Geography and the political and cultural values attached to different regions and locales – specifically, the role of borders – are of major consequence for an understanding of national formation as it is communicated through the media. As John Dickie writes, “A great deal of national self-esteem or aspiration is invested in territorial integrity and, more generally, in the imagining of the geographical space with which the nation is deemed to be coterminous.” In Italian literature and cinema, geography has been identified with numerous and often conflicting conceptions of the landscape. For example, major metropolitan centers such as Rome, Milan, and Naples have served as signifiers of national identity and modernity. Such portraits of the urban landscape expose the constituted and contested character of, and the different values assigned to, conceptions of the Italian nation.

The history of the Italian nation can be read through visually graphic representations between urban and rural life that rely on distinctions among various geographical and cultural boundaries. Architecture, painting, and statuary are identified with different historical and cultural moments as well as with the landscape of the ethnicized male and female human body. Although actual maps (often inserted into cinematic texts) indicate regional landmarks and differences among the various locales, another form of mapping is also evident in the parallels drawn between the landscape and the iconography and behavior of its inhabitants. In particular, distinctions between the northern and southern landscapes of the nation are common in the iconography of the Italian cinema.