Preface . . vii
Acknowledgments . . xii

PART ONE: EARLY ITALIAN CINEMA 
1 The Silent Era . . 1
2 The Coming of Sound and the Fascist Era . . 20

PART TWO: ITALIAN NEOREALISM 
3 Masters of Neorealism: Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti . . 61
4 Exploring the Boundaries of Neorealism . . 98
5 The Break with Neorealism: The Cinema Reconstruction Fellini's Trilosies of Character and Grace, and the Return of Melodrama . . 127

PART THREE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF ITALIAN CINEMA 
6 The Italian "Peplum": The Sword and Sandal Epic . . 159
7 Commedia all'italiana: Comedy and Social Criticism . . 180
8 Neorealism's Legacy to a New Generation, and the Italian Political Film . . 217
9 The Mateur Auteurs: New Dimensions in Film Narrative in Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica, and Fellini . . 259
10 The Spaghetti Nightmare: Horror Films from the 1950s to the Present . . 306
11 A Fistful of Pasta: Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western . . 338 
12 Mystery, Gore, and Mayhem: The Italian Giallo . . 372
13 Myth, Marx, and Freud in Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci . . 416
14 The Poliziesco: Italian Crime Films from the 1970s to the Present . . 453

PART FOUR: GENERATIONAL CHANGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CINEMA 
15 The Old Guard Never Surrenders: Italy's Prewar Auteurs in the 1980s and 1990s . . 497
16 The Third Wave: A New Generation of Auteurs . . 519
17 Italian Cinema Enters the Third Millennium . . 557

Notes . . 567
Bibliography . . 593
Photo Credits . . 646
Index . . 647