Italian Ministry of Culture 100 Top Films

A family man travelling for work, Paolo Bianchi, meets on a train a lonely girl, Maria. He sees her again on a bus and she reveals him that she's in troubles: she's pregnant, her baby's father has left her and she doesn't know how to tell to her parents that she's not married. She asks Paolo to play the role of her husband and he accepts....

The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth-century Italy as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.

Gino, a drifter, begins an affair with inn-owner Giovanna, and they plan to get rid of her older husband.

During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, the Resistance leader, Giorgio Manfredi, is chased by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a way to escape.

American military personnel interact warily with a variety of Italian locals over a year and a half in the push north during the Italian Campaign of WWII as German forces make their retreat.

Two shoeshine boys in postwar Rome, Italy save up to buy a horse, but their involvement as dupes in a burglary lands them in juvenile prison; the experience take a devastating toll on their friendship.

A rowdy woman is so forceful that she outdoes her husband in a loud cry against speculators who refuse poor people entrance to a block of new apartments, built after WW2. Without noticing it, she starts a people's movement, and leads a march to the capital. She returns to her village a winner, an honourable MP. Yet, she is still the same simple, fiery woman, able to get in a hair-pulling brawl with the local barmaid for the affection of her man.

In post-war Italy, a working-class man's bicycle is stolen, endangering his efforts to find work. He and his son set out to find it.

In rural Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and operate independently.

Two criminals on the run end up working in a rice field and decide to recruit other workers for their next robbery.

The city of Pola is being evacuated after the peace conference of 1947 decided to assign the sovereignty to Tito's Jugoslavia. However the main character decides to stay, thinking that communism might bring him a better future. Life turns to be hard for him and his family until he changes his mind, but he is killed before he can leave the country.

In 1902 in the disease-ridden Pontine Marshes, a disease-ridden region, 12-year-old Maria Goretti lives with her parents, poor farmhands, in the house of Serenelli, a heavy-drinking farmer who offered them board and lodging. Serenelli's 18-year-old son Alessandro is sexually attracted to the pious Maria, who resists his advances. One day the young man murders her because she won't give in to him. Before she dies, Maria forgives her assailant. After her death she is canonized as a saint.

Karin, a young woman from the Baltic countries, marries fisherman Antonio to escape from a prison camp. But she cannot get used to the tough life in Antonio's volcano-threatened village, Stromboli.

First in a series of Matarazzo melodramas: A happily married Naples woman, with two children, is threatened by the reappearance of a man from her past. Her husband takes a drastic action which results in the family members being separated.

The story of a group of Sicilian miners and their families, and their hardships as they decide to illegally cross the border to France.

A variety of different people, both adults, children, families, young lovers and youth gangs, spend a Sunday at the beach of Ostia outside Rome.

Paola is a young, beautiful woman married to a wealthy entrepreneur. She meets her former lover Guido after seven years, but their relationship is marked by tragic events.

A beautiful, ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises.

The daughter of Signor Carloni is about to take her first communion. A problem arises when the dressmaker spends too much time working on the girl's communion frock.

A woman from the lower class desperately tries to get her daughter into the movies.

A love story between a poor fellow and a daughter of respected workshop owner set in an Italian post-war village.

Esposito is a thief who cons tourists in Rome. Officer Bottoni manages to catch him and starts persecuting him. When Esposito manages to flee, Bottoni's superiors inform him that he'll lose his job if he can't catch Esposito.

An open-hearted, unrelentingly energetic orphan struggles to make the best of his life on the streets of Milan.

A Sunday at the beach for the Passaguai family is a succession of more or less pleasant adventures.

An elderly man and his dog struggle to survive on his government pension in Rome.