The historian Robert Rosenstone asserts that films have become “the chief medium for carrying the

stories
our culture tells itself.” To what extent can this be applied to filmic depictions of the Italian Resistance in
World War Two?

On the morning of the 27th April 1945 the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, partisans affiliated to the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), stopped a convoy of Fascists and Nazis near Lake Como. As it transpired one of the
Italians, hidden under a blanket in the back of a lorry, was Mussolini. There was much discussion amongst
the partisans about what to do with him. Some advocated that he should be handed to the Allied forces, at
that point rapidly advancing across the flat plains of the Po Valley. However, the majority of the 52nd
Brigade opted for quickly executing the Duce. He and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot the next day and
their bodies transported to Milan’s Piazzale Loreto where they were desecrated by the public and strung up
from the canopy of a petrol station. During the preceding Fascist ventennio (1922-1943), the monarchy, the
Catholic Church, the constitution and the legacy of the Risorgimento had been appropriated by the regime. In
short, Italianitá had been thoroughly Fascistized. Therefore, the scenes of popular rage against the corpse of
Mussolini symbolised the rupturing of Italy’s national identity making viscerally clear the need for national
redefinition.1

Following the liberation of Italy, a new artistic movement developed in Italian cinema – neorealism. Film
critics have made much of neorealism’s influence on the cultural climate of post-war Italy but have, until
recently, largely neglected the movement’s relationship to historiography and its role in attempting to
reshape the Italian national identity. However, it is now widely acknowledged that neorealism “politically
and ideologically … is linked with the liberation movements, with post-war reconstruction, with anti-
Fascism and with the establishment of a democratic Italy.” 2 The historian Philip Morgan asserts that the
aforementioned PCI – whose Garibaldi Brigades comprised around 50% of partisan forces – the Christian
Democrats (DC) and the liberal-socialist Action Party participated in the Resistance so as to be in a position
to shape post-war Italy.3 While the Actionists quickly dissolved following the war, both the DC and PCI
came to dominate the politics of post-war Italy. The historian Simone Neri Serneri asserts that these parties
derived their legitimacy to rule from “the Fascist-anti-Fascist antithesis and the recall of Resistance values.”4

Aldice De Gasperi and Palmiro Togliatti, the respective leaders of the DC and PCI, aimed to redefine the
Italian nation through the anti-Fascist values of the Resistance. Indeed, the vision of Italy promulgated in the
1948 Constitution embodied these values: democracy, de-centralised political power, human rights and anti-

1
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (England: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 529-533 ; Marian Hurley, ‘Working
Class Communities and the New Nation: Italian Resistance Film and the Remaking of Italy,’ in (eds. Laura Rorato & Anna Saunders), The Essence
and the Margin: National Identities and Collective Memories in Contemporary European Culture (Netherlands: Rodopi, 2009), p. 84
2
Lesley Caldwell, ‘What about women? Italian films and their concerns,’ in (eds. Ulrike Sieglohr), Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female
and National Identities in European Cinema 1945-51 (Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, 2016), p. 136
3
Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism: 1915-1945 (Wales: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 225
4
Simone Neri Serneri, ‘A Past to be Thrown Away? Politics and History in the Italian Resistance,’ Contemporary European History, Vol. 4, No. 3
(1995), p. 367
Fascism.5 Both the DC and PCI propagated an interpretation of the Resistance as a national war of liberation
from Fascism and Nazism that served to unify the nation in what amounted to a second Risorgimento. The
neorealist work Rome, Open City (1945), directed by Roberto Rossellini, embodied the unified and anti-
Fascist Italy envisaged the DC and PCI and presaged the liberal historiographical tradition promoted by the
scholar Benedetto Croce. As Robert Rosenstone would assert, Rossellini’s work told “the stories our culture
tells itself” in order to make the past serve the needs of the present.6 However, it will be shown that more
recent revisionist historiography and films, particularly those produced following the collapse of the post-
war order in the 1990s, have sought to undermine Rossellini’s idealised Italy.

The historian Philip Morgan, while attending a conference in Pesaro in the mid-1980s on the Resistance,
witnessed an ex-partisan object to many of the contributing historians’ research: “when people ask me how
many partisans there were, I never reply with a number because in reality we were an entire people …
because everyone contributed in various ways.”7 Clearly, this ex-partisan had watched Rossellini’s Rome,
Open City too many times. Characters directly and indirectly aiding the Resistance populate the film’s
setting, the Roman suburb of Prenestino, ready to give their lives for the cause of national liberation.8 Pina
shelters her Communist partisan fiancé Francesco who prints and distributes L’Unità – the PCI’s official
organ. Manfredi, Francesco’s comrade, is wanted by the Nazi-Fascists for being the leader of a Committee
for National Liberation (CLN) – broad coalitions of anti-Fascist partisans, including the PCI and DC,
recognised by the Allies as the de facto government of northern Italy.9 Don Pietro, Prenestino’s parish priest,
transports messages, money and false documents to partisans imbedded in the mountains across central Italy.
Even Pina’s young son and his school friends stockpile arms on the apartment roof and blow up German oil
tanks at the railway depot! Made in the weeks following the war’s conclusion, Rossellini’s film attempted to
create a new Italian identity from the values of the Resistance foreshadowing the political efforts of the DC
and PCI.10 Much like the two political parties that emerged dominant from the conflict, Rossellini’s film
embraced the vision that the Resistance had been a war of national liberation in which the entire nation
fought against the Germans and their Fascist collaborators. 11 In doing so, Rossellini hoped to create an
imagined shared history that would heal the divisions that riddled the Italian peninsula.

Rome, Open City embodies the optimism of the early days of the Italian Republic with a strong focus on
cross-class and cross-faith collaboration. Don Pietro has no qualms in working alongside the underground
printers of L’Unità in transporting a million lire to aid Communist partisans. Equally, Manfredi is willing to
work alongside the Badogliani – partisans loyal to Marshal Badoglio, himself a Fascist, who had replaced

5
Grant Amyot, ‘The Shadow of Fascism Over the Italian Republic,’ Human Affairs, Vol. 21 (2011), p. 35
6
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Malaysia: Pearson Education LTD, 2006), p. 3
7
Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians and the Second World War (Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 164
8
Hurley, pp. 72-73
9
Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871-1982 (USA: Longman, 1995), pp. 305-306
10
Hurley, pp. 71, 84
11
Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance (USA: Verso, 2013), p. 251
Mussolini following his dismissal by the king in July 1943. Moreover, at the film’s conclusion both
Manfredi and Don Pietro are martyred for their nation equally distributing the suffering of the Italian people
upon both Communists and Catholics.12 All of this suggests that the desire for national liberation went far
beyond the sectional interests of the PCI and DC.13 Although Rossellini’s onscreen depiction of cross-party
collaboration may seem utopic, it does have some historical precedent. As the historian Paul Ginsborg
explains, Palmiro Togliatti, the long-exiled leader of the PCI, returned to Italy from Moscow in 1944 with a
similarly idealistic vision for post-war Italian society. Following the anti-Fascist theory laid down by
Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti’s primary goal was not social revolution but the re-establishment of democracy.
He advocated an alliance of progressive forces, including the DC, which would rid society of Fascism
creating a distinctly Italian road to socialism. 14 Indeed, for a brief moment under the broad anti-Fascist
coalition government of Feruccio Parri, formed in 1945, the DC and PCI did cooperate. The CLN in Rome,
Open City epitomises Togliatti’s dream of a progressive alliance. As Don Pietro says to Bergmann, the head
of the Roman Gestapo, who questions the viability of the alliance between the PCI and DC, “I believe that
those who fight for justice and liberty walk in the way of the Lord. And his ways are boundless.” In
Rossellini’s Italy politics is clearly secondary to the mutual aim of all partisans to defeat Fascism and forge a
new democratic nation in the Resistance’s self image.15

Rossellini’s Rome, and hence his Italy, is largely absent of Nazis and Fascists. Instead, as the film critic
David Forgacs notes, the Gestapo gather information on Don Pietro, Manfredi and Francesco from their
ivory tower in the centre of the city removed from the spaces ‘ordinary’ anti-Fascist Italians inhabit. 16
Indeed, when examining a blurry photograph of Manfredi, the head of the Gestapo notes, “I met him here, on
this desk. I always take a long stroll around Rome in the evening without leaving the office.” Furthermore,
the anonymity of Prenestino, the film’s setting, makes it a facsimile of the many new housing estates built by
Mussolini’s regime throughout the 1920s and 1930s thus nationalising the narrative, important in such a
regionalised country. This is a trait common to many neorealist works with Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine
(1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) both set in similarly anonymous Roman locations, mainly the suburb of
Val Melaina. Despite this level of anonymity, as Peter Brunette asserts, “Rome is [the film’s] chief
protagonist” as Rossellini “reappropriates [the city] for its ordinary citizens.” 17 Rome, despite its treasure-
trove of ancient buildings, defied attempts by both the liberal Italian state and the Fascists to transform the
city into a symbol of a unified Italy.18 The city was near universally despised by patriots prior to the First
World War with the Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, calling it “second-rate and tawdry” and unbefitting
for a supposedly modern nation due to its clericalism. Mussolini attempted to rectify Rome’s flaws at once

12
Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, ‘Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: sixty years on,’ Screening the Past, Issue 12 (Dec., 2006)
13
Hurley, p. 75
14
Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 (England: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 42-46
15
Hurley, p. 74
16
David Forgacs, Rome, Open City (London: British Film Institute Press, 2000), p. 37
17
Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (USA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 51 ; Forgacs, p. 44
18
John Agnew, ‘The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome Under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1970-1943,’ Geografiska Annaler Human
Geography, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1998), p. 229 ; Duggan, The Force of Destiny, pp. 301-304
modernising the city, through Rationalist architecture, and connecting its former imperial grandeur to the
present day through the sacralisation of ancient ruins. However, the Fascistisation of Rome “failed to square
the necessity facing the city as a living entity with the grandeur of the city as a national and imperial
centre.”19 Rossellini’s Rome, Open City marks a clear break from the traditions of the Fascist state. By
setting his film in an obscure suburb the director turns the city away from its supposedly symbolic sights,
associated with the liberal and Fascist states, creating a Rome inhabited by anti-Fascist and ordinary Italians
who will comprise the post-war state envisaged by the PCI and DC.20

The historian Mercedes Camino aptly notes, Rossellini’s Rome, Open City did not simply mirror
historiography but, coming in the weeks following the war’s conclusion, laid the foundations for the
historiographical mythologisation of the Resistance.21 The historian Paolo Pezzino argues that in the post-
war the DC and PCI, although representing ideologically antithetical positions, strove to maintain an “area of
solidarity” or, to put it less ambiguously, a “politically useable reconstruction of the past.” 22 This was a
master narrative in the public historical discourse that portrayed the Resistance not as it really was but as the
DC and PCI would have preferred it to have been. As the historian Bernard Lewis remarks, “broadly [the
aim of such invented histories] is to embellish – to correct or remove what is distasteful in the past, and
replace it with something more acceptable, more encouraging and more conducive to the purpose in hand.” 23
The purpose was to reconstitute the Italian nation by turning the Resistance into a foundational myth. In the
mould of Rome, Open City the conflict became a war of national liberation that appealed to the entire
population. It did not matter that at their peak in strength, in the days just before the Allies broke through the
Apennine Mountains, there were no more than 250 000 partisans amongst a population of 20 million in
northern Italy.24 Or, that the geography of the Italian peninsula saw the nation divided in half between the
Allied and Axis powers with the Mezzogiorno never experiencing German occupation. Or, perhaps most
troubling, that for two decades large swathes of the Italian population consented to Mussolini’s rule.

In this vein, Rossellini’s film clearly foreshadowed the liberal historiographical tradition, championed by
Benedetto Croce, which emerged following 1945.25 Croce famously argued that Fascism was a parenthesis in
Italian history separated from what had come before and would come after. His parenthesis theory aimed to
place Italy amongst the victors of war as it suggested that ordinary Italians had nothing to do with
Mussolini’s rise but had everything to do with toppling his regime in what amounted to a national

19
Agnew, pp. 230-235
20
Hurley, p. 76
21
Mercedes Camino, ‘Foundational Films: The Memorialization of Resistance in Italy, France, Belarus and Yugoslavia,’ in (eds. Jennie M. Carlsten
& Fearghal McGarry), Film, History and Memory (England: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 85-86
22
Paolo Pezzino, ‘The Italian resistance between history and memory,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 396-403 ;
Michael Kelly, ‘The Italian Resistance in Historical Transition: Class War, Patriotic War or Civil War?,’ Eras Journal, Vol. 4 (Dec., 2002), p. 1
23
Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (USA: Touchstone, 1987), pp. 56-57
24
Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini, pp. 164-165
25
Kelly, p. 3
awakening.26 The historians John Clarke and Paolo Barile perceive the Resistance in similar terms to Croce.
It was a collective “act of courage and sacrifice in the interest of liberty and justice” akin to the
Risorgimento. However, unlike the 19th century unification process, patriotism in the Resistance was not an
elite phenomenon but “brought together for the first time all classes of Italians who … banded together and
risked their lives for an ideal, the creation of a new Italy where justice and liberty would reign.”27

However, the mythologisation of the Resistance never went entirely unchallenged with several waves of
historiographical revision deconstructing the monolithic foundational myth of the Republic. In the years
immediately following the release of Rossellini’s film the cross-party unity it exhibited collapsed with the
onset of the Cold War. The Truman administration in United States trained “its big economic and political
guns upon the Italian people” in order to banish the PCI to perpetual opposition.28 Communism replaced
Fascism as the enemy thus preventing the necessary anti-Fascist purging of Italian political structures.
Indeed, large parts of the military and bureaucracy were hostile towards the anti-Fascist Constitution and the
idea of democracy.29 The historians Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia, on the far-left of the PCI, decried the
continuity between Mussolini’s regime and the Republic. 30 Neorealist cinema mirrored this leftist
historiographical trend with Giuseppe De Santis’s Bitter Rice (1948) depicting a revolution betrayed. Set in a
northern Italian farming cooperative, the peasantry are exploited by the ex-Fascist local landowners who had
avoided retribution. Far from Rossellini’s utopic vision, Bitter Rice shows that the Resistance, and the
subsequent sidelining of the PCI, categorically failed to transform the lives of Italy’s working class.

By the 1960s the myth of the Resistance came under greater revisionist pressure with disillusionment
spreading across Italian society as the fragility of the Republic’s democracy became clear. 31
The
aforementioned lack of a post-war purge led to the existence of a “deep state”; behind the ‘democratically’
elected DC existed a hidden layer of power with connections to the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement
(MSI). Italy witnessed a wave of bombings orchestrated by the far-right following the student-worker
protests of 1968-1969 and an attempted coup by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, former leader of an
infamous anti-partisan formation in Salò. Increasingly it became clear that the Resistance had not paved the
way for untrammelled democracy. 32 Historiographically, the new-left protests and the visible failure the
liberal historiographical tradition catalysed leftist historians to shift towards embracing radical individualism.
As Adam Curtis describes in his most recent documentary, Hypernormalisation (2016), the new-left
struggled to identify with any existing political ideologies. As such, oral and cultural history became a means

26
Charles L. Leavitt IV, ‘An entirely new land? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr.,
2016), p. 6
27
John Clarke Adams & Paolo Barile, The Government of Republican Italy (USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), p. 13
28
William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII (London: Zed Books, 2003), p. 27
29
Duggan, pp. 545-546
30
Claudio Pavone, ‘The Continuity of the State and the Legacy of Fascism,’ in (eds. Jonathan Dunnage), After the War: Violence, Justice, Continuity
and Renewal in Italian Society (Great Britain: Troubador, 1999), p. 6
31
Ferrero-Regis, p. 3
32
Amyot, p. 37 ; Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini, p. 171
of understanding the Resistance leading to “a multiplication of subjectivities and identities.” 33 The oral
historian Luisa Passerini demonstrates this individualism in her work as she sought to breakdown hegemonic
historical narratives.34 Bernardo Bertolucci’s deeply pessimistic 1900 (1976) traces the rise of communism in
Italy from the fin-de-siècle to the Resistance and illustrates the loss of faith in the dominant post-war parties.
Far from making a patriotic decision to join the Resistance, characters are born into Fascism and anti-
Fascism. The film focuses on the unlikely friendship between Olmo, who grows up in a distinctly socialist
household and is drawn towards the Resistance, and Alfredo, whose family are local landowners and
inevitably gravitate towards Fascist squadrismo to prevent violent rural class warfare. In essence, Bertolucci
exposes the false dichotomy created in the liberal historiographical tradition between non-patriotic Fascists
and patriotic anti-Fascists.

However, as the historian Pamela Ballinger asserts the memory of the Resistance became increasingly
contested in the last two decades of the millennium.35 In 1991 the PCI dissolved itself following the collapse
of the Soviet Union and three years later the DC, amongst an orgy of corruption, scandals and
recriminations, fragmented.36 The demise of the post-war order and the common culture and history it had
attempted to inculcate through invoking the values of the Resistance initiated a crisis of national identity. 37
The historian Gian Enrico Rusconi argued that the Italian nation was in existential crisis at risk of fracturing
into “regional ethnodemocracies.”38 The most prevalent impact of this was a surge of support for the far-
right, perceived as able to maintain the integrity of the nation. In 1993 Gianfranco Fini, leader of the
aforementioned MSI, was nearly elected mayor of Rome while Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s
granddaughter, ran a high-profile campaign for the same position in Naples. 39 The following year Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia was propelled to national power on the back of a coalition that included Fini’s
newly rebranded and supposedly sanitised neo-Fascist National Alliance. Upon winning, Berlusconi hailed
that Italy had finally entered the post-Fascist era.40

Alongside politics, historiography shifted rightwards with the Resistance coming to symbolise division
rather than unity. Until the 1980s there had been little historiographical discussion of atrocities committed by
partisans for fear of upsetting “the delicate balance between history and memory” that had been constructed
by the Resistance parties.41 Outwith Italy historians had been challenging the paradigm of ‘good’ partisans
for decades with the anti-Communist historian Denis Mack Smith failing to see the unity of Rome, Open City

33
Ferrero-Regis, p. 4
34
Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (USA: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
35
Ballinger, p. 145
36
Duggan, p. 581
37
Guri Schwarz, ‘The moral conundrums of the historian: Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War and its legacy,’ Modern Italy, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Nov., 2015),
p. 428
38
Gian Enrico Rusconi, ‘Will Italy Remain a Nation?,’ European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 34, Issue 2 (Nov., 1993), p. 309
39
Duggan, p. 584
40
R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship (England: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 531
41
Luca Alessandrini, ‘The Option of Violence – Partisan Activity in the Bologna Area 1945-1948,’ in, After the War: Violence, Justice, Continuity
and Renewal in Italian Society, p. 59
in what he described as a “futile and shocking civil war” that “divided the nation.” 42 Indeed, even in his later
work he characterised the war as “savage, with retaliation on both sides.”43 Conservative historians, led by
Renzo De Felice, appropriated the language of Smith in what amounted to “search and destroy missions
against a positive history of anti-Fascism.”44 Although De Felice claimed he was “look[ing] beyond political
pragmatism” it is clear that he used the Resistance as a means to further his ideological-political agenda.45
Ashamed that the Resistance had legitimised the PCI, historians of the right wanted to help forge
Berlusconi’s vision for Italy – one in which communism was expunged and the ‘good’ elements of
Mussolini’s regime recovered from historical oblivion.46 The Garibaldi Brigades, they said, were not fighting
for the Italian nation but for the USSR and worse was their willingness to murder political opponents even
after liberation.47 In short, it had been a civil war with no moral high ground that, in a disturbing analysis, De
Felice claimed had killed Italian patriotism and poisoned the Republic at its very inception.48

At their most extreme, revisionists reopened old historical wounds pointing to the events in Friuli Venezia
Giulia whereby Garibaldi Brigades intermixed with Tito’s Slavic communists to forge an “Italo-Slovene
brotherhood” hoping to incorporate Italy’s northeastern frontier into Yugoslavia. Communist partisans
(Yugoslav and Italian) allegedly massacred thousands of patriotic Italians by throwing them into the foibe –
limestone sinkholes in the karst landscape. Indeed, in 1993 an inquiry into the foibe massacres was launched
with the judge ruling it as genocide.49 The far-right sought to use their interpretation of the Resistance to
mould a new Italian national identity. The Italian nation was no longer to be defined by its anti-Fascism but
rather against the Slavic and Communist ‘other’ that threatened the nation. Porzus (1997), directed by Renzo
Martinelli, is a filmic representation of this intense historiographical revisionism. Bitter Rice and 1900
undoubtedly broke with the liberal tradition of Rome, Open City in their portrayal of the Resistance struggle
but neither are as antithetical to the foundational myth of the Republic as Martinelli’s work. Far from
national unity, Porzus, and the massacre it depicts in the borderlands between Italy and Yugoslavia, depicts
the Resistance as an act of fratricide with PCI partisans killing Christian Democrats. In short, Porzus
questions the very patriotism of the Italian communists.

The final scene of Rome, Open City sees Pina’s son witness the execution of Don Pietro by the Gestapo
before marching defiantly back towards the centre of Rome symbolising a new anti-Fascist generation ready
to reclaim the Italian nation. However, in reality over the next five decades Italy agonised over its
relationship with its Fascist past. Far from the historical parenthesis envisaged by Croce, Rossellini and other

42
Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (USA: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 486
43
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (Great Britain: Phoenix Paperback, 1994), p. 309
44
R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘Explaining Auschwitz After the End of History: The Case of Italy,’ History and Theory, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 94-95
45
Renzo De Felice, ‘The Resistance “Vulgate”,’ in (eds. Stanislao G. Pugliese), Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy (USA: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishing, 2004), pp. 284-286
46
D.W. Ellwood, ‘The never-ending liberation,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 390-393
47
Pezzino, p. 369
48
Morgan, Italian Fascism, pp. 231-232
49
Glenda Sluga, ‘Italian National Memory, National Identity and Fascism,’ in (eds. R.J.B. Bosworth & Patrizia Dogliani), Italian Fascism: History,
Memory and Representation (Great Britain: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 181-185
followers of the liberal tradition, Fascism’s legacy exerted a profound influence on the politics and
historiography of the Republic. Moreover, as Alexander Stille notes, “the disinterested pursuit of historical
truth is supposed to take no note of shifting political winds” but in Italy historiography and politics remained
entangled, especially in regards cinema.50 Rosenstone asserts that during the 20th century films emerged as
the “the chief medium for carrying the stories our culture tells itself.”51 However, in Italy the opposite is true.
If Rossellini’s work represents an idealised vision of the past subsequent films have sought to undermine its
interpretation of the Resistance highlighting its failure to “appropriate reality convincingly.” 52 Indeed,
cinema has been on the frontline of the historiographical transition of the Resistance from war of national
liberation towards something far more troubling and divisive for the concept of Italianitá.

50
Alexander Stille, ‘The Battle Over the Past,’ in, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy, p. 296
51
Rosenstone, p. 3
52
Hurley, p. 84
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