But in its construction Viaggio in Italia is no closer to the documentary than it is to the melodrama or the fictional romance. Cer­tainly no documentary camera could have recorded the experiences of this English couple in this way, or, more to the point, in this spirit. Bear in mind that even the most direct, least contrived scene is always inscribed in the convention of editing, con­tinuity and selection, and that convention is denounced by the director with the same virulence as he displays in his attack on suspense. His direction of the actors is ex­act, imperious, and yet it is not at all ‘act­ed’. The story is loose, free, full of breaks, and yet nothing could be further from the amateur. I confess my incapacity to define adequately the merits of a style so new that it defies all definition. If only in its framing and its camera movements […] this film is unlike any others. Through its magic alone it manages to endow the screen with that third dimension so sought after for the last three years by the best technicians on both sides of the Atlantic. […] Viaggio in Italia is the story of a couple’s es­trangement and their subsequent reconcili­ation. A standard dramatic theme, and the theme also of Sunrise. Rossellini and Mur­nau are the only two filmmakers who have made Nature the active element, the princi­pal element in the story. Both, because they reject the facility of the psychological style and scorn understatement or allusion, have had the remarkable privilege of conducting us into the most secret regions of the soul. Secret? Let’s make our meaning clear: not the troubled zones of the libido, but the broad daylight of consciousness. […] Both these films are a drama with in fact three characters; the third is God. But God does not have the same face in both. In the first a ‘pre-ordained harmony’ governs at one and the same time the movements of the soul and the vicissitudes of the cosmos: nature and the heart of man beat with the same pulse. The second goes beyond this order – whose magnificence it can equally reveal – and uncovers that supreme disorder that is known as the miracle. […] From the museum of Naples to the cat­acombs, from the sulphur springs of Vesu­vius to the ruins of Pompeii, we accompany the heroine along the spiritual path that leads from the platitudes of the ancients on the fragility of man to the Christian idea of immortality. And if the film succeeds – logically, you could say – through a miracle, it is because that miracle was in the order of things whose order, in the end, depends on a miracle.
Maurice Schérer [Eric Rohmer], La Terre du miracle, “Cahiers du cinéma”, n. 47, May 1955, transl. by Liz Heron in Cahiers du cinéma: the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hol­lywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hiller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1985