Ochre and cream plastered facades, wooden shutters and narrow stepped lanes climb the hill above the Vieux Port, the streets Taxi and Borsalino both filmed.
What Le Panier looks like
Rendered apartment buildings four and five storeys high line the lanes. Their facades are painted cream, ochre and pale yellow, with grey wooden shutters closed over most of the windows. Many of the streets are too narrow for cars. Several climb in flights of stone steps, cutting between buildings that nearly meet at the roofline.
Rue de la Charité runs past the arcaded courtyard of the , three tiers of stone galleries built around a domed chapel. opens into a small sloping square lined with café tables, closed on one side by a row of shuttered houses. climbs away from the square as a long stepped lane, walled in on both sides by plastered buildings three and four storeys tall.
, a stone church dating from the twelfth century, stands near the edge of the quarter above the harbor. has its own bell tower, the Tour Sauveterre, visible over the rooftops around it. The , a corner house dated to 1535, sits at an angled turn where two streets meet.
Laundry lines are strung between buildings over several of the narrower lanes, with potted plants and climbing vines crowding the doorways below them. From streets near the hilltop, gaps between the buildings open onto views down over the harbor and the water beyond.
Shot in Le Panier
Taxi used and the adjoining Rue de la Charité as filming locations in 1998. Thirty years earlier, Borsalino had dressed with period cars to play 1930s Marseille.
Taxi, 1998
Rue du Petit-Puits
Taxi used this lane and the adjoining Rue de la Charité as filming locations in 1998. Both streets keep the same narrow, walled in proportions on screen as on the ground, four and five storey plastered buildings close on both sides. Street View
Borsalino, 1970
Rue des Repenties
Played 1930s
For Borsalino in 1970, the production dressed this street and brought in period cars to play Marseille in the 1930s. A photograph published alongside the film shows this same stretch of Rue des Repenties, the stone steps and shuttered facades unchanged since. Street View
Vieux Nice climbs the same kind of narrow pastel lanes, with plastered facades and wooden shutters above a working harbor. Rue Droite and the streets around Cours Saleya run at a similar width and height to the lanes here. Nice's lanes sit flatter and open out more often into small squares. The stone also runs pinker than the ochre and cream here, so a tight street level frame holds the match better than a wide one. Try searching pastel lanes above a harbor now.
Genoa's Centro Storico has the same tangle of narrow caruggi climbing between tall plastered buildings, with laundry strung overhead in places. The alleys run darker and closer together than the lanes here, since Genoa's are walled in on both sides by buildings a storey or two taller. The caruggi are shaded for most of the day, so a shot that needs daylight on the walls favors the brighter, more open lanes here instead. Try searching narrow caruggi alleys now.
Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples, Italy
The grid of straight, narrow lanes in the Quartieri Spagnoli has the same laundry lines strung between facades at every level. The buildings run taller here, five to seven storeys instead of four or five. The streets are also straighter rather than curving. Keep the frame tight on the laundry and the shutters rather than pulling back, since a wide shot gives away the grid's straight lines against the curving streets here. Try searching laundry lines between facades now.
Montmartre's oldest lanes still climb and bend the way these streets do, narrow since before the boulevards reached the butte. That may be behind Film France's own listing tagging this quarter as a Paris lookalike, though no production credit backs the comparison yet. Most of Montmartre's best known streets run wider than this, with taller buildings and zinc roofs rather than shutters. The comparison only holds on its steepest back lanes. Try searching narrow back lanes now.
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