8
The Italian Neorealist Experience: The Orphan Child and New Ways of Looking at the World

Introduction

How are we to conceive of the cultural aftermath of Fascism and World War II? What can there be after destruction? And, more specifically, how are we to map out the wake of such traumatic events in the Italian cultural landscape of the 1940s? If we follow Giorgio Agamben (2007) and interpret Western modernity as a project consisting of the “destruction of experience,” a progressive flight “outside of Man” (7), Italian neorealism might be defined as an attempt to reconstruct human experience after the dehumanizing technicizations of Fascism and the annihilating practices of World War II. Central to this reconstruction is a renewed interest in the Other as “a possible world,” to use Gilles Deleuze’s (1990, 306) insightful term, reflecting a willingness to accept an open‐ended, inclusive, elaboration of the real, as opposed to the clichéd and rigid reductions of reality typical of the Fascist frame of mind.

In this regard, the etymology of the word “experience,” from the Latin verb experiri (to try or prove), opens up the possibility of conceiving Italian neorealism both as a radically new way of experiencing the world, and as a radically new life experiment through artistic means, capable of interrogating what Michel Foucault (1983) identified as “the fascism in us all” (xiii) and what Umberto Eco (2001) has termed “eternal fascism” (77): an ever‐present attitude, rather than a specific historical phenomenon restricted to the pre–World War II European political context. Cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy (2000, 84) has used the term “camp‐thinking” in conjunction with the Nazi‐Fascist approach that might, he notes, be defined “by the veneration of homogeneity, purity, and unanimity that it fosters.” He goes on to say:

inside the nation’s fortifications, culture is required to assume an artificial texture and an impossibly even consistency. Culture as process is arrested. Petrified and sterile, it is impoverished by the national obligation not to change but to recycle the past continually in an essentially unmodified mythic form. Tradition is reduced to simple repetition.

Commonplaces surrounding discussions of Italian neorealism tend to present it simply as a rejection of classical—for example, Hollywood style—dramatic and cinematic conventions.¹ In this regard, the innovative solutions adopted by the universally acclaimed Italian filmic masterpieces of the 1940s traditionally include historical actuality, “realistic” (albeit a fraught term) treatment, and an authentic deployment of landscape; location shooting and the use of natural light rather than studio sets; the casting and dubbing of nonprofessional actors; the privileging of seemingly unobtrusive camera work and editing to match film time and real time; and a combination of fictional narrative with documentary‐like recording of preexisting reality, to emphasize quotidian truth and reveal dramatic social conditions.

Starting with the Pesaro conference in 1974, though, critics began to relocate the cinematic traits of a nascent neorealist style within the Fascist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Ben‐Ghiat 1991; Rocchio 1999; Bondanella 2004; Minghelli 2013), highlighting how indebted the masters of neorealism were to pre–World War II cinema. Many protagonists of the Italian neorealist experience had been active in the Fascist film industry, as all the early works by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica reveal. On the other hand, as one of the most sensitive intellectuals of the time, André Bazin (2004, 20), notes, Italian neorealism can be linked not only to certain factual and reportorial forms of preexisting cinema but also and foremost to a profound message of humanism, fostered specifically by the anti‐Fascist Resistance experience of the 1940s, which marked a pivotal change. The humanist dimension is highlighted by Federico Fellini (1976, 152)—“neorealism is a way of seeing reality without prejudice … not just social reality but all that there is within a man” (152)—and by Rossellini, who considered neorealism the result of “an increased curiosity towards man … a moral position that can be explained in three words: love thy neighbor” (quoted in Rondolino 1977, 7–8).

Interestingly enough, both of these definitions closely echo the renewed human solidarity to be found at the center of some of the most relevant interventions within the neorealist Italian cultural debate of the 1940s, from Cesare Pavese’s (1962) often quoted 1945 article “Ritorno all’uomo” (“Return to Man”) to Alberto Moravia’s (1946) essay “L’uomo come fine” (“Man as an End”), to Luchino Visconti’s (1943) influential appeal for an “anthropomorphic cinema”—all of which share the predominance given to “the unconscious plea of every human presence” (Pavese 219). Italian neorealism is thus more about new ways of looking at reality than about realism per se. It is the cinematic rendering of a new epistemological attitude, the reappropriation and reinvention of cinema, after the traumatic experiences of Fascism and World War II.

Privileging this interpretation, Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema I and II, for instance, present Italian neorealism as the direct consequence—or wake—of the disrupted political, social, economical, and physical situation brought about by World War II. In so doing, the two books identify several characteristics that are specific to the new cinematographic image introduced by directors such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti: the dispersive situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of clichés, the eschewal of plot. According to Deleuze (1986, 211–12), in order to grasp the new situation, it was necessary for these directors to create:

… a new type of tale [récit] capable of including the elliptical and the unorganized, as if the cinema had to begin again from zero, questioning afresh all the accepted facts of the American tradition. The Italians were therefore able to have an intuitive consciousness of the new image in the course of being born.

Surrounded by empty or disconnected “any‐spaces‐whatever,” immersed in environments with which only chance relations can still exist, faced with intolerable situations that can no longer extend into actions or reactions, the characters—and directors—of Italian neorealism resort to visions or thought‐images that may even have something of the hallucinatory about them. This is what compels Deleuze to describe Italian neorealism as a “visionary cinema” in which characters have gained in an ability to see what they may have become excluded from in terms of action or reaction.²

Central to the visionary nature of Italian neorealism is the fact that what we see is very often witnessed or filtered by the eyes of an orphan child. Films such as De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943), Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), and Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), as well as Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948) are structured around young protagonists who either are or become orphans. Moreover, the figure of the orphan child plays a significant role in other neorealist films of the time, such as Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946).

Analogously, many Italian neorealist novels of the 1940s seem to deploy the figure of the orphan child to confront the reader with an estranging image of the real. Relevant examples include Italo Calvino’s first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947), where the partisan struggle in northern Italy and its inevitable wake of ferocious deaths and powerful dreams are portrayed from the point of view of the parentless Pin; Alberto Moravia’s Agostino (1943), in which we see a fatherless 13‐year‐old boy as he enters the disquieting adult world of sexuality and desire; and many of Cesare Pavese’s works, from the overtly mythological Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucó, 1947; Pavese 2014b) to La casa in collina (The House on the Hill, 1949; Pavese 2014a), or La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950; Pavese 2014c), where the orphaned children Dino and Cinto force the adult protagonists to look at reality in a new way.³

According to Hungarian mythologist Károly Kerényi (Jung and Kerényi 2002, 2), the figure of the orphan child has often been viewed as an open‐ended mythologem, that is, a mythological element that constantly resurfaces in culture and is constantly remodeled. Unlike the Jungian concept of archetype, commonly adopted in myth criticism, Kerényi’s approach opens up the possibility of privileging not so much the origin (arche) of a given myth, but the fact that this latter can be constantly remodeled as a discursive practice (logos), capable of acquiring in its various “becomings”—to use Gilles Deleuze’s expression—either genuine or technicized connotations. The abandoning or bereavement of a child who later on causes profound transformations is one of the most powerful mythologems of all—in the stories of Moses, Oedipus, Paris, and Romulus, just to cite a few. In these cases, as well as in the films analyzed here, the orphan child functions as a powerful dual symbol of crisis and renewal, capable of subverting the status quo. As noted by Italian mythologist Furio Jesi (1968, 13):

In the great turning points of the history of culture, especially when the crisis of the religious sentiment becomes symptom and presage of the end of a cycle, the image of the primordial child, the orphan, surfaces from the depths of the psyche. An image to which the human mind blindly commits its own hopes and that always appears, in itself, arbiter of metamorphosis.

If the Fascist youth association of the Figli della Lupa (Children of the She‐Wolf), created by Benito Mussolini in 1933, represents a dangerous, repressive use of the myth of Romulus and Remus, aimed at reproducing a closed, tyrannical, reality (e.g., the Fascist myth of nation), the neorealist deployment of the orphan child allows, on the contrary, a more inclusive, expansive, “dis‐closure” of the world. The Italian neorealist experience of the 1940s—at least in some of its most relevant cinematic and literary outcomes—might be interpreted as an antidote to the myths and clichés perpetuated by the Fascist frame of mind: an attempt to bring about an awakening in/to an open community through the powerful prism of the orphan child. More generally, if we follow Jesi’s (1967, 106) interpretation of the bourgeois spirit as “the tendency to organize life within a microcosm, in which all social relations reveal the presence of very solid walls: those of the home, the family‐run company, the city,” then the orphan child’s mythologem within the Italian neorealist experience of the 1940s will appear as a powerfully subversive presence, capable of disrupting all three of the above‐mentioned “camps” (to employ Gilroy’s terminology) while allowing for a more flexible and inclusive interpretation of the real, full of Deleuzian puissance and in contrast to every Fascist pouvoir.

Rossellini’s (Anti‐)War Trilogy

Often credited with initiating the neorealist reinvention of modern cinema, Roma città aperta is perhaps one of the best examples of neorealism’s ability to embrace complexity while evading orthodoxy and camp‐thinking at all levels: religious, political, cinematic. Gottlieb (2004, 20), in a chapter significantly entitled “Reappropriating the Old, Making the New,” demonstrates how Rossellini’s 1945 film contests Fascism not only by portraying and glorifying the Resistance, but also and foremost by “opposing and overcoming the fascist control over myths, symbols, institutions and values.” What is at stake in Roma città aperta is nothing less than the mythological re‐foundation of Rome: an attempt to de‐construct the image of the Urbs erected by Fascist rhetoric, while re‐founding the city on a more genuine basis, through the mythologem of the orphan child.

Famously shot on location in the summer of 1944 in conditions of great hardship, the film represents a three‐day period in the fight for freedom against the Nazi occupation of Rome, employing as magnifying lenses several characters whose stories are closely intertwined in a truly collective portrait. Apart from the opening and closing panoramic views of the city and the iconic image of the Spanish Steps, the only recognizable sight of Rome within the movie is a clearly Fascist one: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (Palace of Italian Civilization), completed in the same year as Roma città aperta in the EUR quarter of Rome. This building, often referred to as the “Squared Coliseum,” is a perfect example of the totalitarian appropriation of the past enacted by Fascism, and the camera angle used by Rossellini to frame it in the partisan ambush sequence helps create a kind of optical illusion, transforming it from a distant backdrop into the main target of the attack: a powerful metonymic symbol of the Fascist frame of mind (Figure 8.1).

Photo of a scene from the film Rome Open City by Roberto Rossellini displaying 3 people holding guns facing away from the viewer towards a line of trees and a building on the background. — **Figure 8.1** The Palazzo della civiltà italiana in the background of the partisan ambush: *Roma città aperta* (*Rome Open City*, Roberto Rossellini, 1945). Screen grab.

Advocating for a truly neo‐realist take on the world, Rossellini, in this scene and throughout the film, asserts that, in order to establish a genuinely humanistic, non‐nationalistic, idea of civiltà italiana, we need to subvert and overthrow all prescriptive clichés, as well as the dogmatic identity‐forming policies that have haunted Italy under Fascism. And it is precisely in this sense that Roma città aperta contests the traditional concept of “home.” We see an unconventional family—by Fascist standards—in which Pina, a widow with an eight‐year‐old son Marcello, is pregnant by another man, Francesco, whom she is about to marry. Marcello is a half‐ (and eventually fully) orphaned boy whose words and deeds tend to defamiliarize the real. In the bedtime sequence on the eve of Pina and Francesco’s planned wedding, for example, as Francesco puts Marcello to bed, the latter asks him all of a sudden, “starting tomorrow, can I call you dad?” The question may seem unremarkable, especially from the perspective of our contemporary world, but it is actually very powerful, pointing to a rupture in the conventional reality of the Fascist family microcosm. It advocates for a more open, nonexclusive, idea of fatherhood, conceived not as something naturally given, but as something that can be nonbiologically bestowed and chosen.

More generally, Rossellini infuses the real with epistemological complexity to subvert Manichean distinctions between opposing sides in the film. The character of the Austrian deserter, for instance, although irrelevant from a strictly narrative point of view, is fundamental in shaping the ethical standpoint of the movie, insofar as he disrupts any tendency to consider the representatives of one side as simply evil and the others as fully good. As an Austrian, he is Nazi‐identified, but as a deserter, he becomes aligned with the Italians. As a “coward,” he complicates that identification, becoming a character we might potentially condemn—yet, in another twist, Rossellini represents his fear and terror as something with which we can sympathize. Equally relevant is the ethically charged decision on Rossellini’s part to entrust the film’s deepest reflection on the wrongs of the Nazi frame of mind not to a partisan fighter—as one would expect—but to a drunken German officer, Hartmann: “we Germans simply refuse to believe that people want to be free. … All we’re really good at is killing, killing, killing. We’ve strewn all of Europe with corpses, and from their graves rises an unquenchable hate. Hatred. Hatred everywhere. That hatred will devour us.”

At the same time, the positive characters are difficult to label or categorize: Pina is betrothed to a communist, but she openly acknowledges her faith in God; Don Pietro is a Catholic priest allied with the communists; and the chief partisan Manfredi, a former anarchist who fought in the Spanish civil war, exhibits extreme judgmentalism, perhaps even to the point of cruelty, in his treatment of his lover Marina. Even Romoletto, the crippled boy who leads the insurgency organized by Marcello and his friends, embodies a paradox. His disability, age, and status as orphan would normally bespeak vulnerability and the kind of openness we find elsewhere in the neorealist orphan child. However, his name evokes Fascist rhetoric around the founding of Rome by the mythological Romulus, and his authoritarian and violent behavior aligns him as well with the oppressive past rather than a potentially emancipating future.

If Rome itself is, as Millicent Marcus (1986, 46) insightfully puts it, the real protagonist of Roma città aperta, then the movie might be interpreted as a courageous attempt to purge its image of its Fascist associations, while offering audiences the possibility of going back home to a newly founded city, as the orphan child’s doubled symbol of crisis and renewal, which closes the film, aptly suggests. It is not by chance, in fact, that Marcello is the last of the main characters to be seen in the film, walking back toward the city with the other children who have witnessed Don Pietro’s execution. He traverses the highly symbolic Via Trionfale arm‐in‐arm with a young companion and part of a group (no Romoletto visible) to whom the future of Rome will be entrusted. The (re)founding of Rome is now configured as a communal, not individual, event, paving the way for a truly open city far removed from Fascist rhetorical appropriation.

The disrupted socioeconomic and psychological landscape of Italian cities and rural areas gives birth in 1946 to Paisà, which opens up a new horizon of experience while striving to decolonize the mind in the wake of Fascist cultural ideology by acknowledging the Other’s presence. What we find at the core of the second segment of Rossellini’s War Trilogy is, in fact, a series of culture shocks deriving from the clash between different worldviews and customs, as well as the attempt to finally overcome such clashes in the name of a more open and inclusive idea of civilization.

Divided in six episodes, the film presents a specific geohistorical moment—the landing of the Allied forces in Sicily in the summer of 1943 and their progression up the Italian peninsula—as an instance of profound deterritorialization, in which people found themselves collectively orphaned: de‐linked from their home, birthplace, nation, and heritage. The first five episodes are based on the misconceptions, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that characterize interactions between and among protagonists, at the linguistic and/or cultural level. The Naples sequence, for example, is based on the encounter between the drunken black American soldier Joe and a sly little orphaned street urchin named Pasquale, who will eventually steal the man’s shoes. At first, the language and culture barrier between the two seems insuperable, but as soon as Joe experiences the dreadful living conditions of Pasquale, his resentment toward the child gives way to a profound though unspoken sense of the shame of all that has brought Pasquale’s situation about—and his dramatic response turns into a powerful appeal for solidarity on the part of the audience.

As the film’s title implies—the word paisà is an affectionate Neapolitan term for a person from the same village—foreign cultures can indeed find a common humanist ground. If Fascism is all about the cult of origins, be it within the walls of the family, the city, or the nation, the neorealist approach and frame of mind are more attentive to the Deleuzian concept of becoming: the constant production of difference, the very dynamism of change. It is the latter that wins out in the final episode. Contesting the Nazis’ attempt to separate regular soldiers from partisans (they observe the Geneva Conventions with American prisoners, but mercilessly execute the Italians), an American officer cries out and leaps toward his Italian comrades‐in‐arms in a gesture of solidarity, self‐sacrifice, and ethical revolt.

Paisà shifts neorealism’s perspective from the microcosm of Rome to the macrocosm of Italy and beyond; Germania anno zero can be read as a revolutionary attempt on Rossellini’s part to cross the barricade and situate himself in a German context through the looking glass of another orphan child. What is most striking is that no one in the movie seems capable of establishing a real, compassionate, loving connection with Edmond, and this is true not only of family members and friends but also of all the minor or secondary characters who punctuate the plot and are constantly trying to take advantage of one another. This seems to signify the expulsion of the individual from that society of “friends,” structured both physically and mentally around a communal space, that, according to Jean‐Paul Vernant (1982), was at the origin of the Greek concept of the polis. As a consequence, what lingers most evidently over the ruins of 1947 Berlin is nothing but death: from the graveyard setting at the beginning of the movie, to the dead horse strewn across the street and torn to pieces by hungry passersby, to Edmund’s shockingly well‐intentioned parricide and subsequent suicidal act of repentance and/or loss of faith in everything and everyone.

The foreclosure in Germania anno zero of the potential renewal embodied by the orphan child’s perspective points to the dangers that lay ahead in the European postwar reconstruction process. At the same time, though, the film does not plunge us into desperation. It begins with a prologue that suggests that the film and its tragic ending are a call for action on the part of the audience, particularly in our everyday encounters with the Other: “If anyone should feel, after watching Edmund Köhler’s story, that something must be done, that German children must be taught to love life once again, then the efforts of those who made this film will have been greatly rewarded.”

De Sica’s Subversive Orphan Children

The death of Edmond in Germania anno zero might be viewed as the ultimate form of orphaning, and in this respect his experience might be likened to that of Pricò in De Sica’s 1943 film I bambini ci guardano. In both cases, the ethical path of the child‐protagonist functions as an eye‐opening experience and wakeup call for audiences. Often overlooked by critics as merely protoneorealist, I bambini ci guardano might fruitfully be considered fully neorealist, in the terms laid out in this chapter, because of its willingness to question precepts of Fascist ideology in the realms of domesticity, motherhood, and infancy.

Based on Pricò, a rather conventional and larmoyant novel published by Cesare Giulio Viola (1999) in 1922, and written with the fundamental contribution of scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, the film captures an entire zeitgeist, while focusing on the powerful emotions and reactions of its five‐year‐old protagonist. The first merit of this subtly subversive film is its willingness to engage with disquieting themes and issues, such as petit‐bourgeois adultery and suicide and the unhappiness of children, which were deemed taboos under Fascist censorship of the time. Moreover, as justly highlighted by Lino Micciché (1966, 149), I bambini ci guardano is particularly successful in problematizing the bourgeois triangle by changing its focus from the usual suspects—the husband, the wife, and the lover—to the figure of the child, who becomes “the true bearer of the looming tragedy’s weight.”

But, besides adultery and suicide, there is also a third truly revolutionary gesture that critics have often overlooked. It is the ending itself, which can be interpreted as the subversive orphaning of a sorrowful five‐year‐old who willfully turns his back once and for all on his mother and on everything she represents. Pricò’s conscious acceptance of his orphan’s fate acquires then the sense of an ethical choice, which transforms him into a powerful symbol of revolt against the falsely serene microcosm of the Italian bourgeoisie (Figure 8.2).

Photo of a scene from the film The Children are Watching Us by Vittorio De Sica displaying the character of Pricò willfully turning his back on his mother. — **Figure 8.2** Pricò willfully turning his back on his mother: *I bambini ci guardano* (*The Children are Watching Us*, Vittorio De Sica, 1942). Screen grab.

It is not by chance that we, as spectators, first learn about the mother’s love affair through Pricò’s gaze and the change in his facial expression when he first sees the threat that the man talking to his mother in the park represents. Similarly, Roberto’s face will express a mixed sense of surprise and guilt when, later on in the movie (and conveyed through masterful use of shot/reverse‐shot), he realizes that his love effusions on the beach are being silently witnessed by Pricò. What we are dealing with here is a reinterpretation of the child’s “pure gaze” trope that, in contrast with the models employed up to this point by Fascist ideology, sheds light from within and with honesty on the cracks in the fortified walls of the Italian bourgeoisie.

Pricò’s narrative and ethical function throughout the film is that of subverting the world that surrounds him by inadvertently exposing its subterfuges and mechanisms of denial. His youthful innocence and openness indict adult hypocrisy. In contrast to his unsullied presence, the social control and morbid curiosity that animate relatives, friends, neighbors, and hotel guests in the movie, are the perfect incarnations of that “hypocrite, lying society” that De Sica and Zavattini openly identified as the main target of their attack (quoted in Savio 1979, 489).

If we are to interpret Italian neorealism first and foremost as an epistemological break from the Fascist frame of mind, a new way of experiencing and experimenting with the world after the cliché‐ridden attitude of the “white telephone” movies, then I bambini ci guardano is just as successful as De Sica’s subsequent masterpieces of the 1940s in fostering an awakening of the audience to the possibilities of open‐minded community. All these films, in fact, demystify the real by focusing on what De Santi (1999, 37) has insightfully called the “subversive angelicism” of children. As Zavattini noted (and never ceased to reiterate in his interviews, letters, and writings):

We keep them aside, but they see with their own eyes, listen with their own ears, pass judgments; children do watch us after all and judge us and we seem desperate to stop them from expressing those judgments, which are often impressive, revealing, brilliant, full of a mysterious experience, with a mysterious timing of their own.

(quoted in Siciliani de Cumis 1999, 15)

In Sciuscià, the complex reality of postwar Italy is powerfully portrayed through the eyes of the orphan Pasquale and his little friend Giuseppe, whose sincere, mutual attachment—initially cemented by their fantasy‐driven will to spend their hard‐earned money as shoeshine boys on a horse—is gradually crushed by the mechanisms of the surrounding world. While their beloved animal functions as a leitmotif of freedom and subversion, adults either exploit the two children (as in the burglary organized by Giuseppe’s brother) or pit them against each other (as with the “corrective” methods used in jail), thus breaking forever—and in the most tragic possible way—their initial tie.

What De Sica seems to imply in this somber portrayal of postwar Italy is that nothing much has changed since the times of Mussolini: education is still identified with the sterile repetition of multiplication tables, and justice is undetectable—as is suggested when the iconic image of Lady Justice is mistaken by one of the little sciuscià for an ordinary effigy of Queen Margherita. Truth is reduced to something that is “only good for your confessor,” as the lawyer cynically warns Giuseppe. Moreover, it is not by chance that the prison closely resembles a military barrack and that the warders are euphemistically referred to as “maestri” (the term used for teachers), while the prison director can only barely restrain himself from using the Fascist “voi” verb form and the infamous Roman salute as he praises wholeheartedly the low crime rates registered under Mussolini’s dictatorship. The law court is unable to grasp the boys’ sincere affection for a horse, and the police chief, the prison doctor, the priests, and the warders (with the sole, albeit significant, exception of Bartoli) treat the young inmates with striking cold‐heartedness and/or ruthlessness. It is precisely in this sense that we can argue, together with Lucia Re (1990, 290), that the quest for freedom from Fascism was governed in Italy by “a paternal(istic) discourse and a patriarchal organizational structure that reflected many of the very same values against which it aimed to struggle,” thus perpetuating the same principles of domination and the same strategy of repression of individual desires that had appeared inhuman during the regime.

De Sica’s attempt to denounce the attitudes that were still active within the newborn Italian republic lies also at the core of his third masterpiece of the 1940s, Ladri di biciclette. In roaming the streets of the capital, together with his little son Bruno, in search of his stolen bicycle, Antonio and his desperate quest for justice collide with the (re)established powers and authorities of postwar Italy, none of which is capable of or willing to provide any real help. The police station, the local section of the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, as well as the nerve centers of Italian life—the square and the market (in the Piazza Vittorio and the Porta Portese sequences)—all reveal lack of sympathy toward Antonio’s drama. In addition, the characters in the upscale brothel and the proletarian neighborhood where the young thief hides, and in the fortune‐teller parlor where Antonio goes as a last resort, are dismissive, hostile, or indifferent.

The complexity of De Sica’s neorealist take on the world is purposely underpinned by the use of the plural (“bicycle thieves” instead of “the bicycle thief”), which triggers the question as to who we, as an audience, should consider the actual thief to be within the movie. In fact, once Antonio locates the young crook in a rundown part of the city, he extends his accusations to the entire neighborhood where the boy lives: “You’re all thieves!” But then his own attempt at stealing a bicycle out of despair and frustration forces us to reconsider the motives behind the youngster’s initial theft—especially after we have witnessed his health problems and extremely poor background.

In other words, reality is always far more complicated than what it may seem at first, and this might well apply also to the film’s ending, in which the protagonist’s dejection is powerfully juxtaposed to the excitement and revelry of passersby, as the crowd of soccer fans swallows up Antonio and Bruno in a flurry of after‐game comments, while remaining oblivious to their grief. What matters most in the end, though, is that Bruno—who has witnessed everything in silence, together with us—does not pass any judgment on his father. On the contrary, in an appeal to solidarity that cannot but involve us viewers as well, the child is successful in breaking the traditional father–son relationship model, as he attempts to console Antonio by offering him his hand: a gesture that sharply contrasts with the callous attitudes that punctuate the rest of the film.

Along these same lines, compared to the more rigidly Marxist–Gramscian ideological standpoint of neorealist films, such as Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) or Giuseppe De Santis’s Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950), a fantasy‐driven movie such as De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano widens the expressive horizon of Italian neorealism, without actually violating its spirit, as some of the most acute critics of the time justly saw (Renzi 1951; García‐Márquez 1999). An orphan child figure from the start, the young protagonist Totò perfectly embodies the double‐sided nature of crisis and renewal identified by Jesi in this powerful mythologem.

When we first see him leaving the orphanage where he grew up, he is dressed exactly like Pricò in the ending sequence of I bambini ci guardano. A subtle connection seems to exist between the two movies, not only in the rhythm and sound of the two protagonists’ names, but also in their ethical function: Totò might well be considered a grown‐up version of Pricò, to the extent that they are both symbols of revolt against the conformist reality that surrounds them—be it the falsely serene microcosm of a petit‐bourgeois family, or the ruthlessly wealthy macrocosm of a large industrial city. Moreover, when Zavattini (2014) was working on the script of I bambini ci guardano, he had already started writing the novel Totò il buono, which would eventually turn into Miracolo a Milano.

Throughout the film, as noted by Italian critic De Santi (De Santi and De Sica 1999, 28), “the flash of truthfulness is achieved by the juxtaposition of two different traits: the realistic and the fantastic.” The first example of such a fruitful juxtaposition can be found at the beginning of the movie when Lolotta returns home from grocery shopping to find Totò staring mesmerized at an overflowing pot of boiling milk that is trickling down the stove and across the floor. Instead of scolding him, like any respectable bourgeois mother would do, Lolotta turns the realistic messiness of the incident into a playful, poetic, and uncanny event, in which the trickle of milk suddenly becomes the river of an imaginary landscape, while the implied vastness of the earth can be bridged with a simple jump back and forth within that landscape. Here the boundaries between actual and virtual become indiscernible, transforming the sequence into a powerfully instructive epiphany of the potential malleability of the real for both Totò and the audience.

The moment Totò turns 18 and enters the adult world, he will bring to it his liminal gaze, thus realizing the Deluzian (1997, 41) ideal of “being foreign in one’s own language.” In this regard, even a quintessentially banal greeting like “good morning,” addressed to a stranger in the middle of the street in a large industrial city like Milan, can acquire an uncanny and even revolutionary connotation. In a way, Miracolo a Milano can be considered De Sica’s version of Rossellini’s Roma città aperta, representing an attempt to deconstruct the stereotypical image of Milan as the economic and industrial center of Italy, while refounding the city on a more genuine basis.

At the same time, though, this is not an ideologically aligned work of art that sides with one political or intellectual position over another. Egotism and selfishness can spring up everywhere, even among the tramps, as in the case of Rabbi. What De Sica and Zavattini seem to advocate is an inclusive interpretation of society, far removed from any sectarian attitude, as well as from any idealized depiction of the Marxian proletariat. At the beginning of the movie, for instance, Totò spontaneously applauds the rich bourgeois spectators leaving La Scala because he can appreciate their elegance and beauty without passing any class judgment on them. (This kind of aesthetic appreciation is mirrored when a tramp steals Totò’s bag not for the contents, but because he likes the bag.) Then, later in the movie, Totò will grant all sorts of material wishes to his fellow citizens: fur coats, a radio, tails, a wardrobe, a chandelier, a fancy sofa, expensive wristwatches, and so on. These material goods often become simple playthings in the hands of Totò’s community, thus undermining the false status of power traditionally granted to such commodities.

If it is true that, in De Sica’s words, the film is “a grotesque fantasy that, despite the comic exaggeration, reveals the drama of the poor who live and work without help, aliens in the midst of other men’s lives” (quoted in Cardullo 2009, 178), then the film can be interpreted as an “exercise in strategic universalism,” to use Gilroy’s (2000, 96) expression. The great power of Miracolo a Milano is that, in the end, Totò and his friends do not fly away to a kingdom lost in the fogs of Utopia, nor to a place of some political “ism,” but to a land “where good morning really means good morning,” as the closing card reads. After all, to genuinely greet the Other’s presence in our lives is a way to re‐cognize the intrinsic potential for renewal always already embedded in the Other’s gaze. This is not an idea based on some ideologically limited interpretation of the real; it is a new way of looking at the Other.

The Italian Neorealist Experience: Beyond Camps

Compared to the majority of orphan children who populate nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century Western literature and cinema, what distinguishes the bildung of the orphan child figures portrayed within the Italian neorealist experience of the 1940s is the fact that they are never reintegrated within their world—and thus they embody a quintessential Otherness. The protagonist may not “fit in” right from the beginning, as in Miracolo a Milano, or may become gradually estranged from his context as in I bambini ci guardano or Germania anno zero, but in each one of the works here analyzed the traditional coming‐of‐age story is transformed into a difficult, oftentimes painful, eye‐opening experience, at the end of which the protagonist decides to turn his back, either physically or metaphorically, on the conformist world that surrounds him.

Without denying that the child trope, as Edelmann (2004, 3) convincingly argues, has often acquired conservative overtones in what he calls the “reproductive futurism” of mainstream culture, we must note that the Italian neorealist approach to the orphan child may prevent the rhetoric of futurity from embracing the status quo. In a way, if we expand on Agamben’s (2007, 91) reading of infancy and interpret every orphan child as the “unstable signifier” par excellence, then the ethical function of these figures might be that of actively combatting clichés, automatic responses, and supposedly self‐evident truths by challenging audiences to rethink and question, at various levels, inherited conceptions of the world, as well as its fictional representations. This means confronting, in short, many of the strongholds of Fascist thinking, be it at the level of the family (I bambini ci guardano), the city (Roma città aperta, Miracolo a Milano), or the community at large (Sciuscà, Paisà, Germania anno zero).

This profoundly new approach to reality was deeply hindered, if not overtly opposed, by the sociopolitical context of the newborn Italian republic: a democracy whose public education system continued to be largely based on Giovanni Gentile’s Fascist‐inspired reform of 1924 and whose official cultural policies were shaped more and more by the binary ideological requirements of the Cold War. In his 1964 preface to The Path to The Spider’s Nests, looking back at the 1940s, Italo Calvino (1998, 26) acutely defined the literary side of Italian neorealism as “a potential that was in the air [but was] quickly exhausted.” Analogously, in reference to the cinematic side of Italian neorealism, Giuseppe De Santis noted, “this cinema somehow died, certainly not of natural causes …. Being what it was, Neorealism became a cinema that was purposely marginalized until it slowly disappeared from Italian culture, even though it represented perhaps a moment of critical consciousness within Italy” (quoted in Vitti 2006, 27).

If the mid‐1940s can be read as a moment of profound deterritorialization, which gave birth to an open‐ended mental space, perfectly embodied by the orphan child figure, the following decade can be seen as a moment in which the Italian cultural landscape closed itself once again into opposing camps. The year 1950 is marked not only by the symbolically significant suicide of Cesare Pavese, which gives a sense of closure to an entire epoch, but also by the beginning of the Korean War, generally considered to be the first significant armed conflict of a new era in which a major part of the world was forced to take sides. In 1952, the Catholic Holy Office put on the Index all of Alberto Moravia’s works, and in January 1954, the Italian parliament passed a law prohibiting state funding for films that could be considered influenced by the Communist Party—while Christian Democrat member of parliament Giulio Andreotti (1952, 5), who will come to serve seven times as prime minister of Italy, openly accused De Sica of rendering “a poor service to his country” with films such as Sciuscià and Umberto D.

Interestingly enough the attacks against the neorealist way of looking at the world came not only from the Catholic Church and center–right political parties, but also from that same PCI (Italian Communist Party) around which orbited more or less closely many of the protagonists of the neorealist experience. Calvino, Moravia, Elio Vittorini, and others, for instance, found themselves increasingly criticized by hardline Marxist critics such as Mario Alicata and Carlo Muscetta, who accused them of such heresies as “irrationalism,” “voluntarism,” “subjectivism,” and “decadentism” (Rosa 1982, 594–95). As noted by Lucia Re (1990), Palmiro Togliatti, head of the PCI, openly and unconditionally condemned psychoanalysis and modernist aesthetics, thus undermining from the outset potentially subversive projects of cultural renewal such as Vittorini’s influential periodical Il Politecnico or Cesare Pavese’s Collana di studi etnografici, psicologici e religiosi.⁴ De Santi (De Santi and De Sica 1999, 56) speaks of a more generalized “Marxi‐Crocean prejudice of formal and dialectic unity,” the presumed lack of which pushed many left‐wing critics—Alicata in primis—to tear apart a film such as Miracolo a Milano.

Perhaps, the best depiction of the new attitude brought about by the Cold War is the virtual imprisonment of Irene in the final sequence of Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (Europe ’51/The Greatest Love, 1952)—a film that perfectly exemplifies the division into opposing camps that occurs during postwar reconstruction throughout Europe. As implied by the bold and overarching title, Rossellini’s film presents itself as a vast portrait: an analytical assessment and close reading of European society at the start of the new decade. The awakening of a quintessentially bourgeois mother to the needs of others, after the highly symbolical death/suicide of her lonely child (closely reminiscent of Pricò’s and Edmond’s ethical revolts) will eventually bring her into direct contact with the tenement hall, the city slum, and the factory, thus changing forever her way of looking at the world.

As often happens in Italian neorealism, being moved to tears and/or to sympathize, in the Greek sense of the term—that is, to “suffer for and with another”—is a powerful way to deterritorialize oneself. But within the newly factionalized context of the Cold War, a woman who decides to abandon her family and privileged social class to provide for the needs of destitute strangers without adhering to any apparent ideology or creed (such as the PCI or the Catholic Church), cannot but be considered dangerously mad. In the end, by privileging her becoming, rather than her belonging, Irene will appear as the consummate Other, an outsider who must, by film‘s end, be isolated and confined to an asylum (Figure 8.3).

Photo of a scene from the film Europe ’51 by Roberto Rossellini displaying Irene behind a window of steel bars with her right hand on the outside portion of the window. — **Figure 8.3** Irene, as the consummate Other, is isolated and confined to an asylum: *Europa ’51.* (*Europe ’51*, Roberto Rossellini, 1952). Screen grab.

Overall, the Italian neorealist experience of the 1940s can be interpreted as a subversive and boundary‐breaking cultural phenomenon that, ethically speaking, placed itself “between,” rather than choosing fixed positions. But in seeking to transcend sectarian divisiveness, it got caught in the crossfire of opposing sides. If we follow Gilroy (2000, 55) and agree that Modernity defined a new role for its citizens based on a “distinctive ecology of belonging”—that is, a special formula for the relationship among territory, individuality, property, and war—then it is precisely this pervasive formula of belonging that the Italian neorealist experience of the 1940s attempted to put into question, as the recurrent orphan child mythologem aptly suggests. The potential divisiveness of belonging applies not only to Fascist myths of family and country but even to well‐intentioned championing of the proletariat (united not by nation but by class) insofar as a radical politics of class can entail exclusion and dogmatic contraposition of self and other. In contrast, as Gilroy, puts it, “Deliberately adopting a position between camps … is not a sign of indecision or equivocation. It is a timely choice. It can … be a positive orientation against the patterns of authority, government, and conflict that characterize modernity’s geometry of power” (84).

In this sense, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Italian neorealist experience has been its ability to foster a politics of complexity, aimed at overcoming the dichotomous simplifications of encamped thinking. Seventy years later, it is up to us to keep watch over the ethical supplement still contained in neorealist films. As Deleuze (1997, 73) wrote to Serge Daney: “If criticism has any point … it’s to the extent that a film bears in it something supplementary, a sort of gap between it and a still virtual audience, so we have to play for time and preserve the traces as we wait.” Acknowledging and cherishing the subversive, open‐ended, ways of looking at the world contained in these works of art might finally allow us to move beyond the taking of sides. It is not just a matter of historical respect. Both the strategies and the spirit of neorealism can be a source of renewal in a contemporary world still plagued by the kind of ideological blindness, divisiveness, and violence that neorealism sought to banish, ideally forever, from the Italian landscape.

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