"The Best of Youth," was set in Torino.

"Cinema in Italy was born in Turin," said filmmaker Marco Ponti, whose 2001 "Santa Maradona," a low-budget look at Turin's slacker scene, was an international hit.

Film historians attribute the early arrival of moviemaking to the city's cultural and geographic ties to France, where the Lumiere brothers and other 19th century innovators pioneered cinema in Europe. A French cinematic society held a screening in Turin in 1896, the starting point of a rich 100-year tradition.

Ponti, 37 and no relation to famed director Carlo Ponti, was born and raised in the mountains outside Turin. He recently moved to Los Angeles, but has returned to his hometown to assist Turin-based colleague, Lucio Pellegrini, on a documentary of the "XX Giochi Olimpici Invernali."

Turin's movie dominance ended after World War II, when Fellini and other filmmakers set up primarily in Rome. The city has remained out of the cinematic limelight except for the occasional scientific documentary provoked by the never-ending speculations about the origins of the Shroud of Turin. But its emergence as an industrial city enabled Turin to become a center of technological innovation, be it movies or cars.

The original 1969 version of "The Italian Job," starring Michael Caine and Noel Coward, is a crime fable set in Turin that is all about cars, starting from the opening sequence in which a Lamborghini Miura smacks into the blade of an earthmover parked at the end of a tunnel by a gang of mafiosi, who then use the heavy equipment to shove the car off a cliff.

Turin is described in a short home movie within that movie as Europe's most modern industrial center, where newfangled computers actually control traffic, giving perhaps some hope to Olympic visitors trying to get to their venues on time. But the plot circumvents all that by having the crooks subvert the computers to snarl the cars. (In the 2003 Hollywood remake of "The Italian Job," Mark Wahlberg stars in place of Caine, and the action shifts to Venice and Los Angeles.)

For decades, Ponti said, Turin "was kind of forgotten as the Italian capital of movies -- it was silent for a long time." That's been changing lately amid a renaissance of innovative Turin filmmaking, including Ponti's "Andata e Ritorno" ("Round Trip") and the "Best of Youth," the Italian-language surprise hit in international cinema last year. The "Best of Youth" ("La Meglio Gioventu") is a six-hour epic now out on DVD that looks at contemporary Italy through a family's personal story, starting in the late 1960s, focusing on labor turmoil, the violent Red Brigades and a psychiatrist's life in Turin.

Silvana Mangano in "Bitter Rice" ("Riso Amaro").

Starting in the '70s, Turin became "the best place to show how Italy was changed," Pellegrini said in an e-mail. "It became the perfect example of the industrial town with many workers from the south of the country and cold weather. Exactly the opposite of the image that everybody had of our country abroad."

A new generation of Italian filmmakers has been using post-industrial Turin to depict a new view of Italy, he added, "very far from sun, sea, pizza and mandolino." These artists include, besides Ponti and Pellegrini, Gianluca avarelli, Mimmo Calopresti, Guido Chiesa, Daniele Gaglianone and Davide Ferrario.

The contemporary filmmaking has deep roots extending into the region's migrant farm labor. In the 1949 neorealist melodrama "Bitter Rice" ("Riso Amaro"), best known for the hot dance numbers of a young Sylvana Mangano as well as an Olympic-scale mudwrestling bout, women are imported by trainloads through Turin to plant the rice fields of the Po River valley.

Giancarlo Giannini and Elena Fiore in "The Seduction of Mimi."

In 1972, Lina Wertmuller's award-winning political farce "The Seduction of Mimi" covers the travails of a Sicilian metalworker who relocates to Turin after a spat with the local mafia.

"Turin for a long time was a city of immigrants, when people from all over Italy arrived to work for Fiat," Ponti said. "In the last several years, Turin has really been challenged. It's not anymore a factory-oriented city, so we had to develop something else. There was a huge crisis of unemployment, so the goal of the filmmakers has been to tell about this change."

That's been done in many different ways, as evidenced by Turin's frequent appearances in the annual Italian Film Festival in Marin County (italianfilm.com), which marks its 30th year this fall. Festival director Lido Cantarutti said the attention focused on Turin as a result of the Winter Games should have lasting impact -- if the world looks past the sporting venues and finds the real city.

Even Italian film buffs often are clueless about Turin's history. Cantarutti teaches a film course and finds that "students don't know diddly about Turin," which he visited in the early '80s with his family and found it a gritty but fascinating place.

"It's not on the tourist track," he said. "People don't go there, and not many people know its industrial importance, its historical importance, its artistic importance."

The movies may help reveal some of this -- if not the Olympic season, TV crews and 10,000 visiting journalists. But like so much else about this year's Olympic venue, Turin's cinematic output is ignored behind a shroud of neglect that has long surrounded Piedmont's capital.