city in which to stay, without being too far from the main sights.