First women, then children. To resist and dream in warring cities: Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine

Resistance in cities at war, especially in Rome during World War II, when the capital was under Nazi occupation, fell primarily on the shoulders of ordinary women, such as Pina played by Anna Magnani. In Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the main character, before being killed by a machine-gun fire during a raid in the Prenestina district, rebels against the famine that hit the Romans and makes one of the frequent attacks on the bakery. This attack was also described in the memoirs "Pane nero. Donne e vita quotidiana nella seconda guerra mondiale" by Miriam Mafai. Civil resistance also affects children, whom the film director has hope for in future at the end of the film. However, Rome of the post-war period, liberated, but at the same time occupied by the allies on 4 June 1944, does not yet give much hope to children and adolescents, despite the desperate attempt of the heroes of the film Shoeshine (1946) by Vittorio De Sica. They wanted to escape from reality and dreamt of buying a white horse. They wanted to escape from the social status that they had from the birth and turned them not only into military orphans, but also into vagabonds, beggars, and shoe-shiners for American soldiers along the Via Veneto. Through reading archival documents, viewing photographs, archival materials and excerpts from selected films, the lecture will enable listeners to immerse themselves in the reality of those days and in the artistic world created by two great masterpieces of Italian neorealism.

Lecturer

Stefania Carpiceci is Professor at the University of Siena for Foreigners. She teaches film history. She has been involved in research and provided editorial advice for a publication "A History of Italian Cinema" (2002-2014) at the Experimental Centre for Cinematography in Rome. She is a member of the University Film Council and the National Syndicate of Italian Film Journalists; a curator of events and film retrospectives; a member of the editorial board of magazines of Italian Essay Film Friends Association (Associazione Italiana Amici Cinema d’Essai), Massenzio/Estate Romana, Viterbo University, and the University of Rome. She has written numerous essays and articles for the Encyclopaedia of Cinema and the Biographical Dictionary of Italians (Treccani). She has contributed to the magazines "Fata Morgana", "Allegoria", "Bianco e Nero", "Quaderni del CSCI", "Carte di Cinema", "Cinema/Studio", and "Filmcronache". She has written several monographs, including "Amara terra mia / io vado via. Cinema italiano e canti della grande emigrazione del Novecento" (Italian Cinema and Songs of the Great Emigration of the 20th Century, 2020).

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