In A Similar Way, De Sica Chooses To Ignore The Beauty Of Rome's Most

In a similar way, De Sica chooses to ignore the beauty of Rome's most familiar landmarks in favour of crumbling alleys that could be in any Mediterranean city.
We might expect in a film based around the social climate of post-war Rome to see wide, open piazzas, grandiose architecture, baroque statues, ancient monuments, the accepted international face of Rome. But De Sica chooses to set his story in a Rome of high-walled alleys, hawkish markets, dusty half-finished buildings, twisting side-streets. The prestigious beauty of Roman Rome is conspicuous by its absence; De Sica's Rome is a city of lost glory.
We can see then that when we describe these films as being 'realistic', what we really mean is that they are socio-political. They may also claim themselves to be of the 'real world', of everyday protagonists, populated by non-professional actors, shot in natural lighting, even occasionally using improvised dialogue, but as we have seen, neorealist films remain adventures in fictional cinema. In understanding them then, we must understand what they are compared against, in the world of fictional cinema. To describe them as 'realistic' or representative of the real world is not necessarily to say they are more 'real' than, for example, a well executed melodramatic tale of love and passion set in Beverly Hills. Is Don Pietro, in Open City, for instance, more real than Greta Garbo's character Marguerite Gautier in Camille (Cukor, 1936)? What we can see is that, in being less grandiose, less deliberate, and less glamorous than the mainstream cinema of its time, The Bicycle Thieves references external reality, becoming attached to it by comparison. It is perhaps better to consider the film as socio-political as opposed to realistic, the underclass not having a monopoly on reality, and the most effective way to present socio-political subject matter (such as post-war unemployment) is in a departure from the glamour of mainstream cinema, via the backstreets and slums of Rome, simple ragged costumes, natural lighting, long takes with few edits. One can become bogged down in discussions of realism and artifice, but as Millicent Marcus has said, neorealism was first and foremost a moral statement, and in this respect The Bicycle Thieves is one of the most successful films of the neorealist movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Roy Armes, 'Film and Reality', Penguin 1974
Andre Bazin, 'What is Cinema? Vol.