In 1989, one year before the Italia ’90 World Cup, the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment funded the film project “12 registi for 12 città” with the aim of promoting the sporting event through an artistic narrative that would bring together cinema and urban history. Twelve leading Italian directors (Antonioni, Bernardo and Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bolognini, Lattuada, Lizzani, Monicelli, Olmi, Pontecorvo, Rosi, Soldati, Wertmüller, Zeffirelli) were tasked with writing and shooting a short film lasting approximately fifteen minutes on each of the twelve host cities of the tournament. The 1989 film project proves fundamental for the analysis of many of the architectural works built for the World Cup – not only stadiums, but also large-scale infrastructures (railway stations, roads, parking areas, facilities designed to reshape entire urban areas) – which in the short films appear either still under construction or even not yet present in the urban fabric. These works thus represent a highly valuable body of study materials that offer multiple layers of interpretation. They are not only useful for gaining deeper insight into the construction processes of certain architectural structures, but can also be considered as an atlas: a topographic map of the places affected by the World Cup interventions, alongside the map of a sort of “cinema-city” portrayed through the gaze of the filmmakers. Cinema, with its power to engage emotions and senses, provides scholars of architectural and urban history with new avenues of investigation, complementing and enriching the perspectives obtainable from traditional documentary sources such as technical drawings or photographs.