It's 1947 and the war has only been over for a few months. That year, a large industry like Pirelli in Milan celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary and the management of the time dreamed up the idea of celebrating the anniversary with a film that would celebrate not only the company but also its workers . The idea was to have the film directed by the most important Italian director of the time, Roberto Rossellini , a master of Neorealism.
Alberto Moravia was chosen for the screenplay , and he worked on the film plot for several months with the collaboration of Alfredo Guarini, Massimo Mida and Gianni Puccini.
Moravia set to work writing a screenplay of great narrative and evocative power, set in the large Pirelli factory in Milan. The project seemed on the verge of taking off, it seemed it could become an important episode in the relationship between literature and cinema, between culture and industry. Then everything came to a standstill, especially due to the economic difficulties of shooting a high-level film in an Italy that had just emerged from the destruction of the war.
Moravia's text remained, in a certain sense forgotten for almost eighty years and today finally available in the volume Questa è la nostra città (Bompiani, 2025, pp. 192, also e-book) in a critical edition edited by Alessandra Grandelis , professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Padua and scientific director of the Alberto Moravia Fund in Rome.
Let's say it right away: reading Moravia is always a very engaging experience. Reading an unpublished work by the greatest writers of the twentieth century is something more: an unexpected gift. A gift that allows us to find ourselves face to face with an Italy that is almost eight decades old, a wounded Italy, but not tamed. The events of the book take place in the autumn of 1945, when the memories of the Piazzale Loreto massacre of August 1944 are still alive, of the imprisonment in Germany from which few had returned, of the war and the Resistance, against the backdrop of a Milan that bears the signs of destruction and that at the same time is already ready to grow, to run towards modernity, of which the Pirelli factory stands out among the rubble.
On this stage, the stories of a family tied to the factory move. Coming from the countryside and hired as workers at the Pirelli tire factory, the Rivas live the period of post-war reconstruction and the discovery of the largest Italian metropolis . They live moving between hopes, disappointments, contradictions, anxieties of living, without ever forgetting the effort, but also the expectation and hope that every existence entails.
Far from the rhetoric of progress, Moravia describes to us, as in his most successful novels , the daily sacrifices, the existential and identity torments creeping through Milan racing towards the future . Above all, in this unpublished work Moravia once again shows a narrative language of an “international” type, universal, comprehensible to readers of every era and every latitude . This is a conscious operation on the part of the author, which also explains a particular characteristic of Moravia's production: its extreme adaptability to cinematic transposition. Moravia has greatly extended the notion of the “public” and this inevitably leads to the use of a language or immediately translatable, in cinema, for audiences all over the world.
Furthermore, after the war Moravia discovered Neorealism: his acute capacity for observation and his sovereign detachment from what was observed and narrated thus allowed the development of a gallery of particularly effective human types.
Through the factory departments, the dark and damp streets of the city and the working-class neighborhoods, a community of workers emerges who observe and experience the transformations of their time.
The bond between the protagonists and their colleagues is intertwined with a story of struggle, dignity and resistance, offering an authentic glimpse of an era that indelibly marked the identity of Milan, but also of Italy as a whole.