Hands up who hasn't groaned inwardly at the over use of film and television locations as a way of selling tourism, sometimes on the most tenuous premises? PRs propose, newspapers and magazines oblige. So it was interesting, recently, to witness the revival of a movie which might have been tailor made to attract visitors but which was made long before the marketing departments had any such idea.

I received an email invitation to a preview of Visconti's The Leopard, little seen in recent years after suffering scratches and other effects of age and now digitally restored to all its former glory. The invitation came not from any tourist board but from the British Film Institute. Why me, I asked them? Well, you're a travel writer and we thought you might be interested.

They might have been psychic. I had just spent a week in Sicily and had re-read Giuseppe Thomaso di Lampedusa's wonderful, eponymous novel about political and social change which film reflects so faithfully. So I went along and immersed myself in the golden light of Sicilian landscapes, the architectural detail and the rich interiors, all sharply defined again in the wide screen after a restoration which included some 12,000 hours of painstaking manual work. This was not the shortened, dubbed version I saw on its original release but the full, subtitled 3hrs 5mins, in Italian. Burt Lancaster, who took the title role, was apparently third choice after Nicolai Cherkasov, who was Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Laurence Olivier. He was contracted behind Visconti's back but it turned out to be an inspired piece of casting.

The film now looks ravishing. Go and see it. But if it inspires you to hop on a jet, don't expect to find precise locations. Which should spare us that other marketing curse, the brown sign welcoming us to “Leopard Country”.

The Leopard (1963) opens to the public on 27 August at the British Film Institute on the Southbank, the Curzon Mayfair, Richmond Filmhouse, Filmhouse Edinburgh, Cambridge Arts Picturehouse and the Irish Film Institute in Dublin.