such as Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone, and continue to be used as film sets. Other filming locations used were in central and southern Italy, such as the parks of Valle del Treja (between Rome and Viterbo), the area of Camposecco (next to Camerata Nuova, characterized by a karst topography), the hills around Castelluccio, the area around the Gran Sasso mountain, and the Tivoli's quarries and Sardinia. God's Gun was filmed in Israel. Context and origins Early European Westerns European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. The Lumière brothers had their first public screening of films in 1895 and already in 1896 Gabriel Veyre shot Repas d'Indien ("Indian Banquet") for them. Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in the French horse country of Camargue 1911–1912. In Italy, the American West as a dramatic setting for spectacles goes back at least as far as Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (“The Girl of the West”) it is sometimes considered to be the first Spaghetti Western. The first Western movie made in Italy was La voce del sangue produced by Turin's film studio Itala Film (1910). In 1913 appeared La vampira Indiana—a combination of Western and vampire film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Waleran in the title role as Indian princess Fatale. The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickok films, while the Germans released back-woods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas. Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one attracting most attention is probably Luis Trenker's Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936), about John Sutter. Another Italian western was Girl of the Golden West (1942). The film's title alludes to the opera The Girl of the Golden West by Giacomo Puccini, but is not an adaptation of it. It was one of only a handful of Westerns to be made during the silent and Fascist eras. Forerunners of the genre was also Giorgio Ferroni's Il fanciullo del West (The Boy in the West, 1943) and Fernando Cerchio's Il bandolero stanco (1952), starring respectively Erminio Macario and Renato Rascel. After the Second World War, there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy or musical comedy. A cycle of Western comedies was initiated in 1959 with La sceriffa and Il terrore dell’Oklahoma, followed by other films starring comedy specialists like Walter Chiari, Ugo