Journey to Italy (1954)Journey to Italy is the 1954 drama directed by Roberto Rossellini, starring his then-wife Ingrid Bergman as Katherine, a wealthy British woman who travels by car with her husband Alex (George Sanders) on a trip across the Italian countryside to close on an inherited villa in Naples. The couple’s relationship becomes strained amid mutual misunderstandings, cynicism and jealousy, and they begin to spend their days separately. The film is electrifying and moving, ending with a devastating final scene. It was much maligned and indifferently reviewed, but has grown to be recognised as a seminal work of modernist cinema – considered by many to be Rossellini’s masterpiece, and voted into the 2012 Sight & Sound poll as one of the 50 greatest films ever made.
One of my biggest challenges, and indeed joys, at the BFI was researching a Rossellini retrospective in collaboration with colleagues at Cinematheque Ontario and MOMA, New York. The project took around two years to put together and was full of rights complexities and challenging screening materials, but we made it! The situation around materials has greatly improved since then and very happily the BFI subsequently acquired Journey to Italy, making it available across the UK.
Julie Pearce
Head of Distribution and Programme Operations
