Italian Neorealism: 21 essential films

Weekly collection in the app for the week of April 24, 2026.

After the Second World War, Italian directors took cameras out of the studios and onto broken streets, casting real people and filming the poverty around them. The movement they built, neorealism, became the school almost every modern director studied, openly or not: De Sica's fathers and sons, Rossellini's occupied Rome, Visconti's fishermen.

This collection of 21 films was the first weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab, for the week of April 24, 2026, featuring Bicycle Thieves. It runs from the movement's core (Rome, Open City; Umberto D.) to its edges and heirs (Il Posto, Hands Over the City).

The collection

1. Bicycle Thieves (1948) De Sica Featured In postwar Rome, a man finally lands a job that requires a bicycle, and it is stolen on his first day; he and his small son search the city as desperation closes in. Cast: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
2. Rome, Open City (1945) Rossellini A resistance leader, a priest and a pregnant widow live and die under the German occupation of Rome; shot in the actual ruined city months after liberation. Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Marcello Pagliero, Harry Feist
3. Paisan (1946) Rossellini Six stories climb the boot of Italy alongside the Allied liberation, from Sicily to the Po marshes, tracking soldiers and civilians who mostly cannot understand each other. Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Benjamin Emanuel
4. Umberto D. (1952) De Sica A retired civil servant with a small dog and a smaller pension slides toward eviction while trying to keep his dignity; De Sica's bleakest, tenderest film. Cast: Carlo Battisti, Napoleone the Dog, Maria Pia Casilio
5. Ossessione (1943) Visconti A drifter and an innkeeper's wife fall into lust and plot her husband's death; The Postman Always Rings Twice transplanted to the Po delta, and the movement's dark seed. Cast: Clara Calamai, Massimo Girotti, Dhia Cristiani
6. La Terra Trema (1948) Visconti A Sicilian fishing family mortgages everything to escape the wholesalers who fix the prices, and the sea and the market punish them; acted entirely by villagers in their own dialect. Cast: Antonio Arcidiacono, Giuseppe Arcidiacono, Venera Bonaccorso
7. La Strada (1954) Fellini A simple-hearted young woman is sold to a brutish traveling strongman as assistant and wife; Fellini's fable of cruelty and grace, with Giulietta Masina's unforgettable face. Cast: Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart
8. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Fellini A proud Roman streetwalker keeps trusting men and being robbed by them, and keeps walking anyway; ends on the most generous final smile in cinema. Cast: Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Franca Marzi
9. Bitter Rice (1949) De Santis Seasonal workers in the northern rice paddies harbor two thieves on the run; neorealism crossed with pulp melodrama, and a star-making role for Silvana Mangano. Cast: Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman
10. Il Posto (1961) Olmi A shy boy from the Milan suburbs sits exams and interviews for a lifetime clerkship, wanders the city, and glimpses the desk waiting at the end of it all; gentle and quietly chilling. Cast: Loredana Detto, Sandro Panseri, Corrado Aprile
11. The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) Olmi Four peasant families share a Lombardy farmstead through one year of births, harvests and small injustices; three patient hours acted by real farmers in dialect. Cast: Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar Brignoli
12. Accattone (1961) Pasolini A Roman pimp who has never worked drifts between women, hunger and petty theft in the borgate; Pasolini's debut gave the slums a doomed, sacred grandeur. Cast: Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini
13. Mamma Roma (1962) Pasolini A former prostitute claws her way to a market stall and an apartment to give her teenage son a respectable life, and the past keeps its grip; Anna Magnani at full force. Cast: Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti
14. Salvatore Giuliano (1962) Rosi The bandit's bullet-riddled body opens the film, and Sicily is reconstructed around the corpse: police, press, Mafia and politics each with a version; the investigation as film form. Cast: Salvo Randone, Frank Wolff, Pippo Agusta
15. Il Grido (1957) Antonioni Left by the woman he built his life around, a sugar-refinery worker drifts along the Po with his small daughter, trying and failing to start over; neorealism turning inward. Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Dorian Gray
16. In the Name of the Law (1949) Germi A young judge posted to a Sicilian town finds the Mafia running everything and every witness silent; an early, sharp look at what the postwar state was up against. Cast: Massimo Girotti, Jone Salinas, Camillo Mastrocinque
17. Without Pity (1948) Lattuada A Black American GI and a desperate Italian woman fall in love in the smuggling underworld of postwar Livorno, where every exit is closed to them; a rare interracial romance for its era. Cast: Carla Del Poggio, John Kitzmiller, Pierre Claudé
18. To Live in Peace (1947) Zampa An Italian farm family hides two escaped American POWs, one Black, as the front approaches and the village drunk celebrates peace early; comedy and war grief in one held breath. Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Gar Moore, Mirella Monti
19. Two Pennyworth of Hope (1952) Castellani A jobless veteran in a village under Vesuvius hustles at a dozen trades while courting a fireworks-maker's daughter against both families; neorealism at its sunniest. Cast: Maria Fiore, Vincenzo Musolino, Filomena Russo
20. Banditi a Orgosolo (1961) De Seta A Sardinian shepherd wrongly suspected after a police raid takes his flock into the mountains and is made an outlaw by suspicion itself; shot with real shepherds of Orgosolo. Cast: Michele Cossu, Peppeddu Cuccu, Vittorina Pisano
21. Hands Over the City (1963) Rosi A Naples building collapse exposes the alliance of developers and councilmen rezoning the city for profit; Rosi names the mechanism outright, and the film still plays as current affairs. Cast: Rod Steiger, Salvo Randone, Guido Alberti

Keep your place

Open I Like Movies, add the films you have not seen to your watchlist, and mark the ones you have; the app keeps the collection sorted by what is left. A new themed collection lands in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

Where do I start with Italian neorealism?

Bicycle Thieves (1948): one father, one stolen bicycle, and the whole movement's method in ninety minutes. Rome, Open City and Umberto D. are the natural next two.

What makes a film neorealist?

Location shooting, non-professional actors, working-class subjects, and stories about survival in post-war Italy. The style faded by the late 1950s, but films like Il Posto (1961) and Hands Over the City (1963) carried its methods forward.

The week after: Workers' cinema: 21 films about labor and dignity. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.