Rossellini spent the neo-realistic period (which was not only in film) making its history, in other words defining its strong points, the general ideas that influenced and moved it. In doing so, he started from the appearance of this history, which is primarily cinema as the most advanced expressive medium of the era […], the medium that had itself already put the notion of art into crisis. Rossellini went on to use cinema as a realistic ‘specialization’. This was not so much an a priori choice as much as it was the result of the use of a particular technology against the established rules, which can be reassumed in the ideology of show business and which are defined in stardom, the literary pretence and the ‘theatrical’ relationship with the public. Cinema went out into the street; it became ‘realistic’, once it had eliminated a series of divisions in its technical specificity  […]. The title Roma città aperta, reveals an unusual openness: the common people (not the bourgeoisie, who stay hidden in their offices) live out in the open, in the city. The reason that the film is the story of a block of flats, is because it shows a microcosm which represents (like an open air stage) the whole city. In Rossellini’s view, in 1945, our homes had already become the streets, they were not inside the flats anymore: our private lives, love lives, involving others, develop out in the open; the secrecy of the partisan struggle is a new practice, which passes over the rooftops and is not hidden in the bottoms of the cellars, and which links in very complex network what the enemy is struggling to perceive, with his older cultural coordinates (but the Nazis were better than the Fascists: see the scene where the major Bergmann “reads” the city from his office, through its daily photos; his is however, an unproductive knowledge). With the war behind him, Rossellini was living in the space of modernity. The centre, centralization and surroundings have been fought for and beaten, at the end of the film the children have inherited an experience of decentralizarion and Saint Peter’s dome is not something to be aimed for anymore, it is the backdrop for an ‘open’ journey, because you have to keep our cultural heritage in mind, which for Rossellini is Catholic.

Adriano Aprà. Rossellini oltre il neorealismo, in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, edited by Lino Miccichè, Marsilio, Venezia 1975