Through the story of the term Neorealism we are just arrived to the problem of the chronological definition of this movement. In general we agree that the explosion of Neorealism belongs to the period from 1943 to 1949, but, even if in different ways, the final period of the Thirties is considered a fundamental precursor of this cultural phenomenon: there’s just who talks about a “new realism” (Luperini) and who sees in it the period of the sowing: the preparing period of the sowing began about in 1930 with the consolidation of the intellectuals’ first reactions to the stabilized Fascist dictatorship in and outside Italy. It’s right to reconize that Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, was the first country that offered an active opposition against it, on the action and on the ideological sphere both.
This forward vaccination against Fascism was very important for what Italy was able to say to Europe with the Neorealist movement; some intellectuals like Gobetti, Amendola, the Rosselli, Gramsci, Silone, Salvemini etc. wrote and operated when Fascism ruled Italy and exorted Europe.
Apart Fontamara, the first european antifascist novel, Neorealism began with the letters and the notebooks written by Gramsci when he was in prison, with the reflecions and the experiences that Carlo Levi and Cesare Pavese were living in the confinement, and with the critic of the Italian reality in the first books of Moravia and Vittorini.
Therefore, Italian Neorealism finds its origins before the war and the Resistance Movement, it has to be considered on long times, and the fact that after fifteen years this reality has been put under everybody’s eyes by Rossellini and De Sica’s films, that is not a good reason to allow us to be ignorant where the archetypes are.
Moravia in 1929 with “Gli indifferenti” and Silone in 1930 with Fontamara, offered the first photograms without blinkers of a scene that just in that period the fascist cinema began to conceal under the anonymous name “white phones”. Many times Moravia denied any social and political purpose to his first novel which equally preserves its documentary value. On the other hand, the certitude to present an inedited reality is completely opened in Silone and, in the introducion of Fontamara’a first edition, he wrote: “It will appear to the reader in striking contrast with South Italy’s picturesque image that is often found in literature” and he added: “In Fontamara there’s no wood: the mountain’s dry and barren, as most of the Appennines. Birds are a few. There’s no nightingale; in the dialect there’s not even a word to indicate the nightingale”.
(Freely drawn from “Rivendicazione del Neorealismo Italiano” by A. Russi, Letteratura italiana, Marzorati, Milano 1982 ).

Another meaningful moment in Neorealism’s storical evolution is costituted by the years 1948/49, in which two meaningful phenomena, a historical one and a cultural one, impressed a turn to the whole movement. The historical remarkable event is constituted by the general elections of 1948, in which the Christian Democracy Party got the absolute mayority accenting what Galli Della Loggia calls “the peculiar contradictory feature of the post-war italian society for which, while the modern middle class state rises left-shifted, in Italy the capitalist system remains and preserves a marked historical “ right ” charater.” (Drawn from “L’impegno a sinistra della cultura” by E.Galli Della Loggia, Marzorati, Milano 1982).
The second phenomenon, strictly connected to the first one, has a cultural character: infact, if the PCI (Italian Communist Party) had engaged all its energies to the Resistance struggle, it was conscious of the national unifying ideological value contained in the armed fight against fascists and Germans; the new PCI’s character was immedately clear in the attention it dedicated to intellectuals, that felt the PCI as an obliged reference point. Partly we can take back this phenomenon to something happened in the past, that is to say the increasing political and social interest that Fascism promoted in the period between the two wars. When Fascism collapsed, this socialization pushed toward a large diffusion of Marxism. Infact it appears as an organic and finished vision of the world and the intellectual officials, either for the institutional shallowness wiht which their elaboration ser itself and the need of an instrument to quickly orient themselves , they feel the deep necessity of a vision of the world that can be easily formulated in case of need, thanks to which they can proceed their daily activity. (Galli Della Loggia, ibidem).
Galli Della Loggia’s text clearly expresses the cultural situation of those years, even if an unfavourable judgement of the relationships among PCI’s intellectuals traspare, because it was put in evidence a certain superficiality, a missed philosophical study in depth of the cultural choices made.
Infact he continues his exposition saying: “Not for nothing - apart Pavese and Vittorini - that choice didn’t caused any radical re-examination, for the people who made it, of their intellectual roles (Galli Della Loggia, ibidem).
Anyway, the most important fact of this cultural moment was the publication of “Quaderni dal carcere” by A.Gramsci, that was finished between 1947 and 1951.

Gramsci invited the intellectuals to “identify with the village’s reality, to give rise to a literature, to a national-popular community and tissue, that is to say to promote an intellectual and a civil reform of the Italian society, taking side of the subordinate classes. For that reason the Italian culture had to revive, and to revive, it had to establish a relationship of inspiration and destination with the popular masses, recovering today the political irresponsability showen in the past, with a democratic engagement. (Galli Della Loggia, ibidem).
On this argument, the reading of the critical works of G. Lukacs and the pressures coming from URSS, were remarkable for PCI’s cultural policy.
This two phenomena we’re talking about, contributed to the transformation of the initial spontaneus realism in an ideologic oriented and conscious Neorealism that will find its most meaningful expressions in “Terre del Sacramento” by Jovine and “Metello” by Pratolini. We don’t want to say that in the previous period there weren’t political ideological oriented positions (we can think, in the first realism, that Silone was one of the protagonist of PCI’s birth); but the way of creating and narrating had different origins, deeply anchored to a common feeling that the poet represented. To understand this moment it’s interesting to go back to I. Calvino, who textually says in “Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno” introduction: “In Italy, the literary explotion of those years was, before than an art event, a physiological, existential and collective fact. We lived the war, and we, the youngest - that had just been in time to be partisans - we didn’t feel pressed, defeated and burnt, but winners, pressed by the propulsive charge of the just finished battle, sole consignees of its inheritance... Principally this hurts us today: the anonymous voice of that age is stronger than our individual reflections that are still uncertain. Beeing went out of an experience -...- that didn’t save anyone, it restablished an immediacy of communication between the writer and his public: people were face to face, at par, charged of stories to tell, everyone had his one, everyone had lived adventurous dramatic and eventful lives, it gets the words out our mouth. The reborn liberty of talking was, for the people, the frenzy of narrating: in the trains that started to work again, crowded with people and flour packets and oil cans, every passenger told to strangers the events that occured him, and in the same manner every customer at the table in the “people canteen” and every woman queueing the shops did; the gloominess of the everyday lives seemed things of other periods; we lived in a multicolor universe of stories.
Consequently, who started to write was found to treat the same matter of the anonymous oral narrator: the stories already arrived as tales, with a voice, a rhytm and a mimic expression were added to the stories we lived personally and to which we had been spectators.
During the partisan war, the stories just lived were transformed and transfigured in stories told around the fire at night, they already acquired a style, a language, a bluster humour, a research of grevious and cruel effects” (Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Introduction).
Previously we talked about Metello of Pratolini and this moves the terms of the speech to 1955, exceeding the limit of 1949 formerly stated. Actually, in the opinion of some authors, expecially according to those people who place the accent on Neorealism’s ideological value, its most interesting period arrives to 1955, the year of Metello’s publication, after which they arrive to a form of experimentalism that has nothing to do with the realistic movement.

Therefore this work will be interested in Neorealism, either cinema and literary Neorealism, in its expressions which goes from 1942/43 to 1955, that is to say assuming the film “Ossessione” by Visconti as the ad quo limit and the film “Senso” fo the same director as the ad quem limit.