The Resistance has been the last and more dramatic action of the struggle against fascism and antifascism in Europe during the Second World War. In Italy the experience of the Resistance started after that the fall of fascism (July 25 th 1943) and the armistice (signed by the government with the allied forces the 8 September 1943) transformed the German forces from allied in forces of occupation with the consequent civil war between the partisan forces and the fascists of the republic Salò, allied with the Germans. It’s evident that the literature on the Resistance and that on the antifascism have a lot of common characteristics, but the first one is distinguished for some particular elements: in first place, as Calvino has written, there is a strong choral desire to tell, after the end of the fascist dictatorship, the experiences lived during the war and the partisan experience, then there are a great intensity in the deepening of the human and moral values that have been at the roots of the Resistance, and finally the expression of a great political awareness that has brought many intellectuals to join the PCI that had had a fundamental role in the struggle for the liberation.
Neorealism’s filmography has also faced the problem of the Resistance with work of big artistic value, among which some original as Open city and Paisan of Rossellini and others drawn from literary works, as L’ Agnese va a morire of Montaldo, drawn from the homonym novel of Renata Viganò, Uomini e no of Orsini, drawn from the homonym novel of Vittorini.