Il neorealismo: cinema e letteratura del dopoguerra

Neorealism is perhaps the most intense moment of twentieth-century Italian culture.

It is born amid the rubble of war, driven by the urgent need to tell reality just as it was.

Think of Roberto Rossellini, who shot Rome Open City in 1945, with non-professional actors and little film stock.

There were no built sets, no artificial lights: only the street, faces, natural light.

This aesthetic choice was at the same time an ethical choice.

The same impulse was present in literature: Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Beppe Fenoglio.

They all wrote of peasants, partisans, workers: characters that bourgeois literature had always ignored.

But neorealism was not simply a political program dressed up as art.

It was above all a matter of gaze: looking at the world without filters, without embellishments.

Vittorio De Sica in Bicycle Thieves shows us a father losing all hope before his son's eyes.

There are no heroes in this cinema, only people trapped in circumstances that overwhelm them.

This rejection of rhetorical heroism was a direct response to Fascist propaganda.

Even language changes radically: in neorealist novels dialects, slang, fragmented speech all appear.

It is no coincidence that Luchino Visconti drew inspiration from the American novels of Steinbeck and Dos Passos.

This season came to a close around the mid-1950s, as the economic boom transformed the face of Italy.

But its legacy is immense: from the cinema of Pasolini right up to contemporary TV series.

Every time a director chooses to shoot on a real location rather than in a studio, there is something neorealist in that choice.

Neorealism taught us that the truth is already out there, outside the window: you just need the courage to look at it.