We All Loved Each Other So Much

We All Loved Each Other So Much (Italian: C'eravamo tanto amati) is a 1974 Italian comedy-drama directed by Ettore Scola that follows three former Resistance fighters across thirty years of postwar Italian history, tracing how their friendship and ideals are worn down by the country's economic boom and political changes.^{1 • 2} Written by Scola with the veteran screenwriting team of Age (Agenore Incrocci) and Furio Scarpelli, it is widely regarded as one of the high points of the commedia all'italiana (satirical Italian comedy-drama genre of 1950s–70s) and as Scola's first international success.^{3 • 4}

History, cinema, and metacinema

The film spans thirty years of Italian history, from the Resistance to the "years of lead," and portrays the betrayed hopes of a generation.^{2 • 7} Scola gave a voice in it to the communists and socialists who had been forced out of government by the Christian Democrats, and set his resistant, socially minded characters against the consumer society that invaded Italy in the 1960s.¹² Scola once quipped that the film should have been titled C'eravamo tanti delusi ("We Were So Disappointed").⁴

Cinema as a third protagonist. The film weaves Italian film history into its narrative through constant metacinematic references. Nicola claims that De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) determined the entire course of his life, and his obsession with neorealism is the theme with which he competes on Mike Bongiorno's quiz show Lascia o raddoppia.^{4 • 5} Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni appear as themselves in a recreation of the filming of the Trevi Fountain scene from La dolce vita (1960), and De Sica is seen in archival footage talking about Bicycle Thieves.⁴ The film also cites Michelangelo Antonioni in the incommunicability between Gianni and Elide, and Antonio Pietrangeli in Luciana's job as a cinema usherette, a nod to her own role in Io la conoscevo bene (1965), which Scola scripted.⁵

The original conception was different: the film was to tell the story of a professor haunted by Bicycle Thieves, but the project took another road and ended up evoking thirty years of Italian history with irony and a veil of melancholy.⁵ Scola's thesis, as the Turner Classic Movies essay puts it, is that neorealism went beyond style to express the Resistance's ideals for a new national identity, and that all postwar Italian films, even comedies made in reaction against it, owe it a huge debt.⁴

Production and style

Scola shot the film in Rome in the early 1970s, using locations from piazza del Popolo to piazza di Spagna, the Trevi Fountain, the Aventino, and San Camillo Hospital, some chosen as tributes to masterpieces of Italian cinema.⁷ The photography by Claudio Cirillo is partly in black and white, shifting between an "authentic" past and a "decadent" present with symbolic emphasis.¹⁰ Armando Trovajoli wrote the score, and the title comes from a line of the popular 1918 song Come pioveva! by Armando Gill.^{6 • 10}

The film blends comedy and drama, parody and social denunciation, and ends on a deliberately unresolved note: the friends converge on the untranslatable Italian interjection "boh," a discussion that could go on forever.¹³

Reception and legacy

The film was an enormous success with public and critics in Italy and became Scola's first international success for a director previously known mainly for comedies.^{4 • 10} It won three Nastri d'argento, a Globo d'oro for Gassman, and the 1977 César for Best Foreign Film.^{2 • 5} Fabrizi's Catenacci, who declares "I don't die" in the film's last part, was read by film scholar Emiliano Morreale as the embodiment of tenacious, ineradicable national characteristics, and the role won Fabrizi the Nastro d'argento for Best Supporting Actor in what the Bologna festival notes call his last great role.⁸

The film has been a lasting reference for later Italian cinema, and it marked the start of Scola's more mature phase, followed by Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (1976) and Una giornata particolare (1977).^{3 • 10} A 4K restoration from the original negatives held by Dean Film was carried out in 2016 by CSC – Cineteca Nazionale with StudioCanal funding, color-graded at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory under the supervision of Luciano Tovoli with the film's cinematographer Claudio Cirillo, and premiered at the 2016 Festival de Cannes; the film was also shown in the Zibaldone section of the 43rd Torino Film Festival.^{8 • 14 • 2}

References

1. C'eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much), Festival de Cannes film page
2. C'eravamo tanto amati, Minerva Pictures
3. SCOLA, ETTORE, in a dictionary of Italian cinema (PDF)
4. Rob Nixon, "We All Loved Each Other So Much," Turner Classic Movies (2019)
5. Monica Sardelli, "Cinquant'anni fa usciva 'C'eravamo tanto amati', capolavoro di Scola," Italy for Movies (2024)
6. Alissa Wenz, "Nous nous sommes tant aimés," Critikat
7. C'eravamo tanto amati historical marker, Historical Marker Database
8. C'eravamo tanto amati film notes, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna
9. C'eravamo tanto amati, MSP Film / Italian Film Festival
10. Filippo Mazzarella, "C'eravamo tanto amati, illuminante affresco dell'Italia del dopoguerra," Corriere della Sera (2024)
11. Letizia Piredda, "C'eravamo tanto amati: una rilettura," longtake (2022)
12. Eugénie Malinjod, "We All Loved Each Other So Much, a tribute to Ettore Scola," Festival de Cannes (2016)
13. "C'eravamo tanto amati: una rilettura," Odeon Blog
14. "Il restauro di C'eravamo tanto amati realizzato dal CSC," Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (2026)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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