Remapping the neorealist nation: Il cammino della speranza and the rhetorics of the road to realism

Based on the hypothesis that realism in narrative cinema is the result of a set of rhetorical strategies that operate at the indexical, representational, communicative and social levels, and at the same time merging a poststructuralist and a cultural studies methodology, this essay compares three post-war films which share the ambition of embracing the entire peninsula: Roberto Rossellini's Paisà (1946), Pietro Francisci's Natale al Campo 119 (1948) and Piero Germi's Il cammino della speranza (1950). Arguing for postwar cinema's need to replace Fascist geopolitics with a novel mapping of the nation based on a realistic impulse, and proposing that road narratives promised the successful negotiation of realism and ideology, this article discusses the position of Il cammino della speranza in particular and examines its rhetorical strategies vis-à-vis those of Rossellini's canonical neorealism and of Francisci's popular cinema.