INTRODUCTION

Rome Open City does not depict an open city, at any rate not in the sense this expression had in the Second World War of a demilitarized urban zone. What it shows is Rome under military occupation, a city divided. On one side are German troops and police, together with those Italians who collude with them, rounding up citizens for forced labor and rooting out political opponents. On the other side are the antifascist underground and the mass of ordinary Roman people who might not actively resist the occupation but who nonetheless resent it and do not willingly comply with it. When the first reviews in Italy referred to the film's title as sarcastic or ironic they were talking about a deliberate sarcasm and irony that would have had an immediate resonance with audiences who had lived under the occupation and other Italians who knew about it.

Rome had first been declared an “open city” by the Italian government on August 14, 1943, three weeks after Mussolini had been removed from office and as the Italians began to prepare a separate armistice with the British and Americans in secret from their German allies. The declaration, which came the day after the second American bombing raid on the city (the bomb damage we see in the film is probably from the August 13 raid, though some bombs had fallen in the Prenestino area also in the first raid on July 19 which had devastated San Lorenzo just to the north), was communicated.