Rome, 1935: the impoverished 19 year-old Adriana is being pushed by her ambi­tious mother to work as an artist’s model. Against her mother’s wishes, she begins a relationship with the chauffeur Gino, with whom she has her first sexual inter­course and who promises to marry her. Her cynical colleague Gisella, a kept woman, throws her into the arms of Astarita, a high-ranking member of the secret police. After learning from Astarita that Gino is as a prostitute. She then falls in love with Giacomo, or “Mino”, a polite, anti-Fascist student. But Gino introduces her to the brute Sonzogno, an ex-boxer and assassin, and that is when the real trouble begins. Zampa has always been considered a craftsman disinterested in matters of style. La Romana is one of the films that demonstrate how such criticism is unfounded. It is quite possibly Zampa’s most openly stylized film, in which an elevated, complex style permeates every frame. This is partly due to the subject – it is a period piece set in Fascist Rome. But it also has to do with the needs of the pro­ducers: make an art-house box-office hit (even though these terms were not used in 1954), with a star (Gina Lollobrigida), a respectable literary name (the film is taken from the novel by Alberto Moravia), all packaged with the highest quality.Zampa was called in as director after the success of his films Processo alla città and Anni facili. An early version of the screenplay had already been presented to the censors by Ponti and De Laurentiis but had been rejected. Strengthened by the long battle he endured while making Anni facili, Zampa managed to make the movie without too many compromises. There were two things that bothered the censors: the character of Astarita being a member of Ovra, the fascist secret police squad, and the direct portrayal of sexual­ity. The references to fascism, however, were overshadowed by the leading char­acter resorting to prostitution out of ne­cessity, her surroundings and her mother’s cynical greed. Adriana was a character who clashed with the Italy of Don Camillo and the rise of pink neorealism. Zampa depicts reality without hypocrisy and with severity: following in the foot­steps of Moravia, he shows the petti­ness of a certain element of anti-Fascism and also reveals how 1935 Italy was not much different from the country run by Democrazia Cristiana. And in all this, Zampa makes a great movie, with set de­signs admirably reconstructing the period, expressionist overtones, Hitchcockian se­quences, and the awareness that, behind all their ideals and morals, men are moved by other impulses. This was no small feat: indeed, post-neorealist Italian cinema of the 1950s had not unanimously em­braced centrism and rappel à l’ordre.

Alberto Pezzotta