In an article entitled Why I Chosed Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini assigns Swedish nationality to Karin, the main character of Stromboli (rather than Lithuanian, as it will be in the film), and declares that the actress feels “the filmic tale she is about to live will become, in many ways, her own adventure, a personal matter”. Today we know that she chosed him, by writing him a now famous letter in which she offered to work together and affirmed she could say “ti amo” (I love you) in Italian. But in Rossellini’s words – and in Karin’s story, a foreign refugee catapulted into a world as far away as hostile to her – there is the tangle of private and public, truth and legend, autobiography and fiction that surrounds all what was born out of that fateful meeting between the director and the actress. Starting with Stromboli, a film destined to have an adventurous life, like all six films the couple made together. First of all,  because of the existence of three different versions: one American, distributed by RKO in the United States from 15th February 1950; one international, awarded on Capitoline Hill and presented to the Roman press in March of the same year, therefore  shown, but not included in the competition, at the 11th Venice Film Festival on 26th August 1950; finally, an Italian version, which was around six minutes shorter that the international one, despite having some extra shots made especially for the end of this version, which was distributed with the title Stromboli terra di Dio. The many differences were due to various reasons. They were mainly  commercial for the RKO version, proving a total incompatibility between Hollywood and the Italian director: in fact there were plenty of fake additions of cross cutting, establishing shots, redundant editing and voice over (announcing, in the end, Karin’s return to the village). All these additions were used to make the plot more fluid and the language more ‘normal’, as well as to melodramatically accentuate the conflict between Karin and the culture and the place, as hostile to her as the volcano. The two other versions, on the other hand, relegate the cultural conflict between Karin and the environment in the background, in order to accentuate the spiritual conflict between Karin and God. They also reduce the melodramatic plot, leaning towards the religious theme. The Italian version, which like the international one has the advantage of conserving Rossellini’s style and language, in particular contains the most visible signs of a collaboration with the Dominican father Félix Morlion (and with Gian Luigi Rondi), who declared that he personally filmed the new shots for an ending where Karin invocation’s to God is fundamental. However, the real strength of these images and sounds (it is Ingrid Bergman’s voice in the Italian version too), in all versions, is what recurs everywhere: the images (and sounds) of diversity, that “personal matter” Rossellini wrote about, which reveals itself to be full of autobiography. It is Karin’s diversity (like Ingrid being foreign, gambling on a world she does not know to follow a man, and like Ingrid being pregnant at the end of the film and sure that she would keep her baby), so tall and blond compared with the short, dark fishermen, surrounded by the black sea and by the dark volcanic earth. It is the actress’s diversity, a professional among amateurs, catapulted into the most real landscape of Italian neorealism. It is the diversity of the director, who has already experienced being excluded (by Italian critics, by the Italian production system) and who, being a real experimenter, confronts it in the way that best suits him here: accentuating it and radicalising it. As he will always do with Ingrid Bergman.

                                                                                                             Elena Dagrada