The script is co-written by John Mortimer, author of the Tuscan ur-novel Summer’s Lease. Smith’s wholly fictional character, the widow of a British ambassador, is a devotee of Mussolini and once took tea with him, only to be interred, along with the rest of the ladies, during the war, as a foreign national. They are played by the formidable trio of Tuscan veterans, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright, with Cher and Lily Tomlin thrown in as a couple of salty American broads. Tea With Mussolini, by Franco Zeffirelli, is set in the same Fascist 1930s as Life is Beautiful.

It chronicles the relationship between a Florentine boy and three elderly English ladies. It is Zeffirelli’s most autobiographical film yet, based on the bond he formed with a set of snobbish but hugely cultured expats. The scorpioni, as they are called, love Italy, and would love it even more if it didn’t contain quite so many Italians. Benigni, of course, is another Tuscan – he comes from Prato, near Florence. It’s probable that no Tuscan has reached such a wide audience since Michelangelo.Last summer, another Tuscan director went home.

But the Taviani brothers are Tuscan, and no one is that dreamy about their own backyard. In Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Good Morning Babylon, two unemployed Pisan stonemasons take their skills to Hollywood because there is no more work in their native Tuscany.A foreign film-maker would have stuck around in Pisa and shot the Romanesque masonry. For the two young lovers who elope by leaping into a hay cart from the summit of one of the towers, their Tuscan home represents the oppressiveness of roots and tradition. In Queen of Hearts, Jon Amiel’s charming debut about a family of Italian immigrants in London, the plot kicks off in the stone towers of San Gimignano. But you get an entirely different view of the place in films where characters abandon Tuscany at the outset. It’s just another bad movie about Tuscany.So it’s no wonder eyeballs roll and yawns are stifled when Tuscany turns up on screen It only ever stars in films about people on holiday.

You might easily suppose that the stolen beauty of the title is actually Tuscany itself, and that the thieves are the foreign interlopers But it was too unsophisticated a film for that. Foreigners are always doing that at the end of movies set in Tuscany, just like any other tourist.The idea that Tuscany is a foreigner’s chimerical neverland has taken root so deeply that when Bernardo Bertolucci set Stealing Beauty in the heart of Chianti, he peopled it with ghastly English roues and an American ingenue, and shot it in a replica of the house of two of the region’s best known expats: the artists Matthew Spender and Maro Gorki. The region is a blur of military activity, and pocked with German mines, but it’s as if she’s stepping into her own private time warp. In the final shot of The English Patient, Binoche climbs on to a truck and drives out of Tuscany with a smile of contentment on her face. In the Second World War, Juliette Binoche’s nurse hops off an Allied convoy to shelter a badly burned Ralph Fiennes in a disused monastery.