But Italian directors still believe the US owes a great deal to the ‘home’ country. Mario Martone is competing at this year’s Venice Film Festival with an updated adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s play, The Mayor of Rione Sanità, set in the heart of the Camorra gang in Naples.

“We did export the Mafia to the US, but we also gave them some of the best directors, grandmasters like Coppola and Scorsese,” he says. “It’s said that the writer Mario Puzo, when he wrote The Godfather, had the Mayor of Rione Sanità in mind as a model for his protagonist.”

Epic story

Italian film-makers certainly make use of history on their doorsteps. Romanzo Criminale was based on a novel that told the true story of the Magliana gang in Rome. Gomorrah, a 2008 film by Matteo Garrone, which had a brutally stark aesthetic, was based on the work of journalist Roberto Saviano in exposing the Camorra crime syndicate.

Often the real-life criminal element is too close for comfort in Italy – the film Gomorrah (a forerunner of the TV series) had several non-professional actors who ended up arrested or investigated, while Saviano, author of the book the film is based on, is still under police protection after being put on a Mafia hitlist. The Mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, recently blamed Gomorrah for a rise in crime in Naples.