"You English are a little crazy, I think,” chirruped the receptionist at our guesthouse just off the Piazza Castello in Turin. “I know Michael Caine and I know Torino, but what is this film — The Job of Italians?”

And well might she ask. The truth is that while the 1968 comedy caper is laddishly regarded in this country as a classic of its kind, moving some to claim in all seriousness that they wouldn’t trust a man who didn’t like it, it is hardly known at all in the city where it was filmed. Then again, as I was to find when I travelled to Turin to experience first-hand the thrilling escape made by Charlie Croker and his gang in the now legendary Mini Cooper S Mk 3, there are many things about the film that even British fans don’t know.

For a start I had travelled to Turin through Europe — 2,000 bone-shaking miles in an unmodernised Mini — only to find that the cast and crew had actually been shipped with their Minis to Italy in the six-wheel Bedford bus that ends up seesawing above the St Bernard Pass. Michael Caine, the star of a film that was to glorify cars and celebrate breakneck driving like no other, didn’t even have a driving licence at the time.

The first stop is the Col du Petit St Bernard, high in the Alps, our first homage at the scene of the supercar destruction derby unleashed on Caine and his cockney mob by the mafia. “Pretty car,” sings the mobster before flicking one of Caine’s Aston Martins off the side of the mountain with a digger. In reality, however, the car was only a dressed-up old Alfa.

Not all the locations used in the film are where you would expect them to be. The traffic control centre sabotaged by the gang in order to create havoc in the streets of Turin is actually in west London, and the scene with the Minis speeding through the sewers was shot in Coventry. Apparently a Mini did do a complete 360-degree loop of the tunnel, but it was not caught on camera, and a handful of Minis were written off trying to repeat the manoeuvre.

Originally set in London, where the heist was to occur in Bond Street, the location was moved at the last minute. Troy Kennedy-Martin, the scriptwriter, who also wrote the television series Z-Cars, thought a foreign setting would better reflect the cheeky patriotism of the film while at the same time making use of the fact that Turin had the most sophisticated computerised traffic control system in the world.

Today, of course, it is unimaginable that those twin elements — British lads getting one over on Johnny Foreigner while laughing at chaotic Italian traffic — should not appear in the film.

Not that the location quirks discourage fans of the film. Richard Edwards has lived in Turin for a year and has been asked so often about the locations for the film by visiting Brits that he has set up www.italianjob-tour.com, a company running bespoke tours to all the Italian Job locations.

“Italians love the Mini and eccentric Brits,” he says. “I guess that’s part of the reason the film and the city worked so well. We drive around in an old Mini pointing out the locations; the locals think we’re bonkers.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given the number and nature of the stunts they were asked to complete, the Minis in the film were not especially modified, being kitted out only with extended sump guards for sliding down the steps, and Minilite alloy wheels for the jumps. As a result, none of the nine cars used in the film is thought to survive today.

Minis are now common in Italy. The new version in particular is perfect for the congealed spaghetti that is the Turin traffic system. But in the late 1960s Turin’s streets were clogged only with Alfa Romeos and Fiats.

The gang’s antics in alleyways, down staircases and round back street courtyards in Turin helped sell more Minis than any amount of advertising would have. However, British Leyland refused to supply the cars for free, and charged the producers.

Caine is scathing of the Mini bosses in this respect. “We went to the car manufacturer and asked them for help in return for what would be great publicity,” he writes in his autobiography. “Their attitude was that they didn’t need us to sell their cars and they could only spare one.”

In fact it was Fiat that made the film possible. As well as offering as many Fiats and Ferraris as the crew needed, Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat, let the company’s rooftop test track be used for the chase sequence.

“The police respected Mr Agnelli and they did what he wanted,” says Michael Deely, one of the producers. On the whim of the Fiat boss, the whole of Turin was put at the disposal of the film makers.

This was to prove vital when they came to re-create the chaos of Turin’s rush hour. “We simply blocked the streets with a canteen van and a camera vehicle,” says Douglas Slocombe, the cinematographer. “Then we filmed from the tallest building possible so we could not be seen.”

In other words, the feet-on-the-horn frustration and rage through which the Minis made their escape to the tune of Getta Bloomin’ Move On!, with the famous refrain “we are the self-preservation society”, was totally real.

“It was incredible,” says Slocombe, “the authorities in Turin really let us create those jams. Can you imagine that happening in any other country?”