One of my fellow reviewers referenced Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema from later in the 1940s in connection with one of the striking scenes in this film with the beautiful Alida Valli, but in another way this period literary adaptation seems to me a forerunner of Visconti's much later The Leopard.
It is like that film an exquisitely detailed recreation of the specific manners and eccentric characters in a sheltered aristocratic little world which is about to end with the momentous political changes of the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy.one scene in particular, where the family all get together to say the rosary after dinner though they are half asleep, reminds me of the scene early in The Leopard where the family in that film pray in their estate.
The movie as well as much of the rest of Mario Soldati's career are worth rediscovery.
Review of Piccolo mondo antico
