Rocco and his Brothers, still

There are always many modernisms, and I do not want the last two chapters to give the impression that the important ones in the late twentieth century all took place in New York. The modernism that mattered most to me in the beginning – for years I had a blow-up from Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa on my wall – was that of film and literature in Italy after 1945. Modernism from Italo Calvino’s The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), roughly, to Antonioni’s The Cry (1957) and …