Film Forum

Italy/France, 1961
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Renzo Ricci, Paolo Stoppa, Franco Interlenghi
In Italian with English subtitles.
Approx. 129 min. 35mm.

Produced to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of unification, VIVA L’ITALIA! recounts Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign to throw off the yoke of empire and create the modern Italian state with an army of one thousand ill-equipped peasants who shared his nationalist dream. Rossellini devotes no time at all to biographical niceties, character development, love affairs, or any of the other tropes that bloat so many Hollywood epics. If you come to historical films instead for detailed discussion of military maneuvers and political strategy, then all roads lead to VIVA L’ITALIA! With battle sequences shot in the hills of Sicily and Naples where Garibaldi’s men fought, VIVA L’ITALIA! aspired to be, in Rossellini’s words, “a documentary made after the event, trying to figure out what happened. I tried to place myself in front of the event of a century ago, the way a documentarist would have done who had the good fortune to follow Garibaldi’s campaign with his camera.”

35mm print courtesy Cinecittà.