A review of the 1954 classic film “Journey To Italy” 

Director Roberto Rossellini is best known as a noted creator of the post-war Italian Neorealism movement with works like “Rome, Open City” (1945), but “Journey To Italy” is not a neorealist film (he had moved on by then) and, although it was shot in Italy with an Italian crew, almost all the dialogue is in English and the lead actors are English (George Sanders) and Swedish (Ingrid Bergman who was married to Rossellini at the time). Yet this work is regarded by many critics as Rossellini’s masterpiece, as well as a seminal piece of modernist cinema due to its loose storytelling.

I really enjoyed the location shooting in and around Naples, because my Italian mother came from Naples and took me there twice as a child. However, I found the narrative depressing because it shows a married couple insulting and hurting each other, before eventually deciding on divorce. The final sequence, during a procession in honour of Saint Gennaro, is unconvincing, but I suppose there are a lot of miracles going on at this point.