Director Roberto Rossellini saw his 1945 masterpiece as an antidote to the escapism that had characterized Italian cinema under the Fascists. After everything Italians had lived through during the war, he said, “we couldn’t afford the luxury of these made-up stories.”
Fair enough, but was this opening salvo in the neorealist campaign any less of a myth?
The film was dark and gritty—such a contrast to the clean aesthetic of Fascism! The style was no-style. Much of it was shot on the street, as opposed to in a studio, using non-actors to play most of the parts. 
The German soldiers in the film were real POWs. Instead of a glamorous movie star, Rossellini’s leading lady, Anna Magnani, was earthy, a woman of the people. The character she plays was based on a real woman killed in the streets by the Germans. The priest in the film, Don Pietro, who works with the Resistance, was also based on a real person.
But for all of the picture’s authentic, documentary feel, despite the deaths and betrayals, and notwithstanding the brutal scene of torture that we, along with Don Pietro, are made to witness, “Rome Open City” is a surprisingly uplifting film. Its message, in Rossellini’s own words, was that the German Occupation brought out the best in Italians, purifying them of the taint of collaboration with an evil regime:
If we go back to that period in our minds, it was perhaps the loveliest most thrilling period that we lived through, and the most extraordinary thing is that at that moment when everything seemed destroyed, when our lives seemed completely shattered, it’s precisely out of those ruins and debris, all that destruction, that there suddenly and miraculously arose in Italy, in every field of life an activity, a pugnacity, a consciousness and a human warmth that were absolutely astonishing.
Certainly Italian audiences were proud to recognize themselves in the ordinary heroes of this martyred Rome, and felt vindicated in the eyes of the world when “Rome Open City” won the Grand Prix at Cannes. A new Italy was rising from the ashes, one that was no longer passive. An Italy in which Catholics and the Left could find common cause in the quest to behave decently.
“It’s not that hard to die a good death,” says Don Pietro, “what’s hard is to live a good life.”
Let’s call it a necessary myth.
Deathless Prose 
Nice review, Lisa. I know Rossellini made at least one other film in what could be called a series–Germany Year Zero–but was there a third? If so it might fit in my trilogies seres–but first my site has to be cleared of a malware warning going back to a hacker’s assault I understand has been cleared, but which Google isn’t giving a clean bill of health to yet. (Even if there were only the two, and you’d done reviews of both, or only this one you’d reviewed, I might–again, when I can confidently get into the site and invite readers again–like to have this as a guest review.
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Thank you, Martin. I’d be happy to contribute to your site.
Yes, this film is part of a trilogy. According to film historian Robert Burgoyne, the film brought international attention to Italian cinema and is considered a quintessential example of neorealism in film, so much so that together with Paisà and Germania anno zero it is called Rossellini’s “Neorealist Trilogy.”
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