Some say cinema is a dying art form but don't say that to anyone at Bologna's Ritrovato Festival, a celebration of carefully curated restored classics to be seen and experienced in one of the country's most beautiful settings. I am sitting in one of the most beautiful Piazzas in Italy, Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. On a huge screen, Gene Hackman is walking across Union Square in San Francisco, which by coincidence is almost exactly the same size as the square where I’m sitting.

He’s trying to record a conversation between two young lovers. The film is , the masterpiece which Coppola sandwiched between the first two Godfathers in 1974. Coppola’s film was also inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s (1966), another Italian connection.

I can’t think of a better way of watching this 4K restoration, shown here as part of the 38th Cinema Ritrovato Festival, a festival dedicated to restored classics, once lost films and hidden gems. This is a carefully curated cinephilia paradise, and it doesn’t hurt that the food is the finest in Europe: mortadella, tortellini and piadine. Here there are seasons of Marlene Dietrich’s work, including her silent films; Anatole Litvak, the Kiev-born, Russian Jew who went on to direct films in Britain, France, Germany and Hollywood and the much-underrated Italian director Pietro Germi, whose (1964) and (1961) were keystones of Italian comedy but whose breadth – which is on full display here (see for instance his 1956 film ) – has been negl.