Romania has been selected by Italian director Renzo Martinelli as the location for the first scenes of a historical blockbuster on what was one of the greatest military successes in Polish history.

The movie tells the tale of the relief of the siege of Vienna in 1683 in which King Jan III Sobieski led an army of 70,000 troops (Poles and Germans) against 100,000 men from the Ottoman Empire.

Later in the year, the production team will move to Poland and several other European countries.

The Battle of Vienna is a joint Italian-Polish-Turkish production, with several top Polish actors in the cast ( Alicja Bachleda-Curuś, Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn, Piotr Adamczyk, Borys Szyc), 10,000 extras and 3, 000 horses in the battle scenes.

One of the leads is played by the American actor F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for the role of Salieri in Milos Forman’s Amadeus.

The central character of the feature is Marco d'Aviano, a wandering preacher for the Capuchin monastic order, who is credited with rallying Catholics and Protestants on the eve of the Battle of Vienna, an event which was crucial to halting the advance of Turkish troops into Europe.

The film is to be premiered in the second half of 2012. (mk)