Considered the first example of an anthropological documentary made in Italy and, for some people, a forerunner of the language of neorealism, it tells the story of the pilgrimage undertaken every year on the first Sunday after Pentecost by people from the Ciociaria region and Abruzzo to the Sanctuary of the Most Holy Trinity in Vallepietra, on Mount Autore. The culmination of the feast day is the so-called “weeping of the spinsters”, a prayer chanted by the young unmarried women of the area. It was the first of only two films made by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini, a refined intellectual who made a name for himself after the Second World War as an art and reportage photographer. In the early 1930s, he was hired by the production studio Cines as assistant director to Ludovico Toeplitz and collaborated on the writing of some screenplays with Mario Soldati and Alberto Moravia. Despite winning an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1939, the film was heavily cut by fascist censorship to less than half the leght of the film due to its use of excessively archaic and crudely realistic imagery, which portrayed rural Italy (“a non-conformist short film in which folklore took on a decidedly polemic value” according to Roberto Nepoti) in a way that was not in line with the aesthetic canon of the regime. Pozzi-Bellini, rediscovered today thanks to the research of scholar Elisabetta Giovagnoni, managed to save the original version by depositing the negative at Cinémathèque française, thanks to the help of his friend Henri Langlois. Twenty years later, Gian Vittorio Baldi returned to the same locations to shoot another short film by the same name.