2022 “Lezioni di Cinema” Festival [Cinema Lectures], Livorno, organized by the “Commedia all’Italiana” Research Centre
Museo di Storia Naturale del Mediterraneo a Livorno, via Roma 234
A conversation on Tombolo, Black Paradise and Without Pity, 8 October 2022
In the immediate post-World War II period, Livorno became the stage for some important film productions of the neorealist strand. Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo, paradiso nero (1947) and Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà (1948), films at the centre of this lecture, both focused on the ‘forbidden pine forest’ of Tombolo,which had become a national emblem of the most deleterious consequences of the Allied occupation.
The massive presence of troops, which lasted until December 1947 and led to Livorno also becoming an immense warehouse of war material of all kinds, drew thousands of individuals from the already liberated south of the country in search of fortune. In this context, Tombolo became an icon of the degradation produced by the ‘long liberation’. A sort of no man’s land – often beyond the control even of the Military Police (MP) – where deserters, traffickers, smugglers and ‘segnorine’ were stationed. A legend was soon created around it, fuelled by journalistic reportages. It is not surprising that, with such a concentration of ingredients, Tombolo and Livorno attracted the attentions of film directors and producers. The town provided a literary and transcendent backdrop to the descent into the underworld of post-war misery. The adventurous space that this context offered allowed neorealist cinema to draw on the chronicle to readapt old genre codes to the new post-war horizon: gangster movie, spy story, noir, western, comedy and melodrama.
