Cinematographer Milton Kraser won his only Academy Award for this film, and you can see why. The first film in Cinemascope to be shot entirely on location, it brought ancient and modern Rome home to American audiences in sweeping panoramic views and gorgeous Technicolor. It is almost programmatic in its documentation of monuments, such as the fountains of Rome seen in the opening sequence, as well as outlying sites such as the Via Appia Antica and the Villa d’Este at Tivoli. It’s the 1950s American equivalent of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane and Vedute di Roma, produced in the 1750s and ‘60s mainly for British “Grand Tourists.” The tourists here are three American secretaries: Miss Frances (Dorothy McGuire) works for a famous but jaded American writer (Clifton Webb), while Anita and Maria (Jean Peters and Maggie McNamara) work for the US Distribution Agency in Rome, which occupies a Fascist-era building. There’s no mention of the war, but its clear that they’re all part of the postwar “pastoral bureaucracy” of American power. They live like princesses in the “Villa Eden,” which is set up high on a hill overlooking the city. Each woman has her own frustrated love affair. The actress who shines here, with her heavy New York accent, is Maggie McNamara, a discovery of Otto Preminger who made only a handful of films in her short, sad career. Her character uses American secretarial know-how to seduce an Italian aristocrat, played by a dashing Louis Jourdan. Although clear-eyed and pragmatic, she’s burned in the end—a prick that points to the darker currents running beneath the lush green and rich ochre surfaces of the Eternal City.