* Not that the Communist Party was ashamed of the execution or of the executioner, Walter Audisio, who became one of its parliamentary deputies. In 1947 its leader, Palmiro Togliatti, said that the Duce’s execution had been ‘one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest contribution that the movement of national liberation made to the nation’.⁴

† One province in which Catholics were prominent in the Resistance was Lucca, which lacked the anti-clerical traditions of the rest of Tuscany. Fifty-seven Lucchese priests were executed by the nazis.⁷

‡ One director who ignored neo-realism was the great Federico Fellini, who took audiences into his private worlds of fantasy and surrealism. Instead of following the trend of filming on location, he preferred to recreate the Via Veneto or the streets of Rimini, his home town, in the studios of Cinecittà. Fellini was untypical in other ways, being uninterested in politics and claiming he had never kicked a football in his life. His films were more appreciated at foreign film festivals than by cinema-goers in Italy.

§ By this moment of the film, the Socialist Party must have split, which allows Depardieu to join the communists.

** In Italy magistrates are divided between the prosecuting and adjudicating components of the judiciary. A magistrate can therefore be a detective as well as a judge.