Torunn Haaland is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages at Gonzaga University.

• List of figures; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1. A moment and a country; Chapter 2. Realism and neorealism; Chapter 3. Literary neorealism: narration and testimony; Chapter 4. Rossellini’s cities of war and resistance; Chapter 5. Wandering among De Sica’s urbanites: shoeshiners, bicycle thieves, miraculous outcasts and a man with a dog; Chapter 6. Visconti’s worlds of aestheticism and ideology: between tradition and invention, from country to city; Chapter 7. Faces and spaces of neorealism: from dystopian cities to utopian countries; Chapter 8. The journey beyond neorealism: streetwalkers, political rebels, anti-mafia resisters, stolen children and unwanted citizens; Filmography; Bibliography; Index

In recent years, Italian cinema—and in particular its highest moment, neo-realism—has enjoyed a revival within international scholarship. This has contributed to emphasize Italian cinema’s centrality and its fertile influence on all world cinema of the postwar period. Within this panorama, Torunn Haaland’s book appears as one of the most brilliant and most capable of combining rigorous documentation with a reading of cinema history as part of a larger cultural, political and social history of Italy in the postwar period, adding to this the passion of an authentic researcher.