Call me by name filming locations #4: Scenes around Cascate del Serio

Cascate del Serio waterfall

Another well-known location is Cascate del Serio, Italy’s highest waterfall, 50 kilometres north of Bergamo, near the Swiss border. It is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular waterfalls in Europe, and the use of its indescribable beauty in the film was deliberate, as the director explained in an interview with Amuse.

“They go to a place where there are no words,” he says of the Serio scene. “They go to a place where they just interact with nature because I thought it was a moment of absolute surrender to their own intimacy.”

However, filming wasn’t easy: “We knew that the waterfall was closed for most of the year and it was definitely not possible to shoot the scenes when it was full of tourists. The permits were quite complicated to obtain, but thanks to the Valbondione municipality, they were opened for us on a priority basis, which for safety reasons could not exceed half an hour,” Guadagnino told the press.

The amazing nature here seems to have been the scenery for myths and legends, in which love is the mainstream. There is a legend about the beautiful Serio Cascades:

Once upon a time there was a rich landlady who fell in love with a humble villain. The latter refused the court of the landlady as he already loved another girl in the village. The chatelaine went on a fury and jailed the girl in her castle. The young beloved cried and cried and her tears turned into a river which destroyed the castle and gave life to the beautiful cascades.