Rossellini’s film follows a marriage in crisis through ancient landscapes and presents what happens as a mutual awakening. What it cannot see is that only one person was awake.
EXCAVATION FIELD RECORD Site: Pompeii, Region VI. Date: ongoing. Finds: two forms, preserved in volcanic ash, position suggests simultaneous death. The subjects appear to have been in contact at the moment of burial. Exact nature of contact undetermined: proximity may indicate affection, or accident, or simply the narrowness of the space available. Condition: excellent. Expression: not recoverable. Note for site log: a visitor wept at the sight of them. This is not unusual. It is, in fact, the most common response. The forms do not change. The visitor always does.
| Director | Roberto Rossellini |
|---|---|
| Year | 1954 |
| Runtime | 97 minutes |
| Cast | Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders |
| Awards | Not widely awarded on release; now considered among the essential films of the twentieth century |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
The Certified Copy review made a claim about this film. It said Rossellini’s camera in Viaggio in Italia “observes the couple from the outside, holding them at the distance of a patient witness,” giving “neither George nor Katherine more of the camera’s attention.” That was written as contrast to Kiarostami, who presses into Binoche’s face and quietly resolves the film’s ambiguity in her favour despite the script’s insistence on uncertainty. Writing Viaggio in Italia now as the subject rather than the comparison, the claim requires revision. Rossellini’s camera does not give them equal attention. It follows Katherine. Alex is mostly absent during the film’s most sustained sequences. What looked from a distance like democratic observation was already, from the beginning, leaning.
Viaggio in Italia is the film Kiarostami went to Tuscany to answer. Roberto Rossellini made it in 1954 with his wife Ingrid Bergman, their marriage already fracturing, the affair that had begun on Stromboli four years earlier now wearing into something more difficult. The film follows Katherine and Alex Joyce (Bergman and George Sanders), a prosperous English couple driving to Naples to settle the estate of a recently deceased uncle. The villa is beautiful. The marriage is not. They have, without quite naming it, run out of things to say to each other. Naples gives them an occasion to be apart without divorcing, and the film follows what each of them does with the occasion.
What Alex does: socializes, drives around, attends a party, appreciates pretty women at a polite distance. He is a man who has made peace with surfaces and finds, in Naples, nothing but more agreeable surfaces. He is charming in the way that men who keep their distance are often charming.
What Katherine does: goes to museums, descends into catacombs, drives to Pompeii, stands before ancient things and lets them do whatever they are going to do to her.
The museum sequence is the film’s first great set piece, and one of the strangest in Italian cinema. Katherine walks through a collection of Graeco-Roman sculpture: gods, athletes, idealised bodies arrested in marble. Then a room of pregnant women, fertility figures, their stone bellies enormous and serene, and Katherine’s face in front of them does something Bergman cannot entirely manage as a performance — it simply opens. She is thinking about something the film does not name. She has no children. The film does not connect these facts explicitly. It does not need to. The image carries the weight of the connection without making it literal.
Then the catacombs, the buried city, finally Pompeii: bodies cast in ash, a couple preserved at the moment of death, their positions suggesting contact. Katherine watches the excavation, watches the forms lifted from the earth, and weeps. It is not a theatrical weeping. It is the kind that arrives before you can stop it, that belongs to something you were not expecting to feel.
Rossellini built a film about two people equally lost in a foreign landscape. Then he followed the woman.
Alex is not present for any of this. He is elsewhere, doing something the film records more briefly and less tenderly. The film’s formal claim is that both of them are being acted upon by Naples, that the ancient world is corroding their modern indifference equally. But the camera is with Katherine when Naples does its work. Alex’s Naples is a social surface. Katherine’s Naples is a descent.
This is the film’s blind spot, and it is also the film’s greatness, which makes it difficult to name without sounding like a complaint about something that is not a flaw. Rossellini was not being dishonest. He was, almost certainly, filming the experience that was available to him: his wife, moving through a landscape, being changed by it. Sanders gave him surfaces. Bergman gave him interior. He filmed what he had.
But the ending carries the consequence. A religious procession in a small town, an apparent miracle healing, the crowd separating Katherine and Alex and then pressing them together. Alex says, suddenly, that he loves her. Katherine runs to him. They embrace in the middle of the street, the crowd flowing around them, something restored that the film presents as grace: the ancient world’s gift, the miracle’s dividend, the proof that the landscape worked.
Only one of them has been through the landscape. The miracle happens to Katherine. The marriage is restored to Alex.
The film that illuminates this from the sharpest angle is not Certified Copy, though the comparison holds. It is our review of L’Avventura, Antonioni’s 1960 film, made six years after this one and in direct conversation with it. Sandro and Claudia also move through an Italian landscape following a loss, and Naples makes a brief appearance in L’Avventura‘s own register. But where Rossellini’s landscape acts on Katherine and restores her to her marriage, Antonioni’s landscape acts on Claudia and opens a question about Sandro that the film cannot answer, and the ending refuses every restoration the couple reaches for. The two films are mirror images of the same formal problem: a woman changed by Italy, a man essentially unchanged, and the question of what you do with that asymmetry at the end. Rossellini reconciles. Antonioni cannot. Both positions are honest. Neither is complete.
Viaggio in Italia is, by any measure, the film that invented modern cinema as it is still practised: the location shooting, the underprepared actors, the improvised emotional truth, the refusal of conventional dramatic structure. Godard said so. Bazin said so. Kiarostami said so by going to Tuscany with a camera and a French actress and making essentially this film again. What none of them quite said, because the film’s beauty makes it difficult to say, is that the invention was built on an asymmetry. The woman goes into the earth. The man drives around. They meet at the end and call it a marriage. Naples has been watching the whole time.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950): the Bergman-Rossellini film before this one, where the same woman-against-landscape dynamic is rawer and less reconciled, and where the ending refuses the grace that Viaggio in Italia allows itself.
The Green Ray (Rohmer, 1986): named twice now in our watch-nexts; a woman alone in summer, moving through landscape without a husband’s social surfaces to stand between her and what she finds — and Rohmer’s most honest accounting of what that costs.
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