It’s a Neorealist World

“The cinema,” claims screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, the chief theorist of what came to be known as Italian neorealism in the early 1950s, “has always felt the ‘natural’ and practically inevitable necessity of inserting a story into reality in order to make it thrilling and spectacular.”1 For Zavattini’s generation, the thrill of new narratives hewing close to everyday life promised to restructure Italy’s postwar ruins, both physical and political.