Spine 675: Journey to Italy

The third and final film in the 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman boxset is another film in a long list of looks at the class and culture of Naples, Italy across time - Rossellini's own Paisan, Rosi's Hands over the City (and his Neapolitan Diary), Garrone's Gomorrah, to name a few. While the story of Journey to Italy (1954) is about a British couple decoupling and recoupling while selling a relative's house, Rossellini says he wanted to make a film where Southern Italians were not viewed like "zoo animals", and indeed our main characters become the curiosities as they have a series of crises while interacting with the common people and tourist sites of Naples, a land that, like India in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, is just too weird for the British mind to comprehend.