From La Dolce Vita to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there are a ton of must-see movies from the storied history of Italian cinema. From Federico Fellini to Michelangelo Antonioni, some of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived have come from Italy. Italian cinema has delivered lavish Telefoni Bianchi comedies and complex and expressionistic Calligrafismo dramas. The end of World War II saw the rise of the Italian neorealism movement, which went on to influence filmmakers from around the globe, including Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, and Richard Linklater.

One of the best things about Italian cinema is that Italy’s movie classics hail from a wide variety of different genres. Italian filmmakers pioneered their own grisly take on the detective noir with the “giallo” subgenre and pioneered their own rough, gritty take on the western with the blood-soaked “spaghetti western” subgenre.