Italy for Movie Buffs 2025: The Filming Locations and Their Cinematic Context

How Italian Neorealism changed world cinema from a bombed-out Rome

Italian Neorealism — the filmmaking movement that emerged in Rome between 1943 and 1952 — changed cinema permanently. The context: Rome during and immediately after WWII was physically devastated; the Cinecittà studios had been bombed; the film industry had no money for sets, no professional actors, and no scripts in the traditional sense. The response of directors like Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City, 1945), Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948; Umberto D., 1952), and Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, 1943) was to film on the streets, using non-professional actors and improvised dialogue, with stories about working-class Italian life in all its unfiltered reality. The aesthetic was necessity — but the effect was revolutionary. These films established the template for what cinema could be: shot on location rather than in studios, using real people rather than stars, exploring social reality rather than fantasy. The French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, 1959-1968) was explicitly and acknowledged influenced by Italian Neorealism. So were the British Kitchen Sink films of the 1960s. So is every "realist" cinema tradition in every country from Brazil to Iran to South Korea that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. The bombed-out streets of Rome in 1945 became the accidental origin point of modern world cinema.