1. There is some dispute concerning the ending of the film. In Fellini's original version, according to Angelo Solmi, "Nanni rings the bell of a little church to announce the event. These ignorant men understand and fall on their knees crying that it is a miracle" ( Federico Fellini , p. 82). Rossellini wisely avoided this ending, and in so doing made it consistent with the absence of a visible, verified miracle at the end of either Stromboli or Voyage to Italy . Guarner, however, says that "for the Paris presentation of L'Amore in 1956, Rossellini removed the end of the film in which bells rang out in greeting as the peasants welcomed the birth of the new saviour. The film now ends with the mother's first words to her child 'mio santo figlio'" ( Roberto Rossellini , p. 28). As far as I have been able to discover, however, the version shown in Britain and the United States has always had this latter ending.

2. The Italian critic Mario Verdone and various elements of the South American press later claimed that the story was plagiarized from a novel called Fior di Santita by the South American writer Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan (1869-1936). The parallels are in fact remarkable, but Fellini continued to insist that it was his own invention. (See Verdone, "L'amore," 76-77).

3. Quentin Reynolds, Leave It to the People (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 149.

4. Ferrara, Il nuovo cinema italiano , p. 247.

5. "A Discussion of Neo-Realism," 72.

6. Borde and Bouissy, Le Néo-réalisme italien , p. 106.

7. Quoted in Ferrara, p. 245ff.

8. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma (1954), 4.

9. Quoted in Lillian Gerard, "Withdraw the Picture! the Commissioner Ordered," American Film (June 1977), 31. Gerard, who was managing director of the Paris at the time, is the source of much of the information in this chapter on the film's American reception.

10. Quoted in Gilbert Seldes, "Pressures on Pictures," Nation , 172, no. 5 (February 10, 1951), 133.

11. Quoted in Lillian Gerard, " 'The Miracle' in Court," American Film (July-August 1977), 27.

12. Interview, Cahiers du cinéma (1954), 4-5.

13. Quoted in Gerard, " 'The Miracle,' " 26.

14. This motif is suggested in The Miracle , however, especially in Nanni's relationship with the ambivalent, perhaps "divine," goat at the end of the film (the cause and effect of whose minor "miracles" are always suggested cinematically rather than verified). It is the goat, in fact, that leads Nanni to her place of "natural" childbirth.