1. Interview with Marcella Rossellini Mariani, conducted in Rome in 1979.

2. Renzo Rossellini, Addio al passato: Racconti ed altro (Milan: Rizzoli, 1968).

3. Pio Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini (Rome: Edizione Samonà e Savelli, 1972), p. 253.

4. In a recent interview, Assia Noris maintained that she and Rossellini were actually married, with the consent of their families, in the Russian church that she attended. But for some reason—she could not say why—the civil ceremony never took place, her father came and "rescued" her from a San Remo hotel, and forty-eight hours later the marriage was annulled. According to Noris, the photographs of their "honeymoon" were never printed in the newspapers because Fascist censors considered the whole affair scandalous. In the same collection of interviews, Marcella De Marchis, usually considered Rossellini's first wife, and a lifelong collaborator on his films as well as the mother of his son Renzo, recounts how in May of 1936 she met Rossellini, who had been left by Assia Noris by that time for Mario Camerini, a popular director of comedy in the thirties. Marcella's family was very much against the marriage, especially since Rossellini's family had gone through all its money by this time, but Roberto worked his charm on them until they agreed. They were married that September, further upsetting her family when he refused to go through an elaborate religious ceremony. (See Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, L'avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti (1935-1959) [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979], p. 12, for both interviews.)

Newspaper accounts of Rossellini's early life as a "notorious playboy" flourished early in 1950 with the outbreak of the scandal surrounding his love affair with Ingrid Bergman. These accounts are replete with juicy details of spurned lovers taking their lives, accusations against the morality of Rossellini's parents, and stories of Rossellini's days as a race-car driver before he "settled down." At this distance, however, it is impossible to separate the real from the sensational in these accounts. The interested reader is referred for further details to a two-part story that appeared in the New York Post on February 15 and 16, 1950.

5. Massimo Mida, Roberto Rossellini (Parma: Guanda, 1953), pp. 39-40.

6. "A Discussion of Neo-Realism: Rossellini Interviewed by Mario Verdone," Screen , 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973-74), 75. (Interview originally published in Italian in 1952. Here and elsewhere I have modified this translation.)

7. "A Panorama of History: Interview With Rossellini by Francisco Llinas and Miguel Marias," Screen , 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973-74), 96. (Interview originally published in Spanish in January 1970.)

8. Mario Verdone, Roberto Rossellini (Paris: Seghers, 1963), p. 19.

9. Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 48.

10. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

11. Francesco Savio, ed., Cinecittà anni trenta: Parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano, 1930-1943 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1979), vol. 1, p. 31. Quite another view is offered by Jose Guarner, the author of a small book on the director, who states quite simply, without citing any evidence, that "it seems very likely that Rossellini reshot most of the sequences directed by Alessandrini." ( Roberto Rossellini [New York: Praeger, 1970], p. 6.) In Perilli's account, Alessandrini was filming on location in Africa while Rossellini was filming interiors in Rome, and Alessandrini was upset when he discovered that his film had been tampered with. (Savio, Cinecittà anni trenta , vol. 3, p. 924.)

12. Faldini and Fofi, L'avventurosa storia , p. 48.

13. Savio, Cinecittà anni trenta , vol. 3, p. 962.

14. Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini , p. 252. Rossellini goes on to say in this interview that everyone considered him crazy, but full of ideas. "So they used me, you know, like a drop of vinegar in a salad." He then tells the story of how he would ghostwrite scripts for a famous writer who paid him three thousand lire, one thousand in advance. When that money was gone, Rossellini would go to a little copying store in the tram station on Via Principe Amedeo, dictate the first half of the film, and then collect the second thousand lire. When that was gone as well, he would dictate the second half and be paid the final installment: "And with this kind of work I went ahead for a couple of years, not concerning myself with it in the slightest." (Incidentally, in this interview, the film is incorrectly referred to as Un pilota ritorna , but it is clear from the context that he is speaking of Luciano Serra, pilota .)

15. This organization was established in 1927 to provide instruction films, but eventually graduated to more overtly propagandistic films like Il Duce , which portrayed Mussolini in a favorable light.

16. Edward Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture, 1922-1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 269.

17. Adriano Aprà and Patrizia Pistagnesi, I favolosi anni trenta: Cinema italiano, 1929-1944 (Milan: Electa, 1979), p. 109.

18. Various histories of Italian postwar cinema have included the following as precursors of neorealism: early Neapolitan films such as Assunta Spina (1914) and Sperduti nelbuio (1916); Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912); Renoir's Toni (1934); Blasetti's Sole (1929) and 1860 (1934); Camerini's Rotaie (1929); Ruttman's Acciaio (1933); nineteenth-century Italian verists, such as the novelist Giovanni Verga; American genre films; American fiction; futurism; the writer and painter Leo Longanesi; and so forth. Obvi- soft

ously, the question is an enormously complicated one, too large to be taken up here; hence I have concentrated upon direct influences on Rossellini, rather than considering the sources of neorealism in general. The interested reader is referred to two useful recent histories of the period in English (Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present [New York: Ungar, 1983], and Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy From 1942 to the Present [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984]). The definitive history of the roots of neorealism, however, is Gian Piero Brunetta's Storia del cinema italiano 1895-1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979).

19. Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma . Volume 6: L'Époque contemporaine: Le Cinéma pendant la guerre (1939-45) (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1954), p. 105.

20. Film , no. 34 (September 17, 1938), quoted in Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience , p. 275.

21. Savio, Cinecittà anni trenta , volume 1, p. 32.

22. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience , pp. 275-76. His quotation is from Mino Argentieri's article in Il cinema italiano dal fascismo all'antifascismo , ed. Giorgio Tinazzi (Padua: Marsilio Editore, 1966), p. 70.