Welcome to Sapienza, 47.
It’s safer here
This is one of the best levels for Hitman, up there with classics like that one with the drunk
clown at the child’s party- or that one with the precarious pool with the glass bottom suspended
over the edge of a mountain. When I think about what makes these levels so special, it’s about
how… accessible either the targets, or the places, feel. The levels aren’t just 12 layers of security
you have to sneak or fight your way through; you could just be a regular person in a regular place,
and the target stood in a standard backyard, or literally right above you as you start the level.
They’re so easy to kill, yet the beauty is in doing it right, and unseen. And without killing
everybody else in the level, which is inevitably what WILL happen the first time you play these.
So… what is it about Sapienza that makes this level so great?
It’s simple: there are endless routes across the level, a wide assortment of opportunities, and so
many places where you can just be a person, going about your daily business without immediately
triggering suspicion and getting shot at. And this level looks nice and sunny, which always helps.
So where is it set? ITALY! Yes, Italy. That place with the Romans,
and lots of statues with small cocks and taut buttocks everywhere. They’re horny freakers
over there. The sort of place where emperors visit their spectacular new palace and think
‘this places needs 500% more schlong’. The sort of place where an artwork is commissioned
for the Church and they’re like ‘we need it to be modest… so 4 nip slips maximum,
please’. And where no fountain is complete without water gushing from at least 3 orifices.
And you know what? I like it! Even the male statues. Especially the male statues. I’m not
gay. I just appreciate the naked male form! Their well-developed muscles, the serious
looking faces of old beardy men, and the cocks everywhere. No homo. But if I was to make a city,
I’d find ways of displaying dicks everywhere I could as well. More floppy phalluses than
you can flick your fingers at. And I’d make them really small. Because why should I be the only one
You may know Pompei as being the place that got destroyed by a volcano,
and with all the cement casts of the people who died there, frozen in their final moment
for us to make broad sweeping judgements about from the comfort of our computer screens. But
there’s so much more to Pompei than just its final moments! Did you know, for instance,
that this city has more one eyed trouser snakes on display than your average Finnish sauna?
These raunchy Pompeians plastered peckers everywhere they could, slipping schlongs
into walls and cramming cocks into the cobbles on the pavement. It’s like one of my Counter-Strike
maps! This fabulous symbol was their good luck charm. Worked well for them, didn’t it.
Where was I? Ah yes, Hitman. Sapienza is not a real place- it’s a fictional town on
the West-coast of Italy, so I visited the Cinque Terre region to see how it compares with reality.
Which was a mistake, because it’s apparently based on a region further south known as the
Amalfi Coast. Oh no! Guess I’ll have to go back to Italy and endure all those erotic monuments again.
But as I descended from a hike across the cliffs, and down into the REAL town of Vernazza,
I had flashbacks to Sapienza! And I found enough similarities between
the two places to justify making this video. Both have a tower and ruins on the left-hand
side of the cove. We’ll get the obvious out of the way- the tower is not the same shape.
I’ll admit: I didn’t visit it in real life because it costs 2 Euros… and I’m not made of money.
And also because it costs just one to visit it in Hitman.
‘I WONDER WHAT THAT WAS’ So let’s move onto the Church!
No coastal town in Italy is complete without at least one of these things. And I fear this
is one of those features the Hitman level took general inspiration from, rather than setting out
to recreate a particular church from a specific place. So in real life, there’s this church, which
is closer to the sea than the one in Hitman is. And there’s this one in another town, which is a
little further away from the coast, and surrounded on 3 sides by houses. Both are- simultaneously-
bigger, yet more claustrophobic than the one seen in Hitman’s world. Neither of them had a
nice big graveyard surrounding it. Neither had lab workers spilling secrets in the confession boxes.
‘THE LORD FORGIVES YOU, SON.’
But… these towers do look similar, don’t they.
Here’s the Hitman church’s interior… and here is the first church I visited…
and here’s the second. It’s a bit more like this one, but still not close enough for me
to get really excited about. I read that the developers picked and borrowed elements from
different towns, but I suspect they didn’t want to completely copy them. Especially
when it comes to churches and hitmen and GOD. But this is where it gets interesting. Because
as I was walking around these churches I was memeing to my girlfriend that they could have
an entrance to an elaborate underground network of passage ways, thinking by this point that
it clearly had to be a fictional element… only then I found THIS, further down towards the sea.
‘It’s the tunnels under the church!’
Yes! Who knows WHERE these tunnels could lead?
‘Oh… well that’s a rubbish tunnel.’
The Hitman level misses one key part of this bit of coastline: and that’s the train,
which runs through or under most of the towns and hills in this region.
But imagine how over the top Sapienza would feel for a small town to contain all of that!
But it does have some spectacular mountains- no doubt more inspired
by the more Southern Amalfi coastline than it is by the Cinque Terre region. Indeed,
where I visited it looked less like a rugged, mountainous region and more like
…Teletubby land on steroids. But this is a comparison video, and I’m going to find a
way to draw parallels between these no matter how vague or convoluted it may become! So, here we go:
just across the valley from the Cinque Terre region, are some very interesting mountains.
These mountains are known as the Apuan Alps, and are like, a tier above what’s seen in
the background of the Hitman level. So these mountains, yeah, they used
to be all like underwater and stuff before people discovered the flat earth theory,
which pushed the curved bits upwards and made them into mountains and stuff. All the sea
creatures contained with these got crushed down until they became the finest quality marble,
which is now mined from here and used across the world for all sorts of monuments and decorations!
And of course, Italy itself makes heavy use of marble. It’s used all over Rome. Famous sculptors,
like Michelangelo here, got their stuff from these marble quarries, to make stuff like THIS. Marble
was in such popular demand that, just like an extended Minecraft session, these mountains
have become totally reshaped by these quarries, with some mountain tops being almost entirely
mined out of existence! And THIS is something that these mountains have in common with the
ones from Hitman: they’re shaped by mankind. I tried comparing the streets, but streets
are streets. And while I thought at the time they were similar to one another, when I compared them,
in all the ways that are important they were nothing alike. Real life streets were wider,
brighter and more colourful, and totally CROWDED with tourists milling about and blocking my
movement. I’ll show more comparisons here but we’re going to have to accept the reality that
one of these is designed to be a labyrinth with lots of secluded corners for you to steal stuff
from people in, and the other is a Hitman level. It made me realise just how UGLY the videogame
depiction of these streets was- I thought it was all bright and colourful and vertical when I was
playing it, but the reality is bigger, better, brighter, and contains about 1000% more ice cream.
Even that pretty beach area is an immensely toned down versions in reality, which may have
contained a crowded pier, people diving into the water, waves crashing over everything and
boats coming and going. Which would have been a great opportunity to deliver reinforcements
to the area. Meanwhile, the Hitman beach is just a bunch of NPCs looking sexy.
But the general feel of the towns was sort of similar. I was only at each town for about an
hour but I got the gist of them- they’re one main street leading down the middle that was absolutely
full of people, and then loads of back alleys that you wouldn’t bother walking down unless you
lived there. Or were looking for something to eat. So compared with that, the Sapienza level
feels more like a maze- this is by design to make it seem bigger than it really is, plus it’s got
to lock areas away behind checkpoints and locked doors… AND you’ve got optimisation to consider,
which is presumably why you can’t see the beach from the main street until you pass this oddly
narrow bottleneck right before you reach it. That wouldn’t have gone down well in real life!
And no- there’s no grand mansion sat right there next to the town square -not that I saw,
any way- there were no armed guards milling about, waiting to shoot people who stepped foot
inside. And I’ll be honest- you’re not going to overhear any juicy opportunities to sneak inside
high-level places. Not unless you speak Italian. In Hitman, there’s a massive underground cave
complex where they’re developing a secret biological weapon. So how does the one
in real life compare? You think I’m joking, but there IS an underground cave thing where
I deployed a secret biological weapon of my own. In the game, it’s full of armed guards,
dangerous drops and scientists in PP suits… while the reality is, there are tourists everywhere,
a dangerously low ceiling, and a sewage outlet. Not quite the same standard of cave.
To state the obvious: Sapienza is not a real place, but it’s heavily inspired by a bunch
of different seaside towns in Italy, with a load of other stereotypically Italian stuff
thrown in as well. It’s a sign of a good imitation when you view a spot for real
and get flashbacks to somewhere in the game, and you wonder if the developers
were hanging around the exact same spot as you are now, but at an earlier time,
when they first clocked the inspiration for what this level would eventually become.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way, because the resulting Sapienza level has made for one
of the greatest Hitman levels of all time. And there’s quite some competition for that
spot! When there are so many different places, with so many different styles of gameplay,
it’s funny how we almost universally agree on which are the best levels from each game. Some
things just capture our imaginations- and Sapienza is one such place. And it seems like even Hitman,
as gruesome a concept as it may be, is at its best when in a friendly setting, somewhere peaceful,
where we can all innocently pretend to be somebody else in a land of make-believe.
‘I want, I want, I want… let me think… I want the yellow looks good? The light – OOHOH the pink!
I love pink. When I say pink, I say it 4 times. Pink pink pink pink. That’s what I’m going to get,
I’m going to get the pink one. Oh, it’s so pretty. Here, it reminds me of cotton candy… and
it reminds me of a little skirt that I wore when I was a little girl I’m going to get the pink pink
pink pink. OKAY, I’m definitely going to order the pink pink pink pink. I hope it tastes good…’
‘Will you just decide?’ ‘Yes yes yes, whatever. Okay, I…’