In the best tradition of the realism and of the nineteenth-century naturalism, either the filmography and the Neorealist literature has faced in a lot of works the problem of poverty and the difficult condition of the needy classes; it can be said that the large majority of the films and the literary works, whatever their fundamental themes were, has touched the problem of the material and spiritual poverty of the Italian population in the difficult years of fascism, of the war and of the postwar period. However there have been films and literary works whose themes are concentrated on such problem and in which the denunciation of the aberrant situation in which the Italian and European populations were found in emerges with strength and with extraordinary artistic effectiveness.
For what concerns the literary works, the authors that mostly have been interested in this matter were, before the war, the expert on the problems of Southern Italy (Alvaro, C. Levi, Silone) that have denounced the conditions of backwardness of the south, while during and after the war others themes have prevailed, as those of antifascism, of the Resistance and of the political struggle.
In the filmography, instead, it assumes particular relief the problem to present poverty in work as Shoe Shine, The Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan, Gold of Naples, Two women of De Sica, La Terra Trema of Visconti and others. The film Germany Year Zero of Rossellini has particular relief, not only because it is the only case in which an Italian director is engaged with the difficulties and the problems of the reconstruction in Germany, but also because for the first time the difficulties of the immediate postwar period have been analyzed and represented from the point of view of the German people too, generally considered by the public opinion responsible of the drama of the Second World War, but that after all having suffered the consequences of the war and the bombardments, is found in front of the problems of poverty and of the reconstruction as Italy and the other European countries.