Journey to Italy with Alessandro Comodin and Michelangelo Frammartino

“To me, Roberto Rossellini is the auteur who, more than any other, managed to make cinema and life coincide.” –Michelangelo Frammartino

Unanimously selected by our “fab four” of New Italian Cinema as a primary and endless source of inspiration, Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy is a landmark of both Italian and world cinema, often considered one of the greatest films ever made by critics, filmmakers, and audiences alike. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are Katherine and Alexander Joyce, a fractious English couple, who undertake the eponymous journey in order to sell a villa they have inherited near Naples. With their marriage on the rocks and tensions running progressively high, they individually seek solace — she in Neapolitan museums and volcanic fields, he in Capri — their mutual contempt ultimately giving way to a form of sensual sublimation and searching. A film of startling beauty, strangeness, and spirituality, its once-convulsing landscapes reflective of inner turmoil and transformation, and the ruins of Pompeii metonyms for disintegration and death, Journey to Italy exudes a sense of unpredictable aliveness, in which the real threatens to overtake its fiction. Endlessly praised by successive generations for its breathtaking modernist spirit, Rossellini’s semi-improvised, neorealist masterpiece is “a film whose poetry is fathomless and wondrous, melancholy and wise” (The Guardian) and “one of the most quietly revolutionary works in the history of cinema” (The New Yorker).

ANDRÉA PICARD

The 2K digital restoration of the English version of Journey to Italy was carried out using the original negative, kept at Cinecittà. The English opening credits were restored using a positive copy kept at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. The restoration was carried out by the Cineteca di Bologna at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in 2012.

Content advisory: mature themes