I wouldn’t understand how different those worlds were until I watched Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic about a poor father trying to provide for his family in post-World War 2 Rome. It was through that film that I felt like I really saw my father for the first time. The film is an honest portrait of Italian anxiety of the time, depicting how poverty pushed decent men to desperation. Even if he was in America now and doing well for himself, there was still a part of his brain that would always be struggling to scrape by in the hills of Abruzzo.
Mafia: The Old Country review: bleak, brilliant history
